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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

I'm still not convinced that the lack of women in tech is due to sexism. Maybe women just aren't as excited by the field as men? Nobody seems to question that this is the reason why there are so few male preschool teachers.

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There a few male preschool teachers because of the threat of accusations and prejudice. I work in schools, you're told not to be alone with children. You can work 10 or 20 years to get into your stride teaching in lower school and it can be all undone in one bad press piece. It's a massive problem.

^this; after a large child abuse scandal in an Amsterdam day care, male day care employees were scorned, distrusted, frowned upon, etc, and a lot of them either lost of quit their jobs. The sexism is real, and that industry doesn't get as much pressure to increase diversity either - mostly because their customers (i.e. parents) pressure the day cares into discriminating based on gender, either directly or indirectly by taking their children elsewhere.

That just doesn't happen in IT. Nobody cares by who software was written, as long as it does the job right - as it should be. Real tolerance is not worrying about the demographics of people in a certain industry.

I agree that the paranoia of adult males being around children is ridiculous, but are there really that many men out there who totally wanted to be preschool teachers but decided not to for that reason?

There are so few male preschool teachers because our society is very sexist against men when it comes to interacting with kids. This is societal and not innate because in many other countries male teachers are the norm.

Are we really sexist against male teachers? I don't buy it. There are male teachers everywhere at all levels in Chicago, and male teachers are routinely represented in the media, usually positively.

Much like the existence of female engineers does not prove that the industry does not discriminate against women...

It looks like there are twice as many male teachers as there are female engineers.

If I'm searching the BLS site correctly, nation wide 57% of secondary, 80% of primary, and 97% of preschool/kindergarten school teachers are women.

[Edit: For comparison it shows 21% of computer programmers as women.]

In these 'many other countries' are women as high of a percentage of the workforce as in the US? I personally believe that more women are teachers in the US because it is an occupation that is more open to them than many. Men simply have more options.

There is an excellent Norwegian documentary, Hjernevask, that explores this question and many others like it. The premise is set up in the first couple minutes of the first episode: why is it that in one of the most gender equal countries in the world that women and men still flocked to traditional jobs? It had such an impact that the government decided to shut down their Gender Studies Institute.

But you won't see these kinds of things discussed on HN. I'll be surprised if I don't get any ad hominems lazily labeling me as a redpiller.

Thank you for this - a fascinating documentary and I am planning on watching the rest in the series.

(http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xp0tg8_hjernevask-brainwash...)

The above link is from Wikipedia and is a English subtitle - the comedian / host wants to know why in Norway there are clear gender divides - 10% women in a construction firm, no men in a hospital maternity ward. He approaches Norwegian researchers who basically say there is no biological difference, but it's cultural (boys clothes in blue etc). He then points at a road sign with a male worker digging.

Then we fly to USA and England, visiting researchers in biological basis of gender difference. And hey presto there are some. He amusingly shows English researchers video of Norwegians and vice versa, running his own academic face-off.

In the end the Norwegians Coke off worse, being dogmatic about there being no biological basis instead of some mixed approach.

Well worth a look.

Does it matter? Is there some (testosterone related) difference in empathy that means jobs with more human to human basis (nursing, pre-school teaching) attract women / reject men and vice versa for construction / IT?

Well, yes.

Does this mean that you and I and every hiring manager and departmental culture is perfect, balanced, diversity friendly,. No of course not.

The biological basis for our geneder differences is valid and (not being an expert) probably unassailable. However if there is some scientifically determined geneder ratio for each industry (or even individual job!) is the firm you work in showing that ratio - or is it biased towards some other ratio?

That's my point - no matter if biology says 50/50 or 80/20 , I refuse to believe every tech firm out there is perfectly gender balanced and has nothing to learn.

Oddly enough, one thing that shines through is that in "poorer countries" (India, Eastern Europe) gender preferences are over-ridden by the simple desire to get lucrative jobs. And anecdotally, there are more non- western women in my Fortune 500 workplace than western.

And this leaves the last question - what should be the ratio of men/women in software? 10% like construction firms? 50/50 like medicine?

I doubt this is a simple or solvable question - but Inwoukd always suggest that if you think you are doing it all right and have nothing to learn - you are wrong.

I like how the documentary investigated studies on nature vs. nurture. One thing I do admit is that it's very difficult to measure how much of it is genetics alone, since we can't raise kids in a lab isolated from the outside world to ensure 100% that there is no outside cultural or parental influence that may skew the results. That steps on some ethical toes as well. While it's gotten much better, there is still a great deal of culture, advertising, parenting, etc that can subconsciously influence gender roles. Although it looks as though you can only influence people so much, at innate genetic/biologic nature seems to want to resist.

I don't think there's an answer to it either, but to me it looks like while biology and genetics do have some sway, so does environment and culture- enough where the current gender percentages probably shouldn't be quite so divergent. We're still a society in transition, and it wasn't very long ago where women weren't allowed to have career opportunities at all, it will be interesting to see how the numbers change in another generation or two.

I, too, must also thank you for that link. That is a very interesting documentary, I watched all 7 episodes. I do have to say that while it brings up a lot of good points, research and the validity of it is very difficult to verify at times. I was disappointed in some of the closed-mindedness that some of the "experts" seemed to have, although they may have been correct about some of the research being on shaky ground in terms of proof. A lot of research offers up correlations and anecdotal observations, but no actual scientific proof. However if you find a lot of anecdotal correlations pointing in the same direction it's begs for scientific study to see if there is proof or mere coincidence. Sadly many of those scientists didn't seem the least bit curious to find out if there was any scientific cause behind anecdotal evidence, especially if it conflicted with their political views. That was so disappointing! I would have expected a much different attitude from scientists and experts. But if political opinion is what funds research and determines which scientists get promoted, I suppose I shouldn't be quite so shocked. I do wish they looked into why non-western females had a higher rate of interest in STEM, they seemed to gloss over it and attributed it to "It motivates them because it's more lucrative", I don't buy that and I wish they investigated it more.

That is on possibility. However there is strong evidence that people judge the same work worse when it comes from a woman. Here's[1] a study where identical resumes were sent to science labs applying for a sciency job. The women were rated less suitable.

And yes, people do look into why there are fewer male preschool teachers[2], and blame sexism.

Some people want to believe that the world is 6,000 years old, or that Big Phrama wants to hide the fact that vaccinations cause autism, or that tech is a meritocracy where code and only code is valued. But sometimes the evidence doesn't support that.

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract#aff-1 [2] http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/05/09/30maleteacher_e...

There is even stronger evidence that there is a 2:1 hiring advantage for women in STEM fields[1]. That study first looked at real-world hiring rates, which showed this 2:1 advantage and then tried to see whether the advantage was due to the women applicants being generally more qualified (which would obviously explain the empirical finding). The study went on to show that superior qualifications were unlikely to be the cause for the real-world hiring advantages.

Note also that the departments selected in the study you cite were Psychology, Biology, Chemistry and Physics, not tech (Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Engineering in general). In Biology women are the majority, in Chemistry the ratio is close to 50/50. Physics is close to Tech at around 20-25% and in Psychology women are the vast majority of students and practitioners at around 75%.

Therefore, this study shows, if anything, that there is no link (causal or otherwise) between the discrimination it purported to find and participation rates.

Also note that the study you cite looks at sending the exact same resume and changing the name. Another study (that I can't find right now) showed that if the qualifications are noticeably different, gender and other factors play no role. People are competent at spotting differences in qualification and will select on merit if possible. So whatever discrimination there may be (in whichever direction) apparently only plays a factor if the resumes are carefully calibrated to be the same, an unlikely scenario in real hiring situations.

Another issue I had with the study you cite is that they write that the resumes were identical apart from the name, so not real-world resumes. I could imagine that male and female resumes are different in practice, and a female name on a "male-style" resume would look odd, as would a male name on a "female-style" resume.

Some people want to believe that tech and STEM are this maelstrom of sexism, but the evidence doesn't support that...

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract

If that is the study I remember, I don't think it shows women are deemed less capable. It might as well be possible that women are deemed less likely to follow through with their studies (for example because they might drop out to have kids), making them a worse investment.

That's of course still a problem, but a different one than you make it to be.

I think if there is an actual issue like that (if women are a less promising investment), rather than crying "sexism", society should compensate for it somehow. Why should it be the burden of employers to insure against women's life choices?

> Nobody seems to question

Yes they do - there are programmes to get more men teaching, especially to younger children.

This is mentioned in every single thread about women in tech on HN, btw.

It's also asked how prevalent those programs are compared to IT. "Women in Tech" is now a common phrase in IT, is "Men in Education" as well?

According to Google, "men in education" is the more common of the two phrases, for whatever that's worth:

"men in education" = 2,070,000

"women in tech" = 528,000

However,

"men in education" = 2,070,000

"women in technology" = 9,200,000

"women in technology" = 9,310,000

The problem is that they're never mentioned by anyone else, e.g. by mainstream media.

As others have noted, lots of people question why there are so few male preschool teachers. Additionally, the fact is that there once were more women in tech than there are now. The book The Computer Boys Take Over and others have shown that early programmers were women and over time the concept of a programmer changed to our more modern conception.

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