Hacker News Reader

Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

She follows up that it is "established fact" that the "specific types of thought process and problem solving required for engineering of all kinds (software or otherwise) are simply less prevalent among women"

I'd like to see where she got this "established fact". Many of the early computer pioneers were women, and many of the early human "computers" were also women.

I've known some extremely talented female software engineers (and some mediocre ones), and well as some extremely talented male software engineers (and some mediocre ones). But, I've met many many more male engineers than female which I believe is because more females are discouraged from entering the field by society.

Since this trend seems to be changing, it will be interesting to see in a decade or two if the field becomes more balanced.

View on HN

The female software engineers I've worked with have nearly all been super talented, and incredible at their jobs. Several have been extremely gifted at quantitative reasoning and machine learning applied to geo/spatial problems.

I suspect they've had to be, given how unwelcoming the field has been to them.

Sure, my sample size is like 10, but enough to make me laugh at statements about womens' lacking in technical abilities.

It should be obvious that she isn't saying that female software engineers can't be talented.

Furthermore, it isn't a given that the lack of women in tech is due to society discouraging women from entering the field.

Furthermore, it isn't a given that the lack of women in tech is due to society discouraging women from entering the field.

It's not a given that cultural bias is the only factor, but it is a given that there is a cultural bias against women going into STEM fields. It feels like that trend is changing (I certainly am seeing more female applicants at college job fairs), but it seems that we still have a ways to go before it's erased entirely (if it ever will be).

So it's possible that without any cultural bias at all that fewer women than men would choose a STEM career, but we should still strive to lower that barrier to entry so any woman that wants to go into a STEM field is able to do so freely and without discouragement (whether explicit or implicit)

Why is there an assumption that women are being discouraged to enter STEM fields rather than men being pushed? Lets imagine if there were a social culture that rewarded men who took high income jobs, discourage men who selected their occupation based on interest, and allowed women full freedom to choose any occupation. How similar to our world would that look like?

A find it a good question to ask is how society rewards people based on their decisions. Women that follow gender norms in their career choice, and women that don't. Men that follow gender norms, and men that don't. Using social status as a metric, who reaps the best rewards and who get punished the most?

That’s not entirely true.

Women are actually more equally represented (or over represented in the case of medical sciences) in STEM fields, the discrepancy in computer sciences is where the unequal representation is most apparent.

When people talk about a toxic culture, the implicit metaphor is that culture is to people what water is to fish. People default to filling the role that we think we are expected to fill.

Rather than getting into the issue of who was more dominant in a field at a given time, let's look at another field. Literally all early psychologists were men. Today the field is about 70% women with a rapidly increasing "gender gap." Do you think that's because 'men are discouraged from entering the field by society'? Of course not. Should we start trying to 'correct' this? Again, of course not. We should of course always ensure that men and women have equality of opportunity to do as they see fit, but differences in outcome alone do not mean anything.

Scandinavia is the most gender equal region in the world. And one of the many discoveries they made on the way there is that when there is a major push to get people into atypical roles there tends to be a roughly constant increase in participation. After that push fades everything rapidly converges back to where it was before. The constant aspect is also interesting in that it seems to suggest there is no self feedback mechanism as would be implied by simple social differences causing a change.

Some of the biggest companies for trying to get 'x into computing', including women, have been Google, Apple, and Intel. These are the exact same companies that were also engaging in an illegal anti-competitive collusion cartel whereby the agreed to not try to recruit each employees from one another. They were fully aware of the consequences of this action. Eric Schmidt of Google ironically wrote in an email, "[discussion of this agreement should be done] verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later." [2]

As Schmidt was well aware of the possibility of, they've now faced losses at trial in the hundreds of millions of dollars. So why would these companies voluntarily engage in such a high risk behavior? Because it kept wages down. What does pushing for 'get x into computing' do? It would markedly increase the labor pool without a proportional increase in the number of jobs. It would help drive wages substantially down.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Role_in_illegal_n...

Do you think that's because 'men are discouraged from entering the field by society'? Of course not

Since I'm not in that field, I really have no first hand knowledge, but if I had to guess, maybe men are encouraged to go into psychiatry instead of psychology while women are discouraged from becoming a psychiatrist?

What does pushing for 'get x into computing' do? It would markedly increase the labor pool without a proportional increase in the number of jobs. It would help drive wages substantially down.

The more important thing it does is bring additional talented people in the field, making it easier to hire top quality people.

It's not about making it "easier" to hire top quality people, but cheaper. Easier would imply that companies such as Google, Apple, and Intel are simply unable to hire enough top quality engineers. That's clearly false. It might also suggest that the engineers that they have are insufficiently skilled - again something I see no evidence for at all. But we are certainly at the equilibrium where supply and demand are in a nice balance. This is unlike most other fields where labor supply has greatly outpaced demand in part due to college becoming as typical as high school. And because of this engineers at these companies are in positions of unprecedented privilege. They can actively try to influence corporate policy, demand wages that in many cases are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and so on.

The idea of increasing the supply is to bring the equilibrium in line with most other industries which is where labor supply generally greatly outpaces business demand. This not only helps drive wages down, but also enables companies greater control over their employee. For instance in tech there is massive turnover. Since employees are in high demand, they can and do job hop much to their own benefit. When employees are less in demand a job becomes more sacred which increases employee "loyalty" giving the company more power to do as they see fit. As but one example employees are going to be less inclined to object to dubious corporate behavior, which has become a running theme at Google, when said employees attach an extremely high value to their job.

What would happen however is that no-name shops who can't offer all that much would be able to hire top quality people. And while that's good for them, I see this no better than the current state of the job market where it's increasingly common to see that the guy serving your coffee has a college degree, and the mountain of debt that entails. Labor oversupply benefits companies and hurts employees. In a 'big picture' view, this is probably a good thing since marginalizing labor means more companies can grow and compete which benefits everybody in the longrun. But from the perspective of labor, it's obviously not a good thing.

https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/political-correctness/the-ge...

For years Mr. Peterson has criticised people as being Marxists but didn't read the Communist Manifesto until about two weeks ago. I'm not sure he's best positioned to offer commentary on complex topics like this one.

Then who is? Ben shaprio?

Both are hacks.

That is a lie. He said he read it in preparation, because he hadn't read it in a while.

Peterson clearly has no idea what Marxism actually is, outside of the boogeyman created in his head. He proved so in the 'debate'.

When questioned directly about what Marxists he believed represented what he's characterising, he couldn't name a single one. This lends more evidence and fact to the pile of facts that demonstrate he has no clue what he's talking about.

If Peterson is not of your like, you could still take a look at some of the papers and studies referenced in the article from credible sources[1][2], before drawing conclusions from an unrelated subject (whether or not he read the Communist Manifesto).

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6412/eaas9899

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188691...

Considering that academic rigour is at stake - given we need to trust he's made a rigorous survey of the academic consensus surrounding this topic - it is a very related subject.

Given that none of these papers prove that women are better or worse at programming than men, perhaps you can demonstrate your academic rigour to me, too?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com