Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Every time this subject gets brought up, I keep wondering why it seems to be nearly exclusive to the US; East Europe and Asia in particular, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14164600

I while ago, visited a Chinese software/hardware company and half if not more of the employees I saw were female. To my knowledge, there is essentially no explicit "we need more girls in tech" movement there.

View on HN

Yeh, US is pretty intense for social justice. I'd love to see a timeline and some kind of justification as to why it became such a strong force. I remember not even knowing what "social justice" mean't.

Like all the people's time and energy invested in social justice today...what would these same people have been investing their energy in before 2010s?

What I see is that people love being outraged, purpose-driven, and procrastination. And with social justice, while you're procrastinating, you can be outraged, and you can join a movement and gain a purpose.

Social media is probably to blame.

There is a claimed "Norwegian Gender Paradox", where in countries where there is freer choice of career and equal-opportunity for women, then jobs are increasingly split along traditional gender lines.

As an anecdotal data point, in Greece (where there is some, but not much gender pressure), lawyers are around 80% female. I'm not sure which way this skews in the US, or what it means, but I thought it was interesting enough to mention.

Education is also free regardless of socioeconomic status, and rich and poor students attend the same universities.

I am from India, where the representation of women in the tech field is pretty good. I don't know about any other countries, but at least here, for most of the middle/lower middle class families, "CS/EC engineering" is one of the only way to get a cushy job in a safe environment, that pays well. So a large part of the population regardless of the gender, is attracted to it. There's also the factor of major influence parents have in their children's education/future. I am willing to wager a good part of the people who came into IT field here, only because their parents pressured them to take up CS/EC engineering. Keep it in mind though that this only applies for electrical/computer science. The number of women in Civil/Mechanical engineering is abysmally low, probably because the work is physically strenuous.

I've noticed here is that the number of people who are genuinely interested in computers/programming is very less. A large part of the workforce (both male and female) only considers it as their job, it's not something they would do in their free time. This is kinda depressing because it's hard to find people here who are genuinely interested in computers. :/

I don't know how true this is, but maybe the tech field in US consists mostly of people who are actual geek/nerds (who happen to be males). So maybe to hire more women, instead of favoring them at the time of hiring, it's much more beneficial to foster interest in computers at a young age. Maybe work towards removing the bias people have that programming/computers is a "nerds" hobby, and people regardless of gender should be able to take it up without much stigma.

I wonder whether that is about to change. As an exchange student in Shanghai, I noticed a clear gender disparity in my CS classes at the undergraduate level. Interestingly, the effect was not visible for graduate students. I don't know whether it's a new development that hasn't had time to affect older students, or whether more women choose to spend more time in academia, or whether male students go abroad for graduate school more often.

The top comment in that thread has a hypothesis.

The explanation I heard was in poorer countries, women are more likely to choose careers by how well they pay, instead of how interested they are in the field.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger... seems to agree (ctrl+F 'Galkin')

Because their parents push them to academic and professional success. In America, parents generally tell their kids to follow their dreams and to ignore the money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com