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Comment by overcast | Hacker News Reader

I'll probably face wrath, and hell's fury for this, but maybe, men and women are different. Has forcing STEM upon the female population, driven any more of them towards the discipline? Taking the sampling size of every woman I've ever went on a date with in my 37 years, none of them were interested in anything related. The vast majority were teachers, psychologists, and nurses. Occupations based around nurturing others. One, was a designer/artist. None of the women in my huge family, sister, mother, none of them care about technology fields. My father, and male cousins on the other hand, are in various fields of tech and engineering.

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Is it possible that your dating pool is subject to sampling bias?

Empirically speaking, about 1/4 of people in STEM are women, so if you've met 0 women interested in STEM, it seems like your experience simply aren't an accurate reflection of reality. [0]

I think it's incredibly ironic that you're highlighting your own relative interest in STEM while failing to apply any degree of scientific rigor to your own thinking.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

Oh brother, there's always that one guy on HN. None of this was supposed to "scientific", so relax. I'm giving you my 37 years of experience dating at least a couple hundred women, that's it.

Please don't be rude, even if someone's reply seemed nitpicky.

That's fine as long as you don't try to draw any conclusions from your anecdote :-)

Which country do you assume OP is in? In Germany women only make up 16% of engineers http://www.zeit.de/2013/38/frauenanteil-ingenieure. In my starting class of 300 ten years ago there were 5 women in electrical and computer engineering. Mech and building engineering was much higher. Computer science was somewhat in between. In my high school some girls went for math and many for medicine (still a science, somewhat), but none went for engineering or computer science AFAIK.

I think you're too easily discounting his personal experience. If you ask me, at least in Germany, EE and CS is pretty much devoid of women. And if you're talking about dating, a small pool of women surrounded by men will probably be off the market most of the time. So him never dating engineers at least in my experience, is the norm.

They're doing a lot here to attract girls to STEM, but it isn't bearing much fruit.

> but maybe, men and women are different

Umm.. even US courts have disagreed with you in the James Damore case, saying that Google was right to fire him for suggesting this... I agree with you, however when the govt, judiciary and private employers agree that "men and women are the same, except when difference benefits women", there isnt a lot that can be done

> US courts have disagreed with you in the James Damore case

U.S. courts have not yet weighed in on the James Damore case.

https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-firing-of-diversity-memo-a...

>Google didn't break the law when it fired James Damore over a memo that criticized the company's diversity policies and claimed tech's gender gap may be due to biological differences between men and women.

You're right, its some other entity in US that interprets laws, I assumed it was a court

And they didn't even weigh in on the science, they just said the science was irrelevant if it caused a "hostile working environment".

It's certainly been the case that the participation of women in medicine and law, both peripheral to STEM, has increased significantly over the last 50 years.

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