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Comment by EduardoBautista | Hacker News Reader

Convincing women to focus on a career in STEM is telling them that their choices for careers in nursing, teaching, and any other career dominated by women are wrong choices. I don't believe that, they are essential to our society and are arguably more important than helping create better ads at Google and Facebook.

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That's not the argument being made by advocates for women in STEM. The mission (I among one of many adherents to it) is to open pathways in STEM up to women who are choosing not to pursue it because of socioeconomic blockers.

Blockers such as this guy.

Anyway, the real position being pushed by Women in Tech/STEM movements is that anyone can/should be free to work in any career and not expect e.g. pay differences and biases against them solely because of gender. Male nurses are an example in the reverse direction.

The more free the genders are, the more they tend to polarise on certain careers.

Since they tend to pursue what they prefer.

I'm all for having no blockers for people choosing what careers they want. However people will move towards there preferences, and there preferences will be set either by nature or culture.

What evidence do we have of that?

> there preferences will be set either by nature or culture.

Culture is something that hiring practices can change.

The thing being that people are everything but free and equal in our societies today.

"The more free the genders are, the more they tend to polarise on certain careers."

Yeah, just calling a Scandinavian nation "free" says absolutely nothing about its particular societal pressures. Societal pressures which effect everyone whether they are egosyntonic or distonic to the individuals caught up in the society.

More evidence is needed to support this hypothesis.

I'm not sure biasing interviews towards certain genders is the way to fix that though.

Get more people apply, educate women about those options etc etc

If you think that any given woman would be dissuaded from pursuing a career in STEM by an essay that, using peer-reviewed scientific studies as supporting evidence, suggests that differences in interest levels across populations may partially but not totally explain why women as a population, not as individuals tend to choose STEM at a rate lower than men, aren't you helping advance the stereotype that women are delicate shrinking violets whose easily-hurt feelings keep getting in the way of their life goals?

> Blockers such as this guy.

Please elaborate on this. How is he blocking anyone?

Objectively these careers are less well paid.

We all have our opinions, but money is society’s way of prioritizing activities. And these jobs as essential as they should be, also get shittier shittier in average , as time goes on, which doesn’t help.

The median income for a pediatrician is ~170k vs the median income of software engineer at ~80k, but 75% of pediatricians are women.

So no, it's not only the "less well-paid" jobs. And even if it were, a lot of the lowest paid jobs are almost entirely men, like garbage collectors and construction workers.

This is a ridiculously cherry-picked statistic. Pediatricians are the worst paid doctors. In fact, most of the specialties in which women are more common are lower paid:

https://wire.ama-assn.org/education/how-medical-specialties-...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2012/07/20/the-b...

I’m not familiar enough with the field, but from what I get scanning payscale.com:

- general physician: 60% women, 137k in average

- pediatricians: 80% women, 144k in average

- obstetricians/gynecologists: 70% women, 205k in average

- radiologist: 20% women, 300k in average

Basically, in the doctors field pediatrician or gynecologist are middle range salary. Nothing to sneeze at, but the more lucrative areas pay way more and are dominated by men. And honestly I don’t think the requirements for radiologist is so much harder than gynecologists, or is it ? (I am no radiologist, that’s just my impression)

Since there isn't much difference in required skill or credentials or prerequisites (let's assume there isn't) we are back to preferences. What do we observe? The top three are high-social-interaction, nurturing-type jobs, the bottom one is technology-heavy and more solitary.

So we are back at the point that the document made - differing preferences are a far more likely explanation than discrimination.

I don’t think there is much social interaction difference or technological investment difference between the jobs...but lets assume there is.

Wouldn’t it seem reasonable to you that a young single woman getting out of years of heavy training would want a shot at the 300k job instead of the 200k one ?

Even assuming she is not that interested in radiology, the gap is wide enough she could go the 300k way for a decade or so to amass FU money and just retire or move to a more fun but less paying job afterward (I personally know medical staff going this route and semi-retiring at 35)

I mean, people have preferences, but more than half of the woman in the medical course giving up on 100k of revenure just to have a “nurturing” job seems highly artificial to me. I would highly expect a dozens of other factors pushing them that way, instead of it just being pure personal preference.

The fact that those fields are undervalued (and often underpaid) is a huge part of this discussion that anyone who fights for diversity in tech is well aware of and has been saying long before this memo was released.

they are essential to our society and are arguably more important than helping create better ads

Then they should be more respected and be paid more. Until they are, asking people to go into them when better, easier jobs exist is patronizing.

Is your assertion that being a teacher or a nurse is easier than SWE?

read it again...the argument is the opposite.

And speaking for the OP, I would imagine 'easy' in this context likely includes many elements but is strongly influenced by physical demand of these activities.

Look at the output of ones work. If the output of ones work is positive, then it doesn't really matter how they got there or what they do.

The elephant wrt to "women are under-represented in stem careers" is that education is not universally applied/available.

Gender should not matter.

Provide universal education from birth to all minds and let those minds "mind their own business" as it were...

If people land in places due to their own thought, that is a true democracy of thought and freedom - but poor choices only ever occur based on poor information.

There is a lot of technology involved in healthcare and teaching.

In fact, healthcare technology, specifically user interfaces, needs all of the brilliant people it can get.

As a former medical tech developer, the problems in healthcare are almost entirely social/political and the healthcare tech business is making things worse in most respects.

New drugs are making things worse? Tell that to my oncologist friends.

STEM is more than CRUD apps.

Fetanyl was a new drug at some point. Pharmaceuticals are over prescribed, healthcare businesses are a leech on the infrastructure, American lifestyles are inherently unhealthy, and no amount of new drug patents are going to fix those problems. Your oncologist friends might have new drugs to prescribe but that doesn't change the core problem of soaring cancer rates due to lifestyle and environmental issues.

Okay, you know exactly what is meant when people in this forum talk about tech. Being pedantic about the word technology isn't helping this discussion.

That doesn't make school teachers or nurses any less important or necessary.

If a nursing school made a push for recruiting more male nurses I wouldn't feel like my software engineering career was a wrong choice.

You do know that is exactly what's going on, right? There are plenty of male only scholarships in nursing school and schools put forth considerable effort to assuage the fears that men have entering the field and provide special accommodations and support for them including campaigns to get their co-workers to stop calling them 'male nurses'.

Yes, and I'm saying I don't see anything wrong with that.

Meanwhile, nursing as a profession is seeking more men to increase diversity as well.

So why not encourage men to pursue careers in nursing and teaching?

I would go ahead and say because men are just not interested in those careers as much as women. That's the whole point. And that is fine.

The point is disputed: to what extent are the differences biological vs. environmental? Hiring practices could influence preferences.

There were more men in these roles when it was more respected and well paid. As the relative wages and notarity declined, men started targetting ‘higher jobs’

For instance these are the numbers for teachers for the last decades: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_209.10.a...

If you talk to men who worked as primary school teachers (within the last 20 years) and then changed careers, you'll hear a lot of interesting stories of discrimination.

Exactly. No one's worried that we have too few female coal miners or garbage collectors. These are physically demanding, not prestigious and often low-paying jobs.

Hell, no one's worried that we have too few female oil rig workers and these ARE (in my understanding) high paying jobs.

But STEM? That's somehow different.

> Exactly. No one's worried that we have too few female coal miners

> Hell, no one's worried that we have too few female oil rig workers

There are programmes to increase the numbers of women in both those industries.

There's news media coverage of it: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellevate/2016/12/07/the-energy-...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-business/11620315/Bu...

There's research on it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4279861/

There's a lot of effort going into this, actually. My father was a nurse for 30 years and in his nursing school graduation photo, and his retirement photo with his colleagues, he was still the only male. It's possible men view these fields as female dominated and resist applying. It also raises the awkward question of how men are treated in female dominated fields. Would a man be treated better in a female dominated field, than a female in a male dominated field, or the same? I've not seen research on this, unless someone knows of any?

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