Comment by funkythings | Hacker News Reader

Comment by funkythings | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

So, all these women present anecdotal evidence.

If you are interested in an opposite opinion from another woman coder: https://medium.com/@marlene.jaeckel/the-empress-has-no-cloth...

Reality looks very different.

Women have a 2:1 chance over men to get a job in STEM: https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2015/11/04/women-favored-2-...

more detailed research on this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4611984/

Then there's the Scandinavian gender paradox, which states that women are LESS likely to choose a career in STEM the more equal society becomes. This is because there's no more economic necessity, and other reasons. See http://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-girl...

I'm not surprised by the responses of these women. They represent the acceptable opinion of Silicon Valley.

Anecdotes are evidence, especially if they are personal anecodotes of things they actually experience.

A lot of people on HN seem to have this bizarre rejection of any evidence that wasn't collected by objective experimentation--something which isn't possible in this sort of context. So you do the next best thing: you survey people, and their responses (i.e., anecdotes) form the data. As with experimental data, in the real world, different things will happen to different (test) subjects, which is why you need to collect sufficient data to have a representative sample.

In this case--why does it matter that Scandinavian women are less likely to choose a career in STEM? How is that relevant to Silicon Valley, or the US computer programming industry? Why does it matter that women have a 2:1 preference for STEM jobs--that's just a reaction to the initial problem, namely--why aren't women pursuing STEM jobs?

EVERYONE has anecdotes of things they had to fight. Only large scale data shows us if there is specific discrimination in an industry or not.

American women are not far behind Scandinavian women on the equality index. Same applies to them.

In one breath you dismiss these women and their "ancecdotes" while in the next breath you claim that what another woman says is "reality".

Hey, I guess as long as it supports your hypothesis, right?

Please don't be uncivil in comments here, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I said "opposite opinion"

Then I provided data. I don't care about anecdotes

Reply on news.ycombinator.com