Why is Russia so good at encouraging women into tech?
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
The former-Communist East-European country I lived in as a kid was a lot more egalitarian than most of present-day Western countries and the women were treated pretty much the same as men were when it came to work. I remember as a kid that I regarded my mother going each morning to work and returning in the evening as a very normal thing, and I regarded the few kids' mothers who weren't doing that as being lazy (to this day I still think that a stay-at-home parent is a lazy human being).
State-run kindergartens were also of much help for women back then.
That really depends on how you measure gender equality and general freedom though.
> to this day I still think that a stay-at-home parent is a lazy human being
You're just being too judgemental though. If a family is wanting for nothing and they agree that one parent should stay at home to spend more time looking after the family, why not?
Like I said, gender equality was pretty well established. "General freedom" doesn't have that much in common with equality, we can all be equal but not free. I'd say that for further reading on the matter Mona Ozouf's essays on "liberté, égalité, fraternité" is a good starting point (a related article about it in French: http://www.letelegramme.fr/bretagne/mona-ozouf-pas-simple-de...)
> You're just being too judgemental though. If a family is wanting for nothing and they agree that one parent should stay at home to spend more time looking after the family, why not?
I know this point-view might be seen as judgemental, it's just that I see people not contributing back to society with their work-time as not giving it all. It's not a matter of money, I am a little marxist inside me and I do believe that work it's one of the things that define us as a species. I've heard my ~84-year-old peasant grandma' saying that she was very upset that her legs were hurting her because she wanted to continue working.
It is judgmental.
>it's just that I see people not contributing back to society with their work-time as not giving it all
Child-rearing has societal benefits. It's one of the key reasons why children from two parent-households do significantly better on average than children from one. Either they get the benefit of dual income or a full-time parent.
>I've heard my ~84-year-old peasant grandma' saying that she was very upset that her legs were hurting her because she wanted to continue working
I believe that but it's a choice.
Link to studies on that? And I mean comprehensive studies, not the ones limited to the US.
This. Soviet block was also mostly atheist, which affected this egalitarianism positively as well (and opposite in places like the US). This still largely remains, even with Orthodox Church reemerging and realigning with the government (at least in Russia).
I'm not sure why it's lazy to avoid work if it doesn't negatively affect your health or well-being. I can't say what the objective meaning of life is (or if one even exists for certain) but I can say with a fair amount of certainty that it isn't to "grow up, work for decades, and die." Nothing gold can stay.
I've also said it in a previous comment, but my ~84-or-so peasant grandma' did just that, i.e. she worked all of her life ever since she got married at 17, never took a "vacation" day off. I've heard her saying that she was really upset that her legs were hurting her, because she really wanted to continue working as she had done before. I'm pretty sure that, if given the chance, my gradnma' would choose the same lifestyle as she had. For some of us work is indeed fulfilling.
It's not only Russia, either, which I find to be a bizarre point of focus here. I find female colleagues are far more likely to be from India, China, or Taiwan than any western nation.
Where are you currently based? In the UK (and this is a BBC article) I don't see many (or any really) female tech workers from the countries you mention but lots from Russia and easter Europe.
That's still repercussions of calling Russia the whole USSR.
Now most post-Soviet republic are kind of shadowed.
For example, if a person choose from two similar professions with similar pay but where one is dominated by ones own gender and the other isn't, then I predict that a above 50% will chose the one which employ a majority of ones own gender. However if there is only a few professions that is high paying and a lot of unemployment in other areas, and many people live in poverty, then gender will be less of a factor in the decision.
Given that populations of humans will naturally self-organize themselves into groups (whether based on race, culture, music choices, geographic birth, language, etc), the expected outcome is almost never going to be perfect representation. I don't think black people are genetically predisposed for basketball, just like latinos are not genetically predisposed for baseball, and yet the respective demographics are over-represented in NBA and MLB respectively.
For example, the teacher profession is generally female dominated at 80%, but gender segregation becomes even worse when a teacher finish studying and chooses a specialization. Language teachers are above 90% female, while music is 80% male. There is no innate reason why the language of music and the language of text has this difference, but over time it just have been that more women choses languages and more men choosing music when picking a subject to teach. This trend that people has a tendency pick places (especially within a profession) where ones own gender is majority was given as one of the primary theories in a government report on the subject a few years ago here in Sweden.
I see it as the best theory available to explain the data and general trend for gender segregation.
There's absolutely nothing paradoxical about this. The more wealthy a society is, the less incentive there is for women to work instead of being the primary full-time caretaker. Women are happier in single-earner households where they don't have to work or can work part-time at their leisure. This usually means they chose the right partner, e.g. a high status male that lets them survive on 1 income (presumably high).
Beware the cognitive dissonance that liberals are so intent on perpetuating that empowering women has anything to do with the workplace. It doesn't.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijop.12265/abstra...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask
And we are not sure what that is.
Gender roles is what you would expect from a species that developed distinct genders. For example, the simple fact that hormone levels are different between genders, should strongly imply differences in behaviour which should bleed into day to day choices. The fact that one gender specializes with birth, while the other with insemination would strongly imply this difference would in some way segregate genders within a developing culture, and so on.
So I cannot imagine how the "social construction theory" could possibly be correct.
I think religion/culture plays a bigger role. Russia was largely atheist and mostly remains so.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2017/03/31/millennials_...
However, that brings up the politically incorrect argument that men are more interested in Tech than women, which seems hard to justify as well.
The world would be a drastically different place if people were rational.
While individual people need not be rational, a better theory is that society as a whole is largely rational when taking into account disruptions due to causal factors (people, groups, situations). These causal factors need not be rational, and the extent to which society allows these causal factors to influence it determines how far it deviates from rational behaviour.
but from observations of Russians I've seen I'd also say that:
a) Intelligence is strongly valued in general, with women being no exception. There is no native faux-ironic 'im a math geek nurrrg so i have to be awkward because noone understands me' or 'look at the nerd what a dork' culture..
b) Russian women aren't afraid of being strong willed, and this is also valued
c) Russian women seem to have a stronger notion of 'womanhood' and 'sisterhood' - similarly 'adulthood' and 'solidarity' are more generally valued - so hiding behind or supporting immaturity and selfishly infighting is less dominant/accepted
d) The general cultural philosophy seems more (despite bad eggs as anywhere) a focus on personal excellence and service to community/society/nation, rather than a desire for personal gratification according to abstract self-selected individual preferences
e) People call out BS when they see it, and this is considered a good thing, rather than 'being rude' or 'disrespecting everyones right to their own opinion'
So while perhaps sexist jokes and activities are allowed in some areas, in other areas actually acting on them - or letting them get to you or not calling them out in others - is dishonourable, a personal 'cultural liability' (e.g. cause for being ostracised), and to be avoided.
Of course there are exceptions everywhere, and this is observation and generalization - not an absolute statement of fact, also put with a bit of an ideal spin to underscore the argument..
I definitely would think the socialist economic system did a huge and perhaps bigger part to normalize women in the workplace and in these industries, but some of these cultural factors I think were pre existing and also help facilitate the pattern..
Some of these used to be more prevalent in US society as one example, but have been devalued over time.. So, if correct, perhaps the 'right mix' is support for women in these industries, but also a culture which values intellegence, integrity, community, and excellence rather than personal achievement for selfish reasons irrespective of the means..
I would agree with this. Here is a Soviet cartoon based on a Russian folk fairy tale about smart and mighty wife rescuing her husband from king's prison:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnysHoprhsQ
Here is another version of this fairy tale:
I also grew up in Eastern Europe in the '80s, and this is what most of present-day Westerners don't get. And women were not supposed to hold only "women-related" jobs, for example my aunt was an industrial-crane operator.
The same argument goes for women in science. Albert Einstein was told he wouldn't amount to much. Doesn't mean he 'got discouraged' and quit physics. That's not why we do science - for public appreciation - we do it because we love it no matter what anyone else says. This is the point that the girls in tech people miss I think.
Instead of buying your daughters lego sets with women wearing fancy lab coats and looking into telescopes, buy them gyroscopes, or electronics kits, or lego's own DIY robot? None of the toys mentioned above feature gender and actually give a sense of what science is about.
I'm open to hear your thoughts, especially from women.
I have a two year old and I can tell you fighting against pinky-princess girl culture is a battle. As a parent, it's you vs basically the rest of society that sends a million little cues about what girls are supposed to do. I had this conversation with my daughter the other morning:
Daughter: I want to be a boy when I grow up. Me: Why is that? Daughter: So I can be an astronaut!
Of course, I explained that girls can be astronauts too. And I've never done anything to set her expectations differently. But they just absorb this stuff from the ether of our culture. At her age, she's picked up on the idea that only boys are astronauts, and girls are ballerinas and princesses and shit.
They (i.e., Disney and Viacom) do have princesses-types doing actiony stuff thinking it's the same thing. And encouraging women to lean in.
They don't typically write those females to think like a someone in engineering, exploration, or security, though. Boys watch Batman be Batman, train hard, think ahead, get beat up, but still be heroic. Girls watch, what, the girl from Brave do action hero things and fight with her mom. Or the princesses from Frozen use amazing powers to resolve what end up being relationship issues.
Honestly, though, I suspect it's difficult to get writers for kids' shows that can think like, say, a theoretical physicist. Writers tend to get art or English degrees.
I suspect it's not television or other media, but rather personal role models in their life.
Unfortunately with society as it is now, having a role model who isn't your gender (and also isn't your relative), mentor you is largely untennable.
Why do you assume this is cause rather than effect? I find it hard to imagine we set out to define gender roles, rather than those roles evolving over a long time due to a billion factors.
The economics of our society have changed both in what efforts are expected from whom, and in what options are granted to whom. That changes some of the billion factors weighing on our constructed social order, but there are still those who benefit from retarding the process.
The problem is a certain things have a very high barrier to entry. Getting into such things requires over the natural amounts of persistence and other myriad life skills for which you need a certain level of biological independence(like not having kids for example).
These barrier to entries vary with each profession. They are higher for the cool jobs, like the CS ones. Most of these career type jobs where continued work is required. Taking long breaks, asking for lesser working hours(While having colleagues at office who would be pushing 15-18 hour workdays) and other such things makes you a bad worker even if you were to somehow work hard and gain initial access. Net result is people feel they are better off doing things where their contributions have some meaning than having to compete with 16 hr shift workers against whom you are set up to lose by default.
This is the whole difficulty with the diversity problem. There is a inherent assumption that things be made easier to accomodate minorities of all kids. Whereas doing well in any profession requires the exact opposite. Harder the things, the better you get by doing them. But that also means, people who are not tough enough for the job get filtered out every iteration along the way.
You just come down to the point that you can't make people do, what they are not ready to put over the necessary efforts to make happen.
Well, for the cool CS jobs, yeah, which is maybe 1% of the total. The rest aren't cool—they're brain-meltingly boring, often frustrating, health-destroyingly sedentary, and often (not always) fairly low-status, despite the pay[0]. The way-above-median pay's just about all a CS career's got going for it, for most.
[0] Compare especially the status boost granted by entering either of two full-on professions which, strikingly, kept improving gender balance through the 80s and beyond despite a long history of being dominated by men: law and medicine. Meanwhile, CS/programming started out better, then got worse around the mid 80s, as measured by graduates in relevant majors.
Partly that's because those 1% have to do outreach to get enough workers willing to endure those conditions, and partly it's because those are entire companies filled with passionate people (because everyone who doesn't love the job quickly quits) and they want to share their passion.
Most employers won't. But yet some people pour in a lot of time to make themselves better. That is precisely the whole point.
Its exactly a bit like school. Schools won't force you to put any hours. But people putting in late nighters and burning the midnight oil end up scoring high marks and getting better grades.
How do you suggest we help low scoring students? By telling the better student to study less?
You know what else we are influenced by? Biological traits, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism
Did you think about what if she would have a happier life as a ballerina than an astronaut?
There is also the fact that those who truly want something will go get it despite the headwinds.
Rather peoples inclinations are varied and weak, so a society that discourages women from entering science will find more than half of women who had a weak inclination to science will simply choose the next-equal profession they were inclined to.
How would one go about preventing this from happenning without segregating the child?
You the parent have to go out of your way to make a list of women astronauts, scientists, stateswomen, authors, captains, professors-- everything-- so your daughter grows up in a world women can do anything.
A thing that all of us can do is to get rid of their prejudices for real. We like calling things mysogny and racism and attack, but what they profoundly are is hereditary prejudice which only heals through self-education.
Edit: prejudices are not limited to white males, but we all have them (obviously me too, thus having to do this edit).
I don't know how true this is now, but there's plenty of Soviet propaganda aimed at women telling them how they're an important part of the workforce too. They were certainly specially encouraged to go into "technology" of the time (or industry, as it was more commonly known in Soviet times).
http://russiatrek.org/blog/art/the-image-of-a-woman-in-sovie...
Witness for example how much more of a celebration international women's day is in the ex-Soviet countries than elsewhere.
The pay is not great and a lot of hoops to jump, but the hours are usually flexible. Maybe some women don't feel pressure to be breadwinners, so they can choose a career in science, but men feel that they have to make more money than science ever promises in Russia.
Your gender doesn't matter that much. Both men and women usually pursue most of the majors. And in physics and maths you usually substantial amounts of women.
In IT, being pretty fresh in this part of the world, men are majority but still not overwhelming.
Anecdata: from primary school to the end of my university I've only had male maths teachers for a year and a half.
I don't have an immediate source for this but I have an impression that post-Soviet societies are a lot more equal than Western ones.
For instance, from a women-in-business study it follows that the proportion of female-ocuppied senior management positions in Russia is 47% while in the US it's 23% and in UK it's 19%.
https://www.grantthornton.global/en/insights/articles/women-...
A quote from it:
"Eastern Europe continues to top the rankings (see figure 3), with Russia in the lead as the only country in which every business has a woman on its senior leadership team. In Poland, the proportion of senior roles held by women has improved by six percent to 40%. The region owes some of its strong performance to the legacy of communist principles which have placed women as equals for generations."
Of course, such a conclusion goes against the main-stream narrative of communism being all about abuse and human rights violations while the West being the undisputed champion of human rights. So the BBC article just have to provide the following paragraph:
"While Russia is doing something right, it's still not there yet in terms of gender parity."
What is this about? Nothing. Whatever the subject is BBC must retain some reservations about Russia however unsubstantiated they are.
Out of the 60 that actually flew to space, only 2 are from the USSR/Russia, and both of them were elected to the soviet/people's representatives, so I'd say female astronauts in the USSR was nothing but a publicity stunt.
Not just fighter pilots, but bombers/CAS as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Witches
They also employed female snipers, who were very effective in that role. For example, Lyudmila Pavlichenko is one of the most successful and decorated snipers in military history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyudmila_Pavlichenko
I think the advent of the startup as being culturally associated with youth and creativity (i.e. that they're cool) is helping to rectify this image, but the startup industry has only recently gotten into mainstream culture.
[edit: as tptacek notes, this is not an issue that extends to all of STEM, so I've updated my comment to reflect this. I've left in the highlight on Russia placing cultural value on STEM subjects because I think it's relevant, and that saying Russian culture places value in programming but ignoring the value of Maths, Science and other logical pursuits like Chess would be giving a partial and inaccurate picture. Also, I'm not Russian myself so this is purely an outside-looking-in perspective.]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14164886
There is major disparity in tech, but it is not a problem common to all STEM fields.
I wonder how science or maths is viewed differently to technology in this regard - perhaps because those fields are much smaller in terms of people, and super-specialised, so are already appealing to a very small, highly passionate, self-selected group anyway? I can't help but think that part of the problem is the fact that tech wants to recruit a much broader range of people (to make the required numbers of people in industry, which is ever-growing) and thus the requirement to appeal to a more "average" person tends towards displaying the biases of the average person at the age of interest (ie. primarily teenage)?
I find this kind of justification a pretty sexist view against women that they'd pick their entire career path on such frivolous details.
This seems like a decent survey of the topic (major selection by incoming students), with some references to a few studies at the end.
https://dus.psu.edu/mentor/2013/06/disconnect-choosing-major...
'In contrast with the evidence that first-year students are most likely making uninformed choices when determining a major, the common four-year curriculum path colleges and universities use assumes that students enter college prepared to make a decision regarding major and, ultimately, career path. Unfortunately, the reality is that students are most likely not developmentally prepared to do so.'
There's nothing unique to women here.
Young adults graduate from college programs that have low chance of getting them ready for a job that could reasonably cover their tuition debt. Some of those kids will choose colleges where the tuition is far higher than a reasonably equivalent program at a state school. People are not rational agents.
And it's not a gender thing either. There are plenty of men who will expand enormous amount of time, money, and energy to attempt to get into jobs or careers where they have a low probability of recouping their investment. This is pretty much the case for anybody who tries to make a living playing professional sports, or tries to make a living from acting, for example.
same thing is happening in ukraine: https://s.dou.ua/files/lenta/salary-report-dec-2016/fem-titl...
full survey: https://dou.ua/lenta/articles/salary-report-dec-2016/?from=s...
compare to previous surveys: https://jobs.dou.ua/salaries/demography/dec2016/
Maybe a smart girl is so smart she's not going to get underpaid for her skills?
It think this is the main reason. Stereotypes are great for capitalism. I can speak only for germany, but in the 90es i felt, there was a movement to reduce this gender stereotypes stuff, but this got completly reverted in the last 15 years or so. Nowadays there exists a Kinder Surprise Girls Edition with pink flowers on the packaging and special potato chips flavors for men and women (WTF). I also recognise the effects frim this in my personal environment, with young parents going full into this stereotype things. The boy has to play football from day one he can walk. The younger daughter can not wear clothes from is older brother because they are not pink and she is put into ballett school ignoring that she obviously prefers football too. It's a real shame!
From the industry point of view, hand-me-down is a bug that has since been fixed, at least 50% of it. Business cannot uphold ideas when they are at odds with profit (single companies can, as long as they are not public, but business as a whole can't).
That may very well play a role. Here in former East Germany women were expected to work despite being parents which resulted in some side effects like widely available daycare / kindergartens.
Communism might have been promoting individualism, but certainly engineering professions were men-only affairs.
While there has been some regression on this coinciding with more exposure to Western culture, I still notice that there is a much higher proportion of women in Chinese tech companies than in Western ones, although not a 50-50 split.
It's possible that nutrition + butts in school seats created the Flynn effect, where the population's IQ rose. The next century might see the reverse.
[1] Per gwern: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729085
But if you stay away from the details behind the effect and just look at the measured data, you see an unequal distribution of average IQ scores across the globe. The effect may not be as large as the referenced book claims, but the difference has been confirmed by critical responses albeit with reduced magnitude. It is pretty hard if not impossible the get an unbiased picture of this topic, so I will leave it at this and ask you to dive into the rabbit hole yourself, I don't want to accidentally spread false claims because I am certainly no expert on this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
Smarter people get fewer children. IQ is inheritable. This only says we get more and more dumber people around the world in general. Maybe parts of the world with more births get the m faster than the rest, but still everyone gets them.
I don't think so.
A better question would be why no concern for China and Japan. In case of China, it's because they consider themselves overpopulated. In case of Japan, I simply neglected to include them on the list - it was not meant to be comprehensive, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d... for that.
And another thing: would shrinkage really be that bad, in the long term? In any case it could never be very difficult to ramp up reproduction again when needed: all future generations, no matter how low the reproduction rate of the ones before, will be descendants of a direct line of ancestors who all did reproduce, against the odds. An environment that makes it easier to resist the reproduction drive could only make that drive stronger in the next generations, due to selection.
(There are a number of different good answers to that, I'd imagine. I just don't know what they are.)
Both the wife and I are engineers. Our daughter shows no interest in tech. She does like to mix stuff, so maybe Chem E. Though I'm not going to prod her. STEM just does not pay over the long term.
Whaa? What's your definition of pay? Anyway, IMO no prodding needed - expose the child to a wide variety of things, and then help them find and nurture their passion.
My coworkers daughter and her husband are both accountants. In their mid 30's they are doing much better than any STEM majors. They will both be firm partners by 40. +200k salaries for two people over 27 years (not that they'd work to 67 anyway).
I know of a mechanical engineer who went into finance. Not a quant, or even in NY. Just a manager for VISA. Her bonus is larger than my salary, and so is her salary.
STEM, well really TE, need to bank that initial high salary for, often forced, early retirement. SM majors, you are just fucked.
$100k - $200k a year puts you, individually, over, at the very minimum, the 75th percentile income for American household.
Also, your friends aren't even close to typical accountant salary, median pay $68,150 per year - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/business-and-financial/accountants-a...
Compare that to the typical software salary, median pay $102,280 per year - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
I think OP is talking relative to other skilled vocations, i.e what a potential STEM student might do instead.
If you have the opportunity to choose STEM, you are already at a certain level of opportunity.
> median pay $68,150 per year
How do you compare medians? What if there are more young software developers than young accountants?
Besides that most people will never even make half of your lower end salary during their whole career.
My advice (not that anyone asked) for STEM graduates:
1) Immediately max 401k contribution. Hopefully you'll get a employer match, but none is common these days. Should have no problem getting $1M by age 55, though more is better.
2) 15 year mortgage on a house. So buying a house in your 30's you'll own it by late 40's
3) Don't have kids until 30's. Tech pays well (initially), but require along hours. Be prepared to do nothing but work in your 20's
4) $80k educational savings for each kid. As they will need that by your late 40's or early 50's. That should minimally pay for 4 year degree at State U, and kept them from being saddled with debt upon graduation.
Remember 55 is elderly. So by early 50's you want no mortgage, no education funding requirements, home ownership, and at least $1M in retirement savings. So when you are targeted for elimination, at least you can join the working poor; i.e. $30k/year household income (401k interest only) and no medical benefits.
Ideally you'd have $2M in savings. That will get you to $60k/year so you can afford health insurance and cruise it out till medicare at 63.
If you have any sort of medical needs at that age, with no health insurance, you are truly fucked, as heart/brain surgery is $300k minimum. Though I believe their are laws to prevent debt collection from retirement savings.
Doing nothing but working in your 20s, after going to college in an all-male environment (as that's what STEM classes are), and planning to not have kids until your 30s means you're going to have a really hard time meeting any desirable women. If you don't get really lucky and somehow make time for socializing in college (between all the hours required by your CS/engineering classes) and meet a wife there that doesn't result in break-up divorce before your 30s, then you're kinda screwed. It's much harder to meet singles after college IME, and if you're "doing nothing but work in your 20s", that's going to put a real damper on your dating life during that time you're looking for a partner to have those kids in your 30s.
I think this whole plan is fraught with huge risk and problems, and shows exactly why, here in America, most people having kids seem to be "working poor" or in other fields than STEM, where they have better career longevity and stability though not as much initial salary (and maybe not as much total salary over the career even), and a lot more free time after work.
I think better advice is: you have a choice: STEM or family/kids. Pick one. You can't have both unless you're really lucky, much like professional athletes. Another alternative might be moving out of the US to Europe, where the far better social systems and working conditions make it much easier to have a family.
"Should have no problem getting $1M by age 55" is totally not just "middle class." by my definition its "rich as fuck." and I'm saying that as someone who grew up poor and is now "rich as fuck." We can save ~70% of our take home salary and have enough spending cash to, literary, do whatever the fuck we want without ever worrying about the cost.
> Everything else is working poor.
"Yeah, you're poor if you aren't a millionaire by your 50s" is so silly I would believe it to be satire in a different context.
>15 year mortgage on a house.
I could have gotten a 15 year mortgage, strongly considered it, but I went with 30 because the interest rate was absurdly low so I believe I'd make better return investing that money rather than putting it towards my house. It's a risk/tradeoff I was willing to take. Everyone's situation is different.
If you absolutely require a 30 year mortgage on your home to make payments and don't have a good down payment or savings, you probably can't really afford it though.
>Don't have kids until 30's
There's both pros and cons to having kids younger vs older. It's an individual choice if and when to have children.
> Tech pays well (initially), but require along hours. Be prepared to do nothing but work in your 20's
That's silly, it certainly doesn't have to require long hours. I don't work long hours and I certainly didn't in my 20s either. In my 20s I worked less with more flexible hours than most of my peers.
>$80k educational savings for each kid
Oh, God, no!! Paying my own way through school is what made me make good choices. If my parents gave me $80K towards school I would have never taken it seriously nor understood the value of $80k.
>Remember 55 is elderly.
No, its not.
Again, all this stuff about being fired at 55, it's a Silicon Valley startup culture nonsense.
>home ownership
Is certainly not for everyone!!
Upper middle class is retirement and educational savings, and not living paycheck to paycheck.
I believe it's 70% of households could not come up with $1k within 2 weeks. 90% could not miss a paycheck without skipping bills. Middle class these days is living pay-check to paycheck. That used to be working poor. The working poor will rely on housing/food/medical aid.
The 30 year mortgage is fine as long as the investment difference can be liquidated to pay it off at 15 years (or in early 50s.
I paid $100/credit-HR at KU 23 years ago. That did not require debt. I worked a few hrs/week and was able to handle the full engineering course-load. It's now $10k/semester (that includes room). Can't be done debt free with any major, much less STEM course load. Hence my $80k minimum for education. Guy in the cube next to me graduated in 71 and paid full tuition (including room) by only working summers. He is the oldest here at 67. They are running him out; I'm the old man soon. The next oldest is me at 45. Every one else is 20's or just barely 30.
$1M assets is not rich these days; not by far.
I work at old school, boring fortune 50 company. Plenty of people walked out at 55. That won't happen if you are good; I mean GOOD. Eat, sleep, breath circuit design. That's me. Can I keep it for 10 or 20 years; we'll see. About 10% of STEM majors are still in STEM by mid career (40s). 50% are out by 5 years, or never even enter it upon graduation.
For the love of God! Give me a break! If you can't somehow manage to do that while making over $100k you are living way way way above your means, period. You can live over your means at any income level and adding more income doesn't solve that problem.
Sure, maybe if I owned two Beemers, a Cadillac, a boat, and a second home I'd be unable to do that.
>I believe it's 70% of households could not come up with $1k within 2 weeks. 90% could not miss a paycheck without skipping bills.
That says more about spending habits than is does income.
>as long as the investment difference can be liquidated to pay it off at 15 years (or in early 50s.
Your can never know your investment returns.
>Can't be done debt free with any major, much less STEM course load.
So what? I went into debt for an education and it wasn't a bad thing. Its my opinion that downright giving your kids money is a bad thing. I made my choices accordingly. I would be a total loser nowadays if my parents gave me money, for my education or otherwise. Its also in my opinion that parents obsessing over saving money for college is a big cause of rising tuition.
Women or Men, most people I know who go into non-STEM fields sooner or later have to negotiate with the fact there is nothing special going to happen in their lives forever.
Here in India some people even believe its rather better to be a plumber or an electrician than do non-STEM degrees. Former helps you develop some skills. Compared to getting a degree in commerce and finding your whole education could be replaced by spread sheet macros.
That's the advice I would give most people in the United States as well. Plumbers and electricians can make bank, and it is something almost anyone can be trained to do well. Far better than trying to go to college, and either dropping out after a few semesters, or graduating with a useless degree - either way amassing many thousands of dollars of debt.
That was true 20 years ago but no longer true today. Russia is in a period of relative baby boom and fertility rate is now higher than in most European countries (except France, Sweden and Ireland I believe). It's already quite difficult to put kids in school!
Of course the effect is bound to peter out in a coming decade.
Europe for the most part has a negative native birth rate, the positive birth rates come from immigrants.
It is still true for _native_ Russians, not Russian-based immigrants from neighbouring states.
Also, the Soviet era contained a lot of progressives in terms of gender roles. That is easy to forget with today's stereotypes of male-exclusive buddy networks on all levels of economic success and high-heeled golddiggers. (again: outside perspective! I don't know the facts on the ground, just talking about perception)
Second, and I think more important, is that engineering jobs pay - and especially so today. Given the issues with economy there, being an engineer (not just software) yoru'e almost guaranteed to find a job, either at home or remote/abroad.
I've personally zero experience with Russian culture beyond what makes it to the media.
From a Western perspective, we've a society that promotes and idolizes women based on their looks and sex appeal. Young girls look up to and subscribe to the snapchats of people like the Kardashians and other transient entities with a very low social value-add but a very large capitalist value add (product promotion, sales, etc.).
The visibility into successful women outside of these looks or "personality" orientated industries is about on par with the modern man. Successful female scientists and successful male scientists receive roughly the same media or social coverage. Successful female business people and successful male business people receive roughly the same, etc etc. (all anecdotally based / personal experience / intuition).
There's also a (social?) pushback against successful non-media women bringing themselves to the spotlight (such as Sandberg) for being seen as pushing themselves into the spotlight for being successful despite being a woman.
Like others have suggested, it could also have to do with the lack of routes to prosperity offered in Russia vs the West. As a whole, women in the West are have far greater access to self-actualization than men in the West, which also spreads the same women across many more routes while condensing men into a more fixed set.
Again, all non-academic and anecdotal but intuitively I feel that, like many other social issues in Western society, the heavy capitalist nature of our society is likely the root of any "issue" we perceive here.
Maybe, but it's interesting that at least in America (which is relevant since you specifically cite the Kardashians), women don't actually put much effort into looking good. Obesity in America is among the highest in the world (Mexico is a little higher). On average, you'll have a much easier time meeting attractive women in Russia, east Asia, or anywhere in Europe (except probably the UK). People just aren't as fat in other countries.
So while American society might "idolize" women based on looks/sex appeal, I don't see that actually translating to regular women trying to look good, or succeeding at it at any rate. People here like to look at pretty people on TV and in the movies, sure, but that doesn't translate to them trying to make themselves look good. They'd rather drive everywhere in their big SUV and drink sodas and eat junk food.
At my former job my superior told me that he had a job application from a woman and said to me basically "women can't be programmers, their brains are just wired differently" and asked me if I met any women programmers. I said the gender doesn't matter, and yes, we had one woman programmer at a job before that one, and she was pretty good (but yeah, just one). Anyway, he actually hired her, so I'd like to think I changed his mind.
As some commentators already mentioned, Soviet Union tried to make no distinction between male and female professions. But nowadays social roles of men and women are strongly polarized and Stem mostly considered as not women's business.
However, if other Russian tech women from Skolkovo state dramatically different things, who's bullshiting: Anna, BBC or both?
https://sk.ru/news/b/articles/archive/2016/03/08/celebrating...
These numbers seem ludicrously high regardless of gender. I'd be surprised to hear that 29% - almost 3 of 10 - men were scientists. Is what they're actually saying that 29% of scientists are women worldwide, but in russia it's 41%? That would make more sense.
Maybe not taking artificial hormones keeps women interested in science and tech?
I think I remember reading that there were so few males left that the soviets literally bussed males around the country to impregnate women so they could rebuild their population.
Some other less-technical positions held by women, still much less than 50%.
In Soviet Union, it is no secret how much the scientists, mathematicians as well as intelligent people (e.g. chess players) were revered on national level.
> Most of the girls we talked to from other countries had a slightly playful approach to Stem, whereas in Russia, even the very youngest were extremely focused on the fact that their future employment opportunities were more likely to be rooted in Stem subjects.
They do tech because it provides a way of getting a good life. In the West, where conditions are less harsh, women don't feel the need to go into tech to get a good life.
Similar considerations explain why female university students are more likely to do STEM subjects in Iran than in Sweden.
This, incidentally, blows out of the water the argument made by some feminists that women don't do STEM because of conditioning in nasty patriarchal societies.
Citation needed for this. From a quick look from a paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06196.pdf it seems like this statement is true at the undergraduate major level, but certainly not true at the doctoral level.
This is particularly relevant as unlike engineering/tech, where a Bachelor's (or less) suffices for the majority of work, the same is certainly not true in mathematics.
As an illustration of this, note that for many people graduate school in mathematics is spent trying to come up to speed with the current research efforts of the community, unlike engineering where one is (generally) expected to be a "producer" once one hits graduate school.
The current path of ~10 years of schooling through women's 'best' biological time to have a child is, I imagine, a reason for some of the discrepancy between male and female post undergrad.
On the other hand, my friends who had children in their early-20s had no issues.
It's convenient for both women's studies departments and tech recruiters to pretend other fields don't exist. It is taboo to talk about it, to the point that I haven't come across any serious piece of writing that dared to seriously contemplate the question of "what are the girls choosing to do instead?", but I don't think it has much to do with psychoanalytic undercurrents.
https://nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsb20161/uploads/1/6/at03-12...
It does mention nurses, nurse practitioners, and technicians.
I find that hard to believe.
When you say "others" it's helpful to convey the distribution. Overwhelmingly, STEM has better gender parity than CS. And MechE might be the only STEM field worse than CS.
In India. Mechanical engineering sees least enrollment from women. Many times there no girls in the Mech eng class at all. Or worse, 1 or 2 who go and tell other girls not to take up Mech ever.
The issue isn't discrimination at all. You regularly have to do physically demanding work. Welding, Metal cutting work with a myriad other stuff. Of course you may argue Women do physically demanding work all the time. But the point is such women come from a background of poverty which demands such a lifestyle.
If you come from anywhere a above lower-middle class lifestyle the overall lifestyle of your family never prepares you for this.
I don't care how many lego sets you buy for your girl. Nothing prepares for you for a certain things.
However the argument that we should put our focus based on how high the gender unequal distribution is is an fascinating argument since here in Sweden we have a perfect record of every employed person profession (as part of the tax record). We can list every professions and their gender distribution, and naturally very few of the stem professions are at top or even in the top 20. Worst two professions (of each gender) had midwife and floor tile worker at both >99.4% of each representative gender.
The data for female dominated professions was midwife and dentist at 99.6% and above, with pediatric at 98%. For male dominated profession at 99%-98% it is tile worker, mechanic, thin plate worker, carpenter, concrete worker, electrician, and last plumber. With 90% of people working in a profession with less than 40% women or 40% men, IT with a distribution of 81%/19% is quite average and unremarkable on the list. molecular biology, being in that small 10%, is much more remarkable because it actually has a gender equal distribution.
I'm very interested in looking at the raw numbers.
Thank you.
Or we could stop acting as if the metric at the end is what we need to equalize, look at it only as an indicator, and then find issues to fix. If 19/81 is caused by some actual sort of discrimination, we can fix which ever issues we identify. Just as we can with the 66/33 split.
C'mon man. You're better than that.
I too have seen tptacek communicate a lot better than today.
Notice what was written. It was not >50%. It was better than 50%
> and some STEM fields, like molecular biology, have better than 50% representation of women.
not ">50%"
not "more than 50%"
not "higher than 50%"
but "better than 50%"
Of all the variations, only the last one has a moral value attached to it.
If you can think of a way of making things fairer for men, without making things worse for women at the same time I'm all for it.
How so? It's not even established that an unequal gender ratio is "sexism" at all.
Note that the problem it is specific only to some degrees, in general women are advancing in most western countries: http://politikon.es/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/4.png
This wording reminds me of that which Obama also used with respect to gender in STEM & education:
>In fact, more women as a whole now graduate from college than men. This is a great accomplishment
-Barack Obama
Source: http://www.newsweek.com/president-obama-reflects-impact-titl...
What I mean is, there isn't anyone out there telling women that physics is cool whereas programming is not. My bet is that anyone encouraging their little girl to be a physicists would be equally enthused about electrical engineering.. but I could be wrong.
I think when people decide what a good career would be, they're going off what little knowledge they have. And programmers aren't displayed on TV as big earners - but rather scrawny stinky anti-social dorks. And sadly there's a source of truth to this..
Software just isn't cool. It's actually pretty un-cool. I don't know how to change that.
> Software just isn't cool. It's actually pretty un-cool. I don't know how to change that.
I don't see how you find this to be a conflict. If software is presented as "uncool", is that not social conditioning?
I'm currently as an exchange student in China, and every time I tell someone that I'm studying CS, they are like "Oh my god, that's so cool!".
Somehow I'm still completely surprised when I hear that reaction. I have no idea what causes this perception, I need to remember to ask next time.
The gender distribution in my classes is still 90%+ male, though. Somehow the different image of the field does not translate into more female students.
No, it absolutely does not.
You suggest "overall society might affect individual choices" and then from that premise reach the conclusion "overall society definitely does not affect individual choices."
>[Women get into] tech [in Russia] because it provides a way of getting a good life. In the West, where conditions are less harsh, women don't feel the need to go into tech to get a good life.
Consider hypothetical societal differences [that may be patriarchal] that may make "a good life" to a Russian woman a totally different thing than "a good life" to an American women. Consider, even if definitions were identical, societal differences [that may be patriarchal] that may make make pursuing a good life much harder (or even downright impossible, see Saudi Arabia) in one country vs another.
I could go on.
For one example, after Title IX of the Higher Education Act was passed in 1972 female enrollment in medical school went from around 10% to over 20% in just 2 years. It's now around 50%.
But does it now? All of 'the West' isn't Silicon Valley.
I live in 'the west', Western Europe to be exact, and while I probably make more than a plumber or a shoe salesperson, I'd say someone with a medicine, law or business degree tends to make a lot more than I do, under easier conditions, and in those fields, you're not considered old at 40, and you're not on call in the weekends. IN terms of 'a good life', tech isn't the best return on investing 5 or 6 years of your life in a degree.
It's probably not a coincidence that these are the degrees women like to pursue. For a job that requires a college degree, 'tech' isn't that rewarding in terms of money or 'the good life'. It's rewarding in terms of getting to work in tech. You really need to want to work in tech to do it. This may be stupid prejudice of mine, but I get the impression guys tend to think more in terms of what they want, and girls tend to think more in terms of what would be smart of practical.
Now I can imagine that for someone in India or Romania, a degree and skills in tech means you could work for customers in the west or even move there, and make a lot more money than you would otherwise, while a business or law degree and skills don't transfer as well across borders, so the same dynamic of choosing what you want versus what would be the smart choice leads to a different decision.
What do you do, that's in worse conditions than those fields?
No it doesn't
At most it suggests that in more desperate circumstances women will be motivated to climb that hill and struggle through it
It doesn't mean there isn't a problem
It does no such thing, because there is no universally agreed upon metric by which we can rank the degree of any given form of "conditioning in nasty patriarchal socities." It could simply be the case that, in this regard / with your example, this is a dimension in which the West is more patriarchal than Iran.
I don't understand your logic here. Isn't the more natural conclusion that the desire to get a good life is stronger than the conditioning?
What does that have to do with anything? In what country do you get an engineering degree, heck a degree of any sort with a goal to be broke? Obviously, there is a financial motivation, but you can find the same motivation in the United States and women tend to avoid going down this path here.
Russian women, in general, are more into this type of thing than the American counterparts. You are trying to downplay this and make it seem like they are doing it out of desperation. They are not, thank you very much.
It's pretty ignorant and shortsighted, the educational system in Russia always favored math, engineering, and science sans gender bias.
In societies with weaker social safety nets, the motivation to go into a field with high earning potential but that you have no inherent interest in is greater. Someone from the U.S. will be less motivated by financial security than someone from Russia.
I know I did, I wanted to study sociology but that doesnt pay the bills.
This doesn't really give any evidence for or against the argument that women avoid stem because of conditioning.
... what's the social safety network like? Is there welfare? Are there government programs that will help with housing / food / healthcare for a single mom (working or not)? This absolutely influences things.
... what's the legal marital environment like? Are the laws regarding divorce more or less favorable to women in one place vs the other (property, child support, alimony, allowance of 'no-fault' divorces, burden of proof, etc)? This will also influence choices.
In both of these tangents, actual risk and perceived risk in various life choices is different based on the answer to those questions.
Yep, that one anecdotal line from an article totally destroys the idea of any sort of patriarchy or sexism happening in the US.
Sheesh, this is the top comment? Give me a break.
I came from mech eng, and the cluelessness and defensiveness techies display when their field's hostility towards women is discussed is incredibly messed up.
If you were an innocent bystander and being tarred with an overly broad brush by people with an agenda, I would imagine that you'd be annoyed and defensive too. What's actually messed up is that attempting to argue your own innocence is furthermore taken as conclusive proof that you are guilty, as alluded to in the above quote and elsewhere in this topic.
Frankly, I fall under an underrepresented category that these identity politics advocates are purportedly trying to help (more than one actually) and even _I_ don't wish to be in any way associated or represented by them because they're just that absurd and alienating to ordinary people.
Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash put it really well:
> It was, of course, nothing more than sexism,the especially virulent type espoused bymale techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.
It's hard to find them because they were, correctly, flagged and Algolia search doesn't return dead comments, but they do exist.
Also, you purposely expanded the scope from "women don't do STEM because.." to "any sort of patriarchy or sexism happening in the US" in order to construct a straw-man.
The reason why women in Iran, Russia, Romania etc choose STEM and woman in Sweden and the US don't is because it is deadly serious which profession they choose. The same seriousness in not in evidence in the West. In the US, people (often from rich families) are spending tens of thousands to study trivial subjects. Americans are infantilised to such a degree that they unable to recognise their infantilisation.
The same impetus is seen in all the tech people from India. Do you think they are all really interested in Richard Stallman? No, they just need to eat.
And those are not even pure fantasy: an economy that is far down the service economy road towards what would be better characterized as an ad economy offers quite a few career options far from male-dominated fields that are both "serious" enough to be considered a possible path to success (vs the make-ends-meet-until-marriage spirit of traditional female occupations, think nurse instead of doctor) and still sufficiently down-to-earth to not be considered starlet territory (like the traditional girly pipedream careers of acting, modeling, singing). Why aim for engineer if you can dream of VP for social media outreach? In an economy that is closer to industrial than to service/ad, evading male-dominated fields comes at a much bigger price in career options.
Can we brainwash them with a Chinese version of Kardashians or something?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14164831 and marked it off-topic.
Wouldn't that be natural though? If there was no issue of lack of diversity, there would not be a need for PR pieces on the subject, right? So the fact that PR pieces about women in technology exist may very well be a good indicator that there is a lack of women in tech.
I'm so proud of this fact :)
Its worth noting the age limit for gymnastics was only raised to 16 in 2000 and many previous Olympic gymnasts competed while 14, including Nadia Comăneci who earned a perfect score (which was until then considered unobtainable, the scoreboards weren't equipped to even handle that score) at 14. Of course, at the time, the Chinese athletes were competing against other athletes that followed the age rules which, arguably, gave them an unfair advantage.
That's all irrelevant though because the whole subject is totally off topic.
Which is ironic, since the inability to ask to right question (about the US) is indicative of the problem (here). The question tech here should be asking is: If our "party" is so great (and being the self-absorbed Kool Aid drinkers that we are, we're 100% certain it is), how come so few outside our immediate circle wants to come to our party? Maybe it's not them? Maybe it's us? Could it be us? No!!! Never!!! It can't be us.
THAT is what should be the mindset of trying to understand to problem. It's not. Funny tho'. Tech is willing to solve all the rest of the world's problems. But it's unwilling - and unable? - to solve its own.
Yeah I know. Let the down votes begin. Please feel free, cause that only proves my point.
1. We don't understand what our problem is.
2. Nothing we try seems to really work.
3. So we compare ourselves to places that don't have the problem.
4. We hope the differences shed some light on the things we are doing wrong so we can change.
Let me break it down. Nice and simple...The answer isn't in Russia or any other country for that matter. The answer is in the mirror. IF you're willing and able to look into it.
The key to problem solving is...wait for it...to identify the right problem. But before that, it's admitting you have a problem. So how exactly does looking at Russia help? (Hint: it doesn't.) And now, look at that, we're back at the mirror, or should me.
p.s. Thanks for the DV. As already mentioned, it only makes my case stronger.