Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies
quillette.com
quillette.com
It's well known that men generally are stagnating economically, while women are catching up. In many metro areas, single women out earn single men.
And so I came across this paper[0], which had some interesting research about that. And what struck me was this: there's an explicit assumption that men have worse socio-emotional skills than women, and that can be used to explain the gap.
By itself, I don't take any issue with it. It's true. But if you turned it around and explained the CS gap starting from the assumption that men are disproportionately represented among the upper levels of spatial and mathematical abstraction skills, there'd be an uproar. Petitions would be signed, scalps would be taken. I say that as someone who thinks much of those differences can be explained by childhood socialization.
And you're not even allowed to talk about it. I'm hesitant to post this comment, for fear someone might hunt me down and dox me to my employer. (Even now, I ponder if I should be making a throwaway account.)
In real life, I had been willing to have conversations about this because I find it an interesting and nuanced topic. But now both sides have taken to treating anyone who doesn't take a stance of complete agreement with their respective ideologies as the Enemy.
It's creating a class of people who know just to shut up and withdraw from any discussion about the topic, because there's clearly no good that can come from it, either socially or professionally. Even academics. And I genuinely don't get why anyone would want that.
This account began as a throwaway. I used to comment with my real name, in the days before the war broke out. In the days when pg used to comment here regularly. The days when, if someone disagreed with you, they'd tell you so, or why you're wrong, or maybe that you're a dumb-dumb. Now, if you don't follow approved talking points in your social media communiqués, you're in real danger of being pilloried, and - as these things go - you're more likely to be attacked by fellow members of the party. I've identified as left-leaning my entire life, but I've never for a moment feared this sort of personal sabotage from a right-leaning person. This is a pursuit of ideological purity at any cost.
I tend to attribute this type of thing to what I call the "identity politics" wing of the left. In a Parliamentary system they probably would be in a different party than you.
Maybe I am on the autistic spectrum, or ots teh fact I studied science but i thought that Damore's memo was fairly well written. First time I went through it he made a couple of points where I though to myself "that sounds controversial", but then in every case he had backed it up with some study validating it to some extent.
It was certainly a lot better written than the majority of the media's reporting on it.
Also, Google even agrees with him: https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/958138574171287552
"Did I read this right? Susan Wojicicki said that women find “geeky male industries” (as opposed to “social industries”) “not very interesting” and Sundar cites research on gender differences."
As for his writing ability, it may not be at the level of Mark Twain, but it seems quite eloquent to me...
Was it really rife with fallacies? Lee Jussim (professor of social psychology at Rutgers University) wrote:
> The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right.
Geoffrey Miller (evolutionary psychology professor at University of New Mexico) wrote:
> For what it’s worth, I think that almost all of the Google memo’s empirical claims are scientifically accurate.
Debra W Soh (PhD in sexual neuroscience):
> Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at.
http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
It doesn't seem reasonable to characterize this memo as rife with fallacies or unsupported generalizations when multiple scientists are willing to go on the record saying the memo's science is generally correct. I have not seen similar in-depth rebuttals from other scientists claiming it's wrong. (If anyone knows of one I'd be glad to read it. I have seen brief quotes from scientists in articles written by reporters, but nothing with depth or analysis.)
EDIT: I wish I understood why I've been downvoted so that I could improve my comments in the future. Would anyone be willing to explain the downvote?
As a leftist, yes. I understand to be on the left means to strive for equality of power among people, economic and social. To be on the right means, at best, not to care about power inequalities between people.
I cringe every time when other people think that feminists and SJWs (I would prefer to call them by different terms but I don't know any) are leftist. They are only in a certain very narrow sense, which makes them often to be on the right, paradoxically. They often do not care about oppressed white males. But if you do not care about some oppressed group, then you don't stand for equality.
Feminism became to be included in the left, because in the past, all women were oppressed. It's no longer the case, and some feminists do not actually care about equality of other groups.
Some biologist put it nicely in a discussion: The left (as a broad political movement) might suffer from a predatory problem - being joined by someone who is oppressed, but doesn't actually want equality, only power. But that's the nature of the game.
And this conflict is nothing new, either. Noam Chomsky, a giant of the left, has been affected by it in the 70s, when he defended free speech of a Holocaust denier.
I’m for all of those things but there is zero doubt society has moved left fast.
I’ve mentioned it repeatedly on HN and have never so much as gotten a rise out of anyone. (I should also point out that the SAT folks publish a detailed report on SAT gender differences each year and nobody blinks an eye.) The problem is that it doesn’t explain the disparity in STEM—it cuts against it.
Men outrepresent women about 2:1 among perfect SAT Math scores. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this represents a real difference in mathematical ability. Even if programming ability were 100% correlated with mathematical ability, you’d expect a much higher ratio than you see in practice. That is strong evidence that women are kept out of STEM for other reasons. Beyond that (1) the pool of programmers isn’t just people with perfect SAT scores—the representation gap rapidly disappears as you go from top 0.5% to top 5%; (2) professions leverage other competencies too. The same 2:1 difference shows up in the top percentile of the LSAT and MCAT, but those fields are more gender balanced because women applicants tend to have better college GPAs.
Anecdotally: I went to a competitive admissions STEM high school, where admissions is gender blind and based heavily on an SAT-like test. The ratio was about 60:40 boys, about what you’d expect from the required testing percentiles. CS was required for all students so it is gender balanced. But APCS was overwhelmingly boys, not because it was full of the best math minds, but I suspect because we’d play DOOM if we got our assignments done early.
That doesn't follow for reasons explained in the article. Choice of whether to go into sciences over humanities isn't correlated with just science ability in school, it is correlated with relative ability between science and reading. The 2:1 ratio tells you precisely nothing about expected ratios of entrance into science programs until you compare it with the performance ratio on the English portion (assuming here, I don't know anything about SATs) of the SATs.
You might do well enough for a PhD in maths and in sociology and still decide try to become carpenter because you love working with wood more than sitting in an office, no matter if you're arguing math or social contexts.
For a woman that might be the hardest career of all these, too (2% of carpenters are women).
I might be boiling down your comment down to that one line, but it such a common line that I feel the need to point out some data. Here in Sweden about 12.5% of the population, men and women, work in a profession where the gender segregation is not higher than 150% dominance for a single gender.
The other 87.5% of the population all work in a profession which is seen as extremely gender segregated. We could describe it as if the wast majority of the population is keeping people who don't gender identify similar to their own out of the work market for which they themselves work in. Evidence that men are kept out of 87.5% of the professions that women work in, evidence that women are kept out of 87.5% of the professions that men work in. In a nation which pride itself on equality, we could claim that there is evidence that the wast majority of everyone here is actively being sexist in their professional life.
When looking at numbers to explain whats going on in society, I feel that the discussion often lack perspective. A ratio of 60:40 is actually within that small minority of 12.5% that is recognized as gender equal, and yet many feel that it too is unacceptable high level of gender segregation.
Beyond that, I’m not inclined to believe that Sweden really is more gender equal. It seems based on little more than assumption.
But my point is that's not the kind of discussion you could have on social media (or, god forbid, ill-advised internally published manifestos) and a not get significant blowback. If I see several friends sharing an article that describes a study effectively showing women are better than men at using Microsoft Word and using that as proof of deep sexism in tech, I'm posed with two choices: I can accurately point out that doesn't make sense as an argument and get people really mad at me for ruining a feel-good social moment, or I can do nothing and roll my eyes internally. Most reasonable people will do the latter, and I don't see how that's a good thing.
Lets say I have a preference for MMs over Skittles - a 2:1 preference. How often will I eat each? Probably in that ratio over a lifetime, because I'll eat snacks lots of times.
Now lets say I have a 60:40 preference for Driving a car as a career over being a shop assistant. What is the chance that the I will be a driver? Given I can only choose one, in a less than ideal world, it will be influenced by lots of things beyond my personal preference, opportunity most of all. But in an ideal world, the chance I am a driver starts to approach 100%, because why would I choose the 40% option, when I have a better one?
Free societies enable lots of choice, and tiny differences, 60:40 or even 55:45, will start to skew towards 100:0 over time. This is likely to play out right to the bottom, where people with fewer options are still likely to choose based on preference, hence garbage collectors and manual labourers vs shop assistants / PAs.
The consequence of tiny differences in preference and the small instances per person are likely to lead to some radical results.
I stay well away from it too. In fact I fear simply writing this comment.
On Twitter, I've taken to unfollowing people who repeatedly retweet threads that have turned into piling-on contests built on a shaky foundation - the uncritical joining of a mob to throw stones at the perceived oppressor is especially worrying when a closer examination shows nuances that don't justify mob justice even in an emotional sense.
As a German I can (mostly) speak my mind about men vs women, the only minefield there is IMO (remotely) Nazi-related stuff, e.g., try to criticize Israel foreign policy or mass immigration.
If you're a technically-minded woman, who's more interested in her career than being a wet-nurse, you've got problems no matter where you're living.
Yeah, you don't really have free speech if you can't even criticize a domestic policy like immigration.
They convinced you that it is Nazi to oppose the government's stance. Soon you will be Nazi for preferring bacon in your sandwiches or having preferences in dating.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality
This is about bullies and assholes. Bullies and assholes come in every race and creed. The thing about male/female chauvinists is that they're actually the same! A male chauvinist, born as a female, would still be a chauvinist. They have everything in common. They're the same asshole bully. They are the enemy.
We need to make a stand against assholes whether they identify with us or not, and stop letting the actions of assholes who identify with us cause us to sit by and tolerate further discrimination and bullying. My 'us' and 'them' is whether you discriminate against people.
Freedom from discrimination is a human right. You don't fix discrimination with discrimination - you only perpetuate it. I'm tired of the assholes running everything.
The effect of this is to reframe the debate from the actual issue at hand, into a debate about how we discuss it. The way we discuss it does matter, but the level of attention that gets around here feels like bikeshedding.
Is that not "silencing" (your word) because you think we are irrational and everyone can discuss reasonable points of view without reprisal? Or is it not silencing because we choose to remove ourselves from the conversation?
That may have been true in some circles and at some times, but in early (especially pre-Web) Internet days when it was primarily academic along with some early tech companies, true names were definitely the norm.
For BBSs and the like, it varied. For hacker sites and the like anonymity/pseudonymity was certainly common but for more mainstream discussion boards, lots of people used their real names. We even had IRL get togethers.
In the end the people with an actual opinion and interesting things to say don't talk, and the idiots throwing bullshit around scream louder and louder.
Making these claims simply adds hurdles for an already disadvantaged group. When claims like this get made it acts as subconscious, or even conscious, justification for the biases of some of the readers/listeners. I.e. simply making the claim adds to the problem.
I agree that this isn't fair, but worrying about that is selfish. It is perfectly acceptable to attempt to formulate solutions based on these beliefs, but vocalizing the the beliefs rather than the solutions in public is harmful.
Regardless, arguments that present this logic feel like a desperate attempt to shunt responsibility to someone else. Women used to be well represented in computer science. This is no longer true, and I suspect that the blame for that lies all over the spectrum.
One thing all these fields have in common is that they are more intellectually rigorous and harder to succeed in than the computer software industry.
Clearly, they have something else in common. We just need to figure out what it is.
This essay, which invokes the "Google Memo", is subtly attacking a straw man. Even those almost the entire rest of STEM is better than CS, it's true that it's not balanced; it remains deeply imperfect. Physics and mechanical engineering, clustered with CS, remain the province of men. There's a expanse of STEM fields with female participation between 25-40% that you'd want to explain or correct. Is it stereotype threat? Implicit bias? Who knows? Probably not?
But that has nothing to do with why Google has so few women engineers. The work that a commercial software engineer does --- even at the lofty heights in which the profession is practiced in such a cathedral of software design as the Alphabet Corporation --- is simply not that hard; most of it is just wiring form fields to databases in new and exciting ways.
Whatever is holding women's participation in our field at or below twenty percent is artificial, and a travesty.
Can we rank these fields by day to day... sociability? Or how solitary they are?
Say, by the number of coworkers you talk to on a given day for a given number of hours. Or the amount of time you spend not at all speaking, and staring at a screen?
Can we approximate these somehow?
~~~
Can we rank these fields by prestige in the eyes of the median person? E.g. If you are a biologist, does a guy on the street think its more interesting and glamorous than being a programmer? Or less? Why?
From the people I've talked to about why they didn't go into computer science/programming, a lot of them see programmers as essentially overpaid janitors or hi-tech sewer workers. They make Facebook/civilization/the internet run, but just how isn't important, and it probably isn't fun. The people I talked to have no idea what the pay scale is for programmers (actually many programmers I've talked have no idea what the pay scale is for programmers either). So they don't consider a cost-benefit very clearly when rejecting CS/Programming.
Also, when kids make program choices, they do it by their 'perception' of the profession, not by actual professional reality.
To reflect on first op, first half of the article is straw man attack, second half is golden insight. The author must be really scared of cultural studies-like interpretation to fend off so many windmills before giving us some meat.
Part of why I like computers is that I can spend my day not talking to these fucking apes that infest this planet -- present company excluded, of course. I say this as someone who's not a social moron, who's recognized as an excellent teacher, and who's actually interested in team-dynamics and debugging miscommunication.
If I'd wanted to be a social worker -- I would have become a social worker. Who let all these social workers into the computer lab?
Anecdata -- dated a kick-ass Data Scientist, and a Molecular Biology Prof recently (separately). Their professional interests were a large part of their attraction to me. As I got to know them, the data scientist confessed that she didn't really like the math and wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't so lucrative. The Prof. was much less interested in biochemistry than in how people relate to science in the context of health care.
So dissapoint.
Your expectations are pretty high if realizing this led you to be disappointed. Not expectations of your SO in particular, but in general about people.
I think this is inherent to most people - they generally don't enjoy the job they do, but they do it still to pay the bills and secure for yourself some form of retirement and safety net in your later years.
Not commenting on other points, but may be you are looking at it from an angle of an expert who has mastered it, so everything looks trivial. As, clearly its much more than that. It is like building extension for machines - the brains and the controls and also pure information management. That's why projects run into millions of lines of code. And the complexity is still growing, as we have new fields like ML emerging on top of it.
Certainly there are specializations that are pushing the edge of research, but we are talking about an industry here, not the few research-y jobs that still exist.
Science is fucking hard, and biology is fucking complicated. Trying to make this transition now, and ermahgerd I thought I dealt with complex system. Not!
Technical implementation details vs the big picture / domain.
> But that has nothing to do with why Google has so few women engineers.
Uh. What?
As far as I can tell, it has _everything_ to do with that. These two things are so closely related i cannot fathom how you can make such a statement...
Also... You make the same point twice. To paraphrase you:
a) "academic CS is less intellectually rigorous and less hard to succeed in than chem/etc -- but there are less women in it"
b) "work as google is simply not that hard, just wiring form fields to databases -- but there are less women in it"
For both a) and b) you then point out that they are problematic and that we cannot explain them (and, for the record, I agree with you on both counts) - but they are still unrelated?
EDIT: To reiterate: I think you are right in that the gender imbalance is a problem and is hard to explain. It's just this disconnect that i don't get here...
It may be the case that some intrinsic difference between men an women keeps the field of chemical engineering at 40-60 women/men, or mathematics at 35-65.
But those fields are cognitively more demanding than commercial software development or, for that matter, undergraduate computer science. No cognitive ability or innate affinity explains the degree of disparity in computer science as practiced in industry. If it did, you'd see it in related STEM fields.
The term for an argument gerrymandered around the data to the degree "CS participation disparity is innate" is is special pleading.
What those two have in common are shitty working conditions. Yes, coding is done sitting in climate controlled offices. But it is mostly shit: shit doc, shit managers, shit clients, shit hours, shit tools. Only dumbfucks who don't mind shit conditions for more money would do it.
I'm sure if you checked the gender balance in government coding jobs and in gamedev you'd discover how it is more about working conditions than sexism.
We do see it in related fields. Women comprise at least 50% of medicine, but they are not evenly distributed like men. Men are disproportionately surgeons, and women are disproportionately gynecologists and pediatricians. Similar distributions occur in actual STEM fields.
As I said in my other post, things-vs-people explains all of this data, but the sexism/oppression hypothesis does not. It's not a matter of cognitive ability, but it is a matter of affinity.
And I think you are right. CS is not that special imho, and the gender imbalance should be more similar to e.g. maths.
> The term for an argument gerrymandered around the data to the degree "CS participation disparity is innate" is is special pleading.
I'm curious, though... Do you have any kind of research that would back your point up? Anything that would refute this "special pleading"?
I mean... I think you are right, but then again I (and you?) are CS experts and not experts at chemical engineering. Could it be that we underestimate the difficulties in CS, and overestimate these in chemical engineering?
> those fields are cognitively more demanding than commercial software development or, for that matter, undergraduate computer science
... you arrive at
> No cognitive ability or innate affinity explains the degree of disparity in computer science as practiced in industry.
Even if software development is "cognitively less demanding" in every sense (though I'm not convinced there is just one universal kind of cognitive ability), it may still be that women do not possess the "innate affinity" for it - namely, they do not like working in it, preferring other fields instead. To my understanding, there is nothing to contradict this explanation, and it makes perfect sense.
The gender imbalance is systemic, and not at all that hard to explain. In the early 90s, as home PCs were becoming ubiquitous, they were in part marketed in the same vein as any other masculine hobby -- auto repair, diy tinkering, etc. The "titans" of early tech companies were men -- not because women weren't interested or weren't smart enough -- but because socially, the gender stereotypes were such that women need not concern themselves (i.e. "Women need not apply").
Ultimately, the same systemic sexism that refused women the right to vote until they pushed hard enough, or refused women equal pay, is the same systemic sexism that keeps women away from CS.
Someone else commented that perhaps it takes a certain "grit" (paraphrased) to maintain interest in CS. I think they're so wrong they're right: It takes a certain "grit" to continue in such a "programmer-bro" culture, where there are few female role models.
Have you also considered a possibility that there is no explanation, and the gap is simply due to internal variability in the underlying dynamical system?
Although personally I favor the "different interests" explanation, let me expand on this a bit. Humans love explanations, even of random events, that's how superstition comes about.
There was an interesting biological experiment done with ants. If you put two identical piles of food the same distance from an anthill, you would intuitively expect that ants will eat from each pile in 50/50 ratio. However, it's not what happens; in reality, the ratio fluctuates over time, at points being 20/80 and can reverse to 80/20.
Why? Because behavior of each ant depends on strength of pheromone path to food that is produced by other ants. In other words, ants, to some extent, copy behavior of other ants. And this copying is enough to produce a large difference in ratio even in cases that are objectively absolutely equal.
So is it hard to conceive that humans also copy behavior of other fellow humans (actually, the above example is from Paul Ormerod's book Butterfly Economics), and that women might prefer a job where already are other women? Or where isn't an overwhelming majority of different people (i.e. men)?
The influence on individual decision can be very subtle, but yet can, statistically, lead to large differences in outcome.
Or just natural. I mean there's gender imbalance in most careers, as is also mentioned in that article; there's just less attention being paid to e.g. the gender difference in day cares (which is in part due to people's preferences in lines of work, but in that particular area a very clear case of gender discrimination and stereotyping)
So, if that were the case, would you say that it's fair to now force these would be neuro surgeons, doctors, lawyers, microbiologists, etc.. to 'wire fields to databases', because in 2018 some people believe that has a somewhat high status in (mostly american) society?
Another friend did make the jump, mostly for the money and career opportunities and she's struggling and feeling a bit demotivated. The CS theory is quite hard, and it's not something she's especially interested in.
These anecdotes don't prove anything, but I've been thinking for a while if the mental toll of this profession is really worth it.
We say that the others didn't make it into the industry, but what if the others are clever enough to avoid having to spend all day in front of a computer working on very abstract things that aren't really understood by most of the people in their lives, including their managers and a significant number of their colleagues.
Having to spend their free time studying just to keep up with the latest fashion, doing overtime, going through the interview gauntlet every damn time, getting shafted by incompetent business leaders and managers.
Programmers are kind of the punching bag of the software industry.
This is why my wife left the industry to be a full-time mom/homemaker. The problems she solves are more rewarding and the time/energy she spends on things are more worth it according to her. Why would she want to get out of bed every morning to churn out JS for some scummy corporation every day when she could be spending time with our kid, teaching them new things, hiking/backbacking/kayaking/fishing with them, etc.?
She's appreciative that I go to work everyday to pay the bills and sees her position as the more ideal one.
I'd never go back to programming as a career unless medicine became completely untenable, and I doubt that's going to happen at the level I'm at now.
especially when CS folks are still considered nerds by default and nerds are still the butt of jokes.
It's not high status, there's just a window of opportunity where it's high paying compared to jobs with similar complexity (clerical office work). That, too, will end.
It's unlikely that's due to two completely different mechanisms, so I'd put more stock in theories that explain both situations.
Software developers have a $102,280 median salary. [1]
[0] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/mobile/registered-nurses....
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
There are many professional and specialist roles in the medical field that go beyond "nursing" but don't require going to med school for full MD training. You have occupational therapists, physical therapists, speech-language pathologists, physicians assistants, nurse practitioners, behavioral therapists, and probably many others I don't know about. Last I checked, all of the fields I mentioned are majority women. The salary ranges clear $100k though there's a generally higher education requirement for a given pay range. Although I think that is more an issue that tech has a uniquely low bar for formal education and a higher bar for informal education and experience.
They make 80k, I make at most 80k if I work at the highest-end webdev firms.
Seriously? Why does it even matter if women don't want to work in CS? Why do we software "engineers" have the ego to think that we work in some great occupation and it's a "travesty" that women largely don't have any interest in working sitting in front of a computer all day.
We are glorified mechanics. Glorified by ourselves. We mostly build intellectually draining CRUD apps mostly and earn shit wages in super expensive cities like SF. Half of us are indentured servants via the H1b system. I think women are smart that they want absolutely nothing to do with this field.
We really need to get off of our high horses and stop believing we are "changing the world" via JavaScript.
See, for example, "HP doesn't care about black people," the ongoing trend of tech devices that are sized for men's bodies and hands and not women, social networks that fail to consider how a stalker could exploit their access policies, etc.
Similarly, I know that as an h1b hire, more often than not, I am just cheaper. No, the company is not hiring me because "I am the best in the world". I fear negotiating salary, fear leaving and am a little underpaid compared to the numbers I see on HN.
I hope women don't degrade themselves like we do to feed the massive profits of the big tech companies. I have faith that women are generally way more sensible then us guys and won't put up with this crap. Being a developer can be isolating, depressing and lonely.
On the other hand, I can't blame women for not wanting my job. IT has a reputation for attracting white, male, introvert nerds - and like many prejudices, there is some truth in this even if this is only because of the self-fulfilling aspect of it (I certainly do conform to this stereotype to some extent). It has been shown that females are generally more attracted to fields evolving around social interaction - and IT has quite a bit of the opposite reputation.
If we compare the situation in CS with the situation in sports the situation does stop appearing to be problematic. We never get worked up about the lack of male cheerleaders, ballerino's (have you even heard that word before?), or that few women play football. I fail to see the point of getting worked up about this specific example of inequality of participation.
No one has ever suggested that I shouldn't or can't go into HR. It just doesn't interest me.
Really? Where do you work (as in what part of the country)? I'm in the Dallas area and have been for 20 years - everywhere I've ever worked has had lots of women (close to 50/50) in technical roles. They're almost all Indian, though (as are 90% of the people in any technical roles). Rare to see a female manager of any nationality, though.
The workplace shouldn't be your dating pool...
All other points aside, this is simply an untrue statement - the lofty heights of the average software engineer at Alphabet is not even fractionally close to the pinnacle of "intellectual difficulty" in our professional field.
> The sex difference in interest in people extends to a more general interest in living things, which would explain why women who are interested in science are much more likely to pursue a career in biology or veterinary medicine than computer science.
Right, so because as a woman she intrinsically like people more, my friend is now doing a postdoc about moths?
Biochem, when offered as an undergrad program, is offered through the biology department and has a number of standard biology department requirements that would be elective at best for chemistry undergrads. Biochem majors also take orgo following gen chem, just like chemistry majors.
I don’t know what “touchy-feely” means in this context, but “chem except you take orgo almost immediately” does not match with my experience at all.
Hm, are these US statistics? Cursory look at our electrical engineering (european post-communist country) study programme list of students reveals that out of ~50 students, there is exactly zero women (:(). There is decidedly more women in the CS programme (~14%)
If we only could figure out what is common below and above our field, we might get out of this place in astoundingly average in gender segregation and become exceptional. Whatever is holding men's and women's participation in each other fields may be something fixable.
edit: nvm, I misread. You lump MechE (and I'd guess EE) with CS, and I think are pointing out they're in the 15-20% range as opposed to the other engineering disciplines mostly around 30%. I incorrectly thought you were saying the other fields were around 50%.
This is very misleading. Female post docs in the maths are below 30%, and computer science post docs are at about 20%:
https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17310/digest/fod-wome...
There is no really justification to think that the maths "are doing better" than other STEM fields. It's certainly not a double digit difference.
> Whatever is holding women's participation in our field at or below twenty percent is artificial, and a travesty.
That's pure conjecture. There is very little evidence that this is artificial, and a few good reasons to think it's not. For instance, female participation in STEM in more repressive countries like Iran is at 50%, because it's one of a small number of careers they can choose from.
Pretty much every country in which women have more opportunities to choose from a wider selection of careers shows the exact same gendered STEM trends. Do you really believe these prejudices holding back women from STEM are somehow universal in precisely the same ways across dozens of cultures? And furthermore, that the fields that were even more sexist and old-boys-club, like law and medicine, couldn't keep women out, but a bunch of nerds with keyboards are far too scary for women? That frankly stretches credulity.
A better theory that reasonably explains all of this data is the things-vs-people hypothesis:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
You claimed widespread prejudice, which has no supporting evidence.
And you may consider the article I linked to be rambling, but it's comprehensive.
The overwhelming majority of kindergarten teachers are female (over 97%). Is this a travesty as well? Why can't various fields be dominated by one sex?
> is artificial
Our entire economy is artificial, so that goes without saying. I think you were insinuating that this is purposeful. It isn't.
> Is it stereotype threat? Implicit bias?
It isn't.
Women are simply more sensitive to work/life balance. For whatever reason, our industry seems to think it's normal to work 12 hours a day. Very few women want to spend 12 hours at a job. That's fine. Very few men want to spend time taking care of little kids. That's also fine.
Most people in tech don't work 12 hours... it is not the norm. Maybe it's a Bay Area or early startup thing, but I never have.
Even if you were right, a lot of other office/"professional" jobs work just as much or longer than us. My friends (female and male) working here in NYC in other industries (finance, marketing, accounting, etc.) usually work 9-10 hours and don't take a lunch break (work while eating). Some careers like nursing are known for their crazy hours.
I've seen it almost everywhere, that's been my experience, but that's anecdotal. I do primarily work with startupy companies and large corps with aggressive environments.
> My friends (female and male) working here in NYC in other industries (finance, marketing, accounting, etc.) usually work 9-10 hours
These are industries dominated by men ...
> Some careers like nursing are known for their crazy hours.
It's not the consecutive hour count that's the issue, but the total hour count. Nurses do work long stretches of time, but they also get long stretches of time off.
CS is often toxic in my opinion. I can recall one instance were a lecturer harped on about why "men are better than women" .
Wish i spoke up, but the guy ruled the place.
I'm so sorry to hear you've had an underwhelming career working on boring projects. There's so much more that's passed you by.
It wouldn’t matter if you were accurate, it would still be rude and inappropriate, but note that tptacek is about the last person in the world I would describe as having had an underwhelming career working on boring projects (although I’m sure he’s done his share of those, too), so you got your facts wrong on top of everything.
I've also seen this in the six years I worked in the UK as a developer, before starting my PhD. Of the women developers I worked with, (in this case, not so many) the majority were Indian or Eastern or Southern European. The same goes for the students in my data science Masters (also in a UK university).
Other women I've discussed this with, have similar experiences. In particular Greek women (like myself) don't remember any perception of a strong bias in numbers against women in STEM subjects. I have a fair few Greek women friends who have bachelors or master's degrees in computer science.
All this is of course anecdotal but it makes me think there is some sort of bias that is not explained by "interest in things" vs "interest in people", or any such difference between the sexes, because it is particular to specific cultures, rather than to the sexes around the globe.
In any case "gendered interest" sounds like a convenient oversimplification that seeks to confirm cultural bias as natural and spontaneous, rather than an attempt to understand it. Instead of answering any questions it passes the buck; it leaves someone else to wonder why girls and boys are interested in different things (e.g. fire trucks vs barbie dolls). The same goes for academic performance in school: that is also an observation that requires an explanation- not an explanation in and of itself.
Essentially, despite various attempts to get to 'equal' gender outcomes in the most 'equitable' societies in the world, participation in jobs and industries associated with men and women remains stubbornly unmoved towards 50:50 (or whatever proportion is considered desirable). The suggestion is that it's precisely the relatively equitable and liberal norms of those societies that have provided the conditions for women to make use of their agency and choose roles according to their preferences. Whereas women in societies less predisposed towards liberal norms may be motivated by other considerations, such as the need to maximise their earning potential, familial expectations of success or a stronger sense of needing to prove one's potential and achievement (including perceptions of gender in their own societies). In the instance of the anecdote about your Greek colleagues, I wondered if the financial crisis was a catalyst for greater participation, along with the current trend of Greeks' tendency towards staying in HE for longer?
I've probably made mistakes or mischaracterised aspects of this idea, but that's broadly how I understand it. It doesn't answer the why of 'systems/things' vs 'people' (which has more accessible academic discourse than this does), although I think it offers a different perspective on biases that may be in play.
Admittedly, I'm yet to read it (Pocketed it for later).
I assume I agree with your sentiment about what equality means and what its relationships with freedom and liberty are - it's just not something that can easily be said in the open without running the risk of having to defend it or attracting pariah status. I don't really want to say much more on the matter here beyond that (it's mostly a draining experience).
What this tells us is the opposite of what the article concludes. If women in more equal countries, with an absent "glass ceiling" that keeps them from attaining the top-paying positions, choose non-technical careers, that is because (they expect that) those careers pay better than technical careers.
This choice however, does not allow us to conclude a lack of interest in technical subjects. It merely suggests an interest in a better paid job.
Note that we also can't conclude that women in less equal countries are more interested in technical positions. However, this is not what I'm claiming. My point is that it's not safe to infer "interest in X" fom "works in X".
P.S. I see below you say you didn't read the article. It basically says what you say in your comment.
_______________
[1] This comes from my personal experience, but I don't expect it to be controversial. In many companies I've worked, men and women, even if they started out as technical workers, jumped on to a managerial track as soon as they got the chance. In one particular multinational financial company I worked, this was so common that the company had very few technical employees and had to outsource most of its technical work to contractors- which should also not come as any news to anyone who's worked in the financial sector.
For example, a British woman that graduates from a British university with a history degree and wants to work in the UK probably met a couple people during the course of her degree (or at any other point) that can help her move forward with a career. Because let's face it, you're not going to get a high-paying job with high marks in your History BA and nothing else. As such, her prospects will be better in her field of study or in a reasonably related field (or any field where having contacts strongly helps and where she has made such contacts).
Meanwhile, an immigrant will be much, much less likely to have such local connections/contacts. Presumably then, immigrants will gravitate towards fields where getting into them / your pay grade is more closely based on competency and not "who you know". In other words, fields like STEM or (in your case) anything which requires a PhD.
Could that not be an explanation for your experience?
I think a simpler explanation is that people choose a career in their countries for whatever reason (that I don't know and can't speculate about) then when demand for their skills rises, they may find that emigrating is a better choice than staying at home- for instance, because salaries are better abroad.
That would be a simpler explanation for why more women in IT professions are immigrants to the UK (and possibly the US, though I'm not sure): they got the skills, there's job offers, they go abroad and take the offers.
Some of my engineer colleagues are very hard to understand on the phone because of their language. It's hard to imagine them getting anywhere as a lawyer, for example.
Thats not correct theory. Visas (h1b) are only granted where there is perceived shortage like computer programmers ect.
An indian woman cannot come to "choose" to be an english teacher in usa.
You won't see lots of indian students studying philosophy because once you are done you have to go back. Bad monetary investment.
Want a better life = study engineering. The explanation is as simple as that.
Even so, why are there more of those technical immigrants female than the locals? That the majority of visas granted are for technical fields doesn't tell us anything about the gender of those who obtain them. There's nothing stopping 100% of immigrant IT workers from, e.g. India from being male. Why are they not?
Also, I'm not sure the assumption that visas are only granted to technical workers is correct. My experience is from the UK and I don't know what happens in the US, but over here, immigrants do all sorts of jobs. For example, many doctors and nurses in the NHS (the National Health Service) are from India or the EU; the majority of agricultural workers are from the EU; plumbers, famously, are all Polish; catering workers are from the EU; etc etc.
You are comparing locals( general population) to immigrant females( self selected group). Ofcourse population selected for technical degrees has higher % of technical degrees.
> There's nothing stopping 100% of immigrant IT workers from, e.g. India from being male. Why are they not?
Because all people want better life male or female. Getting into tech(even if goes against their inherent choices) for Immigrant female population is worth the high reward vs local population where upside of getting into tech is might not be worth going against their inherent interests.
> the majority of agricultural workers are from the EU
You explained it yourself. What you are asking is equivalent to 'why aren't there more of UK natives among agricultural workers'.
I believe that, at age 18, women have more sophisticated social lives and care more than boys do about relationships with people. But I think the perception that CS is less beneficial towards people or that technologist don’t work with people as often as other professionals is false. My job as a PM at Google was incredibly social, and I felt had a huge impact on “living things”, much more so than my female friend’s role as a psychology researcher or operations associate at an insurance company. There’s a belief in society that all CS grads do is sit in caves alone and make video games, whereas the truth is that they have beautiful offices, close-knit teams, a lifestyle with time for friends, a lot of influence, and a huge impact on real people’s lives through the software they create.
Now, a related problem is that CS actually is less social for woman than in it is for men. I had very few friends in my advanced classes, whereas the dudes took those classes together in packs. I benefited a huge amount from women in CS community at my university because I felt like I knew more people in my classes, could sit, chat, and work with them. IMO, all of the dollars going towards women in STEM that this author criticized are and should continue to target these two problems: that CS is perceived as less to do with “living things” and that it actually is less social for girls because there isn’t a strong community.
That's not "the truth", that's your experience in the amusement park that has been created for the pampered developers of the current dotcom bubble at companies like Google. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Regardless of gender, I'd rather have the doubters weeded out by an unrealistic negative perception than have them lured in by an unrealistic positive one.
The thing is, some programmers really are socially inept and CS work is one of their last refuges. That includes a bunch of socially inept women, too! Let's not disturb their natural habitat by bringing all these overly social people in, those will thrive in many other places as well.
Re:success - In my eyes, success is when women have better representation as engineers, makers, and technologists. A PM and UX designer could be a great engineer and technologist, although it's hard to keep your technical chops when you're not coding regularly. So I agree...
I think you are on to something. This is really the critical age when the decision happens. Everything else is the just the result of this.
My own theory, is that CS (programming) is perceived as having low social status. Women are socially smarter, so they are aware of that. Men are clueless, so they are more likely to choose programming and later they move into other CS fields.
A colleague told me when out at a bar he refrains from telling women that he is a programmer because they suddenly become way more interested because they know how much $$$ programming jobs bring in. That does not sound like low social status signalling to me, but the opposite at least for males.
What does this mean? Do women talk more? Yes. Is it substantive? Women are more willing to talk about their feelings but they also can be quite indirect compared to a man.
Women also have a reputation of being more adversarial and catty: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/opinion/sunday/why-women-...
It simply means that they are more socially aware. If you allow the metaphor, I would say that they are more likely to "play the game" and "play it well" at that.
Social skills have very little relationship to "emotional intelligence", so I have no clue why you would bring up the point that women are more willing to talk about their feelings.
You are comparing extraversion and agreeableness. While both are statistically higher in women, you are comparing apples and oranges.
Here, have some science: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/
And I can understand why -- I did the opposite -- dropped out of my philosophy BA to go join the .com rush, and now 20 years later am a SWE @ Google -- but having come from a humanities background originally, I continue to find this culture off-putting.
And I very much would prefer to be working with 'living things' (plants) at this point in my life. If I could only make a decent living that way.
I think discussions like these make progress, but very slow progress. I think the root of the issue for many people is more than factual at this point, it's become emotional for both sides. And I think progress will come when both sides can get a handle on their frustrations and then articulate their feelings gracefully.
At the end of the day, I think only a very small percentage of people commenting here care too much about what a new study finds. I don't think it will move many viewpoints.
So I think I'll propose a template for resolving this conflict (a longshot, I know).
Pursuit of agreement:
A) Do I want to understand the feelings of the people I'm talking to? If not, don't expect progress.
B) Do I want to understand my personal feelings? Do I recognize why this topic is emotional to me, why I'm spending my Thursday morning arguing this?
C) Do I see how tangential the connection is between my feelings and the article at hand?
D) Do I care about reaching a point of agreement, or is my motivation more around rewarding myself/punishing others?
E) Am I willing to describe my feelings/worries/motivations without using emotionally charged-words?
To paraphrase Data O'Briain, "zombies are at an all-time low but the fear of zombies could be incredibly high, doesn't mean we should have government policies to deal with the fear of zombies": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zopCDSK69gs
If we're getting meta, I think that the first thing that should be discussed is: What are we optimizing for, and how do we measure it?
Take a look at the article. How is someone who is concerned about sex differences in representation going to feel when they read, "Many academics in the modern world seem obsessed with the sex difference..."?
The article shoots itself in the foot in the first sentence. It's not going to change minds because it doesn't consider feelings.
Writing in a way that gets the facts right, and uses good arguments, and is worded in a way that doesn't turn off your opponents is hard. But it can be done. I think slatestarcodex.com often does it (though not always).
So going even more meta, that's the first thing that should be addressed. I realise that eliminating feelings completely is a lost battle, but I thing at minimum how socially acceptable it is to make decisions based on feelings would be beneficial.
I think the problem with computer science in general is that it's one of the few careers you need to like at an early age and do a lot of self-directed study before you even enter college, or you are at a disadvantage compared to others. This affects both men and women, and keep in mind most men aren't interested in those fields either.
I do strongly suspect that has a lot to do with the fall-off in women working in CS. (It's probably not limited to that though it probably also leads to some self-perpetuating feedback loops.) It's almost unique among careers in that regard with the arts (playing music, etc.) or sports being the only other major exceptions.
You don't just decide in high school you'd like to do the violin thing and apply to Juilliard. But it's considered perfectly normal to decide you really liked high school chemistry, even if that's the extent of your exposure to it, and consider majoring in it once you hit college.
On the other hand, I've taken a couple of programming MOOCs based on intro programming courses at a couple of elite schools. The idea that I could have made it through them as a freshman never having touched a text editor/IDE is farcical. Yet [EDITED for clarity: when I took an intro programming course as a mechanical engineer in college way back when there was no expectation that I had ever touched a computer]. (I had done a little BASIC programming in high school but it was very rudimentary.)
The point is that you are supposed to struggle with the answer because you can't imagine the doctor to be the boy's mother. That there exists an assumption that people will find this difficult to answer suggests that there is some sort of expected cultural bias about doctors being male or female.
An anecodte, of course- literally.
My sister is rarely at a loss for words but I'm not sure _she_ even knew what to say to that.
Completely leaving aside the rest of content, the only obsessed people here are those who are obsessed with not understanding what the issue is about perceiving it to be an obsession. We are not obsessed with the number of women in STEM for its own sake (it's an important but a secondary concern) but obsessed with the inequality of power. As women happen to be underrepresented precisely in those areas that confer power -- including some STEM fields -- that is what we care about. If women were underrepresented in software engineering but commensurately overrepresented in, say, politics, banking or high management, this would have been a matter of less concern. As women happen to be underrepresented in all of these, we're attacking each of these individually.
Of course, those of us who are in STEM also feel that women underrepresentation (aside from the much more important issue of power equality) is a huge loss of talent for our field.
I just wanted to state that, for the record, having these sorts of discussions on hacker news is extremely distressing to me. I've worked hard to get the accreditations that I have, and I usually enjoy the things I read on this website. But just imagine for a moment how all this appears to an aspiring programmer when she wakes up in the morning and checks her favorite technical content aggregator.
Like, yeah, none of you are saying that ALL women are less capable than ALL men, but what I'm reading here is the subtext. When I pursue a career in this field, how will my coworkers perceive me? Will I be treated with respect? Or will I be seated next to someone who is convinced that there is a gender war going on, and thereby offended by my very presence?
In all honesty, recently I've seen underperforming women get promoted to positions they shouldn't have been promoted to because of political pressures, so there is going to be some sense of "is she competent or is she a diversity hire/promotion?" They also might think, does she really enjoy tech, is she a nerd like me, or is she just looking for a cushy office job in software that the "diversity/women-in-X" groups are so loudly promoting.
Hell I think that about all my colleagues whatever their gender is. Seen plenty of males don't really want to code, but it pays too well to not.
As an immigrant wondering how the natives perceive me, I've learned that one has to do their best and be assertive when it's necessary.
Ultimately it depends on luck. To split the world in ones tribe and "the other" is human nature, and not discussing things on HN won't make things better...
*Sexism has can take many shapes others than direct attacks on women.
Edit: Interesting how this went from +5 to -5 in minutes. Very controversial topic, eh?
The more we keep framing things in the context of hiring to meet gender based quotas, the more people will see us as diversity hires. I would hate that more than knowing someone doesn't like me because of my gender because that persons mind I can maybe change via my skills and work.
That being said, I've seen it with males as well, but it has been more of the one guy on the team gets his MBA/college buddy hired kind of thing. In both cases, employees would be rightfully skeptical because of outside influences in the hiring/promotion process that are trying to purposefully achieve some end goal.
My wife, who formerly worked as a software dev, hated this aspect of the industry because there were so many women-in-tech groups that were trying to help (a.k.a. coddle) her achieve something she could easily achieve on her own by her own technical acumen. In similar vain, I've gotten jobs because of who I know more than what I know before (in my case it was because I'm a submarine vet and the hiring manager was also a former submariner), and yeah, it does undermine the sense of accomplishment that comes with doing something on your own.
Don't think about it. Of many valid reasons to work to change ones behavior, I don't think this is one of them. All that effort you were spending trying to change something that 1. may not be happening and 2. if it is, is "pretty damn typical human psychology" (It's as old as humanity to find ways to look down on others) and there's not really pragmatic ways to stop that short of a lobotomy. Spend that effort on excelling in what you do. Bust ass and the people who matter will respect you regardless, and it makes it easier to tune out the ones who don't.
Feel free to ignore this advice, I've long since decided to avoid commenting in threads like the overarching, but your original concerns and question made me want to try and contribute at least something marginal :)
As far as I can tell, the linked article is saying exactly the opposite - that women can be and are perfectly capable as programmers, but that the gender imbalance is probably not driven by exclusionary tactics on the part of the men who make up the majority. It is noteworty that I've never even heard of a woman saying that she actually pursued programming as a profession and found herself excluded - just that the ones who do are surprised how few other women they see.
Sexism and harassment is rampant in this field, as well as any male dominated field.
Congrats!
> extremely distressing to me.
Why?
> just imagine [..] appears to an aspiring programmer
Hmm...how do you think it should appear? You hint (strongly), but you don't really say.
> none of you are saying that ALL women are less capable than ALL men,
Yes. As in: not even a bit.
First, most of the talk is about preferences, not ability. Second, if anything it is about distributions that have large overlaps, with average ability being the same and with differences (in STEM), if anywhere, mostly in the width of the distribution (so males may have wider variance). Third, there is apparently one difference in ability, which then reflects itself in preference: women with high math scores tend to also have high verbal scores, whereas men with high math scores tend to only have high math scores, they are not good at the verbal bits. And statistically, people of either gender with high scores in both prefer going into non-STEM fields.
Fourth (going back to the second point): all of these are at most distributions. They say absolutely nothing about any individual. For example, I am a guy but despite the fact that I scored high in both math and verbal parts (and absolutely atrociously at the 3D mental rotation that supposedly explains a slight edge for guys in STEM), and was interested in (a) physics (b) english literature and linguistics (c) philosophy here I am as a programmer.
> but what I'm reading here is the subtext.
What is the subtext you're reading? Can you be specific?
What I see, text and subtext is an entire field defending itself from being smeared as sexist assholes with zero credible evidence of this being true and due almost entirely to choices other people make, choices that the people in this field have absolutely no influence over.
> [How will be perceived/respected etc.]
This will depend almost entirely on your individual circumstances, meaning most people will treat you with respect if you treat them with respect and behave respectably yourself. If you enter as a gender warrior, things might be different. Is this a 100% guarantee? Nope, nothing is. Assholes exist. In every industry.
If I told you the things that have happened to me in this industry, you probably wouldn't believe me, and if I claimed this happened to a woman, it would be seen as surefire proof of the systemic sexism in the industry. Except it happened to a guy, so whatever. And if shit happens to you, you probably want to assume it is because there are shitty people, not because of your gender.
A 2008 survey[1] by the ACM that actually interviewed both men and women didn't find significant differences in most parameters of job satisfaction, and in fact women reported slightly higher support by their superior than men did.
[1] https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2008/2/5453-women-and-men-in-...
I am not sure that I agree with the entire article, but this part stood out to me. I never know how to express this in a way that sounds appropriate, but I feel that some of us might be better off if we focused more of our energy on actually developing in our chosen field and less on dwelling on how sexist everyone says the field is.
I understand that the above comes with a lot of caveats. "What if the sexism is the thing _preventing_ me from developing?", etc. And I do think there are legitimate problems, and that they need to be addressed. But sometimes it seems like the flood of media and popular opinion constantly shoved at us about how bad we have it only makes us more tuned to focus on things that may not even matter (and may not _all_ come from a place of gender bias, but are now prone to being categorized that way). This then results in us wasting our time being affected by/thinking about/dwelling on those things rather than a) actually growing in our chosen field and b) focusing on more _serious_ gender issues that may be a little bit more concrete than "This guy was rude to me, obviously it's because I'm woman and not because he's an asshole to everybody."
At the same time I'm not sure if the above is the right viewpoint to have. Is it better to potentially be blind to actual "microaggressions" or other "smaller" issues that might build up and keep trudging along in a state of ignorance, or is it better to not see those things and keep working in a field you enjoy?
I don't speak about this much because to be honest I don't have the energy, and prefer to spend my time on making things. This may be bad: one day I too may have a "MeToo"-esque story of working in tech, and maybe I will suddenly realize I've been blind this whole time.
For some agendas, exarcebating an issue and exposing a divide between groups of people is more desirable than solving the issue itself (which is counter-productive to the agenda )
A notable point advanced in the video is that there is a difference in the summary statistics (not the entire distributions) which indicate men prioritize status and family different from women (with men more likely to prioritize status at the expense of family, the opposite of women). Another notable difference (again in the summary statistics, not the entire distribution) is that men prefer careers that are thing-centered over people-centered.
I wish statistics were better understood by the general population.
The basis for this argument is that both boys and girls are equally likely at birth to go into a given field. As they grow society gives cues to them that X is for boys and Y is for girls. These cues end up shaping preference and explain the large difference we see in the ratio of boys/girls in X. The issue I have with this theory is that it shouldn't apply only to STEM, it should work for all fields. Thus if instead of STEM we say Law or Finance or Medicine have cues then that should mess with the ratios there.
If you go back several decades the ratio of men/women in Engineering, Law, Finance, and Medicine were all equally low. As time moved on the ratios improved in Law, Finance, and Medicine but not in Engineering/STEM. If you want to claim cues as a major factor in the current STEM ratio you have to explain either
1) why unchanging cultural cues were not the reason for the improvement in Law/Finance/Medicine but still negatively affected STEM or 2) why the cultural cues when away for the other fields and not STEM
I haven't been able to find an answer to either of those points and so I think that while some cultural cues exist, it isn't the main reason for the ratio differences and doesn't need to be address to fix the issue.
> Before 1970, women took between 10% and 15% of computer science bachelor’s degrees. By the early 1980s, the number rose to 37%. However, the trend began to reverse in 1985. In 2013, 18% of bachelor’s degrees in computing were earned by women. Part of this decline is due to the fact that computer science became a male-identified field. But during the 1990s, hiring practices also began to favor men, according to the AAUW study, and “the creation of professional organizations, networks, and hierarchies” that supported the entry of men into the field helped pushed women out. In fact, as the study notes, once employed in the field, women are more likely to leave than men. They tend to suffer from isolation.
http://fortune.com/2015/03/26/report-the-number-of-women-ent...
The current ratio varies widely between STEM fields.
It would be helpful to understand how the culture came to accept women as lawyers and doctors, but why would that be necessary to identify cultural factors as a reason for the imbalance in CS?
It is necessary because the question "What cultural factors cause the imbalance in CS?" presupposes that cultural factors caused the imbalance. The whole point of bringing up that more gender equal countries have larger differences in ratios is to highlight a strong piece of evidence that this is not the case.
Economically speaking, I suspect this is more to do with the superior position of women, as a class, in setting the standards of what an acceptable relationship looks like.
If husbands are willing to do heavy lifting, wives would be economically irrational to do their own heavy lifting. I'm pretty suspicious that the deal offered to a housewife comes with better quality of life outcomes than the deal offered to most engineers. I've always assumed it is linked to the relative excess of young men to the number of young women (something like 107:100 or close to [1]).
It makes sense to me that the group with most power in establishing a relationship would choose not to be an engineer if they could be, say, mind the house.
As why many girls make that "decision" at around 12 - they might be smarter and see that they don't have to work that much anymore. Maybe in the past when things like cooking for 10 people family or washing clothes/cleaning were super difficult the partners had to form a team; these days most of this is semi-automated and allows different strategies.
Do you really believe that girls aren't making conscious choice to stay away from "weird smelly" engineers in STEM fields that are now popular wrt. $/status but were completely undesirable 20 years ago? Have you grown up completely isolated from young females and couldn't observe what were their choices? Yes, I have seen a lot of men dissing them "just females, can't be good" (I hated it in my idealistic youth), but then later you observe their choices and they aren't doing themselves any favors either, usually picking "safe choices" instead of risky ones needed for success.
>Microaggressions are subtle behaviors (e.g., facial expressions) or statements that are not explicitly hostile but are nevertheless interpreted by the receiver as conveying contempt, stereotypical attitudes, or other negative beliefs.
Would you say that is a problem that can or should be fixed after the fact? For instance, if we assume that we know the major cause to be social conditioning at young ages should we then try to correct that after they leave education?
As far as fixing the problem, no we can’t correct all limiting stereotypes overnight or even for a very long time. But we should work on it. The least we can do is be supportive of those who try to succeed in spite of the stereotypes.
It doesn't look like you read the article. It clearly stated that in countries like Finland and Sweden, where such cues are less likely to be given, there is a larger inequality in STEM. Meanwhile, in Iran there are more women in STEM. Do you think that in Iran young girls are more or less likely to be subjected to "harmful gender stereotypes" than in Sweden or Finland?
> Cues can be as subtle as a wide-eyed look while reacting ...
This was precisely addressed in the article. It goes by the name of micro-aggression. Go back and read about it.
No. As I said above to another person who also made the same mistake:
They only describe it in the context of the workplace and in degree-granting institutions, not in earlier schools or in the home where minds are in their formative stages. It’s microagression for sure, but they are overlooking the more powerful instances of it.
I was lucky enough to take a Mechatronics class (software + electronics) in high school a couple of years ago (Australia, year 11). One (very talented) female chose to take the class along with probably 15 males, though physics & maths seemed about a 50/50 split.
That's an even worse percentage than the engineering faculty at my university, which at 23% has the highest ratio of women in engineering faculties nationally.
Well, what was actually tested was if showing girls and boys a video declaring that girls are bad at math would make them perform worse at a math test right after[0]:
> Students in the two groups were brought to separate classrooms and watched the video that either activated stereotype threat or nullified the stereotype and then completed the mathematics test. The testing session took approximately 40 min.
> The video shown to the stereotype threat group depicted a scientist telling students that recent research “shows that math intelligence levels among students do not change as students get older. Students are born with a certain amount of natural math ability which does not change.” Students were then shown brain imagery and were given a detailed explanation regarding how some students are born with better mathematics skills (as indicated by more brain activity). In this condition, the students were also told that “females have lower levels of this kind of brain activity than males. This makes sense because girls often get lower scores on standardized tests compared to boys.” These students were also told that the “test that you will take today is a very good measure of your natural math ability.”
[0]: An examination of stereotype threat effects on girls’ mathematics performance. Developmental Psychology Vol. 49, Iss. 10, (Oct 2013): 1886-1897.
Stereotype threat has been proposed as 1 potential explanation for the gender difference in standardized mathematics test performance among high-performing students. At present, it is not entirely clear how susceptibility to stereotype threat develops, as empirical evidence for stereotype threat effects across the school years is inconsistent. In a series of 3 studies, with a total sample of 931 students, we investigated stereotype threat effects during childhood and adolescence. Three activation methods were used, ranging from implicit to explicit. Across studies, we found no evidence that the mathematics performance of school-age girls was impacted by stereotype threat. In 2 of the studies, there were gender differences on the mathematics assessment regardless of whether stereotype threat was activated. Potential reasons for these findings are discussed, including the possibility that stereotype threat effects only occur in very specific circumstances or that they are in fact occurring all the time. We also address the possibility that the literature regarding stereotype threat in children is subject to publication bias.
Did you read a different paper, or do you disagree with the author's own abstract?
Obsessed as in "doing science on socially relevant topics?"
> These differences are socially important because these tend to be prestigious occupations, and practically important because the different numbers of men and women in these fields contribute, in part, to the sex difference in earnings.1
So... "doing science on relevant topics."
Why misrepresent that as an "obsession?"
But I also think it's a fair question why gender differences are such a huge focus right now, as compared to say class problems (MOST Americans don't have $500 in savings [1]), or environmental problems (Men's sperm counts have gone down by half in the last 30 years [2]).
Obviously these aren't mutually exclusive, but there is a case to be made that the amount of energy/money going into this problem isn't proportional to its severity.
1. http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/12/pf/americans-lack-of-savings... 2. https://www.npr.org/2017/07/31/539517210/sperm-counts-plumme...
In a way, they are voting with their choices, and all we need is a focus group.
"It should be noted, though, that the largest study to date included nearly 1000 children (9-14 years old) and found no effects.9 This latter study is of particular interest, because it included adolescents, whereas most other stereotype threat studies were carried out with university students. If stereotype threat discourages girls from pursuing math-intensive STEM coursework and careers, its effect should be evident in high-school. The fact that a large and well-designed study could not find any effect, in our opinion, suggests either the effect does not exist or it is unmeasurably small."
edit: and then of course, such dataset should be anonymized and made public, so anyone could see what we are talking about.
A related read that I found quite illuminating: http://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05...
(I run in fairly left-leaning liberal circles and you know what I hear about? NOT actually being PC (whatever that is -- define it, I dare you) but people complaining about something being PC. This has been going on since the year 2000 so much that I'm pretty sure jokes about something being PC are PC, while actually being PC is not PC..)
The non-domination mindset focuses on non zero-sum win win results. This requires creating something out of nothing. An example is relationships. There is nothing directly measurable or improveable, but meaning is can still be derived purely through reorganization of actors and the interfaces between actors.
The degenerate win-win situation is when both actors win due to the loss if a third party. A wealthy country can have win-win between all sorts of actors as long as the negative consequences can be outsourced.
This implies that all existing win-win methodologies are probably corrupt in some way because there are very few people who expand their bubble of humanity recognition to all humans. Whether it's a different country or a different ideology, the tendency to dehumanize is trigger-happy.
I'd say that society creates two mindsets. One geared to winning. The other to living. Culture specializes these two mindsets into 2 groups. The male/female divide being one that matches fairly well due to physical difference.
This isn't the case now since mentally there is no large difference. At least in potential.
To focus nowadays though is too much on having the "living" mindset learn how to win. Instead it should focus on the winning mindset learning how to live.
But, on the other hand, his counterargument for the existence of other potential factors seems to me to be quite weak and lacking the same rigor. The existence of "basic sex differences" is not discussed in detail, with only a couple of references. And a lot of his counterargument seems to be based on a few example countries with high gender equality rankings and low STEM participation.
Is there any validation that these gender equality rankings are a useful indicator of gender equality? What about factors that surface only after school/college in these countries? What about network effects in various fields?
Not that I'm saying such factors do exist. But the author makes a somewhat strong (IMO) argument against stereotype threat, implicit bias etc. and a very weak argument for the existence of other factors.
Many years ago Feynman expressed concern and regret about the harm that causes to experimental physics. One can imagine it being a far bigger issue in some of the social sciences, where there is nothing nearly as consistently apolitical as Nature to gradually separate reality from comforting delusion.
However, right at the beginning, this is really a bad argument: “There is particular concern about the lack of women in prestigious STEM fields, such as Ph.D.-level faculty positions, but surprisingly there is no concern about the under-representation of women in lower-level technical jobs, such as car mechanics or plumbing.”
This can hardly be surprising to the authors. People in lower-level technical jobs don’t have as much power over society at large as those in high-level positions. Thus gender imbalances there don’t have the same supposed impact and perpetuating effect on structural imbalances as those in high-level fields (an example: the recent study about facial recognition being less accurate on female faces). Thus they are not considered as harmful in the grand scheme of things.
Edit: In other words: no matter where one stands in the debate about the reasons for gender imbalance in STEM, it is totally reasonable not to be too concerned about imbalances among plumbers or car mechanics, because this imbalance does have less consequences. It doesn’t matter for any other aspect in life whether a woman or man fixes the car, but it matters who creates the algorithms that control everyone’s lives.
Others have commented in this thread how gender-biased attitudes towards engineering fields are present even in young children. There's an obvious connection between this and the fact that when you're a child most of the adults you met in your everyday life practicing technical jobs (plumbers, cable technicians, car mechanics) are male. On the other hand, children see how their pre- and middle- school teachers are mostly female. Thus, children learn by observation that technical job => male.
Yes, neither car mechanics nor pre-school teachers have prestigious, 6-figure salary, PhD level positions, and yet they have a big impact in the perception of gender bias in adult labor when children are growing up and unconsciously cementing their views of the world.
I believe that a big step to close the gender gap in engineering would be young girls watching the super cool woman in the car shop expertly fixing daddy's car.
Can't wait for the next campaign to make men 50:50 in kindergardens and schools!
Most young men do not like to be with children. Most young women do not like working in car repair. While none of these claims are sufficiently substantiated in research, if the first can be true, then surely the second one can be, as well?
Seen from that perspective, I agree. Still, in the eyes of those being referred to in the argument I criticized, fighting over high level positions likely promises higher returns - or at least appears to do that. Whether this then actually turns out to be true is a different story. Right now it doesn't even look like it, as pointed out in the article. Maybe indeed, starting at the bottom, with low level tech jobs, would be a better way to go. However, it would also take much longer. Some are impatient. Considering the accelerating progress in tech, I can understand that impatience.
I'm not trying to misrepresent you but are you making the claim that if we had more female PHDs in STEM, that would lead to more female plumbers and car mechanics?
Or is it more, the changes needed to get women into stem would necessarily get women into other "less prestigious" fields?
surprisingly there is no concern about the under-
representation of women in lower-level technical
jobs, such as car mechanics or plumbing
These differences are socially important because these
tend to be prestigious occupations, and practically
important because the different numbers of men and women
in these fields contribute, in part, to the sex
difference in earnings.
That aside (and not meant as criticism against you), it’s super frustrating how when it comes to this specific topic, it’s unbelievably hard to express a thought in a way which is not being misunderstood by others. We all seem to have a mental concept of the debate in mind and then just match everything we read to this existing concept, which leads to all kinds of misrepresentations.
I guess what ill say is that having a mental concept of debate, i personally find useful in getting to the root of ideas.
Of course circling the wagons in your echo chamber by always taking on the debate in your favour isn't good, asking people to further explain thoughts and arguments you don't understand/don't agree with i think is good and people should do more of it.
Here's what happened. Somebody posted a link to a PhD thesis in mathematics which was not at all written in the style in which math PhD these are written. Somebody else commented that this is great all math PhD these should be written like that. Then, I pointed out that the author of this thesis (a black woman), wrote a piece on a blog of the American Mathematical Society website saying that all the white male in the math departments in the USA are the problem, she wants them out and they should all resign.
Then various people started down-voting and attacking me. I replied to their attacks and defended myself. This amounted to "ideological war" according to some moderator. Also, since I did not use this account for making lots of comments, it appeared to the moderator that this account was created to primarily to start flamewars. The people who attacked me in a very nasty and personal way did not suffer any consequences since they had more comments hence their accounts looked more legitimate.
So yes, I feel like I've been the victim of an injustice.
Gender corresponds to the societal and cultural difference between the sexes, as opposed to the biological, and is socially constructed [4]. Gender is part of what changes how we act and think, both as normal psychological and behavioral processes, and in more inherent ways as determined by some studies [3]. It commonly is assigned based on sex, but in many cases, some people innately feel that their gender is different than the one assigned to them.
In biological terms, sex may be determined by a number of factors present at birth, including the number and type of sex chromosomes, the type of gonads (ovaries or testicles), the sex hormones, the internal reproductive anatomy (such as the uterus in females), and the external genitalia. People whose characteristics are not either all typically male or all typically female at birth are intersex. [1]
There are many different conditions in which a person's sex organs may not match up with levels of hormones in their body, primary or secondary sex characteristics[2], or someone's internalized gender identity. It's important to note that these are not deformities, but simply conditions that different people are born with. Doctors around the world have for centuries actually been surgically intervening and modifying the sex organs of babies to fit the surgeon's or parents' expectations, which is now considered a human rights violation and widely condemned by the international community [5].
So some people are born with one set of chromosomes, and/or one set of genitalia that may not be typical, yet exhibit some or all of the other characteristics and thoughts of someone with a different set. Their gender may not correspond to their sex, or sex organs.
Hence, it is better to refer to gender differences than sex differences when talking about the roles of people in society. Unless we're specifically talking about making babies, and even then it's not totally simple.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virilization [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_differentiation_in_huma... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_assignment#Controversy
A simple example of why equality of outcome might be undesirable is this: people don't like doing jobs they find unfulfilling.
Even though I admire the nursing profession, I have absolutely no desire to become a nurse. If nursing were the highest paid profession, it still wouldn't interest me -- because I get my kicks out of playing with ideas and building things.
In my case, it has nothing to do with ability, or IQ, or emotional intelligence.
Should nursing training and culture be manipulated to be more appealing to people like me? I would only want that if it were beneficial for the nursing profession itself.
It doesn't matter that people with my temperamental make-up are under-represented, because there are plenty of other people who are drawn to nursing.
Where there are systemic problems that hinder women / minorities who want to excel in tech, focus on those, instead of an artificial number.
It's not for its one sake. It's for peace in the society.
> Should nursing training and culture be manipulated to be more appealing to people like me? I would only want that if it were beneficial for the nursing profession itself.
Have you tried it? I think it's not really reasonable to assume that humans are made to do exactly one thing. It's more of a necessary convention to have a functioning society.
> Where there are systemic problems that hinder women / minorities who want to excel in tech, focus on those, instead of an artificial number.
The number is not artificial its reality. One systemic problem is nudging which is tried to be fixed implementing quotas. The quotas are not meant to fix the number but the nudging effect.
Of course, for Equality of Chance to be properly implemented you need to do away with as many barriers to it as possible but you should be willing to accept that no matter what you do, there won't be a perfect 50/50.
From all evidence we have, there is strong evidence that male and female humans grow up differently independent of their social surroundings, for example, we found that the brains of newborns can be easily distinguished into female and male as little as 1 month after birth, before any social factors have had much chance to get deep into development.
From that I find it easier to believe that there will be some statistical biases in one direction or another (like how will have, on average, a bit more height) outside of the purely physical domain.
I would rather see some evidence that despite all the physical, hormonal and developmental differences in male and female humans, there is absolutely no statistically significant difference in the brain and/or mind.
More desirable to whom? To the one with the worse outcome equality of outcome will always be more desirable than equality of chance. Plus, from a probabilistic point of view, wouldn't equal chances mean that for large numbers of trials (people) the outcome would also be equal?
> I would rather see some evidence that despite all the physical, hormonal and developmental differences in male and female humans, there is absolutely no statistically significant difference in the brain and/or mind.
You cannot even properly define what you mean by "brain and/or mind", which is why it's impossible to convince you that there actually is injustice if your opinion relies on that. But, for the moment suppose there is some convincing theory which explains naturally why less women are in STEM. Then why would we have to adjust our society to it, as it would benefit from less social tensions if there was equal outcome? Your point has to be much stronger to justify the inequality, as in everything would go downhill super fast if we had equal outcome. Otherwise there will always be social tensions and you have to learn to live with the "feminists".
I am going to try and describe this in a math/programming way.
Say we have two functions randM() and randF() the first returns a Male Person, the second returns a Female Person. Person has an Ability and a Preference. We also have a function stemJob(Person p) that takes a Person and returns a Job with an Income, Prestige, and Satisfaction.
Equality of outcome would mean that after 10^9 calls of each the this is true average(stemJob(randM()) == average(stemJob(randF()). This could be either because 1a) randM() and randF() produce on average the same person modulo Sex and stemJob() does not consider Sex or 1b) The difference between the average randM() and randF() is corrected for by stemJob() considering Sex.
The other option is equality of chance where stemJob(randM()) == stemJob(randF()) where randM() and randF() have the same Ability and Preference.
Notice that in equality of chance and in equality of outcome stemJob() may or may not be the same. If randM() and randF() produce on average the same person modulo Sex then stemJob() is the same for both equality of chance and equality of outcome. If that assumption does not hold then stemJob() must be different.
Thus, if I support equality of chance and believe avg(randM()) != avg(randF()) I would not support equality of outcome because that would require stemJob to consider Sex in a way that invalids equality of chance.
Hope this give you a different way to look at why some people are against equality of outcome in STEM.
I think it's a bit clearer now where the differences lie. For example the assumption avg(randM()) != avg(randF()), which should more precisely be avg(randM()) >> avg(randF()) to justify stemJob(randM()) >> stemJob(randF()).
There is another assumption here, that is that if you don't touch it, stemJob() is a fair function in the sense that stemJob(randM()) == stemJob(randF()) where randM() and randF() have the same Ability and Preference. I find that unlikely as, for example, there is evidence that people are more likely to hire candidates of the same sex.
What is interesting is that it boils down to the question whether or not you believe that avg(randM()) >> avg(randF()), or in words that in general men are much more capable then women in STEM and I asked for a theory supporting that claim in my original comment. If I understood correctly someone who supports equality of chance would agree that stemJob() must be unfair if it turns out that avg(randM()) ~ avg(randF()).
Why do we see so few East Asian, Hispanic, and Jewish NBA players? What policy would you create to correct this "injustice?"
If it wouldn't on average it's reasonable to assume that there is a bias of some sort. You can decide if this bias desirable or not.
> Why do we see so few East Asian, Hispanic, and Jewish NBA players? What policy would you create to correct this "injustice?"
Because they don't seem to care. If they would care, it is your decision whether you fight with them or implement a quota.
I guess it depends on how you go about it. If you needed 100 programmers, and there were exactly 100 programmers available, but 80 were men and 20 were women - but you insisted on equality of outcome, you'd hire 50 of the male programmers, all 20 of the female programmers, and be 30 programmers short, even though there were 30 perfectly capable programmers that would upset your gender ratio.
I'd like to offer some advice to make things go a bit more smoothly. There's a widespread view that all beliefs are political, you can't be apolitical, and anyone arguing for a belief opposing yours must be an enemy. To me, that view is pretty much a type error. Beliefs are value-neutral. Only arguments for or against beliefs can be political or not.
More specifically, some arguments are rational (based on evidence) while other arguments are political (based on who benefits and who loses). You can be a very civil person, but still reach for political arguments when defending your beliefs, and thus cause net harm. Or you can be a rude person, but drawn to arguing based on evidence, and thus cause net benefit. It's up to you.
Now go forth and make a flamewar :-)
So if people choose to believe in something because that has certain consequences - then a belief can be political.
EDIT: To expand on this a little... It seems to me that you divorce a belief itself from its consequences. As there are a lot of beliefs that have immediate and direct political and social consequences, i think that this separation is questionable.
If you have a belief, you probably will act on that belief. Having a belief and _not_ acting on it _at all_ seems rather useless and abstract to me. I'm not saying that this doesn't happen, but in general, if some person has a belief, he (or she) will act on that belief.
So, to be blunt: for some beliefs, having them is a political act.
For example, my decision whether to take an umbrella today must be based on my honest best guess whether it'll rain today (and the relative utilities of various outcomes). If I shift my best guess one inch away from what's warranted by evidence, to obey social pressure or something, then acting-as-if the new belief was true will predictably lead to lower expected utility for me. That holds always, no matter how controversial the belief.
When social pressure is weak, it mostly makes people lie about their beliefs, while still acting-as-if their best guess was true. When social pressure gets strong, people start acting-as-if false things were true, and get lower utility. No amount of pressure can change the fact that actions based on accurate beliefs lead to higher expected utility. That's why I'm not a fan of social pressure on beliefs. For both individuals and societies, the best consequences are achieved by believing what is true.
Formally:
1) A => B
2) I would really like B to be true, because it has some benefits.
3) Therefore A must be true.
If we are in search of truth and want to build a consistent model of the world then we just can't accept this kind of reasoning.
Also, even if A really turns out to be false, it doesn't mean that B can't be true and our world will forever be sad i.e. Even if it turns out that all people are not created equal, we can still live in just and enlightened society which treats everyone fairly.
And of course the implication between A => B may not even exist. Is it really true that if all people were created equal the society would benefit?
If the gap is big enough, I think the result becomes indistinguishable from a theocracy, with analogues to blasphemy and ostracization for describing reality too closely, enforced by the state.
Nearly all beliefs are of this type. I believe the Earth orbits the Sun because it's helps me predict the seasons.
For example there is plentiful evidence that women are less represented in certain STEM fields. But is that because they are ill-suited to them or the fields themselves are ill-suited to women. Do we accept this lack of representation as an inevitable consequence? It is this way and it ought to be so. Or do we broaden the possibilities and consider what these fields might be like and may accomplish otherwise if they were more female friendly.
I'd take a wild stab in the dark that prior political world view is probably a greater predictor than most for which of those options seems the more appealing.
You might be implying that but it's worth stating as a particular case.
I'd say this article probably fits that category, and is why the flamewar will emerge :)
These attributes are mostly orthogonal though. Most evidence, even if conclusive, will show that certain approaches benefit one group more than some others. There is no such thing as purely evidence-based policy, because there is no agreement on what to optimize for.
I think this whole evidence-based fad completely misses the point. It insinuates that there is a perfect possible outcome that will benefit all equally, and that is simply not the case. And by focusing on the outcomes, it detracts from the real sticking point: let's talk about how to harmonize goals, instead of only results.
I wonder why you didn't go a step further to postulate "only actions can be political or not". Of course argument is action, but it could be claimed that only argument qua action is political.
Whether or not these few specific effects they claim to have debunked are real or not, to explain the gaps, you have to go far beyond a few narrow sociological effects. There's a self-reinforcing culture of same-hiring-same that glorifies algorithmic intuition as the end-all be-all of software development. There are cultural and fashion trends in the social media landscape that reinforce what's appropriate to be interested in based on your self-identity. The authors claim that gendered interest in CS and the like has remained "stubbornly low" because "women prefer working with people", ignoring huge evidence that even as CS has become far more human-centered and collaborative since the 80s, the numbers of women declaring it as a major have plummeted.
I did keep reading, and I find that I do agree somewhat with their conclusion, but I wonder if they're aware of how ridiculous their framing is.
Of the many points I found objectionable, I'll focus on only one, the most egregious silliness:
It is neither "surprising" nor "curious" that "there is no concern about the under-representation of women in lower-level technical jobs, such as car mechanics or plumbing." Two paragraphs later they go on to spell out why it should be completely unsurprising: "the different numbers of men and women in these fields contribute, in part, to the sex difference in earnings."
If there's a problem with both A and B, and B generally pays 10x what A pays, I'm going to focus on the problem with B.
Duh.
It should be seen as sexism, if company does not offer remote jobs.
Also women have more expenses than men (ping tax, daycare...). Big cities are unaffordable even at the same salary.