Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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> starting from the assumption that men are disproportionately represented among the upper levels of spatial and mathematical abstraction skills, there'd be an uproar

I’ve mentioned it repeatedly on HN and have never so much as gotten a rise out of anyone. (I should also point out that the SAT folks publish a detailed report on SAT gender differences each year and nobody blinks an eye.) The problem is that it doesn’t explain the disparity in STEM—it cuts against it.

Men outrepresent women about 2:1 among perfect SAT Math scores. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this represents a real difference in mathematical ability. Even if programming ability were 100% correlated with mathematical ability, you’d expect a much higher ratio than you see in practice. That is strong evidence that women are kept out of STEM for other reasons. Beyond that (1) the pool of programmers isn’t just people with perfect SAT scores—the representation gap rapidly disappears as you go from top 0.5% to top 5%; (2) professions leverage other competencies too. The same 2:1 difference shows up in the top percentile of the LSAT and MCAT, but those fields are more gender balanced because women applicants tend to have better college GPAs.

Anecdotally: I went to a competitive admissions STEM high school, where admissions is gender blind and based heavily on an SAT-like test. The ratio was about 60:40 boys, about what you’d expect from the required testing percentiles. CS was required for all students so it is gender balanced. But APCS was overwhelmingly boys, not because it was full of the best math minds, but I suspect because we’d play DOOM if we got our assignments done early.

> Men outrepresent women about 2:1 among perfect SAT Math scores. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this represents a real difference in mathematical ability. Even if programming ability were 100% correlated with mathematical ability, you’d expect a much higher ratio than you see in practice.

That doesn't follow for reasons explained in the article. Choice of whether to go into sciences over humanities isn't correlated with just science ability in school, it is correlated with relative ability between science and reading. The 2:1 ratio tells you precisely nothing about expected ratios of entrance into science programs until you compare it with the performance ratio on the English portion (assuming here, I don't know anything about SATs) of the SATs.

All this also assumes that SAT scores map well to interests and not aptness.

You might do well enough for a PhD in maths and in sociology and still decide try to become carpenter because you love working with wood more than sitting in an office, no matter if you're arguing math or social contexts.

For a woman that might be the hardest career of all these, too (2% of carpenters are women).

> That is strong evidence that women are kept out of STEM

I might be boiling down your comment down to that one line, but it such a common line that I feel the need to point out some data. Here in Sweden about 12.5% of the population, men and women, work in a profession where the gender segregation is not higher than 150% dominance for a single gender.

The other 87.5% of the population all work in a profession which is seen as extremely gender segregated. We could describe it as if the wast majority of the population is keeping people who don't gender identify similar to their own out of the work market for which they themselves work in. Evidence that men are kept out of 87.5% of the professions that women work in, evidence that women are kept out of 87.5% of the professions that men work in. In a nation which pride itself on equality, we could claim that there is evidence that the wast majority of everyone here is actively being sexist in their professional life.

When looking at numbers to explain whats going on in society, I feel that the discussion often lack perspective. A ratio of 60:40 is actually within that small minority of 12.5% that is recognized as gender equal, and yet many feel that it too is unacceptable high level of gender segregation.

The US is not Sweden. In the US, you die or your kids starve if you don’t have enough money. So when you see a statistic that women have the altitude to go into a high paying career disproportionately to their actual representation, it’s harder to dismiss that just by saying “oh they must prefer to do something else.”

Beyond that, I’m not inclined to believe that Sweden really is more gender equal. It seems based on little more than assumption.

> In the US, you die or your kids starve if you don’t have enough money.

We do have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assista...

Are things in the US are that bad? Maybe you should focus on how to help people with lower-paying jobs not starve, rather than pushing to make sure that the scarce "living-wage" jobs are going to women instead of men.

So, here's the thing: I think there are lots of good points in everything you wrote here, and yours is the only response to mine that I've upvoted. And I don't even disagree with most of it: I tend toward thinking that the gap is multicausal and that attribution is difficult. "Playing Doom" is exactly the type of thing I mean when I say I think socialization is a major factor in the gap. We could have an interesting back and forth to draw out if and where we disagree.

But my point is that's not the kind of discussion you could have on social media (or, god forbid, ill-advised internally published manifestos) and a not get significant blowback. If I see several friends sharing an article that describes a study effectively showing women are better than men at using Microsoft Word and using that as proof of deep sexism in tech, I'm posed with two choices: I can accurately point out that doesn't make sense as an argument and get people really mad at me for ruining a feel-good social moment, or I can do nothing and roll my eyes internally. Most reasonable people will do the latter, and I don't see how that's a good thing.

This is just a weird argument to me - the argument about ability. I don't think, in any western country - which for point of reference I'm taking as any country Israel or above on this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)... - that ability plays much of a part. I'd say it is mostly preference.

Lets say I have a preference for MMs over Skittles - a 2:1 preference. How often will I eat each? Probably in that ratio over a lifetime, because I'll eat snacks lots of times.

Now lets say I have a 60:40 preference for Driving a car as a career over being a shop assistant. What is the chance that the I will be a driver? Given I can only choose one, in a less than ideal world, it will be influenced by lots of things beyond my personal preference, opportunity most of all. But in an ideal world, the chance I am a driver starts to approach 100%, because why would I choose the 40% option, when I have a better one?

Free societies enable lots of choice, and tiny differences, 60:40 or even 55:45, will start to skew towards 100:0 over time. This is likely to play out right to the bottom, where people with fewer options are still likely to choose based on preference, hence garbage collectors and manual labourers vs shop assistants / PAs.

The consequence of tiny differences in preference and the small instances per person are likely to lead to some radical results.

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