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Comment by rewqfdsa | Hacker News Reader

> against its wishes

That's the bone of contention here. Nobody is keeping women out of computer science; they're largely just preferring not to enter the field. The point of the article, echoed by many commentators over the past few years, is that it's a "problem" that women are largely staying out of computer science.

If you believe in the blank slate theory of human nature, of course it's a problem, because under this worldview, women's default preferences are the same as that of men, so some external factor must be pushing them away from computer science. The teach for this factor has become increasingly desperate the past few years: now we're down to Star Wars posters.

I believe it's more parsimonious to reject the blank slate theory and understand the world through the lens of innate differences in life preferences between genders, and that it's this innate difference that leads to different gender balances in various fields.

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> Nobody is keeping women out of computer science; they're largely just preferring not to enter the field.

Ted is the new kid at school, and he wants to make friends. At recess he approaches a group of smiling, laughing boys to introduce himself. But as he nears the group they get quiet. Ted says hi and his name, and mentions he's new and wants to know if they play "tag" here. The boys reply, "we don't play tag, we play Weasel Escape." Ted asks how to play, and they say "How do you not know how to play? You needlefish. Needlefish!" The other boys laugh, but Ted doesn't get the joke. They walk away and Ted feels embarrassed. Over the next few days he continues trying to befriend the group of boys but they have so many inside jokes! There's one nice kid in the group that explains the jokes to Ted, but most of the time one of the other boys loudly interrupts and teases Ted for not knowing, and nobody really enjoys standing around explaining things because standing around means not playing. Ted eventually decides that the boys he's been trying to befriend aren't very nice, and that even though he enjoys playing weasel escape now that he figured out the rules, it's less degrading to spend his recess in the library playing Magic cards with the weird kids. They actually seemed excited to explain their inside jokes and how the game works.

Nobody is keeping Ted out of that group of friends. He just largely prefers not to join them. But of course, why he prefers not to join them changes the story.

If I understand your parable correctly, you're suggesting that men deliberately mock and reject women trying to enter the field. In my experience, nothing could be further from the truth. I have never, not once, witnessed the behavior you describe. I've seen nothing but welcoming behavior toward everyone who wants to learn software.

Even among proponents of the systemic discrimination theory, the consensus these days seems to be that bias must be subconscious, since overt bias is practically extinct in the wild.

I suspect a more realistic scenario is that it's the other girls who do the mocking and rejecting as a reaction to one person's interest in computer science.. that's the thing.

the question then becomes.. why does the little girl care what the other little girls think ? Why isn't she more than happy hanging out with the more open and accepting group of computer cherishing boys ?

I assume it has to do with social norms, early childhood developmental experiences, not wanting to break certain social guidelines passed down through family values, the anticipation of "dating"..

What???

My childhood best friend and college roommate shocked me by calling one of our CS classmates a "huge bitch" for not going on a date with him after they had lunch together our first week of college.

I've lost track of how many sexist lines I've heard, like:

"make me a sammich bitch, haha",

"don't be an emo bitch about it, haha",

"if we don't let people freely express themselves on the CS listserv, then this is a tyrannical school that has been ruined by feminists (this one after of course, a guy posted a several page rant about why women are bitches, 'haha')".

Also, let me tell you this story of two friends I knew who applied at a certain internet start-up on Market Street in San Francisco in 2014:

A was male, 21 years old, a stoner and business school drop-out with a portfolio consisting of a Java tower defense game.

B was female, 30 years old, with several years experience doing QA on computer peripheral drivers who had re-trained herself as a web developer and had a Rails StackOverflow clone and a Meteor KhanAcademy clone for her portfolio.

A got offered a six-figure full time position.

B got offered an internship.

Final point, I've seen so much elitist and arrogant behavior from MEN directed towards OTHER MEN. Nothing could be further from the truth than software being completely welcoming. Of course it's still a very good industry overall; it's by no means the worst.

> bitch

Unfortunately, that's how college kids talk. I wish they wouldn't be so crude, but the language isn't CS-specific. That women in general are doing so well in college in general relative to men suggests crude language on the part of college men is not a serious problem. In the professional world, that kind of denigration would be completely unacceptable.

> Also, let me tell you this story of two friends I knew who applied at a certain internet start-up on Market Street in San Francisco in 2014

I don't think it's reasonable to generalize from this anecdote. Maybe he aced his interviews and she flubbed them.

> that's how college kids talk

That wasn't my experience at all. That kind of attitude or language would have been taboo.

Would have been but no longer is. Unfortunately, it is really the standard language of today's youth.

> "emo bitch"

"that guy was kind of a dick" is an offhand comment that just means "rude" or "jerk" and you hear it all the time from college age women when referencing the slightest deviations from their standards of behavior. It refers to the male genitalia in a negative connotation and is terefor far more explicit than the dog word.

It sounds like you're trolling, but if you aren't:

1. One wrong does not make another wrong right.

2. "Dick" is used as an offhand comment usually because it is considered less offensive than other words with the same meaning, like "asshole" or "piece of shit".

3. I agree that women treat men badly as well. People suck.

4. Imagine your daughter or mother being called an "emo bitch" because they reacted angrily to an insult. Would you tell her "well at least they didn't explicitly insult your genitalia?"

> One wrong does not make another wrong right.

True but the two neutralize each other when thinking in terms of a running tally of gender-specific offensive terminology.

> used as an offhand comment usually because it is considered less offensive than other words with the same meaning

the fact that it's considered less offensive simply illustrates a bias towards the acceptance of gender-specific negative remarks or "putdowns" when they're directed away from the feminine and towards the masculine. This goes to my point that actually women do throw a lot of these remarks around but we've just learned to tune them out. If a man makes a 'putdown' remark towards a young lady in class which references the female reproductive anatomy then he's on shaky ground and theoretically could have to worry about a lawsuit, but not the other way around.

> 4. Imagine your daughter or mother being called an "emo bitch" because they reacted angrily to an insult. Would you tell her "well at least they didn't explicitly insult your genitalia?"

I don't know a ton about the word "emo" but I assume it means "overly emotional" and the word "bitch" is a gender-specific word which insinuates that she's not attractive. While I'm sure we both agree that such a rude and insulting phrase is a terrible thing to say to anyone it's still only aimed at the individual.

On the other hand when you use a phallus reference as an implied negative connotation then you've just made a sexist remark because it denigrates an entire gender.

If I had to choose one or the other I'd rather my mother or daughter be exposed to rudeness or insult before obvious yet normalized sexist remarks.

> A was male, 21 years old, a stoner and business school drop-out with a portfolio consisting of a Java tower defense game.

> B was female, 30 years old, with several years experience doing QA on computer peripheral drivers who had re-trained herself as a web developer and had a Rails StackOverflow clone and a Meteor KhanAcademy clone for her portfolio.

> A got offered a six-figure full time position.

> B got offered an internship.

Yeah, sorry but that is a lie

I wish it was a lie, but it is not.

Anyway, the story ends well. B is a front-end engineer at Google now, A didn't take the offer and went to a different start-up.

I've been that Ted, and honestly, I'm happy in how this turned out. The "group of friends" were jerks and I would be worse off if I got accepted by them.

Also, the example is interesting in this context because it's usually Teds who become programmers. Or at least it used to be back when programming wasn't a popular career choice but something you did because you were into technology and building things.

That's clearly bullying. The article describes things that I would have thought are really benign:

Over and over, Dr. Cheryan and her colleagues have found that female students are more interested in enrolling in a computer class if they are shown a classroom (whether virtual or real) decorated not with “Star Wars” posters, science-fiction books, computer parts and tech magazines, but with a more neutral décor — art and nature posters, coffee makers, plants and general-interest magazines.

The researchers also found that cultural stereotypes about computer scientists strongly influenced young women’s desire to take classes in the field. At a young age, girls already hold stereotypes of computer scientists as socially isolated young men whose genius is the result of genetics rather than hard work. Given that many girls are indoctrinated to believe that they should be feminine and modest about their abilities, as well as brought up to assume that girls are not innately gifted at science or math, it is not surprising that so few can see themselves as successful computer scientists.

In another experiment, Dr. Cheryan and her colleagues arranged for female undergraduates to talk to an actor pretending to be a computer science major. If the actor wore a T-shirt that said “I CODE THEREFORE I AM” and claimed to enjoy video games, the students expressed less interest in studying computer science than if the actor wore a solid shirt and claimed to enjoy hanging out with friends — even if the T-shirt-clad actor was another woman.

Such superficial stereotypes might seem laughably outdated. And yet, studies show that the public’s image of a scientist hasn’t changed since the 1950s. And such stereotypes do have a basis in reality. Who could fail to notice that only one of the eight people awarded Nobel Prizes in science or medicine last week was a woman?

If this is accurate, then the idea that women simply like other things, like rewqfdsa proposes should get more merit.

If that turns out to be the core of the problem, then there may be nothing for people in STEM to do. Because we could be the most welcoming and inclusive bunch but the majority of us are going to turn women off by decorating our walls with Star Wars/Trek posters, reading sci-fi, wearing nerdy T-Shirts and playing video games.

My point is not that women might like different things, just as Ted still enjoyed playing Weasel Escape, but that because of the T-shirts and all that they feel unwelcome. It's like the inside jokes making Ted feel left out. Sure they could explain the jokes and culture, and sure, there are probably lots of nice people in software willing to explain the culture, but it's tiring to feel like you're on the outside culturally even if the actual job (coding) is unrelated to the extraneous culture.

That's not what the article said though. The women in the studies mentioned were turned off STEM by classroom decor, and by both men and women wearing nerdy t-shirts who mentioned the like to play video games.

Sounds like they are judging us!

We need to be clear about what's happening here. Otherwise we'll spend millions of dollars trying to 'fix' things and it turns out what should have happened, is that we need to stop watching Star Wars and stop wearing XKCD t-shirts.

Thanks for this... It appears that a lot of folks here fail to recognize that they are part of an in-group in the context of tech.

In any other circumstances, this kind of social discouragement would be looked at as a discrimination/exclusion issue. Instead, the prevailing argument seems to be that "they're just different".

Premise 1: There are some innate differences that obtain between people of different sexes.

Conclusion: The gender disparity in computer science is the result of innate differences between the sexes.

Seems legit...

You misunderstand. I'm not making a statement on the cause of the gender disparity in computer science. I'm making a higher-order argument about why we're so apt to attribute this difference to discrimination. I hope you understand the distinction even if you disagree with my argument.

The idea is that if you believe that humans have no innate differences and you observe group differences, then you must attribute these group differences to external discrimination, and hence injustice.

If you accept that groups of humans might have innate differences, you are no longer required to attribute group differences to discrimination. Some group differences might arise from discrimination, but it's plausible that they might not.

A lot of people take it as an article of faith that there are no human group differences, so they're forced to look for discrimination in order to explain the world. For these people, no amount of evidence can prove the fairness of the CS world, since the idea that (gender disparity -> discrimination) is a necessary logical consequence of their worldview.

Indeed. You can show by simple calculations that slight innate differences giving slightly different preferences lead to significant differences in recruitment if you select entirely fair and purely by merit. In fact, restoring the 50/50 split requires significant amount of discrimination to counter the natural disproportions.

We do that in CS because it's a hot sexy field with shittons of money, so everyone wants in (also makes this field sucks more, it was better when people actually cared about doing great work instead of earning a lot, but I digress). Nobody cares that there is serious (intentional) gender imbalance among e.g. shop clerks or bank tellers. Those are not sexy jobs.

> Nobody cares that there is serious (intentional) gender imbalance among e.g. shop clerks or bank tellers. Those are not sexy jobs.

On the contrary, most of those who are interested in addressing gender imbalances in fields like computer science are simultaneously interested in addressing the gender imbalances in "unsexy" jobs, since these are just two sides of the same coin. Since higher paying jobs in fields like computer science tend to be had by men, the individuals who tend to hold the "unsexy" low-wage jobs tend to be women. The fact that people don't explicitly name the unsexy occupations does not entail that nobody cares about their gender imbalances.

The reason that high-wage positions are usually the positions of focus may simply be a product of our tendency to be more interested in leveling up rather than down when it comes to addressing distributive injustices.

> On the contrary, most of those who are interested in addressing gender imbalances in fields like computer science are simultaneously interested in addressing the gender imbalances in "unsexy" jobs, since these are just two sides of the same coin.

That's another claim that, if true, would be pretty, but happens to be false. (Just like "men are mean to women in technology and so keep them out of the field.") It's just another bromide to smooth over unpleasant reality.

A Google News search for "women in technology" yields 61 million results. A Google News search for yields 1.5 million. There's nowhere near as much attention to getting men into traditionally women's roles as there is increasing the number of women in technology.

>A lot of people take it as an article of faith that there are no human group differences, so they're forced to look for discrimination in order to explain the world. For these people, no amount of evidence can prove the fairness of the CS world, since the idea that (gender disparity -> discrimination) is a necessary logical consequence of their worldview.

I think that you would be hard pressed to find people who actually believe that. Most who point out problems with the CS environment probably feel no need to have any sort of robust view of innate differences between groups, and many are likely to be open to the possibility that some of the gender gap can be explained by such differences.

Note that much of the discussion of this issue has focused upon ways in which the CS culture is one which is overtly and unnecessarily hostile to women. It's not just that men vastly outnumber women in the field, it's that those men frequently engage in behaviors that are hostile, threatening, and demeaning to women. It is not implausible that these behaviors play a significant role in determining the gender imbalance in CS.

> CS culture is one which is overtly and unnecessarily hostile to women...men frequently engage in behaviors that are hostile, threatening, and demeaning to women

Many people repeat this claim, but I don't think it's true.

Conclusion: The gender disparity in computer science could be the result of innate differences between the sexes.

Innate differences between genders may play a part, but the idea that "women tend to be less interested" is not the only possible innate difference. What's to say the innate difference in play here isn't "men tend to be more hostile to women joining their space"?

That's different. Yours is a bias that necessarily influences other people.

But you are right; other innate biases are possible. Men could be better at logical/mathematical reasoning, which is necessary for technical skills. A difference in interest though is the most popular proposal.

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