Comment by T2_t2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by T2_t2 | Hacker News Reader

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> I am less inclined to believe there is systemic bias against women, and minorities, and instead a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and groups which are not.

And that cultural difference is INDIVIDUAL CHOICE.

When people are free to choose whatever they like, because they aren't scared of starving, which is true in Western countries, they overwhelmingly choose gender stereotypical professions. This is most true in the most gender neutral countries, Scandanavia basically, where the gap is the widest in traditional roles such as nursing. As you go down the GDP per capita list, the gender gap shrinks.

Indian, Chinese, and Russians are from cultures where ANY job is hard to get, and good jobs are very few and far between. Because jobs are scarce and a safe, middle class life requires sacrifice, people in these developed countries are more likely to choose jobs based on pay and availability than what they will enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE is a Norwegian documentary on this, in 8 parts, and it is well worth a watch.

> they overwhelmingly choose gender stereotypical professions

Oh? Which ones are those? There used to be more women employed as computer programmers than men, for example. The shift happened because computer programming turned a corner and became prestigious, at which point it became "stereotypically male", and the pattern of "stereotypically male" = prestigious holds through a number of professions. Men are doctors while women are nurses. Men are professors while women are primary school teachers.

You can't just look at the present, you have to look at past shifts in employment demographics and "prestige" explains a lot more than "some genders just intrinsically desire certain kinds of work" (which, just to ensure my point is clear, is bullshit).

>There used to be more women employed as computer programmers than men //

Can you cite a good source for this.

I'm concerned it might be confusing the job called "programmer" with the role we now call programmer. AIUI in the early days of computers a "programmer" was a sort of typist that took a written program and punched the cards that allowed the program to be entered in to a computer, the technical tasks of algorithm design, program construction and such were generally not done by these same people.

That aside, I'm not sure it matters: why aren't there more female top chefs? It's certainly not because women don't like to cook. I posit that it's because in general they care less about being competitive and prefer to avoid high-stress situations.

Do you consider that testosterone is inert? It's mood and mind altering and men have lots of it. Denying the basic biological differences between the sexes is a dangerous axiom on which to attempt to create a stable and fair society.

Men, as an example, undergo hormonal changes when they become parents. These changes lead to greater tendencies towards nurturing behaviours, tendencies that female ordinarily possess by default and which make men and women naturally suitable for different societal and occupational roles. It makes a lot of sense for humans to be hormonally perturbed towards preference and ability at different roles -- why we are fighting against that rather than embracing it is well beyond my ken.

> Oh? Which ones are those? There used to be more women employed as computer programmers than men, for example. The shift happened because computer programming turned a corner and became prestigious, at which point it became "stereotypically male", and the pattern of "stereotypically male" = prestigious holds through a number of professions.

I think you meant 'computer'.

My grandmother was a computer. That is what they used to call the women who performed calculations in the old days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer

It's interesting history but this could not honestly be described as computer programming. Looking around online it appears there are a lot of articles that have conflated the jobs. There certainly were women in computer science back in the early days, Lovelace, Hopper come to mind.

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