Comment by gnarbarian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnarbarian | Hacker News Reader

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That's one explanation that fits a narrative. (and ignores the fact there are far fewer women who even attempt to enter the tech industry).

The gender gap in tech starts with children, is seen in STEM enrollment rates and continues in the job market where a multitude of diversity initiatives exist to promote underrepresented groups in tech.

So, an alternative speculation for the abnormally high promotion rate for women is there are fewer women interested in IT in the first place and companies are scrambling to compete for women because it makes them look better (via diversity initiatives).

There is a great documentary examining actual science on the subject and interviewing both scientific researchers and social scientists on opposite sides of the issue:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70

Should we attempt to combat the gender gap in the nursing industry with the same vigor that we are focused on tech? How about the gender gap we see with garbage workers or psychology?

edit: clarity.

>> This means that the women who do stay in are from the upper end of the distribution.

> Another explanation is there are fewer women interested in IT in the first place and companies are scrambling to compete for women because it makes them look better.

Those aren't even mutually exclusive explanations. It seems likely that both are true as the people that go into it despite the lack of interest from the rest of their cadre will be better candidates vs. borderline candidates.

I am mostly playing the devil's advocate. Both explanations may be true to a degree.

I believe it is misguided to shoehorn discrimination as the goto explanation for every statistical difference between groups of people. In this scenario the data literally implies the opposite conclusion yet danharaj was able to contrive an explanation that leaves women as the victim despite lliterally being promoted twice as fast. You can bet danharaj would still be arguing the same conclusion if the data had born out the opposite results.

To be fair there it's likely that there's a bit of victimization there as well if it's harder to go into one field vs. another due to social norms. You get it from both sides, too! "You're a man, why do you want to be a nurse??". Going back to tech, if you were a borderline woman candidate that wanted to get in it seems that you would statistically be less likely to follow that dream.

I like to step back and just say that it's not something that has to be fixed if a cadre of people appear to "collectively decide" based on individual decisions. It sucks that if you are in the cadre and have to fight the perception that you should(n't) be doing something. But I think (as I suspect you do as well) that saying that your individual decision should be different simply because you share an identifying trait with others is broken.

Ideas that men or women are some collective that needs to be pushed one way or another are difficult. You can generalize based on the apparent preferences of the group, but then judging an individual based on those preferences is where it starts to get troublesome.

Try being a male who wants to go into education for young children. I have a friend who went through the process as the only male member of his entire graduating class, and he says the level of suspicion he had to face from his professors and fellow students was overwhelming at times.

It was consistently implied that a young male would only want to teach young children for puerile reasons.

Even when he was given the benefit of the doubt, it'd only be to say "oh, so you'll take your education degree and enter administration?"

Totally agree with you and I implore you to watch the video I linked above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70

There is growing scientific evidence (discussed in the video) that men and women have preferential differences that are exhibited as early as we are capable of measuring them. (Toys chosen days after birth)

The differences in choice of profession are seen globally across all cultures and are in fact stronger in places like Scandinavia which are arguably world leaders in gender equality and provide women with the most choice.

When you see something that all cultures have in common it hints that it is not a cultural phenomena and that there is something biological going on.

I am speaking by and large here and paraphrasing the evidence laid out by researchers in the video. There are plenty of exceptional outliers which buck the trend and any individual's choice in profession doesn't imply that the group as a whole has a poor aptitude or are incapable of it. It simply states that they prefer to do something else.

Every explanation """fits a narrative""", including your alternative.

Your explanation requires significant mental gymnastics to make your claim fit the data. If anything the data implies the opposite conclusion. If women were discriminated against in tech they would not be promoted at twice the rate.

Wouldn't you also blame discrimination had this study revealed women were promoted at half the rate of men?

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