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Comment by timje1 | Hacker News Reader

I always wince whenever I see a person espousing any inherent gender differences or preferences, because they are consistently ripped to pieces.

I actually think it's valuable to examine if, when X occupation is 80% male, does that mean that 80% of the people entering the occupation are men?

Do the women:

- drop out (possibly sexist work requirements, hours etc.),

- get pushed out (obvious sexism),

- or are there just a small number of them pursuing that path to begin with?

And if it's the latter, is this actually an issue? And if it is, is it the fault of the industry, or does the problem start with girls not finding science (for example) very interesting at eight?

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I think it is very possibly a result of culture in America and to a lesser extent, Europe, showing people working in technology as unglamorous, lonely nerds with questionable personal hygiene.

Witness the many TV shows making fun of STEM-concentration people, The Big Bang Theory, The IT Crowd, etc. In any film, the hacker will typically be shown as the over-eager, quirky, physically weak character (think Charlie Day as the kaiju scientist in Pacific Rim). Unless the film is something edgy like the Matrix, people always expect to see computer professionals as low-status individuals.

In my opinion, this results in women being afraid to enter these fields, because they are painted as having low social worth even if they have high economic worth. (BTW, if you live in Silicon Valley and are used to coffee-shop discussions about your favourite JS libraries, remember that it is a distorted reality field; if you are male and work in tech elsewhere in the States, the most people will come up with is "Do you work in IT? Oh, I see...")

On the contrary, in the former Soviet Union, scientists and technologist had a high social worth. Boom, 58% of engineers were women, as the article says.

At first, I thought that this was a viable explanation as well, however there are many low-status office occupations that are majority female (e.g. call centres).

Perhaps its a combination of CS being predominantly male-oriented with all the trouble that brings for a woman trying to 'break in', and low-status as well.

High-status occupations are sought after and reach gender equity even when there's a high barrier to entry. Examples would be law, and medicine (doctors).

I don't know what sort of call centers you hare talking about, but the ones I have heard of from friends in India are pretty gender balanced.

Secondly, no woman in the several most recent crop of graduates (from the US) I know has been trying to get into a call center job. The one I most hear is "I want to work in a non-profit job in DC / New York / <insert big city here>".

Thirdly, with the more or less egalitarian society for people under 30 in urban areas, social status is much more important than economic status. There isn't any society-wide mocking of people who work in call centers, but there is some of people who work in tech. Ergo, less people (and specially women) go into tech in their 20s.

I'm not sure anyone from college is dying to work in a call center, but it was supposed to be an example of a job that traditionally was female-dominant in US/UK.

> I always wince whenever I see a person espousing any inherent gender differences or preferences, because they are consistently ripped to pieces.

Well, there are studies demonstrating the effect of sex hormones on cognition. Also, if there weren't gender differences, there wouldn't be genders.

Damn, I meant I wince when I see someone espousing inherent gender differences, because the poor sod that brought it up finds himself or herself shouted down. Obviously there are gender differences. Stating that gender differences result in inherent preferences tends to get people's hackles up. Part of the problem is amateur evolutionary biologists starting sentences with 'Just like monkeys, women tend to... ' or 'Men tend to...'

Oh shit, I totally misread your sentence! I think the problem is most people just aren't in touch with their bodies and the effect that having a body has on the mind.

I always wince whenever I see a person espousing any inherent gender differences or preferences, because they are consistently ripped to pieces.

I espouse gender differences in genitals, secondary sexual characteristics, and levels of various hormones.

Can this be ripped to pieces?

You need to combine those two thoughts in your last paragraph. Women being driven out of areas of interest starts very young:

https://www.usenix.org/blog/my-daughters-high-school-program...

And it comes from all over:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/12/4693710/the-end-of-kindnes...

Women can be pushed out before they even get to begin on the path. Lots of people asked me if I was "sure" when I decided to study CS in college, whether I was worried about making friends with other women, or to share their negative experiences about being the only girl. These concerns were greatly exaggerated, but worrisome before you even begin.

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