Does this not mean we have a gender bias towards females in STEM at the education level?
If so it’d turn around a long held belief that STEM education is biased towards men. At least in grade school.
1. Girls who are interested in STEM tend to abandon it at the high school / undergraduate level [factual]
2. That one factor in that may be a gender bias favoring males during this period in a students education. [well supported by academic research, though I presented the information casually and without citation]
If we can believe the research that there is a gender bias against males at the middle school level surely the opposite may also be true at the high school / college level where there are more male teachers.
The sex/gender of the teacher didn't play a role at the middle school level though. I find it hard to keep up the narrative of "society doesn't want girls to go into STEM" when there's a lot of affirmative action, selective media representation, lots of programs etc. "But it's only to offset the invisible bias" I'm sure some might argue, but I think they overlook the possibility that there is nothing keeping them down and they just make different choices.
I didn't downvote your previous comment, but it did sound like you were a bit reaching for straws to turn an observation into the desired outcome by filling in the middle.
However, gender bias and lack of representation are, from anecdotal observation, the most cited reason in academic journals for the lack of women in STEM. Take that for what you will.
And by all means make a counter argument, edify me, cite sources, but burying a comment for even the nascent mention of a connection between gender bias and the lack of women in STEM seems to demonstrate a lack of willingness of some on HN to even engage with the idea, which, funnily enough, could give credence to the existence of gender bias against women in STEM.
I see it naively like this: life is a long process of eliminating options that don't meet your interests or best chances at success. Women in general have more options in life than men, career being only one aspect of that, which means that over time, any one of those options is going to be chosen less and less.
Sociology distinguishes itself from economics in the assumption that people's choices are the result of stupidity or victimization. I just looked up the top math student in my 5th grade class. She's a 5th grade public school teacher after attending an Ivy for Geography. I have not the slightest clue why one would ever study Geography in college, nor would I find it financially prudent in my situation to be a public elementary schoolteacher, but I also know this person to be quite smart and fully-capable of making her own choices. I talk to female H1B engineers that came here for a better life, which was not STEM work, so they often quit as soon as they get a green card. I see women retiring earlier to start new careers. Female attrition is a constant feature of the entire STEM pipeline.
If I try to be honest with myself, I will admit that I was not at all intellectually interested in my engineering degree. Computers were always about creation and expression and social possibilities to me, not the pedantism and rigor that I practiced for financial reasons. I think we all just saw it as a test to see whether we could make it, or how well we could do, a game. It might as well have been pinball, and it never ends. 30-year SWE veterans still play leetcode. I am constantly being told that the opportunity to unleash my creativity and wonder upon the world is just around the corner. I should have dispensed with all that and started out as an artist.
All the STEM greats quit this game early. That says something. If Gates, Zuck, Musk, Jobs, etc. had never taken DiffEq, would they have been any less capable or motivated? I doubt it. The women that abandon STEM may have more in common with them than we admit. They're probably doing something better with their lives.
Maybe women leave STEM because they can.
!
Because everyone is pushed into STEM, I believe that the bar for engineering has been lowered. I'm a SWE and over the last few years, I've realized that more and more of my coworkers don't have any idea how computers work. Most can't use a shell, don't understand unix, never wrote a line of C, are unclear what a pointer is, that sort of thing. It's no longer a requirement to understand computers and computer culture to be employed as a developer.
I think a lot of older SWEs probably recall stereotypes of women and minorities not being able to do computers because most of them didn't grow up with the culture. In the 80s and 90s, it was much less common for those demographics to have a computer in the home and to have internet access. We tried to fix that by promoting diversity, especially in the STEM pipeline. In reality, that diversity just killed the culture by sinking it to the lowest common denominator, which looks a lot like leetcode.
> I should have dispensed with all that and started out as an artist.
Then you'd be poor, which is why you didn't dispense with all of that.
> Maybe women leave STEM because they can.
I can't wait to join them.
It's disappointing because it takes away agency and becomes a form of control.
We know that by nature, men and women MUST have different interests on average, otherwise they wouldn't be interested in each other and our species would die :).
Can't we just accept that we make different choices sometimes and try as best as we can to make things progress to the best of our capabilities, regardless of how much each gender contributes to each human endeavour?
In third world countries, women reprensent 50% of the students in engineering classes ( for reasons that are easily understandable).
Actually, the bias observed applyies in countries where freedom of choice is given to everyone.
> claim is "sexism".
I disagree. The differences could be societal, cultural or biological. For example, I don't think it's contested that at least some women pick some career choices due to the want to have/raise children. People could argue indefinitely as to exactly how much influence each factor plays, but to call 'sexism' simply because there are gender differences seems incorrect.
That's how I understood it.
> If you suggest different reasons, you'd get in trouble if
> you worked at Google for example.
Unfortunately, it seems so. And this is the same most places I've experienced. In academia for example, you couldn't even pose the question in most places - there would be protests, your tenure would be under review, your funding would be cut - to name a few possibilities. If academics are nothing, they are overly cautious.
You have to ask yourself for example why the term "intellectual dark web" was coined [1]. They don't refer to them as 'wrong' or 'conspiracy theorists', they just pose different questions, and for that alone they were ostracized.
I refuse to live in a world where even posing the question is not possible. If Google won't dare hire me, I'll build my own theme park with blackjack and hookers [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Dark_Web
[2] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-going-to-build-my-own-them...
This is according to this[1] report from Plan International Norway (whose author's "focus is on gender, technology and social justice"), which has the objective of finding ways to actually increase the participation of girls in STEM in Scandinavian countries, where their participation, paradoxically, is just about the average of the world at around 30% female, against 19% in the USA.
From the paper itself:
"More recently, Stoet and Geary’s (2018) paper on the «gender equality paradox» demonstrated that, perhaps surprisingly, the more «gender equal» a country is, the larger the gender gap in STEM education and careers."
Despite that statistic, the Scientific American[2] claims that this is NOT due to women choosing differently than mean, but because "Early in school, teachers’ unconscious biases subtly push girls away from STEM".
I don't know how they came up with this conclusion (they link to a paper[3] correlating student's mothers biases with the student's later choices - which is NOT what they had just claimed and seems to only weakly give the argument any substance), but that goes directly against the new research we're discussing, which seems to point to the exact opposite conclusion.
[1] https://www.telenor.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/The-Gende...
[2] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/countries-with-l...
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232604569_Achieveme...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976177417...
Obviously the validity of this is highly controversial.
No, you can't infer this conclusion from that paper.
Yes, the paper claims that there exists some bias towards girls (from teachers' grading). And the sentence you quote claims that without that specific bias, the gender gap would be in favor of boys ("12.5% larger"). However, we do not know if this figure is free of bias (IMO, fair to say probably not). Therefore, there might be other biases in STEM in favor of boys that could explain the gender gap in their favor.