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Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

> If I setup a boys club for computers at school or hosted a men’s IT society at work, that wouldn’t end well.

Maybe not, but nearly every <Subject> Users Group I've attended may as well have been a men's IT society for all the women I've seen attend, despite specific outreach efforts to get them there.

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Probably. But why should small boys be punished and denied opportunities because of that?

Also, this has been even broader:

Around here, until recently girls got extra points even on studies were they were massively over-represented (in addition to being generally over-represented in higher education.)

Just recently boys started to get extra points when applying for Engineering degrees in Chemistry or in Nursing.)

I don't know where "around here" is or even what "girls got extra points even on studies where they were massively over-represented" means. Are you talking about grades? "points" towards college admissions?

Around here is Norway were I have spent most of my adult life (save a few weeks at work in other countries.)

I'm not a native English speaker and while I get my points across I struggle with the school system. Sorry for that.

Point is, around here when you apply for higher education you get a standardized score based on:

- how good your grades were.

- being over a certain age

- having extra maths/physics/chemistry classes

- being a girl (at least in STEM)

- etc

Recently, but only recently they have finally started to add extra points for boys applying for BSc nurse studies.

At least in the US, most schools practice either explicitly or implicitly (through adjusted admissions criteria) affirmative action towards women for STEM subjects. That's the case even for subjects like Biology where the gender ratio is already balanced or tipped towards women.

One obvious example of this is the fact that CMU admits 50% women into its CS program, even though their applicant pool and similar caliber schools have around a 20-30% ratio. So if you believe that women and men in the applicant pool are equally qualified, women have a 2x higher chance of getting in. That's just basic statistics.

> One obvious example of this is the fact that CMU admits 50% women into its CS program, even though their applicant pool and similar caliber schools have around a 20-30% ratio. So if you believe that women and men in the applicant pool are equally qualified, women have a 2x higher chance of getting in. That's just basic statistics.

This is a reasonable initial assumption (candidates are equally qualified), and so there is evidence that something is happening (by examining the initial figures). But it may or may not be a bias in favor of women (that is, in this case, something like giving "points" to female applicants either explicitly or implicitly). You'd have to examine the actual applicant pool to determine what was happening other than being able to conclude that something is happening. It is also plausible that the female candidates are, as a group, more qualified than their male counterparts.

It would be plausible, but if you examine the historical enrollment numbers it's clear that CMU expanded their CS program around the exact time that their female representation went to 50%. In essence they created more spots reserved for women, but still admitted the same number of men each year.

You'd also have to ignore that similar caliber schools have the same 20-30% ratio so CMU would have to be doing something special that MIT, Stanford et. al aren't in its applicant recruiting/marketing - that's a tough one to believe.

While I share your first hand observations here, I'll note that (from my limited perspective) there was nothing obviously catering to non-females or any particular gender in these groups. Many of the groups I've attended also had 'professional standards'.

So what is the discrepancy? What has changed and what is being done differently between the groups where 'boys' can optionally attend and ones that 'girls' appear to self select against attendance? We should reach for a world that doesn't require discrimination.

1. Women aren't going to want to join a group where they're the minority

2. Given a brand new group with 0 members yet, it's still likely that women will avoid it, because of their past experiences with 1. putting them off joining groups in general

3. Women are less common than men in general in CS. Any group that accepts the average person will statistically end up with more men than women.

The groups that "advertise" to women avoid these problems, which is why they tend to work.

I agree that we shouldn't need specialized groups, but I haven't seen any other solution, at least in the immediate term. Likely society will improve simply due to the passing of time, and in 50 years from now and it won't be a problem anymore.

Are you implying that women were banned or explicitly discouraged from attending those groups?

EDIT: my bad, think I got you confused with a different comment.

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