Do Women Only Initiatives Really Help Women?

http://nibletz.com/2013/11/20/women-only-initiatives-help/

by MonicaSelby • 13 years ago

72 136 13 years ago

dmn757• 13 years ago

Great post. I have been trying to make this point here on HN this past week or so, only to be downvoted into oblivion. Thank you for putting it so eloquently.

fantnn• 13 years ago

b-but the patriarchy!

sp33210• 13 years ago

If this is true, why are only 20% of Computer Science grads women? And the ratio has been falling since 2001.

montage• 13 years ago

Maybe its because women down't want to take Computer Science?

sp33210• 13 years ago

That's probably not true. The money is pretty good, for one thing :) The ratio used to be higher in the USA, and it's still higher in some other countries. To be specific, it seems like boys are encouraged to go into tech while girls are not, which has a few effects. The first is that girls don't really consider tech at all: it's not that they consider and discard it, they just don't think of it. The other is that more boys are proficient at computer skills and programming by the time students are entering college, so even if girls do take intro courses, they are discouraged because it seems like the boys are so much better at it.

Edit: do I really have to put "on average" every time I use the words "boys" and "girls"?

11thEarlOfMar• 13 years ago

Posted separately: "In another report, in 2013, 41% of college seniors that elected majors in Physical Science were women. Yet, only 18% of those who chose computer science or engineering were women. It seems they'd be equally capable in chemistry and physics as in computer science and engineering. But their major choices indicate it is not about ability and something else is going on: http://www.directemployers.org/2012/08/16/the-college-class-.... "

This indicates that women want to take computer science and engineering to a lesser degree than the other physical sciences. And it appears to be a matter of choice.

watwut• 13 years ago

Woman that wants to study computer science or like coding will have no trouble to go to study it. However, if a girl is not sure what she wants to do, she will almost certainly NOT pick up computer science, because it is thought about as a boy major.

Conversely, if a boy does not know what he wants to do, he is likely to go for CS, because that is the "usual" decision.

Not every boy who went to study CS was dreaming in code since elementary school. Most of them learned to code in college. However, CS girls I knew usually picked it up because they really wanted to do it.

DougBTX• 13 years ago

You're assuming that given free choice, more women would choose computer science. But there are lots of other higher status degrees to choose, so I wouldn't take that as a given.

jerf• 13 years ago

Personally, I still think this is the most parsimonious solution to the question. Its only flaw is that it doesn't give anybody any reason to self-flagellate, or at least not much of one.

People keep trying to have this discussion in the context of the 1950s, but we're in 2014, where women are, among other things, the majority of college graduates (and increasing). It is a obvious fact that in the past 20-30 years, every discipline has made a huge push to attract more women, with great success. The real problem today is that computer science/programming needs to attract women in a world of incredibly stiff competition.

Why is enrollment declining? Is it that unreasonable to suspect that the answer is "because computer science is being outcompeted by the dozens upon dozens of other disciplines making women better offers"?

I deliberately phrase this as "computer science" and not "computer scientists" because I'm unconvinced the problem is in the people. "But sometimes, there are misogynists in the computer world"... how is that unique? Every field had that problem. Today, computer scientists have been damn near actively begging for women, to the point that the solicitousness itself is becoming offensive, as the author points out. There gets to be a point where advocacy turns into trying to tell women what to do.

Unless both genders are precisely equally drawn to every single discipline, an idea which I think is itself rather offensively insensitive ("feminism" shouldn't be defined as "women are just funny-looking men" but my goodness is that a popular version if you really look at what people believe), there's going to be unbalanced disciplines.

This goes against some of the doctrines, and so I think people tend to put this argument when I make in the wrong bucket, but personally I think the question of whether we're trying to tell women what to like and how to like it is itself a feminist question. "So we should just stop trying because it's hopeless, huh?" No, I don't think that. Roll the carpet out, with all due honesty and openness, sure... but if nobody chooses to walk on it, that may very well simply be their decision (in aggregate). We have no right to run up to them and tell them they are wrong.

Might I also add that by sp332's own statistic, that the ratio has been falling since 2001, the idea that the field has been getting more misogynistic in the past 12 years is just patently absurd, and that is itself evidence that what's happening here isn't about the people.

ps4fanboy29• 13 years ago

Are you suggesting that its falling because of sexism? Do you have any evidence of this?

sp33210• 13 years ago

There's a lot of data on this page http://www.womenintechnology.org/witef/resources It's a bit scattered but here are some parts I found interesting:

Women in the mathematics, and engineering have long been underrepresented in tenured and full professor positions but overrepresented in untenured and junior faculty positions, even after controlling for publication productivity and institutional affiliation... Today, women faculty in science and engineering are still promoted more slowly and receive fewer honors and leadership positions.

77 percent say significant numbers of women and underrepresented minorities are missing from the U.S. STEM workforce today because they were not identified, encouraged or nurtured to pursue STEM studies early on.

"Persistent stereotypes that say STEM isn’t for girls or minorities" is one of the top causes of under-representation in STEM.

aroch4• 13 years ago

Are you genuinely suggesting that every degree should have a 1:1 (or thereabouts) distribution of male and female graduates?

ps4fanboy29• 13 years ago

If so a lot of women are going to be upset when they choose architecture which is 80% female in my country.

sp33210• 13 years ago

Not necessarily, although it does worry me that the ratio is declining. Specifically, computer-related fields make more than average amount of money, so getting women into tech would help reduce income inequality and associated issues in our society. But here my specific point is: tech fields would be better off with more women!

Spooky23• 13 years ago

In the US, I'd argue that the declining ratios are due to a larger proportion of foreign students (now a majority). Different cultures have much lower focus on female education.

onada2• 13 years ago

As a woman, I've been told I was bad at math and science since I was a kid. And the funny thing is, is that I'm not bad at math and science. Quite good, really. Your comment drives down to the pits of social and cultural challenges for the past few decades. Remember, women were only allowed to compete for the same jobs as men a generation ago.

nraynaud• 13 years ago

On a side note, in traditional designation of gender roles in many cultures the women handle the family money, or do the sales (for example the man does the harvest and the women does the sale at the market). Which I think could be leveraged when it's time to break the mold.

Traditional gender roles has been exploited in education in some part of the world for example. They decided to focus on little girls going to school, since they will be the ones caring for the family later in life, they will be the one spreading the knowledge to the kids, so if there is a choice is to be made, it's more efficient to send a girl than a boy to school.

Scienz2• 13 years ago

It seems doubtful that the answer to social inequalities is to make special privileges for each group to match the special privileges already enjoyed by others, as opposed to working more towards an ideal of equal treatment for everyone. I kind of cringe every time I see some study or argument saying something to the effect of, "Women are, in fact, better suited for this type of work than men are." The healthy thing to do would be to judge each individual on their own merits, regardless of what group they belong to. Women-only type things seem a bit regressive in that respect, in that they fight fire with more fire rather than fixing the underlying issue of automatic special treatment based on which group you belong to. Not that I'm actively against such programs, anymore than I would be against a bachelor's party or a girls-night-out. People have the right to organize and I know such programs were instrumental in helping to decrease the amount of sexism in society. The point is just that the more you isolate people into special groups and make them stand out, the more you encourage inequality in society as a whole. So yes I think this was a good post.

velis_vel• 13 years ago

It seems doubtful that the answer to social inequalities is to make special privileges for each group to match the special privileges already enjoyed by others, as opposed to working more towards an ideal of equal treatment for everyone.

If two people are running in a race, and one of them has been running the past 4 miles with a 50-pound weight on their back, taking the weight off isn't going to make the race fair. You've either got to give them some kind of help or put a weight on the other person's back.

mkr-hn3• 13 years ago

Most people have a weight that's not obvious to others. One person runs with their 50 pound sexist society weight. Another runs with their 50 pound tormented in school and has no one to turn to for help in moving past it weight. Another has a 50 pound echoes of institutional racism weight. I could go on, but I think you get the point.

Everyone could do with programs to help unload their weights. No one needs or deserves more weight.

Scienz2• 13 years ago

The mentality of the world as a competition between different groups of people, where either men win and women lose, or men lose and women win, doesn't seem particularly helpful either. A race implies winners and losers, so I think this is a bad analogy. An idea of "let's treat men worse for a while as revenge for years of male-dominated history" isn't very sophisticated, no particular offense intended. Also, giving special privileges to all the known groups will just disenfranchise the people not associated with any particular groups (in this case, one might consider trans people). Human equality (or even including non-human-persons equality) would seem a better ideal than just male-female equality.

If we're actually intelligent creatures, let's try and fix the underlying problems instead of just pushing them around for someone else to suffer from.

aroch4• 13 years ago

No you don't, doing so only breeds more animosity. There's a reason why men get touchy over female hires and promotions that are framed in the context of diversity and women's rights. Hiring or promoting someone primarily for being female, especially if they aren't the best candidate, is stupid.

PavlovsCat3• 13 years ago

Whoever downvoted this, I suggest they look into the criticism of "colorblindness" in regards to racism, and consider if an analogy can be made here as well.

spodek• 13 years ago

When Nixon went to China people said it took Nixon to go to China, implying only someone obviously anti-communist could go there without being labeled a communist.

Likewise, no man could say "Women in 21st century American cities are the privileged of the privileged," as the woman who wrote that article wrote, without being lambasted.

I don't know if I would say it so strongly, but the once-standard view that men succeed at women's expense seems to be crumbling as people recognize the glass cellar as powerful as the glass ceiling; that as much as men occupy the top echelons of business and politics, so do they occupy the bottom of homelessness; that as they dominate lucrative fields like engineering, so do they dominate fields that dominate workplace deaths like mining, construction, trash disposal, long-haul trucking, soldiers, etc; that as much as women have trouble entering STEM fields, so do men have trouble entering teaching, nursing, etc. Women are successful in the West -- more of them get college degrees, they live longer, no law forces them to register for the military (in the U.S. at least), the law doesn't imprison them nearly as much, the government has many programs to help them, and so on.

It seems that decades ago both men and women had to follow gender roles. Women's roles have since opened up, giving them more options. Men's roles have opened somewhat, but less so. I know a lot of fathers and I've never met one who didn't want to spend more time with his children, but they tend to have fewer options to.

Many of the initiatives the author of the article questioned could probably help more if they defined need around issues other than sex.

(EDIT: I hope people posting realize that HN weighting sinks stories with more posts than upvotes. If you want a discussion with many people participating, keep the number of posts below the number of upvotes the story gets. Otherwise it drops off the front page.)

pessimizer18• 13 years ago

Do men dominate homelessness, or do old women and single mothers with children? I'd be interested in any links you have.

also:

Women are successful in the West

In what way?

more of them get college degrees,

Oh, that actually is pretty good.

they live longer,

Didn't they always? That's just biology, isn't it?

no law forces them to register for the military (in the U.S. at least),

That's not a success of women, that's just a sexist (and common) law. Saudi women aren't drafted either.

the law doesn't imprison them nearly as much,

Because they don't commit nearly as much crime? I don't understand this at all.

the government has many programs to help them,

Yup. More would be even better.

and so on.

So more than college, then?

vezzy-fnord4• 13 years ago

That's not a success of women, that's just a sexist (and common) law.

Yet when was the last time you saw feminist and women's organizations actively campaigning for more females to register in the military and fight in the battlefield? Practically never, from my experience. Last time I saw it mentioned was an activist who was insisting on diluting military training to make it more accessible to women, which... is not a solution, I hope you realize that.

But for the most part, it's never discussed. After all, war is hell. If women are not encouraged to go out and die, that's a big advantage, even if a technically sexist one. It's an example of sexism that is actually beneficial to the group that experiences it. Why would they want to fix it?

Because they don't commit nearly as much crime? I don't understand this at all.

That or they get more lenient sentencing: https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ap:10:0::NO:10:P10_ETD_SUBID:49114

Also: "Interestingly, among women, white female defendants receive more severe sentence outcomes than black females."

Yup. More would be even better.

I guess they would if you value short-term hacks that give specific advantages to a group over actual long-term solutions.

trentmb• 13 years ago

Regarding homelessness: http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/who.html

GENDER

Most studies show that single homeless adults are more likely to be male than female. In 2007, a survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that of the population surveyed 35% of the homeless people who are members of households with children are male while 65% of these people are females. However, 67.5% of the single homeless population is male, and it is this single population that makes up 76% of the homeless populations surveyed (U.S. Conference of Mayors, 2007).

EDIT: Another: http://www.societyhealth.vcu.edu/Page.aspx?nav=29&scope=0&so...

Most homeless adults are men, but most homeless adults with children are women.

4bpp• 13 years ago

don't commit nearly as much crime

I remember previously stumbling upon http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmhansrd/c... - while I don't know to what extent the situation is similar in the US and haven't cross-checked the statistics, the data the speaker quotes seems to suggest that there is a significant disparity even if you control for that. (The relevant figures are all on the first two pages or so; beyond that, there isn't much to see apart from polemical banter)

danso• 13 years ago

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s true for everywhere else now, too. Are there sexist and biased individuals out there? Of course. Are there systems still in place from a sexist past that need to be revamped? Sure, and the flood of educated, successful women will eventually take care of that.

I can't speak for the women groups, but I think the last sentence in the above statement has not, to their opinion, borne itself out. Thus, the need for groups that specifically advocate for them.

I'll say this as a member of an "empowered" minority group... I'm Asian, I've grown up in nearly-all-white communities in the Midwest, my family was technically low-income but otherwise, I never felt disenfranchised. And I did follow in the "model minority" path of working hard and doing well for myself, and Asians, overall, perform highly on tests of academic measure and personal wealth in America.

But let's ignore the thing of not all Asian immigrants being on equal footing (that is Chinese/Korean/Japanese is not the same as, say, Cambodian)...Asians, despite their empowerment, get roundly screwed in media portrayal and perception. In news coverage and in popular media. The only reason why I watch WAlking Dead from time to time is because it is so utterly astonishing to me to see a popular lead Asian character who is not at all exotic, not valued for his math skills, and doesn't appear to know martial arts. (there's also BD Wong in Law and Order SVU, but he's not as much in the spotlight as Steven Yeun's character).

A friend of my works in an Asian American advocacy group...we both ponder on how Asians are indeed a privileged group, yet at the same time, because collectively we do so little to be the greasy wheel, there are ways we get stepped on. But because the meritocracy seems to be working for us (as a group), there seems to be little desire to get involved in advocacy.

ps4fanboy29• 13 years ago

No one will be happy until we have full blown socialism where everyone is assigned a career at birth that maintains a neat ratio for every industry by race/sex.

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

This is so stupid on so many levels, its actually a work of genius.

Im impressed.

ps4fanboy29• 13 years ago

How eloquent and insightful

gress2• 13 years ago

I think it was a decent piece of glib satire.

hbags• 13 years ago

There's an over proliferation of all conferences, and this includes niche conferences.

The answer to her headline question appears to deviate from Betteridge's law, in that she concludes that some of the initiatives help women.

pessimizer18• 13 years ago

There's no connection between the headline and the article, which not only doesn't examine the results of any women-only initiatives, but only mentions a single example (that it seems to approve of.)

But there’s something wrong when we treat half the population like a minority or special interest group.

There's also something wrong when we treat half the population like baby breeding kitchen help, too. We remediate the damage done by open sexism through targeted help. When it comes to management, ownership, and government, women are not only a minority, they are an extreme minority.

Women don’t need all the help we can get because we’re women.

No, that's why a sexist would help women. Women need all the help that they can get because men run everything and often don't really think of women as completely human. Women need help because they are constantly under attack. Women sometimes need help because they are generally smaller and lack upper body strength. If you can get by without it, feel free.

There's a temptation as a member of a discriminated against group who has found some success amongst the dominant group to use their own success and the success of their friends to argue that merit will always rise to the top. Don't do this, because you will be paraded as evidence that discrimination is over, and it's alright to withdraw from the ghettos and set them on fire.

If a few millionaires are enough to say that discrimination doesn't matter anymore, racism against blacks must have ended before slavery.

ppprop4• 13 years ago

"Women need all the help that they can get because men run everything and often don't really think of women as completely human. Women need help because they are constantly under attack."

Not sure if this is troll bait, but... are you serious? Do you have anything at all to back this up?

athesyn2• 13 years ago

Maybe he doesn't live in a modern liberal society. I doubt it though.

pessimizer18• 13 years ago

1. Men run everything.

2. Men often don't think of women as human.

3. Women are under attack by men.

I don't think these points are controversial.

1. Women are 50% of the workforce, but 4.5% of fortune 1000 CEO positions.

2. Women didn't get the right to vote in America until 50 years after black people, who were officially only partially human.

3. Is a characterization.

PavlovsCat3• 13 years ago

As a guy, I wonder how one can miss this. I certainly had and have my fair share of WTF moments... at some point I even vowed to make a documentary with a hidden cam about the shit some men say about women behind their back, who act completely different to their faces, but I never got around to it. And frankly, I think some women don't really want to know. Stockholm syndrome comes to mind. So my heart jumps for joy about the strong women who do point (and cuss) this stuff out. I wouldn't know how to prove it to anyone else, but maybe they can prove the opposite to me... ?

gdwatson• 13 years ago

"There's also something wrong when we treat half the population like baby breeding kitchen help, too."

Is that really your view of stay-at-home mothers?

stefantalpalaru• 13 years ago

Bravo! It takes courage to suggest there's something wrong with compensatory sexism.

undoware• 13 years ago

Another oft-overlooked problem with women-only spaces is that they tend to put enormous pressure on the litmus, namely, "is so-and-so a woman?" This tends to screw over people like me (trans).

Now, I know that's not front page news -- there are how many of us? -- but if you care about things like wheelchair ramps and braille, you care about how structural decisions affect the ability of minorities to access a space.

In this case, the minority is being kept out by a conceptual barrier rather than (say) a pre-war flight of stairs, but it still really really sucks to be that minority.

Just another consideration. I'm actually undecided if inclusive, well-managed women-only (or _-only, where _ is a minority of your choosing) spaces are the best approach to the (serious) problem, but I know that some people benefit greatly from such spaces. So it's a question for sociology, really, not hand-waving debate (is there a way of preserving the benefits of these spaces while being more inclusive? what are the supposed benefits? How significant? For whom?)

daleharvey• 13 years ago

The main quote that sticks out for me is 'Sure, and the flood of educated, successful women will eventually take care of that.'

The plural of anecdote isnt data, because some people have managed to find success doesnt change the fact that women are leaving this fairly hostile field in droves.

quinnchr6• 13 years ago

The goal of women oriented initiatives isn't to tell women they aren't as capable. The author may be perfectly capable and she may be treated on her merit alone, but in aggregate women are not treated like that.

From http://www.oecd.org/inclusive-growth/Closing%20the%20Gender%...

"They reveal considerable gender differences among the self-employed, particularly those who are also employers. Figure 22.1 shows that across the 27 EU countries only 25% of business owners with employees are women (for definitions, see Annex IV.A1). The low share of women has only marginally grown over the last decade in the EU27, Canada and United States"

Let's not kid ourselves. Women face serious hurdles in entrepreneurship. They have less access to credit when starting new businesses for one. Women who own businesses are on average higher educated than there male counterparts yet they earn significantly lower salaries.

I will end by pointing out that women focused initiatives help everyone, not just women. There is a positive correlation between gender equality and GDP per capita, everyone wins in an equitable society.

ps4fanboy29• 13 years ago

Women who own businesses are on average higher educated than there male counterparts yet they earn significantly lower salaries.

I remember reading this I wish I had the link but it showed female business owners tended to take more time off than male counterparts and had a nicer work/life balance over money/growth/profit.

Are you suggesting that consumers are buying/consuming products/services from female run businesses?

quinnchr6• 13 years ago

No, I'm not hypothesizing a reason for this. I'm simply describing the end effect, which is women being paid less.

When you control for working hours women entrepreneurs still earn less.

growupkids7• 13 years ago

The gender pay gap appears to be a myth:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/05/the-bigg...

quinnchr6• 13 years ago

Except the report I linked provides data and statistics that show women entrepreneurs earn less than their male counterparts across OECD countries, which is specifically what I was talking about.

ps4fanboy29• 13 years ago

In 2010-11, there were more female (55%) than male fulltime undergraduates (45%) enrolled at university – a trend which shows no sign of shrinking

http://www.theguardian.com/education/datablog/2013/jan/29/ho...

This sort of thing is happening in most western societies, majority of university students are women, but what we are most concerned about is which degrees they are choosing.

quinnchr6• 13 years ago

And by far the majority of PHDs and professors are men. Even in women dominated fields the the professorships are dominated by men.

What exactly is your point?

ps4fanboy29• 13 years ago

What do professors have to do with the work force?

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

Why does no one care how many men are in hairdressing, finger nail painting, child care, teaching and so on?

gammarator2• 13 years ago

Because those are low paid, low-status jobs?

Or to flip the question, if they were highly paid, what would stop men from taking them?

claudius• 13 years ago

People not wanting men to change their kids’ diapers for one.

ninkendo• 13 years ago

Because they aren't considered to be as desirable of jobs? Same reason women aren't generally complaining that they're not as well represented in coal mining, oil rigs, construction, etc.

With the exception of teaching in your examples, nobody really cares that there exist jobs that tend to attract one gender over another. What matters is if the better jobs only attract one gender.

csixty4• 13 years ago

There was a big push to get more men in nursing a decade ago. Hospitals offered big hiring bonuses and 100% tuition reimbursement after a couple years' employment. There were billboards on the side of the expressway talking about how it wasn't just a woman's job.

I don't know how successful it was, but I would have jumped on it if I wasn't close to finishing a CS degree already.

nicktipp2• 13 years ago

And just like that this post went from #3 to off the front page in 5 minutes. Is sexism to controversial of a subject to discuss so it's just going to be ignored?

ps4fanboy29• 13 years ago

I think people are just sick of the debate where no actual evidence of sexism is being produced. But most probably this was down flagged because it doesn't fit the narrative of social just warriors on HN. The author is saying that women programs are bad.

smtddr• 13 years ago

Aaaaaaaaand... GONE![1]. Took about, hmm, 37mins. Perhaps HN's and/or tech community isn't the open-minded, diversity-welcoming group we all think we are...

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7006583

ps4fanboy29• 13 years ago

Did you read the article? If anything this is getting buried because its goes against what people are saying and its written by a female so it cant be immediately be dismissed. So next best is censorship.

vezzy-fnord4• 13 years ago

Either that or you have no idea how HN's ranking system works. If the proportion of comments exceeds that of upvotes, the story sinks.

I hate how in every social justice discussion, there's always people who rant about this and think it's some patriarchal conspiracy.

Perhaps the social justice warriors aren't the technologically literate, competent group they all think they are?

Sorry for the blatantly provocative statements, but this is a tired trope here by now.

nicktipp2• 13 years ago

I just don't understand why this post and discussion is being censored? Any one know why it just went from #3 to off the front page in under 5 minutes?

ps4fanboy29• 13 years ago

It doesnt fit with the social justice warrior narrative.

xdd• 13 years ago

The reason why this became a topic is only because technology, soft/hardware developer really make a lot of money right now.

I remember reading this in HN:" How to detect female-ism? Don't just focus on the fancy job like CEOs, Founders who made million of dollars, you also need to look at mine workers, bus drivers these dangerous jobs." ask yourself why female-ism not talk about women need to work at those fields too?

Then, if you read "revenge of the nerd" by paul graham, you will understand more.

onada2• 13 years ago

Feminism is not meant to only help women, at least in the last few renditions of it. It's meant to seek justice for all persons. It's a rather complicated political-social phenomenon that has seen many renditions, so I wouldn't try to simplify it further.

Anyways, I doubt women-only-initiatives only help women in the great scheme of things, as that's not how things/communities/humans work. Women-only groups and incubators are wonderful, and of course they would support the world beyond because they exist in the same world.

Do Women Only Initiatives Really Help Women?

Related Stories