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Comment by curiousgal | Hacker News Reader

Tunisian female here. The answer is simple for Tunisian women. The highest paying jobs are in Engineering and Medicine and all of the other jobs are miserable. That combined with a free-ish education where you can choose any field, makes the choice obvious.

I personally see the lack of women in STEM in Western countries as a good thing, it means that they are doing well economically and don't have to deal with the tedious STEM education and workload.

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The article makes exactly that point:

"I asked Wendy Williams, founder and director of the Cornell Institute for Women in Science, what she makes of these findings. She wrote that if girls expect they can "live a good life" while working in the arts, health or sciences, then girls choose to pursue what they are best at—which could be STEM, or it could be law or psychology. She added, "However, if the environment offers limited options, and the best ones are in STEM, girls focus there...""

Even being a medical doctor means having a very good life, I wouldn't go for it in a million years.

I have a blog and a youtube channel that talks about raspberry pi, open source, embedded, and other programming projects that I do for fun in my spare time. I checked the youtube stats yesterday and my female audience was 0% (not rounded down, it was 0.0% according to Youtube) among about 10K people who watched them last week - globally. When I had google analytics on my site, it reported the same thing. Because my channel is new and no one knows whether I am a sexist person or not, so we can safely filter out the reputation problem. Also, I have a foreign name so people can't guess my gender by looking at my name. I think that anyone who watches my video has to be curious about what I do, not because they are used to me talking in a certain way.

Now my channel is a small sample, but I have a feeling that not many girls find tech (or at least what I do) fun and appealing the current way it is while many boys do. So it's just about an opportunity, money and job and whatnot as it is a hobby, a thing to have fun with that attracts certain demographic to a profession.

You are presuming that those stats are accurate though.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some women were miscategorised by whatever algorithmarked their gender.

Of course they are. This is practically in the definition of stats. It isn’t a question of if it’s inaccurate, but of how inaccurate it is. A confidence of 95% isn’t much worse than 100% for purposes of advertising.

Well... how do you think Google Analytics guesses whether or not a person is male or female? It uses a machine learning algorithm based on browsing habits, and "views Youtube videos about technology/open source/Raspberry Pi" is a feature that is strongly weighted towards maleness.

Valid point. Although tons of people have both GMAil and Youtube accounts and Google forced you to connect them a few years ago when they were pushing Google+, so they should have actual personal information on many people these days.

Sure, but in many cases it didn't have to guess. It knows. Moreover, even when it had to guess, the guess can sway both ways based on a person's watch history too: Wouldn't you think a person who watches a raspberry pi video after they watched 10 videos about handbags and jewelry and mascara can be guessed as a female? After all, Google IDs unique people and devices.

There are millions of women out there that don’t watch videos of handbags and jewelry and mascara, as there are millions of men who don’t watch sports or cars or whatever.

I'm currently running a forum where people has to select it's gender. I'd say, by the samples I've done, that most of the people don't lie.

And the stats are not surprising, I have about half females, and they participate way more in "girly" things.

The same happened in another forum I had.

Do you know that's how it works, or is it a guess? That's not really the standard way to do audience segmentation.

I'm a woman in tech. Google used to have a page somewhere where it told you what it assumed about you from your habits. It was 100% confident that I was male until I started searching for pregnancy stuff all the time.

Also a woman in tech. A while back I checked my profile. It thought I we was a man.

If you're logged into your Google account when you watch a Youtube video, I'm guessing they don't have that much uncertainty in their assumption of your gender.

> The article makes exactly that point:

For everyone's reference, for some reason dang migrated this comment thread wholesale from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510442

>>> I personally see the lack of women in STEM in Western countries as a good thing, it means that they are doing well economically and don't have to deal with the tedious STEM education and workload.

I personally would like the same freedom applied to men.

Yeah, that quote seems a bit sexist when you think about it.

The article contends that women tend to focus more on communal well-being while men focus on individual success. Yet an increase in women in governance and leadership has gone hand in hand with a decrease in male success in education, lower mental health for men and a family court system entirely biased in favor of mothers. These are issues the female gender activists do not seem interested in fixing. These people have influence themselves because... they asked for it, after men built technology and infrastructure that made the traditional labor role of women in the home obsolete.

I really don't buy this notion that women look out for all. I don't doubt that they believe it, but I have yet to see women come together en masse to redress imbalances they benefit from. Unlike the entirety of civilization, built by men, many at the very bottom rungs of the ladder.

1. Men seem to like dealing with things compared to dealing with people more than women do (on average).

2. Men know that women value their ability to provide. In other words, money/power/status/ambition makes men sexier (in the eyes of women). This doesn't apply to women (although you can make the reverse argument on why women spend more on makeup/clothing/skin- and hair-care.

"don't have to deal with the tedious STEM education and workload."

I wouldn't call my STEM education tedious. Demanding more like it. Tedious gives impression of rote learning and abstract concepts separated from practical considerations and lack of joy of discovery and achievement. I could call the curriculum of my MSc in physics a decade ago by many things (I was straining at several points) but not "tedious".

Perhaps there is regional variation in the curriculum, culture and method of education (my university training was in Finland).

Curricula in Tunisia are taught in French (the native language being Arabic). Access to engineering schools is achieved through CPGE[0] which have an intensive workload. I am sure people who went through that will attest to how tedious it is.

0.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classe_pr%C3%A9paratoire_aux_g...

My international observations completely reaffirm this. Let's consider the differences in just the Arabic world.

I have spent considerable time in Kuwait. It is interesting to see many women continuing to wear the niqab that so many western societies find repressive and possibly sexist opposed to the more western accepted hijab. This garment is not forced by society or law, but is typically a choice of the head of household and the person themselves. I can tell you from my own observations with the wealth and freedoms available women absolutely do not appear strongly repressed in Kuwait and there also does not appear to be ambitious career goals among many (certainly not all) women in Kuwait. Compared to Americans Kuwaitis are lavishly wealthy.

Contrast that with Kuwait's southern neighbor Saudi Arabia where my mother-in-law has been more than once on business. Women were given the right to drive themselves for the first time only about 6 months ago, and the niqab garment is absolutely not a choice. Compared to Kuwait and much of the rest of the world women are heavily repressed in general freedoms. Despite all the limits there appeared a very strong effort of women to wanting to join the work force and take on ambitious careers. Compared to Americans the average Saudi is in a similar place economically, but I suspect the difference is observable societal pressures cause Saudi women to more frequently question their independence and work ethic compared to US women.

What I gather from those observations is that when you have anything you want and almost no performance pressures you simply won't have the motivation to work towards ambitious objectives. On the other hand when societal pressure to perform and compete is high a person is heavily motivated to work towards ambitious objectives.

Kuwait and Saudi Arabia make for good extreme examples, but I would say the stated conclusions apply universally. The US is still so far away from achieving gender parity.

In the US many women do not feel pressured to invest in career ambitions when conservative traditional social pressures say they can marry a man who does feel so pressured and still enjoy median financial results. The important thing about that statement is that it isn't claiming anything about a willingness to work, but is merely talking about investment in a future career. This thinking is largely to blame for far fewer women entering advanced careers of an abstract nature and why in many locales many women are more eager to take on menial work compared to males.

Another interesting observation is the US military. Women are a minority population in the military, but compared to US culture at large the military is generations ahead in achieving gender parity with regards to compensation, opportunities, and so forth. Pay in the military is based upon rank and years of service where subjective qualities have no influence. In about the past year and half the military eliminated its final restrictions upon women entering elite combat training. Promotions are more objective in the military compared to the corporate world (I am a military officer in the reserves and a senior developer at a fortune 50 company).

What makes the US military interesting to observe is performance of women compared to men in the force generally given that women are a minority population. My personal observation is that given a more challenging opportunity and sufficient preparation women tend to fail substantially less compared to males as ratio of sex to total population. In other words once societal pressures are normalized for individual pressures of success/failure take over and individual pressures are high given that there is already an investment in a career.

>I personally see the lack of women in STEM in Western countries as a good thing, it means that they are doing well economically and don't have to deal with the tedious STEM education and workload.

Are you saying that there's an inherent difference between men and women regarding science/technology?

Because I didn't get into science/technology because of money. I got in because it's fucking awesome.

Similar argument for mandatory draft.

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