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The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

theatlantic.com

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Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#471

Post by jimbokun »

Impossible wrote: post #421
jimbokun wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How to distinguish between "I didn't know that was a feasible choice for me" and "I know what programming is like and I don't want to do that as a career"? How many girls and women fall into each category?

The majority of people fall into the first category, regardless of sex. There are a lot of people who with exposure might consider software development as a career, but didn't think of it as an option. For various historical reasons (exposure to programmable computers, video games, adults that can explain or teach programming, access in school, peers that program, role models, etc) the people that tend to realize pro…

5 years old? Are you joking?

The Dot Net bubble in the 90s was arguably the biggest news story of the decade. Everyone knew there was tons of money to be had in tech, and stories of people landing jobs at startups after learning a little bit of HTML.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#472

Post by jimbokun »

jayd16 wrote: post #371
jimbokun wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How to distinguish between "I didn't know that was a feasible choice for me" and "I know what programming is like and I don't want to do that as a career"? How many girls and women fall into each category?

I'm not sure I understand the question. As phrased I think you have a natural understanding of the difference. Are you asking how we measure that nationally?

I mean what are the relative sizes of those two groups, maybe worded it awkwardly.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#473

Post by selfishgene »

In the United States, medicine and law have something that most professions in STEM do not: licensing boards and professional school admission committees that strictly control the flow of new employees into their respective fields.

Is it possible that women are better at seeing how poorly a lot of employees in STEM are treated (especially in those disciplines that have been flooded by H1-B applicants) and realizing that better opportunities lie elsewhere?

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#474

Post by manfredo »

throwaway8548 wrote: post #426
manfredo wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is in reference to gender differences like extraversion, and make newborns dedicating more attention to things and female newborns dedicating more attention to people. As far as this post's article, the rates are not vastly different results, most of the countries that observed fall within a range of 30%. If this were socially determined, we'd expect some countries to have 80-90% women in technology. That is not…

> most of the countries that observed fall within a range of 30% That's huge > If this were socially determined, we'd expect some countries to have 80-90% women in technology That's assuming social pressures are randomly distributed. But we don't observe 50/50 split between patriarchy and matriarchy. > Furthermore, what differences that are observed contradict the idea that rigid gender roles cause lower rates of wom…

Whether or not a range of 30% is "huge" is a subjective judgement, but that's besides the point. The point is, there are zero observed instances of women forming the majority of a the technology workforce in any county.

I'm not sure if it's even possible to put countries in a binary between patriarchy and matriarchy. Instead, the study presented put countries on a scale that measures overall gender equality. And what difference we do observe is that patriarchal countries have higher rates of women in tech, but still lower than parity. Countries with gender equality (is this what you mean by "matriarchy"?) have low rates of women in tech often in the 20-10% range. So in "patriarchies" we see more female representation, but still lower than the majority and in egalitarian countries we see

> The nerd/geek being an awkward boy with glasses troppe is specifically a western concept for example.

And yet, the disparity between women and men in technology exists outside of western countries. Thus, attributing the disparity between men and women in tech to tropes like these is not effective line of reasoning. This is exactly the point that I'm making: attributing the gender distribution in tech to social factors is difficult when said distribution is observed across a wide variety of societies.

> Women in Eastern Europe worked in factories side by side with men for generations.

This was the same case in Western Europe and Asia as well - I'm not sure why you chose to highlight this fact.

> Gender roles does not equal your concept of gender roles like women not liking/belonging/choosing not to be in tech.

I'm not sure what you're writing about here, this sentence does not make sense to me. The point is that highly unequal societies with strict gender roles see more women in technology than more egalitarian societies.

And for what it's worth, while 20% representation in tech in the united states might seem low at first glance it's actually not at all uncommon to have fields that are >95% one gender or another. Tech is on par with "Health practitioner, support technologists, and technicians", "Loan interviewers and clerks", "Printing press operators", and a couple percent above "Couriers and messengers" as far as gender disparities go [1].

1. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce...

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#475

Post by jimbokun »

kaitai wrote: post #463
jimbokun wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, thanks for your input! What I'm trying to better understand, is whether women who are not applying for programming jobs at the same rate as men, are due to lack of interest, or are they somehow being actively discouraged from the field? I've worked with many women programmers, some of them better than me, so I know it's not the case women are inherently worse at programming than men. But I don't know the reason…

The social aspects are subtle, and more important than most of the official stuff. In seventh grade a great (male) teacher of mine recommended a summer program for me, at the dawn of the internet (Gopher!). I joined the math & computer class and was the only girl. None of the boys would talk to me at all. At lunch every day they ditched me and I went to find some kids from the theater class to sit with. Is it malicio…

Hey, sincere thanks for this honest feedback!

As a man in tech, I honestly have no idea what the women around me experience, so it’s valuable for me to get some perspective.

It’s interesting to me how you don’t blame any one specific person for actively trying to discourage you, just the constant exhaustion from being treated differently from those around you.

So one take away, is by recruiting more girls and women into coding, the girls and women who do want to pursue it won’t feel so out of place. So it is difficult to determine the “true” number of female people who like programming, until we have a critical mass of women programmers.

That’s given me something to think about.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#476

Post by rishav_sharan »

lgleason wrote: post #130

It all comes down to equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. When there is equality of opportunity women choose different fields...often (but not always) because of different interests. Equality of outcome forces people to do things that they may not have an interest in. And that is before you get into interests vs natural talent and how that does or does not affect ones success in a field. On a fundamental l…

Unrelated to the topic but can you even downvote in HN? I only have an upvote button. Does it have something to do with how much the HN equivalent of karma that you have?

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#477

Post by gnicholas »

rishav_sharan wrote: post #476
lgleason wrote: post #130

It all comes down to equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. When there is equality of opportunity women choose different fields...often (but not always) because of different interests. Equality of outcome forces people to do things that they may not have an interest in. And that is before you get into interests vs natural talent and how that does or does not affect ones success in a field. On a fundamental l…

Unrelated to the topic but can you even downvote in HN? I only have an upvote button. Does it have something to do with how much the HN equivalent of karma that you have?

Yep, not sure what the current threshold is, but in the past it was 500. You're close!

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#478

Post by jholman »

koonsolo wrote: post #285
lgleason wrote: post #130

It all comes down to equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. When there is equality of opportunity women choose different fields...often (but not always) because of different interests. Equality of outcome forces people to do things that they may not have an interest in. And that is before you get into interests vs natural talent and how that does or does not affect ones success in a field. On a fundamental l…

I worked with a few women in software development. 2 of them separately told me they liked working in an all men team more than working with women. "Men are more honest and straightforward, women more jealous and backstabbing". Their words, not mine. But since the whole upheaval of women in workplaces that flowed to Europe from US, I have the feeling that this sentiment has changed.

Agreement in the form of an anecdatum:

More than one baby-boomer woman I know has said that every time she has a male boss, things are okay, and every time she has a female boss, the whole office gradually goes insane. I'm in particular thinking of my aunt, working in banks (all of her peers were women), but I've heard it elsewhere too.

But then again, it's anecdata. I try not to take it seriously (I mean, I take it seriously about the individual's experience, but not as a description of large-scale patterns). But also when people have just-so stories about how male bosses are toxic to female underlings, I have the same "maybe that was true for you, but I don't see any reason to generalize" reaction.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#479

Post by roenxi »

koonsolo wrote: post #285
lgleason wrote: post #130

It all comes down to equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. When there is equality of opportunity women choose different fields...often (but not always) because of different interests. Equality of outcome forces people to do things that they may not have an interest in. And that is before you get into interests vs natural talent and how that does or does not affect ones success in a field. On a fundamental l…

I worked with a few women in software development. 2 of them separately told me they liked working in an all men team more than working with women. "Men are more honest and straightforward, women more jealous and backstabbing". Their words, not mine. But since the whole upheaval of women in workplaces that flowed to Europe from US, I have the feeling that this sentiment has changed.

That anecdote tells you precisely nothing; women who prefer working in all-female teams, etc, etc, have already been weeded out. Talking to people in the industry is sampling from a population of people who probably don't see a problem regardless of the actual situation.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#480

Post by thrower123 »

lgleason wrote: post #130

It all comes down to equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. When there is equality of opportunity women choose different fields...often (but not always) because of different interests. Equality of outcome forces people to do things that they may not have an interest in. And that is before you get into interests vs natural talent and how that does or does not affect ones success in a field. On a fundamental l…

Women are unbelievably toxic if they achieve critical mass in a department. I cannot believe the level of petty conflict that my wife endures in her female-dominated PM team; my male-exclusive band of semi-autistic programmers seems like fiddler's green in comparison.
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