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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Are the rest of the STEM career paths seen as more social than CS? Is mathematics more social than CS? Because CS is almost (not quite: physics is almost as bad) unique among STEM specializations for its gender disparity.

I talk regularly to academic math people (because cryptography) and the sense I have is that if anything, CS is far more social than the work they do --- to get anything significant done in technology, you have to coordinate and cooperate amongst teams of people. And yet if you go to a cryptography conference and then a technology convention, the difference will be starkly apparent: there are far more women in the former than the latter.

I don't think this is a persuasive explanation for the whole phenomenon.

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I agree, Math and Physics are in many ways similar to CS, and yet have more women. And I can think of a pretty good reason to explain it: Math and Physics are more classically respected and authoritarian. CS is the wild-west by comparison.

In Math and Physics in high school and college, you can just study what you're supposed to study, do the problems you're supposed to do. You can mostly do that in CS too, of course, but that's not ubiquitous. In CS you're programming, and when programming you're running into bugs and devising work-arounds. Some stuff does not work like it's supposed to. Sometimes the best implementation for a purpose is a clever but not-quite-correct shortcut that's way faster. Some of my CS classes had automated code submissions testing and grading systems, and some students managed to hack the system in novel ways, and were given full points for doing so. My experience in school is that the smartest girls studied a lot more, and the smartest guys messed around a lot more. CS is programming and programming is a lot of messing around.

My dangerous 2c ;)

I agree, Math and Physics are in many ways similar to CS, and yet have more women.

I think it might be useful to ask: In what ways are Math and Physics are different from the programming field? I think the requirement to work together on larger projects is different. What is the gender distribution of physicists working at CERN?

My experience in school is that the smartest girls studied a lot more, and the smartest guys messed around a lot more.

Sounds about right.

CS is programming and programming is a lot of messing around.

Is it? Back in the day, there were CS professors who proudly declared they didn't like programming.

Back in the day, there were a few more women in CS :)

I still agree that CS being "less social" is a huge factor. But have to admit it seems like there's some other factors too, and I think the "less social" and "wild west" combo is pretty significant.

> Back in the day, there were a few more women in CS :)

I actually think this is probably wrong. Back in the day there was a higher percentage of women in CS. It's possible that in absolute numbers there are as many women today in CS as there was then. That's because there's probably a lot more people in CS overall.

I also think it's likely that back in the day most college-educated programmers had EE degrees, not CS degrees, so what you'd really want to look at is the percentage of women in CS and EE, not just in CS.

Back in the day, there were a few more women in CS :)

The professor I was thinking of was a woman, actually.

The math majors in my upper-level math classes had significantly better social skills than the people in the CS classes I took.

This is only an anecdote, but it's not obvious to me that mathematics isn't more social than CS.

I don't know how true this is; I've also had the experience of sitting around a restaurant table with academic math nerds and other times with computer programmers, and the differences there was pretty stark as well.

But another point: pay attention to the distinctions we're drawing, because "computer science is less social than other STEM fields" is not the same argument as "computer science is more forgiving of antisocial behavior".

The latter statement is one I could easily be convinced of! We all know about dev cultures that thrive on toxic behavior, and a lot of us have seen firsthand how homogenized groups of developers have mistreated people from outside their narrow social experience. A lot of this is well-studied human behavior: you pay a different kind of attention to the only woman on your team, or the only black person, than you do to the nth 20-something male nerd from central casting, and that can cause people to falsely attribute things to the outsiders.

We all know about dev cultures that thrive on toxic behavior,

I think a part of the problem is that the programming field is immature and flubby with ideology masquerading as principles. I think the programming field inadvertently trains us to become ideologues and engage in behaviors reminiscent of sectarian religious conflicts of the past.

and a lot of us have seen firsthand how homogenized groups of developers have mistreated people from outside their narrow social experience...that can cause people to falsely attribute things to the outsiders.

Sure. I think one such event at Google recently was widely covered in news media, though it was ideological narrowness, not social narrowness. I saw a whole bunch of false attribution across social media.

I think CS is unique in two ways. The first one way is it has a unique pipeline. Many CS majors started off tinkering around with their computers in ways that many high school girls don't.(where as most people's first experience with math/other stem is through classroom instruction)

The second is that programmers are perceived(rightly or wrongly) to be more lacking of social skills than other equivalent professions.

i.e. the office versus silicon valley

> Are the rest of the STEM career paths seen as more social than CS?

This guy actually put some pretty decent work into researching this - he found that women dominate "sociable" STEM fields like veterinary sciences and obstetrics, while men dominate the "cold" STEM branches like surgery and computer science.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

Alexander believes a lot of things. But you can just look up the stats on STEM fields yourself; they're not hard to find. There are STEM fields that approach parity, there are a couple in which women slightly lead men, and there are a bunch with more men than women. But CS is, by what to a casual glance looks like multiple stddevs, worse than the rest.

Unless math is "warmer" than CS --- it isn't --- this explanation doesn't hold much water.

Maths is clearly warmer. Go look at the stats for undergrad vs postgrad. There's a huge difference. Women get maths degrees to become teachers, more or less.

Women do not get math PhD's to become math teachers, nor do they publish cryptography research to do that.

Playing devil's advocate, it's possible that someone winds up getting a PhD or publishing crypto research after finding out that they really like doing math, after initially choosing it with the intent to teach.

I have absolutely no idea whether that matches reality for enough people to make any kind of a difference.

He address that in the article

"Women are around 20% of CS majors, physics majors, engineering majors, etc – but almost half of math majors" ...

"I was totally confused by this for a while until a commenter directed me to the data on what people actually do with math degrees. The answer is mostly: they become math teachers. They work in elementary schools and high schools, with people.

Then all those future math teachers leave for the schools after undergrad, and so math grad school ends up with pretty much the same male-tilted gender balance as CS, physics, and engineering grad school."

No, the numbers hold up all the way to PhDs. Women aren't obtaining math PhD's to become "math teachers" (and, if you read my original comment, you can also predict that they aren't doing academic crypto research to go teach math either).

Could you provide a citation on "the numbers hold up all the way to PhDs"?

I found https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/fraction-p...

https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajor...

Over 40% undergraduate degrees go to women, while less than 30% of doctorates.

https://imgur.com/a/nNHqwsP

Science Magazine, "Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines", vertical axis is PhDs, 2011 numbers.

If nothing else at this point I think we can put a bullet in the "they just want to be math teachers" hypothesis.

That url works, but no image loads.

> Is mathematics more social than CS?

Many people who major in math are aiming to become math teachers, so yes.

You're like the 3rd person on this thread to write the same comment. No, see the other comments, that explanation falls flat.

I talk regularly to academic math people (because cryptography) and the sense I have is that if anything, CS is far more social than the work they do --- to get anything significant done in technology, you have to coordinate and cooperate amongst teams of people.

I recall a paper I read in grad school which found that programmers actually had more need of interaction than other fields. As jdavis notes elsewhere, accounting and bookkeeping employs more women nowadays. I also note that very early on, computer programming was seen as a desirable job by women. Is there a common thread between computer programming in the very early days and accounting and bookkeeping today?

I don't know. But I do know that the masculinization of computer science seems to line up chronologically with the emergence of the home computer movement, which was began as a male-dominated 1970s hobby.

And I don't think it's hard to find serious CS people who can trace other malign influences from "homebrew hobbyist CS" in our field. We're basically a field that experienced a bizarre and potent deprofessionalization a few decades ago, and then rebuilt back up from that. Forget about the social and equity issues and just look at poor engineering practice, a lot of which is traceable to programming cultures that emerged from hobbyist computing.

just look at poor engineering practice, a lot of which is traceable to programming cultures that emerged from hobbyist computing.

Do you have citations? I do think you're onto something here, though I don't think it's necessarily the best idea to vilify men or the masculine. Anthropologically speaking, didn't the subculture of hobbyist programming come out of the subculture of model train building?

I'm not "vilifying men or the masculine". I am a dude. Also a dad, of a STEM college boy and a STEM HS girl. I like beer and pork fat and whiskey and cars. I don't so much like video games, but only because I'd rather code or yell on message boards. I'm happy to keep talking to you about this stuff, but I will not do that if you're trying to trap me in some weird ideological conflict about the persecution of men. The problem with the field is not that "men are bad".

Would you like to try asking me that again? It's also OK if you and I just don't try to have a dialog on this thread.

I'm not "vilifying men or the masculine". I am a dude. Also a dad, of a STEM college boy and a STEM HS girl. Also a dad, of a STEM college boy and a STEM HS girl. I like beer and pork fat and whiskey and cars.

Glad to hear it.

I'm happy to keep talking to you about this stuff, but I will not do that if you're trying to trap me in some weird ideological conflict about the persecution of men.

Well, likewise. I don't want ideological conflict, though sometimes I feel it's foisted upon me. I'm also quite open to the idea that something in the subculture of programming could be pushing women away. Please don't take my mention of vilification as an accusation, and my apologies if it came across that way. I don't think anyone can deny that the whole area of discussion has a history of someone vilifying someone else, so I think that steering away from that is useful.

When have I ever tried to ideologically trap you? If there was ever anything ideological I'd associate with you, it's this phrase about, "the social compact." (Not that I'm absolutely against redistribution. It just sounds like reparations between sovereign powers from centuries ago.)

I didn't say anything about men being bad, I don't believe there is anything intrinsically bad about men, and in fact I reject a lot of hypotheses about gender disparity based on "masculine behavior" explanations, such as the notion that women are put off by competitiveness (I am married to an extremely competitive woman engineer and, through her roller derby escapades, have met more than my fair share of other competitive women).

You implied that I did. I'm shutting that down hard. Thanks for acknowledging.

Like I said: I think our field is weird in that home computing deprofessionalized it. I think programming methodology also deprofessionalized. I don't think it's a weird observation to make that our field stagnated or even regressed and that a lot of practices and technologies we work with today are (a) rooted in the 1970s and (b) ignore decades of subsequent research.

Since you can trace a lot of badness in our field back to home computing (which: to be clear, was a very good thing! life is complicated!), I find the "we're male dominated because hobbyist computing in the 1970s was an insular and chauvinist culture" explanation pretty powerful. I think all these things feed into each other, too. There can be more than one explanation.

I didn't say anything about men being bad

I never said that you did. You only impute that from the juxtaposition of the sentences. I only said that vilification wasn't such a good idea. Given that we are talking about the potential downsides of "an insular and chauvinist culture," I think it's useful to say one should be circumspect about vilification. Assume incompetence before maliciousness, and all that.

You implied that I did.

Not at all. You are stating that I implied that you did, however, and that's simply not true, which I have stated above. In this, you are implying that I am a liar. Let me "shut that down hard." I've already apologized so either provide your evidence, or be calling me a liar.

(a) rooted in the 1970s and (b) ignore decades of subsequent research.

Aww, hell. Also ignore research from the 60's and from common practices of just 5 years ago!

I think all these things feed into each other, too. There can be more than one explanation.

Are there other de-professionalized fields?

I don't know. Are there? The home computing revolution was a weird inflection point. Medicine got more scientific over the last 200 years, steadily so, not less. The law has steadily remained formal and accredited since the founding of the country (and presumably long before). I'm sure there are similar cases, but this might be the biggest one in recent memory.

Again, part of my claim is: this is not really a surprising or weird argument. It's pretty obvious from the recent history of the field. You can argue that it doesn't have as much explanatory power as I'm giving it, but I don't think anyone can reasonably argue that the underlying phenomenon didn't occur.

I don't know. Are there?

Popular Music? Fiction writing? Journalism? Creating video content would qualify. (Possibly relevant: YouTube's audience is mostly male, while Tumblr's is mostly female. IIRC, the audience for video pornography also tends to skew male, while written erotica skews female.)

The home computing revolution was a weird inflection point.

Basically, it's the start of when computing went from a tool for accounting/administration/bureaucracy to also broadly encompassing media. Many of the de-profesionalized fields I mention above are associated with media.

Again, part of my claim is: this is not really a surprising or weird argument. It's pretty obvious from the recent history of the field.

I do think you're onto something.

Journalism seems like it could be a good example!

In some sense yes. I don't have the stats at hand, but women who study math are very n likely doing so because they want to become math teachers which I would say leans social.

Big difference to me is how does the core work get done. If it’s like coding where you need zero distraction time and actively have to turn off socially, it becomes less appealing. As a former PM turned dev, the difference is striking in how isolated the work can require you do be.

I believe this. The problem is, it's not unique to CS (it might be unique to knowledge work, but CS is far from the only species of knowledge work). So for it to have demographic explanatory power, it would have to account for the intense solitary concentration required for elite research in other STEM fields --- including fields like math, which are very closely related to CS, and the multitude of random STEM fields which have been taken over by computational approaches where the underlying work is really just domain-specialized programming by another name.

I think part of the programmer stereotype is that you basically have to be socially handicapped to fit in. Which may draw more people like that in and keep more well adjusted (or socially conscious) people out. In general, it seems that from a relatively young age women are given the impression that "nerds" are to be avoided at all costs -- we're stereotypically "weird" (meaning creepy perverts). Even though I haven't met a single person out of hundreds of people in this profession that overtly acted that way (although I've heard 2 anecdotal stories from people who had). Of course I'm not trying to say that there isn't a legitimate problem there, because there likely is, and especially with the small proportion of women in this profession they are very likely to run into those types. But I think the perception of the problem, or the quality of the people who are in CS, is probably greatly exaggerated by the stereotypes and that keeps people away.

I feel like if you talked to code conference runners, you might have a different opinion - being one of the few women at a social event really brings out the socially awkward or aggressive advances.

I'm sure it's more of a problem at these events than others, but I doubt it's never an issue at any type of event with that much of a gender imbalance. I'm absolutely not suggesting that there isn't a serious issue with harassment in our industry, I just don't think that is the actual root cause of the gender imbalance that exacerbates this issue. Clearly workplace discrimination broadly is an issue, but that all happens after the talent pool is heavily skewed towards men.

It seems to me less a question of how social the various STEM fields are than that CS is more closely tied into the larger internet culture. Especially for young men I can see this making them more insular as a group even if they're, in lots of ways, just as social

I have friends from other STEM areas, and we jokingly agree that my major has the weirdest people. That includes me.

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