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Comment by dunslandsboo | Hacker News Reader

Why do you want to change the behaviour of women regarding their choice of study field?

You misunderstood. We want any person, women and young girls included, to be able to pursue a career path, if they have even the faintest desire of it, without self-censorship, negative remarks, feeling out of place, their vocation and/or skills being continuously challenged randomly, or having to cope with various forms of harassment. If you build an environment that allow that, women presence in the field surge. And then you see retrospectively that many women wanted to try this field, but it was really the field that didn’t want women to try. Because, as you will probably agree, desire for a career is not natural destiny, it’s the result of many factors including avoiding being hurt.

In more equal societies women tend to choose STEM less though

Maybe you can help me understand. So how do you explain why there are fewer women in STEM fields in Scandinavia and more in Turkey, Tunesia and United Arab Emirates?

Well at least according to the paper "The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Gijsbert Stoet, David C. Geary"

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761774171...

Do you realize that women aren't a monolithic group? Various effects can be at play at the same time - women preferring on average other kinds of work isn't an argument in favour of discriminating against those that do not.

Scandinavia has hundreds of years of mostly unbroken history in STEM. It is literally the home of the Nobel prize. It isn't really comparable to nations that have rapidly shifted their workforce and industries more recently.

That is some just-so-story that doesn’t present a disprovable hypothesis. There was a better-supported causal hypothesis floating around that exposure to the internet, in particular, turned women off of CS because the culture #onhere was so full of sexism. Try looking up “ambient belonging”: I remember some thing about all you had to do to get more women interested was change the decor to not suggest they were going to have to put up with sexist bullshit if they chose the field.

> without self-censorship, negative remarks, feeling out of place, their vocation and/or skills being continuously challenged randomly

This is the life of all men in competence hierachies. All of these things happend to me within the last half year and have been since I was a boy. Doesn't matter in the least, you couldn't pry me away from my interests with a crowbar.

This is your real problem: generally, girls want to be invited, boys just do.

The reason I speak up at all and will take all the abuse and downvoting thats sure to follow is it irks me so much.

We got into PCs and didn't matter one damn if they came from space aliens or out of the dumpster. We sat at them, we sat at them and we got scolded for it and told to go outside and called nerds. Our status was absolute dogshit and few women would associate willingly with computing in any form.

I am old enough to remember that at parties we mumbled "something with computers" and smiled apologetically hoping the topic would move on. Yes, many of us spent years, decades even, feeling slightly ashamed of our profession.

Now that the best and brightest of us nerds literally reshaped the world into a place where your personal handheld computer became a status symbol here come the women.

And you know, it would be okay, we are very tame men overall, except now you claim your collective absence from this topic is because we hurt you. No, we did not, you all just didn't like computers.

To add to this, another important question to ask is: what kind of equality, in general, do you want? Do you want equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? They are mutually exclusive.

Optimal application of talent. The concept of "choice" isn't very consistent, especially when applied to populations instead of individuals.

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