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Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

As usual, I like Philip Greenspun's explanation better than all of the anecdotes and fuzzy generalizations in this blog post: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/acm-women-in-computing http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

tl;dr: It's because the women who would do well in CS/STEM have much better paying, or easier, or more prestigious options available to them.

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…or, you know, the directly hostile and sexist things women sometimes experience in the industry. As described in the original post.

Not to say that Greenspun is wrong in his conclusions, but when women are saying "I find it unpleasant to be in the industry because…", it seems kinda patronising to turn around and suggest that they're wrong.

To experience the sexist things, you would first have to enter the industry, though. I somewhat doubt it is a good explanation. Also, is life in CS really so unbearable for Stubbornella and other women?

It's not saying that they're wrong, but that there are factors beside sexism and bigotry that contribute to the problem.

The problem I have with that logic is, why wouldn't men decide the same thing?

The author's reasoning seems to be

   1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group
   2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?"

but I ask, why? The article seems to be rejecting the idea that men are naturally better than women at programming (and some other ideas) and embracing the idea that women are naturally better than men at finding a suitable career.

I suppose this is just as valid of a hypothesis, but I don't think it is good enough to simply dismiss the other one.

> men are naturally better than women at programming (and some other ideas) and embracing the idea that women are naturally better than men at finding a suitable career.

If it's plausible enough that millions of young women can have their career and life choices distorted away from STEM by a little sexism (a distortion in the dozens or scores of percents), then why isn't it even more plausible that millions of young men can suffer from well-known traits linked with autism or Asperger's (which are known to be vastly more common in males) and make choices distorted towards STEM?

Or why not say "men are naturally more attracted than women to programming", and human beings have a decent track record of becoming skilled at what they're interested in. There's a big difference between not being interested in doing something and not being as capable at doing something.

I don't put it that way because it makes the causality sound wrong. If you think about men being attracted, then it all sounds neutral and due only to one factor, when it's that men being skewed to STEM makes the fields untenable to women who are, if anything, skewed away from STEM (consider the well-established superiority of women at verbal tasks and interpersonal skills).

The question is not why are the other occupations that Greenspun characterizes as attracting women - doctor, psychologist, lawyer, etc. - so well paid, but why STEM occupations are so poorly paid.

If we thought about it from the perspective of a Martian who has just landed, we might say, 'programming, especially in its niches like embedded or highly distributed scalable, is an intensely demanding task which can be profoundly alien to the human mind, and often requires years of training and experience starting as a child-user just to begin to grok things; therefore, I would expect it to be highly professionalized and to have salaries for its accomplished specialists quite commensurate with specialists in other fields like medicine.'

The Martian, of course, would be quite wrong.

In case you didn't bother to read my Greenspun links, he says that a motivated and very intelligent person - the sort of women whose absence is noted in STEM - could expect in their 40s to collect salaries in specialist medicine in the neighborhood of $300,000, or $500,000 as a law firm partner, or $90,000 as a tenured teacher; he didn't cover child psychologists, though I could swear he did somewhere, but those have similar or higher salaries. Assuming you're even able to get tenure in STEM, your salary will be nowhere near any of that...

A software engineer elite enough to make it into Google will earn - while he's employed there - somewhere around $100,000. (http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm) So yeah.

It's not that they're not equally plausible; it's that they're not equally solvable. We can "fix" sexism (and thus cause the "right" number of women to go into STEM); we can't "fix" Autism-linked chromosomes in people who have already been born.

Does reality care whether something you have a problem with is solvable?

For one thing, achieving high status might not be so relevant for a woman. A womb is inherently valuable, whereas men have to prove by status that they can take care of a child. Or rather, in theory one high status male can make babies with a lot of low status women. It may not quite work that way anymore in todays society (? I am not high status enough to know), but it might still be genetically driving our behavior.

> It may not quite work that way anymore in todays society

Whether or not this is true today is irrelevant; what matters is whether it was true in the environment of evolutionary adaptation.

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