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Comment by Xylakant | Hacker News Reader

There’s to the best of my knowledge no study that shows that the biological gender matters for the choice of profession. The issue that often muddies things is that girls have been (and still are) brought up with the notion that some professions are not suited to them. This is especially pronounced in IT, where for a long time at the start of the profession, women had the majority of employed people and things started to switch over when home computers were marketed as a boys toy. There are strong indicators that the biological gender contributes much less than what the society expects in terms of gender roles.

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It almost requires no study:

When there's equality of opportunity, then women tend to outscore men on average in Danish high schools (and this trend is true all over the world, given any equal-opportunity situation).

Since women are scoring higher, they have more choice in what fields they want to study since the grade average tend to determine this. In contrast, men have to pick the subjects they can "get" which tend to be the STEM fields. All the typical "female subjects" are the ones which usually requires unethically high grades in Denmark.

Now, to convince a young woman to study STEM not only requires you to convince her that it is an awesome field (which it is, and we should definitely encourage that!). It also requires you to argue why she shouldn't put all her high-grade-work into effect by gravitating to a subject which is women-dominated and the competition is fierce. And that she can live out her dream: she has worked hard and can be anything she wants!

Whereas the young boy who were lazy in school (because he had a hobby of playing a lot of computer games) has to pick one of the "boring fields" where they accept anyone because there are always space for more people.

It is a two-sided situation and as much as you want to focus on the women not picking a given area, you have to focus on why men are so friggin' outright obsessed with the same thing.

There is one type of study which determines part of this: namely that men are interested in things and women in people (on average: The split is something like 33/66 and there is a considerable overlap - but it is one of the strongest gender effects!).

Of course, reality is a mix between biology and environment. And thus also location: the strong welfare state of Denmark could easily play a role.

This is an excellent point. Some time in the past, society drew a line in the sand and said "everything a man does is better than anything a woman does". As a result, women are being pressured into fields that are male dominated _because_ they are are male dominated. Without pausing to think if that truly makes those jobs inherently better.

I think realizing this is a false paradigm will be the next phase in the evolution of this social issue, I just have no idea how it will happen or how it will play out.

And, to prove this point, the gender ratio is much better in STEM fields other than computing and engineering. Biology, for example, has more women graduating nowadays than men, despite the fact that a lot of biology work is actually CS (and more intellectually challenging than most software engineering jobs at tech companies, which to a large extent involve creating CRUD apps).

This is a great argument against the idea that women don't go into those fields because they're somehow incapable of this kind of technical work, but I don't think it's so useful against the claim that they don't because they're just not interested in those fields.

From working in that field, I can tell you this is not true. There are lots of women in biology but in computational biology its more like one in three (and often much less). In the algorithmic and tool developmental parts even more so. It may be more equal than in pure CS but still the imbalance is huge.

The YouTube CEO claims that the CS graduation rate for women in the US is around 40%.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrOp8ewzJDc

So a hiring rate of 40% would indicate a level playing field in hiring. 33/40 is around 82%. The doubling down policies of "The (metaphoric) beatings will continue until equality is achieved," would seem to be misplaced at the workplace level. If there is systemic bias, it would seem to exist at the educational level.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIRvtA2JIIA

Regardless, the point of mentioning how much CS is in biology is to dispel the silly idea that biology is somehow less intellectually demanding than CS as practiced in industry.

I agree. It seems to be an oversimplification to say that, given the choice, women choose non-STEM jobs. There is centuries of inertia behind the expectations of males and females with regards to career choices. Over time, it is likely that these gender-based expectations will erode and only then will we see if there is true gender-dependent preference when it comes to career choices.

I think he is referring to the research work of Simon Baron-Cohen?

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/belinda-parmar/sugar-and-spic...

The general conclusion being that men tend to focus on ideas and woman gravitate towards people.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/may/03/biolog...

And that still confounds the issue of biological gender and what society constructs to be gender. I doubt that reliable research into this can currently be made since obviously any person that has been brought up in today’s society has been brought up with this societies notion of gender roles. And boy, have we been wrong about what we considered what women could or could not do in the past.

Can you point me to research into how XX is different from social gender? I think I'm not understanding this point. How can society construct the idea of a gender, if not from biology? How else was the social concept of gender created ?

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