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Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

"Anyone who argues there should be "More women in medical school" needs to go visit a secretarial school. Completely filled with super smart women interested in typing and being secretaries."

"If secretarial school women found being doctors as interesting as they did being Secretaries, we wouldn't have any shortage of women being doctors."

same comment in 1950 when only 6% of doctors in the US were women (surprisingly, a lower number than in 1890), which was due to, surprise! male hostility to women in such a career, as we are seeing on gala display in this thread. in the case of medicine, the barriers were only broken through more forceful means than we see in tech, e.g. class action lawsuits and federal legislation.

lots of great background at https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/01/fight-women-doct...

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I disagree with your comparison saying Medicine is to Tech, as Secretarial Work is to Medicine. The entry to tech is extremely forgiving and easy compared to Medicine. I believe Medicine is much more important to society on an individual level than tech ever will be. A more accurate comparison would have been Law.

My sister works in an O.R. performing heart surgeries, saving lives. I make websites. We both like what we do.

She thinks my job is dreadfully boring. I would hate the hours she works, and the finality (lack of version control/ctrl-z) that comes with working in the medical field would stress me out every day.

Different strokes for different folks.

The difference being, being a doctor is (in many parts of the world) both more challenging/competitive and better paid than programming.

You explain with discrimination (which was real in the 50s according to most evidence we have) what is in parent's case better explained as a difference in motivation (making a five-figure salary by being responsible for humans is more attractive to the average US woman than being responsible for modules of code is).

Your secretarial school figure is a strawman to make the parent post look like a strawman. There's a legitimate discussion to be had on why women nowadays are found in a higher proportion in medical school and to law school than to CS, and there is a multitude of reasons that are more plausible than purely discrimination. Let's start to tease them apart without merely stopping at the clichés.

Being a doctor also carries much greater social respect (partially linked to the pay aspect). I expect this social respect gap has eroded in SV, but is still very significant in the remainder of the world.

I started in medicine when I went to university (parent pressure), but swapped to a computer science/engineering combination from the second year. The impact on my dating prospects at that time was very significant.

> You explain with discrimination (which was real in the 50s according to most evidence we have) what is in parent's case better explained as a difference in motivation (making a five-figure salary by being responsible for humans is more attractive to the average US woman than being responsible for modules of code is).

and your evidence for this is ....?

> , and there is a multitude of reasons that are more plausible than purely discrimination.

same? When computer programming was first invented, nearly all programmers were women. Only when the job became prestigious were they pushed out by men. So this would indicate that discrimination, not interest level, is the sole reason we don't have a lot of female programmers today.

evidence: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-first-women-in-tech-didnt-l...

> When computer programming was first invented nearly all programmers were women. Only when the job became prestigious were they pushed out by men.

Or maybe they were placed in these positions by men and when they were free to select it as a career, they didn't. In the early days of computing, personal interest wasn't a driving factor in selecting it as a career because it was still so new. I really think your example demonstrates the opposite of what you think it does.

> and your evidence for this is ....? If we look at other professions (business, law, medicine), we'd find more discrimination but also more women. So discrimination is unlikely as a sole cause.

> Only when the job became prestigious were they pushed out by men. I clearly recall the days when programming was thought as the domain of the pimple-faced nerds with the thick glasses, way before the brogrammers and other "cool" nerd types came along. Law and medicine are all more prestigious and by your reasoning would have pushed out women even more. So there's something you're missing, and actively missing it even when reality waves its hand to you.

Just one google query gives something more nuanced, such as this: https://austinstartups.com/the-tech-gender-gap-a-2016-progre... which rightly points out that the percentage of women was rising in CS as much as in medical and law until around 1985. And if you look at the graphic here https://blogs.sas.com/content/sascp/2018/12/05/booming-enrol... you notice that it's not women leaving the field, it's more men coming to CS while the number of women stays the same until they leave in troves at the following bust cycle.

You keep using evidence from the 50s (i.e., 70 years back) as explanation of today's state of affairs, but the evidence points that the 50s don't tell us anything about why we don't have more women programmers. Instead, ask why women got pushed away by post-bubble insecurity and maybe (and this is interpretation) some stigma that we as CS people have that pushes out women.

The job never became prestigious. I love computer programming but saying “I’m a programmer” has been one of the best ways to lose interest of people who aren’t programmers. The most common response is just “oh, that must be nice because it pays well, right?”

Compare that to the response people get when they introduce themselves as heart surgeons and you’ll see what prestige amongst the general population (at least in the US) looks like.

> Let's start to tease them apart without merely stopping at the clichés.

Yes, please do so. "They are not interested in computers" is a huge cliché. So which non-cliché reasons do you see?

> "They are not interested in computers" is a huge cliché. So which non-cliché reasons do you see?

Motivation goes beyond "being interested" in something. If you ask why there aren't more men studying art history it would be rather silly to say that men are less interested in art history. Then again, if you said that men don't pursue art history because they (most often) wouldn't be able to sustain a family on an art historian salary - and are expected to do so, while women find it appealing because appreciating art and understanding social and political undercurrents is more important than earning potential to them. (I don't know many art historians but see here for an example: https://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/art-history/why...)

We could also ask why art history is not a candidate for "new collar jobs" (i.e., having people with associate-level degrees in art history) or why we don't have art history bootcamps for men. Part of the answer is that - at least since GC languages and Ruby on Rails - we do have good uses for people with shallow CS knowledge, or at least that there are less people interested in erecting high barriers of entry. The answer to that is that CS is thought of as skills-based and shallow, another aspect that is more likely to dissuade (especially white middle-class) women from pursuing a 100% CS career while it will help pull in people combining domain expertise with at least some CS skills.

It's also only anecdotically, but I think your art history example doesn't fly: https://art.stanford.edu/people/faculty

My art history example does fly if we're talking about students. The question then would be - what about faculty? Why is faculty still mostly male when students are mostly female.

And the answer is that the faculty selection process is - for art history as much as for other faculties - skewed towards a narrow sub-demographic that is predominantly white and male from a well-to-do background. If you call that discrimination I'll agree with you, but it's not a kind of discrimination that would be specific to either art history or computer science.

Even if you look outside Stanford https://art.vassar.edu/bios/ you can see a definite difference in gender distribution between adjuncts (poorly paid, mostly female) and full professors (mostly male).

At least in Germany, this is being changed by rules that give female applicants preferential treatment when there are (as is common) more male than female applicants for a professorship, and at least in female-dominated courses of studies we now see more female professors.

So we seem to have gender (+other, less visible) discrimination in many cases where managers, professors and other roles are selected in a competitive manner. And we have ways to change this if universities and private enterprise play along. But this has nothing to do with females not choosing CS as a major, and it has nothing to do with females not entering programmer jobs.

You are right, the selection/motivation mechanics for students are very different from the ones for faculty.

I think relative status is implicit in your analogy.

But doctors are higher status than software engineers... I think almost everyone would agree with that. Except maybe the HN crowd - but only if that software engineer is also an entrepreneur, because that's the trump card. But most devs aren't.

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