The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/

by oftenwrong • 7 years ago

330 599 7 years ago

theatlantic.com

namirez• 7 years ago

This has been posted here a few times:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411227

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407966

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21699498

m0skit0• 7 years ago

Correlation is not causation.

banads8• 7 years ago

Is it even possible to prove objective causation in a complex social sciences study, since there can be no control group?

DuskStar5• 7 years ago

Yeah, by the same logic you can't blame sexism or racism for any differences in outcomes, since there's no control group there either.

homonculus1• 7 years ago

No, it could be a third variable or it could even be that women avoiding STEM somehow increases gender equality.

But regardless of the cause, if there is an inverse correlation then pursuing gender parity in STEM is at best a huge waste of effort and at worst counterproductive for all parties involved.

The graph in the article doesn't look too far removed from a cloud though, so I question the strength of the correlation.

dang5• 7 years ago

Maybe not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

dralley• 7 years ago

The headline does this article a disservice. The data does not boil down so cleanly (as the article itself points out clearly) and to leave out the other factors it discusses is to invite false conclusions.

I realize that it's difficult to write a headline that is both scientifically precise and short, but the point remains.

DuskStar5• 7 years ago

What are you saying it leaves out? From my reading of the article the only obvious other cause would be that countries with lower gender equality also tend to have worse social support systems, which would allow people to pursue their desires more than otherwise - but that still leaves open the question of why those differences affect women more than men.

Porthos9K• 7 years ago

It sounds like women who grow up hearing they can be whoever they want to be tend to not want to be techies. I don't blame them. If I were any good at anything else I wouldn't do STEM for a living, either. It's a thankless job best outsourced.

Lio• 7 years ago

Each to there own. I think it's a great life. I'd almost do my work for free. I can't imagine doing a job I hated long term.

sokoloff• 7 years ago

I’d absolutely write code for free. You need to pay me to come to your spreadsheet mine every day and work on your specific problems though.

jelliclesfarm27• 7 years ago

This! I have said this so many times and all my girl friends hate me for it!

I also believe in gender segregated schools(after HS and at university level). I am not advocating gender segregation but just gender segregated education.

This is only a BS theory of mine..and so I am trying to work it into my hobby fiction writing. Please allow me to test it here for opinions.

I think that in formative years, children should not be gender segregated, but when rubber hits the road at specialized and advanced education, it’s better if there is gender segregation because there is so much competition and rivalary between genders when both are at peak reproductive phase.

I tend to be on the biology trumps/mind rules body/nature vs nurture side of the camp. I believe that there will be equality between the genders and less conflict if they don’t compete with each other in the same space. This might bring out the innate strengths and better intellectual capabilities of both genders because fundamentally they clash and neutralization absorbs the explosion of what good might come out of great human potential.

This is not just in an intellectual setting. Last week I had a voice quivering, temple throbbing, blue vein screaming episode at a guy I hired to do some work. I just lost it.

It’s a constant battle of wits dealing with men that it’s exhausting. It’s even worse than in an office environment because men think the tasks that involve physical prowess is their domain. They simply will NOT take orders from a woman. And it’s exhausting trying to make every instruction sound like a ‘suggestion’. I am running out of time and honestly the man was just using brute strength to achieve what physics could do...

And for every grudging acceptance of my way of doing things, I had to endure dumbass flirting. I just couldn’t stand it anymore. And then after every attempt to puff his chest, I have to listen to him talk about his wife because now he feels guilty for flirting. And it’s stuff I don’t need to hear.

And this is a person I am PAYING to work FOR me. I can’t even wrap my head around it. I had spent another part of my life in office environments and it was just the same. It’s better farming because it’s easier to cut off people if I have the right machine for the job.

I think there ought to be a jobs boards and work spaces for JUST WOMEN. It was the same during my years of education. I went to a co-Ed school and I loved it. My college education was at a nun run women’s only college. And I LOVED it.

glofish4• 7 years ago

What you are saying is that since you prefer something everyone should do the same.

And what you prefer is the correct choice for everyone ...

jelliclesfarm27• 7 years ago

Of course not... I am soliciting opinions.

What do you feel about what I said? TIA.

tathougies4• 7 years ago

As a man, I'll say I absolutely agree. I went to an all-boys high school, and teenage boys simply do better without girls around. Boys are more likely to engage in not traditionally masculine activities when girls are not around because there is no need to impress. Furthermore, girls often mature faster than boys, and this leads to unnecessary stress for both girls and boys at this stage. Furthermore, a lot of what drives teenage boys is competing against other boys for attention from girls. This dynamic is messed up if there are girls around. This damages girls too. Girls often complain that boys are uninterested in competing with them. This is because beating a girl does nothing for boys. They want to compete with boys. If each gender has their space, they both get to flourish.

I don't think single sex environments harm future gender relations either. If anything, they make it better. Both genders need friends of the same gender uncomplicated by romantic feelings. Furthermore, from my own experience, the boys at my high school, and the girls at our sister school, found no trouble getting married, having kids, etc.

Speaking of our sister school, the women they produced were independent minded, competent, competitive, and had leadership experience. Without the need to compete with boys, the girls developed their own leadership and competitive structures that they excelled at.

TimTheTinker• 7 years ago

Without the need to compete with boys, the girls developed their own leadership and competitive structures that they excelled at.

I think there are several arenas where girls and women benefit when men are excluded; secondary education isn't the only one. A few others to mention:

- Sports and physical competition. Excluding men enables women to compete on their own plane, set world records, etc.

- Restrooms, locker rooms, and the like. Excluding men protects women from unwanted advances, privacy invasions, etc. I know this isn't a popular opinion, but the primary benefit of segregated restrooms is that women do not have to be afraid to go to the bathroom. Besides sanitation, this is one of the greatest benefits to society of having restrooms in the first place. (In areas with no restrooms, such as rural India, women often have to risk being molested when trying to relieve themselves.)

Another unpopular opinion: desegregation efforts in the above areas (including those motivated by wanting to achieve "gender equality" or allow transgender women into areas designated for women only) will result in harm to women.

xzcat2• 7 years ago

I really can't overstate how skeptical I am of all the supposed benefits of gender-segregated schooling when attendance of a gender-segregated school is so strongly correlated with socioeconomic class.

I agree that all of your explanations fall well on my metaphorical ears. They seem right, and I can nod along while I read them.

But I can't help but have a nagging suspicion that you'd get extremely similar results if you just tossed a random sample of kids into a school after filtering for household income > $XXX,XXX/yr.

I'd also argue that even if you compared gender segregated schools vs a mixed-gender private school of the same price, you'd still be left with a confounding variable of "whose parents clearly valued education enough that they either specifically picked, or tolerated (depending on their views on this matter) a gender segregated school.

Remember that parental involvement is a very powerful predictor of academic success (though I'll admit I don't know if it trumps the predictive power of just socioeconomic class).

kick2• 7 years ago

I am not advocating gender segregation but just gender segregated education.

That's quite literally what you're arguing for. Doesn't "jobs board and work spaces for JUST WOMEN" sound familiar to you? You're advocating for bringing us back the 1960s, and worse, the argument you're using is eerily close to "separate but equal." The format of that and "separate water fountains" is identical.

Why not fire him?

Granted, given the obnoxious use of caps lock and lack of critical thinking skills, you probably run a small business. If so, you should be aware that companies are legally allowed to segregate for any reason under a certain level of employees.

https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/smallbusiness/requirements.cf...

dang5• 7 years ago

given the obnoxious use of caps lock and lack of critical thinking skills, you probably

If you post in the flamewar style to HN like this we will ban you.

If you attack another user personally like this we will ban you.

You're extremely familiar with HN. Don't do this again.

iimblack3• 7 years ago

I'm not understanding what the gender segregation during advanced/specialized education is meant to accomplish. Also, can you expand on this: "I believe that there will be equality between the genders and less conflict if they don’t compete with each other in the same space". Is that space referring just to school or even further than that?

jelliclesfarm27• 7 years ago

I want to preface with ‘only in my experience’, ok?

Men are a distraction while trying to focus on work/studies. And they are constantly vying for attention too and it’s flattering.

From my perspective as female, it took a lot of my mental space and time to engage male attention. First we take a lot more time to groom ourselves. Physical attractiveness is time consuming for women(just trust me on this) and there is also competition amongst women ..but in a different way than how men compete with each other.

At the risk of generalizing, I would say that women/girls are more mental/emotional than men..these emotional space shares the same mental bandwidth as the focus and concentration required to do work at hand.

Again..I am generalizing and I want to say that this is my opinion only.. women need to learn how to compartmentalise their mental spaces. I would likely have several mental ‘rooms’...one for work..one for family..one for fun..one for men(or more depending on how many men catch my interest etc). The key is to manage traffic of thoughts and bandwidth to each of these rooms.

I won’t pretend to know how men think. (But would like to know more!), but my gut instinct suggests to me that men have different thought processes and mental modes than women.

dev_by_day• 7 years ago

Work places discriminating based on gender would be terrible. There shouldn't be "male only" work places just like there shouldn't be "female only" work places.

This would be a regression to the dark ages of grouping and separating people based on biological identity, not a good idea and honestly not helpful.

There is zero evidence that shows these ideas actually make students or working environments healthier and more productive.

jelliclesfarm27• 7 years ago

I disagree. I think pay scale disparities would also disappear if women had gender segregated work spaces. It would be a more supportive environment and less conflict. I suspect efficiency would also improve at work places. Throw a picnic or party or twice a week meeting or something for everyone to meet up...but having equal strength and equally compensated and mirror hierarchies of gender segregated work places would be a good experiment.

I don’t know how non binary people would feel about this and would like to hear more from them.

jelliclesfarm27• 7 years ago

Well..we could always give it a try as an experimental space and see if it works. No harm in learning more. Obviously it’s not the dark ages anymore. Why shouldn’t we adopt practices and check what works if it makes the world a better happier place?

wayoutthere2• 7 years ago

So this is incredibly misguided and sexist. But I've lived as a man and a woman, I feel qualified to comment.

The problem is that society holds men and women to a different standard: women are expected to be in control of their emotions / self and men are not. If a woman's emotions come out (screaming or whatever) then she's unhinged, irrational. If a man does it, he's just blowing off steam or asserting himself. Men are not often held accountable for taking their emotions out on people, be they anxiety, depression or insecurity -- so it's not a skill that most men have a chance to develop. This is about societal attitudes held by both men and women, not anything that men have done wrong.

In reality, there are men who can control their emotions and not inflict them on others. It takes the right personality, a nurturing upbringing or lots of therapy, but they exist. It took me a lot of work to learn how to control my emotions to a degree that was considered appropriate for a woman -- even though my behavior hadn't changed. I'm still working on it. But I'm a better person for it regardless of gender, and I think everyone should be held to a high standard on owning their feelings and not inflicting them on those around us.

cgiles• 7 years ago

women are expected to be in control of their emotions / self and men are not
Men are not often held accountable for taking their emotions out on people, be they anxiety, depression or insecurity

I think a more accurate framing is that women are not allowed to be angry or aggressive, and men are not allowed to be sad or vulnerable. In public, at least. Consider how much more tolerable, and therefore common, it is for a woman to cry in public than a man.

So when men feel anxiety, depression, or insecurity, they express it in the socially acceptable way for men: anger and irritability. Presumably women feel angry a lot more frequently than they show, and have to find other ways to channel it. However, the latter is changing, because it is becoming much more acceptable for women to be angry and aggressive than it used to be.

SolaceQuantum7• 7 years ago

How does this apply to nonbinary people? Not trying to poke holes just genuinely curious.

jelliclesfarm27• 7 years ago

I don’t know. I have a few non binary friends. I find them more artistically inclined rather than STEM inclined.

I feel like creative pursuits tend be more collaborative and thrives better when there is more inter personal energy. Study(for me at least) is solitary. Artists and creative people flourish when there is a lot of back and forth of energies and they birth something from those interactions.

Within my circle of friends and acquaintances, I find that Uber-STEM thinking people are either asexual and/or autistic.(is there a correlation there? I don’t know..I haven’t looked into any studies about that) In my mind, I visualize both characteristics as though it is the blunt end of the emotional/social quotient. Obviously there are many who are in the middle and balanced, as it were..I am just picking on the ones see-sawing on both spectrums.

jtcruthers• 7 years ago

I think I've heard of this separate but equal idea before. Can't quite remember, but I don't think it worked out too well.

zarkov9917• 7 years ago

I think you are probably right, though you could have left your diatribe about the men who work for you out. One could easily come up with equally typical scenarios to ridicule neurotic, shallow and emotionally unstable women. Each gender has its set of typical pathologies. But somehow we made it work, together, as a species, so there is some magic in the balancing the two.

jelliclesfarm27• 7 years ago

Why is it a ‘diatribe’? It is my life. It is my work.

That each gender has its own set of pathologies is exactly my point. When they don’t complement each other, why not create an environment where each of us can be our best?

Hitton• 7 years ago

This is not just in an intellectual setting. Last week I had a voice quivering, temple throbbing, blue vein screaming episode at a guy I hired to do some work. I just lost it. It’s a constant battle of wits dealing with men that it’s exhausting. It’s even worse than in an office environment because men think the tasks that involve physical prowess is their domain. They simply will NOT take orders from a woman. And it’s exhausting trying to make every instruction sound like a ‘suggestion’. I am running out of time and honestly the man was just using brute strength to achieve what physics could do...

Female managers I know and under who I worked don't seem to face these problems. Did you consider the possibility, that the problems you face aren't caused by your gender but rather by your skills as a manager?

jelliclesfarm27• 7 years ago

You could be right. I have considered that, but not wanting to be in a traditional manager position is one of the reasons I came to farming. I have since realized that it’s no better for women here too.

jelliclesfarm27• 7 years ago

Curious: have you asked female managers if they have any grievances? How do you know that they don’t face ‘these problems’?

blattimwind4• 7 years ago

voice quivering, temple throbbing, blue vein screaming episode at a guy

kaitai7• 7 years ago

I had a Saudi colleague in mathematics who said she'd never experienced discrimination in mathematics in Saudi Arabia, simply because every mathematician she worked with on a daily basis was also female.

Saudi culture is sort of orthogonal to American culture, but it was an interesting comment.

tzs• 7 years ago

I think that in formative years, children should not be gender segregated, but when rubber hits the road at specialized and advanced education, it’s better if there is gender segregation because there is so much competition and rivalary between genders when both are at peak reproductive phase.

That's probably the right general idea, but I think you have the time frame wrong. Separate classes starting around 5th grade (10 years old), joining back after high school.

I base this on brain development stages. After several years of childhood, your brain starts reorganizing itself. It prunes a bunch of connections, and strengthens others. This processes takes several years. It generally starts earlier in girls, around 10 or 11 years old, and later, around 15, in boys.

So starting around age 10 or 11, we have boys and girls of the same age at significantly different stages of brain development, which I suspect means that teaching methods that are best for the boys aren't best for the girls, and vice versa. Hence, separate classes would be better.

Once it starts in boys, the initial changes are more rapid than they were in the girls, so boys do catch up although in some areas it does take a long time. So probably no need to separate classes by gender at college or beyond.

alfromspace• 7 years ago

This is essentially what James Damore was fired for saying.

pmdulaney4• 7 years ago

No more callers, please. We have a winner.

kleer0013• 7 years ago

essentially

exactly

nathias• 7 years ago

this seems to do more about the specifics of cultural integration of math/science/reading and not gender

glofish4• 7 years ago

I have a hard time believing that Hungary, Malta and Slovakia have comparable gender equality to Indonesia or Arab Emirates.

Based on that, if those countries were moved up I would say the trend will be even stronger.

calibas3• 7 years ago

Gender equality means you can enter into whatever profession you choose and not be discriminated against. It's about equal rights, equal treatment, it does not mean that men and women are the same, it's not a mathematical equality.

Seems to me people are confusing conformity with social/political equality.

blunte3• 7 years ago

This is exactly the point. Freedom to direct your energies toward your personal passion _without artificial restraints_ is equality.

malandrew4• 7 years ago

_without artificial restraints_

What constitutes an artificial restraint?

For classical liberals, that means being free from the constraint imposed by other individuals.

Today the definition of "restraints" is being expanded beyond the artificial to the point where everything is being declared a "human right" without any consideration for the fact that some of those things can only be provided by taking from someone else (resources and/or labor). Basically, more and more people feel that people should be free from natural restraints like the responsibility of having to provide for oneself (or at least trying to). But the rub is that the only way to free some people from those natural restraints is bondage of others to provide for them.

OJFord• 7 years ago

I agree that's how it should be, but what we actually have instead is quotas and targets.

allovernow3• 7 years ago

It's about equal rights, equal treatment, it does not mean that men and women are the same, it's not a mathematical equality.

Sure, perhaps in theory. In practice, the kind of differences in performance and achievement that would be explained by psychological and physiological differences between men and women are immediately blamed on discrimination and the like. There is an implicit assumption that men and women are mathematically equal, which leads to the conflation of equality of opportunity with equality of outcome, exaggerating the effects of discrimination and leading to poor allocation of resources in an attempt to correct a "problem" without consideration for part of all of the actual cause.

throwaway854817• 7 years ago

the kind of differences in performance and achievement that would be explained by psychological and physiological differences between men and women

That's a bit of circular reasoning though.

- Look how men and women behave differently!

- But why do they behave differently?

- Because they're different.

- How do you know that?

- Because they behave differently.

It's not logically consistent and doesn't answer anything.

jakelazaroff4• 7 years ago

You're not actually supporting your claims, just asking us to share your assumption that "psychological and physiological differences" makes more sense than "discrimination". Look: all you have to do is swap the two explanations and it functions just as strongly as an argument against.

In practice, the kind of differences in performance and achievement that would be explained by [discrimination] are immediately blamed on [psychological and physiological differences between men and women]. There is an implicit assumption that men and women are [inherently different], which leads to the conflation of equality of opportunity with [disparity of outcome], exaggerating the effects of [inherent differences] and leading to poor allocation of resources in an attempt to correct a "problem" without consideration for part of all of the actual cause.

tenpies2• 7 years ago

That's now what Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity initiatives at companies, universities, and governments are aiming for though. It's quotas for everyone and anything other than 50% females and 50% or more of "minorities" [in quotations since this is the vaguest term ever] means there is rampant racism and sexism in this toxic patriarchy.

iamsb8• 7 years ago

The most important thing that matters is ability to earn a decent living. Decent living is essentially ability to afford most things like a property in good neighborhoods, personal identity (clothes), transportation, quality education for children, and safety.

People are really smart and they optimise for their own survival. Essentially - decent wage -> better options for partner -> better standard of living. In some countries, like Norway, a teacher makes a decent wage. Not as much as a software engineer, but good enough to support a pretty good lifestyle.

Where in some countries, like India, a stem graduate makes a LOT more money than a teacher. I made more money in my third year as a software engineer, than my father who worked in public sector as a civil engineer with 25+ years of experience. Comparison with non technical workers with stem fields is really lop sided when it comes to earning potential. Plus if you are possibly the first generation which can break out of poverty cycle for your entire family, then that adds another layer of pressure to choose certain fields. Hence men or women tend to choose these fields.

As wealth creation in some of these countries reaches to a point where non stem fields receive similar earning potential, already happening in India, we will see lower number of women opting for these fields as well.

We would really like to find a non economic reason for some of these disparities, like patriarchy, gender discrimination and so on, but it is probably mostly economic.

throwaway854817• 7 years ago

But why doesn't this affect men's decision making as well?

throwaway84592• 7 years ago

Men and women are optimised for _slightly_ different thinking that results in _huge_ divergences at scale?

iamsb8• 7 years ago

It absolutely does. I know many men in India who would rather do something else than do engineering. Look at the background of most standup comedians in India for example. Most of them come from engineering/stem background and use that to fulfill their side hustle to be a comic and then become full time comics if successful. I was personally far more interested in studying classic Sanskrit literature, but was talked into becoming an engineer.

malandrew4• 7 years ago

We would really like to find a non economic reason for some of these disparities

I don't even know if we like to find a non-economic reason or if most people simply don't know economics well enough to reason through 2nd and 3rd order economic consequences. Since they can't reason through it they choose simple explanations despite it being wrong. This is the same reason why people used to believe that deities controlled things like the weather and their fortune in life.

The "patriarchy" gets basically the same faith-based treatment as Zeus/Jupiter.

iamsb8• 7 years ago

It is quite difficult to reason with people who would rather blame an invisible force. For example - most women did not work in factories until much later or even today. More Americans died in making stuff for the WW1 than in the actual war, as the conditions of factory work was brutal. Why would anyone want to subject themselves to that environment if they can avoid it?

Not even for a minute suggesting that women should not be allowed to work in dangerous environments. Having said that no one wants to subject themselves to dangerous work and it is perhaps slightly easier for women to avoid that.

iamsb8• 7 years ago

Also just to add - In countries like India, it is incredibly difficult to defer which major to choose. You basically have to choose a major as soon as you have graduated high school and it is quite painful and costly(time+money) to change it afterwords. Which is why we see far higher percentage of engineers go get a MBA in India, as most do not want to be engineers in the first place.

dang5• 7 years ago

The main discussion was here in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411227

and the same topic was discussed here in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407678

squidsurfer3• 7 years ago

And it needs to be brought up frequently because marxist DEI policy trying to force an outcome is all the rage in tech these days.

dang5• 7 years ago

We've banned this account for using HN exclusively for ideological battle. Doing this will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't.

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

zarkov9917• 7 years ago

Two possible explanations: A) Biology is a real thing and genders have differences that extend beyond their gonads. B) Nope. It is all sexism, always, and these Scandinavian women are just traversing an uncanny valley of internalized misogyny.

pmdulaney4• 7 years ago

People ask me how The Atlantic differs from Harper's. Here is a good example. Harper's would _not_ run an article that would even suggest a crack in the framework of leftist orthodoxy.

But noting the date of the article, would this article be published now that Mrs Jobs is at the helm? Perhaps not...

IAmEveryone2• 7 years ago

The Atlantic was bought by Laurene Powell Jobs in July 2017[0], about nine months before this article was published.

I've stopped asking people not to make such accusations without any evidence. But could you at least check if the most basic facts do not contradict them?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atlantic#Ownership

pmdulaney4• 7 years ago

I am duly rebuked for not having done fact checking on my comment.

topspin• 7 years ago

People ask me how The Atlantic differs from Harper's.

They do?

Really?

pmdulaney4• 7 years ago

OK, not really. But when I get into a discussion with people about the Atlantic, I give them my view on how it differs from Harper's, the other longform American magazine that is over 150 years old.

sakopov• 7 years ago

Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “STEM,” as it’s known—are female.

I used to live in Russia in my teenage years and went to school there until grade 9. One thing that I remember being distinctly different from public education in the US is that the course selection was provided by the school each year and students had no say in this process. The benefit of this is being exposed to subjects that you thought you wouldn't like, but ended up gravitating towards after completing the course work. Not saying that Algeria uses similar technique in their public education, but I always wondered how much being able to select your class schedule keeps students away from discovering their potential in areas where they didn't know they could excel.

fatnoah• 7 years ago

One thing that I remember being distinctly different from public education in the US is that the course selection was provided by the school each year and students had no say in this process

I grew up in the US and that was my experience as well. There were no "optional" classes until high school, but even then only one or two of my classes were my own choice.

bluGill6• 7 years ago

Even when there were optional courses the school made it clear the only real option was band/choir/french/german/spanish (I think there was home-ec and shop courses available too). There was one hour free that you could pick one of the above, in theory you didn't have to take math and science the last year, but they made it clear that if you had any hope of college you better not skip them. I found out the hard way that band/choir were not really options because my college wouldn't admit me without the foreign language (I had to do catch up classes)

pj_mukh3• 7 years ago

Coming from one of these countries to America, the answer seems obvious. STEM jobs have a HUGE differential in stability and status in those countries, so women put up up with much more patriarchal BS at the workplace to hold on to them.

My sister was a STEM worker in India. When she moved to America, she looked around to see writers with relatively safe, high-status job and switched out immediately.

Yes, women in America are "organically" picking non-STEM jobs, but that is because the jobs suck, the environments suck and people are assholes at these jobs. My sister loved the core STEM aspects of her job, but hated the culture of the companies she was stuck working with. This is not "equality", its hostile corporate culture.

tl;dr: Ask Women.

DuskStar5• 7 years ago

The problem I always have with this argument is "Why not medicine? Why not Law?"

Why is it that two professions that you'd naively expect to be just as sexist, if not far more sexist than STEM (Higher status, more of an "old boys club", established hierarchy that has positions like nurses for women, etc) have achieved gender parity, while STEM hasn't?

nervousvarun2• 7 years ago

Not necessarily disagreeing or commenting on your point, but doesn't medicine typically fall under STEM?

rayiner5• 7 years ago

The legal profession is far ahead of STEM in addressing sexism. Many law firms have adopted the Mansfield Rule, which requires the pools of promotion candidates to comprise 30-50% women or other underrepresented groups: https://www.law.com/dailyreportonline/2019/09/06/more-firms-.... Major clients are imposing diversity criteria on outside counsel hired for their matters. Many major firms have 20% or more women in the equity partnership ranks. About a third of newly promoted partners are women. More than 30% of Fortune 500 GCs are now women.

That’s the result of decades of work, which started with affirmative efforts by law schools to achieve gender parity at the beginning of the pipeline. (Those efforts proved self sustaining. Once women didn’t have to swim upstream to choose law school—facing years of being in a small minority at the outset of their careers—efforts to recruit them specifically became unnecessary.) There is a ways to go yet before we hit parity, but I feel like in STEM folks are still litigating the issue of whether numeric parity should even be the goal. That question was settled in the legal field a long time ago.

lifeformed• 7 years ago

I think STEM just has a much lower barrier to entry than med and law. It's a lot more accessible in terms of cost and number of opportunities available, and doesn't require spending a third of your life in school.

TeMPOraL• 7 years ago

In case of medicine - because it's a large field full of career paths that are very different from each other. The daily realities of being a pediatrician, a surgeon, a psychiatrist or a radiologist have very little in common.

There's this hypothesis that men statistically tend to pick jobs involving working with and treating patients as things, and women tend to pick jobs involving people and socializing. Medicine as a field is full of high-status jobs of both kind, so - under this hypothesis - gender parity of the overarching field is entirely unsurprising. And, as predicted, individual specializations tend to show strong gender skew.

Law is also a very large field, so I suspect the profession probably shows a similar dynamic.

Viewed through this lens, our industry is less like "medicine", and more like "radiology". And I suspect - but didn't check - that if you expand the definition of "software" to include supporting fields like design, UX and testing, the overall gender ratio will be much closer to 1:1.

mindslight• 7 years ago

You're talking right past the comment you're replying to. "Why not medicine? Why not Law?" is straightforwardly explained by the original theory (higher status/stability), yet you're bringing them up as if they're counter examples.

stubybubs• 7 years ago

Medicine is, in fact, absolutely brutal with misogyny and every other kind of discrimination. People just can't leave it because they are $200k deep in debt, and just have to put up with it. It can be better if you end up as an attending with autonomy, but you still have problem with hospital management etc.

Even straight white men hate medicine and can't leave because of debt... so it's not a great comparison.

swagtricker• 7 years ago

Perhaps the biases around the home PC and video games from the 80's is still embedded today? It's my personal favorite theory: the girls were told they couldn't play in our forts 30+ years ago. This became part of modern western culture with respect to computers & gaming and became applied to computers in general.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

jhedwards• 7 years ago

This kind of confirms a hunch I have which is that macro social beliefs change faster than corporate cultures. So a society as a whole might decide "men and women can work wherever they want" and start to teach children these values, but that doesn't mean the employees at a law or accounting firm are going to change their behaviors (not to mention their policies) at the same rate.

My father was a postal worker and described to me the process that the USPS used to improve their culture, and it involved new policies, procedures, and training for all employees.

kleer0013• 7 years ago

tl;dr: Ask Women.

This would be an amazing survey. I look forward to its publishing. I wouldn't be surprised if someone is doing it as we speak. It shouldn't be too hard or cost that much.

Though, I do have to say, your sample of one is not sufficiently convincing to me.

commandlinefan5• 7 years ago

I don’t know how such a survey could control for projection, though. I remember reading Susan Fowler’s “blog post that was heard around the world” that ended up taking down Uber’s CEO (and nearly Uber itself) and being surprised how little of it had anything to do with being a woman - most of the frustrations she expressed were things that I’ve been frustrated by, too. It seems to me that she just experienced what every developer experienced (other than the thing about the T-shirts) and attributed all of it to her being a women, assuming that the grass must be greener on the other side.

reroute13• 7 years ago

You mean Ask People? What does any of that have to do with being a woman? Just blanket 'patriarchy bs'?

AnimalMuppet3• 7 years ago

Well, you know, if the question is "Why are there so few women in STEM?", then specifically asking women might make some sense...

masteranza4• 7 years ago

You're right about one thing "patriarchal BS". The theory that there should be more women at some particular job sector has now reached a tipping point where it no longer makes sense because it is non-disprovable. Really, is there any kind of evidence that can hope for that would disprove this bad idea? Or will you always try to come up with some excuses?

Preferential treatment (positive discrimination) in hard science not only makes the mistake of treating women as handicapped (they're surely not), but also makes the situation worse by skewing meritocracy.

zarkov9917• 7 years ago

Here is a theory, perhaps you could comment on how if fits your experience: Women are less inclined than men to choose STEM Fields, for biological reasons, that is they tend to be more interested in people than things. Because of this STEM fields are dominated by men, who, because of sheer numbers alone, end up shaping the culture to be more masculine. This makes STEM even less appealing for the relatively rare women who do have some degree of passion for STEM. If we were to accept this theory, how would we go about improving matters for society?

Doingmything1234• 7 years ago

Robert Martin talks about how in the 60's and 70's women made up a large amount of the worlds programmers. It would seem somewhere along the way we found ways to significantly reduce the number of women entering the profession. I would argue that any biological reasons have little to no influence compared to social factors. If we accept this alternative theory, then the solution is to change the social culture around STEM to not be so exclusionary.

Reedx3• 7 years ago

Ask women and you'll find that most aren't interested in programming a computer all day. Which one could argue is a sane choice. If anything it's more sane.

Stop trying to make them feel like something is wrong if they don't have this inclination. Males and females have different preferences on average, some as early as birth[1]. This is not a bad thing.

For the ones that want to program all day, obviously they should be welcomed and any company that doesn't is doing themselves a huge disservice. In fact the best programmer I've ever worked with is a woman.

1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222673203_Sex_Diffe...

rayiner5• 7 years ago

Males and females have different preferences on average, and do from birth[1]. This is not a bad thing.

I feel like this is a “??? Profit!” argument. Accepting that girl infants prefer faces and boy infants prefer trucks—what does that have to do with programming? Even within the context of traditional stereotypes about male/female preferences, what makes programming a “male” thing? The analogy that programmers “build things” is just that—your typical programmer is certainly not cut out to be a construction worker.

TulliusCicero25• 7 years ago

Males and females have different preferences on average, and do from birth[1]. This is not a bad thing.

Sure, but it seems more than a little convenient that the male-chosen professions seem to generally pay significantly more, on average, than the female-chosen ones. Haven't there been studies that showed that women moving into a profession was actually associated with pay dropping?

kaitai7• 7 years ago

Most people, period, are not interested in programming a computer all day.

My girl child likes trucks, not Frozen, and the pressure from other adults to get her to conform and play with Disney-branded dolls is non-trivial and unrelenting. Ugh.

harryh• 7 years ago

Yes indeed. Women just don't want to work in one of the fastest growing and highest paying professions in America. They would much rather take lower paying jobs where you don't get free lunches and flexible dress codes at the office.

I'm sure you're right.

zmmmmm• 7 years ago

Ask women and you'll find that most aren't interested in programming a computer all day

I think this though itself is an artefact of a male dominated profession. The fact that working with software is "programming a computer all day" reflects a male preference and value system, and many people open acknowledge that it's quite harmful and often creates quite dysfunctional teams. We need better requirements, better communication, better documentation, more human approach to the whole process. I've talked to great women working in software development who say "I don't really care about the programming itself and I would never go home and do it for fun - but I love the other aspects of the job". Perhaps the nature of the job itself needs to change a bit for the preferences to adjust.

UncleMeat2• 7 years ago

A few years ago I was on a plane wearing a sweater with the logo of the major tech company I work at. The person sitting next to me was excited to talk to me about how he was trying to develop his son into an engineer. His son was like six. He was buying his son toys and games that tried to promote an interest in technology.

He also had a daughter. Similar age. He was not doing the same for her.

Perhaps these children had such a strong idea of what they wanted at a very very early age and the father was responding to that. But I find it more likely that the father held an implicit bias about what jobs his son and daughter should have and was providing support to push his son into tech.

When these two people graduate college and the son becomes a software engineer and the daughter doesn't it will be their choice. But it is not clear to me that it wasn't sexism that produced the circumstances for that choice.

TulliusCicero25• 7 years ago

she looked around to see writers with relatively safe, high-status job

She did? Where did she find these writers with safe, high status jobs? Maybe PR?

metalforever2• 7 years ago

I am a woman in software and I agree with this.

datashow• 7 years ago

I can't believe this comment get voted up.

women in America are "organically" picking non-STEM jobs, but that is because the jobs suck, the environments suck and people are assholes at these jobs

Very general assessment without any supporting evidence.

Your sister is not sufficient evidence to make this kind of assessment. Neither is "Ask Women".

By the way, I will be very surprised to hear women in general are treated better in India than in America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_inequality_in_India

hailk2• 7 years ago

My gf is in a community oriented job here in India. Dominated by women. Men are criticized much harshly, the environment is outright unprofessional with sex talk and gossip constantly at work. Every other day there is another girl crying because her work was criticized (fairly). Maybe try looking outside populist narratives with a more nuanced view, toxicity flows both ways.

tl;dr: Ask Men and Women.

turc1656• 7 years ago

This isn't new information. Not even sort of new. This has been known for quite some time (20-30 YEARS). Jordan Peterson has also mentioned it numerous times over the years but the original studies are quite old.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xjvzH24Mwo

Yet people are shocked to learn this because this data/facts aren't liked by politicians and even some scientists so it doesn't get discussed. Not sure why. There's nothing wrong with having different preferences. But some people like to pretend everyone is more or less exactly the same and want to do the same things and the only reason to differ would be societal influence.

4ntonius8lock3• 7 years ago

The odd thing is that the same people who talk about there being no inherent biological differences between sexes then go ahead and talk about 'male aggression'. The amount of people that employ mental gymnastics to justify saying both these things is amazing. In fact the attacks I've seen on Peterson have bordered on the downright delusional/incoherent.

IAmEveryone2• 7 years ago

It's perfectly possible to consider traits to be culturally assigned to the genders and not biologically determined, and still complain about them. Complaining about innate (and therefore unchangeable) biological traits would actually be somewhat useless.

Besides, nobody denies the existence of biological differences. It's pretty obvious that women tend to have breasts and men tend not to. What's being criticised is:

- Misinterpreting culturally-enforced differences as biological and therefore fixed. Hair length, for example, could be misinterpreted as a difference between the sexes if any aliens did a quantitative study without ever noticing the barbers. Job choices could very well be similar, except the process how they are culturally reinforced are less obvious.

- Making decisions affecting individuals based on group differences (biological, culturally, or imagined): Even if women are 2% at picking stocks, using that information only to hire Alice and not Bob will lead to the wrong decision in 45% of cases because the differences between individuals swamp the group averages.

omarhaneef• 7 years ago

"Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women.... Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “stem,” as it’s known—are female."

Wait, so they're comparing computer science with all of STEM? That might obfuscate the picture. It should be STEM:STEM.

Edit: Perhaps I am not being clear but computer science is a subset of STEM, so even within the US, the number of people going into STEM > Computer Science. Comparing STEM in country X with CS in country Y seems like the wrong comparison.

edoo2• 7 years ago

I'm pretty sure it has been proven most genius women go into medicine and most genius men go into engineering. The genius part means you get to pick your path. Biological imperatives are at play.

malcolmgreaves• 7 years ago

There are absolutely zero "biological imperatives" here -- your take is some pretty low-effort, tired sexual discrimination.

viggity• 7 years ago

"STEM" was this thing that was invented to drum up interest in fields that were in high demand. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of scientists, engineers, or mathematicians. The shortage is in technology.

mixmastamyk10• 7 years ago

And no shortage there either. Or rather the shortage is in efficient interviewing techniques and interviewers.

lowdose2• 7 years ago

When people are more equal they will have more reason to differentiate. Women in countries like Norway tend to choose more professions based on the alignment with their gender. Men in the same country are known to have more typical "guy" hobbies and toys. It's basically a catch-22.

jl27182• 7 years ago

Mostly because it’s not a very good job. The total hours, job security, and amortization of training time, are some of the worst of any profession.

Nursie• 7 years ago

That's nonsense. It pays very well and can give you great freedom to set your own path.

uwuhn• 7 years ago

I think that poster is referring to STEM as a whole. Software engineering is a small subset of STEM, and I'd argue that it is, surprisingly, both the most accessible and the most lucrative.

georgeburdell• 7 years ago

I submitted a similar article last week about how muslim countries punch above their weight on women in STEM.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2017/11/the-stem-paradox-wh...

The conclusion there was parental authoritarianism (especially dads) was a primary cause. My own family is part Muslim so I have direct experience. Every child must be an engineer or doctor. As the Atlantic article notes, women in the West have more freedom to NOT choose STEM.

4ntonius8lock3• 7 years ago

It's good that the article mentions poverty and interest in STEM, but they plotted the participation in STEM against Gender Equality instead of say, affordability to survive on minimum wage. They are literally quoting a study on the effects of basically poverty of a country, and then decide to plot against gender gap? Seems like they are trying to sell a narrative instead of understanding the issue fully.

It also seems odd the amount of information they glance over to create their narrative.

In the article, there's a video that mentions a ton of facts.

Among the facts: Women make up 18% of CS engineers. 1:4 computing jobs are held by women. I'm no math genius, but this actually seems to dispel the myth of women just aren't hired in tech. I mean, if they are 18% of CS engineering graduates, you'd expect them to hold slightly < 1:5 computing jobs, not 1:4.

jlebar• 7 years ago

If you look at the scatterplot excluding the four countries at the bottom right (Algeria, Turkey, Tunisia, UAE), you get basically a circle and (to my eye anyway) the trendline is horizontal, meaning, no correlation.

Moreover, there are two countries with approximately the same gender inequality but many fewer women in STEM, namely Qatar and Korea.

It seems to me that reducing this to "the more gender equality, the fewer women in tech" is a stretch! You could have just as easily written a headline to the effect of, "Turkey and three northern African countries have a higher percentage of women in STEM than almost anywhere in the world, including places that have the same gender (in)equality, like Qatar and S. Korea. Why is that?"

_Nat_• 7 years ago

If you look at the scatterplot excluding the four countries at the bottom right (Algeria, Turkey, Tunisia, UAE), you get basically a circle and (to my eye anyway) the trendline is horizontal, meaning, no correlation.

Their hypothesis doesn't predict a straight line.

Rather, they're saying that free women don't tend to choose STEM as often as men in the same society choose STEM. If they're correct, then we should expect a lack of data points in the top-right quadrant, above those 4 you pointed out, as such points would represent free societies in which women do pick STEM.

For there to be a straight line, we'd have to further assume that oppressive societies always force women into STEM, which doesn't follow. For example, early-1900's America didn't grant women freedom, but it didn't force them into STEM, either.

lgleason• 7 years ago

It all comes down to equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. When there is equality of opportunity women choose different fields...often (but not always) because of different interests. Equality of outcome forces people to do things that they may not have an interest in.

And that is before you get into interests vs natural talent and how that does or does not affect ones success in a field. On a fundamental level I personally prefer equality of opportunity and freedom of choice.

As to the men being jerks/toxic etc argument. Are there times when that is true? Absolutely. But, men do not have a monopoly on being jerks, creating toxic work environments or harassing people. Personally I've seen bad behavior from both sides. I've also seen exceptional talent, skill, empathy etc. come from both groups. Many corporate cultures are toxic to everybody, irregardless of your gender.

I'm sure this will be down voted, but it is what it is.

TulliusCicero25• 7 years ago

As to the men being jerks/toxic etc argument. Are there times when that is true? Absolutely. But, men do not have a monopoly on being jerks

I'd say the bigger point against the idea that women aren't in CS purely* because of men being sexist, is that this implies that male doctors and lawyers in the 60's and 70's were less sexist than male engineers of today. Does anyone actually believe this?

* of course, it may still be a partial factor

foldr45• 7 years ago

this implies that male doctors and lawyers in the 60's and 70's were less sexist than male engineers of today.

I don't see how it implies this. The more relevant question is whether STEM has higher levels of sexism than other similarly attractive fields.

aidenn02• 7 years ago

Eh, pain is relative. If you think hospitals today are less sexist workplaces than software companies, you might pick med school.

I hope that it's clear to most people that there isn't a single reason for the disparity though. People are complicated.

jayd165• 7 years ago

Implicit bias also guides interests and choice. Many women I meet today simply did not consider the possibility of an engineering career, not that they were forced out of it.

We look to outcome equality to gain some kind of insight into this.

izzydata2• 7 years ago

It sounds like informing everyone that these options exist is part of creating a more equal opportunity. If two people didn't have the same information for available options then there wasn't an equal opportunity.

mixmastamyk10• 7 years ago

In school way back in olden times, most of the girls in my class would say "oh, I hate computers," when the subject was brought up. Odd, because I loved them.

I don't hear this anymore from the grown-up-on-iPad generation.

TulliusCicero25• 7 years ago

Many women I meet today simply did not consider the possibility of an engineering career

And I'm sure many men simply did not consider the possibility of a career in female dominated professions, like nursing or elementary education. I think there's certainly something to the idea that we internalize stereotypes and that can restrict our options, but I'm skeptical that it generally explains large differences in career preference today.

For example, women were once stereotyped as not being doctors or lawyers, but that didn't seem to stop them from joining those fields en masse. If internalized stereotyping didn't matter enough to stop them then, for those fields, why does it matter now for engineering?

naasking5• 7 years ago

Implicit bias also guides interests and choice.

The existence of implicit bias is contentious. All purported tests to measure its existence have failed replication.

mixmastamyk10• 7 years ago

    s/irregardless/regardless

UncleMeat2• 7 years ago

I'm sure this will be down voted, but it is what it is.

It's currently the number one post.

jxramos• 7 years ago

I was curious if these terms were formally defined anyplace, looks like there's actually wikipedia articles devoted to them:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equality_of_outcome

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_opportunity

blaser-waffle2• 7 years ago

They've been defined concepts in social science for a while.

Also equality vs equability, etc.

pj_mukh3• 7 years ago

"As to the men being jerks/toxic etc argument. Are there times when that is true? Absolutely. But, men do not have a monopoly on being jerks, creating toxic work environments or harassing people"

This is a red herring. If you ask women they won't say their bosses were "jerks" or "toxic" (though a lot of time they are), they'll say they made them "uncomfortable", "un-accommodating".

It reminds me of a friend who got pregnant and left the STEM field because the dudes at her office made her feel like she was SUCH a huge drag on them. None of them were jerks, just not accommodating. Its a subtle but substantial difference.

"I'm sure this will be down voted, but it is what it is."

Actually, its the top comment, the popularity of this opinion among programmers is the crux of the issue. Nobody wants to work at a company where a majority of people think you are "unnatural" or an "outlier" for being there.

y4mi• 7 years ago

If you ask women they won't say their bosses were "jerks" or "toxic"

Most women I know do exactly that though if you speak with them in a private setting?

I'll have to take your word for the rest of your opinion, as I don't know your friend nor her colleagues.

I'm a little surprised you expect them to be totally accommodating though. It's a professional setting after all. It's nice if you can create good friendships there, but expecting it is just asking for trouble

Buldak• 7 years ago

Practically no one endorses "equality of outcome" in itself. It's a question of whether disparate outcomes evidence disparate opportunities (findings like those in question suggest that they may not).

ajuc2• 7 years ago

Gender quotas are basically enforcing equality of outcome. If the reason for disparity in some trades isn't discrimination but preferences (as this article strongly suggests) - gender quotas make both man and women less happy to satisfy statistics and ideology. It's insane.

BTW I wonder if people proposing gender quotas because of pay gap would also support gender quotas in hospitals to fight life expectance gap, and gender quotas in psychiatry to fight suicide percentage gap.

stjohnswarts• 7 years ago

I've seen pretty much both sexes being equally abrasive at work, it's a pretty co-equal trait of the two (plus) sexes.

throwaway098513• 7 years ago

I am a woman, and this pervasive opinion that women are leaving STEM fields because of toxic behavior feels more sexist to me than anything else. It seems to me that if you have a genuine passion for STEM stuff, it takes a lot more than a bad environment to completely redirect your career path.

Every woman I know with a genuine and deep interest in STEM subjects has had to deal with some level of toxic/sexist/whatever stuff in their life, and they persevered and dealt with it because they weren't going to let it get in the way of their passion.

It might sound harsh, but I don't feel terribly concerned about keeping these displaced women in STEM; if their interest isn't strong enough to overcome a bad environment, then maybe they just weren't that interested to begin with. That's not a bad thing, it just means that they misjudged the interest:difficulty ratio.

Of the cases I know of personally, most of these women ended up in a job working fairly close with STEM stuff, writing manuals, doing graphic design, etc, and are perfectly fine with those jobs.

To be clear, I'm not accounting for cases where an entire university or business or whatever is made up of toxic sexism, but that's been pretty uncommon in my experience in the US.

Women of STEM: if you've got a bad environment, do something about it! Tell your higher-ups, talk to people directly, seek a different position, endure what you can, and for God's sake stand up for yourself.

tl;dr the implication that most women in STEM can't handle a toxic work environment without giving up entirely doesn't seem that progressive at all

NB disclaimer, most people I know are computer scientists, plus a few mathematicians, so maybe engineering is different

WalterBright4• 7 years ago

Every woman I know with a genuine and deep interest in STEM subjects has had to deal with some level of toxic/sexist/whatever stuff in their life, and they persevered and dealt with it because they weren't going to let it get in the way of their passion.

I grew up in an era when kids interested in STEM were "nerds" and were harassed, denigrated, and had lower social status. This changed when Bill Gates made his first billion. Suddenly, people realized that STEM was a ticket to the good life.

The title of the documentary "Triumph of the Nerds" was no accident.

A Seattle local comedy show "Almost Live" regularly ran skits about Microsoft engineers being socially inept and unable to get dates. (Of course, the joke turned out to be on Almost Live, as the super wealthy Microsoft engineers transformed the city.)

I suppose my point is that men who liked STEM had persevered in spite of the negative image of it.

whack• 7 years ago

this pervasive opinion that women are leaving STEM fields because of toxic behavior feels more sexist to me than anything else

I don't think it is sexist at all to claim that some people would not want to be in a field because of its hostile work environment. I sure wouldn't. Factually debatable? Sure. But sexist?

It might sound harsh, but I don't feel terribly concerned about keeping these displaced women in STEM; if their interest isn't strong enough to overcome a bad environment, then maybe they just weren't that interested to begin with

I'm not a woman, but I am a person of color. And if anyone expressed those exact sentiments about people of color, I would never want to be around that person again. "I don't feel terribly concerned about keeping displaced minorities in my field. If they aren't interested enough to put up with racism, they shouldn't be here to begin with. It is their own responsibility to do something about it and fix the racist environment that they are in". Can you even imagine someone saying that? And yet, I hear the same sentiments being directed towards women constantly.

Ironically enough, you and I probably agree on most things. I don't think the STEM field is "toxic" or any worse than any other profession. At most companies I've worked, both management and other engineers made great efforts to be welcoming and friendly to women. That said, misogyny and hostile work environments do exist, and when it happens, we need to make sure we blame the culprits and not the victims.

stale2002• 7 years ago

they persevered and dealt with it because they weren't going to let it get in the way of their passion.

Yes, it is true that if someone is really passionate about something, then they will put up with a lot of bad things and problems.

But I am confused as to why you think this is a valid argument as for why society shouldn't try to solve these problems.

There is still a lot of value in fixing problems, so that people who would be otherwise interested, will want to join.

koonsolo2• 7 years ago

I worked with a few women in software development. 2 of them separately told me they liked working in an all men team more than working with women. "Men are more honest and straightforward, women more jealous and backstabbing". Their words, not mine.

But since the whole upheaval of women in workplaces that flowed to Europe from US, I have the feeling that this sentiment has changed.

jholman• 7 years ago

Agreement in the form of an anecdatum:

More than one baby-boomer woman I know has said that every time she has a male boss, things are okay, and every time she has a female boss, the whole office gradually goes insane. I'm in particular thinking of my aunt, working in banks (all of her peers were women), but I've heard it elsewhere too.

But then again, it's anecdata. I try not to take it seriously (I mean, I take it seriously about the individual's experience, but not as a description of large-scale patterns). But also when people have just-so stories about how male bosses are toxic to female underlings, I have the same "maybe that was true for you, but I don't see any reason to generalize" reaction.

roenxi3• 7 years ago

That anecdote tells you precisely nothing; women who prefer working in all-female teams, etc, etc, have already been weeded out. Talking to people in the industry is sampling from a population of people who probably don't see a problem regardless of the actual situation.

mewpmewp2• 7 years ago

I am from Europe. I keep hearing the same things. Although it is anecdotal and from other people. At times it seems women have it constantly against each other focusing a lot of their time on social power plays. Myself I work in an environment with 97 percent male ratio so I do not have enough experience to comment on it myself. I would rather have it 50/50 at this point though. I think it would be less boring.

speedplane3• 7 years ago

I worked with a few women in software development. 2 of them separately told me they liked working in an all men team more than working with women.

There are far more male bosses than female bosses. Accordingly, assuming bad bosses are relatively rare, it's far more likely every female boss you've ever had is awful than every male boss you've ever had is awful. This is just probability.

Let's take an example. Suppose 10% of bosses are awful, regardless of gender. Further suppose that due historical societal reasons, only 20% of bosses are female. If you've had 3 different bosses in your career, there's a far likelier chance that every female boss you've had is awful (3.94%) than every male boss you've had is awful (1.4%). (I'll leave it as an exercise to derive these numbers).

So, even if men and women are just as likely to be awful, you're nearly 3 times as likely for all of your female bosses to be awful than all of your male bosses to be awful simply due to the fact that women are under-represented.

This probability may explain at least some of this common and sad bias against female bosses.

belorn9• 7 years ago

Being in groups of the opposite gender has the benefit that you can opt out of inter-sex competition. Men compete with men. Women with women. A woman working in a otherwise all men team have no other woman to compete with which can be a great freedom. If a person explicitly talked about "jealous and backstabbing" I would interpret it as terminology of inter-sex competition.

tmh79• 7 years ago

As to the men being jerks/toxic etc argument...

I think its a lot more complicated than this. Yes, men and women can be jerks. The bigger issues seem to be when a team is 80%+ one gender or another, and the issues aren't about "being mean" the issues are about the dominant group being blind to and then not accommodating the nondominant group's needs.

A huge problem is that we have a lot of 6 person tech teams with 5 guys and 1 women and the women naturally feel alienated and either aren't actually able to do well or are at least perceived as not doing well due to their situation. This holds back women's career development as a group and reduces the numbers of women in higher ranks in corporate life.

banads8• 7 years ago

The same is true is in fields dominated by women, such as education

belorn9• 7 years ago

the issues are about the dominant group being blind to and then not accommodating the nondominant group's needs.

I do not think that is the problem of 80%+ one gender groups.

Imagine going into a store and see that 80%+ is the opposite gender. Before anyone has a chance of accommodating your need, what emotions pops up? Now compared that to going into the same store with the 80%+ being your own gender.

Going into an environment where you feel like a part of a dominating group give most people a feeling of security. They feel safe and what ever choice everyone else does is a safe choice to adapt. Entering a group where you are a minority has not just the absence of that, but can also induce a sense of insecurity.

This is one theory why countries like Sweden have a very extreme gender segregation of around 90% of men and 90% of women working in a gender segregated profession. From student to senior employee, every step is impacted in how secure the person feel in continuing with their career path, and the above effect influence how leaky the pipe get.

mikekchar• 7 years ago

Keep in mind that if I am in a team of 5, then 80% of the group is in the dominant "not-me group" and 20% is in the minority "me group". We often (and reasonably) choose to prioritise the needs of the dominant group over the non-dominant group. If I want to use Elm, but the rest of the team wants to use JS and React, I'd actually be a bit of a jerk to force them all to accommodate my wishes.

While contrived, I'm convinced this is precisely the problem. If I am a woman on a team of men, am I a bit of a jerk for demanding that the rest of the team accommodates me? Perhaps they all have a communication style that suits them that is born from their upbringing as male children while I have a communication style that equally suits me, but is different from theirs. Must I adapt to their system, or should they adapt to mine?

When we talk about programming style, or preferences for tools the answer is seemingly easy. We go with the majority so that we please the most people. When we talk about gender, sexual orientation, race, etc the answer is much more complex. We can divide our groups in infinite ways and yet some categorisations are chosen to be significant while others are not.

Because of this, I feel that it is actually really important that we recognise that we will not and can not accommodate everyone. Being different, having a different opinion, having a different set of experiences is not actually enough to warrant special treatment. In many cases we choose to discriminate: no matter how good a Java programmer you are, we will not write our frontend in GWT! (Real story: I maintain a frontend written in Java and GWT, so I'm taking some liberties ;-) ).

As I said, there are some special cases where we have decided that we wish to provide special accommodation. We do this because, on balance, we believe that doing so enriches our societies. It will always be a tradeoff, though, and it's important to understand that.

Consider the word "discrimination". Without that word, we can not discriminate between "good" and "bad". We do not want to live in a world without discrimination. We should always strive to discriminate in such a way as it makes the world a better place. We wish to avoid behaviour that works against our interests and encourage behaviour that works for our interests.

To that end, we specifically discriminate in certain situations so that we accommodate minority groups in a way that we feel enhances our society. It should not be a surprise if we occasionally get this wrong and I strongly discourage people from assuming that the "right" answer is easy to determine. It is important that we think very carefully about which things we wish accommodate (minority representation of gender, sexual orientation, race) and things which we do not wish to accommodate (hate speech, violent behaviour, and GWT :-D).

P.S. I hereby apologise for my horrible characterisation of Java and GWT. I actually don't mind it that much...

silveroriole• 7 years ago

the women naturally feel alienated

Why “naturally”? Is it really natural for men and women to alienate each other just by existing?

jressey• 7 years ago

I have managed delivery teams and this all fits my experience. One sex can have 100% best intentions but can nonetheless dominate. My best performing, and funnest, teams have been nearly equally split.

pkghost• 7 years ago

Downvoted for this:

Equality of outcome forces people to do things that they may not have an interest in

What?! Equality of outcome, as I've encountered it, is always downstream of individual choice. That is, it's up to the hiring committee to enforce gender parity by selecting from available applicants, and not up to educators or policy-makers to force equal amounts of women to be in STEM. No one has ever, to my knowledge, made the argument the way you represented it (except, ironically, incels calling for mandated marriage).

I'd have taken you more seriously if you hadn't straw-manned the shit out of equality of outcome.

tj-teej• 7 years ago

This article implies that the correlation between gender-opportunity and representation in STEM is a causation.

Look at the chart in the article, look at the countries on each end of the opportunity spectrum. There are many obvious economic, societal, and cultural differences between the countries on one side and the other of that spectrum.

To take this correlation and use it to forward a sexist idea (that women PREFER different, often worse-paying, fields and that's why there's less women, and thus we don't need to change anything in our industry's culture) is the reason I would downvote this article and the OP's comment.

toxik3• 7 years ago

Please don’t spread moral panic by labeling other people’s worldviews sexist. It does not sell your argument but only serves to polarize the debate.

I know a lot of women in tech who feel uncomfortable with all the special treatment they get — entire conferences dedicated to “women in tech.” I find the idea so patronizing, just like I would a “men in daycare” conference. It is an extension of coddling the incapable and meek servile woman. Get out of here.

yibg4• 7 years ago

You're taking an idea, that there are differences in preference between men and women and calling it sexist. Why is it sexist? Do you not think there are difference in preference between men and women? That perhaps the different levels of hormones would result in a difference in temperament? For example higher levels of testosterone leads to more risky and aggressive behavior.

masteranza4• 7 years ago

To take a perfectly rational conclusion and call it sexist is quite a deriding trick, isn’t it?

You’d need to try really hard to disprove different interest of men and women, as literature suggests differences from a very young age, even before those children have chances to meet their peers.

You’re just giving alternative explanations, which given the left side of the chart are much, much less likely. The economic argument also doesn’t make sense. STEM jobs may be among the highest paying ones, but certainly are not THE highest (not to mention the amount of effort compared to different high pay jobs).

partiallypro2• 7 years ago

I don't understand why modern society doesn't understand/want to believe that men and women have different career interests than men. Men and women value things differently, and it's not all because of society.

yibg4• 7 years ago

Animals have behavioral differences between males and females, I also don't understand why it's so hard to believe that humans will have differences between the genders as well.

smadurange2• 7 years ago

There's a whole lot of people who have studied fields that are irrelevant to today's industry needs and have ended up with no real marketable skill. Various forms of activist movements have money in it.

Modern developed societies have solved most of the serious, basic problems making it easier for a group of people to capitalise on solving more lofty problems. I have seen someone who did a degree in communication studies or something like that going after video games for sexism and raise millions for the cause.

This trend will probably continue until we have more serious things to worry about. This is very eloquently described in "Fate of empires" by Sir John Glubbs.

tarsinge• 7 years ago

What I don’t understand is the obsession to draw conclusions as soon as possible. We just don’t have the data yet. From my experience developers are still seen as black magicians by other roles. Being initiated is having been a weird unpopular boy which used computer since he was young. It’s slowly starting to change, and maybe real trends will emerge in 20 years, but why the hurry?

Our only responsibility is that we provide welcoming environment and equality of opportunity. But I may be missing some US context on the obsession here.

liziwizi• 7 years ago

i hate this argument so much! it has been thrown in my face soooooooo many times... it's the go-to excuse managers and sales people use to tell a woman in IT that she's weird for doing what she does. even in teams with 90% men, it was almost never the men in the team that were the problem, but almost always those looking in on the team: managers, sales people, marketeers, project managers, journalists, ...

please, stop telling women they are weird for wanting to work in IT or for enjoying their IT job.

fg6hr2• 7 years ago

I think it's the people in power are applying the usual divide and conquer technique: they add more women to tech, alienate men and women and keep them busy fighting each other. How to alienate them? By giving special preferences to only one group. This is a textbook technique.

yibg4• 7 years ago

I'm all for equality of opportunity, remove unconscious bias and creating a welcoming environment for all groups, including women. But equality of outcome I think pretty quickly breaks down. If we force 50% of software engineers to be women, we'd pretty quickly run out of women. This cascades as well, as we're not getting gender balance for CS enrollment in colleges either.

rishav_sharan• 7 years ago

Unrelated to the topic but can you even downvote in HN? I only have an upvote button. Does it have something to do with how much the HN equivalent of karma that you have?

gnicholas• 7 years ago

Yep, not sure what the current threshold is, but in the past it was 500. You're close!

thrower123• 7 years ago

Women are unbelievably toxic if they achieve critical mass in a department. I cannot believe the level of petty conflict that my wife endures in her female-dominated PM team; my male-exclusive band of semi-autistic programmers seems like fiddler's green in comparison.

_lacroix3• 7 years ago

Not totally related but being the one socially adept developer on a team of semi-autistic devs is the absolute worst. I was also the only woman but it wasn't the gender ratio that bothered me as I've been on great all-male teams in the past. But my god is it hard to enjoy your workday when you're the only person on the team with social skills and nobody ever wants to talk to you or go out for lunch occasionally!

SenHeng• 7 years ago

I'm sure this will be down voted, but it is what it is.

I totally agree with you but I hate that you had to end with that line. It's pointless and simply shuts down any useful discussion and implies that 'you disagree/downvote with me because I'm right'.

Cougher5• 7 years ago

That was my thought as well. I read a good post, then my dominant thought was changed to a negative slant because of an entirely unecessary -- and probably very inaccurate -- note of paranoid self-defense.

coatmatter• 7 years ago

Chess Grandmaster David Smerdon (PhD, Economics) noticed a similar correlation with chess too: https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-best-and-worst-countries-t...

xwowsersx• 7 years ago

Jordan Peterson has highlighted this many times. As he puts it: in Scandinavia, which has gone further than any other country in promoting gender equality, as equality increases, the differences between the genders (interest, careers, other pursuits) INCREASE, not the other way around. This came as a big surprise to many.

gamesbrainiac• 7 years ago

I think the truth of the matter is that you cannot dictate what people feel passionate about or what they need to do. For example, people in Algeria or from my region of South Asia study the sciences because it is a way to better incomes in the future.

Simply giving people all the opportunity in the world will not guarantee that they will take up that opportunity. Just because you offer someone a carrot does not mean that that person will bite.

wufufufu• 7 years ago

Is it not arrogant to think engineering is the profession that all minorities aspire to?

jariel• 7 years ago

"A new study explores a strange paradox:"

It's not a paradox!!

That people refer to it as a 'paradox' only confirms their very entrenched, possibly ideological view of reality, to the point wherein 'real life data' that calls into question that view ... is considered 'strange'.

It's not a paradox, it's just reality, probably easily explained (in very crude terms) by the fact that men and women are different, ergo, different outcomes. 'Gender' is a very powerful construct with underlying physical aspects, and it's just a part of who we are.

So we can try to make sure everyone has a real chance (taking into account systematic issues i.e. it's really hard for the 'lone minority' in a group etc.), but going too far beyond that might be hard.

downerending• 7 years ago

I have no doubt that women face adversity, often in the form of sh__ty behavior during their STEM careers, so I'm not particularly surprised by accounts of it. I'm far less sanguine about the idea that they face more of it than men, as I've been on the receiving end of a lot of it myself (some life-changing).

It'd be interesting to see this studied.

squidsurfer3• 7 years ago

Wow, it turns out that much to the protestations of the left, women are in fact not men, and given more equality of opportunity and freedom to choose will gravitate more towards fields suited to their natures, on average. This was common sense a generation or two ago, but now feels like heresy to speak out loud. Certainly a fireable offense (just ask James Damore!)

b0rsuk6• 7 years ago

I think it's safe to say that board games are kinda STEM-related? I go to a local fantasy/SF club that's dominated by board gaming. There are lots of STEM students in there due to location, also plenty of programmers. And very few girls, and the only woman over 30 is mentally <inoffensive word>.

No, there's no beer, no cigarettes, no posters with elves in g-strings, that sort of thing. It's almost as if girls and young women weren't really interested in that. The few that do occasionally show up gravitate towards LARPs, pen&paper RPG games, and RPG-ish board games like Arkham Horror. If anything, I think those activities are more associated with toxic and sexist behavior and subtexts. I mean those are the people that spend lots of time in the same company, often in pubs or cellars, as opposed to board games where there are always people coming and going.

I don't know why, but very few young women come to us to play heavier or more competitive board games and we have several games going at any given time. And because board game renaissance is pretty recent in my country, there's absolutely no possibility it's traditionally male.

I'm for equal opportunities, but I think differences between sexes are not limited to physical. It's hard to pinpoint the tendencies, but they seem to be there. I mean look at smaller guys - they often have confidence issues and the ones I know are gym rats. They are also more afraid to go out after dark. Would it be crazy to think that people who evolved having about 20% less muscle mass also got some related mental differences?

softfalcon• 7 years ago

More than likely, the reason others avoid you is because once it became a distinct group huddled around a table nerding out about a technical board game, it became intimidating to join. Hell, I was raised playing D&D and other games, am male, have a computer science degree, and even I feel intimidated walking up to another table of gamers.

The same thing applies in reverse when you're with your mates at a pub. You want to go over and talk to a girl, but she's surrounded by her army of friends who are forming a social barricade that is intimidating to enter.

Those girls don't want to leave their comfortable social circle and risk entering this unknown board game world either. Here are a bunch of guys who all "know" this game and she has to enter into it not just from a social disadvantage, but also a gaming skill disadvantage. That's a tough ask for anyone, male or female. People do not like to enter social situations where they feel isolated.

Even if you were all a bunch of ripped, attractive, friendly, well dressed, wealthy, and obviously social gents, you'd still probably find women don't waltz right up to you and your friends playing a game of Scythe or some other complex strategy game.

If you want people to join your game, you have to go out of your way to make the game environment approachable to other people.

This means playing simpler games, inviting people over, and including other fun things to ease them into it. This means networking outside of just going to a board game cafe and hoping a girl will come through the door. You have to go out and find those wonderful people yourself.

NOTE: this can be really hard, cause the same way you and your friends are hiding out in this board game cafe, so are all those other like-minded individuals. They're also hiding away in basements, back alley cafes, etc, playing board games.

Remember, the reason you're into this hobby is because you've been a gaming fan for years. If we take away all your prior knowledge of games, you too would be anxious to jump right into the thick of it.

b0rsuk6• 7 years ago

I think you jump to conclusions too easily. There are usually a few (2-3) groups that play similar kinds of games as me that do NOT contain me at the moment. If it was about me personally, I'd see women in the complimentary group, just not in mine. That is not the case. I usually play in any of the groups except one, which has people I personally don't like. We have a lot of table jumping and newcomers, in fact it's rare to have a match when no one needs to be introduced to the rules of the game. The nature of the club is also that we rarely play the same game twice in a row.

ajuc2• 7 years ago

It's pretty obvious once you stop with ideology and politics.

When STEM is your only shot at a comfortable life - you go STEM if you can, even if you don't want to. When it's not - you pursue your interests instead.

b0rsuk6• 7 years ago

I know it's not a popular opinion, but consider a company analogy. People who leave because they're not competent have a tendency to badmouth the company. I'm not saying all of them do, and all that badmouth were incompetent. But there is a tendency to rationalize and lash out. What if women were calling those environments toxic because they had a hard time doing well in there?

There are absolutely toxic, hermetic, unpleasant environments. But we should at least permit considering the idea that people of different sexes have different abilities. I get sexist comments all the time (men can't distinguish colors, men can't multitask) and there are no white knights riding to my rescue.

b0rsuk6• 7 years ago

If you rule out an idea without verification and forbid studies in the area, that's just a variant of "la la la la I can't hear you". It's childish, and taboo.

SubuSS• 7 years ago

Let's say you bring up an issue about a bug in software you're working on. Let's also say you didn't cause it. But the moment you talk about it, I respond, 'didn't the code you wrote yesterday have a bug?', 'isn't this code base from a reputed oss repo?' and so on.

Essentially my exact words don't mean that this is also your bug, but there is an (un)intended implication that you're a crappy developer. You're probably gonna latch on to that at the speed of light rather than giving a Data like logical response. That's the problem with bringing up such alternatives.

It alludes that women or minority will right away fall back to their gender or whatever when convenient. It also alludes that they don't know the weight of one such allegation, they aren't thinking about the effect it is going to have on their future employment opportunities (It so happens this kind of allegations true or not seriously affect your career, everyone starts to tiptoe around you at the least in your new job) - essentially attributes a lack of integrity and foresight.

IOW - I do agree that there is a very interesting question around what do we do about incompetent employees who happen to be a minority. I also know this line of responses are probably not going to be productive :)

b0rsuk6• 7 years ago

Obviously I'm not going to test this myself, but I think the consequences of saying bad things about past work environment are less if you're leaving an industry altogether for a different career anyway. Or if you're asked by someone random like a journalist, who's not considering hiring you or telling the next recruiter.

ProofByAccident• 7 years ago

These comments are wild and the headline is not great. I know this is a contentious issue and that people like to armchair philosophize about stuff like this, but I think the study conclusions warrant a lot of critical attention before you say anything about "equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome".

First off: this is one study. No matter where you fall on gender politics, I wouldn't hang anything too seriously on a single paper. Obviously gender discrimination has been a historical cause of the gender STEM gap; so are we saying that we've solved that particular problem? Is there still room to improve? How much room? To me it seems naive to assume the first one without lots of evidence, and this paper is not that.

Second: the regression shown in the article doesn't seem great. For one thing: there's a small cluster of countries with pretty high X values, and pretty low Y values which suggests that they have relatively high leverage over the results and should probably be excluded. If you cover up UAE, Tunisia, Algeria, and Turkey does the regression line make any sense at all? To me it seems way too steep, ie. leverage. (Maybe the authors talk about this in the paper, I can't get behind the paywall). Also my priors would be that there are a number of country- and regional-level effects at work for an issue like this. It would be way more informative if the authors were to perform subgroup regressions by region of the world, cultural factors, ecnomic factors, etc. It's very possible, for example, that these two variables have an opposite correlation within region, education system, etc, but appear to have a negative correlation on aggregate. Simpson's Paradox is real and can cut many ways.

Third: choice of metric. Per the article """In this study, the percentage of girls who did excel in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with STEM degrees. That means there’s something in even the most liberal societies that’s nudging women away from math and science, even when those are their best subjects""" This could be caused by a lot of things, but this suggests to me that the "Global Gender Gap" metric may not be giving us the whole picture. I think it's real hasty to draw basically any conclusions about eg. the US STEM culture based on this study. When the results suggest a paradox like this, I think it calls for looking at a variety of metrics to see if the same results are borne out repeatedly.

tl;dr there's a lot of research on the gender STEM gap, and a lot of people shooting from the hip in these comments.

dfilppi• 7 years ago

Women dont like nerds

sossles• 7 years ago

I've always wondered: Does encouraging women to pursue STEM subjects send the subconscious message that it isn't something they are naturally suited to? Ironically having the opposite effect?

EGreg• 7 years ago

What if I just post an alternative hypothesis without any apologies? Let’s find out...

Perhaps women in general are less interested than men in problems that require long stretches of “cold” and abstract reasoning, including building back-end software, and prefer activities that involve more human interaction or more frequent decisions involving “warmer” human elements such as aesthetics, human perception, relationship building, understanding everyday needs etc.

Also, perhaps women prefer more of a work-life balance, and not stretching themselves too thin when working on abstractions?

wfbarks• 7 years ago

When people are truly free to choose the careers they want, it accentuates natural gender preferences.

fefe23• 7 years ago

I always wonder why we just assume STEM are an attractive field to be in. Because if it is not attractive, then why would we want to force more women into it?

Maybe we should not be asking why there are so few women doing it but why there are so many men doing it.

Almost nobody who studied physics ends up doing physics.

Both men and women will do unfulfilling jobs if they need the money, but when it comes to investing into a career, women will more often choose one that leads to interesting and fulfilling jobs, while men tend to select for "return on investment". Men are much more likely than women to invest into an career that only has unfulfilling but well-paying job prospects.

I view this is a defect in men, not a sign of oppression. Men are the victim of reactionary gender stereotypes and think they have to study something that will lead to them being able to provide for a family.

Look at, for example, container ship crew or workers on an oil platform. Clearly both genders can do those jobs, but almost only men will actually do it. Oil workers are getting paid exceptionally well. Not sure about container ship crews, maybe that was not a great example.

aznpwnzor• 7 years ago

If companies truly value diversity, just pay women more then men.

b0rsuk6• 7 years ago

How about the 'forbidden fruit' syndrome? What if hard-to-get-into STEM attracts the girls who are naturally competitive and strong-willed, who want to SHOW THEM? In that case easing the resistance could also lower the perceived attractiveness.

luord2• 7 years ago

All this article tells me is that there's a problem regarding boys and reading and that we need to find ways to motivate boys into reading more.

Women aren't inherently better than men (obligatory "and viceversa") so if both are about as good in one area but one group is (only seemingly) better at another area, there clearly is an issue that needs addressing.

dragonwriter• 7 years ago

Women aren't inherently better than men (and viceversa)

While I would agree that that is true, axiomatically, when discussing moral worth and human dignity (whether speaking in terms of gender identity or biological sex), it's very clearly not true when talking about, well, a whole lot of capacities with physiological components when speaking of either averages or distributions between the biological sexes. I mean, this is fairly obvious with biological capacities closely related to sex and reproduction (I don't think anyone is going to argue against the idea that biological females are inherently advantaged when it comes to childbearing), but strucural and hormonal (among other) sex differences have far wider impacts. Testosterone levels alone, which are clearly linked to though not strictly determined by biological sex, have fairly wide ranging impacts on physical capacities and psychology/behavior.

luord2• 7 years ago

Oh, I don't disagree with that. Men and women are certainly different in many ways, just not necessarily better, as you said, in worth and dignity.

In this case, I meant reading; I don't think there's anything in our biology that would necessarily make one group better than the other at reading.

The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

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