So basically men and women prefer women to gain tenure in STEM fields as shown in this graph[0]? Can we now close the "no women in stem" meme finally?
[0] - http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360/F1.expansion.html
[0] - http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360/F1.expansion.html
Some fields are majority male, and some fields are majority female. There are two possible causes: that women and men have, on average, different preferences, or that there is a bias problem earlier in the process than the point at which tenure is considered.
There is evidence that men and women do have different preferences and so we'd expect to see a gender imbalance in some fields. But we should still try to ensure that anyone with the ability and the inclination is able to enter the career path of their choice — that means schools, families, and the media not discouraging girls and boys from entering "non-typical" fields, something these studies don't address.
They do, however, show that the way many ideologically motivated individuals go about achieving their aim of gender balance is based on misconceptions about the world and is therefore likely to be counter-productive.
People need to address the issue at each stage of the pipeline. I would argue that early stage imbalances are even more important than late stage imbalances (post-graduate) because upstream imbalances necessarily propagate downstream but not vice versa.
This comes from me talking to friends who are women in CS. It made me realize that as a dude in CS I have an interesting advantage of not being noticed when I walk into a room.
The field has made progress but there are still real frictions that make the everyday experience worse for women, even if the balance has shifted during the big decisions. So it may shake out as an advantage when applying for faculty positions or grad schools, but it's probably not an advantage the rest of the time. I don't think the former compensates very well for the latter.
> None of that stuff is because of bias though.
Sentence 2:
> That is just the result of being in a field dominated by the other gender.
This is not to minimize anything a woman has to go through, but let's, at least, not compare as if it's on equal terms. If we're able to talk about women issues at all, isn't that because women and men are different? Why compare it so easily and uni-dimensionally?
BTW, what about cases where a woman approaches a man about a technical matter, but with a _romantinc_ interest? Where's the real danger in that? We, as grown ups, should have the tools to dismiss politely romantic interests. It's the same case between men and men/women, as it is between women and women/men. It's part of life. The expression 'unwanted advances' is by far the craziest accusation one could make to a person. Man or woman.
> The CDC analyzed the murders of women in 18 states from 2003 to 2014, finding a total of 10,018 deaths.
> The overall age-adjusted homicide rate was 2.0 per 100,000 women.
18 states, tens of millions of people, and an inconceivably small number of homicides in reality. The overwhelming majority of women are not murdered by men, but live a long life and die of heart disease, cancer, or other old-age diseases.
Even when you only consider the age range in question - call it 18-64 - the leading causes of death are still unintentional injuries, cancer, heart disease, and suicide: https://www.cdc.gov/women/lcod/2014/all-females/index.htm There is a spike in homicides up to a staggering 7% of all deaths for the 15-24 age group, but that's only because young women almost never die, there's little real danger but an awful lot of fear surrounding this topic.
The graph clearly shows that women are prefered in STEM, what more proof do you need?
Would you conclude that you are truly "preferred"? Would you rather be in your friend's place? Would you stick around this company at all, even if the work appeals to you?
This is what I mean -- that having an advantage at one step in the process does not necessarily compensate for a negative experience at other steps in the process.
You've also posted a bunch of unsubstantive and even uncivil comments in the past, and we've warned you several times before. I don't think you're breaking the site rules on purpose, but we eventually ban accounts that repeatedly do this and don't change when we ask.
If you'd read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart when commenting here, we'd appreciate it.
Heh, I don't know about other STEM fields but I remember a lady attending a computer science freshman social event once. There were very few women there as the majority of women in CS are in HTI. After a while she said to my friend, "Why is everyone such a nerd."
She left the field, men were at fault.
If we expect people to "enter into" nerd culture to join "nerdy" professions, we're basically expecting people to learn a new language and move into a semi-foreign country just to enter a job field.
When the woman turned up to a social event and said, "why are the men such nerds" and walked away, that wasn't the men's fault or problem actually (unless they wanted to date her). That's her problem: she's the one lobbing insults against an entire group despite not knowing the individuals in question. They do not need to do anything to welcome such a person into their "culture" because she wasn't talking about a culture to begin with.
The story given above, assuming the last "men were at fault" statement is related to the first part, is sadly reflective of all the worst stereotypes of young women. The woman in question decided what career to pursue because she didn't want to be seen as hanging out with uncool people during her studies. Guess what - nerds would be happy to hang out with "non nerds" too, if they came to their events and didn't act all judgey and superior. This is not something unique to women, it's rather, that men seem more willing to either embrace it or tolerate it.
Presumably she is now in a field with fewer "nerds", but quite possibly earning less money than if she'd stuck with CS. Too bad for her.
You don’t think other professions have cultures?
Good luck with facial piercings and purple hair in Corporate Law, but in software no one would bat an eyelid. The culture you are complaining about is MORE tolerant than nearly all other professions!
It's a consequence that hiring practices should favour women who are equally qualified on paper, because they have likely overcome more barriers in practice and, all other things being equal, are better hires.
This is sexism right here.
I want to argue against this from a purely utilitarian standpoint, where we care about getting better hire, and don't care about any ethical implications. I think your logic is just bad math.
You're right, and women have more barriers to entry into STEM. And if some barriers are already removed (as this study suggest), I can assume that others still exist. Let's make the numbers simpler, and assume that these barriers make it 2 times harder for a given woman to get into some experience level (I don't know real numbers anyway, and they don't matter).
However, when we observe the effect of these barriers, we simply see that there are 2 times more men on that level than women. That's the whole effect. Statistically, if a woman had 2 times less chance of getting through, and there are already 2 times less women than men, then we already see the full effect of this barrier: there's no evidence that there should be some hidden variable to explain this barrier.
However, if we would know that women's barrier makes it 10 times as harder, and still, there are only 2 times as many men as women, then we would need some other data to explain this; namely, that these women are actually 5 times as good as the men.
But we don't know that. The whole knowledge about these barriers that we have comes from the outcome: we see that there are 2 times as many men as women, and that's how we assume (correctly, I think) that there is a barrier. But if we start from this outcome data, we can't through some magic come back to it and add a hidden variable - it's just a logic loop, and a strange one: we see data, make conclusions from observations, and from these conclusions change our observation of this very data to see it as incomplete, without help of any data points outside this original observation. How could such logic be correct?