My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer
jeanhsu.com
jeanhsu.com
In addition to being totally messed up politically, it's really harmful to your self-esteem if you think that you are being given special treatment to satisfy someone else's political correctness quota. Not to mention that eager men (with the best of intentions, no doubt) over-compensating can lead to "othering", that feeling that everyone is going overboard making you so welcomed that you kind of want to barf.
My current speculation is that for most girls, it's actually their parents that instill a nagging sense of doubt regarding what they are "supposed" to consider good career options. Therefore, I think the key is to reach young minds.
Girl coders: go speak at public schools or high schools today!
In addition I noticed in the Bay Area when I lived there for a few years many of the immigrant Asians really didn't give a damn one way or the other what their daughters did. This is actually worse, in my opinion.
Ah well, here is to the hope more of the sublimely proficient women I know seek engineering careers instead of pigeonholing themselves into "touchy feely" crap fields like marketing & PR.
Not all the people I socialize with are into computers. Most aren't. You can't make all your friends in your own industry. I don't care if a person is a man or a woman, unless there are seriously extenuating circumstance I won't work or socialize with them if their assholes. The problem is that in geek circles there is a heavy social penalty of advocating that someone be ostracized for behaving like an asshole, everyone has to be included no matter how much no one else wants to hang out with them.
There are a lot of anti-social retards in tech regardless of gender. I'm quite happy with it as there are lots of people willing to hire devs who are willing to not be condescending and have some semblance of adherence to social norms. As the OP pointed out quite accurately in their post 'I realized he was just an asshole who probably wouldn't get too far in life anyways.'
Many people are hardwired to respect the opinion of anyone who forcefully and confidently expresses it. It's a two way street though, want people to think you know software engineering or any other topic? Just say something reasonably intelligent in a forceful and confident way, also if someone else has said it that they respect mention that person as having saying it. Most of the debates in software engineering are subjective in nature as much as everyone involved in the decision likes to claim otherwise.
If you know your rhetoric you'll have no problem intellectually disarming most people in CS. CS geeks think they only pay attention to logos but realistically there are a lot of CS decisions made based on ethos and pathos. I'll probably be down modded for saying this but the appeal of open source is based largely in ethos and pathos, and not logos.
I'd settle for more people in tech who can write working code with out being an asshole regardless of gender.
This is an argument that's popped up in a dozen varieties over the last century of slowly bringing equality to a bunch of different groups. An extreme example would be the "separate but equal" line that promoted racial segregation in America; if there is no codified barrier, the argument goes, then there must be no barrier at all! Right?
The problem is that scripted barriers are not the only barriers that exist. Social barriers are much more prominent and damaging. If the culture around technology has been built in a way that encourages a certain type of usually-male character and discourages anybody else, and I would argue that this is the case, then even if everybody's invited they're not necessarily going to show up.
This isn't a tech-only problem, mind you. The acting world is famous for its cliquishness; certain sports and school sports teams also have a certain exclusive attitude. It's not that you can't participate equally in theory; it's that the prospect of participating at all is so unpleasant to certain kinds of people that they choose not to of their own volition.
The programming world is remarkably and unfortunately geared towards only certain sorts of minds. It's very late at night so I hope you'll excuse me if I'm not defining just what sorts of minds those are, but I know that I find programming a hostile and unapproachable subject in general. There's nobody out there teaching it or explaining it in a way that appeals to me. The programming courses I've taken in college failed to spark my interest entirely. So it's not just that women aren't in tech; there are a lot of sorts of people who simply aren't represented, and so the entire field misses out.
This doesn't matter if your only goal is to maintain the status quo of programming — but I think that's a remarkably shallow ambition. The more people we have programming, the more diverse and creative we'll find programming becomes. Everybody benefits from such diversity, because each potential new approach to programming will yield discoveries that bounce back to benefit people in each field. Fact is that programming is still an incredibly new industry; we haven't begun to see the extent of what it can do for society. And our progress will be limited to the sorts of people who are able to develop a passion for programming. If we don't strive to invite and encourage new sorts of people to join the fold, we're hurting ourselves as well as those others.
You're technically right that everybody's equal in tech. But in practice there's a severe discrepancy in gender, and that discrepancy will only naturally balance itself out very slowly. If we make an effort to push towards real equality we can speed up the process immensely, and it's also a nice thing to do, so I don't see much of a reason not to do it.
Could that be because it is in fact an extreme brain activity that only a small percentage of people is capable of doing?
And since men are over-represented in the extremes of society, both in good and in bad, they are over-represented in programming?
Nope. The ideas behind programming are extremely basic. The rules, so to speak, that dictate how programming works are simplistic. And the actual method of creating programs — essentially, breaking down a single task into lots of little pieces — is a method of problem-solving that's existed for a long, long time.
The problem is more that the people who teach programming go at it in a very unfriendly, non-intuitive way for the majority of the population. Programmers aren't user-friendly. This isn't inherent to the nature of the task. I've handed a lot of people who literally knew nothing about how to program things like Game Maker, RMXP, and _why the lucky stiff's TryRuby, and it's impressive how quickly they both learn how programming works and begin making things with what they've learned.
"Extreme brain activity"? Hardly. I mean, let's not kid ourselves, programming's simple enough that lots of programmers get started when they're eight years old.
Abstract thinking, then using those abstractions to build new abstractions is a hard task. Programming at its basic level is simple. But its complexity grows exponentially to the point where managing complexity is the totality of programming. This is what people can't seem to do, even on a trivial level.
>The problem is more that the people who teach programming go at it in a very unfriendly, non-intuitive way for the majority of the population. Programmers aren't user-friendly.
They teach programming by asking you to program. Unfortunately this is impossible for some 60% of the people who take a programming course. We have yet to come up with a better way.
I can agree with that statement, to some extent. The composer Brian Eno once said of prodigies: "The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities." Programming fits the "discontinuous possibilities" mold very well.
The question is whether or not you want to keep teaching programming in a way that only clicks with those more prodigious people, or if you want to come up with approaches that let in people who may not have the same instant intuition. And, just as in classical music, if you encourage only the people who have a certain sort of aptitude, you're also encouraging people who will only ever approach programming in one certain way, and the result is that the medium as a whole suffers from lack of diversity.
> They teach programming by asking you to program. Unfortunately this is impossible for some 60% of the people who take a programming course. We have yet to come up with a better way.
It's not that they ask people to program that's problematic. (I'd like to see a citation for that 60%, as well; it sounds fishy.) I've taken several programming classes at several levels and I don't think anybody who gets what they're doing finds programming difficult.
The challenge, rather, and this is not only a challenge that comes up in programming courses, is figuring out how to make people get it. You need to develop a manner of teaching that makes all these actions somehow intuitive; why is it that we program in this particular way? What does each word mean? Why's each language constructed in its particular pattern, and how does that affect coding?
Teaching programming without putting serious thought into creating a comfortable abstraction for students is not really teaching programming at all. It's like teaching a creative writing class without simultaneously teaching literature (and, sadly, many creative writing classes are guilty of this). You can pretend that writing is an obscure, difficult art that only a select few minds can master. But I'm a skilled poet and I teach poetry to middle schoolers and I think it's safe to say that the reason most people can't write a good poem is that they don't understand the reason why they're writing a poem in the first place.
I had a teacher, in a high school Java class, who was actually very good at teaching this; I didn't recognize how good he was at the time. He took a class composed mostly of people who knew literally nothing about anything code-related, and in a year turned them without fail into programmers capable of making competent programs. No student dropped out or switched the class; he worked with what he had and didn't fail a single one of us.
The guy-to-girl ratio was pretty close to 1:1, for what it's worth. We had a surprisingly diverse class. And it was really surprising who ended up really showing a knack for coding and who didn't. Frequently the really good coders struggled for longer than the rest of us did, but when they hit upon how to get something done their approach was a lot better than the rest of the class's.
(And by the way, I'd like to mention that this is the best discussion of gender equality that I've ever read on Hacker News, and that I'm in a way really proud that we're having this conversation right here. Cheers to everybody on both sides for keeping this a relatively civil conversation; this is not an easy subject to discuss politely.)
It's not that women should be encouraged because we're women. It's that 1/2 the population often feels (at least to some extent) like outsiders to the field. If there are other groups that feel the same way, then that needs to be dealt with as well. It's just that lack of women tends to be noticeable - in 15 years of software development I've only had 3 other women developers on my team.
Additionally, it is highly likely that if we actually looked for different perspectives, optimizing for them honestly would routinely result in allocating scarce resources (like jobs) away from individual women. This is exactly what happened in university admissions: if you do something like e.g. give extra bonus points for foreign languages on the theory that it privileges children of immigrants over rich white kids at Andover, you'll find that rich white kids at Andover are quite capable of bending their considerable resources to the acquisition of foreign language skills if you give them sufficient incentive. (This is why universities desiring a particular racial balance in the United States achieve it through severe and pervasive racial discrimination.)
The solution isn't to optimize the process to hire more women, it's to look at the reasons why women avoid tech. Getting more qualified people into the hiring pool can only help.
When I started off in CS, the introductory class was 60/40 (approximately the same as the school) at the start. By the end it was 85/15 - women dropped it at a far higher rate then the men. Why? I don't think it has to do with men being better at it than women, I think a lot of it has to do with what we're told to expect of ourselves.
Everyone in that class was smart, and almost everyone was used to getting A's throughout high school. A guy who got a B or C would look at it as they we're doing well enough and work harder, a woman would be more likely to think that "they" were right and this field wasn't for them.
In high school, my guidance counselor told me not to bother applying to MIT, and if it wasn't for my parents standing up for me, I likely wouldn't have. I know other women who heard the same sorts of things growing up. That's where the problem lies, it's not something that can be fixed easily. Maybe it's too deeply rooted in our society to be fixed any time soon, but I think that if we at least can help women over that hump and get them to realize that they can do it, that the numbers will come up, and everyone will benefit from it.
The prevalence of bad simplistic solutions should not suggest that it is not a problem worth addressing, however. Only that the problem is not trivially addressed, if at all deemed a problem.
I'm unconvinced that the problem, if it is one, can be effectively addressed at the college level. This is not a problem of admission, but one of interest. That interest needs to be encouraged, or at least not discouraged, far earlier.
> I'm quite happy with it as there are lots of people willing to hire devs who are willing to not be condescending and have some semblance of adherence to social norms
That actually sounded pretty condescending to me.
Equal in the sense of:
TotalSum(Woman) == TotalSum(Man)
not:
Woman == Man.
We all have the same rights. This a very different thing than being equal.
The key to getting more females in CS is to expose them to programming in middle school or earlier.
Jean put her finger on why recruiting females for CS at the college level is so difficult: if they are starting programming in college (or even high school) when most of the class has been programming for years, they are way behind on the learning curve and have a daunting task to catch up.
"Something that frustrates me about the field of computer science is that there are a lot of jerks who think that just because they've "mastered" some programming language or know some obscure unix commands, they are gods and you are nothing."
And frankly, that's the level at which a typical CS freshman is operating. Lots of knowledge about "coding"...very little knowledge about anything else. The playing field is much more level than it initially seems, but because the CS 101 classes are mostly about writing toy code it's easy for prior coding knowledge to be intimidating. In my own undergrad CS program, the CS101 hotshots fared no better, on average, than the kids who came in with no experience at all. In fact, a few of the loudest initial braggarts were the most spectacular flameouts, and about an equal number of the no-prior-experience kids ended up the honors graduates.
Universities could do a lot to combat this problem -- it might be a good idea to let the high-school coding jocks place out of the first CS classes. Alternatively, making first-year classes more about math and less about code would probably put 99% of all incoming students on an even playing field.
Since my university had large Korean and Chinese populations, it kind of struck me as parallel to the problems the Asian Studies department had weeding out native speakers looking for an easy A - it was hard to tell them from the kids who could speak but not write. Putting them in a separate section kept them from driving the class, and things went much smoother.
My girlfriend took Berkeley's introductory CS class as an undergraduate. She did well in the class, got an A, but she was really put off by the attitude of many classmates who had prior programming experience and judged her for not having any. It doesn't have to be with programming languages: it can be with things like setting up your UNIX shell, using emacs, ssh etc... something that we take for granted but had to learn at one point or another.
While she didn't intend to Major in Computer Science in the first place, I can't help but think that the environment was almost deliberately designed to make sure that somebody who had great potential to be an excellent programmer couldn't accidentally realize it (much as Jean, the author of the article did). Women who are good at programming still end up deciding against it as a career; on the other hand, many men are horrible at programming, but persist at it.
Interestingly enough, in Russia/former USSR the male:female ratio is in Computing is slightly better (more females) than other technical fields. I am not sure whether that's still the case (I left former USSR in 1996). My mother is a software engineer (she introduced me to Scheme and OCaml, back when you weren't considered a real programmer if you worked in anything other than C++). She had many female colleagues when she worked in a Computer Science research lab (back in the days of [Soviet clones of-] PDP-11s, VAXen and IBM 370s, ATT UNIX, etc... when programming was much more incidentally complex than it is now).
I'm not sure math makes all that much of a difference either because the most experienced people in my class were all doing math-related things (myself a physics minor, my girlfriend a math minor, and my two other friends a math and physics double major, respectively).
I just wouldn't worry so much about experienced students or give them something extra to work on if they wanted it. I started programming when I was 9, meaning I had been messing around with Linux, systems, programming languages, and algorithms for a full 9 years before stepping into my first class freshman year. My professors did the proper thing and used the finals from the freshman year CS courses to propel me to upper level courses in my first quarter. Don't try to work against experience, work with it.
I've graded and TA'd the course for two years, and I think his approach works extremely well. It lets you filter out the people who really get it from the people who are just pattern matching from previous experience.
How do you know this?
At the school where I went, the distribution for CS101 was bimodal; higher peak were the experienced ones, lower peak were the neophytes.
And no, it's not just the effect of "weeding out" the inexperienced kids -- as I said above, a number of the best students in my program had no prior experience, and a fair number of "experienced" kids flamed out once they hit the non-coding portion of the curriculum.
I went to a small school for undergrad, so I knew everyone who graduated with me, and everyone who started with me. Later, I went to a very large graduate school, and while the same patterns seemed to hold, I can't say for sure.
How is the computer field different from other fields? Once they are proficient, some people choose to share their knowledge to let people reach even higher goals, whilst others people enjoy making fun of those less educated and put them down. I've seen such behavior everywhere.
EDIT: Moreover, in the latter case, if you add some ingrained misogyny to the mix, things get even worse.
All sentences that start with these words are misguided. It is a complex issue with contributing factors at EVERY stage of a programmer's development.
Yes, let's help middle school girls get a chance to program. But let's also change CS curricula to draw on more skills besides programming. And let's make intro programming classes more welcoming to nonprogrammers. And let's find new venues for promoting startup job openings. And let's give grants for women making open source contributions, and, and, and....
The same is true of promoting literacy and bike friendly cities and fighting racism and most every other kind of activism. This is not a world of root causes.
What about others who have a few more gray hairs than I? When did Seymour Cray, Vint Cerf, Peter Norvig, Tim Berners-Lee, and other early pioneers start programming? I think it's pretty safe to say they didn't have mainframes in their parent's basement growing up that they were programming on since before high school. They had a natural interest and the aptitude to do well in it.
> Cray was born in 1925 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin to Seymour R. and Lillian Cray. His father was a civil engineer who fostered Cray's interest in science and engineering. As early as the age of ten he was able to build a device out of Erector Set components that converted punched paper tape into Morse code signals. The basement of the family home was given over to the young Cray as a "lab".
That's not a mainframe, no. But he was still learning a lot about programming.
I'm a few years younger than the youngest of the quoted pioneers (Tim Berners-Lee, born 1955). My first access to a computer was in my junior year in high school: a DecWriter[3] connected via a 300 baud dial-up modem to a timeshare system, programmed in Basic. (Obsessively. Still. :-O)
The limiting factor for pioneers was access to computer. For kids today, access isn't a problem.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_H._Aiken [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I [3] http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/la36.html
That's not the fastest way to run your programs but things like 'guess a number' are definitely doable.
Shortly after that I got a Saturday job at a local radio shack which gave me access to the real thing.
So it's not necessary to have access to computer hardware at all to learn about programming, even though it certainly helps.
I think that it is important to make software engineering a codified, professional field.
It is not an advantage to have programming be a field where the bragging rights go to those who put together a D&D weather generator in a true Mini-computer in Middle School.
Rather, it is much better to have software engineering be something you can enter in college if you a good mastery of abstract thinking.
I would further mention that it helps programming as a professional if a good programmer is a generalist who knows how to get any required details. The process of becoming a generalist is entirely possible if you enter the software engineering field in college. Essentially, the point is for a person learn good process and let the rest take of itself.
Oppositely, if programmers are merely hackers, geeks or idiot-savants, who accumulate massive amounts of details concerning systems, languages and libraries in a near-autistic fashion, then not only will programming remain a ghetto but it will be a poorly paid, miserably ghetto.
Careful, this could be similar to saying that it's not advantageous to have mathematics be a field where people who prove non-trivial theorems in high school do better in university courses.
Some people have prior background or a special talent and that's not a bad thing. It's just important that this is also not required to succeed in the given field.
I personally couldn't disagree more, but luckily in this case there is no need to speculate since we have an almost perfect natural experiment available. Virtually all of the other branches of engineering - including the ones which you're presumably basing this idea on - have exactly the same gender imbalance issues as software engineering.
Sample from one institution: http://web.archive.org/web/20080611075012/http://www.eng.uwa.... Class sizes are around 80-100 except for environmental and geological which are half to third of that.
I spent 10 years as a land surveyor and GIS cartographer, and during that entire time I met one (!) woman surveyor. CE is notorious for this.
So after getting your degree you can only be a CEng by working for an existing CEng in a company that certifies CEngs.
Sounds like a perfect way of weeding out all those women who do pick a CS degree. Unless all traditional big-iron firms are looking to hire more women, and all 60-something male senior engineers are really clamoring for more women to certify ?
It would be rare for a new engineering grad to work under a 60-year-old engineer, typically the supervisors are much younger.
Perhaps women are attracted to public sector-type jobs, for some values of "public sector type", rather than a specific engineering discipline. How will that change the gender ratios question?
So, your premise of "most of the class has been programming for years" is false in at least my case.
At his confirmation hearing, when Greenspan was asked why Townsend-Greenspan employed so many women (> 50%, compared to about 5% in finance at the time), he replied that since he valued women as much as men, but other firms didn't, he could get better work for the same money by hiring women. Are there any software companies doing the same thing today, and if not, why not?
I now run my own company and it's really hard to find women to hire as developers - out of every 100 resumes I might get one girl, who doesn't have the qualifications. I'm hoping to see that change over the years. I feel I need to help on that and do outreach, speak at highschool classes maybe.
I encourage people in the tech industry to look into doing this. I think it's important to take the opportunity to show people in schools some of the exciting and fun things we get to do on a daily basis.
Teachers can appreciate people from industry coming and talking about their experience with students.
And so they continue to have centerfolds on the wall and have their servers named after playmates.
That would have been a golden opportunity to change the system from the inside.
Women that do go into engineering and do well in school usually have no problems finding jobs.
http://www.buffettsecrets.com/benjamin-graham-biography.htm
Somehow I suspect if you said something like,
"Enrico Caruso was Italian, and so couldn't find a job since none of the opera houses would hire an Italian..."
...the bullshit detectors would have tripped more readily.
Fyi, Jews have been prominent in finance since Joseph, at least.
"Benjamin Graham was born Benjamin Grossbaum in London, England[1] to Jewish parents.[2] He moved to New York City with his family when he was one year old. After the death of his father and experiencing poverty, he became a good student, graduating from Columbia, as salutatorian of his class, at the age of 20. He received an invitation for employment as an instructor in English, Mathematics, and Philosophy, but took a job on Wall Street eventually starting the Graham-Newman Partnership."
The women on the panel, who were all Westerners, couldn't even comment on that. They were just plain speechless, and rightly so, because most of their arguments involving bullying boys, mother nature, and other standard points were pretty much refuted by the simple fact that there already exist places in the world where this topic is not even an issue. And it's not the ones you would usually relate to human progress.
Exemplar: Bulgaria
The participation rate for women in these fields is slightly higher than for men: 7.8 percent of the female college-age cohort obtained an NS&E degree in Bulgaria in 1992; 7.2 percent of males in this age group obtained such a degree in that same year.
In 1992, women obtained 57 percent of all university degrees. In addition, they obtained half of the engineering degrees, 70 percent of the natural science degrees, and 73 percent of the mathematics and computer science degrees. These percentages have not changed since 1975 (Stretenova, 1994).
Of course, this stereotype was perceived as The Truth. Mother Nature, backed up by statistically demonstrable demographic evidence. Can't argue with that, right? And so it goes...
They can say something so simple as "Oh don't you know that command?" but in an inadvertently condescending voice that makes you feel like you're the only person who doesn't know it. As someone just testing out the CS waters, that type of experience in every class can be very daunting.
In general, computer science tends to be a major where people go into college with a lot of prior-knowledge and I have seen this discourage many people from majoring in it.
Having been through music classes myself I noted I was initially wary of those who hadn't been trained musicians since the age of 7, but quickly realised that it really didn't matter and some of my peers really excelled at music having picked it up even as an adult.
Doesn't apply to performance/dance schools though, obviously - you can't get a degree in piano performance if you're just starting at 18, unless you're a rare genius.
1) The programmer was there once, and probably worked through it on their own. Nobody held their hand.
2) The information being asked is probably in every programming book every written and duplicated hundreds of thousands of times on the internet.
3) Dealing with past programmer-hopefuls has been really disappointing as most of them never get anywhere.
Helping people learn is -awesome-. Holding their hand and doing everything for them is horrifyingly boring and frustrating.
At work, I've had people who were genuinely interested in working hard and learning. They were great and I don't regret a second of the time I spent. These people were generally inclined to look things up for themselves, and only ask for help when they get stuck.
I've had others that I gave way more time than the good learners and they were going nowhere. Then management stepped in and told me I didn't give them enough time and demanded that I spend 1-2 hours every day with them. After weeks of losing 5-10 hours a week, I finally managed to get management to see that no amount of time would help. These people were generally inclined to wait until they could ask a question, instead of looking it up for themselves. It often meant days of non-productivity since they get lost again as soon as you leave their desk.
So to conclude, when a novice programmer asks a really naive question, the first response is to assume they haven't done any legwork on their own, and so the question is really annoying.
The answer is low self-esteem and/or poor social skills.
My youthful experience was that nerds tended to be just as sexually active as jocks. They just tended to be active in different ways.
(And on the flip side, I know a few programmers who are incredibly nice and patient people but still have problems talking to girls. So I'm not denying that some guys find girls intimidating. But I think that inexperience isn't necessarily what leads to poor social skills in other areas.)
I don't associate with many geekier types of people, despite a lot of overlapping interests, for precisely this reason. I'm very sensitive and easily hurt/annoyed by that kind of behavior. So I avoid a lot of things that I'm actively interested in because the crowd is so abominable. The gaming world in particular; I don't even look at games which draw is online play, because I've never found an online gaming community that I've felt comfortable being a part of.
Basically I don't hold with the notion that there is a gang of males deliberately driving women away from tech.
The argument isn't whether or not some people, including many women, are turned off by the current culture of programming. They absolutely are. The argument is whether it's the responsibility of the current culture to try and adjust its ways to let more people in, or if it's okay to let it stay the way it is. People in this thread are making arguments for each side.
After the government forces them to prove they're not pedophiles, of course. Say what you like about the software industry, we don't have ritual humiliation baked into law.
That is a problem for perhaps 90%+ of Googlers, regardless of their gender.
That said, it is intimidating starting as a Noogler, largely because of the huge volume of proprietary material you need to learn. There's one true way to store structured data, and while it's open-sourced (Protobufs), you've probably never used it. There's a unified JavaScript library (Closure), but it wasn't open-sourced until recently. There're logging, and log-processing, and monitoring, and RPC, and cluster management systems to learn. There're a bunch of storage options, some of which you may've read about in public but never used (BigTable), some of which will be completely new to you.
The scale of problems that Google tackles is also bigger than most people are accustomed to. In a lot of the industry, a few-dozen node cluster is fairly large. At Google, thousands of machines are routine. Big-O notation can be ignored at a lot of shops, but at Google-scale, anything that runs in greater than O(N log N) will usually take centuries. Most frontend web devs never worry about latency; at Google, we care very much. A/B testing has recently made a lot of headlines and had some neat libraries developed for it, but its centrally ingrained in Google's feature development processes.
When you first start out - particularly if you're used to always having the answers, as many Google engineers were - that can be intimidating. There's suddenly so much you don't know, and yet you know (through Google's public reputation) that software obviously gets written there. Once in a while, it's even good software.
For your first few weeks, you probably won't even know what questions to ask, because there's such a volume of knowledge out there. Oftentimes, somebody's already solved your problem, but you don't know about it because it might never occur to you that someone's already solved it. There're also things that Google pays attention to that many other shops don't - in many other employers, you'll never have to deal with internationalization, or handling Chinese characters, or right-to-left languages, or XSS, or managing HTTP resources when you have a large fleet of potentially-out-of-sync webservers. When I started doing code reviews for the websearch webserver, the tech lead said, "We don't expect you to know everything, but we expect that by now you've learned enough to know when you need to ask someone."
And isn't being the dumbest person in the room/company a blessing? This just means that people are paying you to increase your skills and learn from people better than you. How much better can a job get?
I have no intention of ever working for Google but the "lots of people there are way smarter than you" would be the biggest draw if I did.
edit: Now that I think about it, my habit of asking "stupid" questions (not only about technology) and the fact that I don't really care what people think of me when I do so have stood me in good stead especially with advancing age.
I've seen many friends get stuck trying to maintain the illusion of knowledge or understanding and "live in fear" of "being exposed for the ignoramus I am". I don't really care if someone thinks I am an idiot as long as I learn something. Attaching your ego to the perception of others is a dangerous hang up imho
Consider every joke you've ever heard about a clueless client. Think of every joke you've heard about some support call some tech guy had to take. Think about the "cup holder" joke, the ID 10T given to a customer, or the multitude of stories told on TheDailyWTF.
No one likes to be the butt of a joke.
> I don't really care if someone thinks I am an idiot as long as I learn something. Attaching your ego to the perception of others is a dangerous hang up imho
This is true. But also realize that a large portion of the population have this hangup to some degree.
The one thing I can credit to really demonstrating that their is no harm in asking was asking this girl out in high school. I did it at the worst possible time: in front of her friends and mine as well. I just asked, simply and plainly. She was flabbergasted. She invited me to dinner that very night, with her friend. I was promptly told by that friend later that evening when we were alone for a moment that the girl I had asked was "in shock, but in a good way." We ended up dating. I'd never done anything like that before.
It occurred to me that it's easy to ask, and that anyone who looks down on asking are people that know less than they let on themselves.
I still fall into the trap. But it's handy to realize that asking can lead to surprisingly good, and fun, results.
I think the trick is to always have the last word. It doesn't matter if you make fun of yourself, but it does matter that the one who makes fun out of someone, is you.
So I some times make fun of myself and nobody think I'm a lesser being for that.
I remember early in my career I had done a fair bit of C. I'm in a meeting with some architects and they start writig up structs with bitfields. For some reason I must've skipped that section in K&R and never seen it code. My first thought was, "you can't do that in C", but then I noticed that no one else was having a problem with it. Then I realized I didn't know for sure what it was.
I wanted to say, "What is that thing after the colon?", but I feared hearing, "This is 'C 101'. You haven't seen this? It's not possible to write good code w/o it. We need to revert all of his changes. Please escort him from the building now".
In other words the concern is not that you'll feel dumb relative to smart people. But rather people thinking that this is so basic, how could you possibly not know that.
With that said, I did consult at a place where one guy didn't know what free/delete was. He had only worked with garbage collected languages, and I was tracking down tons of memory leaks in his code. When he asked me why he had to free memory (in a C++ application) I did have to pause to avoid saying something I might regret. Everyone has their experiences, and I'm sure he would laugh at my naivette when it comes to Lisp macros.
The only stupid questions are the ones you never asked.
The one thing that would help with this is if people realized that compared to others we're all stupid in one field or another, and probably in plenty of them. So there should be no stigma on asking stupid questions or any questions at all, in fact, most stupid questions when looked at in some detail turn out to be not that stupid at all.
The most frustrating part of asking 'stupid' questions is if the person that you're asking them off tells you to go away because it is a stupid question or because 'you wouldn't understand', typically if someone has a superior attitude towards a subject but refuses to answer stupid questions it turns out in the long run they didn't know quite as much about it as they suggested in the first place.
edit: Or as someone else pointed out, ask on IRC. The #whatwg channel on Freenode is where I mainly hang out.
I think you make some really good points - but I would like to mention that you can also get feedback from really smart people in our field and lots of people working on projects like these by participating in mailing lists and hanging out on IRC.
If you aren't paying attention to the name tags, you could well be explaining some C curiosity to Kerninghan, explaining longest common subsequence to someone who wrote the diff for unix. They would listen to you patiently and thank you. May be also subtly point out an error in your argument, while you never realize whom you were talking to, until much later.
The Kerninghan incident did not happen, but several similar incidents did.
Down voter: I assume you disagreed with my opinion and not that there is anything unsavory about the comment.
What I thought was the most interesting bit about your comment is the 'unassuming icons of CS and Machine Learning', as a rule I've found that the real experts in a field are usually humble to a fault and approachable (with some exceptions), it's the people with a little bit of knowledge that will do whatever the can to make it seem like they're the experts, as though they've just read one of those 'how to bluff your way in to computers' books.
A conversation with a co-intern over lunch during the first week:
Friend:"Hey, do you know who he is ?"
Me (busy gorging awesome food): "No. But he got himself locked out and I had to let him in a few days ago. He was so profusely apologetic and thankful... I probably wouldn't have remembered otherwise. Checkout these steaks"
Friend: "Take a look at his name tag on his cube sometime."
And yes, more often than not humility co-habits with expertise.
I have a moderate hearing impairment, so nothing was as inspiring and humility instilling as seeing T.V. Raman work. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/business/04blind.html
What I think is being referred to is the insecurity that comes from within. A lot of engineers come to Google from an environment where they were often the most knowledgeable person in the room. It's tough to adjust to being the most ignorant.
I wonder how much of the gender discrepancy in CS can be objectively attributed to personality differences. Populations who participate in certain logical activities have rare personality traits (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=946249, http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=112...) which are far more common in men than women.
If this is the case, is it possible that direct attempts to "increase the number of women in CS" are misguided?
Can anyone answer, for their alma mater: unless you're already coding "10 hours straight, forgetting to eat and losing track of time into the wee hours of the night", what is the incentive to study CS?
edited for clarity
Your comment only implies that bringing more people will solve the problem. Sadly, that will just reinforce the current social proofs that loud assholes dominate CS.
"Honestly, the atmosphere and culture of most CS departments just aren't appealing at all."
I read this as saying that we need to fix the culture in order to attract more people.
At Clojure Conj I think there were 0 women (other than guardians of minors) out of 200 people. On programming mailing lists I almost never see female names.
I think CS graduation rates might be much higher for a number of reasons. I think females have higher college graduation rates overall in the US, they may be more likely to switch fields and pursue a graduate degree, to switch out of programming after graduating, and in a field like programming where many are self-taught they may be less likely to learn programming out of the classroom.
One day, a top male student came into the lab. A female student was writing some code.
Guy: "What are you working on."
Girl: "Code for the new project."
Guy: "What are you writing it in."
Girl: "Perl."
Guy: "Perl!? (long pause) now that's a man's language."
Girl: "Rolls her eyes... shut-up dumb ass."
That's an example of the banter. The girls wrote just as much code and did all the things the guys did. The only major difference was numbers. There were 6 guys for every 1 girl.
Edit: spelling
They can say something so simple as "Oh don't you know that command?" but in an inadvertently condescending voice
--
"Condescending voice" is a matter of perception. It's quite possible that these engineers were totally ok that she did not know some stuff.
Still it's possible that females are more sensitive to [imaginary] condescending tone, so they shy away from the field.
I have male friends who are also very sensitive to criticism, and female colleagues who can be very insensitive. Please be careful of applying a general personality issue to a gender - I understand how this could make sense at first glance but it's too vague and comes across as reductionist.
2) "Try harder" attitude is not necessarily better than "Avoid potential confrontation" attitude. But the difference might explain why there are so few females in software development.
3) There are other reasons behind gender ratio in software field. For example, software development requires more abstract thinking which on average is easier for males. Females focus more on more practical things and care a little bit less about abstract stuff.
4) All of the reasoning above is about comparing averages. Individual female might outperform average male in abstract thinking and "try it harder" attitude.
Overgeneralize much?
Did you know that women, on average, do BETTER in Calculus than men? I guess it is a good thing for them that there is none of that hard abstract stuff in math!
This is mainly because in the 70s all the curriculums and teaching strategies were rewritten to emphasize feminine learning styles.
When was the last time you saw a teacher in a classroom use the socratic method? That's a male learning strategy that is no longer used because women find it confrontational and competitive.
Male learning styles tend to emphasize contest, competition, oppositional debate, and criticism while female styles emphasize co-operation, discussion without criticism, observational learning, and role modeling.
The schools from kindergarten up have shifted almost completely to female learning styles.
Is it surprising that women make up 60%+ of university students and almost always have higher marks?
The special clubs and programs and self-esteem boosting women get from the media and so on helps too I'm sure. When was the last time a Dove commercial told some nerdy guy that he is beautiful the way he is? :p
And it is getting away from the main point. Which is the claim that women are bad at abstraction, versus my concrete evidence that they are capable of it.
If you need another data point, back when I was in grad school something like 40% of graduate students in math were women. From my experience, they weren't the bottom 40%. And were quite capable at abstraction.
I truly don't believe that women aren't in CS because it is too hard for their pretty little heads. OK, sure, most women wouldn't succeed in CS for that reason. But the same is true of most men.
2) Women are not bad at abstractions. They are just not interested in dealing with abstractions as much as men do. That explains why there are so few women in software development.
My personal experience of women who choose to go on in advanced mathematics (of which there are almost as many as there are men) is strongly at odds with your claim #2.
I never mentioned abstractions because I think that is irrelevant.
You literally clicked "reply" to me and then did not respond to a single point I made.
One point to also consider, which I consider fundamental to any entrepreneur, be it tech or otherwise is the concept of "challenge". I think regardless of sex, if you really are challenged in an area, and feel like you can beat someone, or a company at their game, you will succeed.
More specifically, guys are challenged at a younger age, be it in athletics, video games, neighborhood ball, or your friends telling you, you're a wimp if you don't do this.
As simple as this sounds, guys thrive on challenges, we play video games for the challenge, and girls alot of times don't get that same oppportunity to be encouraged or challenged at a young age. Because this shapes the competitive drive and spirit of entrepreneurship. Sp, what I would say to the women entrepreneur question. Challenge, challenge, challenge. Doesn't matter when you start, embrace a good challenge.
Almost every movie these days will have a woman who is competitive. In action movies she will be a 100 pound waif who is capable of knocking out 250lb men with a few kicks. Or in less action oriented movies she'll be a super genius who shows up the boys with her brilliant deductions and knowledge. Look at Hermione - the nerdy, highly competitive role-models for millions of little girls. Girls idolize her but they typically do not take on her hyper-competitive nature because there is no need and a competitive mindset is usually caused by androgens more than anything.
Little girls are fed competitive female role-models constantly and are encouraged to be competitive. They are enrolled in soccer at a young age and encouraged to join leadership contests and writing contests and so on by schools, parents, and governments alike.
It's just completely not true that girls are not encouraged to be competitive. They are, to an extreme degree. The simple fact is that most girls quickly learn that it's a lot easier to get what they want by being beautiful, girly, and socially savvy than it is to spend hours hacking code.
As a 14 year old male nerd, if your computer is broken, you have no choice but to figure out how to fix it so you can play Quake or whatever. A 14 year old girl on the other hand learns that the easiest way to fix her computer is to get the nerdy guy to fix it for her. This is just simple economics.
Women who get into tech usually were raised by a parent who taught them to love technology/science for it's own sake. It takes an exceptional kind of parent to raise this kind of child though. Most kids don't have this - male or female.
CS / software engineering is an underpaid ghetto, and as outsourcing continues, will remain so.
Perhaps I should have pointed out Philip Greenspun's take: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/acm-women-in-computing
If they insist on IT, I point at helpdesk. The turn-over is so big that within 8 months you can be team leader (by virtue of seniority) and you're on a fast track to management.
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On the other hand, if we deny the premise that CS / Software Engineering is a ghetto for men too, then what is wrong with the picture? Do men get opportunities that women don't get? E.g. ground floor of a start-up?
I think the premise needs to be not that "something is wrong with women", but rather "something is wrong with the system if it treats men and women differently".
Everything you do in life involves sales skills. Getting better sales skills is going to make you more money. Even if you worked in some high-fallutin' ivory tower institution you still need to go cap in hand begging for funding. Every job interview is a sales situation, every annual review etc.
Are you disputing the claim about help desk having a high turn-over? Have you even worked in IT? Seriously.
As for programmers making such big salaries, outside of anomalies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook, good luck with that one. Try comparing against electricians, plumbers and carpenters. Or even the bloke who owns his own lawn mowing business. Yes, I know apprentice jobs are shitty and they make peanuts, but after their apprenticeship is over, they can make big bucks.
For big $ as a wage slave, try medical. Oh, you're such a delicate precious genius as a programmer, but couldn't cut it (sic) as a Doctor, Dentist or GP? Guess maybe you're not as special or smart as you think you are.
A lot of programmers who think they are God's gift to the information age need to pull their head out and go outside. Even a garbo can make good $ (and it's great for your immune system!)
I'm one of the MS/Google anomalies, so I guess I'm not really familiar with IT.
As far as medicine goes, I come from a family of physicians so I see the benefits and costs pretty well. That said, I could never really see myself being happy in medicine anyway, so it's never going to look terribly interesting.
A lot of programmers who think they are God's gift to the information age need to pull their head out and go outside. Even a garbo can make good $ (and it's great for your immune system!)
Sure, there are plenty of other good jobs.
I'm slowly leaving the field because of the smell of it. I want to work with professionals, not idiot-savants in sandals and hoodies. There are professional shops, but they are few and far in between.
So I've started my own company instead.
They have protective associations that get them lots of pay for a smaller chunk of work.
All the professionals are well paid just for having a protected market: Doctors, Lawyers, Psychologists, Nurses, Actuaries, Accountants, etc. None of the work is particularly challenging - they are paid lots for their professional status and because they have associations that lobby and market the profession as a whole. They have standards bodies and certification boards and so on.
The reason for these things is to increase their pay. Pure and simple.
Then you have the blue collar workers who have banded together to fight for higher wages - this goes for both union and non-union. They are manly men who are unwilling to be shat upon and for that simple reason get paid more. They also get bonus money for doing jobs that are not prestigious.
Being a plumber is hardly challenging by MIT standards but a first year plumber rakes in cash hand over fist and has zero competition with India. Likewise for all construction related fields that are booming - especially in Canada. A first year construction apprentice working in the Canadian oil fields can make $100k in a year if they choose to. This requires no high school diploma.
Meanwhile the effeminate computer science dweebs get manhandled by MBAs into working unpaid overtime - reducing the pay of everyone in IT - not just themselves.
Funnily none of the guys getting B's or C's had that psychological problem.
On her point about being at a disadvantage compared to the other students since she had low experience with computer science (having only taken classes in high school). In my point of view, I think she had sufficient exposure to compsci. I didn't get into computer science, or even know of its existence, until my 2nd year in university.
I definitely do think personality has an effect on the experience. The author of the article, I think, took comments and retorts too seriously or negatively. In addition, I think she uses her gender as a weakness but rather it has no effect on her ability at all. Though at least she recognized the asshole soon after his outburst.
In my experience, I don't see a decline of females in computer science, rather it is a increase. I have passed by the portraits of graduated students in my hallways and definitely there are way more females than in the previous years. Matter of fact, it was almost a 1:5 ratio of females:males (may not be super accurate).
I. discriminatory or abusive behavior towards members of the opposite sex II. prejudice or discrimination based on sex; especially: discrimination against women III. attitudes or behavior based on traditional stereotypes of sexual roles IV. Attitudes, conditions, or behaviors that promote stereotyping of social roles based on gender.
The sexist remark in II is quite common. In some dictionaries the word "sexism" is itself defined in sexist terms: "sexist - a man with a chauvinistic belief in the inferiority of women". It may be warranted by the attitude's prevalence; it is sexist nonetheless because it promotes stereotyping.
Definition IV is probably the most enlightening of the bunch. One valid yet unpopular answer to the question "why so few female software engineers" is that most parents provide a sexist (IV) upbringing. Given the standard attitudes (gender identification), conditions (girl's toy collection), and behaviors (mom's occupation), the odds are stacked against a female becoming a software engineer even before she enters the first grade. These things change but it takes generations.
Inspecting my own behavior as a male software engineer, I would find myself guilty of several of the attitudes and behaviors mentioned in the article. My first hope is that I do not discriminate by gender (I'm a jerk to men and women equally) and my second hope is that I can be less of a jerk to everyone.
The thing is the uber-geeks do this to each other too, the difference is to them it's water off a duck's back.
3 years out of school and already a big ego :)
From a standard point about good parenting, nearly all the girls with good parenting had mommies who were happy being mommies.
For more, I draw from
E. Fromm, 'The Art of Loving'.
and
Deborah Tannen, 'You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation'.
So, I continue:
Way before age 5, the little girls realize that they are small versions of Mommy and NOT Daddy. They know in absolute terms that they are a GIRL and NOT a BOY.
Since their mommy was happy being a mommy, the little girls want to be like Mommy and on the 'mommy track'.
By about age 18 months, little girls are already masters at eliciting positive emotions from adults, MUCH better than boys. The girls are also MUCH better at reading emotions than boys. Facial expressions and eye contact are part of how the girls read and elicit emotions; other ways are to 'act' (they are MUCH better at acting than the boys) cute, meek, and sweet and to be pretty. Since being pretty lets them do better eliciting positive emotions, they love pretty dresses with ruffles and ribbons. So, they are in a 'virtuous circle': They act sweet, elicit positive emotions in an adult, e.g., father, grandfather, uncle, get a gift of a pretty dress, wear the dress, elicit even more positive emotions, get even more pretty dresses, white bedroom furniture, patent leather shoes, cute stuffed animals, etc.
Having to act like a boy or be treated like a boy, instead of like a girl, would be terrifying to them.
So, in their first years, such little girls, to be on the 'mommy track' want to play with dolls and not Erector sets, want to work at being pretty and not how to hot rod a car, want to learn how to bake a cake and not how to plug together a SATA RAID array.
Give such a girl a toy truck and she will know instantly that the toy is 'for boys' and will avoid it as a big threat.
Generally, from a little after birth and for nearly all their lives, human females are MUCH more emotional than human males. So, they pay a LOT of attention to emotions, both theirs and others'.
One of a human female's strongest emotions is to get security from membership in, and praise, acceptance, and approval from, groups, especially groups of females about their own age. That is, they are 'herd animals'. Gossip? It's how they make connections with others in the herd. Why do they like cell phones so much? For more gossip. Why pay so much attention to fashion? To 'fit in' with the herd.
In such a herd, in most respects the females try hard to be like the 'average' of the herd and not to stand out or look different. [An exception is when a female wants to lead her herd, e.g., go to Clicker, follow the biographies, get the one for the Astors, and look at Ms. Astor and her herd of 400.] Well, as long as human females with good parenting are on the 'mommy track', and the human race will be nearly dead otherwise, the 'average' of the herd will emphasize the 'mommy track', dolls, looking pretty, cakes, and clothes and not Erector sets, hot rodding cars, or building RAID arrays.
When it comes to a college major, any human female 18 months or older will recognize in a milli, micro, nano second that her herd believes that mathematics, physical science, engineering, and computer science are subjects for boys and NOT girls. Instead the girl subjects are English literature, French, music, acting, 'communications', sociology, psychology, nursing, maybe accounting, and K-12 education. By college the girls have been working 24 x 7 for about 16 years to fit in with the herd of girls, and their chances of leaving the herd in college to major in computer science are slim to none.
Don't expect this situation to change easily or soon: Mother Nature was there LONG before computer science, and, as we know, "It's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature.". Or, to get girls to major in computer science, "You are dealing with forces you cannot possibly understand.". Having women pursuing computer careers give girls in middle school lectures on computer careers will stick like water on a duck's back -- not a chance. Nearly all the girls will just conclude that at most such careers are for girls who are not doing well fitting into the herd of girls, are not very good socially, don't get invited to the more desirable parties, don't get the good dates, are not very pretty, and are not in line to be good as wives and mommies. By middle school, the girls have already received oceans of influences about 'female roles', and changing the directions these girls have selected and pursued so strongly for so long is hopeless.
Besides, 'middle school' is an especially hopeless time: The girls have just recently entered puberty, just got reminded in overwhelmingly strong and unambiguous terms that they are now young women, have received a lot of plain talk from their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and older sisters about the birds and the bees, in their gossip with their herd members have been discussing the birds and bees with great intensity, already have a good woman's figure or nearly so, really, are well on their way to, in another year or so, being the most attractive physically they will ever be and know it, notice men of their age up to age 80 or so looking at them as women, and are in no mood to consider being 'more like boys'. Middle school is about the worst possible time to try to get the girls to fight Mother Nature. Suggestions of such lectures are 'clueless' in grand terms.
So, a typical scenario is a boy in middle school who is really excited because he just understood how an automobile differential (TCP part of TCP/IP, binary search, virtual memory, etc.) works and with great excitement tries to explain it to a girl his age at, say, lunch, and we have a strict dichotomy: The boy is totally clueless that the girl couldn't be less interested. The girl sees right away that she couldn't be less interested, not to offend the boy unduly pretends to be a little interested, and sees in clear terms that the boy is totally clueless at perceiving her lack of interest. She concludes that he is so clueless he is really easy to manipulate (a fact she suspects could be useful and saves for later). The boy doesn't understand the girl, and the girl regards the boy, and soon, all boys less then 2-6 years older than she, as at least 'socially' immature and, really, just immature. She wants nothing to do with such 'children' (she already understands that a woman needs a strong man) and will concentrate on boys 2-6, maybe 8 or 10, years older than she is. She has a point: She was likely more mature socially at age six than he will be at age 16.
Look, it's WAY too easy to fail to understand: So, we can just assume a simplistic 'rational' model. In this model, sure, we can teach 2 + 3 = 5 and (2 / 3) / ( 5 / 4 ) = 8 / 15, and both the boys and the girls can learn, although typically the girls will do better on tests in such things than the boys. So, we entertain that the boys and girls can exercise all their 'rational' abilities and, thus, can learn and do well with anything their rational abilities permit. Nonsense. Naive, clueless nonsense. Instead, Mother Nature says that in addition to rational abilities are emotions and commonly has the emotions overwhelm the rational abilities.
Net, such a simplistic rational model is clueless, even dangerous, nonsense. Give a girl of 4 a toy truck and take away her dolls in pretty dresses, and she will cry, and the crying will be heartrending to any adults around who will quickly swap back the truck and the dolls. It's no different at age 13 in middle school or 18 in college.
Actually, there can be a reason for a girl in college to take some courses in computer science: Look for a husband!
It may be that in college girls of Asian descent are more willing to pursue math, physical science, etc. than are girls of Western European descent.
The question is rather, "Why is female enrollment in computer science dropping, while things like, say, organic chemistry graduate more women than men?"
Your argument implies two fatally flawed notions: That gender roles are static. Obviously they're not. 50 years ago women didn't become doctors, because that was man stuff. The other is that girls avoid the hard boy stuff because it's not very girly. But it's specifically in engineering, physics and CS that there's such a huge gap. It's for the most part not there in biology, chemistry and mathematics.
Because it's not an appealing career choice, even for those with an aptitude? Why is this such a bad thing? Computer science enrollment are dropping for everyone, precisely because it's not as glamorous a career choice as it was in its hey-day. Perhaps women are more selective in their career choices? The point is, I don't think this is evidence for anything.
We need to restrain ourselves from trying to make the career more appealing specifically to one gender, to fix a gender imbalance we perceive to be a problem.
Organic chemistry is often a prerequisite for a career in biology or medicine. Women do fine in some parts of medicine, especially OB/GYN, pediatrics, family practice, and dermatology. There is also a wide range of 'biology and medical technology' careers where organic chemistry is from important up to a prerequisite; likely we should also include pharmacy. And some women might want to try for a career in research biochemistry.
Also chemistry in college can be a good path to a career as a science teacher in high school.
Similarly for mathematics: At a teacher training college, it is common for the girls to major in math on the way to being a high school math teacher. But don't look for girls in math departments in the better research universities or in the math oriented careers (say, DoD work or as a Wall Street 'quant').
Women are attracted to biomedical careers due to the role of human to human contact; generally women seek careers with such contact.
Although I omitted it, one of the strongest emotions of women, and one of their most common directions in hoping to get security from praise and approval from others, e.g., their community, is to have a career that "helps people", and biomedical careers seem to qualify.
Computer science as a college major has had ups and downs due to (1) the NASDAQ tech stock bubble of 1999 and its bursting in 2000, (2) the stories of software jobs going to India, (3) the role of the NSF in writing into academic research grants that graduate students must be supported and, then, the common practice of getting such graduate students from India and Taiwan and, thus, convincing many US citizens, especially girls, that they will not 'fit in' in computer science, and (4) a bubble and its shrinking for 'feminism'.
One of the problems with a woman being a computer science major is that so far it has not been a common K-12 certified teaching subject.
With 'feminism', some enormously talented and determined girls as high school seniors believed "Women don't have to just be cared for. Women and do things, too.", made terrific grades in college and let that reinforce their belief, charged into 'male' careers, and paid a very high price in lack of children, busted marriages, and sometimes even their lives, literally. "It's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature.".
That "A woman's place is in the home" and otherwise as either a nurse or school teacher has moderated. So, right, the patterns are not actually 'static'. But that women can do as well as men in any field where their 'rational' abilities seem to permit is a big, HUGE mistake as I tried to make clear: Rationality is NOT enough and, instead, an appropriate emotional 'environment' is crucial.
Also we have to consider: At each generation, there will be (A) some women who do well as mommies and (B) others who are weak, sick, or dead limbs on the tree. It promises to remain that technical fields will be much better for (B) than (A).
I omitted a huge point: At present the Western European gene pool is likely in the most rapid change in the last 40,000 years because genes of women who are not just DETERMINED to be mommies are being pruned out. So, in another few generations, we will be left with women who are determined to be MOMMIES.
There is another point hidden in the fog: As in E. Fromm, Western Civilization got the norm from the French Revolution that any difference was a threat of tyranny. So, in particular the norm was that men and women should be as 'equal' in all respects as possible. Combine that norm with some simplistic, naive 'rational' model that anyone can readily do anything their rationality permits, and can arrive at the long running story, back to 'the women's movement' and farther, that any difference in careers of men and women is evidence of something ugly or unfair. Then, in particular, as in this thread, we look for what is 'wrong' that so few women major in computer science. Uh, sorry, but that the fraction is small need not be evidence of anything wrong.
Fromm's summary remark was, "Men and women deserve equal respect as person but are not the same.".
Well, not so much wrong as massively over simplifying a complex psychology. It seems to boil down to "girls are mad", which is not necessarily something I would disagree with at 2pm on a Sunday when we just have to see another dress shop... but when talking I do think it is just a mistake.
I see a lot of this; I think it is often born out of the fact that some of the more high profile CS women tend to be kooky or off the wall which introduces an accidental observation bias.
one of the strongest emotions of women.. ..is to have a career that "helps people", and biomedical careers seem to qualify
Nah, this is just a stereotype. It is born out of the stereotype that the female oriented jobs all tend to be inclined in that way; female oriented jobs are historically non-academic, practical and not usually physically taxing. This is due to historical prejudice against female ability.
There is no evidence of a greater "sharing caring" mentality in the female psych compared to men.
With 'feminism', some enormously talented and determined girls as high school seniors believed "Women don't have to just be cared for. Women and do things, too.", made terrific grades in college and let that reinforce their belief, charged into 'male' careers, and paid a very high price in lack of children, busted marriages, and sometimes even their lives, literally. "It's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature."
That's just what they dramatize on TV. Top tip; don't learn psychology/sociology from TV, they thrive on mild prejudices :)
The problem with such a theory is that you are looking at a portion of women entering traditionally male arenas; and you are actually looking at the failures. As with most things, you never really see the successes.
At present the Western European gene pool is likely in the most rapid change in the last 40,000 years because genes of women who are not just DETERMINED to be mommies are being pruned out. So, in another few generations, we will be left with women who are determined to be MOMMIES.
Studies please, that is an extraordinary claim. It puts breeding/nuturing ability against ability to have a "non-female" career, to the best of my knowledge that has never been studied. And I feel that identifying such a broad but simplistic link would be extremely hard...
Uh, sorry, but that the fraction is small need not be evidence of anything wrong.
Finally something rational! :) But there is a caveat; which is that it is not automatically evidence of a problem, but it may be the indicator to a problem (i.e. something that is restricting those women that do want to enter CS).
Generally, from a little after birth and for nearly all their lives, human females are MUCH more emotional than human males.
Studies show generally that this is untrue. Women tend to be more openly emotional and have lower thresholds for both being hurt and "getting over it". Whereas men have a higher threshold, and are emotional more in private, but when it hurts it damn well hurts for a long time. Simple statements like the one you make are classic observation bias.
One of a human female's strongest emotions is to get security from membership in, and praise, acceptance, and approval from, groups, especially groups of females about their own age.
True for people of any age, gender, race etc.
That is, they are 'herd animals'.
Snap.
I am not saying that your observations do not have a basis in fact; but they are polarised so far towards observation bias and general prejudices as to be incorrect.
Waffle about "Mother Nature", without even being able to define what that means, is just that; waffle. What you are really referring to is a complex mix of personal psychology, group psychology, social prejudices and social pressure. All of these things can and have changed; suggesting that it is biologically (or otherwise) impossible for women to be pre-disposed to CS is... misinformed :)
and with great excitement tries to explain it to a girl his age at, say, lunch
I work with kids of this age; particularly teaching them computer science stuff (and other engineerign topics). It'd be hilarious to see them talk about any (extra-curricular) subject with people not within that sphere of interest. This is not limited to computer science, people know not to bore others with their pet interest from a fairly early age. There is no special case for CS :)
and the girl regards the boy, and soon, all boys less then 2-6 years older than she, as at least 'socially' immature and, really, just immature
Hmm, not particularly true. This is the classic "older man" and protector bias, I believe it is disproved but don't actually have the studies to hand.
From my observation middle school girls on average "go" for boys in the same year or the year below. Those that aim higher in middle school are usually socially frowned at ("she's a slut" etc.), that is just my observation, but I bet it holds out generally.
Nonsense about Mother Nature, emotions and herd psychology just shows a miscomprehension of the subject. Make chauvinist? ;)
I was happy to read his opinion, it changes from the usual PC stuff, and the annoying uppercasing can be explained by the boldness of the claim: that Women are actually different than Men, in such a way that one of the result is they are less inclined to mess for hours, days, years with lines of computer language just to prove one theory of theirs.
As a side note, I am very annoyed when I read PC code like the boss "she", or alterning "he" and "she" in tech docs in fields where obviously the concerned people are 80% guys. In 50 years our readers will think we had problems with the reality and language: we seem to have forgotten that the language basically describes reality, it doesn't make it happen, except for those who believe in magic (hope not too many here are in this case).
I personally use "they", because I'm a badass linguistic prescriptivist who's fine with using a neutral plural to indicate singular. But I don't see a problem with stopping the male singular from being the default. Language describes reality, but it also defines it; languages that assume maleness as a default suggest to its users that maleness is the superior form to take. I don't think it's a particularly devastating result of language, but I also don't think it's particularly annoying for women to ask that they not be diminished by the language. If it doesn't mean anything, why not just alternate it and not raise a fuss?
(I draw the line at stuff like "womyn", though, because that's when for me it becomes noticeably silly.)
Or arguably a historical prejudice against female expendability. Males are expendable - http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm (this comes up here quite frequently, you've probably seen it already).
Quoting that link:
"A second thing that makes men useful to culture is what I call male expendability. This goes back to what I said at the outset, that cultures tend to use men for the high-risk, high-payoff undertakings, where a significant portion of those will suffer bad outcomes ranging from having their time wasted, all the way to being killed."
I read that as: "girls like to work with people". May be you are the one who think they are mad and felt the above post a little too personal.
The stuff about "Mother Nature" is just an abbreviation for fundamental effects that are easy to see and seem fundamental but seem to have strong causes difficult to explain.
"I work with kids of this age; particularly teaching them computer science stuff (and other engineerign topics)."
We're not talking about really the same thing. What I am talking about is more fundamental in this discussion. Here I am drawing directly from Tannen, and she's right:
Okay, in my scenario, in middle school at lunch a boy, all excited about some technical topic he just learned, say, the TCP part of TCP/IP, tries to explain the topic to a girl. Likely he will not get a good reception for, say, four reasons:
(1) She's a girl, knows that she's a young women, and is reluctant to interact with males her age or older without a good reason. She has been warned by older women that such interactions have a tough tine being just casual because the male can easily start pursuing more. So, she is selective. Maybe if the boy is 1-2 years younger she will feel less threat and be more ready to be just friends.
(2) He's all fired up about the technical topic. Sorry, but boys have strong desires to master any technical topics around them that appear important. In part there is a lot of innate curiosity. Why? Exercise. Sorry: It's rare for girls to do that. For how an automobile differential works, there is something wrong when a boy is not wildly curious or when a girl cares at all unless, say, being able to give a description will get the her something else she wants, say, an A, and thus praise and approval from others, on a test in middle school general science.
(3) Females make connections with others, and more generally get acceptance in groups, by gossip where they express their feelings. Boys are taught to keep their feelings suppressed as in "How you feel about it is just irrelevant.". So, what the boy is trying to give the girl is not really girl gossip and, thus, is not liked by the girl.
(4) Males make connections by sharing information, especially, neat, cool, technical information. So, that is what the boy is trying to do. The girl doesn't give a weak little hollow hoot about technical information (for it's own sake).
Here (1) was your observation; for (2) I'll let you justify that yourself; (3) and (4) are directly from Tannen.
Lesson for girls who want to be more like boys in computer science:
You have heard about virtual memory. Now, any boy with any hope at all of liking Hacker News, will be eager beyond belief, and thrilled enough to jump out of his skin, for any even small bit of information about why virtual memory and how it works. When they get into page-segment tables, look-aside associative memory translation buffers, least recently used techniques, how I/O makes the virtual to real translations, and the shockingly low average execution time overhead, etc., then they will grow two feet taller instantly and have a "Eureka!" experience.
Similarly for closure in programming languages, binary search, the Gleason bound, the TCP part of TCP/IP, multi-protocol label switching (MPLS, used in the core and backbone of the Internet), and much more. They'd rather understand such stuff than eat, sleep, play sports, watch a movie, or sit in class. They really, really, really want to learn this stuff, all of it they can, whenever they can. The first time they get to see a tower case with the sides off will be one of the most exciting moments in their life.
Girls: If you want to do computing, go for it. It's clean, indoor work with no heavy lifting. Don't need gloves, masks, or special clothes. A computer for less than $1000, a good Internet connection, and a lot of time alone with the computer are a lot of what you need from the beginning into quite high competency.
To get to the "pay window" (JLM at AVC.com), right now you go to the head of the line, well ahead of all the boys with similar qualifications:
(1) The hottest thing in computing now is social media, and there in conceptualizing the opportunities the girls should be knocking the socks off the boys. Uh, much of Facebook, with over 500 million users and worth over $50 billion, is about gossip where boys can at best try to use a telescope from Mars to look at Venus. Larry Page just said that 99% of social search has yet to be done; so, what's in this 99% that would be good to do now?
(2) Learn how to bring up a corresponding Web site. The site will need some graphic design where girls are much better than the boys (25% of whom are partially red-green color blind and likely still draw both trees and people as stick figures). The site will need a good user interface and user experience (UI/UX), and here girls should totally knock the socks off the boys. The site will need some text, and, again, girls are much better at not just typing and spelling but at writing for emotional effect -- knock the socks off the boys. Still more important, girls are much better than the boys at writing and correctly estimating the reactions of others. E.g., I'm a man, here am just writing ideas, and clearly don't have even a clue about how others will react! Maybe I don't even care, but girls both care and know, and that's a big advantage.
(3) Once the site goes live, you will need to get some publicity: "I don't know if you know who runs that business, but I assure you it's not the Boy Scouts." (Dangerfield in Back to School). Neither is it the mafia, but it is women.
(4) Older men with big bucks tend very much to want to help women. No joke. Not just into bed or to be a Daddy Warbucks or Svengali. So, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, and Mark Suster have all been loud and clear on their blogs about how happy they are to fund women. May find much the same at KPCB and Sequoia. You are at the head of the line; the door is being held open for you. HP was thrilled to have Carly Fiorina and Patricia Dunn. Yahoo was thrilled to get Carol Bartz.
Go for it!
You kinda lost me at this point I am afraid; this is just entirely inaccurate. Certainly there is a prevelance in the male population for technical topics, but it is only a generality, most are averagely interested.
The young boy your describe would likely find little interest in most of the other boys, not just the girls :)
Females make connections with others, and more generally get acceptance in groups, by gossip where they express their feelings. Boys are taught to keep their feelings suppressed as in "How you feel about it is just irrelevant.". So, what the boy is trying to give the girl is not really girl gossip and, thus, is not liked by the girl.
Males make connections by sharing information, especially, neat, cool, technical information
Horribly simplistic analysis. Males mostly communicate via gossip too; which is the "neat, cool" part (you probably just don't see it as gossip, but it really is). The "technical information" is undeserving of it's equal share in that sentence - how often do you share technical information with your wider group of male friends. I chat about girls, life, politics, moans and whinges etc. no one would be interested in what I was programming earlier :)
She's a girl, knows that she's a young women, and is reluctant to interact with males her age or older without a good reason
Girls and boys do spend a lot of time apart at that age. But in groups they spend a lot of time together.
a girl cares at all unless, say, being able to give a description will get the her something else she wants, say, an A, and thus praise and approval from others, on a test in middle school general science.
This is just hilarious ;)
Conclusion: You will get boys such as you describe; but they will be in the vast vast minority, and their excitement is as boring to most of the boys as the girls. The reaction to them is not as simple as you make out, and says absolutely zero about the future careers, interests and motivations of females.
I feel you are over simplifying - and that is the main problem with your analysis.
For now, girls tend to pursue what girls do and know that computer science (CS) is for boys and not part of what girls do. So, girls try to avoid CS in college. When they try CS in college, mostly they don't like it.
Why don't they like it? Girls are (1) much more emotional than boys, (2) much more social, (3) eager to get praise, acceptance, and approval from others from work that "helps people" in the sense I explained (essentially volunteer work to help suffering people), e.g., one of the daughters of Bush 43 went to Ethiopia, and (4) better at, and more strongly seek, human to human contact.
So, on these criteria, girls see that CS is so detailed and technical it seems (1) emotionally cold, (2) not very social, (3) not good for work that "helps people", and (4) not good for human to human contact. So, many girls who try CS soon conclude that they don't like it.
For the future, girls who do not want to concentrate on being mommies, unlike for nearly all of history, will be able to so not concentrate and, thus, on average will be removing their genes from the gene pool. What will be left will be genes of women especially determined to be good as mommies and even less interested in CS.
You missed it with my:
"He's all fired up about the technical topic. Sorry, but boys have strong desires to master any technical topics around them that appear important. In part there is a lot of innate curiosity."
Then for my
"I'll let you justify that yourself"
you didn't!
The "technical topics" here are not yet nearly all that would be popular on Hacker News. Instead the topics are whatever are "around them" (the boys as they grow up). So, depending on what they see in their family, adults' careers, neighborhood, community, etc., the topics might be about cars, cattle raising, household electricity, operation of a commercial pizza oven, cardiology, roasting pastrami, trading foreign currencies, computing, etc.
Why? The usual explanation is that the boys know that they are small versions of men, that men take competency in their careers very seriously, that they, the boys, do not have such competency, feel vulnerable and out of control from the lack of competency, and, thus, as part of growing up into such competency are eager to soak up everything that is relevant they can. That's the standard explanation. Although you didn't 'get it' the first time I explained it, didn't work it out for yourself, I believe you can understand this point.
For whatever reasons, you are straining to disagree with what I wrote.
I remember a girl in the fifth grade: Her handwriting was good, and mine, as is common for boys at that age, was poor. So, she looked at my paper and said that she couldn't read it. So, I copied the paper again in block letters, and again she said she couldn't read it. I copied it again in larger, extremely clear block letters, and she gave the same answer. Of course, she was lying and having fun manipulating. You are doing much the same. Enjoy the games of fifth grade girls.
That's... a terrible piece of rhetoric... :(
I don't see how I can explain that what you are saying appears to be founded in stereotype and a lack of understanding. So, I guess the argument is over, except to say:
Don't overthink things, and don't oversimplify. Your point #3, for example, is based on so little fact and on so much on prejudice.
I actually think what you could have done is observed the somewhat socially inept computer geek stereotype; and extrapolated the direct opposite as "how girls are". There is a lot of commonality between male and female phsyc - and many differences.
At a young age both those extremes are amplified.
the topics might be about cars, cattle raising, household electricity, operation of a commercial pizza oven, cardiology, roasting pastrami, trading foreign currencies, computing, etc.
I encourage you to work with teenage boys and try to engage with them on topics like these. Nowadays it is not at all common to find a kid who has such interests; computer games, girls, sports and food (i.e. "gossip") are much more common.
will be able to so not concentrate and, thus, on average will be removing their genes from the gene pool
Essentially you are saying that... girls who do technical careers won't be as able (or be suited) to procreate and so future women will be genetically pre-disposed to motherhood?
Do you have any idea how genetics works, for a start? I'd love to read your work on isolating the genes related to good motherhood and proficiency in technical topics and your research into how they interrelate within the population... ;)
Why? The usual explanation is that the boys know that they are small versions of men, that men take competency in their careers very seriously, that they, the boys, do not have such competency, feel vulnerable and out of control from the lack of competency, and, thus, as part of growing up into such competency are eager to soak up everything that is relevant they can. That's the standard explanation. Although you didn't 'get it' the first time I explained it, didn't work it out for yourself, I believe you can understand this point.
Standard explanation? Really? Find me a kid that, at age 15, is concerned about his competency in relation to a future career. Now, I could agree they would be concerned about competency in areas their social peers are strong; say football.
In fact; I will make it easier. Find me some peer reviewed material that identifies this as a standard explanation
For whatever reasons, you are straining to disagree with what I wrote.
It's really not hard :) although we seem to have gotten off track from the main topic, which I thought was your theory of little girls being pre-disposed to sharing & caring and not interested in technical topics because of genetics.
"That's... a terrible piece of rhetoric... :("
Huh?
You wrote:
"I don't see how I can explain that what you are saying appears to be founded in stereotype and a lack of understanding."
No: The crucial point is that I have and am presenting a lot of "understanding". Neglecting what I'm saying will bring large risks in dealing with human females, especially in the US now.
"Stereotype" argues neither for nor against anything; broadly some stereotypes are accurate and some are not. I argued everything based on simple facts, observations, and references and never mentioned anything about stereotypes; e.g., I never claimed that something was true because many people believe it is true.
"Your point #3, for example, is based on so little fact and on so much on prejudice."
By "#3" apparently you mean my
"{Girls are] (3) eager to get praise, acceptance, and approval from others from work that "helps people" in the sense I explained (essentially volunteer work to help suffering people), e.g., one of the daughters of Bush 43 went to Ethiopia,"
I will omit the many, overwhelmingly strong examples from my own life.
There's a good example on HN right now at
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2145149
with
"Well, I would have kids and stay at home and take care of them. As they grew up, I would love to work more with the catholic church, because that means a lot to me."
So, what is Jim Simons doing? Uh, he's a bright guy, quite a good mathematician, e.g., as in the Chern-Simons result in differential geometry and useful in theoretical physics, and the most successful hedge fund manager in all of history and commonly paid himself $2 billion a year. Can get his story in his autobiographical lecture he recently gave at MIT at
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2011/01/james_simons_sp.ht...
The guy who introduced him is I. Singer of Atiyah-Singer index result, one of the best results of 20th century math; Singer was an informal Ph.D. advisor for Simons!
So there in the audience was his pretty wife, maybe half his age, and running their charitable foundation.
Melinda Gates? Is there any doubt in your mind that she is the one getting Bill to devote his time to charity? They have three kids; with the family wealth, they face some special challenges; they could use a lot of attention from both parents; all this emphasis on charity is too much time away from attention on their kids. So, at least Melinda is so interested in "helping people" that she is essentially neglecting her own children. Why? She wants praise, acceptance, and approval from the public even if she neglects her children and even her husband and has him neglect his business (Microsoft needs him to return to the CEO slot). She's determined to save the world super big time. This ain't a small thing.
Laura Bush? Sure: Devoting her time to charity. And, as I mentioned, one of her daughters is in Ethiopia doing the same. Instead, Laura should be devoting her time to her husband, to getting the daughter in Ethiopia a good husband, and being a good grandmother for the children of her married daughter. So, again, save the world super big time and neglect own husband and children. This ain't a small thing.
That women want to pursue volunteer work, i.e., charity work, that "helps people" is a rock solid part of a large fraction of women, especially Christian women of Western European descent in the US, especially if they have the financial means, and too often even if they do not.
Here we can use Hollywood: Part of what they have to do is present believable images. Well, in the girl's movie Samantha: An American Girl Holiday the mother devotes her time to charity and is in a woman's club also crucial for her work in charity. Seeing this, the grandmother asks if she can help.
The husband? He's clueless and uninvolved in charity. He is, however, very interested in the adoption in the story while his wife mostly is not. So, she's more interested in saving the world than being a parent (and the adopted daughters very much need some good mothering), and he is more interested in being a parent than she is. Again, it ain't a small thing.
Even the series of Legally Blond of chick-flicks has her give up her law job, shoot her law career in the knees, leave the town of her new boyfriend, and rush off to a staff job in Congress to help society by saving puppies used for testing cosmetics. She is so focused on helping society that she has her boyfriend, for the second time, bust his law career to join her in DC. So his role is to follow her from city to city as she runs around helping society, largely ignoring him, and being wildly irresponsible financially. Seen that, too often.
The leadership of the American Red Cross -- women who want to "help people".
It's as plain as the difference between boys with short hair and girls with long hair. If you can't see this, then you are obtuse about society and women.
Again, this urge to "help people" is commonly stronger than paid career, and even marriage, parenting, and financial responsibility. It ain't small, and you fail to see any of it.
For this point about women, there is no "prejudice" at all: Any man who fails to get it on this point is just oblivious and at high risk of making big mistakes about women.
You wrote:
"I actually think what you could have done is observed the somewhat socially inept computer geek stereotype; and extrapolated the direct opposite as 'how girls are'."
You are attacking the messenger, not the message. And, the short answer is, you are wildly wrong. That's not even close to what happened.
I wrote:
" ... the topics might be about cars, cattle raising, household electricity, operation of a commercial pizza oven, cardiology, roasting pastrami, trading foreign currencies, computing, etc."
and you responded:
"I encourage you to work with teenage boys and try to engage with them on topics like these. Nowadays it is not at all common to find a kid who has such interests; computer games, girls, sports and food (i.e. 'gossip') are much more common."
Here you are showing that you are getting a D- in basic reading comprehension. You totally misunderstood the statement. Totally.
Again, and I won't take the time to count the times, I repeated that boys get interested in the technical topics that are "around them" and appear to be important and wrote:
"Sorry, but boys have strong desires to master any technical topics around them that appear important."
So, then, sure, my:
" ... the topics might be about cars, cattle raising, household electricity, operation of a commercial pizza oven, cardiology, roasting pastrami, trading foreign currencies, computing, etc."
is rock solidly correct.
So, your:
"I encourage you to work with teenage boys and try to engage with them on topics like these."
What? You didn't read what I wrote. You are confused.
Again, if you will read, of course, nearly no teenage boys will be interested in
"roasting pastrami"
because that topic is not "around them". But if their father runs a deli, then that topic will be "around them" and will be fully obviously important to the family finances, and, thus, the boy will likely be very interested in it. E.g., if the boy is working in his father's deli to get money for his first car so he can take out his girlfriend, then he can be very interested in
"roasting pastrami".
His sister? If his mother works in the deli, maybe his sister will be interested in the part of the deli the mother works in. If the mother doesn't work in the deli, then the sister likely won't care at all about
"roasting pastrami".
So, the boy is interested in career competency as illustrated by his father, and his sister isn't.
My point is general: Again, again, again, again, again, the boys will be very interested in WHATEVER technical topics that are around them and appear to be important from their family, community, etc.
Got it now? Need it explained seven more times?
Your D- in reading comprehension makes this exchange hopeless.
Again, and I won't take the time to count the times, I repeated that boys get interested in the technical topics that are "around them" and appear to be important and wrote:
I read it.
You are totally wrong. (how many times do I have to say that ;))
Hence my suggestion for you to try and observe this apparent phenomena. Bottom line is; you will struggle to.
I grew up with my Dad in the RAF; but have absolutely zero interest in planes. I could cite similar examples ad-infinitum. I honestly challenge you to find teenage boys that have an absorbing interest in the technical aspects of their dad's job - sure, you will fine some, but a minority.
It's as plain as the difference between boys with short hair and girls with long hair. If you can't see this, then you are obtuse about society and women.
Is this also down to genetics (random irony; I have longer hair than most of the girls I know :))? Or do you think it might be to do with social/historical situation?
Even the series of Legally Blond of chick-flicks... Seriously? You are using a film to demonstrate your point? Seeing as that film series is a classic example of female stereotype it probably says much that you see a general point in it.
Neglecting what I'm saying will bring large risks in dealing with human females, especially in the US now.
I think I am doing ok :) but thanks for the concern.
Basically; your claims about women being genetically pre-disposed against technical topics (and towards "caring/sharing" careers) is, despite the bluster on other tangential topics and terrible examples, complete crap and not something you could begin to support with reasonable evidence.
To return to the original point: the barriers to women in technology are almost all social and psychological, not genetic.
And all the guff about women being like this and that seems representative of reading some pop psychology without going any further (I recommend reading something good on social interaction, one that looks at the similarities in gender groups)
Statements like:
> Women are attracted to biomedical careers due to the role of human to human contact; generally women seek careers with such contact.
ignore the fact that our emotional patterns are not tied directly to our genders. Social/antisocial patterns are not strictly female/male patterns. I know plenty of wonderful women who are antisocial and dislike direct contact with lots of people; I know plenty of guys who are sympathetic and warm and caring. It does not do you well to make such generalized statements about complex subjects.
Paragraphs like:
> With 'feminism', some enormously talented and determined girls as high school seniors believed "Women don't have to just be cared for. Women and do things, too.", made terrific grades in college and let that reinforce their belief, charged into 'male' careers, and paid a very high price in lack of children, busted marriages, and sometimes even their lives, literally. "It's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature.".
are bordering on downvote-worthy. Are you really suggesting that women can't handle male careers? Really? Are we living in the seventies still? Because last time I checked we had a handful of women CEOs proving they could run Fortune 500 companies. I'm pretty sure some of those CEOs are happily married and have families. Sure, the male-to-female ratio is heavily imbalanced, but that's because women are fighting against centuries of irrational bias against their gender. Irrational bias that statements like yours don't help whatsoever.
For what it's worth, my mother has been a corporate executive at AT&T since before I was born, and she managed to be an excellent mother to me and my brother. So if you're going to say things like:
> that women can do as well as men in any field where their 'rational' abilities seem to permit is a big, HUGE mistake
then you are insulting not just an entire gender in general, but my mother in specific, and I'll ask that you meet me at dawn with your pistol loaded.
Finally:
> So, in another few generations, we will be left with women who are determined to be MOMMIES.
This is really, really, really stupid. Your argument only holds water if you think that "wanting to be a mommy" is a genetic trait, that women are born either wanting kids or not wanting them. While there is a biological impulse towards maternity, the fact is that career aspirations are social traits, inherited more from society than from genetics. Just because a girl is born to a woman who wanted to be a mother — and let's pause for a minute to note how absurd it is that you'd say that; literally every girl is born to a woman who wanted to be a mother — doesn't mean that she won't decide she wants to get a job before eventually settling down, or maybe that she doesn't want to settle down at all. In fact, this is more likely the more permitting society becomes of women in the workplace, because working will seem less and less unfeminine the more it's shown that women can hold their own.
There are more women working now than were working a hundred years ago. Did women somehow evolve? Of course not. Society evolved. And society is continuing in the direction of affording women equality. Your attempts to study women like they're simply a byproduct of their genetics ignores what's actually happened in the last century.
Why is it so hard to accept that biological sex can and does have a strong affect on emotional patterns? Testosterone and estrogen are the driving hormones behind our sex differences. It's a fact that testosterone affects aggression. So why is this so hard to accept?
Of course there are going to be outliers, but anecdotes do not disprove the general trend.
>are bordering on downvote-worthy. Are you really suggesting that women can't handle male careers? Really? Are we living in the seventies still?
Again, you're countering his assertion with an anecdote. It's wonderful that your mother was able to balance both, but that doesn't counter the apparent correlation with women's increasing career aspirations and the breakdown of traditional families. This isn't being sexist, it's being honest.
>This is really, really, really stupid. Your argument only holds water if you think that "wanting to be a mommy" is a genetic trait, that women are born either wanting kids or not wanting them.
You're missing the spectrum in between. You're right that career aspirations are social traits, but ambition in general is likely strongly rooted in genetics. So the question is does one outweigh the other in a particular individual. While his conclusion is a major leap, it's not without a semblance of reason.
This is the problem with discussions like these. Any non-PC point of view gets immediately shot down and accusations of sexism fly. If we truly want to get at the root cause of the imbalance, we must be able to ask the tough questions that might have uncomfortable answers.
I don't think you're being sexist. I do think that your line of thought is completely wrong. The breakdown of traditional families is correlated with the breakdown of traditional gender roles, but this is not not NOT because working makes it hard for a woman to raise children. Rather, it's because women, given the choice to defy their traditional roles, have also decided frequently that they don't like the traditional family model and have chosen other lifestyles.
Carly Fiorina, for all I loathe her politically, was a powerful woman in the businessplace for two decades. And she's been married to the same man since 1985, and raised two stepdaughters. Meg Whitman too has been married for a long time and raised two children. The point is not that the traditional family model hasn't suffered. It's that the root of its suffering isn't that women are finding it hard to be emotionally available because all of a sudden they have jobs.
> This is the problem with discussions like these. Any non-PC point of view gets immediately shot down and accusations of sexism fly. If we truly want to get at the root cause of the imbalance, we must be able to ask the tough questions that might have uncomfortable answers.
I agree with you that there are uncomfortable answers! But I think that the uncomfortable answer is uncomfortable in the exact opposite of the direction you're going.
I don't think that the biggest problem in this discussion is that women are somehow genetically incapable of keeping up, because I know many women who can keep up and even surpass men at this. I think the biggest, most uncomfortable problem here is that vast swatches of our society are so wretchedly sexist that men have a hard time seeing just how difficult it is for women. We assume that we are in fact living in a post-sexism world, and that everybody is equal, when in fact we have decades and decades to go before women are truly seen as equals in society. And I'm not somehow exempt from this, by the way; it's been a process of literally years of talking to women and slowly realizing just how shitty they've got it.
Jean Hsu here is just one of hundreds of women whose stories have forced me to accept that while we might have a more equal society than history has ever seen before, that does not mean we are as equal as we ought to be. The status quo is still unfortunately sexist, and while one day perhaps we will get to the point where we can honestly assess the differences between men and woman, the conclusion we draw will not be that women simply can't do these things that we claim they can't do. The fact that we're arguing that right now is proof that we still have grossly distorted views of what an entire sex is capable of.
It's not that I'm calling you specifically sexist, hackinthebochs. And I apologize if I ever made it seem like that. But the society we both live in is profoundly sexist, in ways we don't even recognize, and so a lot of the arguments to be made about how it's okay that women have experiences like this are rooted in logic that's as sexist as it is commonly accepted. Does that make sense?
Your anecdotes don't lead in the direction of your conclusion that "women are [not] finding it hard to be emotionally available". Carly Fiorina I'm sure found it hard to be "emotionally available" when her step-kids needed comforting and she was in a board meeting. See http://web.archive.org/web/20071101051517/http://www.careerj... for example which strongly suggests that her husband Frank's retirement enabled her.
I'm of the opinion you can't have it both ways. Either kids or work in almost every situation one will get marginalised.
>the conclusion we draw will not be that women simply can't do these things that we claim they can't do
Can women scratch their own balls? I'll answer for you - no they don't have any (in general), despite how equal you want things to be that isn't going to change. Men and women are different.
>The fact that we're arguing that right now is proof that we still have grossly distorted views of what an entire sex is capable of.
You're talking about capability but I think you're looking at the wrong thing. The reason there are less off one sex in traditional roles of the other sex is little to do with assumptions about capability IMO. IMO it's about desire of individuals to do those roles as much as anything.
Also in this line you meant men, right?
Of course they are. Gender has a direct effect on one's emotional patterns. (Direct effect does not mean only effect, by the way.) Depending on whether you have XX or XY chromosomes (or some other combination), you will grow up with different organs in your body and different hormones in your blood. Such things define your gender, and they directly effect the emotions you experience.
As an example, men are prone to wanting to engage in pistol duels at dawn over minor quibbles.
> ignore the fact that our emotional patterns are not tied
> directly to our genders
> I know plenty of <…>
> It does not do you well to make such generalized
> statements about complex subjects.
> Your argument only holds water if you think that "wanting to be a mommy" is a genetic
>trait,
> that women are born either wanting kids or not wanting them. While there is a
> biological impulse towards maternity, the fact is that career aspirations are social
> traits, inherited more from society than from genetics
I can't tolerate such a torrent of nonsense more. Your last couple of posts are utter bollocks, plain and simple. After all, "helping people" is probably one of the main incentive for plumbers -- though almost all of them males -- to crawl under other people's toilets, though this doesn't fit much with your silly black and white, childish world view.
You seem to imply that it's impossible for a women to be a "mommy" and an astronaut, a computer geek, or I suppose a boxer. For your information, my sister is altogether pretty, a good mommy, an aeronautic engineer, and has a couple of black belts in various martial arts she could use to kick your silly ass.
Life is complex, and people don't fit into nice little boxes for your (very) little brain convenience and comfort. It's way past time for you to actually leave your computer and meet living people instead.
The statement you made about what he was implying demonstrated what I mean. You're offended by what he wrote, so you are trying to find things to object to. He never said it was impossible for a woman to be a good mommy and an astronaut. He said that women would tend towards being good mommies.
With feminism, some girls believed "Women can and do things, too", charged into male careers, and paid a very high price in lack of children, busted marriages, and sometimes even their lives. It's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature.
Further, what on earth are you talking about when you say that his post is in line with expert opinions on the subject?
A few random quotes...
It's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature. To get girls to major in computer science, you are dealing with forces you cannot possibly understand.
Having women pursuing computer careers will stick like water on a duck's back -- not a chance.
There can be a reason for a girl in college to take some courses in computer science: Look for a husband!
I am all for a balanced discussion but seriously, is this not a little nutty?
The quotes you're picking sound bad, but they're not.
"There can be a reason for a girl in college to take some courses in computer science: Look for a husband!"
He's not saying the only reason any girl should ever take computer science classes is to find a husband. He's saying that a girl following typical gender roles will actually use that reason as opposed to the other good reasons for doing so.
"Further, what on earth are you talking about when you say that his post is in line with expert opinions on the subject?"
Look into the subject of moral development. There are conflicting views on the subject, but at least one of the views (promoted by Carol Gilligan) is very similar to what Hilbert has been saying.
1° generally human behaviour can't be described as simply as bacteria behaviour in a petri dish.
2° there is a general trend recently in using some pseudo-scientific discourse as a comfortable vehicle to shocking ideas, basically pretending there is some science behind the differences between men/women, blacks/whites, etc. This is UTTER BULLSHIT. There is NOT the slightest fucking speckle of science backing this.
3° there is a more profound philosophical error that is trying to justify a scandalous state of matters because "nature makes it this way". Let me tell you one thing, nature sucks. Living in the "good ol' natural way" is being eaten alive by wolves and dying young, and painfully with that. Nature is a very bad excuse; everything that civilisation is about is precisely doing things in unnatural ways because you know, nature is nice as long as you aren't really part of it.
2: Your ignorance of the science does not invalidate its existence. As an example of research that has been done, look up some of the works of Carol Gilligan. There are many others, but it's not my field.
3. And here you are promoting ignorance. Yes, nature is bad, but if you want to change it, you must understand it. If you have no understanding of why women are less likely to go to computer science, have fun solving the problem.
2. I've seen some science on these subjects. Unfortunately it always was heavily politically connoted, and the data was terrible ( no, it's not statistically valid to draw a linear regression from a vague random looking cloud of points).
3. I'm not promoting ignorance; I'm getting sick of right-wing morons, be it the anti-science style of the social darwinist style.
It's simple, dirt simple: Here the shortest clear explanation: "The hand the rocks the cradle rules the world.".
If you don't like that one, take all the woman in the US at, say, 18. Put each woman into either (A) REALLY wants to have children and be a good mommy and is concentrating on finding a suitable husband and (B) women with less overt interest in being a mommy.
Then, track (A) and (B) over a few generations and see what happens. Is there any doubt in your mind? The women in (A) will have the strong limbs on the tree, and the women in (B) will have weak, sick, or dead limbs on the tree. Then over time, the fraction of women in (A) will increase, and the fraction of women in (B) will decrease. In particular, genes that put women into (A) will increase.
Just what is it about this 'thought experiment' you find difficult to understand?
Here is what should be your first question:
Q. If this thought experiment is correct, then why do we have any women in (B) now?
A. I should leave the answer as an exercise. Here's one piece of historical evidence: Supposedly in year 1800 could take all the women in the US of Western European descent, track their descendants, and by year 1850 discover that their population (of say, just the women) had increased by a factor of four. We're talking 50 years with nearly all the women pregnant nearly all the time.
So, (A) or (B) didn't matter: Due to very strong social, economic, and practical pressures, the women got married, and then the babies 'just came'.
Since then, more and more, (A) and (B) mattered a LOT. So, now women in (B) have the option of concentrating less on motherhood and do and, thus, are pulling their genes out of the gene pool. In a few more generations, what stands to be left is women in (A).
The effect of (B) is already strong and easy to see: In the more industrialized countries, women of Western European descent are having way less than 2.1 children per woman and, thus, are dying out. So, as women in (B) die out, the population can continue to shrink. When about all that is left is women in (A), then the population will stand to increase again. Come back in 100 years and find a LOT of REALLY eager women in (A)!
Your next question should be:
Q. But women in (B) should have reproductive advantage because of their better ability to contribute to the economic strength of the home.
A. Good point, but so far it's not working. I suspect that somehow it won't work well enough before the women in (B) die out.
Complicated it's NOT.
No: There is "a heritable biological drive". But as I explained elsewhere on this thread, e.g., for the US population increase from 1800 to 1850, that "drive" long didn't play much role. Now with contraception, etc., that "drive" is crucial. Or, the lack of that drive, with contraception, etc., is now the reason for the fall in the birth rate.
It's dirt simple: Now with contraception, more career opportunities for women, etc., women without that "drive" will be pulling their genes out of the gene pool. So, come back in a few generations and find what? Sure: Find what's left, find nearly all women who DO have just that "drive".
You seem to doubt that the "drive" can exist and be from genes: Don't doubt! It's in the gene pool now: A significant fraction of women see the face of a baby and know right away, front and center, that they want BABIES. Then they go looking for a suitable husband. In particular they don't go looking for K&R on C.
Look, it's even simpler: It's really easy for girls from 2 on to really love their dolls and like to play 'mommy'. Don't doubt that most of this is just in the genes.
I have noticed patterns like: A career military wife has two kids, they both start school, she is still in no position to pursue a real career and is basically bored and lonely. So she has a third child to fill that empty void, because it is the only real viable option that satisfies her needs to be occupied and feel useful/valued and also fits into her current life -- which she can't conveniently dismantle or walk away from. If there weren't enormous obstacles to her pursuing a real career at that point, she might have done that instead.
I don't think the divergence of two types or groups of women has anything to do with "some women really want kids and some don't". I think it has a lot more to do with "some situations, once you get into them, are incredibly difficult to get out of". This cuts both ways: Not only is it very challenging to try to establish and pursue a career (as opposed to just getting a job) once you've had kids, it is also very hard to try to fit in kids once you've established a real career. Women who strongly want both and get adequate support for doing that tend to end up in "pink collar" jobs, thus in most cases really aren't on the same footing with the typical male career. I don't think this involves any male conspiracy to oppress women or any female ambitions to be supermoms. I think it is rooted in the simple fact that a serious career and a child are both similarly demanding obligations which you cannot simply and easily walk away from, limit the demands made on you and so forth -- so they compete for your time, energy and other resources in a way that makes it difficult to do both. For some people it is harder than others. If we can find a cultural means to resolve or ameliorate this fundamental conflict, then you will see fewer women choosing one or the other.
Sadly, your story is not one that is going to be heard often in HN (wrong demographic entirely), but it still falls under the scope of anecdote.
I think what you're pushing is a more deterministically oriented perspective in terms of where women find themselves in their lives.
I don't think that's necessarily going to be much more popular than Hilbert's biologically deterministic tendencies -> choice flip.
You'll need to take a different approach in advancing this argument, although the lack of misandry is certainly appreciated.
A gentle note: countries that have state funded childcare and that otherwise compensate for the burden of child-rearing have even higher part-time and pink collar employment rates for women than countries that do less to provide for women and children.
Your point, I'm afraid, doesn't have fact on its side.
That's a big part of why I was trying to stay out of it. Call it a moment of weakness that I bothered to reply at all.
A gentle note: countries that have state funded childcare and that otherwise compensate for the burden of child-rearing have even higher part-time and pink collar employment rates for women than countries that do less to provide for women and children.
I am 45. In my twenties, I read quite a lot of books on women's issues and some comparisons between the US and some European countries (many of the titles are lost to the mists of time) and the general understanding I developed was that countries that provided better support for maternity leave and childrearing (and had lower divorce rates) had made more progress than America in closing the wage gap. Those statistics are out of date by at least two decades, but I think the general concept has probably not staled in the least.
I don't think I am pushing anything deterministic. I am saying it is tough to change gears once you go far enough down a certain path. But it can be done and understanding what is going on can help in that regard. (EDIT: Also, understanding that this is an issue can potentially help reshape society so that it isn't so much of a "one or the other" kind of choice.) I got divorced and now work full time. After having been a homemaker in a very "traditional" (throw back to the 50's) marriage, I did some gender roll reversal with my sons: When push came to shove financially, I encouraged them to learn to cook and take over more of the housework so I could work more overtime instead of encouraging them to get jobs.
I did this for a number of reasons, but one of them was I did not wish to remain the household "domestic slave" and it was clear to me that if we all had jobs, the majority of the housework would continue to fall to me -- not because they are male and I am female, but because I am the one who already knew how to do it. They are well aware of my views that a lot of stereotypical gender roll stuff is rooted in situational factors, not in our genes or physiology, and they were well aware of my various motives. It was better overall for the family than other options available to us and they went along happily. Since my "theories" are yielding real world results for me and my family, I feel confident they aren't simply hot air or delusions (though I also have no fantasies that I know 'everything' either).
Anyway, long day and continuing to comment on a topic I should probably stay out of most of the time. It would be far better for me to turn my thoughts into a blog so I can explain my views, at my leisure and and at length, instead of "arguing" it in a male dominated forum.
Peace.
Short answer: no. Slightly longer answer: Definitely not categorically and it depended on the endemic culture.
No, it enabled them to have a better quality of life and less work than compared to the US. It also enabled them to have a more secure means of raising a family without having to work full-time.
Being a homemaker in the US is a rather fantastic risk to take, especially if you're a stay-at-home Dad as the courts won't favor a wealth transfer as much.
I consider the improvement of security for those that want to raise a family without requiring massive individual wealth transfers like the US to be valuable benefits. That said, I find it amusing that some think people somehow have some kind of universal goal to play the career game. Not everybody cares.
It wasn't until recently that most feminist writers stopped being so fixated on career development. (Seemingly, anyway. I'm no historian of gender politics.)
> I did not wish to remain the household "domestic slave"
More power to you, glad you made the kids learn how to better care for themselves. My parents did that with me partially out of necessity and partially out of laziness but it did wonders for my independence.
Saved my ass later in life.
I'm sure your kids are better for it.
Can't say the domestic slave wording is exactly necessary or appealing. Would you describe a stay-at-home Dad as a domestic slave? That's extremely offensive.
>It would be far better for me to turn my thoughts into a blog so I can explain my views, at my leisure and and at length, instead of "arguing" it in a male dominated forum.
I agree with the first part, but I'm going to have to tut tut you for making excuses. I called you out on a common fallacy.
You're going to need to suck it up if you want to debate such violently contentious issues on the internet, and I guarantee you having a 100% female presence would do nothing to make it less...whatever it is you're complaining about.
I'm not even arguing with you, I'm just refuting a fallacy and pointing out a wrinkle.
These are some of the more educated, open-minded, and liberal (I'm using this in the broader sense) people you're ever going to find on the internet. If you find this community unpleasant you're in for a hell of a shock if you start really plumbing the Internet for the depths of mediocrity.
Re: "domestic slave" -- seems to me like good shorthand. You knew pretty clearly what I meant -- someone really unfairly bogged down with uncompensated labor -- without a lot of elaborating, offended or not.
Re: Female audience. That's a laugh. Women seem to find me far more intimidating and offensive than men do.
Re: Arguing: That has two meanings, one of which is to debate it and the other is to fight about it. I don't mind a debate though my experience is that most folks on the internet don't really do that. They pretty quickly deteriorate into fighting.
Nor am I making excuses. I have pushed the envelope on topics like this many, many times in male dominated forums. I have a fairly good idea of how hard it is do this kind of thing and that one of the big issues is the framing and underlying assumptions of what other people say. It very, very frequently becomes "If you don't agree it's black, then you must be one of those psychos that think it's white. And that is so amazingly obviously wrong that you must be a retard." There is no room for discussing shades of grey, much less a more technicolor version of reality. If I don't agree 100% with their assertion it's black, they peg me as one of those "100% white" folks. I get routinely slammed as being someone who strongly holds the "opposite" view for attempting to say "I don't see it that way". It really matters very little what the topic is -- politics, gender issues, homeschooling, you name it. If I say I homeschooled my kids, I must be one of those folks who wants to dismantle public school. If I say I don't think the anti-vax crowd is completely crazy, someone inevitably asks me what made me choose to not vaccinate my kids at all (which is a fallacious assumption and real example from this very forum). And on and on. So a public forum is a quite difficult place to try to articulate a view that is substantially different from the "standard positions" everyone is familiar with. All attempts to side step the repeated efforts of other people to peg me as this, that, or the other makes it incredibly difficult or downright impossible to convey how I really see it. Thus a blog would be a better option, and not out of cowardice.
Of course many of the commenters are offended by some of the ideas expressed here; that doesn't make the ideas more correct. It's not a question of finding things to disagree with, because inherently the commenters' shortcoming isn't that they are hoping to reveal a logical flaw in the argument, but that they were tricked into debating a troll in the first place.
Wouldn't you agree that people with outmoded or poorly researched ideals can do a lot more damage if they are clever enough to embed their ideas in layers of empirical-sounding academia-speak?
I'd take it a step further, but I don't want to be "that guy" who invokes Godwin's law. :)
By "help people" they do NOT mean anything like what a plumber does! What they mean is more like social work helping the needy. Why? It is important to know, and some of what I wrote provides some hints, but I'll leave the rest for you as an exercise! Actually, it's an important exercise; you need to know why they want to "help people" in the sense of social work.
Your example of your mommy is impressive, but in this discussion we are talking about only generalities, not particlar cases. In particular cases, nearly anything is possible. But the generalities remain: Men and women are different. If you want a more detailed way to say this, then pick a measure and get the distribution on this measure of men and then of women. The distributions will likely overlap so that some men are better than some women and some women are better than some men. Fine. But the big point is that the two distributions can be, commonly are, so different. The big, classic example is the SAT scores: The girls do better on Verbal, and the boys on Math. I hope you remember that in grade school the girls did MUCH better on verbal than the boys. Uh, the girls like English literature and fiction much more than the boys do; if you don't like this 'generalization', then think in terms of distributions. Amazon 'gets it' on this point and aims their Kindle reader at women who want to read fiction.
What I wrote I very much wish I had read as a teenager. Elsewhere on HN I posted some solutions to some Oxford CS questions; tough to argue with those solutions. But for explaining women here, it's impossible to give solid proofs. So, it's easy to argue with what I wrote if you just wish to do so, and there can be many reasons to wish to do so. In particular, there is no way to get all solid answers to the questions of this thread using only solid science. But if we still want answers now, then we have to make do with the best we can get now. What I wrote took me decades, stacks of books, etc. to understand. Actually a lot of what I wrote is directly from the two references I gave. If you investigate, then you will find that they are both relatively good references. The costs of my efforts were high beyond belief. In the end, what I wrote is good insight into women. Without science here, in the end have to use judgment. Yours likely will not fully agree with mine. But you would be foolish just to discard what I wrote and not think about it seriously. Your mother is just one person and, thus, cannot be a counterexample; until you get past such a simple point, you have not started to think seriously here.
You have an extremely arrogant stance on plumbers, you know. BTW your quick-n-dirty generalisation doesn't work : it seems quite obvious that psychiatrists and psychoanalysts are doing an extremely social work, helping the suffering and the needy, though they're almost all male. You start from the conclusion.
> The big, classic example is the SAT scores: The girls do better on Verbal, and the boys on Math.
Sorry, that may be true in some particular place and time, but last time I checked girls did better on BOTH in many countries. Hint : this hasn't much to do with genetics.
> Uh, the girls like English literature and fiction much more than the boys do; if you don't like this 'generalization', then think in terms of distributions.
Ghaaaaa, this is moronic. Once again you're pretending that vague social trends are rooted into genetics.
> Amazon 'gets it' on this point and aims their Kindle reader at women who want to read fiction.
Funnily, my impression is that the Kindle mostly appeals to geeks; or at least they're the one talking about it.
Too bad, at times you made some interesting posts but this thread is saddening.
In particular, the motivations for "helping people" are heavily emotional. The motivation is very common and strong in women of Western European, Christian descent. If you look, you can see this situation: It's VERY strong. If you don't see it, then your ability to understand women will be seriously limited.
You can try to explain the situation as nature or nurture, but I come down on the side of nature and really regard the nurture role as a result of the nature effect in earlier generations.
Your point about the mental health profession is off: The psychiatrists are heavily men because the field requires a lot of training after an MD.
However, psychological counseling requires much less training and is heavily women.
Also women are heavy users of both because their emotions strongly conflict with much of our society outside of a traditional home. One of the main causes of the emotional problems is anxiety, and that is four times more common in women than men with a guess that somehow such anxiety, which essentially incapacitates women for essentially anything except getting pregnant, has had reproductive advantage. For a reference with the factor of four and the guess about reproductive advantage, see:
David V. Sheehan, M.D., 'The Anxiety Disease', ISBN 0-553-25568-1.
You are angry at what I wrote, and a guess is that you see unfairness. So, you are doing what E. Fromm explained from the French Revolution: You are seeing any difference as evidence of something unfair, and that brings anger.
You should think carefully about Fromm's resolution: "Men and women deserve equal respect as persons but are not the same.". There's another such remark, "In our society, women are treated as privileged characters." They are: At the Titanic, they got the lion's share of spaces on the lifeboats. Our society regards women and especially girls as needing and deserving special protection.
If a girl gets kidnapped, then the whole US media run headlines for weeks. If a boy gets kidnapped, then the media ignores the story, and eventually the kidnappers write the parents a 'ransom note': "Send $5000 or we will return your boy."
So, just why do women want careers that have "human to human contact"? Because from at least 18 months on, human females are MUCH more talented at 'social interactions' and much more highly motivated for social interactions and for getting praise, acceptance, and approval from other people and groups. Broadly their strong 'instinct' is that their security depends on their getting approval from many other people, especially in their community.
So, they seek and excel at careers that have "human to human" contact. Then, careers (outside of K-12 teaching) in math, physical science, engineering, technology, and computing are seen as 'cold and harsh' in the sense of human emotions and missing an important role for human to human contact. Also these fields have essentially no contact with the goal of "helping people" as I have explained this goal. So, that's why women will likely be uncomfortable in such careers. Can they actually do the work, that is, do they have the 'rational' ability? Commonly, yes. So, what blocks them is the 'emotional environment' (context, content, however you want to put it) and not 'ability' in a narrow sense. So, again, for the women, rational ability is just NOT enough, and it is just crucial also to consider their emotions. For men, the assumption is that they control, throttle, or suppress their emotions: So, they can be in a foxhole in a jungle, knee deep in water, snakes all around, explosions going off nearby, and bullets going by less than one foot above their head, and still supposed to stay 'rational' and fully effective. They are not supposed to be "a nervous Nellie who breaks ranks and runs" (LBJ).
Might it be possible to teach middle school girls C, Java, Visual Basic, or some such? Sure. Will they do well? Sure. Why? Because the girls are highly motivated to appear to be 'good' in front of others. But all along they will suspect that they will not have a career in such work. They will hear this strongly from older women they trust. Then in college for their major for their career direction (outside of K-12 teaching), they will not like computer science. And THAT'S the clear, short, solid answer to the question of this thread.
There can be a reason for a girl in college to take some courses in computer science: Look for a husband!
Having women pursuing computer careers will stick like water on a duck's back -- not a chance.
What possible avenues for a "reasoned rebuttal" do you see here?
(I am not being sarcastic. I am with you on approaching an opposing opinion from a constructive point of view but how do you rebutt butt-headedness of such epic proportions)?
His main argument is: women are more social than men, and thus are more strongly influenced by social factors limiting their career choices.
This doesn't seem all that outrageous to me. And honestly, a cursory glance at the state of the world seems to support this opinion. Now of course, it may be completely wrong, but I don't see how this is a sexist position.
If you want a little more, got to tell you, the deeper you look into the behavior of women, the more surprising stuff you find. It is as if the woman with the characteristics we would find ideal for computer science, business, etc. now DID exist 20,000 years ago but is just not one of our ancestors. So, chalk this up to "Mother Nature was there long before computer science.".
It's actually not very difficult.
Here's another point easy to see: Take a women of Western European descent and one of Japanese descent. Look at them and find things in their 'personalities' that they share and that are particular to women. So, in these ways these two women look close.
Now we can get an intuitive view of how strong those ways are, that is, in how long they have been strongly in the gene pool. The simple answer is: May I have the envelop please. And the answer is, 40,000 years.
Here's how that works: The evidence is that humans walked out of Africa and at about 40,000 years ago reached, say, Iran or some such. Then one branch went to Western Europe and another branch went to China and, then, to Japan. So for those two women we started with, their youngest common woman ancestor is about 40,000 years old.
I claim that common ancestor was a LOT like what those two women have in common, and here's how that goes: Pick, say, the woman of Western European descent, go backwards in time in her tree, noting all the changes, to the common ancestor and then go forward in time in the tree of the Japanese woman, again noting all the changes, to the woman of Japanese descent. Now note that all these changes don't add up to much change, and the common ancestor has fewer changes and, thus, is closer to each of the two modern women than they are to each other.
So what you see in common in women in Western Europe and Japan has to go WAY back, at least 40,000 years (unless what is in common developed independently, which we have to assume is very rare). So, those common things have changed very slowly.
In particular, when we are looking a modern women, we are looking at at least some characteristics that worked at least 40,000 years ago. So, when we are guessing at what Mother Nature has in women, some of it, maybe a lot of it, is really old. So, we can expect surprises from 40,000 years ago, and simple models of how women work and what they can do or are happy doing need not work. In particular, the simple view that, "Of course, women can do well in computer science and be happy doing it" doesn't have to hold; there can be reasons 40,000 years old we don't understand that can block us. Net, in simple terms, Mother Nature was there a long time ago, and what she has in the genes it's "not nice to try to fool" with. So, be CAREFUL.
You 'get it' now, right?
Now hurry up and write us that book that explains all about women.
You might want to define "Mother Nature" too for starters