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The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

theatlantic.com

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

#61

Post by shostrift »

> Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there

So if women are choosing not to enter certain fields the "gender gap" is worse? That's to say some people are so idealistic that they would rather remove a woman's freedom to choose her career and force her into a job she doesn't want to do just to satisfy some BS ideology?

A "gender gap" is only bad if women are prevented from entering a field for some reason. If they simply don't want to, then more power to them. Surely the most important thing is the right to choose one's own career, not applying social pressure to women.

It's the same with the recent trend of getting rid of "track girls" at F1. So now pretty girls who want to be models can no longer find as much work they enjoy.

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

#62

Post by throwawaye4j »

dvt wrote: post #2

Equality of opportunity does not necessarily imply equality of outcome . This isn't a paradox. Why are still people still confused about this? (Actually, people aren't confused about this, but it makes for great clickbait articles and ad revenue because it fans the flames of both sides of the argument.)

Personally the reason I'm hesitant to entertain this argument is that code is so awesome - you can reach a billion (1,000,000,000) people practically overnight if your idea is good enough. While women traditionally are more interested in the design/social impact of what they're doing, if the engineering environment is easy enough there's no reason they can't code it themselves. And they are highly incentivized to do so.

I personally look at the outcome (you can reach a billion people just by having a cool idea and sitting down and doing it) then look at the hurdles to that outcome.

One of the hurdles is that engineers love wasting literally hundreds of each others' hours. If I were building something as a newbie, people have no trouble sending me off on a wild goose chase to spend a hundred hours with my head in documentation. When an alternative ecosystem lets me literally type a single line and it's done. (In this case the first ecosystem hates my time and the second one respects it.)

This isn't really related to gender, but it's another hurdle. So when you look at the incentive (reaching people, fame, fortune, money), if there is a highly unequal distribution you have to look at some of the hurdles.

By the way no one knows your gender online when you're learning stuff, you can use a non-gendered username and get treated exactly the same asking stuff online and so forth.

In this case the hurdle is artificial: being cooped up with a computer while the tools you're trying to use waste thousands of your hours. But it's still a hurdle that impacts genders in a different way, and that matters.

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

#63

Post by howlgram »

hackpert wrote: post #60

Whenever such studies or analyses come up in the media, I find that people are often eager to jump to causative conclusions on the lines of "oh females must have a natural inclination towards 'softer' fields" or (as in case of this article) "In wealthy nations, they believe that they have the freedom to pursue those alternatives and not worry so much that they pay less." However, even if we ignore the obvious correla…

are you implying that male students who go for stem don't face bullying akin to being "geeky" or "nerds"? Please...

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

#64

Post by rullelito »

taneq wrote: post #28
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #17

This, and similar research I'd seen before seems to point to women being equal or better at STEM than men (and also being better at non-STEM stuff), but actively avoiding it as a low-status role when they have better options. Slightly baffling to see this celebrated by men in these careers as some kind of vindication. The data appears to be saying you (we) suck, but that's a win if you think the data was going to sho…

> This, and similar research I'd seen before seems to point to women being equal or better at STEM than men (and also being better at non-STEM stuff) What I find onerous is that it's perfectly acceptable to make blanket statements about women being better at things than men, while it's now literally a sackable offense at many major tech companies to even imply the opposite. This doesn't seem like "progress towards eq…

Variations of this has been growing for a long while. You can't be proud to be man or white; and you shouldn't be proud of success if you belong to that group. Unless your success is something that has benefited someone not in that group.

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

#65

Post by K0nserv »

telesilla wrote: post #54

Let's turn the argument on it's head. Statistics say boys are more heavily inclined to have a STEM career. Does this mean they feel they cannot consider a career in other fields like teaching, nursing or other female-dominated fields? As a woman I often wonder, what's so great about STEM aside from the paycheck? It depends on your bosses (or being your own if you are lucky and that way inclined), but I don't think we…

Boys desire for large pay checks could be explained by patriarchal/societal expectations that they must be the main bread winner in a household

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

#66

Post by moosekaka »

lsy wrote: post #50

Drawing conclusions about "innate" differences between men and women from this data doesn't seem valid. There's a lot of research left to eliminate confounding effects on participation that aren't covered or investigated by the "Global Gender Gap Index" (e.g. cultural attitudes towards women in STEM, or on-the-job discrimination). Scatter-plotting two datasets available on the internet doesn't feel like enough resear…

maybe not biology, but personality wise (either due to social upbringing/expectations or genetic imprinting etc) I noticed far more men then women who are of the type who are more comfortable to work with things rather then people. I know I fall into this category.

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

#67

Post by guitarbill »

tanilama wrote: post #39
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #17

This, and similar research I'd seen before seems to point to women being equal or better at STEM than men (and also being better at non-STEM stuff), but actively avoiding it as a low-status role when they have better options. Slightly baffling to see this celebrated by men in these careers as some kind of vindication. The data appears to be saying you (we) suck, but that's a win if you think the data was going to sho…

This article simply means when equal opportunity is offered, there are still fewer women choose to take STEM as their career. Vindictive? No really. The research seems to suggest woman prefers STEM more, when there is no other viable economic opportunity, which makes such choice a conscious calculation, and do render the past accusation that there is an systematic oppression in the society to keep women away from tak…

> the current diversity program is incapable to achieve its own goal

What exactly is the goal of this "diversity program"? Maybe they are completely capable of achieving their goal, it's just not the one you think it is.

(This is the curse of technical people: when you spend so much time thinking and solving problems rationally, it's easy to assume all situations can be approached in this way.)

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

#68

Post by Valmar »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #51
jlebrech wrote: post #38

Why are we telling women do do STEM if that's not what they want to do, we should be supporting women want to do that. For example more entry level roles and considering women for those.

Isn't treating women differently from men sexist by definition? If we want equality, let's treat everyone equally. No special programs for any gender. We're constantly told that men and women are the same, and that you can even switch between them any time you want, but then we hear the complaints that gender X does better/worse at task Z. This narrative doesn't make any sense to me.

Men and women obviously aren't the same, no matter how much gnashing of teeth of matter occurs, because both have their strengths in different areas, according to their overall psychology.

Men and women are psychologically-different, and no amount of trying to force a desperate sameness will change that. In fact, it might even cause people to want to be even more different than before.

The SJWs campaign for "sameness" but act like the complete opposite.

Maybe they're just in denial of who they truly are, and are unconsciously asking for help and recognition that they truly matter, but cannot help but unconsciously portray this in a destructive manner for all to see, except themselves and their blind peer group.

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

#69

Post by jochung »

lsy wrote: post #50

Drawing conclusions about "innate" differences between men and women from this data doesn't seem valid. There's a lot of research left to eliminate confounding effects on participation that aren't covered or investigated by the "Global Gender Gap Index" (e.g. cultural attitudes towards women in STEM, or on-the-job discrimination). Scatter-plotting two datasets available on the internet doesn't feel like enough resear…

Evolution was opinionated enough to create measurable differences in spatial ability, personality, drives and so on, between genders and within genders. Its velocity is directly proportional to the variance that exists in the population: you need something to differentiate in order to have differential selection pressure.

Your hypothesis is in fact the radical one: that programming is somehow such an unseen before ability, that evolution until now has not evolved any machinery to repurpose for its realization. Given everything we know about the very obvious cognitive limits we do have, and where they come from, that seems implausible.

The common reasoning by the way does dismiss reports from men and women alike that all this diversity mongering has poisoned the workplace atmosphere and mostly serves to enrich and flatter the egos of people who wouldn't show up unless they got special treatment for their own demographic, with special segregated events, hiring pipelines and accolades. The old "women in X" spiel. These things are most definitely constructed, and not for the reason they advertise. The standards of evidence demanded to abolish them are sky high compared to the spurious reasoning that spawned them.

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

#70

Post by RyanZAG »

rimliu wrote: post #56
RyanZAG wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's assuming an internal company culture couldn't be created based on shared understanding that would lead to competitive advantage. Eg, if you create a company with only black women, you may not necessarily get the very best individuals, but you could create a very unique culture. That culture could empower the whole team to work better with each other with the end result being a more productive team even though…

May, could, would…

That's right! But the same applies the other way around. The argument that a company that doesn't hire that one guy because he's Malasian may allow your competitor to beat you in a free market is also very much a "may, could, would" scenario.

There's only one way to know: get a free market and see whether the companies that hires all Malasians or no Malasians or a mix of Malasians and non-Malasians comes out on top in aggregate.

(Malasians used as an example, not because of anything specific about Malasians. Feel free to replace with Lithuanians if you want. Although the specific cultures involved are probably very important. A culture that has a focus on technology and work ethic would likely beat out a culture that focuses on extended deep sea fishing when it comes to building a startup.)

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