Why Brilliant Girls Tend to Favor Non-STEM Careers
psychologytoday.com
psychologytoday.com
"A huge testosterone surge beginning in the eighth week will turn this unisex brain male by killing off some cells in the communication centers and growing more cells in the sex and aggression centers."
Since they are different at birth, we shouldn't be surprised that their interests are different, and accept that these differences contribute to varying populations of men and women in different professions.
Stamp out bias. Don't force a specific population distribution.
It is logically possible that the differences we observe in career distributions are more heavily influenced by other factors besides differences in brain chemistry.
That sexual dimorphism could in turn be caused by a different brain chemistry or by cultural values. From studies that look at different indigenous people, it seems universal that women select men based on a mans ability to gather resources, and men selects women based on their ability to raise and nurture a family. Inter-sex dominance hierarchy also follow those lines.
1. An article from Stanford Medicine: "Two minds: The cognitive differences between men and women" [1]. There was some interesting discussion of this on /r/science [2].
2. This month's issued of "Journal of Neuroscience Research" is on the topic "An Issue Whose Time Has Come: Sex/Gender Influences on Nervous System Function". Because of the importance of these issues, they have removed the paywall for this one issue. It is available here [3].
[1] http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-b...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6o6n8a/stanford_me...
[3] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jnr.v95.1-2/issue...
It sure looks a lot more like STEM than my "tech" job, which has more elements in common with what my aunt did as a secretary in the 70s than science.
In that sense, most of the programming work I did in the first decade of my career had more in common with the blue collar tradecraft that my father did than it did with anything anyone would consider to be a STEM career.
And you can substitute just about anything else for 'technical skill' in the above sentences and it will still read true
Then perhaps it is appropriate that at at least one company, Hughes Aircraft, the union that represents programmers is the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America.
That odd situation came about because a whole bunch of union carpenters worked on the Spruce Goose. After that project was shelved many of those carpenters went on to other jobs within the company, but kept the UBC as their representative. As Hughes expanded and also acquired other companies, UBC continued to represent them. In the '70s they made a big effort to organize the rest of the workers, and the result was the UBC ended up representing the majority of Hughes Aircraft workers even though almost no actual carpentry takes place there.
Health care is a very respectable field in and of itself
If you think it matters if nursing is 'part of STEM' you're falling for journo/blogger memes.
We should expose kids to a variety of productive fields. Many people I know were pushed down paths they weren't suited for because of nonsense like this. My aunt was caught up in a "We must get women in business!" thing in the 80s, and ended up spending a long time working for the airlines, which was just a job for her. She went to PT for an injury and discovered this field the never existed, went back to school and became a physical therapist at 50. It's a job she loves and is passionate about -- the only thing she liked about her old gig was helping people.
That's not to say it's anyone's "fault". But there's a difference between pushing and exposing. We're pushing as a society. I don't want my son to be an engineer because his dad expected him to me.
Then again, being good at math in high school as Wang et. al measures doesn't really translate to math in college, which is much more problem solving oriented than math in high school. That's something to keep in mind here, so the whole idea that they end up being spread more broadly and thus aren't concentrated in STEM as the socially dumb men are is a more convincing explanation, it really doesn't have to do with differences in ability, it's merely other factors, mainly which major they try first.
How interesting.
[0] http://www.cds.web.unc.edu/files/2014/10/not_lack_of_ability...
I didn't see it that way. I saw it as: There's a market of "mathy" and "verby" jobs. Men can mainly only be good at the mathy ones. Women can be good at both. So women end up at the verby jobs simply by nature of market forces.
A | B
--------------
Men |1 | 2
Women |2 | 2
This obviously is a toy model, but it shows that even very simple assumptions can lead to very odd outcomes.
In many real-world cases you get diminishing returns for more production. Let's say it's a square-root return, so 16 units of production in "A" is twice as good as 4 units of production in "A" (if you do the math with other diminishing returns like logarithmic you see a similar outcome).
Consider a population of 8 men and 8 women. If they are equally distributed between jobs there are 12 units of production of "A" and 16 units of production of "B" for a total value of sqrt(12)+sqrt(16) ~=7.5 units of total value.
If instead all women work in "A" jobs and all men work in "B" jobs, then you will see 16 units of production in each, for a total value of 8 units.
The most pessimal would be the reverse of that and it would generate ~6.8 units of value.
That quote is straight from the article. I think the author is arguing that everyone should be given a chance to develop their interests and abilities, rather than forcing anyone's interest to match a preconceived notion of the desired population outcome.
0: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
It turns out that the more egalitarian the society, the more the genders self-segregate.
The easy explanation is that once outside pressures reduce, innate differences have a much greater chance to exert themselves.
No. You are supposed to believe that discrimination against women in medical fields was no higher than what existed in society unlike in fields like Finance and Tech where there always was and continue to be a disproportionately higher degree of bias
Surely tech companies now can't be less welcoming to women than the medical field in the 1950s-1980s? Particularly since this is an issue that everyone in tech is now consciously aware of.
http://www.denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm
I def recommend Baumeister and Tice to HN.
2. Boys were more than twice as likely as girls to have strong math skills but not strong verbal skills.
No surprise on the 1st; I recognize that women can do/be anything they want in this world. But I wonder if the 2nd stat is explained mostly by the fact that MORE men are strong at math (not being a chauvinist pig; just running with stereotype)...or are the two genders equally represented among Math Elite and girls twice as likely to have strong verbal skills?
Going straight by the numbers, it seems like the former. Assuming you define math elite to be PhDs holders, this AMS study from 2005 [1] (a little old, I know), says that 30% of math PhDs are awarded to women. Societal factors could also be at play, obviously.
[1] http://www.ams.org/profession/data/cbms-survey/chapter4.pdf
Risks as defined then are a necessity for living a unique life. It isn't always the most desirable thing as the majority of people would rather follow a crowd, but it does often have the most disproportionate rewards for work input.
I don't know if it's biological or cultural, but girls/women often require a much higher sense of safety before being willing to do risky things. There is also a much higher "cost" from society from doing things that look foolish. This results in less of a desire to learn, especially as you approach the cutting edge where the failure rate rapidly rises and civilized structures start deteriorating. (the social structure that works best in this "wild" is the frat bro/alpha male structure)
Being born beautiful is actually a weakness due to an addiction to strength in this regard. A corresponding male strength is academic excellence. Both these strengths become weaknesses because of lack of experience dealing with setbacks and shocks as well as the accumulated dry tinder that was never periodically cleared via said setbacks. (old people are stubborn because they have too much tinder to risk in a fire/refactor) I use academics as the male example as it creates a drives to validate the prior excellence often forcing them along paths into finance or other areas with high monetary compensation. Selling soul for money, taking no risk by not being true to yourself.
Thus addiction to strength creates risk averseness and stagnates growth. Girls are often shielded from reality and also have an escape route of marriage. (men don't, an extreme example of an alternative for them for meaning is being a suicide bomber)
Almost all social structures in the world heavily cause girls to become addicted to social validation. (Note that individual validation can be "proved" by money while social validation cannot. Objective and subjective tokens of value) The stereotype of "ugly" girls in STEM is a result of being beautiful increasing the chance of this addiction. (The stereotype of smart/beautiful but crazy may have origins in life-changing experiences that shatters the status addiction but did collateral damage. )
Safety is a necessity for learning which necessarily involves mistakes. However the minimum safety level can be vastly lowered by encouraging a dismissive attitude towards social validation.
For example, you talk about men and academic excellence being such an example. But isn't it the case that women in general excel academically more than men? Why do you not point out/why do we not obeserve such a pattern, then?
The article's main problem is it's trying to attack a very specific problem, which is actually part of broader trends in human behavior and culture. It doesn't address that at all.
The author claims "gap != discrimination", which is true in basic definition and theory. But if you look at all the other studies that show things like hiring discrimination, discrimination getting into a good school, discrimination based on where/how one grows up, cultural discrimination, etc, gaps immediately form and cause a ripple effect.
That there are about as many black men as white women (or less) in a given tech field is one example of this. Pick any other discriminated-against minority and you see the same, except when hiring from overseas (economic benefit) or hiring someone with a preferred social stereotype.
If the author's argument is that women simply prefer not to go into this field due to some weird connection between math and speech, then you have to ask why the connection? Is it due to "biology", or social conditioning, or the wariness of sexual harassment in a male-dominated field, or the low pay, or a combination of these things? This article doesn't attempt to look at those, and its limited view of the subject leaves it running into the same correlation-is-causation conclusions it laments.
So you really think that the huge over-representation of Indians and East Asians (relative to population) in STEM fields is just because people are hiring a preferred social stereotype? Could in perhaps be that they're actually more qualified?
That's my main problem with arguments that all numeric disparities are because on discrimination. I've never seen any convincing argument or study that Indians and East Asians suffer less discrimination than, say, Hispanics, but as they are no longer "under-represented minorities", they no longer "count" toward diversity goals.
People who self-identify as Asian may be the best qualified for the position, but it doesn't hurt that it also reinforces their social stereotype. Asians are actually significantly over-represented in STEM, and make more money than any other group.
They also tend to live in the most expensive cities in the country. A lot more Asians live in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles than in other regions that cost less and pay less. I'm not sure if that gets factored into the statistics.
Most importantly, you're the victim of selection bias: Only the most-qualified among about 4.4 billion people in Asia end up working IT in the US where you can observe them.
Why do they work mostly in STEM/IT? Because their home countries emphasise certain skills in school, because it's much easier to work in IT when you're from a foreign country than law, journalism, or business. And because these things often create feedback loops, because some people return and start teaching, or their stories become examples for others to follow.
Compare, for example, the success of Cubans in Baseball.
I'm not disagreeing with you. You are saying that there are cultural reasons for why certain groups are over-represented in STEM fields, and that's my point: is quite possible that these cultural reasons are a much larger factor than bias and discrimination.
But here's the crux of his argument that is never answered honestly:
>Is it possible that something other than discrimination is a main source of gender gaps in STEM?
And I think it's clear that the answer is YES! So what are we talking about here?
The problem with your line of thinking is you are looking at the outcome as if it was evidence. The unspoken assumption is that all humans are the same, or if not, then you're assuming that "skills" are distributed the same way across all populations.
There's no reason to think this, and there's lots of evidence to the contrary, but it doesn't get any attention because anyone who talks about quickly gets labeled as racist. Which might be true (that scientists and authors who talk about IQ differences across population could be racists), but doesn't make the facts less true.
If you believe there's a "lot of evidence to the contrary", you should take it up with Turkheimer and Nisbett, both of whom have put more time into studying these issues than any combination of HN commenters have, combined.
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-...
I've seen this vox article before and I think it's a joke.
EDIT:
To clarify my GP comment, the point is that there are very good reasons to conclude that IQ is not distributed equally across different populations, and so if there are different percentages of developers from X or Y populations it should not be seen as evidence of discrimination because it could very well be the result of IQ distribution.
Also, it should not be necessary to point out since it should have no bearing on the discusion, but I am not white (at least not of European ancestry).
Incidentally: Charles Murray is not a major figure in this field. Turkheimer and Nisbett are professors at major research universities both of whom have spent their careers studying these specific scientific questions. Murray is, for lack of a charitable description, a pundit. Obviously, he's well known for _The Bell Curve_, but we tend to forget that his co-author (now deceased) was the scientific authority behind that book.
Reevaluate.
But even the vox article does not dispute that IQ is not distributed equally across populations.
> Race differences in average IQ score. People who identify as black or Hispanic in the US and elsewhere on average obtain lower IQ scores than people who identify as white or Asian. That is simply a fact, and stating it plainly offers no support in itself for a biological interpretation of the difference.
The phrasing is funny "identify as black", ok, but they cannot dispute the facts.
Now, given that IQ is distributed in different ways, why, just why, should we interpret this fact: "there are fewer black people in STEM" as evidence of discrimination?
If you had cited any authority here, I guess my argument would come closer to the caricature you provided. But you haven't. Instead, you briefly tried to pretend that my authority was a random Vox article, written by a random Vox pundit, which you are now clear that it is not.
Just when you get in a good zone, there's some developer meeting or someone needs some information from you. Workdays spent lonely in front of the computer are rare and almost like vacation :-D
PS. I'm a woman, but I think this affects both genders, as it's more of a personality factor (my husband is the same).
Maybe some things are stupid to do, and men tend to get tricked into them more often. Maybe moderately high pay is a trick to get people to do draining, unhealthy jobs, and men are more likely to succumb to the temptation.
It's not a good idea to become an underwater welder, but you do get paid a lot. It all goes into medical care, but you do get paid a lot.
For whatever reason (and while it pains me to generalize), the high-risk, high-reward jobs are all almost all men. Any woman who feels a calling should of course go for it, and no one should stand in that person's way, but I wouldn't ever expect, say, a 50/50 perfect proportion of gender participants at some future date (as this article indicates, this is a dysfunctional expectation)
Back when bitcoin was only $10 a pop, a bunch of guys in our programming shop wanted to get involved. 100% of their wives nixed it. 100%. I was the only single guy, so I put in some money... Crazy at the time? Perhaps. Crazy now? Not with 20/20 hindsight...
It is a fact.
There is an evolutionary reason for men to take more risks and have a desire to engage in hunting behaviours. We just have to be conscious of that and as per one of the top commenter's remarks not "fall" for something irrational or be driven by societal pressures.
"What on first inspection seemed like a sex difference was actually a difference between white males and everyone else."
http://nautil.us/issue/48/chaos/the-hidden-sexism-of-how-we-...
> Interestingly, a recent study conducted in the more socially egalitarian and gender-equal Sweden failed to find the “white male effect.” This national survey of nearly 1,500 households found that, all else being equal—and in stark contrast with the U.S. data—Swedish men and women had very similar perceptions of lifestyle, environmental, technological, health, and social risks
However, our societies are considerably more complex than that one fact; it's a mistake to use it to explain the fundamentals of everything our society does.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
https://www.google.com/search?q=risk+taking+and+testosterone...
http://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-mens...
The article even generously suggests that many women are adept in BOTH math and verbal, but end up in more verbal jobs because men are typically NOT adept in both, so all the high-math low-verbal guys end up doing mathy jobs, and all the high-math high-verbal women do verbal/people jobs, because the mathy jobs are all the guys can do, while the women can do either (but take the non-mathy jobs due to market effects).
Software is kinda mathy, I guess.
Food for thought: Software has a bizarre curve if you look at it from a math/verbal skills perspective. For what could very well be the first 10-15 years of a software career, software is very math-y. Then, if you want to continue to grow, it takes a very verbal turn. If you want to continue to grow in software leadership and capabilities, you need to be able to express yourself, convince others, navigate politics, and figure out how to translate these issues into the code you structure and write. It isn't a sudden transition and some may transition earlier than 10 years, but it's an interesting way of looking at things.
(Note I'm not talking "management", but continuing up an engineering path.)
A lot of engineering looks like that. If software has any unique characteristics it is how far a single math-oriented programmer can get due to our unique abilities to pull down huge libraries with incredible functionality without having to work with anyone to do it.
Again, just food for thought with no particular argument in sight here.
Right. Even if you are unable or unwilling to play those political games, you can stop at the senior SWE or equivalent level at Google/Facebook/Amazon and still have an income that's well into the top decile. I'm not aware of any other field where you can get that kind of compensation without management or leadership responsibilities.
What is high-risk for women in STEM is the risk of having to work with/for sexist idiots.
Betting on bitcoin is as risky as becoming choosing to be a starving artist with the chance that one day you'll be the next James Pollock, and as Su. et. al pointed out (cited in article), women are the majority in creative fields. STEM requires a different explanation than "high risk" because it isn't.
They hold more power deciding which job gets paid how much, which group of people gets a parade on July 4th (soldiers, not nurses), and which profession to glorify in the next credit card commercial.
So, yes: our impression of a job's prestige is formed by culture, and that culture certainly was–and largely still is–dominated by men. And yes, of course that culture has the same impact on mens' and women's views. They are people, you know?
How does that do anything to patriarchy except by reinforcing it?
If those who are not in the roles patriarchy has defined as desirable, and are in the roles patriarchy has defined as less desirable, by doubling down on the patriarchy's preferences, they have rigged the game and declared themselves the losers. How can equality be achieved?
Verbal brilliance of women is also a purely biological thing. Their brain is wired for it.
These things influence and create inequalities.
There's no discrimination in modern western world capable enough and encompassing to create that kind of impact.
It might be that exactly discrimination (as is done in Iran) influences women to pursue STEM fields (and they do) but in the free world women go for their own desires.
And yet there are plenty of successful male writers. I don't know the demographic breakdown, but they might even be in the majority?
I think we can say there are plenty of successful male stand up comedians.
It is more related to the issue.
And yet the more verbally competent the woman, more she's inclined to go away from stem.
More women played the piano during the era when blues was in the making, yet it was mostly african-american men that pushed the genre, and women inventing no genres at all.
There's obviously an inherent biological drive making men do stuff large scale, and women do stuff in their small circles.
It is one of those careers where you either make it before you are 25 or you are replaced.
STEM fields are extremely ageist where at 25 and onwards you have to look over your shoulder and watch out for the next 16 year old taking your job.
STEM for this reason is stressful and non sustainable.
Being in STEM and much older than 25 I feel that perhaps I made the wrong decision getting into STEM. Perhaps a people orientated career would have lasted me longer. I haven't been replaced yet, but can feel it coming...
Also, being replaced by a younger person is a function of the utility you provide vs. your cost. I work with plenty of "older" people, and some of them definitely get replaced. If you're not delivering, it doesn't make sense to keep you around if the budget is limited. "Older" specialists don't necessarily get replaced, as it's silly to imagine a kid can substitute specialized experience, but rather the development strategy pivots to something deliverable with the resources at hand for the given timeframe.
Edit: I probably fall into your "older" category...
Unless you are some prodigy who started college early, you won't even have a PhD until you are 27 and many STEM fields tend to require multiple years of post-doc work before you can get a professorship due to the number of qualified candidates (unless you are working under a different definition of making it).
I see that as a plus for STEM jobs and more generally their sectors as it naturally rewards meritocracy and progress.
If you think you can't keep up with new grads, despite years more experience, I'm going to venture a guess that you don't find technology interesting enough to learn on its own.
That's a funny way of saying "in-group beliefs and identity."
At some point we will discard this nonsense notion of meritocracy. If one exists, it's certainly not in tech.
I never once had to look over my shoulder for fear of younger fresher talent.
Quite the opposite, in my experience, the younger and fresher talent tends to be less valuable.
The level of respect awarded to intermediate level developers is several times that which is awarded to junior developers. Junior developers are practically treated like replaceable labor.
* I took a few extra years to finish high school and university, so when I graduated I was already 25.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BE476MvO_g&feature=youtu.be...
If this doesn't rock you down to your toes, you are not an engineer. At least not a born engineer.
If you get a chance, go see an air show like the one at Paine Field where they fly P-51s, etc. The engine starts are the best part. No video can ever do it justice. Hanging out at Top Fuel drag racing events is also major fun.
But for sheer amazing operation at the very edge of what we know how to do, I like [1]. There's just something about running !% short of destruction as normal. That's engineering!
(The levels of flexing and vibration would have been calculated in advance. But it's different seeing it.)