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Comment by billfruit | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps the lack of women in STEM is a first world phenomenon. In my third world undergraduate CS class, 10 years ago, there were 40 women and 20 men. I would say it even appeared to me that more women were in college than men.The few courses were I found less women than men were in Mechanical Engineering departments.

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It is. In countries where women have the freedom of choice due to political and economical circumstances, the gender imbalance is more pronounced.

Basically, most women choose to not pursue engineering if they don't have to (unfortunately, I'm glad we have some women at the office).

This is often repeated but the data is way more noisy than this comment implies.

For example this chart for Asian countries does have Iran on one side and Japan on the other, but it also have Korea way higher than Japan and Cambodia way lower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_STEM_fields#/media/Fi...

In europe Norway has the fewest women in stem and Croatia the highest, but there are a lot of cases where the correlation isn't there. Hungary is very low and Luxembourg is very high. Ireland and Italy are high but Slovenia is low.

https://ec.europa.eu/research/swafs/pdf/pub_gender_equality/...

Correlation definitely exists but there are a lot of other factors at play too.

Thanks for adding details.

Heres some more studies I found interesting. I'm sorry if this list looks biased, its just what I could find. If anyone knows of (statistically sound) contradicting studies, please share!

"Practically all psychological differences between men and women were LARGER in cultures with more gender egalitarianism." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijop.12265/full

"Women tend to shy away from career opportunities that explicitly make "brilliance" a condition." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103117...

"Women prefer less risk and less competition, appear to prioritize equality over efficiency and report a greater willingness to share wealth." https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/gunwpe/0713.html

"Personality had greater impact on variance in income than sex, narcissistic men earning more, neurotic women less." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886917...

"Women saw typical engineers & computer scientists as more extreme & stereotype-consistent, sabotaging themselves" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-017-0763-x

"The wage gap between men and women vanishes after controlling for so-called "reservation wages"." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268117...

"Women underestimate, while men overestimate their labor market prospects, leading to greater female job satisfaction" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268117...

"Women with managerial careers are significantly less satisfied with their life than their male counterparts." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9832-z

In Denmark for example, which by all accounts is a first world country, the majority of educated people are actually women[2], and there is absolutely nothing that prevents anyone from any social class or gender to take an education (it's free, heck even payed for), yet we still see women leaning more towards the humanities, social sciences and professions such as lawyer[0], than men. Men predominantly lean towards STEM, but even then it varies.

Take for example the first source[0], which only has a difference of 962 women to 1082 men accepted into the scientific faculty. At DTU[1] it varies more, although anything with Bio, Environment or Medicin in the name will be skewed more towards women.

I guess my point is: why do we insist there is some inherent bias against someone in society, if there is not a 50/50 split (which would in itself be weird)? If given completely free choice, perhaps some people are just disposed to being in interested in different things.

Disclaimer: I should probably say that the above of course only applies to Denmark, and I cannot talk on behalf of the situation in the US.

[0]: http://studier.ku.dk/bachelor/ansoegning-og-optagelse/optage...

[1]: https://www.google.dk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...

[2]: https://www.dst.dk/da/Statistik/emner/levevilkaar/ligestilli...

EDIT: Added source on first claim about more women being educated.

I think the idea of a (near) 50/50 split is that if there were absolutely no biases or differences then you would see approximately this distribution.

But we don't. We do know there are social biases, and thus these are being scrutinized much more. Certainly there can biological biases, but is is absurd to believe that is the only factor involved. My guess is that there is a whole complicated mess of problems and not an easy one (or even dozens) answer that accounts for these differences.

Why does it matter if the differences are biological, cultural, or both? If women have the option to go into STEM without risking social exclusion(which is arguably the case in most developed countries) yet they choose to do something else, shouldn't that be their choice? Wouldn't these unequal trends naturally result in an environment with equal opportunities among people with different overall desires?

I think you answer your own question

> Why does it matter if the differences are biological, cultural, or both?

> If women have the option to go into STEM without risking SOCIAL (ie: culture) exclusion yet they choose to do something else, shouldn't that be their choice?

I'd say it matters if it is social exclusion. If a bias is caused by biology, then that's fine. But clearly there shouldn't be a cultural bias, because that prevents people from making that choice. I see the problem solved when there are no cultural or political barriers.

There is a big difference between social exclusion and cultural forces. In the 50's, it was nearly impossible for a woman to gain any power. Those who went against the gender norms of the time were ostracized and shunned. Nowadays, while there are cultural norms that guide how the majority of certain groups think, people who go against the norm are tolerated.

That is okay with me. I think it's fine that cultural norms guide women into certain fields and men into another, as long as everyone has the equal opportunity to choose to go against the cultural grain. Which they do.

Why is it a problem if men and women aren't doing the exact same thing on average (i.e. professions distributed 50/50 by sex)?

There tend to be self-reinforcing trends in human behavior. Jobs that are highly gendered frequently stay that way, making it harder for the categorically-challenged to partake for purely social reasons.

So there are two easily identifiable reasons: One, we should want a society more free from constraints on individual self-realization than less[1]. And for those who lean less cuddly, two, it is economically inefficient to exclude market participants on factors unrelated to performance[2].

[1] Well, I think we should want to optimize that; if you disagree, we have a far more fundamental disconnect.

[2] Ironically, this is also an argument people use to claim that sexism and racism in the work place can't exist, in that annoying way some economists do.

> There tend to be self-reinforcing trends in human behavior.

But we also know how quickly human behaviour changes and adapts to new circumstances.

> Jobs that are highly gendered frequently stay that way, making it harder for the categorically-challenged to partake for purely social reasons.

I can think of many jobs where this is true (for either sex), but software engineering doesn't seem to fit in this category. In STEM about 30-40 % of students are female; less at trade schools (=lower educational attainment). About 25 % of the IT workforce is female.

> One, we should want a society more free from constraints on individual self-realization than less.

Absolutely.

> Ironically, this is also an argument people use to claim that sexism and racism in the work place can't exist, in that annoying way some economists do.

I think the classical Friedmann argument was that there is a cost to biasing against competent people. It doesn't really say anything about what people will actually do (like much of economic theory), since they might be (1) not aware of the cost [and indeed it would be difficult to quantify] (2) valuing their *isms above that that cost.

As far as classic economic theory goes, the argument seems to be correct, it's just a poor predictor for what humans will do.

> but software engineering doesn't seem to fit in this category

I was casting a significantly wider net, but you're correct wrt software-related fields. Moreover, women used to be far more prevalent in early-"IT"/operations than today, a shift that happened really quickly - a generation or two, depending on where you like to start counting. Shifts like this (they've happened elsewhere, too) is one massive argument against the "women just don't like math" silliness that always pops up.

> As far as classic economic theory goes, the argument seems to be correct, it's just a poor predictor for what humans will do.

Absolutely agree. That's the general thrust of my point overall.

> One, we should want a society more free from constraints on individual self-realization than less.

I don't think pushing women into a field that they overall don't want to do will help them earn self-realization. How would this work?

> it is economically inefficient to exclude market participants on factors unrelated to performance

The cynical side of me thinks that this is the real reason for the widespread push for diversity. A larger labor pool deleverages some of the highest paid employees in the world, thus increasing profits.

I didn't say that it is a problem. I said you'd expect to see it (ASSUMING NO BIASES). I think you are reading more into my comment that what I wrote.

The danger there is in trying to explain a complicated social phenomenon with "it's free, so why wouldn't they do it?"

There's very little suggestion that the reason there aren't more women in tech is because they can't afford it. In reality, it's a thousand tiny factors from a thousand people, none/few of them actively trying to do harm. As an offhand, personal example, my sister isn't in tech because she was told CS "wouldn't be her thing" despite being just as good as any of the boys. Because of that, and similar discouragement, she ended up not going into tech whereas she otherwise _might_ have.

It's all statistical, lots of "maybes", "mights", and "coulds", but it adds up over the population. There may well be dispositions which align primarily along gender bounds, but there's not much indication this is one - but neither is it an organized conspiracy. It's just the sum total of thousands of tiny factors.

Then that would more be a aspect of social expectations, no? Perhaps I've read to much malice into the word "systemic bias", as if people were actively working against someone doing the particular thing there is bias against, where it is more a result of social expectations on what is "proper" for each gender.

Again, only speaking from my Danish perspective, but I've never met anyone thinking STEM of all things would not be fit for females, but you probably would get that reaction if you were to say, as a female, that you wanted to become a plumber or similar hands-on jobs.

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Slightly going off-topic: Personally, I think the disparity we see, currently, in STEM et al, is for historical reasons, as younger boys used e.g. computers as an escape from socialising, and thereby grew interested in that particular field. I also think this is why it is sometimes met with a bit of a scuff from some in the tech community, because what was previously viewed as a something nerdy, uncool and with a lot of negative stereotypes attached to it, is all of the sudden the new cool thing, and people that suffered through bullying for being "nerdy" and generally not having the time of their life in younger school life, are now being touted as if they were privileged all along, which very much undermines the struggles they had during their upbringing.

This is mostly guesswork from intuition, since I personally did not have any trouble fitting in, yet even I got the "nerd" remark if I would tell people my interests, so I don't feel I was particularly encouraged or anything into this—in fact, most are probably here despite that.

>Perhaps I've read to much malice into the word "systemic bias"

Bingo. There's no active malice there, which is why it's such a difficult problem to solve. There's no one force to fight against and no "enemy", just a lot of well meaning people who average out to a crummy result.

Speaking of sisters, I'm a triplet with two sisters and I spent a lot of time on the computer as a teen mostly out of social destitution. But that's what got me into tech and programming.

My sisters never had time to play video games with me, although they periodically enjoyed them and even bought a couple games, because they were always meeting up with friends. People were always inviting them out.

I look at my tech-minded friends as a kid and there's a similar pattern of social deprivation. I wonder how much that plays a role in general.

I think a great many folks in software development would still have ended up with a software development job even if they were told that CS "wouldn't be their thing"

The problem is that the more you whittle down bigger arguments to "a thousand tiny factors", the less tangible and less useful arguments around gender inequality become. Your argument seems to be that girls are so suggestible that any discouragement easily bounces them back in line.

Frankly, there are far more reasons why a man would want to enter STEM than a woman. A man can put of devoting time to a family because he doesn't have the biological clock a woman has; STEM is a demanding set of fields that require a lot of thought and time, which becomes a challenge for an intelligent woman who also wants time to find a man she can not only relate to but is at least at the same class level as she is. Being in STEM also means being around a lot of unattractive, perhaps creepy men. STEM is competitive, and men and women compete in different ways, so a woman will likely always have to compete on the playing field of men.

If I was a woman, I probably wouldn't bother, not because someone told me I couldn't do it, but because it makes no sense from a perspective of happiness and reproduction. There's a slim chance the kind of man I would want would also be attracted to me as a person, and I might not even meet such a man if I'm spending most of my time in a lab or behind a computer.

As a man, there is a lot of incentive to go into STEM, probably more than ever. Actually, there's incentive to do just about anything so long as it provides a channel to move into the level of class one aspires to. Good luck attracting an intelligent woman who's going places if you're a cashier or a taxi driver. It's not to say that's impossible, but you put yourself at a huge disadvantage as a man when you don't work towards bigger things. Flip the sexes, and it's totally different; successful, intelligent men are far less likely to negatively judge a potential partner based on her career choice. Because of the tech revolution, working with technology can lead to greater levels of prestige than what used to be attainable. Men perceive prestige as a way of opening doors to the mating pool. For women, too much prestige can close doors because they appear more unattainable. (granted, both can experience levels of unattainableness, but it's all about perception at the end of the day)

I would love for society to expose more girls to science and technology, and encourage them to explore those ideas, but we also need to accept that men and women aren't the same and they are going to have different motivations and perceptions on aggregate. Believing that women can and should behave more like men is fundamentally sexist.

>Your argument seems to be that girls are so suggestible that any discouragement easily bounces them back in line.

They're _children_. Girls or boys, having an authority figure saying "you don't want to do this" will mean most won't do it. It isn't about that girls are any more suggestible than boys, it's that in this area girls get more discouragement than boys do.

Well, since as far as I know there's no real empirical evidence for this. I'll give my own anecdote as a man.

I wasn't encouraged at all, by anyone I knew, to get a career in programming. My parents tried to block certain websites I was frequenting, my friends showed no interest at all in what I was doing. I was lucky to find online communities who did help me and encourage me. But I found those on my own through my own curiosity and desire. I never knew where it would take me and my parents thought I was wasting my time.

It wasn't until I actually got a job that I got some validation by people I actually knew.

I think one of the problems this discussion has is people see "girls, on average, are discouraged more often than boys" and actually read "all girls have it worse than all boys and no boys had anything but a spiffing time". Now, I'm not saying you're doing this, and I'm definitely not saying your experiences aren't valuable, but I am saying that your experiences are fully compatible with girls recieving more discouragement, and that your experiences would be improved by the collective understanding which would help us rectify the problem.

I don't really think that people should need encouragement to do things they want to do. Some might, but if someone discouraging you slightly by saying "you wouldn't be interested in that" succeeds in discouraging you, I'd argue you didn't really want to do it.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not arguing that the active discouragement is a good thing. I think parents especially, should enable their children's constructive interests. If I had a son who liked baseball (a sport I hate) more than basketball (a sport I love), I might try to get him to do both, but ultimately would defer to him.

Those in my circle of friends who made something of themselves came from difficult backgrounds that didn't encourage them to do what they're doing now. Granted, this is anecdotal, but this is the perspective I'm coming from. I myself have always been averse to encouragement because I don't like doing things to please people or for reasons other than purely my own, but I'm probably a minority when it comes to that.

When it comes to women, I do think there's a widespread cultural problem of discouragement that tells them they are either not smart enough or won't be happy doing X. That is something we should definitely change, but if we instead encourage women into things they're not terribly interested in, we're not going to get the results we delude ourselves into believing are attainable. Removing barriers is preferable to tilting the playing field, which should be insulting to everyone.

I'm not saying you are wrong, but has there ever been research that suggests this is actually as widespread a problem as suggested? Otherwise, my main point still stands that there are other factors in play during adulthood, besides systematic bias, that would explain the lack of women in STEM and why the desire for gender parity is absurd.

There is some. It's extremely difficult to pin this kind of thing down, unfortunately.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311595274_The_Roeha... for example covers how gendered schools specifically tackle this, and though most students don't go to gendered schools it's still indicative.

There's other pieces here and there, but nothing conclusively stating "this is why there's a gender gap".

>Otherwise, my main point still stands that there are other factors in play during adulthood, besides systematic bias

There are definitely other factors in play - that's my point - and I don't think we can say it's inherent to the gender. Women being under-represented in STEM is actually a very western thing, most pronounced in the US and UK, and is significantly _less_ pronounced in many other countries. We don't know precisely why, but we do know the answer needs to be complicated and is unlikely to be "women are just naturally predisposed against science, but only in these countries."

Because of that, and similar discouragement, she ended up not going into tech whereas she otherwise _might_ have

I realise it's your sister, but do you know that for sure? Or is that more like a hope you have yourself, based on your own beliefs about women in tech?

It's quite possible that the person who told her CS "wouldn't be your thing" was giving genuine advice based on actually knowing her and her preferences, useful advice that stopped her making a mistake, and was not attempting to discourage her from CS specifically but rather, ensure she would study something she'd enjoy.

She _might_ have. She was into it at the time. She may well not have anyway, hence the might, but it's still additional discouragement the boys didn't get.

> she was told CS "wouldn't be her thing"

Curious who told her that. Career counsellors?

> "wouldn't be her thing"

If that is the case, are you asserting that all of these displaced women are choosing fields of studies that they're not a good fit for?

No, not at all. To go back to my individual, circumstantial example, my sister is now a very good teacher.

Things don't have to be evil to average out unfortunate.

Be careful there or Google will fire you.

> If given completely free choice, perhaps some people are just disposed to being in interested in different things.

Because that would require people to acknowledge that the theory that everyone is a blank slate with equal capabilities and that any differences in outcome are as a result of some sort of systemic oppression might not be entirely correct.

Equal capabilities and interests.

China has similar, if not worse problems, as the USA. The lab I worked for in Beijing made lots of effort to attract female researchers, and it was still very lopsided.

From my graduate CS classes in the US, most women are from foreign countries. I notice the same in other US grad schools as well. From that, I am led to believe that women from developing nations (which kind of includes China) still choose STEM careers (most likely for practical purpose of making money).

There is a lot of selection bias in who comes to the USA to study and work. But also, in china, women don’t drop out of the field all together, but rather tend to move into less technical ones (e.g. PM), and are less likely to get the PhD needed to be a researcher. There are likewise cultural issues that make this hard (e.g. China’s leftover women problem). There has also been a lot less outreach compared to the west because communism was already supposed to have fixed these problems (this is changing of course), while the west has been perversely drawing away a lot of gender diversity at the high end with their current hiring practices.

Perhaps India does a bit better? When I visited Microsoft research Bangalore, it seemed a bit more diverse than Microsoft research Beijing.

I've heard a theory for explaining that that goes like this:

1. choosing a career path you're not interested in can be considered a luxury

2. women tend to be less interested in computer science

3. people in the "first world" tend to have more luxuries of all sorts since they are wealthier

4. thus, percentage of women in STEM anti-correlates with GDP-per-capita

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