Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences
slatestarcodex.com
slatestarcodex.com
If any chance were to be made, the least that I would hope for is that people stop responding to every argument with nothing but hatred. Just pure, unfiltered, hatred. It's very difficult nowadays to find communities, or even individuals, who are good at this.
Probably better just to read the entire site, some really amazing posts there.
In fact, you should read all posts in that blog (only joking a little here). I am saying this as a person who disagrees with Scott on many political views. If everybody approached to controversial topics the same way as he does, Internet would be the best place ever for political discussions.
Given as the alternative is "punch the Nazis!" from one side and "lol libtards are nutz, praise kek" from the other, I'd rather take a gentle mocking now at then. Even if I disagree from time to time. Scott is not ideal, maybe, but definitely in the top 10%. Maybe even 1%, but I don't read enough to claim that.
Also, I don't see much mocking going on there, could you give a couple examples, maybe my understanding of mocking is different?
> without sufficiently backing up his case.
There's plenty of links in the article. Which claim do you think is not backed?
It's such a superficial appraisal of the reality, it's insulting that he then mocks people who think there may be systemic issues.
The reality is exactly as described, namely:
As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female.
These figures are accurate, as far as I can see. The only objection could be to the word "conquered", which sounds to me like an attempt to mine outrage out of nothing. The discussion is about why there's 51% of female law students (despite huge gap existing not so long before) but only 20% of CS students (despite having 40% 20 years ago). Clearly, there is something going on, and that's the interesting part, not discussing whether 51% of female students is "conquering".
> it's insulting that he then mocks people who think there may be systemic issues
I still had no examples of "mocking", but given the reality as described, there should be explanation why "systemic issues" exist in CS and engineering, but not in law, medicine, math, biology, etc. If the concept does not explain that, it is not fitting the facts, and as such can be dismissed.
Is there some collective blind spot here?
Let me spell it out. The reason that there is not a percentage of judges equal to the prevelance of women in the population, is due to systemic factors. Pretending those don't exist, so that you can mock people who think systemic issues apply elsewhere, as if the very thought of it amuses you, is bizarre.
What you mean by "natural state of things"? In nature, there are no judges at all :) I'm not sure what you understand by "natural" here.
> This is the highest heights that women can reach?
I don't see any reason why any specific figure would be "highest heights that women can reach" (excepting obvious cases of 100% :). Statistics doesn't work that way. Statistics shows what happened now. Why it happened is a different question - i.e. why female law students become female judges less than male law students. I personally have no idea and no opinion on this, I didn't research that question. But I think there's a very high probability there is nothing sacred in "30%" number.
> Or are you just ignoring the state of gender in the law, even as you present it as a success story, just as the original blog did?
I am not ignoring anything. The discussion was about the difference in student numbers. Which needs to be explained. The difference of post-education numbers needs to be explained too, certainly, but to be workable, the hypothesis has to explain both (actually, all) facts. That's the whole point - if we have a mismatch between law and CS students, we need to account for it or invalidate or hypothesis if it does not. It is pointless to switch the discussion to other point if we aren't done with this one. You can't reach parity in CS employment starting with 20% of CS students. Unless of course one wants to cause massive unemployment and discrimination against male graduates, which I believe nobody is considering.
> The reason that there is not a percentage of judges equal to the prevelance of women in the population, is due to systemic factors.
What is "systemic factors"? It sounds like placeholder that could mean anything. How can I check why "systemic factors" influence judges but not pediatricians? Why they influence CS students but not psychology students? Engineers but not mathematicians or veterinarians?
> Pretending those don't exist
I can't pretend those don't exist because I have no idea what "systemic factors" are. A definition would be nice. Maybe I agree with you 100% that they exist - I just don't know you call them "systemic factors".
> so that you can mock people who think systemic issues apply elsewhere,
Since I asked to give examples of "mocking" twice and none followed, I conclude that this claim is false, and respectfully ask to stop mentioning any "mocking" until example would be produced. I didn't "mock" anybody, neither did Scott, as becomes clear from absence of examples despite repeated asking for them.
Since there are other possible explanations, like men and women having different interests and drives and following different paths in pursuing those interests, there's no tight logical proof dictating that "systemic factors" ipso facto is definitely the cause of the outcome we are evaluating because there are no other possible causes.
There are other possible causes, so given this reality of multiple possible causes, what evidence would suffice to convince you that "systemic factors," aren't the primary cause?
If we want to stick with the premise that "systemic factors" are a problem, what are they specifically? How are the remedied specifically?
If it turns out after following these prescriptions there is still a divergence in the sex ratio, then what? Should we basically just force some number of women to work as judges so that the sex ratio in the field is equal?
There are far more occupations than judge that have a divergent sex ratio, should we work tirelessly to equalize sex ratios for all occupations where this is the case?
If your understanding of "systemic factors" basically means the system of sexual evolutionary history extending over millions of years, then we can agree.
If there was no sexism, no racism, no *ism, no history and no cultural predisposition towards anything whatsoever, it could still be that only 30% of all leaders would be women, simply because women would be found to be less biologically predisposed to wanting to be the leader and leadership would go to the best suited person that wants to do the job.
Some women argue that in that situation 70% of all leaders would be women, because everyone would recognize them as better leaders and would ask them to lead. I recognize and acknowledge that as a fully valid option. That could also be. The point is that we simply do not know.
[1] 'all identities in ratio of their self-identification'
In the UK feminists are whinging that "only" around an eighth of senior lawyers are women and "only" around a quarter of judges are female.
That in itself should be lighting up a bulb in a logical brain, but the fact is that when judges were going to university only about 1% of law students were female here, and most of those dropped out to raise families, and yet an eighth of "senior" barristers (QCs) are women and a whole quarter of judges are?!
Are they making women judges straight out of law school?!?!?!
> Might girls be worried not by stereotypes about computers themselves, but by stereotypes that girls are bad at math and so can’t succeed in the math-heavy world of computer science? No. About 45% of college math majors are women, compared to (again) only 20% of computer science majors. Undergraduate mathematics itself more-or-less shows gender parity. This can’t be an explanation for the computer results.
Later, he introduces the thing-people interest spectrum and makes a case that it’s inherent. He then breaks down the gender gap in various medical fields in way that’s suggestive that the differences are due to the thing-people idea.
But, how does that apply math vs engineering or math vs. programming? Or for that matter, programming vs. chemical engineering or electrical engineering vs. chemical engineering? During undergrad, my recollection was that there were proportionally fewer women in electrical engineering than in chemical engineering in the classes I saw, and some quick googling seems to bear this out. If math vs. engineering is a mystery that can't be explained by streotypes, it also appears to be a mystery that can't be explained by thing-people. Although I think it's a long stretch, maybe you can argue that computers are more "thing-like" than math, but I don't think you can really push that argument through to explain the relative ratios in CS, math, EE, CivE, AE, MSE, and ChemE? BTW, the reason I think it's a stretch is because you could also argue that computers are more "people-like" than math, so you could flip the arugment around if the ratios were reversed. For EE vs. ChemE, maybe EE rates are depressed because there's a lot of cross-over between EE and BME classwork and BME is arguably more people-like, so the would-be EEs go into BME, but if there's crossover, maybe that makes EE more BME-like and therefore more people-like. I don't think you can give an explanation that's much stronger than a just-so story for some other set of observed ratios.
Sure, you can pick a subset of fields where thing-people appears to explain the variance[1], but you can also pick a set of fields where it doesn’t appear to explain the variance. Scott seems to view a set of counter-examples as a knockdown argument against stereotypes. But then why doesn’t this other set of examples invalidate the thing-people explanation he argues for? Why can’t you apply the exact same line of reasoning he applied to stereotypes to thing-people?
This line of reasoning seems internally inconsistent to me. Am I missing something that would make this line of reasoning consistent?
One line of reasoning is that Scott is merely rebutting someone else's argument and that he therefore doesn't need to explain what's going on and he only needs to explain why the other explanation is wrong. But in that case, there isn't a need to bring up thing-people. It seems like it's been brought up because Scott believes thing-people has more explanatory power than sterotypes and Scott is making a positive argument about thing-people, not just knocking down someone else's argument.
[1] Even within the fields he picks, one example he gives is the rate at which women go pediatrics at a higher rate than any other specialization he lists other than ob/gyn. But why is the rate in pediatrics so different than in psychiatry? He argues that they're both "people" fields, which sounds reasonable. But there's one field is 25% male and the other is 43% male. That's almost the same as the math/engineering difference he cites earlier with the genders flipped. Is dealing with babies somehow more people-like or less thing-like than talking to adults? It's certainly a strong stereotype that women are more interested in babies than men, but this is cited as an example of the explanatory power of thing-people, not of the explanatory power of stereotypes.
It's purely anecdotal, but the two women math majors I personally know are high school math teachers, which would be more "people". Are math teachers enough to account for a 20% (engineering) to 45% (math) difference? Probably not, but I think it is more open ended in terms of what math majors end up doing vs engineering or computer science.
I find Scott's arguments persuasive though, and could easily be fitting my memory/interpretation/facts etc to work within other beliefs. Post hoc rationalizations like this are always tricky.
[1]: Anecdotally, foreign students have made up a larger percentage of the female mathematics (and physics) graduate students I've known than of the male math (and physics) graduate students I've known, though I have no idea if my experience normal, sample size is very small and biased, etc.
What are the relevant ratios you mean here? I found this data[0] on engineering degrees by gender. Here is the percentage of female graduates for each of the ones you mentioned:
14% - Computer Science
13% - Electrical Engineering
22% - Civil Engineering
14% - Aeronautical Engineering
13% - Mechanical Engineering
32% - Chemical Engineering
Other than Chemical, they're all in the same ballpark. My wife studied Chemical Engineering; I'll have to ask her if she had any thoughts about why it's a higher percentage female.
Interestingly, that same chart has two engineering disciplines that tower over the other two: Biomedical, and Environmental, which exactly squares with the hypothesis put forth by this blog post author.
[0] https://www.asee.org/papers-and-publications/publications/co...
If math vs. engineering is a mystery that can't be
explained by streotypes,
As for engineering: the variation within engineering disciplines is much smaller than the variation between engineering and other disciplines and since we already have a hard time explaining the large difference, let's not worry about the small differences. Perhaps chemical engineering is perceived to be about 'people' more often.
"As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female.
"And everyone says “Aha! I bet it’s because of negative stereotypes!”
"This makes no sense. There were negative stereotypes about everything! Somebody has to explain why the equal and greater negative stereotypes against women in law, medicine, etc were completely powerless, yet for some reason the negative stereotypes in engineering were the ones that took hold and prevented women from succeeding there."
Doctors and lawyers make for great television and movies, because of the drama involved and the ease of portraying it.
Pretty girls are also a requirement for entertainment, for <reasons>.
So many doctor and lawyer TV shows were cast with women in them.
And then many girls aspired to be doctors and lawyers, because they saw a viable path that way.
Also, secretaries and nurses worked close to doctors and lawyers and businessmen, tech was more isolated. Again, less bridge, less role model.
Culture > everything.
They weren't powerless; it took several class-action lawsuits and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints in the 70's to increase the number of women lawyers.[1] I've also heard, for example from some comments by 'rayiner here on HN, that law schools made deliberate changes to their admission policies
yet for some reason the negative stereotypes in engineering were the ones that took hold and prevented women from succeeding there
Maybe because tech, both industry and academia, hasn't made the same efforts that the legal profession did?
[1] http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... (p.14 ff)
The first women were admitted to Harvard Business School in 1963 [1], which is a couple of years after Yuri Gagarin first orbited the earth. The first women were admitted as undergraduates to Caltech in 1970 [2], which is a year after the first moon landing.
> As the feminist movement gradually took hold...
"Gradually" seems to be the right word.
I googled some stats on judges, I was correct that it lags student numbers (I say "lags" on the optimistic assumption that those students will eventually go on to be judges in similar quantities. Possibly a judge will release a 10 page manifesto about how the marxist left is forcing women to be judges when they're rather be baking cakes though, so maybe we shouldn't count our chickens until they've hatched):
in particular this infographic which points out that women have been 50% of the students for 2 decades now, but still only 36% of the profession, and only 30% of state judges.
http://gavelgap.org/assets/infographic-3-c78b5c8147005783a23...
So it seems my use of "lags" was over optimistic and student numbers aren't a great predictor, even after two decades.
Scott has a bad habit of setting up bad strawmen and doing literature reviews without talking to domain experts.
(Frankly the weakness of the arguments he's choosing to debunk make me doubt that he even engaged in this topic with good faith. If you think the opposing view point is summarized by ' "And everyone says “Aha! I bet it’s because of negative stereotypes!” ', then you're not serious about this conversation.)