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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Without engaging in any of the rest of your comment, I'm going to call out again the attempt to shift goalposts from tech to STEM in general. Tech people want to believe that the gender disparity in their field is shared among all the STEM fields, but, of course, it is not: women are far better represented in other STEM fields. Computer science, physics, and engineering have similarly acute gender disparity. The rest of the STEM fields --- including mathematics --- have closer to 50/50, and some STEM fields, like molecular biology, have better than 50% representation of women.

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> The rest of the STEM fields --- including mathematics --- have closer to 50/50

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.

Anecdotal from female friends who have started down the path to PHD in stem fields, you basically have to forgo having children until you are in your 30's.

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.

It's not even that niche though is it? A lot of the women I work with have started having kids in their mid-30s. In the US, I think overall people are marrying later and having kids later, IIRC.

You can, but then you would have complications. My friends in their later 30s are having more trouble conceiving and bringing children to term.

On the other hand, my friends who had children in their early-20s had no issues.

"Tech people want to believe that the gender disparity in their field is shared among all the STEM fields"

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.

> what are the girls choosing to do instead?

https://nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsb20161/uploads/1/6/at03-12...

Wow. I knew there was a disparity; I didn't think it was this stark.

I'm aware that there are statistics. Nobody interprets them. (also the link doesn't even include medicine (edit: it does i just missed it D:))

> the link doesn't even include medicine

It does mention nurses, nurse practitioners, and technicians.

There are no female "Agricultural engineers"?

I find that hard to believe.

Interesting. Seems like the biggest ones are Nursing (83.4%) and Teaching (81.1%; kindergarten teachers in particular are 97.7% women!).

I don't think you mean that >50% is better, but your general point is right. Other STEM fields are not as male dominated. Even physics is not as bad as CS. I had several women TAs in physics, but none in CS/programming.

Others are far worse than IT, like mechanical engineering.

CS, EE, MechE, Physics.

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.

Not sure what you are talking about.

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.

so would you say those fields that have >50% women would need to work on their gender diversity to include more men?

Since molecular biology has something like a 54/46 distribution and tech has something like a 19/81 distribution I'd probably tell anyone who told me I should focus on the injustices of molecular biology to shove it up their ass.

54/46 is considered gender equal ratio in Sweden as its within the 40%/40% line.

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.

In case this needs to be spelled out for you, and I apologize if it doesn't, but the subtext of there being a unique gender disparity in tech not shared by thematically similar STEM fields, let alone STEM in general, is that the causal agent is misogyny.

If you have any facts to back up that strong assertion, I am sure people are interested. Otherwise, a blanket accusal of 'misogyny' is asinine and nonproductive.

Here you go:

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=+Numquam+ponenda+est...

I wasn't the one who downvoted you but I'm sure you're aware that the other side of the argument (that claim it's not misogyny) also cites Occam's razor.

Therefore, for either side to claim that the "simplest explanation is misogyny" or "simplest explanation is preferences" is seen as unconvincing to the opponent.

My personal rule is that anyone who deigns to use latin in their arguments also has to use all English words in their dictionary form, and not their colloquial expression.

As per that, your use of misogyny to mean something apart from ingrained dislike or contempt for women is wrong.

You're using misogyny as if its a synonym for any expression of differing attitudes to men and women, regardless of if the outcome is good or bad, and if the participants feel happy or poorly about the situation.

That colloquial usage is utterly disqualified if you want to turn this into a formal argument.

I'm aware that you are a celebrity here and I'm a nobody.

And I agree with you in a lot of things, including that we should make workplaces more inclusive.

But being right does not entitle you to be rude, passive agressive, using various tricks to silence everyone.

Think about this: if someone else behaved like you are doing now (edit: in this whole thread) - and wasn't a celebrity or otherwise safe - they might very well have to face unpleasant consequences (edit: was something like might very well have to find a new job).

There's nothing passive about my take on this problem. And nobody's being "silenced", at least not by me.

Until you mentioned the posters 'celebrity' status, I hadn't even read their username.

Usernames, and personalities, are very de-emphasized on HN.

I'm also uncertain what issue you have with their behaviour?

Where can I find that breakdown of the data?

I'm very interested in looking at the raw numbers.

Thank you.

http://www.statistikdatabasen.scb.se/pxweb/en/ssd/

Labour market - The Swedish Occupational Register

In English no less.

Great resource.

Thank you!

A taste: (unfortunately I can't link to the actual report)

Gender pay-gap in IT related fields is <5% (for the same occupation and education) vs 10 to 20% for the general private sector.

> to shove it up their ass.

C'mon man. You're better than that.

Giving you an upvote (yep, parent was downvoted for some reason) and say agree:

I too have seen tptacek communicate a lot better than today.

People who care about a 19/81 split in one field in college when college as a whole is a 66/33 split should... well you already offered a suggestion at what they should do.

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.

Where are you going to expend your energy? The whole world is full of misogency, do you spend your time trying to fix that, or worry about the compartively small number of times men face unfairness?

Flip this same argument around, and you get accused of derailing/silencing: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Misdirected_feminism

Hmmmmm, that's a really good point. I suppose I agree that in general an argument that there is worse shit in the world is probably a bad reason to ignore other problems. In this case however it'd be difficult to do anything about biases against men without exacerbating sexism further.

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.

> In this case however it'd be difficult to do anything about biases against men without exacerbating sexism

How so? It's not even established that an unequal gender ratio is "sexism" at all.

> so would you say those fields that have >50%

Notice what was written. It was not >50%. It was better than 50%

What is better than 50 % ?

The original comment was:

> 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.

It's either greater or lesser than 50%. If so if not greater, then you are saying lesser than can be "better"?

It's a distance from optimal, making it worse no matter which direction it is.

But then "so would you say those fields that have >50%.." is a valid question by that measure.

Do you have a citation re:mathematics? As a person in mathematical physics, I would be /very/ surprised to hear that math is a more gender balanced field than physics.

I do somewhere; I'll track it down and relay the numbers. But also I'll say that this matches my own personal experience: go to an academic cryptography conference sometime and note how many more women you see than in a generic CS conference. There are more women mathematicians than computer scientists and physicists.

I haven't attended any crypto conferences but, I do work a bit with high school STEM programs and I can tell you.. higher ratio of male to female, BUT, those female students are far more interested in the math / crypto fields than the males (which leads me to believe they will stick to it career wise vs the male students. So it's not too surprising your observations.

In Spain it is about 50-60%: http://www.rsme.es/comis/mujmat/estadisticas/facultades.htm

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

I hesitate to hold up mathematics as a good example. There are an encouraging number of female majors but further down the pipeline the numbers get much worse. For tenured faculty positions the latest number [1] I've seen is 14%.

[1] http://www.ams.org/profession/data/annual-survey/

>better than 50%

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...

That's a valid criticism. As you say I was conflating one thing with another (wider) thing that it's part of.

If women are represented in the rest of STEM but not the T - doesn't that challenge the narrative of "social conditioning" being the root cause?

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'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.

> doesn't that challenge the narrative of "social conditioning" being the root cause?

> 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?

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