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Comment by humanrebar | Hacker News Reader

The article is objecting to special pleading in a different direction. In other words, there's another train of thought:

1) Sexism exists

2) ???

3) Differences in representation are explainable by sexism

I think the original article was making a more nuanced argument allowing for an interconnected set of factors explaining the gender imbalance.

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For differences in representation to be explainable by something other than sexism --- which has been rampant in other fields, in particular medicine and law, in the past and then enduringly corrected --- you'd need to establish either that CS is somehow fundamentally different from every other hard science, virtually all of which see better (usually: much better) gender parity than CS does.

In other words: you'll need to demonstrate either that it's somehow harder to write the 900th instance of the same SQL query than it is to understand supersingular curve isogenies, or that somehow we've acculturated people to believe it's OK for women to nerd out about supersingular curve isogenies but not about SQL queries.

Neither argument makes any sense. Virtually all of what software developers do, even the hyperqualified developers working at Google, is less intellectually challenging than real hard science work, and if anything it's become far more socially acceptable to work in computer fields than to be a hard scientist.

We're in Occam's Razor country here, so the charge that concern over sexism is itself "special pleading" isn't going to stick.

> CS is somehow fundamentally different from every other hard science,

Well the obvious difference is that CS is not a science at all. It's really more akin to engineering, which AFAIK has a similar gender imbalance.

Is Math is a science?

Much of CS is more similar to economics, accounting, statistics etc. than engineering. Making a statistical model is generally much closer to CS than making the hull for a boat.

Yes, and you can see the "pleading" get more and more "special" as people, confronted with the numerical evidence, make more and more elaborate excuses for how software is different from other sciences. "It's like Lego", they'll say, "and boys play with Lego more than girls". Well, isn't that Just So?

75% of Bachelors degrees in Psychology are awarded to women, and almost 70% of active working Psychologists are female. Does it follow that Psychology is sexist against men?

Is is possible that two things are true? That (1) there is sexism in tech that must be addressed, and (2) even if women felt welcome in tech, the composition of tech could be <50% women?

You're just waiting for someone to roll out this trope. The answer is: yes, it's problematic that there are so few male psychologists, just as it is extremely problematic that there are so few male nurses.

Why is it problematic? Why does every field of endeavor have to be exactly 50/50? I'm honestly asking, because I don't believe that at all.

In the case of nursing, which is the most popular incarnation of the trope, what it also means is that our first line of health care in the United States are doctors, who are expensive and scarce. "Nurses", who really ought to be called "Associate Doctors" or something similar, do a far better job at handling that job. But the (gendered!) lower status of "nursing" both keeps us from expanding the corps of Nurses-Practitioners as far as we could, and also retards acceptance of NP's as an alternative to full MDs for routine care.

Your labeling of my argument as a "trope" is unnecessary and dismissive. If we are talking tropes, pretty much nothing is more trope-y right now than the cycle of outrage and virtue signaling that is sure to follow any push-back against the current orthodoxy of social justice. It's so predictable you can set your watch to it (witness: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/08/06...). So please, spare me the attitude.

I can believe that a switch to NP's as the go-to for routine care might be a good idea. But even if that is the case, you're making a very different argument here. I wonder if you notice the difference. You're arguing that more men in nursing might be beneficial for customers, not that men are being kept out of nursing by sexism.

I believe the same is probably true of tech (that more women in tech is better for customers), if for no other reason than something like half of customers are women.

But these two arguments are very different in their moral implications. When you argue that sexism is keeping women out of tech, this is fuel for the outrage machine of moral indignation, like the Washington Post article above. It is evidence that he industry is wronging its female employees and potential female employees. It is cause to criticize the industry as sick and oppressive (which it certainly is in some cases, most notably Uber).

So I think that this criticism is well warranted in many cases. The question is: where are the goalposts? Is the industry sick and oppressive towards women until it hits 50% representation? I don't think that's a fair expectation.

You asked a question. I answered it directly and civilly. You responded with a bunch of slurs. If you're wondering why the discussion stopped here, now you know.

That's not accurate at all. You took a dismissive tone with me right off the bat, and labeled my good-faith argument as a "trope", twice. Also, my "slurs" were directed at a Washington Post article, not at you. Exit the discussion if you like, but I don't think you get to plead the moral high ground on this.

> The question is: where are the goalposts? Is the industry sick and oppressive towards women until it hits 50% representation? I don't think that's a fair expectation.

It's hard to find a benign reason why the percentage of women CS majors would halve in the last 30 years while the profession as such has become more attractive.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

One possible benign reason: as society has gotten more free and open to women's choices, their preferences have been revealed. (Note that this also may explain why there are more female computer programmers in Iran than in, say, Finland. Women are more free to do what they want to do in Finland.)

Now, look, this explanation may be wrong, but, no, it's not hard to imagine alternate explanations. Nice and neat conclusions in the social sciences are hard to come by. Anybody in this thread claiming that they know exactly which explanations are the right ones is full of shit.

I don't agree that this is a benign reason in itself. Regardless if you say that women don't want to be programmers now or that women never wanted to be programmers, you have to find a good reason why they don't want to. Because women have no problem sitting in front of computers in economics, so why do they in software?

I don't think it is hard to find a good reason why someone wouldn't go into nursing (even if this wouldn't disprove sexism in nursing). It has barriers to entry by requiring formal education, which can be competitive. The working conditions are somewhat difficult having to work irregular hours and be exposed to emotional stress as in seeing people dying. At the same time it still relatively low status, not necessarily well paid and has limited career prospects.

Of course you can argue that this shouldn't be the case. That the profession should help people dealing with stress and have good working conditions etc. Still it much harder to imagine these sort of "hard" reasons, negative things that are inherent to the profession, when it comes to programming.

> ...other fields, in particular medicine and law

Women were literally not allowed to be doctors or lawyers, either by law or by certification boards. Programming has never been a field requiring certification.

There was persistent and powerful bias against women in medicine and the law long after women were officially allowed into the field. The fields themselves did things to correct these problems.

At least in law that's not true. There were licensed women lawyers long before it became common for women to be in the profession.

I was referring to when women were disallowed from law schools or bar associations. But there's a bit of nuance to the history of it. Women have been in court in different ways for a long time.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/awlaw3/women_lawyers.htm...

Women were allowed into the bar long before hiring them was routine. The New York bar admitted its first women in 1886. But it was in the 1970s (as a result of a class action lawsuit) that firms were forced to routinely hire women attorneys. Today, half of associates in large law firms are women. That's the legacy of affirmative action programs. The change turned out to be self-sustaining, even after the programs were removed.

My point was that the history of the tech sector and the history of the legal profession are not similar. Hopefully that's very clear at this point.

And his argument is that in this one sense they are, except that computing professions haven't yet taken the corrective steps medicine and the law have. The evidence seems to strongly support his argument.

Ok, we're in presence of solid research finding a) similar sex differences in toy preferences in monkeys as in human children, and b) sex differences visible within 2 days after birth (references here : https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...)

As you justly said, we're in Occam's razor country. So, do you think the 2 observations above are more easily explained by socialization, or biology ?

So basically here's what I see:

One side points out that gender parity is overwhelmingly better in other STEM fields, that in modern science those fields are all themselves largely defined by software and technology, that there's a clear history of women being excluded from other professions, and that those professions later and enduringly corrected those problems, and that gender parity in CS has sharply decreased over time.

The other side has something to say about monkeys.

Citations much needed for your first point, please. What I see is a list of male and female dominated fields which is a near perfect fit for what theory would predict.

I'm sorry you feel the need to trivialize my point about monkeys. Unfortunately, evidence is going to keep rubbing you the wrong way, you're going to love this new thread :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14942022

“At the time, it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts and mistakes in the research, and bias and prejudice. ... After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles … I changed my mind.”

Why? There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys.

Halpern and others have cataloged plenty of human behavioral differences. “These findings have all been replicated,” she says. "

This is a whole lot of words all of which are derived from monkey studies. I think it sounds like I'm being snarky when I say that, but, no, I'm not: literally, this is an attempt to reason the 82/18% CS split from the behaviors of monkeys.

You understand, right, that my side of this argument doesn't have to predict any part of human society from the behavior of monkeys? That all my argument requires me to be able to do is count?

The whole reason monkeys even enter the picture is because the society currently unfairly favors a hypothesis that it's all due to socialization, and not at all due to biology. Any study that attempts to show biological aspects only results in the supposed socialization event resulting in the difference being pushed earlier in the development.

The studies showing that female infants are more interested in looking at pictures of faces, while male infants are more interested in looking at pictures of mechanical toys wasn't enough, so researchers are one upping and studying monkeys. It does not help though, I heard from someone saying this in good faith that the sex differences in toy preferences in monkeys are due to societal norms in monkey groups.

At this point I'm seriously starting to consider the socialization hypothesis (which is obviously true to some degree, i.e. socialization plays a huge role in the observed sex differences) to be unscientific, that is, unfalsifiable.

These people never want to acknowledge the fact that programming used to be near-universally "women's work", right up until dudes decided it was cool and stole it from us. CS admissions used to be more than 40% women!

[flagged]

Would you please post civilly and substantively or not at all?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And? How do you get from the existence of those differences to observed differences in representation? That's a huge conceptual leap.

I feel you are misrepresenting the male/female balance of various disciplines.

Here are male/female distributions of bachelor degrees across many majors. Few of these sit right at 50%:

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

Are you arguing that every field that doesn't sit right at 50% is sexist against the underrepresented gender?

(I don't dispute that sexism in tech exists. I just dispute the expectation that representation will always be equal absent sexism.)

So you reasoning is going like this:

1. There is problem X

2. Possible cause of problem X is the reason Y

3. In fields where we are sure reason Y is rampant, we have successfully solved problem X by attacking instances of Y

4. In the field F, we have had no comparable success doing the same, despite all efforts.

5. Therefore, it is obvious that reason Y is much worse in F than everywhere and we should double and triple and quintuple our efforts there, until there is success. Since we reached success in other fields, it is stupid to assume we can't do the same here.

Do you see a problem with this chain of thought? If not, let me apply this logic to another model:

1. Cough is frequently caused by bacterial infections.

2. Antibiotics treat bacterial infections with much success in many cases

3. In patient P, antibiotics did not lead to any improvement of his cough.

4. Obviously, we need to double, triple and quintuple antibiotics doses until P is finally healed.

I hope you realize here that maybe P has a viral infection instead, or maybe he needs to stop smoking, or maybe he has another one of the hundred of causes of cough there could be.

>you'll need to demonstrate either that it's somehow harder to write the 900th instance of the same SQL query than it is to understand supersingular curve isogenies,

What you mean by "harder"? Is it harder to lift 600lbs than to give birth to a baby? Why do you assume that the question is about "harder" and not, for example, "more pleasurable" or "more intellectually satisfying"? Maybe SQL queries just bore prospective biologists to tears?

BTW, among composers the gender balance is even worse. Is it harder to write a symphony than to decode human genome? What metrics would you use to compare them?

Maybe instead treating everything as a nail we should try and consider some alternative hypotheses than "CS and musicians hate women"? It might be more efficient than force-feeding antibiotics to somebody who does't have bacterial infection.

by the way, not sure if you are correct about composers. You are definitely correct about composers who are featured and given public prizes. In music school, there seemed to be an equal number of women composition students. All the composing professors were men, with one or two exceptions in certain places in the United States. The decision-makers were always men, ultimately. But that is changing today, just like it is slowly changing with conductors. The rank and file had to show it in great numbers first. Mozart's sister was by all accounts a better pianist and violinist than her brother and an exceptional composer. Still she was shoved into manual labor while he was promoted. Clara Schumann may have written some of Schumann's stuff. I do sometimes wonder about Nabokov "not being able to type" and Vera's role in "his" writing. There are countless stories like this in the arts, with the works showing suspicious authorship. It would be interesting to mount a probing investigation into these matter to mine the real data, don't you think?

Writing the 900th SQL query is not hard science, it's engineering. And every engineering discipline, to my knowledge, has a large gender gap in participation. So, it is not necessary to "establish either that CS is somehow fundamentally different from every other hard science".

As I've pointed out before, that shortcut doesn't work.

If we just look at the higher level computer science your jobs, then again we will see that in the most comparable field, mathematics, women underparticiate something like 30-70.

If we ignore all that and pretend working with computers is uniquely bad for women judged against comparable careers, can we start calling out the enablers yet?

Well, bad news, there's another hurdle to jump, which is that female participation in computing is inversely related to a country's ranking on gender equality tables. I've yet to see that stubborn fact integrated successfully into the argument. It is mostly just ignored.

And that's off the top of my head. There are probably more. It's a complicated question to answer. So you must demonstrate at least familiarity with the obvious hurdles before questioning the moral worth of the people who disagree with you.

You know that many professors don't actually do a lot of the nitty-gritty work, don't you? They farm that out to their grad students. So in theory all someone has to do is get a PhD and get hired as an academic.

What's worrying is I know a couple PhDs - in STEM - that were granted when they probably shouldn't have been. One lacked any originality, and the other was basically incomprehensible.

You can isolate sexism by taking action to remove it. Then you can measure the change. Then you will have the answer to ???.

You can not remove the biological factors. So they're a dead end.

Too me, it sounds more like people claim we have nowadays removed sexism, that Google has none, and others disagree, that they are still there, while not as strongly maybe, and until they are fully addressed, we can't tell if the system is fair to biology or not.

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