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Comment by grb423 | Hacker News Reader

Is anybody studying the reasons behind the huge gender disparity in roofing, welding or kindergarten teaching? I think there is a tremendous gender bias in those and other fields that is going unstudied, because nobody cares or because those fields aren't as cool or important.

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Surgery has a large gap to but I rarely hear it brought up in these discussions.

http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/ama-wire/post/medical-specialtie...

That's a particularly interesting one, because it's not susceptible to the usual charges of "no one cares because it's low pay/status". If you look to radiology rather than surgery, the gender imbalance is enormous.

Suddenly we're looking at gender skew in two highly technical, prestigious, lucrative fields, and seeing that they prompt totally different types and amounts of discussion.

It's almost as if men and women have some fundamental differences in psychology that affect their preferred choice of career.

> men and women have some fundamental differences in psychology

This was largely debunked from a biological perspective [1]. Any psychological perceptions you may be referring to are largely cultural and subject to the biases that this product is trying to combat.

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468.full

The study you linked doesn't absolutely say what you are trying to make it say (that there aren't fundamental differences in psychology between men and women). It seems to say that male and female brains and cognitive abilities aren't as dimorphic as their genitalia, but instead there is a continuum and overlaps for many distinct cognitive traits. In other words: (almost) all men have normally formed penises, (almost) all women have normally formed vaginas. Mixed situations are rare. Brains are another matter, genders mix and overlap. That doesn't mean that there are NO genders though.

>That doesn't mean that there are NO genders though.

The study isn't saying that there are no genders - specifically it is saying:

Our results demonstrate that regardless of the cause of observed sex/gender differences in brain and behavior (nature or nurture), human brains cannot be categorized into two distinct classes: male brain/female brain.

"most brains are comprised of unique “mosaics” of features, some more common in females compared with males, some more common in males compared with females, and some common in both females and males"

Nothing in this view says it's not possible that, for example, an interest or a skill for engineering, while rare in both genders, might be n times more common in men than in women.

That paper has little, if anything, to do with aphextron's point. It's a study of brain anatomy.

Here's some directly-relevant literature, which points to a systematic preference for occupations in men vs women: [0]

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th...

Hence saying it was largely debunked from a biological perspective.

aphextron didn't elaborate on the source of the psychological differences. I was pointing out that it wasn't biological and most likely cultural.

And that's completely irrelevant to the current discussion.

BTW it's not even debunked from the biological perspective. It's debunked from a brain anatomy perspective.

Or perhaps many children are raised to conform to particular gender roles that affects their social development, and possibly, just possibly, this might also affect their job opportunities not just by self-selection, but by biases in the interviewer/hiring manager. It seems like a very complicated issue that doesn't have a simplistic answer.

Gender roles exist because they are adaptive. They are inseparable from actual average differences in characteristics.

There's a documentary titled Brainwash: The Gender Equality Paradox that explored those differences [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE

I worry about this mentioning occupations' "prestige." That seems to be incompatible with our goals of universal equality. We shouldn't discount gender bias because of privilege.

I didn't mean to address whether prestige is necessary to consider an occupation.

Rather, I was drawing parallels between software and radiology careers, and observing that one is considered a major, public issue while the other is basically an internal discussion within medicine.

To be fair, my wife is in medical school, and gender imbalances in specialties is brought up all the time.

Similarly, educators talk a great deal about gender imbalances in teaching (K-8 is female-dominated, physics and economics skew, biology female, and so on).

What I think is interesting is that there are a handful of fields - primarily technology and corporate leadership - where the gender imbalance is a national topic. I'm sure it's largely down to the visibility of those fields, but there are a lot of people discussing sexism in tech whose backgrounds are neither research nor technology. That seems much less true for something like radiology.

It also seems to muddy the waters a great deal. With inside-baseball discussions like medicine, I assume(?) things like roughly when the gender imbalances form are common knowledge. In tech, we seem to be constantly rehashing those matters (see: corporate diversity reports constantly stressing "our applicant pool is lower-diversity than our staff, so please stop reducing this issue to discriminatory hiring").

That's because you aren't as steeped in medical culture as you are in tech culture and don't hear about it. It is brought up all the time.

Source: my wife just finished her medical residency.

> It is brought up all the time.

Around HN?

Yes they are. You don't read about them because I guess you don't spend any time on the welding equivalent of HN.

Here's a few for welding (and these have already been posted to HN).

http://www.witc.edu/pgmpages/welding/women.htm

http://www.womeninwelding.com/

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/careers/hey-women-want-hot-c...

Generally these are easy to find. You just put "women in " and the industry into any search engine.

Perfect.

Someone I know worked as a welder at a very high level of experience and skill. She reported constant sexist comments, abuse and obstruction from male coworkers, particularly those whose work she was sent to inspect and/or repair.

I have an aunt who's a civil engineer. When she started her business, she didn't use her first name--only her first initial--for all her professional communications. She didn't want people who didn't know her to know she was a woman.

I think the best gender-bias comparison to programming is nursing. High demand, decent pay, similar amount of education required, but ~10% of nurses are men (compared to ~21% of programmers who are female)[1].

[1] http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm

Ehhh. There's only about 360k welders in the U.S. and 3.6 million software engineers. That's an order of magnitude in difference in impact.

Additionally, a software engineer probably makes more than a roofer, welder, and kindergarten teacher combined.

Part of the reason for studying software engineering is because it's part of a larger trend of women not being as prevalent in high-paying careers. That's also why the number of women CEOs and other leadership positions gets so much attention.

So, while I understand your point (there are any number of careers that have huge gender gaps that no one is looking at), software engineering is specifically scrutinized due to the number of current jobs, the average salary, and the expected growth of the profession over time. No other field has the kind of potential impact on the employee that software engineering does.

3.6 million software engineers? That seems really high - do you have a source?

WolframAlpha reports that in May 2016 there were 144.6 million workers in the USA and 87.2 male workers. That'd mean that 2.5% of all workers are software engineers. If you figure that 75% of software engineers are male (some quick searching suggests this is a conservative number), then >3% of all employed males are software engineers. My instinct is that's high, but if you have a source I'll happily become informed.

BLS says 1.1M: http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/s...

But if you add a bunch of similar fields that probably have software engineers you could probably get close to 3M: http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#15-0000

Is this software engineering privilege? Are we shooting for universal equality?

I think it's more because those are either dangerous, or not well paid, not because they're not cool or important. Generally, more dangerous work gets some kind of hazard pay premium. You'll see the same kind of thing with work that requires lots of travel, like truck drivers. A lot of my family does work out on oil rigs where they stay for a couple weeks at a time - they get hazard and travel pay, so it ends up being quite well paid.

There's no downside to the field on the dimensions of pay and danger. Software engineering/development is safe and well paid, thus there is an unqualified incentive to get one's favored group into the field, and if there is a perception that there is a systemic internal bias against them, to attempt to alleviate that bias.

Two things come to mind

1) I have seen quite a few things about the smaller numbers of men moving into traditionally female fields (nursing being a big example). That may fit with your point about cool/important jobs.

2) But regarding importance, I do think it matters a lot when the field is as socially prominent and well paid as tech jobs.

3) When you suggest that construction work might have a lot of sexism, you don't get a lot of pushback--it's just not a contested topic in the same way. Hence less discussion.

Thank you for bringing this up.

> Is anybody studying the reasons behind the huge gender disparity in roofing, welding or kindergarten teaching?

Yes, in at least the latter case (or, at least the more general case of primary/secondary teaching.)

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