Comment by red_blobs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by red_blobs | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

If we care so much about the STEM gender gap, why not other majors as well?

http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor...

1) Health Professions (85% women): nursing assistant, veterinary assistant, dental assistant, etc.

2) Public Administration (82% women): social work, public policy, etc.

3) Education (79% women): pre-K, K-12, higher education, etc.

4) Psychology (77% women): cognitive psychology, clinical psychology, etc.

5) a majority of Biology degrees in 2012 (58%) were earned by women

These majors are dominated by women, many paying more than some of the other STEM majors. So why aren't we changing these as well to be more accommodating towards men?

More women than men graduate from college on average:

http://fortune.com/2013/03/27/boys-vs-girls-whats-behind-the...

Shouldn't we be figuring how how to change this to make it more equal?

My problem with all of these articles and the entire movement is that the goal isn't to make things equal, it's a power-grab to allow one group to completely dominate the other.

I'm waiting for someone to suggest we either get rid of Calculus as a requirement altogether or reduce it's difficulty to make it more 'fair'. This is exactly what has started happening in our military.

This is not uncommon in other aspects of the society as well. Harvard is facing a lawsuit that the school’s admissions policy discriminates against Asian Americans.

"the suit notes the findings of a study of seven top public and private colleges: “Asian Americans needed SAT scores that were about 140 points higher than white students. . . . [I]f a white student needed a 1320 SAT score to be admitted to one of these schools, an Asian American needed a 1460 SAT score to be admitted.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-misleading-lawsu...

We don't care much about it because it's not politically incorrect for men to acknowledge that they're just not as into these things as women.

I think there are two related problems with your argument. The first is that everybody has to major in something, so a preponderance of men in one group of majors has to be balanced by a preponderance of women in another group. The statistics are two sides of the same coin.

Second, an unspoken perception is that there is a hierarchy of majors with STEM at one end, and well, something else at the other end. Some majors have weeder courses, others don't. Some majors have GPA requirements for entry, others don't. Nobody drops out of <low tier major> because it's too hard, and majors in chemical engineering instead.

I saw this weeding happen when I taught a freshman algebra course at a big ten university. There were kids who, thanks to their performance in my course, weeded themselves out of their chosen majors. Not every student is in their first choice of major, for a variety of reasons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com