Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

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Please provide a source for your last statement since that is not at all clear. By your logic, the primary cause of the gender gap in public school teaching must also be sexism. Do you believe that as well?

The primary cause of the gender gap is tech is the lack of a gender-balanced candidate pool for tech jobs. If you're a hiring manager posting developer jobs and 80% of the applicants are men, is it sexist that you end up hiring mostly men?

The real sexism problems are happening much earlier in life than when people start looking for jobs. If you want gender balance in tech jobs, we need to get more women into tech-focused college degrees, which means we need to get more girls interested in tech in primary school, which means we need to encourage teaching and parenting in early development that leads to an interest in tech later... etc. But wait, prenatal hormone exposure predicts toy choices in young children [1], so it's not that simple. This is exactly what Damore was trying to get at.

I think we need to split the gender problem in tech into a few different categories and tackle each independently rather than throwing everything in the "tech is sexist" bucket and looking for magic umbrella solutions. At a minimum, there are problems with getting girls interested in tech, keeping girls on an education path that leads to a tech career, eliminating subconscious bias in hiring practices, moving startups away from bro culture, and retaining women in tech when work-life balance becomes more important. All of these are important and require different solutions.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15693771

If anyone doubts that "boy interests" and "girl interests" diverge long before they get to the adult job pool, just spend some time people watching in a mall and pay attention to what kids do. You'll see big behavioral differences between boys and girls.

Whether these differences are entirely do to their parents or society steering them toward traditional 20th century gender roles, or are due to prenatal hormones, or some mix of these, or something else entirely, they are real and are there long before the kids are even thinking of a real career.

If we want to get more girls interested in tech (so that they will grow up to become women interested in tech), maybe we should try to find ways to make tech more useful for and relevant to "girl interests".

I remember a story maybe a year or two ago about someone starting a "get girls to code" program that was based on that idea. It was organized around things like jewelry making and fashion, and how programming could be used to help with those areas--in other words, it was organized around things that a large fraction of ordinary American pre-teen/young teen girls like to spend their spare time doing.

It, of course, went down under a hail of criticism that it was trying to force girls into the outmoded gender stereotypes of the oppressive patriarchy or something like that.

That's an interesting study you link to but I don't think it fits in this discussion. The underlying problem is not that boys like "boy" toys and girls like "girl" toys, it's how our culture defines which toys are which. Buying a sewing machine for a girl and a video game system for a boy is somehow "normal" but switch those around and it's at least a little weird (at least 20-30 years ago it was). Some sort of quota system for women in tech might actually have an effect on that (certainly not guaranteed to, though).

I think you missed the point of the study. "Normal" has nothing to do with it. Presented with a variety of toys to choose from, girls picked the stereotypical "girly" toys, even when encouraged to pick the "boy" toys by their parents. This means that you could give a Lego mindstorms kit to a girl and there's a good chance she just straight up wouldn't be interested in it, and would seek some other form of entertainment.

In light of that, we're left with an awkward situation. Should we force kids to play with certain toys and do certain activities even if they're not interested just so we can get to gender balance in lucrative fields? Maybe. Parents certainly do that sort of thing already with piano lessons and language classes. But if you don't think that's a good way to go, then you have to be open to the possibility that, left to their own choices, fewer girls will be interested in things that lead to a tech career than their male counterparts. Certainly it should be better than the (at best) 70/30 split we see now, but targeting 50/50 is not realistic.

And as an addendum, it's not just parents; girls and boys are often segregated, either forced (separate changing rooms, bathrooms) or intuitively (forming groups with their own genders), and then you get peer pressure, or you get ostracized for not being "like the others"

Being a geek at one point was like that, then it became cool.

Anyway point is, even if a parent raises their kid(s) gender-neutral or even pushes them towards STEM or whatever (for whatever reason), there's still peer pressure - but also support! - to either continue or move away from it.

In my personal experience, I got support from other kids that had computers at home (for example). I know my sister didn't have that, so while she'd use the computer at home, their friends had no interest in it. (she ended up doing biology, works at a hospital now)

Ok, I misunderstood what the study says. The underlying idea that boy and girl toys are social constructs could still be true, perhaps? Nothing seems to me inherently "male" about Lego mindstorms besides how we culturally define it. Maybe there are hormones involved in that girl's disinterest but more it's hard to believe that's significant enough. But it's definitely true that it's not an easy job to change culture.

Agreed, nothing is inherently male or female about one toy vs. another. However, there is evidence that preferences that eventually lead to a career in engineering and/or computer science might at least partially be due to gender and not to social norms. There's an excellent essay in [1] that sums up some additional research and also refutes some of the "it's all sexism" arguments that have been made. I recommend reading it and also the two comments to get a bit more data on the topic.

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

I am reminded of this comic strip every time this comes up (despite it being from about 7 or 8 years ago): http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1883

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