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Comment by rubicon33 | Hacker News Reader

> The gender disparity in software development is well documented, and should be fixed. No one should be discouraged from learning, or opportunities denied because of gender.

I can tell you why. In part, it's explicit sexism and goal keeping from men, sure. But a far bigger reason there are less women in tech?

Step into any engineering course at a 4 year university. Come back and tell me how many women where in your class. Get the picture?

Of COURSE there are less women in engineering jobs. They are less women in engineering classes! So while there are definitely sexism problems, far BIGGER issues exist with reforming gender roles CULTURALLY.

Women should be encouraged from a young age to pursue science if it interests them. They should not be given artificial leg ups to help balance a problem which will never go away without addressing the root cause.

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"In part, it's explicit sexism..."

And the same could be said for other fields. Step in to a construction site/auto dealership/mechanic shop/sports field and tell me how many women you see. Are all those fields dominated by sexist men as well?

And for men, how many are nurses/teachers/social workers/counselors/human resources vs women? Are all those fields dominated by sexist women?

Could it be that women enjoy jobs with more human interaction and men are more content to sit in front of a computer screen?

It absolutely could be the case that men and women have differences that transcend culture, pushing them toward certain careers and interests. Totally possible.

Regardless of whether or not that is true, I believe we should all have the opportunity to pursue whatever interests us. Equal Opportunity. This does not mean we should expect Equal Outcome. Those are two entirely different things.

Programs like "Women: Learn to Program This Summer" are Equal Outcome programs. They provide unfair advantages to a certain subset of society, with the explicit intent of "evening the score". That's a dangerous game to play.

What if the underlying reason is that women, as a whole, are less interested in Science/Engineering than men are?

We'd know that once we level the playing field?

This is a socially unacceptable explanation in many areas with large tech industries.

Is this actually true? How do we verify this? (Certain portions of engineering have higher women participation rates than men- can we identify a biological cause for this disparity, or that many of the sciences have women on parity or overrepresentation?)

I agree that this is a definite possibility but I struggle to identify a reason to explain the disparities of participation in subfields purely from a genetic point.

The basic answer is we don't know, hence why this is such a contentious issue. There are many known physical[1] and psychological[2] differences between the sexes[3]. Boys tend to play with inanimate objects while girls tend to play with dolls and role play. Women tend to be more social, while men are less so. Men with higher testosterone tend to be more aggressive overall[4]. Some think many of these differences are caused by society, while others think that it has to do with an entire chromosome being different, causing differences overall.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology

[3] These differences are based on population distributions, and there are plenty of outliers within those distributions, eg. masculine women, feminine men. I am speaking of averages here.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone#Aggression_and_cr...

Intuitively, I don't understand why computer science engineering would have a lower ratio than engineering in general from a biological perspective. Or physics vs chemistry. Or structural engineering vs electrical. Which of the above fields have to do with playing with dolls vs playing with inanimate objects (are dolls not inanimate objects)? Which of the above fields is more aggressive in the academic pursuit? (I've never considered computer science, with a very low ratio compared to other STEM pursuits, to be more aggressive...)

That confusion is why I'm having a lot of difficulty personally buying that much of the differences can be attributed to biological differences in women and men. I feel like I'm missing some evidence where it is proven computer science is more aggressive than, say, structural engineering- and that's why there is a bigger representation of men in computer science.

> Intuitively, I don't understand why computer science engineering would have a lower ratio than engineering in general

If this graph is real, that's not actually true.

https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/2875/why-did...

The stack exchange has nothing to do with whay I'm getting at here, and I apologize if I've been unclear. Let me say for example, in a 2004 survey... "Women were also employed in higher rates than men in environmental engineering (9% to 4%) and chemical engineering (7% to 4%). However, they were less likely than men to be employed in mechanical engineering (8% to 17%) and electrical engineering (12% to 18%)". [0]

Does this mean that chemical engineering is less aggressive of a field than mechanical engineering? Or that computer science engineering is more aggressive of a field than environmental engineering? Or that chemical engineering is the engineering field with the most amount of doll-like objects being interacted with?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_engineering_in_the_Un...

> Or that chemical engineering is the engineering field with the most amount of doll-like objects being interacted with?

Another reason might be “contact with people” variable. As a programmer I can work the whole day and not interact with anyone, and I like it. I never worked in chemistry or engineering, but if my high-school lessons are any indication, chemistry involves a lot more interactive lab work than say physics and math.

If it's the contact with people angle, has the proportion of women in computer science increased with the collaborative nature of computer programming? Open source initiatives? Can we track the number of meetups, conferences, with the population of women engineers? I'm legitimately curious.

See https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge... and read the first couple of comments as well which is further back and forth between the two authors.

You are trying to verify an innate property of a person by measuring the emergent outcome of their choices. While this is a good litmus test, I do not think the answer to quantifying this acclimation toward a certain profession is something that can be measured discretely.

This is exactly why I propose equal opportunity, not equal outcome.

Everyone should be free to pursue a profession that interests them, without artificial cultural hurdles like racism and sexism. At the same time however, we as society should not EXPECT that women (or men) will equilibrate over time. If there are differences, let them be. But ensure equal opportunity.

Do you think education is a female thing? Is that the message having 85% of primary teachers being female (100% in my kids UK school) gives to boys.

If your contention is correct, the absence of male teachers for impressionable young children must be a massively damaging thing? Much worse than a preponderance of one sex or another of students in a lecture theatre?

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