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Comment by NotAnEconomist | Hacker News Reader

It's possible to both discriminate against men, yet have more men in the workforce, if women voluntarily are choosing not to enter a profession.

In fact, that seems to be the problem: no amount of discrimination against men resolves that women simply are choosing careers in a different distribution to what men do, but the only policy lever that can really be utilized is discrimination at various stages of education or employment.

This has left people aiming for a fantasy, and using increasingly aggressive discrimination to try and carry it out, biology be damned.

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> that women simply are choosing careers in a different distribution to what men do

Why is that, though?

Are women not encouraged to pursue technology careers? Or are they being encouraged to chose other careers instead?

Are they driven away from it by a toxic work place culture?

Or just the perception of tech as having toxic workplace cultures?

Are women moving into roles with more flexibility because they are expected to take on more domestic duties?

Or my hunch... Do women just feel less comfortable entering an industry with such an unbalanced gender ratio to begin with, and it becomes a self perpetuating cycle?

You say Biology be damned, but I don't think it's settled that biology is the main factor here.

And I'm not saying it is or it isn't. I'm saying we don't know.

I think you are asking the wrong questions. Why not ask: Why are there so many men in tech?

To answer that I would compare it to a field like finance, where people are well paid and over worked. I think the money comes first, then the men, and with them the bro culture. So my hunch is that men will disproportionately do anything for a dollar. And no-one notices because they are busy wondering where the women are.

That's also a possibility. I think men are pressured more to earn a lot of money. The traditional mindset was that women didn't need to be breadwinners.

Or... may I dare to suggest they simply don't like it?

I used to work at school. Not for a long time, but enough to make some observations. One of them: school kids are passionate. If they're interested in something, no amount of persuasion, toxicity or whatever else will distract them.

That's certainly a possibility. In fact, maybe most people wouldn't enjoy a career in STEM.

Or, like another commented suggested, maybe something about STEM appeals to men disproportionately.

If I had to guess, it's probably a combination of multiple factors. STEM isn't for everyone. But at a young age, more men are encouraged to pursue it. The high salary of tech jobs might attract men more than women, if men face more pressure to make a lot of money. Now you have a male dominated industry. And that starts to self perpetuate. Young boys see role models and women don't. Women outnumbered in male dominated workplaces become subject to more harassment. STEM starts to become a "man" thing, and less women feel like pursuing the career, especially when there are so many other occupations that seem more interesting. I think that's a plausible explanation for how we got to where we are today.

But nobody knows for sure. My point is, biology shouldn't be the default answer whenever we see gender gaps.

It’s perfectly reasonable to consider that maybe women are inherently drawn away from the field for whatever reason. There are biological differences between men and women and it’s possible that this is one.

What I don’t understand is why so many people insist that this must be the explanation, as if the current state of things is definitely a level playing field (or biased toward women) and the fact that there are so many more men in the field must therefore be due to something innate.

We’re only a few decades out from a time when women couldn’t open a bank account without their husband’s permission, and when raping a woman was perfectly legal as long as you were married to her. I think we should give it a little more time and effort before we declare that everything is now fair and any remaining discrepancies must be biological.

Why do you think your last paragraph hasn't prevented women from becoming numerous and successful in many other fields, such as becoming doctors? Could it be because of one of the most reproducable and statistically significant findings in social psychology, that women are generally more interested in people and men more interested in things?

A quick search shows that male doctors outnumber female doctors in the US by about a 2:1 ratio, so I don’t think that’s the best example. Your point remains, since there are fields where women are at parity or beyond.

I think that because it seems unlikely that we’ve managed to completely eliminate thousands of years’ worth of systemic sexism in such a short time. It’s highly improbable that, with so many things changing all the time, this just happens to be the moment when we’ve achieved a level playing field.

And to address the specific claim, why would being interested in people keep women away from computer jobs? It’s an intensely collaborative field. And why didn’t this keep women out of the field a few decades ago when women programmers were much more (relatively) numerous? If women are generally more interested in people and this drives sex disparities in different professions, why are there so few women in politics, the most people-heavy profession imaginable?

> A quick search shows that male doctors outnumber female doctors in the US by about a 2:1 ratio, so I don’t think that’s the best example.

I think it's a good example, you (and GP) just missed the more interesting part: Nurses handle the patients on a more intimate level than doctors, and female nurses outnumber male nurses roughly 10:1 in the US.

https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/total-number-of-pr...

> why so many people insist that this must be the explanation

These people who insist the explanation comes down to preference are basing this on their own lived experience, on the women they've met and what their interests are. 18% just doesn't strike them as being out-of-the-ordinary.

The percentage of women who own a set of wrenches is even smaller. Should we assume that is also due to unjust influence?

Funny how that personal experience angle is so commonly used to justify conservative viewpoints. The lived experience of some random person is completely worthless in answering this question.

Even if it were worth something, am I to believe that those people have never observed sexism? Regarding your bit about wrenches, have you never wandered into a toy store and seen the toy wrenches filed under “boys”?

You might find this an interesting read.

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

Quote:

The upshot of this research is neither especially feminist nor especially sad: It’s not that gender equality discourages girls from pursuing science. It’s that it allows them not to if they’re not interested.

There is a very small (albeit vocal) minority on the left side of the political spectrum that thinks that equality in outcome is a worthy goal.

This this is a minority, that stance does not generalize to people on the left in general.

And yet Google fired the guy who expressed this sentiment in the internal memo.

Are you saying there are biological differences that are preventing women from entering the software industry?

Because historically the trends of CS grads proves this is a false statement [1] so I'm curious where this statement comes from.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

All the talk of discrimination against women requires that they be helpless damsels in distress in all this, when their dominance of college graduation suggests the opposite.

Biology is not "preventing" women, it's directing their inclination. Women have a ton of opportunities, and it's just as likely that as CS blew up they decided they didn't want to and didn't need to take on the long hours and relative social isolation that professional engineering entails.

No, it does not require women to be damsels in distress and to suggest that is to be highly disengenous. It requires discussing greater trends in terms of what career paths women are considering and general industry trends. Women may be a majority of college grads, but that says very little about what they choose to major in, what states they're located in and so forth.

And making biological arguments without any sort of citation or statistical inference is illinformed. You haven't explained what exactly caused the trend reversal in the 80s other than an incredibly strained appeal to biology, which also mischaracterizes software engineering as a whole. Professional engineering is hardly a socially isolated career.

That chart shows relative numbers. A chart which shows absolute numbers tells a somewhat different story: http://blog.bethcodes.com/is-the-internet-convincing-women-n...

Women’s interest in comp sci has experienced two booms and is otherwise somewhat stable.

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