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Comment by SilverSlash | Hacker News Reader

Maybe because like men all over the world, Russian women aren't specially "encouraged" to go into tech? Maybe nobody has to tell them or tell anyone to 'like science'. People just do.

The same argument goes for women in science. Albert Einstein was told he wouldn't amount to much. Doesn't mean he 'got discouraged' and quit physics. That's not why we do science - for public appreciation - we do it because we love it no matter what anyone else says. This is the point that the girls in tech people miss I think.

Instead of buying your daughters lego sets with women wearing fancy lab coats and looking into telescopes, buy them gyroscopes, or electronics kits, or lego's own DIY robot? None of the toys mentioned above feature gender and actually give a sense of what science is about.

I'm open to hear your thoughts, especially from women.

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Yes, because each one of us is an island, and we're not influenced by society at all as it is.

I have a two year old and I can tell you fighting against pinky-princess girl culture is a battle. As a parent, it's you vs basically the rest of society that sends a million little cues about what girls are supposed to do. I had this conversation with my daughter the other morning:

Daughter: I want to be a boy when I grow up. Me: Why is that? Daughter: So I can be an astronaut!

Of course, I explained that girls can be astronauts too. And I've never done anything to set her expectations differently. But they just absorb this stuff from the ether of our culture. At her age, she's picked up on the idea that only boys are astronauts, and girls are ballerinas and princesses and shit.

Agreed.

They (i.e., Disney and Viacom) do have princesses-types doing actiony stuff thinking it's the same thing. And encouraging women to lean in.

They don't typically write those females to think like a someone in engineering, exploration, or security, though. Boys watch Batman be Batman, train hard, think ahead, get beat up, but still be heroic. Girls watch, what, the girl from Brave do action hero things and fight with her mom. Or the princesses from Frozen use amazing powers to resolve what end up being relationship issues.

Honestly, though, I suspect it's difficult to get writers for kids' shows that can think like, say, a theoretical physicist. Writers tend to get art or English degrees.

I guess the question is where are boys getting the idea to become engineers?

I suspect it's not television or other media, but rather personal role models in their life.

Unfortunately with society as it is now, having a role model who isn't your gender (and also isn't your relative), mentor you is largely untennable.

>that sends a million little cues about what girls are supposed to do.

Why do you assume this is cause rather than effect? I find it hard to imagine we set out to define gender roles, rather than those roles evolving over a long time due to a billion factors.

Because researchers have been looking for those factors for a long time but haven't found anything significant. Yes, if you give people a pull-up test men will do better on average but there's a shortage of strong examples of more complex skills where there's a significant innate difference. This is especially true for professional skills where there are multiple paths to success relying on many different mental abilities, decreasing the odds that any single innate difference could be make or break.

Porque no los dos? It's possible that "traditional" gender roles evolved, but are still reinforced by behavior even when they are outdated.

The economics of our society have changed both in what efforts are expected from whom, and in what options are granted to whom. That changes some of the billion factors weighing on our constructed social order, but there are still those who benefit from retarding the process.

No. That is the not real problem here.

The problem is a certain things have a very high barrier to entry. Getting into such things requires over the natural amounts of persistence and other myriad life skills for which you need a certain level of biological independence(like not having kids for example).

These barrier to entries vary with each profession. They are higher for the cool jobs, like the CS ones. Most of these career type jobs where continued work is required. Taking long breaks, asking for lesser working hours(While having colleagues at office who would be pushing 15-18 hour workdays) and other such things makes you a bad worker even if you were to somehow work hard and gain initial access. Net result is people feel they are better off doing things where their contributions have some meaning than having to compete with 16 hr shift workers against whom you are set up to lose by default.

This is the whole difficulty with the diversity problem. There is a inherent assumption that things be made easier to accomodate minorities of all kids. Whereas doing well in any profession requires the exact opposite. Harder the things, the better you get by doing them. But that also means, people who are not tough enough for the job get filtered out every iteration along the way.

You just come down to the point that you can't make people do, what they are not ready to put over the necessary efforts to make happen.

> They are higher for the cool jobs, like the CS ones.

Well, for the cool CS jobs, yeah, which is maybe 1% of the total. The rest aren't cool—they're brain-meltingly boring, often frustrating, health-destroyingly sedentary, and often (not always) fairly low-status, despite the pay[0]. The way-above-median pay's just about all a CS career's got going for it, for most.

[0] Compare especially the status boost granted by entering either of two full-on professions which, strikingly, kept improving gender balance through the 80s and beyond despite a long history of being dominated by men: law and medicine. Meanwhile, CS/programming started out better, then got worse around the mid 80s, as measured by graduates in relevant majors.

But those 1% are all that matter in this context, because they are the only ones doing outreach and are thus the only ones being perceived by outsiders. Nobody (outside the industry) knows what the other programmers do or what their work conditions are, because they don't actively tell anybody.

Partly that's because those 1% have to do outreach to get enough workers willing to endure those conditions, and partly it's because those are entire companies filled with passionate people (because everyone who doesn't love the job quickly quits) and they want to share their passion.

Maybe it's like that in, say, game development, but I've never seen these absurd hours in my career. A certain willingness to learn and do more than the standard curriculum is valued, yes, and there's crunch mode and harder-working startup jobs, but I haven't seen this hazing and exploitation from any of my employers.

>>I haven't seen this hazing and exploitation from any of my employers.

Most employers won't. But yet some people pour in a lot of time to make themselves better. That is precisely the whole point.

Its exactly a bit like school. Schools won't force you to put any hours. But people putting in late nighters and burning the midnight oil end up scoring high marks and getting better grades.

How do you suggest we help low scoring students? By telling the better student to study less?

My top advice would be to look for their comparative advantage. For some that's an ability to work very hard at something they're not obviously talented at or attracted to. OTOH I knew someone who fit just that description who still failed to make the move from technician to programmer, after a lot of personal time studying.

How many fields require 18 hour workdays outside of IB? Even then, that's just shit working conditions regardless

> Yes, because each one of us is an island, and we're not influenced by society at all as it is.

You know what else we are influenced by? Biological traits, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism

Did you think about what if she would have a happier life as a ballerina than an astronaut?

There is also the fact that those who truly want something will go get it despite the headwinds.

Unfortunately, most people do not truly want one profession to the exclusion of all hardship and discouragement.

Rather peoples inclinations are varied and weak, so a society that discourages women from entering science will find more than half of women who had a weak inclination to science will simply choose the next-equal profession they were inclined to.

Honest question, where do you think your daughter learned this expectation from? Medias/advertising, other childs' parents...?

How would one go about preventing this from happenning without segregating the child?

You prevent it from putting an item on your agenda to tell your daughter about cool women with different awesome careers.

You the parent have to go out of your way to make a list of women astronauts, scientists, stateswomen, authors, captains, professors-- everything-- so your daughter grows up in a world women can do anything.

This. I think encouraging women is discouraging in itself. It includes an assumption of power and superiority, and opens them up to doubts and criticism about their technical merits. The best would be not discouraging anybody at all, then those naturally inclined towards the field will be attracted by themselves.

A thing that all of us can do is to get rid of their prejudices for real. We like calling things mysogny and racism and attack, but what they profoundly are is hereditary prejudice which only heals through self-education.

Edit: prejudices are not limited to white males, but we all have them (obviously me too, thus having to do this edit).

I went to a new city and wanted to see what entrepreneurs were up to. Too bad, because the only networking events were female only. What a waste. "Encouraging" women actually leads to them having fewer opportunities.

> Maybe because like men all over the world, Russian women aren't specially "encouraged" to go into tech?

I don't know how true this is now, but there's plenty of Soviet propaganda aimed at women telling them how they're an important part of the workforce too. They were certainly specially encouraged to go into "technology" of the time (or industry, as it was more commonly known in Soviet times).

http://russiatrek.org/blog/art/the-image-of-a-woman-in-sovie...

Witness for example how much more of a celebration international women's day is in the ex-Soviet countries than elsewhere.

Do you have any data on this? I'd be willing to bet women are nowhere near as interested in a pure science career in Russia as they are in IT. I think it has to do with psycho-evolutionary factors -- men have much more incentives to take risks, women much more so to play it safe.

There are a lot of female young (and not-so-young too!) scientists in Russia today.

The pay is not great and a lot of hoops to jump, but the hours are usually flexible. Maybe some women don't feel pressure to be breadwinners, so they can choose a career in science, but men feel that they have to make more money than science ever promises in Russia.

Maybe it's just because most men don't want to do feminine jobs and most women don't want to do masculine jobs. We're all social human beings at the end of the day, and we want to be cool, attractive individuals, and most of us care about others' eyes on us.

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