The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)
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And that is before you get into interests vs natural talent and how that does or does not affect ones success in a field. On a fundamental level I personally prefer equality of opportunity and freedom of choice.
As to the men being jerks/toxic etc argument. Are there times when that is true? Absolutely. But, men do not have a monopoly on being jerks, creating toxic work environments or harassing people. Personally I've seen bad behavior from both sides. I've also seen exceptional talent, skill, empathy etc. come from both groups. Many corporate cultures are toxic to everybody, irregardless of your gender.
I'm sure this will be down voted, but it is what it is.
I'd say the bigger point against the idea that women aren't in CS purely* because of men being sexist, is that this implies that male doctors and lawyers in the 60's and 70's were less sexist than male engineers of today. Does anyone actually believe this?
* of course, it may still be a partial factor
I don't see how it implies this. The more relevant question is whether STEM has higher levels of sexism than other similarly attractive fields.
That they may be less sexist now, after having achieved gender parity or something close to it, is hardly unexpected. Of course a field with roughly even numbers is usually going to be less sexist than one dominated by one gender or another.
This is the crux of the issue that you're avoiding grappling with. Saying "well I don't care about the history" is irrelevant, it's still the most important part whether you personally care or not.
It's like looking at which countries are desirable to immigrate to without grappling with patterns of development, despite the obvious fact that the biggest thing that makes countries more desirable is being rich/developed.
It's also dangerous to treat all software development the same. I'm my experience women tend to be more interested in human facing parts of software like web and ui development, but less interested in the back end parts. Is this the result of sexism? Maybe, but regardless I bet the gender stats are very different if you consider front end as different than back end development.
Relative to what? IT remains less sexist relative to doctors and lawyers, so...
Gender disparity fell in those professions, while in roughly the same time frame, gender disparity dramatically increased in STEM. If women could put up with the sexism in those two professions, is it really plausible that sexism is the reason they didn't similarly push into STEM?
Engineers would have had to have been a lot more sexist to explain this data.
I think in general among engineers there is a lot of awareness about sexism and diversity issues but that doesn't always extend to people on the periphery of the engineering world (I'm from non-software engineering world).
Tradespeople such a boilermakers, fitters and welders as well as suppliers, technicians etc don't always have the same attitudes. These are people you have to work closely with on engineering projects which are often in remote locations like mines, construction sites etc where management is not typically present (or visible). Attitudes are improving, for example its not common these days to see pornography in site sheds and similar out on construction sites, 10 years ago this was rife, but I still feel culture out on sites is maybe 5 to 10 years behind where it is in the office.
My sister and I are both engineers (I'm Chem/materials and she is a mech. eng) the way she gets treated and I am treated there is a noticeable difference. People visiting her office have done things like assume she is a secretary and ask her to fix them a coffee this has happened in last 5 years so I think there are still some strides to be made in the engineering world.
Absolutely, but the question being debated is whether this is worse in STEM than other professions. Every profession still has strides to make for true equality.
In the sense that if sexism is the major force that prevented women from going into IT, then the much higher sexism of doctors and lawyers in the 60s and 70s would have prevented women from going into those fields too. But women were far more in those fields then, than they are in IT now.
If so, I can't see where we substantially disagree. As I've repeatedly said, I make no claims about why the gender balance shifted in law and medicine in the 60s. You appeared to suggest that this had nothing to do with levels of sexism. I'm skeptical of that claim (broader societal attitudes are important too, not just the sexism level of lawyers and doctors vs. the sexism level of scientists and engineers), but it's not as if either of us has actually researched this in detail.
The key point is that tech now is disproportionately sexist, as you appear to acknowledge.
The argument is not about that.
It's that "Those very sexist 60s/70s fields still had a lot of women going in, more than women in IT today. If women could go into those very sexist fields then, it's not sexism that keeps them out of IT today".
I hope that it's clear to most people that there isn't a single reason for the disparity though. People are complicated.
We look to outcome equality to gain some kind of insight into this.
Girls don't know that there's such a thing as programming or Computer Science degrees?
How many girls and women fall into each category?
Now that "tech" is so important and lucrative I'm sure this is changing to some extent, but this is a recent trend that's probably 5 years old at most. Tech wasn't viewed the same as it was now in 2012-2014 and felt like a much more risky and inaccessible field. Now it looks a lot more like any other high paying corporate job.
The Dot Net bubble in the 90s was arguably the biggest news story of the decade. Everyone knew there was tons of money to be had in tech, and stories of people landing jobs at startups after learning a little bit of HTML.
Absolutely had no clue what to go into and they didn't help much. Perhaps they were at a greater disadvantage because the internet revolution was about to hit.
Historically, the professions you're alluding to have been closed to women by men. So for example, the reason that women couldn't serve in the military until relatively recently is not that women used their power and influence within society to get a pass on military service. Rather, it's that men didn't want to let women serve.
1 - Logging workers
2 - Fishers and fishing workers
3 - Aircraft pilots and flight engineers
4 - Roofers
5 - Refuse and recyclable material collectors
6 - Structural iron and steel workers
7 - Truck drivers
8 - Farmers, ranchers and agricultural managers
But yeah, many of those jobs have a skewed gender distribution in significant part due to sexist stereotypes.
I ignored the "for men" qualifier as it seems obvious that these are the most dangerous jobs period.
The problem in STEM isn’t that the gender balance isn’t exactly 50/50. It’s that substantial numbers of women are discouraged from STEM careers by sexism.
But actually, the question is quite easy to answer for me. I am more interested in sexism per se than in the gender distribution. When women in the industry infrequently report that they are experiencing sexism, then I’ll consider that we’re well on the way to solving the problem. The current gender imbalance is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
This is the fox guarding the henhouse. There is no incentive for women to ever stop crying "sexism!" if this is the criterion in use.
Equality of opportunity to die serving a country is all very well, but until men figure out how to operate wombs without women there are practical differences when deciding who is risks probable death. The situation has probably changed now that growing populations no longer looks like an easy win but the calculus goes a bit beyond 'men just didn't like the idea'. Men didn't like the idea because it is an objectively bad idea in an era where population really mattered. The women probably agreed with that one on the whole.
This is an argument that's rarely if ever been used against allowing women to serve in the military. I think it's the argument that you'd like people to make rather than an argument that people have actually historically made.
More broadly, if you see women primarily as baby machines, then military service should be the least of your worries when it comes to fertility.
And we can't really say for certain that what everybody thought was controlling what happened. What everybody thinks and what actually happens in, eg, banking and finance are completely different. The people in control are not the people talking on the street.
> More broadly, if you see women primarily as baby machines, then military service should be the least of your worries when it comes to fertility.
Call me old fashioned but I'm ruling out the idea that men are the primary baby making engine of humanity.
On your actual point; the fact that there are other things to think about doesn't stop people thinking about this specific thing. The US lost 400,000 servicemen in WWII without really even seeing a foreign invasion; those sort of numbers absolutely should involve someone asking the question 'who can we most and least afford to lose?'. The militaries of the world are not warm and happy-go-lucky organisations. They ask quite unpleasant questions all the time.
I think you are just advancing your own arguments against allowing women to serve in the military here, not actually giving any evidence that these arguments were widely used in opposition to women's military service. That's a tangent.
Incidentally, in the broader context of this thread, this is exactly the kind of fringe content that just might give women the impression that the tech community has a sexism problem.
>Call me old fashioned but I'm ruling out the idea that men are the primary baby making engine of humanity.
I think you misread. I said "if you see women primarily as baby machines", not "if you see women as the primary baby machines".
There is a good discussion to be had over why conscription has mostly been male only. Is it powerful men wanting to get rid of young expendable men in some form of evolutionary benefit to themselves? It it because of historical benefit of muscle differences? Did women use their power and influence within society to get a pass on conscription?
Men did not choose to be forced into the military. People do not generally chose to be forced to the front line and die. It is also worth mentioning that in the US, black males were proportionally drafted in higher rates than white males during the Vietnam war. Most people would agree that white men used their power and influence to get a pass on military service.
Maybe the first question to discuss is if being drafted is a benefit or disadvantage in term of power and influence.
As you point out, the people in charge were all men. It was up to them to make the rules about who could or couldn't volunteer and who would or wouldn't be conscripted.
>Most people would agree that white men used their power and influence to get a pass on military service.
This perfectly illustrates my point. That is exactly not how women got a pass on military service. Thus, it misses the point to complain that men disproportionately do certain dangerous jobs. Women have been kept out of those jobs by men, and by sexist attitudes more broadly, not by some kind of inverse sexism that favors women over men.
Most worlds armies are conscription, and even the US army had conscription during the American Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. It culturally defines the military.
> This perfectly illustrates my point.
No it does not. Men as a group did not keep women out of conscription so men alone could get the privilege of being conscripted. It not a privilege. A better claim is that society pick which ever demographic is most expendable and force them to pick up arms during major conflicts. Young men, especially men of color, is consistently seen as expendable. It is racism, sexism, ageism, and a bunch more isms, and part of it favor women over young men.
During world war 2 almost all nations involved used prison population for conscription purposes. It is the most obvious place to find a lot of expendable people.
Voluntary military service still carries with it that culture and non-expendable people tend to not be near the front line.
Yes, but so what? The gender requirement on front-line service has never been limited to conscription.
>It not a privilege.
This is a well-worn argument. When women wanted to vote and join the workplace, they also got told that these things were terrible burdens that they ought to be glad not to have to bear.
Clearly, there are women who do want to join the military, just as there have always been men who want to join the military.
In a modern context, in the US and Europe, the question is not about whether women should be forced to serve in the military against their will, but whether they should have the same right to volunteer for service as men, and the same range of opportunities subsequently.
Until recently, the men in charge thought that they should not.
Not men as a group. Rich old men thought that poor young men, disproportionately African Americans, should be forced into the military.
In modern context we still have remnant views that military is a punishment. Popular culture often use the trope that troublesome boys who don't behave get sent to military school so the boy can redeem themselves in the eyes of society. The concept of military service as a punishment directed at young men is still well alive. One never see the idea of sending misbehaving girls to military school.
In Europe most nation still have conscription. The question has been whether women should be forced to serve in the military against their will. To pick a few examples, both Sweden and Norway think they should, and thus we have conscription there for both genders. As the advertisements says, everyone has equal responsibility to server their nation. The word "responsibility" is used here to make the conscription sound nicer but it no less forced.
Of course it was men as a group. You only have to go back a few decades to get to a time when the majority of men, across social classes, found the idea of women serving in the military ridiculous.
I still don't see how the rest of your comment is relevant to this discussion. Again, the gender requirement was not specific to conscription.
>One never see the idea of sending misbehaving girls to military school.
Because girls couldn't join the military!
Young poor men has always been at the bottom of the social ladder.
As you must be aware, I didn't suggest that this is the case.
I simply said that men chose to exclude women from military service.
The people who got excluded from military conscription were women, rich men and men with influence.
What you're saying is correct, it's just completely irrelevant.
Poor men, having no influence or power gets conscripted against their will. Women, being in the middle, are exempted from conscription but can't volunteer. Rich men, being at the top of influence and power, was exempted from conscription and also had the choice to volunteer (usually for officer or other high ranking positions).
No one denies that the small percent that makes up rich men have more influence and power with more freedom to choose during conscription. Men as a group however is both the poor and the rich. If we only look at the top then we ignore an already marginalized and vulnerable part of the population. Those at the bottom.
This is just a wrong analysis. Women didn't get our of conscription as a result of their power and influence. They were exempted from military service because almost all men, across all classes, were opposed to women serving in the military.
And you are wrong that almost all men, across all classes, were opposed to women serving in the military. Armies that are created by rich men at the top looks very different to those created by lower classes, such as resistance movements in Europe during world war 2.
I don't hear this anymore from the grown-up-on-iPad generation.
I'm pretty sure most of the boys said that too.
And I'm sure many men simply did not consider the possibility of a career in female dominated professions, like nursing or elementary education. I think there's certainly something to the idea that we internalize stereotypes and that can restrict our options, but I'm skeptical that it generally explains large differences in career preference today.
For example, women were once stereotyped as not being doctors or lawyers, but that didn't seem to stop them from joining those fields en masse. If internalized stereotyping didn't matter enough to stop them then, for those fields, why does it matter now for engineering?
The fields you mention made serious efforts to counter sexism. STEM hasn't, yet.
1. https://www.payscale.com/compensation-today/2019/03/tie-bonu...
Furthermore, do you care to identify what in this discussion makes it so clear why women would not go into STEM?
More than that, what "cultural changes" did they enact? From what I've read of the history, culture only shifted after women achieved rough gender parity. Cultural shifts follow demographic shifts, not vice versa.
And even now, gender disparities exist that can't be explained by sexist theories. For instance, why is surgery dominated by men and pediatrics dominated by women?
Sexist theories have a lot of holes like these gender disparities within fields and the gender equality paradox that's the subject of this article. And yet, there's a theory that explains all of the data we see:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018...
This theory relegates sexism to a minor role, perhaps affecting single digit differences in gender disparities, not the double digits we actually see.
Mine, too, and I'm over 45.
Law is essentially the definition of the "Old Boys Club" and as for Medicine... I used to work in the medical field for a while. Go ask any (female) surgical nurse about the supposed efforts to counter sexism in the OR.
I don't believe your claim is true.
You say this as if the fields themselves decided, but it could just as easily be that women pushed in harder.
> Fifty years ago people would no doubt have told you that women just weren't interested in becoming lawyers or doctors.
Again, what was the difference? You've suggested a relative difference in sexism at the time, but I've seen no data suggesting this. It just looks like a guess on your part.
> You don't, either.
Why would you even say this? The comment you responded to didn't have me asserting a reason why. It's like you're attacking a strawman.
I claimed that this is the case today. You are the only one of us making any assertions whatsoever about levels of sexism in the 1960s and 1970s, which are irrelevant to choices women make now.
The major difference (in my opinion) is that the Old Boys Club owns it. They know they’re not welcoming to women and for the most part they don’t care. But Silicon Valley, for whatever reason, absolutely insists that they’re welcoming and that it’s all in our heads. The Old Boys Club was frustrating but Tech is infuriating.
Hm. I guess it was all in my head.
The extent to which discrimination makes tech more welcoming is debatable. It does have the immediate effect of increasing the number of women in tech roles, but it does so at the expense of putting them in an environment where they know that their male co-workers were held to a different standard and vice versa.
Did you consider other reasons than sexism for the environment that you perceive as unwelcoming? E.g., I guess the ratio of introverts vs. extroverts is pretty different between Wall Street law firms and software developers.
Do you have any references on what those efforts were?
I've never attended personally, but we also host an event yearly called "Girls Who Code."
Adobe has also partnered with a local dev bootcamp to hire intern graduates-- I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty confident that there's an emphasis on female graduates.
Representation is important - MLK convinced Nichelle Nichols to stay on Star Trek because she was, at the time, the only black educated woman in a leadership position on television.
Now, yes, but what about in the 60's and 70's?
The examples are legion.
The same cannot be said for the legion "quirky female hacker" characters that exist in many TV shows.
The existence of implicit bias is contentious. All purported tests to measure its existence have failed replication.
s/irregardless/regardlessIt's currently the number one post.
Also equality vs equability, etc.
This is a red herring. If you ask women they won't say their bosses were "jerks" or "toxic" (though a lot of time they are), they'll say they made them "uncomfortable", "un-accommodating".
It reminds me of a friend who got pregnant and left the STEM field because the dudes at her office made her feel like she was SUCH a huge drag on them. None of them were jerks, just not accommodating. Its a subtle but substantial difference.
"I'm sure this will be down voted, but it is what it is."
Actually, its the top comment, the popularity of this opinion among programmers is the crux of the issue. Nobody wants to work at a company where a majority of people think you are "unnatural" or an "outlier" for being there.
Most women I know do exactly that though if you speak with them in a private setting?
I'll have to take your word for the rest of your opinion, as I don't know your friend nor her colleagues.
I'm a little surprised you expect them to be totally accommodating though. It's a professional setting after all. It's nice if you can create good friendships there, but expecting it is just asking for trouble
Proves my point even more then.
BTW I wonder if people proposing gender quotas because of pay gap would also support gender quotas in hospitals to fight life expectance gap, and gender quotas in psychiatry to fight suicide percentage gap.
Every woman I know with a genuine and deep interest in STEM subjects has had to deal with some level of toxic/sexist/whatever stuff in their life, and they persevered and dealt with it because they weren't going to let it get in the way of their passion.
It might sound harsh, but I don't feel terribly concerned about keeping these displaced women in STEM; if their interest isn't strong enough to overcome a bad environment, then maybe they just weren't that interested to begin with. That's not a bad thing, it just means that they misjudged the interest:difficulty ratio.
Of the cases I know of personally, most of these women ended up in a job working fairly close with STEM stuff, writing manuals, doing graphic design, etc, and are perfectly fine with those jobs.
To be clear, I'm not accounting for cases where an entire university or business or whatever is made up of toxic sexism, but that's been pretty uncommon in my experience in the US.
Women of STEM: if you've got a bad environment, do something about it! Tell your higher-ups, talk to people directly, seek a different position, endure what you can, and for God's sake stand up for yourself.
tl;dr the implication that most women in STEM can't handle a toxic work environment without giving up entirely doesn't seem that progressive at all
NB disclaimer, most people I know are computer scientists, plus a few mathematicians, so maybe engineering is different
I grew up in an era when kids interested in STEM were "nerds" and were harassed, denigrated, and had lower social status. This changed when Bill Gates made his first billion. Suddenly, people realized that STEM was a ticket to the good life.
The title of the documentary "Triumph of the Nerds" was no accident.
A Seattle local comedy show "Almost Live" regularly ran skits about Microsoft engineers being socially inept and unable to get dates. (Of course, the joke turned out to be on Almost Live, as the super wealthy Microsoft engineers transformed the city.)
I suppose my point is that men who liked STEM had persevered in spite of the negative image of it.
EDIT: Found a Raymond Chen blog entry confirming that the skit was indeed from Almost Live -- and it featured Bill Nye.
First aired in 1992. I miss that show.
Cops in Redmond is another classic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9jlo4Ht2YA
Done in the same style as the WSU drinking ban...another later classic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Kozfrph9LU
Or Bill Nye as a street walking lawyer on Aurora avenue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgAgPnrJAuQ
They put everything on YouTube. No need for a dvd :)
I recall a well-meaning teacher once publicly recognizing me as a “computer expert”, and the ensuing giggles and ridicule from my friends and peers for being a computer nerd.
While I would not say I was bullied, the “computer nerd”/“spending all your time in front of a computer” was somewhat of an expedient wildcard insult to be used whenever somebody needed to take me down a peg. In terms of group identities, I think the only labels that were lower on the social status ladder were being gay or being obese (exception if you could pull off “the funny fat guy”).
Maybe the millenials had it easier, but I think most people who are well established in their career by now came out of that environment.
Along those lines, it’s no wonder that many men in the field who emerged from that did not develop adequate social skills, and frequently demonstrate their lack of experience in interacting with women. Unfortunately, the social protocol errors are often either lumped in with sexism, or the dreaded “being a creep”, and it’s now fashionable for other (likely traumatized) people to publicly shame them, get them fired, and ensure that their infraction is part of the permanent record of the internet.
I don't think it is sexist at all to claim that some people would not want to be in a field because of its hostile work environment. I sure wouldn't. Factually debatable? Sure. But sexist?
> It might sound harsh, but I don't feel terribly concerned about keeping these displaced women in STEM; if their interest isn't strong enough to overcome a bad environment, then maybe they just weren't that interested to begin with
I'm not a woman, but I am a person of color. And if anyone expressed those exact sentiments about people of color, I would never want to be around that person again. "I don't feel terribly concerned about keeping displaced minorities in my field. If they aren't interested enough to put up with racism, they shouldn't be here to begin with. It is their own responsibility to do something about it and fix the racist environment that they are in". Can you even imagine someone saying that? And yet, I hear the same sentiments being directed towards women constantly.
Ironically enough, you and I probably agree on most things. I don't think the STEM field is "toxic" or any worse than any other profession. At most companies I've worked, both management and other engineers made great efforts to be welcoming and friendly to women. That said, misogyny and hostile work environments do exist, and when it happens, we need to make sure we blame the culprits and not the victims.
I did not say "put up with", I said "deal with", which includes many options other than accepting what you're given. If your workplace discriminates on the basis of race, you could report them for violation of anti-discrimination laws, lobby for stronger laws, leave the workplace for a better one, etc.
> It is their own responsibility to do something about it and fix the racist environment that they are in
Exactly what I just discussed, maybe in an ideal world such things shouldn't be your responsibility, but the only way to guarantee action is to take it. If someone pushes you into a puddle, you might be right to say that it shouldn't be your responsibility to remove yourself from that situation, as you did not put yourself into it, but I think most would agree that the right course of action is to deal with it yourself anyways.
I am not suggesting that the responsibility falls solely on women or minorities to deal with their own problems at all, but I am suggesting that they should take some agency of their own.
Great idea! Perhaps following your comment, women and minority groups will start to organize to protest against unfair and illegal treatment.
My niece expressed an interest in taking CS, and two of the women present immediately launched into third-hand accounts of how toxic and sexist they have heard that the industry is. It pisses me off a bit that they are convincing an otherwise neutral and open mind that they are both unwelcome and that they’re already a victim in the making. If the goal is truly to get more women in the field, I think the twitter mobs and one-sided viral medium.com posts are doing way more to scare them away than anything else.
I've been on many all-male programming teams. Played football in high school.
From my experiences, those men tend to make fun of, poke, prod, and occasionally fight their way to agreement.
Comments were very direct. Abrasive at times. But usually got straight to the point.
I don't think I ever thought of any of it as needing "fixing". Quite the contrary, I think those men loved those other men.
But I could see someone of a different disposition being shocked at the crudeness, the brashness of it all and possibly thinking "it's toxic". It could be conflicting if someone wanted to participate in the team activity, but their approach didn't align with the existing members.
I see no relativism here.
As a description of your past experiences it was ostensibly a productive, functioning environment where every single member of every single group was comfortable communicating in that style.
As a general prescription for the most productive behavior for groups it's a poor model. As you point out, adding a single member with a different disposition can quickly turn the thing into a toxic environment.
Also, that model suffers from the same issue FLOSS projects do-- namely, it's hard to get any numbers at all on how many people never join up because the communication style isn't welcoming to outsiders.
Anyhow, if you posted this on Twitter I'm sure your description would quickly become transformed into an ostensible prescription by its algorithm as it got distributed for maximum outrage. But that's a problem with anti-human digital platforms, not a sign of ambiguity in what constitutes a productive work environment.
Edit: clarification
If you literally mean 'fight', then that's just a bad work environment.
There is something liberating about finally embracing the anger, rage and resentment that you feel and just letting it all out. Unfiltered.
And strangely, as I get older, I take it less personally if I’m on the receiving end. Sometimes people are overwhelmed and tired of doing mental gymnastics to keep things “nice”. I sorta get that now.
But if two consenting adults want to physically fight in a controlled, fair environment, zero problems with that. And I could see how it could be therapeutic to release the resentment towards the other.
Maybe an office boxing league?
Yes, it is true that if someone is really passionate about something, then they will put up with a lot of bad things and problems.
But I am confused as to why you think this is a valid argument as for why society shouldn't try to solve these problems.
There is still a lot of value in fixing problems, so that people who would be otherwise interested, will want to join.
But since the whole upheaval of women in workplaces that flowed to Europe from US, I have the feeling that this sentiment has changed.
More than one baby-boomer woman I know has said that every time she has a male boss, things are okay, and every time she has a female boss, the whole office gradually goes insane. I'm in particular thinking of my aunt, working in banks (all of her peers were women), but I've heard it elsewhere too.
But then again, it's anecdata. I try not to take it seriously (I mean, I take it seriously about the individual's experience, but not as a description of large-scale patterns). But also when people have just-so stories about how male bosses are toxic to female underlings, I have the same "maybe that was true for you, but I don't see any reason to generalize" reaction.
> 2 of them separately told me they liked working in an all men team more than working with women.
It's not comparing all-male to all-female teams, but all-male to teams with any women. As you say, There are roughly zero all-female teams in tech[1], but the proportion of any-female teams is much much higher.
[1] Yes, I know there are teams who have explicitly sought after this for ideological reasons, but theyre a rounding error.
Sure, I read some horror stories, mainly from US. But that doesn't mean that as a women you can't work pleasantly in an all male environment, as my experience clearly shows.
There are far more male bosses than female bosses. Accordingly, assuming bad bosses are relatively rare, it's far more likely every female boss you've ever had is awful than every male boss you've ever had is awful. This is just probability.
Let's take an example. Suppose 10% of bosses are awful, regardless of gender. Further suppose that due historical societal reasons, only 20% of bosses are female. If you've had 3 different bosses in your career, there's a far likelier chance that every female boss you've had is awful (3.94%) than every male boss you've had is awful (1.4%). (I'll leave it as an exercise to derive these numbers).
So, even if men and women are just as likely to be awful, you're nearly 3 times as likely for all of your female bosses to be awful than all of your male bosses to be awful simply due to the fact that women are under-represented.
This probability may explain at least some of this common and sad bias against female bosses.
P(all your female bossses awful) = P(awful boss)^(number of female bosses)
P(all your male bossses awful) = P(awful boss)^(number of male bosses)
The lower the number of male/female bosses, the greater the probability of all of them being awful. The opposite (probability of all of them being not awful) increasing is also true.
This is generally known as a small numbers fallacy[1]
https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Philosophy/Book%3A_...
It doesn't matter if it's bosses or co-workers, the math works out the same.
If your average team size is 5 people, then on average, the gender breakdown in your company is 72% male/28% female. I assumed 80/20, so yeah, it's still pretty accurate.
If fact, if 10% of bosses are awful then there will be far more people who have exclusively had good female bosses than bad female bosses.
I think its a lot more complicated than this. Yes, men and women can be jerks. The bigger issues seem to be when a team is 80%+ one gender or another, and the issues aren't about "being mean" the issues are about the dominant group being blind to and then not accommodating the nondominant group's needs.
A huge problem is that we have a lot of 6 person tech teams with 5 guys and 1 women and the women naturally feel alienated and either aren't actually able to do well or are at least perceived as not doing well due to their situation. This holds back women's career development as a group and reduces the numbers of women in higher ranks in corporate life.
Are they? I worked in the mental health space for over 10 years and almost 80% of therapists are women -- and a vast majority of those are white women. There hasn't been any significant movement to "fix" that despite a very compelling argument that finding a therapist who is a good match to a patient is fundamental to the success of treatment -- there's actually a scientific case to be made that more diversity in mental health care is beneficial to outcomes. However, there's little evidence that "more women" designing silicon chips has any measurable benefit (or harm.) Having more women (and old people, and people from different cultural backgrounds) involved in UX design is definitely valuable -- but more women writing back-end server code or designing airplane wings has little effect either good or bad.
Women vastly outnumber men in the social sciences and in education however, "We need more men kindergarten teachers" has never been a serious initiative. Getting more women into commercial fishing, oil field work, plumbing, or over-the-road trucking has never been seriously pursued. But "computer science" -- it's a damned obsession with people of certain politics.
It's a fact that men and women are different, both biologically and socially. Women can certainly be exceptional computer workers and men could be great therapists or kindergarten teachers -- but that doesn't mean they necessarily want those things nor are they necessarily pre-disposed with the characteristics necessary for success in those fields. It's a fact, for example, that there are gender differences in spatial reasoning. That doesn't mean all men are better than all women at spatial reasoning, but it does mean that men have a statistically higher success with spatial reasoning than do women as a group. Women have their own advantages over men as well. There is nothing wrong with differences and it has gotten stupid how people insist on claiming that everyone is equal. They're not. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses.
This insistence that we have to "fix" the "problem" is just woke nonsense. We should absolutely, 100% end discrimination in the professions -- no question or debate there. But we should stop trying to force equality as an outcome. Let people gravitate towards the things they're good at or care about instead of trying to social engineer everything to please some imaginary ideal. If a girl wants to hack on compilers -- we should get out of her way (i.e. removing bias and discrimination) and let her do it. But we shouldn't be focused on going into third-grade classrooms and trying to convince girls that they should care about hacking on compilers. We should be focused on exposing every student to vast possibilities, but we don't need to force it down people's throats as a social imperative.
In other words, you'd effectively be taking would-be male engineers and converting them into nurses and teachers. And vice versa. The number of people that consider those fields a toss up is vanishingly small. They require completely different skill sets.
While all the other things you mentioned other than maybe oil field work are not as financially lucrative.
In short, the goal is to put people of a certain group in positions of power and influence.
I do not think that is the problem of 80%+ one gender groups.
Imagine going into a store and see that 80%+ is the opposite gender. Before anyone has a chance of accommodating your need, what emotions pops up? Now compared that to going into the same store with the 80%+ being your own gender.
Going into an environment where you feel like a part of a dominating group give most people a feeling of security. They feel safe and what ever choice everyone else does is a safe choice to adapt. Entering a group where you are a minority has not just the absence of that, but can also induce a sense of insecurity.
This is one theory why countries like Sweden have a very extreme gender segregation of around 90% of men and 90% of women working in a gender segregated profession. From student to senior employee, every step is impacted in how secure the person feel in continuing with their career path, and the above effect influence how leaky the pipe get.
While contrived, I'm convinced this is precisely the problem. If I am a woman on a team of men, am I a bit of a jerk for demanding that the rest of the team accommodates me? Perhaps they all have a communication style that suits them that is born from their upbringing as male children while I have a communication style that equally suits me, but is different from theirs. Must I adapt to their system, or should they adapt to mine?
When we talk about programming style, or preferences for tools the answer is seemingly easy. We go with the majority so that we please the most people. When we talk about gender, sexual orientation, race, etc the answer is much more complex. We can divide our groups in infinite ways and yet some categorisations are chosen to be significant while others are not.
Because of this, I feel that it is actually really important that we recognise that we will not and can not accommodate everyone. Being different, having a different opinion, having a different set of experiences is not actually enough to warrant special treatment. In many cases we choose to discriminate: no matter how good a Java programmer you are, we will not write our frontend in GWT! (Real story: I maintain a frontend written in Java and GWT, so I'm taking some liberties ;-) ).
As I said, there are some special cases where we have decided that we wish to provide special accommodation. We do this because, on balance, we believe that doing so enriches our societies. It will always be a tradeoff, though, and it's important to understand that.
Consider the word "discrimination". Without that word, we can not discriminate between "good" and "bad". We do not want to live in a world without discrimination. We should always strive to discriminate in such a way as it makes the world a better place. We wish to avoid behaviour that works against our interests and encourage behaviour that works for our interests.
To that end, we specifically discriminate in certain situations so that we accommodate minority groups in a way that we feel enhances our society. It should not be a surprise if we occasionally get this wrong and I strongly discourage people from assuming that the "right" answer is easy to determine. It is important that we think very carefully about which things we wish accommodate (minority representation of gender, sexual orientation, race) and things which we do not wish to accommodate (hate speech, violent behaviour, and GWT :-D).
P.S. I hereby apologise for my horrible characterisation of Java and GWT. I actually don't mind it that much...
I find your example of communication style to be trickier. It feels in-between to me. I would agree that some elements of communication style should not be changed to accommodate an inflexible newcomer. On the other hand, when people talk about the benefits of diversity, communication style is a really large element! You know what you enjoy about your current boys' club style -- but it might very well be better if you switched to something more professional even in the absence of onboarding someone new. You won't know until forced to by the introduction of diversity, and that's true in many different subtle areas, not all of which you're going to have any chance of spotting in advance.
The same argument could be applied to just about anything. Perhaps GWT would be a really great fit for what you're working on, but you won't know until you try it. That's far less likely than a communication style change, though, so it's probably one of the costlier and less likely things to try to accommodate.
I agree that the question of whether or not to accommodate a difference is not always answered with "yes!" It depends on the accommodation required.
Why “naturally”? Is it really natural for men and women to alienate each other just by existing?
> Equality of outcome forces people to do things that they may not have an interest in
What?! Equality of outcome, as I've encountered it, is always downstream of individual choice. That is, it's up to the hiring committee to enforce gender parity by selecting from available applicants, and not up to educators or policy-makers to force equal amounts of women to be in STEM. No one has ever, to my knowledge, made the argument the way you represented it (except, ironically, incels calling for mandated marriage).
I'd have taken you more seriously if you hadn't straw-manned the shit out of equality of outcome.
Look at the chart in the article, look at the countries on each end of the opportunity spectrum. There are many obvious economic, societal, and cultural differences between the countries on one side and the other of that spectrum.
To take this correlation and use it to forward a sexist idea (that women PREFER different, often worse-paying, fields and that's why there's less women, and thus we don't need to change anything in our industry's culture) is the reason I would downvote this article and the OP's comment.
I know a lot of women in tech who feel uncomfortable with all the special treatment they get — entire conferences dedicated to “women in tech.” I find the idea so patronizing, just like I would a “men in daycare” conference. It is an extension of coddling the incapable and meek servile woman. Get out of here.
Hm.
It was up when I posted the comment.
You’d need to try really hard to disprove different interest of men and women, as literature suggests differences from a very young age, even before those children have chances to meet their peers.
You’re just giving alternative explanations, which given the left side of the chart are much, much less likely. The economic argument also doesn’t make sense. STEM jobs may be among the highest paying ones, but certainly are not THE highest (not to mention the amount of effort compared to different high pay jobs).
Modern developed societies have solved most of the serious, basic problems making it easier for a group of people to capitalise on solving more lofty problems. I have seen someone who did a degree in communication studies or something like that going after video games for sexism and raise millions for the cause.
This trend will probably continue until we have more serious things to worry about. This is very eloquently described in "Fate of empires" by Sir John Glubbs.
Our only responsibility is that we provide welcoming environment and equality of opportunity. But I may be missing some US context on the obsession here.
please, stop telling women they are weird for wanting to work in IT or for enjoying their IT job.
They said that men and women tend to have different broad interests. But that doesn't preclude women from having an interest in tech. He's making a statement on statistics, not making a value judgement about anybody.
If you have people telling you that you're weird for your interests, then they're likely either self-conscious or an ass. That goes for most generalizations that evaluate skill or ideas based on the attributes of the person vs. the merit of the idea itself... but that is a different discussion :)
I don't know what your intent was in writing this comment, but trying to frame any attribution of career choices to gender as a personal attack is a common tactic to try and shut down discussion on the topic.
80/20% isn't even very unusual gender split: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce...
We should tackle sexism where it exists, but we can't tackle it properly if we're trying to say everyone is the same...because they aren't.
I totally agree with you but I hate that you had to end with that line. It's pointless and simply shuts down any useful discussion and implies that 'you disagree/downvote with me because I'm right'.
My sister was a STEM worker in India. When she moved to America, she looked around to see writers with relatively safe, high-status job and switched out immediately.
Yes, women in America are "organically" picking non-STEM jobs, but that is because the jobs suck, the environments suck and people are assholes at these jobs. My sister loved the core STEM aspects of her job, but hated the culture of the companies she was stuck working with. This is not "equality", its hostile corporate culture.
tl;dr: Ask Women.
Why is it that two professions that you'd naively expect to be just as sexist, if not far more sexist than STEM (Higher status, more of an "old boys club", established hierarchy that has positions like nurses for women, etc) have achieved gender parity, while STEM hasn't?
The M is not for Medicine
Actually, I am unsure how country specific this is and where to put medicine with respect to hard sciences, soft sciences, social sciences etc.
It is kind of hilarious how different this works in a lot of countries. For example in German, the translation of science is 'Wissenschaft'. It would literally translate to "the thing you do to make knowledge". Humanities are called 'Geistes'wissenschaft and Law is called 'Rechts'wissenschaft'. Math is generally considered to be part of the humanities, and CS is usually either part of the math-department or very closely settled to the engineering department.
There's many more differences between the german and anglo academic culture, let alone all the other ones out there.
Hm, not always. In my experience it was a B.Sc., M. Sc. and Dr. rer. nat. and in the math-nat department, but it can also be associated with philosophy and of course there is no scientific method in math.
For medicine you also have the (again country specific?) question whether a medical doctorate is comparable to a hard science one, e.g. for the purpose of grants in medical research.
Googling around seems that it's contentious, and that a lot of people consider nurses, physicians etc to be STEM careers under the 'science' heading. But this doesn't seem all that core to me. (And you have to draw the line somewhere - are psychiatrists STEM? How about psychologists?)
Many people who go on to go to medical school will major in a STEM subject in undergrad (like biology or something)
This is a US-centric view - most people do in fact study medicine right out of school. It is interesting though that the definition of what constitutes a field vary quite greaty around the globe.
Medicine-aligned subjects do a lot to improve the gender ratio, if one wants to improve the gender equality figures...
How can anyone get a qualifying score on the MCAT without significant exposure to science?
Disclaimer: I'm definitely coming at this from a U.S. point of view which someone mentioned in another comment effectively (not always but definitely in the overwhelming majority of cases) requires STEM undergrad degrees to get into medicine.
So people tend to disagree about where to put medicine. But overall, most major public institutions in the US don't include medicine in STEM:
* US Department of Labor (Bureau of Labor Statistics) -- No. (https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2007/spring/art04.pdf)
* US Department of Commerce (Economics and Statistics Administration) -- No. (https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED522129.pdf)
* NSF -- No. "The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering."
Just because there are other skills needed besides science based ones doesn't mean it isn't a science field.
People differ in whether they think medicine and the other applied sciences fall under the 'science' umbrella or not. Try searching around and you'll see a lot of mixed opinions on the subject.
That’s the result of decades of work, which started with affirmative efforts by law schools to achieve gender parity at the beginning of the pipeline. (Those efforts proved self sustaining. Once women didn’t have to swim upstream to choose law school—facing years of being in a small minority at the outset of their careers—efforts to recruit them specifically became unnecessary.) There is a ways to go yet before we hit parity, but I feel like in STEM folks are still litigating the issue of whether numeric parity should even be the goal. That question was settled in the legal field a long time ago.
What I said was that recent progress is the result of work that started decades ago. Harvard law graduated its first women in 1953. But back then top women law graduates were still getting offers to be secretaries. (Justice Ginsberg’s story was not at all atypical for her cohort.) That, along with the prospect of joining a 90%+ male class in and of itself dissuaded women from pursing law. Law schools fixed that by making 50-50 classes an express goal, and then achieving that goal. Then law firms made 50-50 classes of incoming associates an express goal, and achieved that goal. Gender parity was achieved not simply by accepting women to law schools, but by actively seeking to admit gender balanced classes. But once that happened, the new ratio became self-perpetuating. When being a woman lawyer no longer meant being part of a tiny minority in law school, a firm, etc., women self-selected into it when previously they had opted out.
I strongly suspect the same factors are in play in STEM: women who would be good programmers self-select out of the field because they don’t want to be the 1-2 women in a class of 20 men, or the 1-2 women programmers on a team of 20 men.
Wait, what? Is this an argument that men are inherently unsuited to be Supreme Court Justices?
My guess is this means having 9 women on the Supreme Court is to make up for all the years there were 9 men on the Supreme Court.
I find this dangerous logic. Seeking to alternate oppression of one group versus another doesn't seem like a good long term solution, in my opinion.
By the way, thanks for your analysis about the progression of gender equality in the legal profession. That's something I didn't know about.
I took that to mean "just as it was unremarkable in the very recent past for the SC to be 100% male, it should be unremarkable if in the future it became 100% female (on merit)".
> Wait, what? Is this an argument that men are inherently unsuited to be Supreme Court Justices?
It just means that if gender is not considered, we should see an all women's court once every 2^9 = 512 time.
If the number never goes above the mean, gender must still be a factor.
I do remember in my first CS class: about 70% of the men, and all but one or two women dropped the week after pointers were introduced.
I think most tech companies would go into a full-blown panic if you imposed a quota of non-asians (who are something like 5% of the U.S. population) for technical positions.
But did they have this back in the 60's and 70's when representation started going up? What caused it back then, that didn't apply to engineering?
Be specific, because this could mean different things. Were the genders balanced because the applicant pool itself had become balanced, or because law schools started enforcing balance in admission, or a mix of both?
> In the 1970s and 1980s there was a series of lawsuits as a result of which law firms began to hire gender balanced classes of entry level lawyers
And what were the graduate pools like at the time, re: gender balance? Do you have sources that talk about these points, because it sounds interesting.
Part of the issue for tech companies is that there are fewer women with CS degrees, something they don't directly control, and have only modest at best influence over. And then at the university level, they've had issues getting more women to sign up, though I understand some schools have had more success than others.
There's this hypothesis that men statistically tend to pick jobs involving working with and treating patients as things, and women tend to pick jobs involving people and socializing. Medicine as a field is full of high-status jobs of both kind, so - under this hypothesis - gender parity of the overarching field is entirely unsurprising. And, as predicted, individual specializations tend to show strong gender skew.
Law is also a very large field, so I suspect the profession probably shows a similar dynamic.
Viewed through this lens, our industry is less like "medicine", and more like "radiology". And I suspect - but didn't check - that if you expand the definition of "software" to include supporting fields like design, UX and testing, the overall gender ratio will be much closer to 1:1.
Data to support this hypothesis here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge...
ObGyns are 85% female, Pediatrics 75%, while radiology is 72% male and anesthesiology 63%.
Could also look at careers like "developer evangelist" and "solutions engineer", both of which are technical but much more people-oriented than being a regular software engineer.
The evangelists also have to deal with not just the environment at Microsoft, but also the partners we were helping architect solutions for. On more than one occasion I know women had problems delivering solutions to a partner because that partner had blatantly sexist stakeholders who would constantly try to question or circumvent them in ways that didn't happen for men. One of the college hires I was mentoring was the point person on a project, yet every single question was sent my way and I had to keep redirecting them to the woman who was perfectly capable of answering the question and was actually in charge of the account.
So yes, there were a lot more face to face interactions, but the women still didn't stick around for these roles. Some had much better experiences actually writing code on the product teams. Some moved into project management or research.
Even straight white men hate medicine and can't leave because of debt... so it's not a great comparison.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
My father was a postal worker and described to me the process that the USPS used to improve their culture, and it involved new policies, procedures, and training for all employees.
This would be an amazing survey. I look forward to its publishing. I wouldn't be surprised if someone is doing it as we speak. It shouldn't be too hard or cost that much.
Though, I do have to say, your sample of one is not sufficiently convincing to me.
Preferential treatment (positive discrimination) in hard science not only makes the mistake of treating women as handicapped (they're surely not), but also makes the situation worse by skewing meritocracy.
This sort of job for women is basically a continuation of the days when women were human computers, hired to do loads of calculations for mathematicians and scientists. The fact that women took these jobs has more to do with their limited opportunities elsewhere than anything else.
First of all, the peak of women's representation in computing was ~35% - not all that much different from today's 20-25%. Second, even if we accept that social changes are what prompted the change in women's representation (and I would agree) it is erroneous to assume that this was due to exclusionary culture in technology. In fact, the data suggests the opposite - reductions in sexism result in reductions in the share of women in tech.
This is likely what played out in the united states. Women were displayed into computing due to sexism in other fields. Several of the women interviewed in Clive Thompson's book Coders, explained that they chose to study computer science because law firms told them explicitly that they would not let women be trial lawyers. The reduction in the share of women in computing was due to the opening of opportunities in other fields like law and medicine, which in turn meant that women who would have been displaced into computing now have the opportunity to study the field of their choice.
I am going to take your point about a reduction in sexism in other fields at face value since it seems you are more read up on that than I am. I'm not sure if this is a rebuttal to my argument though. A reduction in sexism in other fields would in fact complement an increase in sexism in computer science. I'm not sure if it is possible to distinguish the effects of each, especially if they compound on top of each other. It might be a little ironic to choose trial lawyers as an example since I don't think they have that much better of a percentage. I would also like to point out that your conclusion of "field of their choice", in my eyes, is heavily influenced by social factors.
Yes, these figures are from degrees earned.
I searched for sources that claim that the majority of computer programmers were women prior to the 70s. The only one I found is very poorly sources. The only one I found was from this page [1] which links to a Guardian article [2], which does not actually provide any data on the workforce composition of computing industries nor how they define what is and isn't a computing job.
> One of the questions I think is important is why were cs degrees so male dominated in something that was previously a female dominated field?
The question cannot be answered because it is based on an incorrect assertion: women never were dominant in programming or computer science - at least computer science as we understand it today.
To be more specific, in order find a time period during which computing was female dominated one has to take a very broad view of what it means to work in "computing". Women dominated computing back when "computer" was a job title [1]. Well into the 20th century, computation was mostly performed by humans and assisted with mechanical calculators [2] and slide rules. This is computing in a very raw sense, but it is not programming. The workers were not creating programs, they were executing programs. This changed during the 1960s and 70s as computers capable of storing and executing programs became cheaper and replaced human computers. To answer your question, women ceased to dominate computing when "computer" no longer referred to people and instead referred to machines and the work involved changed from personally performing computations to programming a computer to perform computations.
Personally, I don't think a human computer has very much to do with computer programming and I think it's a big stretch to try and put the two under the same banner.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(job_description)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_calculator#1900s_to...
> I am going to take your point about a reduction in sexism in other fields at face value since it seems you are more read up on that than I am. I'm not sure if this is a rebuttal to my argument though. A reduction in sexism in other fields would in fact complement an increase in sexism in computer science.
I'm not sure I follow. Why would a reduction in sexism in other fields have any effect on sexism in computer science?
> I'm not sure if it is possible to distinguish the effects of each, especially if they compound on top of each other. It might be a little ironic to choose trial lawyers as an example since I don't think they have that much better of a percentage. I would also like to point out that your conclusion of "field of their choice", in my eyes, is heavily influenced by social factors.
Women exceeded 40% representation in law schools in 1985, and have been at roughly parity since the 1990s. Representation of women in law is unambiguously higher than in computing, and it has been for decades. While the stories of women shared by Clive Thompson specifically wanted to become trial lawyers, their stories were representative of the field of law opening up to women more broadly. The point is, we observe a reduction of women in computing occurring at the time time that fields previously closed to women open up. The result is that women who would have been displaced into computing due to their field of choice being inaccessible now have the opportunity to study their field of choice. This would result in a reduction in women in computing even as computing remained as welcoming as it was before. This is consistent with the data presented by the original post, which observed a negative correlation between gender equality and women's representation in technology fields.
In absolute numbers, the number of men entering computer science just grew faster, than the number of women. Don't forget that 50 years ago, there were fewer people in CS or programming than today.
Stop trying to make them feel like something is wrong if they don't have this inclination. Males and females have different preferences on average, some as early as birth[1]. This is not a bad thing.
For the ones that want to program all day, obviously they should be welcomed and any company that doesn't is doing themselves a huge disservice. In fact the best programmer I've ever worked with is a woman.
1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222673203_Sex_Diffe...
I feel like this is a “??? Profit!” argument. Accepting that girl infants prefer faces and boy infants prefer trucks—what does that have to do with programming? Even within the context of traditional stereotypes about male/female preferences, what makes programming a “male” thing? The analogy that programmers “build things” is just that—your typical programmer is certainly not cut out to be a construction worker.
Programming jobs often involve extremely minimal face to face interactions
And some of us like it that way.
Also, if programming is solitary as you suggest, why do tech companies discourage remote work and insist on culture fit, team building, collaborative work spaces, etc.? Much more so than law firms.
Deep contemplation of technical problems while staring at a screen and talking to computers for hours on end often made talking to people after work exceedingly difficult
I've heard the argument that somehow "actual coding is a relatively small part of being a software engineer," but unless you're a manager (of which there are many more women), the thing you're being trained for, the thing you spend most of your time doing, and the basis of how people perceive the profession, is sitting in front of a computer coding. You can describe any profession as people-oriented on the basis that one needs to work with others, but the key question is whether the basic activity of the job is a social one.
Regardless of whether the people-vs-thing distinction is significant or not, it seems inaccurate in a big-picture way to describe programming as people-oriented. Like, that's not what people mean when they draw that distinction.
[1]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/taking-...
Building things is not just construction though. I mean, your average clock maker is not qualified to plumb a bathroom, but that doesn't mean he's not making things.
I don't have an opinion on this, but the idea that programmers aren't building something is a bit silly.
Construction worker may do even less engineering design work than garment-makers do.
I don't even know if the data is ready for us to draw any conclusions, but at the very least it seems to me we should find this to be an extremely interesting pattern, and use it to motivate hypotheses.
Sure, but it seems more than a little convenient that the male-chosen professions seem to generally pay significantly more, on average, than the female-chosen ones. Haven't there been studies that showed that women moving into a profession was actually associated with pay dropping?
Programmers are paid relatively well because
1. Software is "eating the world", so a lot of software is being written leading to demand for programmers. 2. Programming scales really well. Software has zero reproduction cost and can reach a global audience almost instantaneously. So software companies can make a lot of money with relatively few employees.
What would be the mechanism for pay dropping when women enter a profession?
Some global masterminds reducing pay across multiple corporations across the board when they find out women are being hired in that industry?
Maybe it's just a matter of a sudden increase of supply of workers as women enter a field to meet the existing demand, driving wages down?
Is it because the women are being paid less, while the men are being paid the same as before?
No coordination is necessary. People will simply start to view the role as less valuable or skilled due to more women being in it.
> In four studies, Bowles and collaborators from Carnegie Mellon found that people penalized women who initiated negotiations for higher compensation more than they did men. The effect held whether they saw the negotiation on video or read about it on paper, whether they viewed it from a disinterested third-party perspective or imagined themselves as senior managers in a corporation evaluating an internal candidate. Even women penalized the women who initiated the conversation, though they also penalized the men who did so. They just didn’t seem to like seeing someone ask for more money.
Some things can only really be tested in artificial environments.
What exactly do you think will be tested in that artificial environment when the environment itself (with what I'd hazard to guess quite a list of specifics, many of the "subtle and implicit, but influential" kind) is a central variable of the test?
If an observational study of this kind is deemed hard/improbable/impossible to set up - how hard do you think it is to get the artificial setup right? To account for - or even identify - all variables and preconditions? This is so easy to mess up and end up with basically meaningless data. (Yeah, I know - that doesn't mean it won't be published. Everybody raise your hands and shout "Replication Crisis"! :) )
Isn't there a study that said women ask for pay raises at the same rate as men, but they are granted them less often?
1. More people (women in this case) enter the profession.
2. Due to increased labor supply, pay starts to drop.
3. Men, placing a relatively higher priority on high pay, begin to avoid the profession.
That last point is sort of interesting. Men are strongly associated with their careers and level of pay. This is most of their status. It has a tremendous impact in the dating market. It is a key factor in the likelihood of divorce. Men follow the money; they don't get randomly assigned careers and they don't just follow their dreams. Men strongly seek the status of a high-paid job. To marry and start a family, that job is almost required. Women have no such trouble, so they don't need to prioritize earnings. Women can pick careers they actually enjoy.
While this is plausible, the data on this isn't consistent. In fact, some professions that saw a large influx of women also saw wage increases. There are many variables at play.
Men hit the extremes more often and as a result occupy more of the outlier positions. They're also over represented at the bottom of the ladder. i.e., the homeless and prison populations. But I don't see anyone claiming it's a conspiracy that men over represent this end of the spectrum.
It’s not a coincidence at all. Men place a higher priority on pay to the exclusion of all else, when choosing a career, than do women. Women are much more likely to choose careers with flexible working hours, benefits, and the potential to help other people (positive externalities).
When you look at it this way, it makes more sense that you’ll find men occupying all these different high paying positions. It makes a lot less sense that every employer deliberately pays less for women-dominated positions just because there are women there.
Because, on average, men are given a lot less social pressure to "be there", they can more often take high-pressure jobs. Then the high pressure becomes a status symbol, and a gate to keep people with higher social obligations out.
As this phenomenon also causes a ton of burnout and is a cause for men's shorter lifespans, the whole thing needs to be actively taken down.
And as for high-powered careers being a status symbol, I would offer that a man's socioeconomic status is a major component in attraction for women. The reverse is true to far less of an extent. The stats on dating apps bear this out.
They don't. Most men have to work in order to earn money and attract a partner. You think all of us love sitting in open offices, following our Scrum Master? Of course not, we just don't have the luxury, as do women, to follow our 'passions' in lower paying jobs. We can't marry a breadwinner too easily. We don't receive subsidies from the state, unlike women who are a net tax loss. We aren't able to attract a mate simply by being young, as can women, due to biological differences between genders.
In Scandinavia, where salaries are progressively taxed and women have tons of opportunity to do what they want, women still choose not to sit in front of computers all day. Why the hell would they if everyone's salary is essentially equalized, regardless of whether you're a part-time teacher, social worker or a talented computer engineer working 60/hours a week. All salaries are taxed down to a median $75K / year, with the same health insurance, subsidized parental leave, etc.
Thus, Scandinavian women follow their 'passions' which is what most Western women do, as we see from their choices in college majors, all of which are unarguably 'easier' but pay less. If society were to equalize my salary at $75K year whether I coded all day or worked for a charity or NGO or a music teacher or artist or actor, I'd dump my programming job as fast as I could.
Look at India or China where far more women are into computers - they don't have the luxury of following their passion in dance or writing, because they don't have as much PRIVILEGE in their societies as do women in the West.
* http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students...
Source for this? I've never heard this claim before and on the surface it makes no sense. I'm a woman and I don't get any kind of special tax exemptions for it...
The tax revenue point can be proven by the same 'wage gap' arguments which are true in the sense that men work more and are paid higher, in aggregate, so pay more income taxes.
Second idea is that most federal and state benefits that are direct subsidies go to women: TANF, WIC, SNAP, Section 8, etc. Most people (i.e. women) who receive these benefits have children.
The biggest difference, can't remember where I saw it, is as our population shifts towards a higher median age, health care (and social security and other things like government pensions) become a larger share of net pay outs. Women live longer and spend more on health care.d.
But responding to your own question, no I don't think there are any special exemptions for working women, though it is creeping into US law in many states and soon Federally. Expenses like parental leave will be paid for by all taxpayers but be distributed mostly to women.
Obviously, some of these discrepancies are due to child care being a non-paid job, but it isn't the only difference.
My girl child likes trucks, not Frozen, and the pressure from other adults to get her to conform and play with Disney-branded dolls is non-trivial and unrelenting. Ugh.
That's true. But if you ask 1000 men and 1000 women if they want to program all day, you'll get a much higher % of men.
> My girl child likes trucks, not Frozen, and the pressure from other adults to get her to conform and play with Disney-branded dolls is non-trivial and unrelenting. Ugh.
I largely agree, Disney is overwhelming. Though no one has pressured or tried to make my daughter conform, other adults do mostly buy her girl typical things. Her cars, trains, dinosaurs, legos and the like mostly came from us (didn't buy any dolls, she got those from others). She likes trucks and Frozen. But mostly Paw Patrol. It's amazing, everything else is a distant 2nd to those pups!
Throw them out, seriously. I did when they got to be too large a portion of the toys.
I'm sure you're right.
I think this though itself is an artefact of a male dominated profession. The fact that working with software is "programming a computer all day" reflects a male preference and value system, and many people open acknowledge that it's quite harmful and often creates quite dysfunctional teams. We need better requirements, better communication, better documentation, more human approach to the whole process. I've talked to great women working in software development who say "I don't really care about the programming itself and I would never go home and do it for fun - but I love the other aspects of the job". Perhaps the nature of the job itself needs to change a bit for the preferences to adjust.
Isn't there a place for people good at thinking deeply about difficult problems on their own and coming up with effective solutions?
Yes, everyone needs to be able to communicate well to be part of an effective team. But there is also a role for deep thinking and introspection.
By the way, introverted women exist, too.
You can't possibly think that this is what the person you are replying to is saying. But anyway, the point is that the conception of programming as a task suited to people who like to work in isolation is incorrect and harmful. One of the most common pitfalls of software development is writing software that no-one wants or needs. The solution to that problem lies in better communication. Of course, there are some kinds of programming problems that are suited to intense work in isolation. But most programmers probably need to spend more time talking to their non-programmer colleagues.
I do think that.
I think programming selects for people high in introversion and maybe even on the autistic spectrum.
I think some extroverted people find those people deficient and don't like working with them, and would like to change the working environment to be less comfortable for the introverts and more comfortable for the extroverts.
If you're employed as a programmer, you're most likely being paid to solve other people's problems by writing code. If you can't communicate with those people, you'll never be able to do that successfully.
It's no conspiracy. A socially clueless introvert who's being paid a lot of money to do nothing useful doesn't have much to offer.
There are also a lot of tasks where thinking deeply without distractions or interruptions for an extended period of time is the best way to come up with good solutions.
And even a lot of the best communication comes from taking time in quiet and deeply thinking about what you want to say and writing a good, convincing argument.
Thinking introverts have nothing productive to offer is just bigotry, and really makes you come across as a complete ass.
???
I don't say that they're deficient as people, or that working in isolation is bad per se. I'm just saying that people who like to work in isolation are unlikely to make good programmers (in the context of a typical programming job).
Personally, I switched to programming from academia, where I really did work in isolation on challenging problems. Now I spend most of my time talking to my colleagues to figure out exactly which not very challenging problem I should be spending my limited time on solving.
Now it makes sense.
He also had a daughter. Similar age. He was not doing the same for her.
Perhaps these children had such a strong idea of what they wanted at a very very early age and the father was responding to that. But I find it more likely that the father held an implicit bias about what jobs his son and daughter should have and was providing support to push his son into tech.
When these two people graduate college and the son becomes a software engineer and the daughter doesn't it will be their choice. But it is not clear to me that it wasn't sexism that produced the circumstances for that choice.
She did? Where did she find these writers with safe, high status jobs? Maybe PR?
> women in America are "organically" picking non-STEM jobs, but that is because the jobs suck, the environments suck and people are assholes at these jobs
Very general assessment without any supporting evidence.
Your sister is not sufficient evidence to make this kind of assessment. Neither is "Ask Women".
By the way, I will be very surprised to hear women in general are treated better in India than in America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_inequality_in_India
tl;dr: Ask Men and Women.
Seems to me people are confusing conformity with social/political equality.
What constitutes an artificial restraint?
For classical liberals, that means being free from the constraint imposed by other individuals.
Today the definition of "restraints" is being expanded beyond the artificial to the point where everything is being declared a "human right" without any consideration for the fact that some of those things can only be provided by taking from someone else (resources and/or labor). Basically, more and more people feel that people should be free from natural restraints like the responsibility of having to provide for oneself (or at least trying to). But the rub is that the only way to free some people from those natural restraints is bondage of others to provide for them.
If you are capable of solving the toughest scientific or technical challenges, but you are prevented from doing so because of some attribute of your circumstance (your color, your gender, your age, your wealth level, your current job title, etc.), then you are being artificially restrained.
If you can solve the toughest challenge, but you choose not to because you would rather throw clay on a pottery wheel, then you are also free from constraints. (There are plenty of people that are practically forced into careers because they are technically capable, and because their elders believe that if one can, one should.)
Sure, perhaps in theory. In practice, the kind of differences in performance and achievement that would be explained by psychological and physiological differences between men and women are immediately blamed on discrimination and the like. There is an implicit assumption that men and women are mathematically equal, which leads to the conflation of equality of opportunity with equality of outcome, exaggerating the effects of discrimination and leading to poor allocation of resources in an attempt to correct a "problem" without consideration for part of all of the actual cause.
That's a bit of circular reasoning though.
- Look how men and women behave differently!
- But why do they behave differently?
- Because they're different.
- How do you know that?
- Because they behave differently.
It's not logically consistent and doesn't answer anything.
Pretty much everything else isn't as clear cut. We know that more men than women go into STEM - but we don't know if it is because men fundamentally like those jobs better, or if it is because our culture makes it less acceptable for women to go into STEM. Often culture things are subtle and people will say things that do not match their actions.
> Between 30 and 50 percent of programmers were women in the 1950s, and it was seen as a natural career for them, as evidenced by a 1967 Cosmopolitan feature about “Computer Girls.” [1]
[1] https://timeline.com/women-pioneered-computer-programming-th...
Feminists made big advances at the same time and so it is hard to separate which factor (or something I can't think of) is important and which an irrelevant coincidence.
I won't be so uncivil as to suggest that your perspective is "bullshit". I suppose the 'successful' qualification is sufficiently ill-defined to give a lot of wiggle room, but if I take that to mean financially successful, a minority of the programmers I know would describe themselves as lifelong machine lovers. Certainly some do, but I'd say more are the sort to get cross with you if you try to "talk shop" outside of work; they have interests and hobbies unrelated to computers and use work with computers to fund those interests and hobbies. And those that do have programming as a hobby rarely work on hobby projects that resemble the work they're paid for.
As an aside, if the industry really were filled with technophiles as you suggest, I think I'd enjoy it a lot more. As it stands, relatively few around me seem to share my interests. I've found the best way to find people who share my technophile inclinations is to look for groups and clubs that form around technical hobbies. And what I've found in doing so is that many lifelong technophiles don't work in tech at all, and of those that do work in tech, most don't get paid to work on the sort of tech they're actually passionate about.
I think there are real differences, other than the two I mentioned, but there is probably a lot of overlaps where you can find plenty of exceptions.
But software is, what, less than a century old? What possible evolutionary differences could have risen in that time frame?
I mean, the number zero is very unintuitive and the ancient Romans/greeks/chinese/whatever didn't discover it, despite the fact all evidence shows they were very smart in many things.
Yet you want me to believe that men understand that arrays are zero based better than women.
Apply that to any software principle.
But guns are, what, less than a millennia old? What possible evolutionary differences could have arisen in that time frame? No way that women and men would perform differently in competitive shooting [0], right? And as it turns out, men shoot faster, women shoot more accurately.
There's all sorts of things that have only existed for a century or two where men and women perform differently. Adaptation for one task often has effects on similar tasks, after all.
This doesn't mean men are better than women at CS! But "this field didn't exist a century ago" isn't sufficient reason to assert no differences can exist.
0: http://www.realbiathlon.com/2011/11/who-shoots-better-men-or...
- Women and men are equal! - But they behave differently - Because women are discriminated against - How do you know that? - Because they behave differently.
What now?
- How do you know that?
- Because women told us!!
The frustrating thing is most of the analysis completely leaves this part out.
I would be interested to hear from women about ways they have been discriminated against, and how the industry can improve to make that less likely to happen.
But most analysis I see on line is just "Most programmers are men! That is sexist!" With no analysis going beyond that.
This is not about generic workplace disagreements. Yes, those happen all the time.
> How do we know this? _Because men told us_!
I know that's tongue in cheek and only half serious but I'll reply anyway.
Even if 99% of men are more accommodating, that 1% would still make employment unbearable. After 10 years you probably met a few dozen assholes and just want to quit the industry because it's not worth it.
To give a few examples of preferential treatment for which I have first-hand information:
- a hiring committee at Google is officially more likely to rule in favor of hiring a female in "borderline" cases; men go straight down the shitter in that case. Promo committees similarly treat women more favorably.
- at Microsoft a hiring manager can't hire a male candidate, especially, god forbid, a _white_ male candidate, unless they filled their diversity quota, without first obtaining an exception from their VP (which very few people bother to do). This is extremely frustrating to them, because MS gets FANG rejects as it is.
I suspect similar policies exist at other tech companies as well. This is special treatment already. This is "accommodation" to the fullest extent.
We can both be right/wrong independent of each other.
I'm a woman. I AM A WOMAN IN STEM. You know what makes my blood pressure rise? People in real life and in this thread who tell me that I'm naturally not suited to it, that I like people more than things. Go away! Shut the f(*& up! I want to sit here and deal with my code and not have people tell me that I either don't know what I like or I'm not a real, normal woman. Maybe we won't get to 50-50 in some STEM fields. Who cares. People telling me for forty years that I'm a weirdo for existing with this brain in this body is not equality.
And you know what? I've got family in STEM in Scandinavia, and the horrifying discrimination stories I've heard directly about their working conditions (down to classic, "You shouldn't be here because when you get pregnant you'll stop doing science" conversations with superiors) dwarf anything I personally have experienced in STEM in the US. The homophobic comments in the sauna are direct and cruel. Scandinavian STEM is not the egalitarian paradise that Americans think it is.
Well... most men aren't suited for STEM, either.
I think that there may be some validity in saying that women, on average, have a temperament difference or focus difference or whatever that makes them want STEM less. But there is NO validity in saying to any particular individual "therefore you are not suited". No, you judge the individual by the individual, not by the group.
What I'm trying to better understand, is whether women who are not applying for programming jobs at the same rate as men, are due to lack of interest, or are they somehow being actively discouraged from the field?
I've worked with many women programmers, some of them better than me, so I know it's not the case women are inherently worse at programming than men. But I don't know the reason there are fewer women in the field.
Obviously you can't speak for all women, but maybe you have some insights as a woman that I don't as a man?
In seventh grade a great (male) teacher of mine recommended a summer program for me, at the dawn of the internet (Gopher!). I joined the math & computer class and was the only girl. None of the boys would talk to me at all. At lunch every day they ditched me and I went to find some kids from the theater class to sit with. Is it malicious? No; it's seventh-grade boys. Is it encouraging? No. I was lonely six hours a day because no one would speak to me.
In my engineering college, it was the dating thing. From being a nerd who was ignored in high school, not exactly prime dating material, I was suddenly transformed into a 'female'. I got asked out constantly. Sounds great, right? But if your classmates only want to have sex with you, and don't want to do homework with you, you're cut off from much of the joy of intellectual discovery of college. I was ignored by the profs and couldn't do a senior project, even though it was in the catalogue, because no prof would sponsor me. When I waitressed, the guys would first flirt with me and then upon discovering I was an undergrad in a tough major they'd turn very serious and gush about how important it was for women to be involved in that field, how special I was. Is it evil? No. It's like being a stay-at-home dad at the park with your kids in the middle of the day. Alienating. (My husband reports he hasn't made it past the none-of-the-moms-talking-to-him phase when he's made his forays.)
From college into grad school the emphasis on me as a potential romantic partner didn't stop. I remember joining the Linux Users Group in the town I went to grad school in. Some great guys, some good parties & good times. All juxtaposed with, for instance, the guy who I thought invited me over to talk about compilers... but when I showed up, candles were lit and the dinner table set for two. Is that evil? Is that an active discouragement from the field? It's just deflating. I thought I'd found someone I could talk to. He didn't want to talk to me after I'd declined to get involved.
I wore baggier and baggier clothes and never figured out how to do makeup or hair (now holding me back in corporate America) but simply trying to disappear into sweatshirts did not enable me to be 'one of the guys'.
In one research center I was involved with in grad school, it was more textbook-style discrimination. The women did all the work and wrote the grants that got the money. How can I say that? Surely it's unfair! But it is true, because everyone in the research group besides the director and one guy was female -- there was literally no one else. The director was phasing into retirement and was trying to groom the guy employee -- taking him to golf on Saturdays, taking guy to drink South African wine with director and director's wife. The problem was that guy employee wasn't very good, and once director retired, guy couldn't do the work and wasn't able to keep that position or the next two. The women found varied levels of success and failure elsewhere, but didn't get the chance at leadership at that center!
Later in grad school and into my postdocs, it was the constant assumption that I was primarily interested in education, not research. Put into a job code where I actually couldn't get funding from the research grants I won, asked last year to contribute to the education components of three guys' research grants to boost their 'broader impacts' score. Not everyone did this -- one colleague actually talked with me about research, and it was really nice.
When I was a prof, one or two (male) students tried to physically intimidate me into giving a higher grade. That's 1, 2 out of thousands... but an experience that my male colleagues did not have. I taught a lot of extra independent studies because people felt 'comfortable' with me; my super-friendly and wonderful and cuddly male colleague didn't experience that. I had to serve on the diversity committee and run a diversity event: I did not want to, but it was strongly implied that my promotion was linked to this service. (Right: I'd forgotten I was 'voluntold' for this by a senior male colleague who then didn't mention my name in the acknowledgements and took all the credit at the opening, because he's a "champion for diversity".) Students also came to me with personal concerns a lot, like roommate problems, family being evicted, needing to schedule an abortion, money trouble. I asked my male colleagues what they did about this and they said they'd never been asked about any of these things! Were these kids in college actively discouraging me from a STEM career? No way in hell! They were lovely young people! But the extra burden of teaching additional independent studies, running this stupid diversity event, and providing tissues to students in real trouble took time away from writing up research, and that's how you get promoted.
I couldn't win the battle with being tracked more and more into education rather than the research I love and left academia for industry this year. Hooray! Now I'm paid more and I 'program all day', and get to do the experimental CS/math/stats I enjoy. Am I a success story or not? I'm the example of the 'leaky pipeline' in academia.
Several replies to my previous comment said things like 'literally no one has said that' there's a conflict between me being female and liking STEM. But from this thread alone:
"I'm my experience women tend to be more interested in human facing parts of software like web and ui development, but less interested in the back end parts." "What if women were calling those environments toxic because they had a hard time doing well in there?" "I don't understand why modern society doesn't understand/want to believe that men and women have different career interests than men. Men and women value things differently, and it's not all because of society." "Ask women and you'll find that most aren't interested in programming a computer all day. Which one could argue is a sane choice. If anything it's more sane. Stop trying to make them feel like something is wrong if they don't have this inclination. Males and females have different preferences on average, some as early as birth[1]." Are any of these commenters actively discouraging me from pursuing my STEM career? No. They're just repeating the message again and again and again that women just like different things. Yeah, I do like different things. But it's always code for "you're not normal". And it's true that I'm statistically not in the majority. Folks, I know that. You don't have to tell me every day. I've been able to calculate percentages for thirty years. I've known I'm outnumbered for thirty years. I'm always aware that I'm a minority. Always. And that's what is tiring. It's not discouraging -- it's the surprise that I exist, then either the turning to talk to someone else or the gush of fake or real 'encouragement' that I'm so brave to be so different.
As a man in tech, I honestly have no idea what the women around me experience, so it’s valuable for me to get some perspective.
It’s interesting to me how you don’t blame any one specific person for actively trying to discourage you, just the constant exhaustion from being treated differently from those around you.
So one take away, is by recruiting more girls and women into coding, the girls and women who do want to pursue it won’t feel so out of place. So it is difficult to determine the “true” number of female people who like programming, until we have a critical mass of women programmers.
That’s given me something to think about.
This is a misrepresentation of what people are writing in this thread. People are not saying that women who work in STEM are "not natural" or are working in a field they are unsuited for. They're saying that natural population-wide differences mean that the fact that women choose to enter computing at lower rates than men is not indicative of sexism. Saying that computing is 20% women because of biological differences is not making any statement of the capabilities of those women that go into computing.
> Maybe we won't get to 50-50 in some STEM fields. Who cares.
Many people do indeed subscribe to the belief that STEM should have parity between the sexes, and many companies are employing discriminatory policies to achieve this. And this doesn't just hurt men. When people witness discrimination in their companies' hiring processes, they look around and at their co-workers and wonder, "would this person have been hired if they didn't belong to a 'diverse' demographic?" Do you think this helps women?
Not a single person in this thread has said anything like that. Perhaps your perception is skewed. I know the consensus is different in certain pockets of our society, and especially online, but being [female|minority race|LGBT] does not automatically make your interpretation of your experiences valid.
Kind of like the humorous rule of thumb: if everyone around you is an asshole, maybe you're the asshole.
> - Look how men and women behave differently!
> - But why do they behave differently?
> - Because they're different.
> - How do you know that?
> - Because differences are observed at birth, are relatively consistent across countries with vastly different cultures, and the differences in behavior are observed even when raising children in a controlled environment free of gendered roles.
Fixed that for you.
I mean the article literally says different countries/cultures see vastly different results.
As far as this post's article, the rates are not vastly different results, most of the countries that observed fall within a range of 30%. If this were socially determined, we'd expect some countries to have 80-90% women in technology. That is not the case, all countries have majority male tech workforces, and they're mostly in the 15-35% range with some outliers on both ends.
Furthermore, what differences that are observed contradict the idea that rigid gender roles cause lower rates of women in tech. Countries with some of the strictest gender roles like south Korea and Algeria see the highest rates of women in tech.
That's huge
> If this were socially determined, we'd expect some countries to have 80-90% women in technology
That's assuming social pressures are randomly distributed. But we don't observe 50/50 split between patriarchy and matriarchy.
> Furthermore, what differences that are observed contradict the idea that rigid gender roles cause lower rates of women in tech
Maybe because it depends which gender roles are applied and not their rigidity?
The nerd/geek being an awkward boy with glasses troppe is specifically a western concept for example.
Women in Eastern Europe worked in factories side by side with men for generations.
Gender roles does not equal your concept of gender roles like women not liking/belonging/choosing not to be in tech.
I'm not sure if it's even possible to put countries in a binary between patriarchy and matriarchy. Instead, the study presented put countries on a scale that measures overall gender equality. And what difference we do observe is that patriarchal countries have higher rates of women in tech, but still lower than parity. Countries with gender equality (is this what you mean by "matriarchy"?) have low rates of women in tech often in the 20-10% range. So in "patriarchies" we see more female representation, but still lower than the majority and in egalitarian countries we see
> The nerd/geek being an awkward boy with glasses troppe is specifically a western concept for example.
And yet, the disparity between women and men in technology exists outside of western countries. Thus, attributing the disparity between men and women in tech to tropes like these is not effective line of reasoning. This is exactly the point that I'm making: attributing the gender distribution in tech to social factors is difficult when said distribution is observed across a wide variety of societies.
> Women in Eastern Europe worked in factories side by side with men for generations.
This was the same case in Western Europe and Asia as well - I'm not sure why you chose to highlight this fact.
> Gender roles does not equal your concept of gender roles like women not liking/belonging/choosing not to be in tech.
I'm not sure what you're writing about here, this sentence does not make sense to me. The point is that highly unequal societies with strict gender roles see more women in technology than more egalitarian societies.
And for what it's worth, while 20% representation in tech in the united states might seem low at first glance it's actually not at all uncommon to have fields that are >95% one gender or another. Tech is on par with "Health practitioner, support technologists, and technicians", "Loan interviewers and clerks", "Printing press operators", and a couple percent above "Couriers and messengers" as far as gender disparities go [1].
1. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce...
No... I mean the dictionary definition.
Where men didn't have the right to vote, work or own property until recently, where women are expected to own and make all the money, where men are raised to be married away, where men are expected to make the coffee and women to run the meeting. So on and so forth.
I'm afraid that entire paragraph does not address my comment because you misunderstood what matriarchy means.
> And yet, the disparity between women and men in technology exists outside of western countries
Not if you take into consideration the labour participation rate... If you do, the disparity basically disappears.
These societies with rigid gender rules tend to have less women overall working at all.
> This was the same case in Western Europe and Asia as well - I'm not sure why you chose to highlight this fact.
But they were forced to do that until the 90s under communism, I'm not talking about peasants in the middle ages.
I mention Eastern Europe because I'm trying to give you alternative explanations for women participation in STEM.
Eastern Europe and India have similar rates of participation but are vastly different societies.
What do they have in common? They are not the West.
They don't have the West's cultural norms. Ergo, one of those norms is stopping women from going into STEM.
That, to me, sounds more likely. Much easier to explain vs trying to find something in common between India and Eastern Europe, which is pretty crazy.
> I'm not sure what you're writing about here, this sentence does not make sense to me. The point is that highly unequal societies with strict gender roles see more women in technology than more egalitarian societies.
And my point is your cultural expectation do not translate to other cultures.
There might be a specific gender inequality that stops women from entering STEM. That may or may not exist in a society, independent on what gender inequality is overall.
Vastly different societies like India and Eastern Europe have similar participation rates, despite the fact that Eastern Europe is much wealthier.
If what you said is true, you'd expect Eastern Europe to have lower participation rate than India, but that's not the case.
Correlation broken.
> not at all uncommon to have fields that are >95% one gender or another
That just means the problem is beyond just STEM, not an explanation.
We would expect to see even lower rates of women in STEM. The data shows an inverse relationship between women gaining more rights and resources and women's representation in STEM.
> Not if you take into consideration the labour participation rate... If you do, the disparity basically disappears. These societies with rigid gender rules tend to have less women overall working at all.
Yes, they do. Differences in labor force participation do not hold up to scrutiny. Plenty of the countries with less women's equality also have high labor force participation [1].
> But they were forced to do that until the 90s under communism, I'm not talking about peasants in the middle ages. I mention Eastern Europe because I'm trying to give you alternative explanations for women participation in STEM. Eastern Europe and India have similar rates of participation but are vastly different societies. What do they have in common? They are not the West. They don't have the West's cultural norms. Ergo, one of those norms is stopping women from going into STEM. That, to me, sounds more likely. Much easier to explain vs trying to find something in common between India and Eastern Europe, which is pretty crazy.
But India and Eastern Europe still see low rates of women in technology. In fact, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic see the same or lower rates of women in technology than in the United States.
You're pointing out these differences, and these differences do not yield higher rates of women in technology. So why do you seem to think that these differences are significantly affecting rates of women in technology.
> And my point is your cultural expectation do not translate to other cultures. There might be a specific gender inequality that stops women from entering STEM. That may or may not exist in a society, independent on what gender inequality is overall. Vastly different societies like India and Eastern Europe have similar participation rates, despite the fact that Eastern Europe is much wealthier. If what you said is true, you'd expect Eastern Europe to have lower participation rate than India, but that's not the case. Correlation broken.
Eastern Europe does have lower rates of women in technology than India. India has ~30% women in STEM [2]. Whereas the Eastern European countries have representation mostly in the range of 20-25%.
> That just means the problem is beyond just STEM, not an explanation.
Correct. The "problem" is that men and women have difference interests, and this difference is largely universal across different societies.
Does social influence have some effect? Probably. We observe that countries with less rights and opportunities for women do have higher rates of women in technology than more egalitarian countries. But this influence only shifts the representation of women in tech by 10-15%.
1. https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/female_labor_force...
2. https://research.swe.org/2018/07/india-undergraduate-educati...
That's just disingenuous, we literally don't have that data to make any claims on it. You're the one which said you'd expect women participation rates to be randomised, as in some countries to have more women in STEM than men. I simply counterpointed with the fact that societies aren't randomised, they are all patriarchal on some level, that's why you never see more women in tech in any country.
> In fact, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic see the same or lower rates of women in technology than in the United States.
Oh, so your correlation that stricter gender roles and women getting into STEM is not true? Did you just prove yourself wrong?!
Also, Romania, Bulgaria and Russia have higher participation rates than the US...
It's almost like your alleged correlation is BS and random, even within similar countries and cultures.
> The "problem" is that men and women have difference interests, and this difference is largely universal across different societies.
You're literally reading an article claiming the opposite (with sources) mate. Did you read it?!
> But this influence only shifts the representation of women in tech by 10-15%.
That's like gigantic. It's almost parity in the workplace. How can you dismiss it?!
The small difference is explained by the difference in labour participation rates.
We already talked about this but it's like you didn't read my comment.
The core thesis of the article posted is that societies that are more egalitarian - closer to "matriarchy" - on average have less female representation in tech. The more countries drift away from "patriarchy" and towards "matriarchy" the fewer women go into tech.
> Oh, so your correlation that stricter gender roles and women getting into STEM is not true? Did you just prove yourself wrong?!
Many of these countries are more egalitarian than the US as per the data in the original post. Perhaps you should not have assumed that all Eastern European countries are less egalitarian than the US.
> Also, Romania, Bulgaria and Russia have higher participation rates than the US... It's almost like your alleged correlation is BS and random, even within similar countries and cultures.
The correlation is between gender equality and women's representation in tech. Yes, the rates of women in tech in Eastern European countries varies because different Eastern European countries have different levels of gender equality.
You're the one who erroneously claimed that "Eastern Europe and India have similar rates of participation but are vastly different societies" when in fact Eastern European countries have a variety of rates of women in tech, many of which are lower than the United States' 25% let alone India's 30%. I agree, the alleged correlation between Eastern Europe and rates of female representation in tech is BS and random - but that was your alleged correlation...
But what doesn't vary? The fact that these rates are overwhelmingly in a relatively narrow band between 20-35%.
> You're literally reading an article claiming the opposite (with sources) mate. Did you read it?!
If this is your takeaway from the article, I would suggest re-reading it. There is some variation across societies - but not much. The overwhelming majority of countries studied had female representation in tech between 15-30%. This is indeed a fairly consistent rate.
The slight variation that does exist demonstrates an inverse correlation between women gaining more rights and authority and female representation in tech.
> That's like gigantic. It's almost parity in the workplace. How can you dismiss it?!
It is nowhere near parity in the workplace. The countries with the greatest gender equality like Finland and Norway have 20% female representation in tech. Countries on the other end of the spectrum like Turkey and Indonesia have 35%. This is still barely over 1/3rd.
> The small difference is explained by the difference in labour participation rates.
> We already talked about this but it's like you didn't read my comment.
I did read your comment, and provided data that demonstrated that differences in labor participation does not hold true. This is factually incorrect. These countries with less gender equality have female labor participation rates that are often the same or higher than the US and other western countries. For example, Indonesia has a female labor participation rate of 52% as compared to the United States' 56%. Vietnam has a female labor participation rate of 76%. It we adjusted its female representation in tech to account for differences in labor participation, the percent of women in tech would go down.
Adjusting for this does not explain the difference in representation in tech. Furthermore, even if it were you are erroneously assuming that if more women entered the workforce those women would.
We literally don't have matriarchies, there's no data about it. And I also don't know why you put that in quotes, it's an actual word.
> Many of these countries are more egalitarian than the US as per the data in the original post. Perhaps you should not have assumed that all Eastern European countries are less egalitarian than the US.
Of really? Which ones? Because Hungary certainly isn't.
You just proved yourself wrong and you're not addressing what the core of the argument of what I said.
> The fact that these rates are overwhelmingly in a relatively narrow band between 20-35%.
> The overwhelming majority of countries studied had female representation in tech between 15-30%. This is indeed a fairly consistent rate.
I'm ignoring the fact that you can't even keep your numbers straight within the same comment...
It's not consistent at all, it's almost the entire range!
And given that close to 0% or 50% is unlikely to happen in any country, that's pretty much where you expect the probability distribution to land anyway. It says nothing.
It's like saying unemployment falls between 5-40% in the majority of countries. Well d'oh, it's expected. It says nothing about the health of the countries in questiom.
> I agree, the alleged correlation between Eastern Europe and rates of female representation in tech is BS and random - but that was your alleged correlation...
Wait, what exactly is your allegation then, if not that?
> Countries on the other end of the spectrum like Turkey and Indonesia have 35%. This is still barely over 1/3rd.
You're still not addressing the labour participation rates between women and men. You don't get it.
> For example, Indonesia has a female labor participation rate of 52% as compared to the United States' 56%. Vietnam has a female labor participation rate of 76%.
You're suppressed to compare bergen women and men in the same country. Women's labour participation rate has less than nothing to do with Vietnam.
You don't get it.
> Adjusting for this does not explain the difference in representation in tech.
Yes it would, you just don't know how to adjust for it.
> Furthermore, even if it were you are erroneously assuming that if more women entered the workforce those women would.
It doesn't matter if they would or not, it won't affect the statistics, you still need to adjust for it.
We may or may not have matriarchies - a couple countries like Spain do have more women in parliament than men so maybe they fit your definition of a matriarchy. But we do have data on how the female representation in tech varies with respect to increases in women's rights and resources, and the data shows that the more rights and resources women have the less they go into technology. This would indicate that a matriarchy would have among the lowest rates of women in technology.
> Of really? Which ones? Because Hungary certainly isn't. You just proved yourself wrong and you're not addressing what the core of the argument of what I said.
I did indeed address this. In this comment [1] You had claimed that Eastern Europe has similar shares of women in STEM fields as India, and that this is due to cultural factors. I pointed out that Eastern Europe does not, in fact, have similar rates of women in tech as India - only Bulgaria, Romania and Georgia do. Eastern European countries with lower rates of women in tech as compared to India include: Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Moldova, Poland, Slovakia, and Croatia (if you consider it Eastern European).
Furthermore, your comment rested on the assumption that gender roles in Eastern European countries are monolithic. This is not the case. Hungary, as you pointed out has very low gender equality as does Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Slovenia, on the other hand, is the 5th highest on this list. Latvia, Estonia, Slovenia, Moldova, and Lithuania have the same or higher ratings for gender equality as the United States.
So to recap:
1. Eastern Europe does not similar rates of women in tech than India's 30%, most have lower rates of women in tech than the United States' 25%.
2. Eastern European countries are diverse and have varied degrees of gender equality, they are not a monolith so talking about gender roles in "eastern europe" rests on the false understanding that these countries have the same culture with respect to gender.
I pointed out that your argument with respect to Eastern Europe is contradicted by the data we have, and is based on the false notion that women in Eastern Europe have a similar experience with respect to gender equality. This seems like this thoroughly addresses your point, care to explain what you feel is missing?
> I'm ignoring the fact that you can't even keep your numbers straight within the same comment. It's not consistent at all, it's almost the entire range!
Can you please read the article before posting comments like this? Every country including outliers falls between 15% (Chile) and 41% (Algeria). That's 36%. That's barely over half of the range, let alone "almost the entire range".
> And given that close to 0% or 50% is unlikely to happen in any country, that's pretty much where you expect the probability distribution to land anyway. It says nothing.
Why? Why wouldn't we expect countries to be 60% women in tech, or 70%, or 80% women in technology? Why do you take it for granted that there won't be any countries with majority women in technology?
> Wait, what exactly is your allegation then, if not that?
You're the one that originally brought up Eastern Europe and India. You falsely claimed that Eastern Europe has similar rates of women in tech as India, and I pointed out that this is factually incorrect - most Eastern European countries have lower rates of women in technology than India.
> You're still not addressing the labour participation rates between women and men. You don't get it. You're suppressed to compare bergen women and men in the same country. Women's labour participation rate has less than nothing to do with Vietnam. You don't get it.
What do you mean by adjusting for women's labor participation rate. You say that I'm not doing this correctly, but you neglect to explain what you mean by this. If a country that has 100% female labor participation had 30% women in technology, and another country has 50% labor participation and 15% women in tech then the latter's rate of women in tech is actually the same if you account for labor participation rates.
If you insist that the better way is to compare the ratio of men to women in the labor force, here's that data [2]. It does not significantly alter the results. The United States has a ratio of 0.82 female to male. Norway has 0.885 - so its share of women in tech would actually go down even further if we adjust it to match the US. Viet Nam has 0.889.
There are some that do have significantly different participation rates. Chile has 0.657, so its share of women in tech would rise by ~20% from 15% to 18% if we made its labor participation ratio the same as the US. Qatar has 0.531 so its ~23% women in tech would rise to 35%. But notice that these adjustments move these countries closer towards the trend line. In other words, adjusting for the differences in labor participation rates makes the inverse relationship between gender equality and women's participation in STEM even stronger.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21786037
2. http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/labour-force-participation-ra...
We don't.
> Furthermore, your comment rested on the assumption that gender roles in Eastern European countries are monolithic.
Neither is India but I feel this is splitting hairs.
> I pointed out that your argument with respect to Eastern Europe is contradicted by the data we have, and is based on the false notion that women in Eastern Europe have a similar experience with respect to gender equality.
Ok... but that's true in India, the US... they are all varied cultures. You're just pointing holes in you argument really.
I always said women equality and women participation in STEM is pretty random.
Once again, you're really arguing against yourself. There is no correlation between women in STEM and women's rights.
> Why? Why wouldn't we expect countries to be 60% women in tech, or 70%, or 80% women in technology? Why do you take it for granted that there won't be any countries with majority women in technology?
Again. Because we don't have matriarchies. You really don't seem to grasp the concept. Please take a minute to think about it.
> You're the one that originally brought up Eastern Europe and India. You falsely claimed that Eastern Europe has similar rates of women in tech as India, and I pointed out that this is factually incorrect - most Eastern European countries have lower rates of women in technology than India.
Oh ok, I should clarify then. Some countries in Eastern Europe have similar rates as India. It does not change my argument one bit, except you win some semantic nonsense.
I can rephrase my argument from before with "some Eastern European countries" instead. Will that change your mind?
> What do you mean by adjusting for women's labor participation rate. You say that I'm not doing this correctly, but you neglect to explain what you mean by this. If a country that has 100% female labor participation had 30% women in technology, and another country has 50% labor participation and 15% women in tech then the latter's rate of women in tech is actually the same if you account for labor participation rates.
Than why are you comparing these countries with the US's women participation rate in the workforce?! What does the US have to do with this?
> The United States has a ratio of 0.82 female to male. Norway has 0.885 - so its share of women in tech would actually go down even further if we adjust it to match the US.
> Chile has 0.657, so its share of women in tech would rise by ~20% from 15% to 18% if we made its labor participation ratio the same as the US.
Can you stop comparing things to the US? What's wrong with you? You're supposed to compare with men's labour participation rates, in the same country.
I already told you this.
0.657 means only 65 of women work for every 100 men.
How are you not getting this?
Qatar has 0.531 so its ~23% women in tech would rise to 35%. But notice that these adjustments move these countries closer towards the trend line. In other words, adjusting for the differences in labor participation rates makes the inverse relationship between gender equality and women's participation in STEM even stronger.
This hinges on how you define a matriarchy. Spain, as I pointed out earlier, has a majority female national leadership. If it isn't a matriarchy, one could still argue that's closer to a matriarchy than a patriarchy.
You insist that we don't have any matriarchies, yet my request for you to explain how you're choosing to define matriarchy remains unfulfilled.
> Ok... but that's true in India, the US... they are all varied cultures. You're just pointing holes in you argument really. I always said women equality and women participation in STEM is pretty random. Once again, you're really arguing against yourself. There is no correlation between women in STEM and women's rights.
The correlation between gender equality (of which women's rights is a component) is the core thesis of the article posted by OP: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
> Again. Because we don't have matriarchies. You really don't seem to grasp the concept. Please take a minute to think about it.
And why would we think that a matriarchy would have over 50% women in technology? As countries move away from patriarchy and towards gender equality the percentage of tech worker that are women go down. Why would one conclude from this that a matriarchy would see a majority of women in technology?
> Oh ok, I should clarify then. Some countries in Eastern Europe have similar rates as India. It does not change my argument one bit, except you win some semantic nonsense. I can rephrase my argument from before with "some Eastern European countries" instead. Will that change your mind?
Sure, some Eastern European countries have similar rates as India. And most do not.
Regardless, rather than examining individual regions how about we look at the world as a whole: https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2018/02/S...
> Than why are you comparing these countries with the US's women participation rate in the workforce?! What does the US have to do with this?
You adjust for labor participation by selecting a baseline, and adjusting the other countries to match this baseline. Sure, I could have used any country for the baseline.
> Can you stop comparing things to the US? What's wrong with you? You're supposed to compare with men's labour participation rates, in the same country. I already told you this.
I am very confused as to what you're saying here. I am comparing women's labor participation rates with men's labor participation rates, in the same country. When I say that Chile has a female/male labor participation ratio of 0.657 it means 66 women work for every 100 men. By comparison the US has 82 women in the workforce for every 100 men.
So if Chile has 15% women in tech, and we want to know what this percentage would be if its female/male labor participation ratio was the same as the US we adjust for that: 15% * (.82 / .657) = 18.2%.
Why do you think that I'm not comparing women's labor participation rates with men? You do realize that the ratio of female to male labor participation is, fundamentally, comparing women and men's labor participation rates?
> 0.657 means only 65 of women work for every 100 men. How are you not getting this?
Again, what am I not getting?
Dictionary definition. There's no opinion about it.
> Spain, as I pointed out earlier, has a majority female national leadership.
Not what defined a matriarchy.
> If it isn't a matriarchy, one could still argue that's closer to a matriarchy than a patriarchy.
Not how it works. It's a gradient, yes. Spain being a matriarchy? No.
> You insist that we don't have any matriarchies, yet my request for you to explain how you're choosing to define matriarchy remains unfulfilled.
I gave several examples...
Like, have any modern countries denied men to vote before women? No.
> And why would we think that a matriarchy would have over 50% women in technology?
You. You f-ing asked that. You expected some countries to have over 50% representation, which is stupid since every country is patriarchal on some level.
We don't have matriarchies. I can't stress this enough.
You can't make claims on what we can't observe.
> As countries move away from patriarchy and towards gender equality the percentage of tech worker that are women go down.
You yourself told me of several countries where that's not true. How are you not getting this?!
> Why would one conclude from this that a matriarchy would see a majority of women in technology?
I don't, matriarchies don't exist.
> Sure, some Eastern European countries have similar rates as India. And most do not.
Population wise, they do.
>> Than why are you comparing these countries with the US's women participation rate in the workforce?! What does the US have to do with this?
> You adjust for labor participation by selecting a baseline, and adjusting the other countries to match this baseline. Sure, I could have used any country for the baseline.
No... My point was about how many women were in that country's workforce... Do you not get maths?
> I am very confused as to what you're saying here.
Yes, you clearly are.
> By comparison the US has 82 women in the workforce for every 100 men.
Nobody cares. It does not matter.
> Why do you think that I'm not comparing women's labor participation rates with men?
Because you're not? You keep bringing up the US for some reason.
> You do realize that the ratio of female to male labor participation is, fundamentally, comparing women and men's labor participation rates?
Yeah, I told you that. Yet, still, you bring up the US. Why, ffs, why?
> 0.657 means only 65 of women work for every 100 men. How are you not getting this?
I told you that, thanks.
There are a variety of dictionaries with different definitions. Some of them define it as a country where the majority of political rulers are women. As explained above, some countries can fit that definition.
> You. You f-ing asked that. You expected some countries to have over 50% representation, which is stupid since every country is patriarchal on some level. We don't have matriarchies. I can't stress this enough. You can't make claims on what we can't observe.
In a previous comment I wrote, "Why wouldn't we expect countries to be 60% women in tech, or 70%, or 80% women in technology? Why do you take it for granted that there won't be any countries with majority women in technology?" To which you responded, "Again. Because we don't have matriarchies. You really don't seem to grasp the concept. Please take a minute to think about it."
I asked why we wouldn't expect some countries to have majority women in tech and your response was that this was because there are no matriarchies. This definitely seems to indicate that you believe matriarchies would have majority women in tech. If not, then this response doesn't make sense.
If one does not suspect that matriarchies would have majority women in tech, then what does the absence of matriarchies justify your claim that it's unreasonable to expect any country to have over 50% women in technology?
I agree that such an expectation is unreasonable - but not because of the absence of any matriarchies. Quite the opposite, when look at the women's representation in technology patriarchal societies that are repressive towards women have the highest representation of women in tech and egalitarian countries have the least. The world, overall, is trending towards gender equality (though some regions are progressing considerably slower than others).
> > As countries move away from patriarchy and towards gender equality the percentage of tech worker that are women go down.
> You yourself told me of several countries where that's not true. How are you not getting this?!
I have re-read my comments and have not found any instance where I wrote such a thing. I believe I have been consistent in my two core claims: 1) The overall distribution of women's representation in technology is fairly narrow, occupying a total range of 15-41% and with 20-30% accounting for the majority of countries. 20-35% accounts for effectively all save for some outliers on either end. 2) What variation does exist shows that women's representation in technology is inversely associated with gender equality. The more equal countries are, the lower the representation of women in technology on average.
Your rest of your comments about my failure to compare men's labor participation and women's labor participation seem to reveal fundamental misunderstandings of what a ratio is.
A female/male ratio of X means that for every man there are X women in the workforce. So when I say that the US has a female to male labor participation ratio of 0.82 it means that there are .82 women in the workforce for every man. Or 82 women for every 100 men. Comparing ratios is comparing the women's labor participation rates to men's labor participation rates. Let me use a an example to put this in practice:
If one country has a female/male labor participation ratio of 0.75 and has 30% tech workers that are women, and another country has a female/male labor participation ratio of 0.5 and 20% of its tech workers are women then one could argue that these countries actually have the same rate of women going into tech. Although women's share in the latter is smaller, the labor participation rate is lower. If we used the former as the baseline, and adjusted the latter's female/male labor participation ratio to match it then the latter country would see it's representation of women in tech go up by 50%, rising from 20% to 30%.
You seem to be fixated on the choice of the US as the baseline. But the choice of baseline does not matter. I could have gone about it in the opposite direction in the above example. I could have taken the first country with a female/male labor participation ratio of 0.75 and adjusted it down to have a female/male labor ratio of 0.5 and its female representation in tech would have dropped to 20%. The conclusion is the same: when adjusted for female/male labor participation the two countries have identical rates of women in tech. So the fact that you're pointing towards choice of the US as the baseline and erroneously saying that I'm not comparing men's and women's labor participation rates reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how this normalization works.
I am indeed comparing the men and women's labor participation rates. To say otherwise is factually incorrect.
> You're supposed to compare between women and men in the same country. Women's labour participation rate in the US has less than nothing to do with Vietnam.
> In practice, the kind of differences in performance and achievement that would be explained by [discrimination] are immediately blamed on [psychological and physiological differences between men and women]. There is an implicit assumption that men and women are [inherently different], which leads to the conflation of equality of opportunity with [disparity of outcome], exaggerating the effects of [inherent differences] and leading to poor allocation of resources in an attempt to correct a "problem" without consideration for part of all of the actual cause.
1.Brain scans showing differences in structure and/or function, used to identify transgenderism
2. Physical sexual dimorphism, which through a lifetime of social interaction can lead to different average behaviors (like growing up being stronger/weaker than 50% of the population)
3. Different concentrations of and responses to behavior altering hormones (testosterone/estrogen in particular)
4. Millions of years of evolutionary specialization through sexual dimorphism
5. Consistent differences in performance on various psychological aptitude tests (e.g. men and women have different average scores in spatial reasoning tests)
This is only a partial list, and I won't put the effort into citing any of this but it's all a Google search away, if you're willing to accept the unpopular but, IMO, glaringly obvious opinion and actually look for it. Of course there is also a well established bias in academia and the subject is sort of off limits, except in the case of transgender studies.
At the very least one shouldn't be so quick to immediately scream discrimination when there are so many alternative explanations rooted in genetics.
People are really smart and they optimise for their own survival. Essentially - decent wage -> better options for partner -> better standard of living. In some countries, like Norway, a teacher makes a decent wage. Not as much as a software engineer, but good enough to support a pretty good lifestyle.
Where in some countries, like India, a stem graduate makes a LOT more money than a teacher. I made more money in my third year as a software engineer, than my father who worked in public sector as a civil engineer with 25+ years of experience. Comparison with non technical workers with stem fields is really lop sided when it comes to earning potential. Plus if you are possibly the first generation which can break out of poverty cycle for your entire family, then that adds another layer of pressure to choose certain fields. Hence men or women tend to choose these fields.
As wealth creation in some of these countries reaches to a point where non stem fields receive similar earning potential, already happening in India, we will see lower number of women opting for these fields as well.
We would really like to find a non economic reason for some of these disparities, like patriarchy, gender discrimination and so on, but it is probably mostly economic.
Why does it affect men disproportionately less?
I don't even know if we like to find a non-economic reason or if most people simply don't know economics well enough to reason through 2nd and 3rd order economic consequences. Since they can't reason through it they choose simple explanations despite it being wrong. This is the same reason why people used to believe that deities controlled things like the weather and their fortune in life.
The "patriarchy" gets basically the same faith-based treatment as Zeus/Jupiter.
Not even for a minute suggesting that women should not be allowed to work in dangerous environments. Having said that no one wants to subject themselves to dangerous work and it is perhaps slightly easier for women to avoid that.
While not specifically about time, the difference principle in Rawl's Original Position is also relevant. Under that principle, inequality is permissible if it can lead to the worst off being better off than they would if there were equality. This principles presupposes that time is considered when trying to maximize well being for the worst off. If you want to maximize the well being of the worst off in the present, you implement equality right now, but that may be worse for the worst off in the future.
"More Americans died in making stuff for the WW1 than in the actual war, as the conditions of factory work was brutal."
I'm doubtful that this is true for many other countries involved in that war.
The US basically wasn't a major combatant in that war, so it's not a representative country to use as an example. I'm sure it does show that factory conditions were brutal, but it falsely implies that they were more brutal than combat conditions.
I used to live in Russia in my teenage years and went to school there until grade 9. One thing that I remember being distinctly different from public education in the US is that the course selection was provided by the school each year and students had no say in this process. The benefit of this is being exposed to subjects that you thought you wouldn't like, but ended up gravitating towards after completing the course work. Not saying that Algeria uses similar technique in their public education, but I always wondered how much being able to select your class schedule keeps students away from discovering their potential in areas where they didn't know they could excel.
I grew up in the US and that was my experience as well. There were no "optional" classes until high school, but even then only one or two of my classes were my own choice.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2017/11/the-stem-paradox-wh...
The conclusion there was parental authoritarianism (especially dads) was a primary cause. My own family is part Muslim so I have direct experience. Every child must be an engineer or doctor. As the Atlantic article notes, women in the West have more freedom to NOT choose STEM.
Moreover, there are two countries with approximately the same gender inequality but many fewer women in STEM, namely Qatar and Korea.
It seems to me that reducing this to "the more gender equality, the fewer women in tech" is a stretch! You could have just as easily written a headline to the effect of, "Turkey and three northern African countries have a higher percentage of women in STEM than almost anywhere in the world, including places that have the same gender (in)equality, like Qatar and S. Korea. Why is that?"
Their hypothesis doesn't predict a straight line.
Rather, they're saying that free women don't tend to choose STEM as often as men in the same society choose STEM. If they're correct, then we should expect a lack of data points in the top-right quadrant, above those 4 you pointed out, as such points would represent free societies in which women do pick STEM.
For there to be a straight line, we'd have to further assume that oppressive societies always force women into STEM, which doesn't follow. For example, early-1900's America didn't grant women freedom, but it didn't force them into STEM, either.
Wait, so they're comparing computer science with all of STEM? That might obfuscate the picture. It should be STEM:STEM.
Edit: Perhaps I am not being clear but computer science is a subset of STEM, so even within the US, the number of people going into STEM > Computer Science. Comparing STEM in country X with CS in country Y seems like the wrong comparison.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hope-relationships/2...
Males and females are biologically different. That is like 2nd grade stuff.
Simply giving people all the opportunity in the world will not guarantee that they will take up that opportunity. Just because you offer someone a carrot does not mean that that person will bite.
But noting the date of the article, would this article be published now that Mrs Jobs is at the helm? Perhaps not...
I've stopped asking people not to make such accusations without any evidence. But could you at least check if the most basic facts do not contradict them?
They do?
Really?
When STEM is your only shot at a comfortable life - you go STEM if you can, even if you don't want to. When it's not - you pursue your interests instead.
Based on that, if those countries were moved up I would say the trend will be even stronger.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411227
It'd be interesting to see this studied.
I realize that it's difficult to write a headline that is both scientifically precise and short, but the point remains.
It also seems odd the amount of information they glance over to create their narrative.
In the article, there's a video that mentions a ton of facts.
Among the facts: Women make up 18% of CS engineers. 1:4 computing jobs are held by women. I'm no math genius, but this actually seems to dispel the myth of women just aren't hired in tech. I mean, if they are 18% of CS engineering graduates, you'd expect them to hold slightly < 1:5 computing jobs, not 1:4.
Perhaps women in general are less interested than men in problems that require long stretches of “cold” and abstract reasoning, including building back-end software, and prefer activities that involve more human interaction or more frequent decisions involving “warmer” human elements such as aesthetics, human perception, relationship building, understanding everyday needs etc.
Also, perhaps women prefer more of a work-life balance, and not stretching themselves too thin when working on abstractions?
Maybe we should not be asking why there are so few women doing it but why there are so many men doing it.
Almost nobody who studied physics ends up doing physics.
Both men and women will do unfulfilling jobs if they need the money, but when it comes to investing into a career, women will more often choose one that leads to interesting and fulfilling jobs, while men tend to select for "return on investment". Men are much more likely than women to invest into an career that only has unfulfilling but well-paying job prospects.
I view this is a defect in men, not a sign of oppression. Men are the victim of reactionary gender stereotypes and think they have to study something that will lead to them being able to provide for a family.
Look at, for example, container ship crew or workers on an oil platform. Clearly both genders can do those jobs, but almost only men will actually do it. Oil workers are getting paid exceptionally well. Not sure about container ship crews, maybe that was not a great example.
It's not a paradox!!
That people refer to it as a 'paradox' only confirms their very entrenched, possibly ideological view of reality, to the point wherein 'real life data' that calls into question that view ... is considered 'strange'.
It's not a paradox, it's just reality, probably easily explained (in very crude terms) by the fact that men and women are different, ergo, different outcomes. 'Gender' is a very powerful construct with underlying physical aspects, and it's just a part of who we are.
So we can try to make sure everyone has a real chance (taking into account systematic issues i.e. it's really hard for the 'lone minority' in a group etc.), but going too far beyond that might be hard.
exactly
and the same topic was discussed here in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407678
Women aren't inherently better than men (obligatory "and viceversa") so if both are about as good in one area but one group is (only seemingly) better at another area, there clearly is an issue that needs addressing.
While I would agree that that is true, axiomatically, when discussing moral worth and human dignity (whether speaking in terms of gender identity or biological sex), it's very clearly not true when talking about, well, a whole lot of capacities with physiological components when speaking of either averages or distributions between the biological sexes. I mean, this is fairly obvious with biological capacities closely related to sex and reproduction (I don't think anyone is going to argue against the idea that biological females are inherently advantaged when it comes to childbearing), but strucural and hormonal (among other) sex differences have far wider impacts. Testosterone levels alone, which are clearly linked to though not strictly determined by biological sex, have fairly wide ranging impacts on physical capacities and psychology/behavior.
In this case, I meant reading; I don't think there's anything in our biology that would necessarily make one group better than the other at reading.
First off: this is one study. No matter where you fall on gender politics, I wouldn't hang anything too seriously on a single paper. Obviously gender discrimination has been a historical cause of the gender STEM gap; so are we saying that we've solved that particular problem? Is there still room to improve? How much room? To me it seems naive to assume the first one without lots of evidence, and this paper is not that.
Second: the regression shown in the article doesn't seem great. For one thing: there's a small cluster of countries with pretty high X values, and pretty low Y values which suggests that they have relatively high leverage over the results and should probably be excluded. If you cover up UAE, Tunisia, Algeria, and Turkey does the regression line make any sense at all? To me it seems way too steep, ie. leverage. (Maybe the authors talk about this in the paper, I can't get behind the paywall). Also my priors would be that there are a number of country- and regional-level effects at work for an issue like this. It would be way more informative if the authors were to perform subgroup regressions by region of the world, cultural factors, ecnomic factors, etc. It's very possible, for example, that these two variables have an opposite correlation within region, education system, etc, but appear to have a negative correlation on aggregate. Simpson's Paradox is real and can cut many ways.
Third: choice of metric. Per the article """In this study, the percentage of girls who did excel in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with STEM degrees. That means there’s something in even the most liberal societies that’s nudging women away from math and science, even when those are their best subjects""" This could be caused by a lot of things, but this suggests to me that the "Global Gender Gap" metric may not be giving us the whole picture. I think it's real hasty to draw basically any conclusions about eg. the US STEM culture based on this study. When the results suggest a paradox like this, I think it calls for looking at a variety of metrics to see if the same results are borne out repeatedly.
tl;dr there's a lot of research on the gender STEM gap, and a lot of people shooting from the hip in these comments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xjvzH24Mwo
Yet people are shocked to learn this because this data/facts aren't liked by politicians and even some scientists so it doesn't get discussed. Not sure why. There's nothing wrong with having different preferences. But some people like to pretend everyone is more or less exactly the same and want to do the same things and the only reason to differ would be societal influence.
Besides, nobody denies the existence of biological differences. It's pretty obvious that women tend to have breasts and men tend not to. What's being criticised is:
- Misinterpreting culturally-enforced differences as biological and therefore fixed. Hair length, for example, could be misinterpreted as a difference between the sexes if any aliens did a quantitative study without ever noticing the barbers. Job choices could very well be similar, except the process how they are culturally reinforced are less obvious.
- Making decisions affecting individuals based on group differences (biological, culturally, or imagined): Even if women are 2% at picking stocks, using that information only to hire Alice and not Bob will lead to the wrong decision in 45% of cases because the differences between individuals swamp the group averages.
From the study the article is quoting: > in nearly all countries, more girls appeared capable of college-level STEM study than had enrolled. Paradoxically, the sex differences in the magnitude of relative academic strengths and pursuit of STEM degrees rose with increases in national gender equality
This is only paradoxical if you're presuming men and women are NOT attracted to different things. Experiments with little kids before they can even process coherent though, and across cultures, have produced quite conclusive statistical evidence that there's innate gender differences (preferences of color, of soft vs spinney/mechanical things, etc) that don't fit the 'evil men suppressing women through artificial social constraints' narrative.
No, there's no beer, no cigarettes, no posters with elves in g-strings, that sort of thing. It's almost as if girls and young women weren't really interested in that. The few that do occasionally show up gravitate towards LARPs, pen&paper RPG games, and RPG-ish board games like Arkham Horror. If anything, I think those activities are more associated with toxic and sexist behavior and subtexts. I mean those are the people that spend lots of time in the same company, often in pubs or cellars, as opposed to board games where there are always people coming and going.
I don't know why, but very few young women come to us to play heavier or more competitive board games and we have several games going at any given time. And because board game renaissance is pretty recent in my country, there's absolutely no possibility it's traditionally male.
I'm for equal opportunities, but I think differences between sexes are not limited to physical. It's hard to pinpoint the tendencies, but they seem to be there. I mean look at smaller guys - they often have confidence issues and the ones I know are gym rats. They are also more afraid to go out after dark. Would it be crazy to think that people who evolved having about 20% less muscle mass also got some related mental differences?
The same thing applies in reverse when you're with your mates at a pub. You want to go over and talk to a girl, but she's surrounded by her army of friends who are forming a social barricade that is intimidating to enter.
Those girls don't want to leave their comfortable social circle and risk entering this unknown board game world either. Here are a bunch of guys who all "know" this game and she has to enter into it not just from a social disadvantage, but also a gaming skill disadvantage. That's a tough ask for anyone, male or female. People do not like to enter social situations where they feel isolated.
Even if you were all a bunch of ripped, attractive, friendly, well dressed, wealthy, and obviously social gents, you'd still probably find women don't waltz right up to you and your friends playing a game of Scythe or some other complex strategy game.
If you want people to join your game, you have to go out of your way to make the game environment approachable to other people.
This means playing simpler games, inviting people over, and including other fun things to ease them into it. This means networking outside of just going to a board game cafe and hoping a girl will come through the door. You have to go out and find those wonderful people yourself.
NOTE: this can be really hard, cause the same way you and your friends are hiding out in this board game cafe, so are all those other like-minded individuals. They're also hiding away in basements, back alley cafes, etc, playing board games.
Remember, the reason you're into this hobby is because you've been a gaming fan for years. If we take away all your prior knowledge of games, you too would be anxious to jump right into the thick of it.
I also believe in gender segregated schools(after HS and at university level). I am not advocating gender segregation but just gender segregated education.
This is only a BS theory of mine..and so I am trying to work it into my hobby fiction writing. Please allow me to test it here for opinions.
I think that in formative years, children should not be gender segregated, but when rubber hits the road at specialized and advanced education, it’s better if there is gender segregation because there is so much competition and rivalary between genders when both are at peak reproductive phase.
I tend to be on the biology trumps/mind rules body/nature vs nurture side of the camp. I believe that there will be equality between the genders and less conflict if they don’t compete with each other in the same space. This might bring out the innate strengths and better intellectual capabilities of both genders because fundamentally they clash and neutralization absorbs the explosion of what good might come out of great human potential.
This is not just in an intellectual setting. Last week I had a voice quivering, temple throbbing, blue vein screaming episode at a guy I hired to do some work. I just lost it.
It’s a constant battle of wits dealing with men that it’s exhausting. It’s even worse than in an office environment because men think the tasks that involve physical prowess is their domain. They simply will NOT take orders from a woman. And it’s exhausting trying to make every instruction sound like a ‘suggestion’. I am running out of time and honestly the man was just using brute strength to achieve what physics could do...
And for every grudging acceptance of my way of doing things, I had to endure dumbass flirting. I just couldn’t stand it anymore. And then after every attempt to puff his chest, I have to listen to him talk about his wife because now he feels guilty for flirting. And it’s stuff I don’t need to hear.
And this is a person I am PAYING to work FOR me. I can’t even wrap my head around it. I had spent another part of my life in office environments and it was just the same. It’s better farming because it’s easier to cut off people if I have the right machine for the job.
I think there ought to be a jobs boards and work spaces for JUST WOMEN. It was the same during my years of education. I went to a co-Ed school and I loved it. My college education was at a nun run women’s only college. And I LOVED it.
And what you prefer is the correct choice for everyone ...
What do you feel about what I said? TIA.
How is that not a statement on what you believe to be correct for everyone?
It’s right at the beginning of my comment. Do you want to read it again?
"some people say", "so I heard" then spews off things to argue a point and convince you. Then there is an easy escape, I "just heard that"
same way, no one writes so many lines of arguments, in such detail, then say, oh it is all BS
I don't think single sex environments harm future gender relations either. If anything, they make it better. Both genders need friends of the same gender uncomplicated by romantic feelings. Furthermore, from my own experience, the boys at my high school, and the girls at our sister school, found no trouble getting married, having kids, etc.
Speaking of our sister school, the women they produced were independent minded, competent, competitive, and had leadership experience. Without the need to compete with boys, the girls developed their own leadership and competitive structures that they excelled at.
I think there are several arenas where girls and women benefit when men are excluded; secondary education isn't the only one. A few others to mention:
- Sports and physical competition. Excluding men enables women to compete on their own plane, set world records, etc.
- Restrooms, locker rooms, and the like. Excluding men protects women from unwanted advances, privacy invasions, etc. I know this isn't a popular opinion, but the primary benefit of segregated restrooms is that women do not have to be afraid to go to the bathroom. Besides sanitation, this is one of the greatest benefits to society of having restrooms in the first place. (In areas with no restrooms, such as rural India, women often have to risk being molested when trying to relieve themselves.)
Another unpopular opinion: desegregation efforts in the above areas (including those motivated by wanting to achieve "gender equality" or allow transgender women into areas designated for women only) will result in harm to women.
Though it's worth noting that mass-transit in Japan is frequently packed so tight that if you don't have your hands up, you're literally touching someone else anyway. Not hard to see how that amplifies the molestation problem significantly in Japan even if other countries (presumably) have the same % of men with a propensity towards such actions.
I agree that all of your explanations fall well on my metaphorical ears. They seem right, and I can nod along while I read them.
But I can't help but have a nagging suspicion that you'd get extremely similar results if you just tossed a random sample of kids into a school after filtering for household income > $XXX,XXX/yr.
I'd also argue that even if you compared gender segregated schools vs a mixed-gender private school of the same price, you'd still be left with a confounding variable of "whose parents clearly valued education enough that they either specifically picked, or tolerated (depending on their views on this matter) a gender segregated school.
Remember that parental involvement is a very powerful predictor of academic success (though I'll admit I don't know if it trumps the predictive power of just socioeconomic class).
How I see it is that the burden is on people who choose to bring children into this world. It’s an important decision. It is the basis of our evolution. The answer to the question re whether my progeny or kin can compete for the same limited resources. Economically lower classes of the population need cohesive and supportive communities that will act as the village..as it were..to collectively raise children. It is the strengthening secret sauce. Community and community support is everything here.
And of course..that’s wildly variable. There is no way to come up with standardized solutions. However, if we look at it as a resource issue..of resource allocation and resource density rather than a species encompassing human collective issue, we can find solutions for all.
It’s difficult to see this as a resource issue rather than a people issue, but smaller tight knit communities with minimal socio economic deltas work better than trying to homogenize large populations inefficiently.
I went to an all boys school with mostly working class boys of color (54% hispanic, 26% white, 13% asian, 6% black -- 75% non-white students ) next to Compton, though, so while I do agree that private schooling is associated with higher socioeconomic class, that was not my experience, and all I gave was my experience.
That's quite literally what you're arguing for. Doesn't "jobs board and work spaces for JUST WOMEN" sound familiar to you? You're advocating for bringing us back the 1960s, and worse, the argument you're using is eerily close to "separate but equal." The format of that and "separate water fountains" is identical.
It’s a constant battle of wits dealing with men that it’s exhausting. It’s even worse than in an office environment because men think the tasks that involve physical prowess is their domain. They simply will NOT take orders from a woman. And it’s exhausting trying to make every instruction sound like a ‘suggestion’. I am running out of time and honestly the man was just using brute strength to achieve what physics could do...
And for every grudging acceptance of my way of doing things, I had to endure dumbass flirting. I just couldn’t stand it anymore. And then after every attempt to puff his chest, I have to listen to him talk about his wife because now he feels guilty for flirting. And it’s stuff I don’t need to hear.
Why not fire him?
Granted, given the obnoxious use of caps lock and lack of critical thinking skills, you probably run a small business. If so, you should be aware that companies are legally allowed to segregate for any reason under a certain level of employees.
https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/smallbusiness/requirements.cf...
If you post in the flamewar style to HN like this we will ban you.
If you attack another user personally like this we will ban you.
You're extremely familiar with HN. Don't do this again.
Men are a distraction while trying to focus on work/studies. And they are constantly vying for attention too and it’s flattering.
From my perspective as female, it took a lot of my mental space and time to engage male attention. First we take a lot more time to groom ourselves. Physical attractiveness is time consuming for women(just trust me on this) and there is also competition amongst women ..but in a different way than how men compete with each other.
At the risk of generalizing, I would say that women/girls are more mental/emotional than men..these emotional space shares the same mental bandwidth as the focus and concentration required to do work at hand.
Again..I am generalizing and I want to say that this is my opinion only.. women need to learn how to compartmentalise their mental spaces. I would likely have several mental ‘rooms’...one for work..one for family..one for fun..one for men(or more depending on how many men catch my interest etc). The key is to manage traffic of thoughts and bandwidth to each of these rooms.
I won’t pretend to know how men think. (But would like to know more!), but my gut instinct suggests to me that men have different thought processes and mental modes than women.
I guess the traditional thinking is that we want to have different thought processes and mental modes all working and collaborating together as much as possible. Wouldn't it be limiting to a lot of people to cut off interaction just because of their sex? Is there really a certain way that only men think and a different certain way that only women think?
I'm trying to think of my own work environment where I, as a man, am actually in the minority on my team. I just can't think of a project where I think that gender or sex made any difference to anything. Maybe since we're programmers and not dealing with lifting heavy things it's different? We also have a good mix in the leaders. I've had both female and male project managers, tech leads, team members, etc. I've seen all kinds of mixes of personalities between the genders too. I guess, only in my experience, I can't find a time where I feel a team of only men or only women would have done something better.
There is no coming back from a politically incorrect comment after it’s out in the open. Gender segregation at high school/college was my original position..not at work necessarily. Altho that would be suitable for some group dynamics. This is just one such position.
I feel like somewhere along this thread it morphed from gender segregated educational environment(the original post was about STEM and gender) to work. I probably am partly responsible for that with my subsequent comments. Altho..I will read your comment again in leisure, consider my response and get back to you as soon as possible. Regards.
This would be a regression to the dark ages of grouping and separating people based on biological identity, not a good idea and honestly not helpful.
There is zero evidence that shows these ideas actually make students or working environments healthier and more productive.
I don’t know how non binary people would feel about this and would like to hear more from them.
Okay so here's the thing. Even with my typically-European limited view into the salaries of others at my work places, from what I've observed and from the statistics I have consulted the actual "pay scale disparities" between genders are tiny / non-existent if you compare the same jobs. There is a major difference in gender-split GDP (~15-25 % depending on the country), but that is mostly down to women and men having different distributions of jobs, and not down to women getting paid less for the same work. Whether, globally speaking, different job distributions are a major issue, is an open debate.
That it reeks of biological essentialism and is exclusionary by its nature.
The problem is that society holds men and women to a different standard: women are expected to be in control of their emotions / self and men are not. If a woman's emotions come out (screaming or whatever) then she's unhinged, irrational. If a man does it, he's just blowing off steam or asserting himself. Men are not often held accountable for taking their emotions out on people, be they anxiety, depression or insecurity -- so it's not a skill that most men have a chance to develop. This is about societal attitudes held by both men and women, not anything that men have done wrong.
In reality, there are men who can control their emotions and not inflict them on others. It takes the right personality, a nurturing upbringing or lots of therapy, but they exist. It took me a lot of work to learn how to control my emotions to a degree that was considered appropriate for a woman -- even though my behavior hadn't changed. I'm still working on it. But I'm a better person for it regardless of gender, and I think everyone should be held to a high standard on owning their feelings and not inflicting them on those around us.
> Men are not often held accountable for taking their emotions out on people, be they anxiety, depression or insecurity
I think a more accurate framing is that women are not allowed to be angry or aggressive, and men are not allowed to be sad or vulnerable. In public, at least. Consider how much more tolerable, and therefore common, it is for a woman to cry in public than a man.
So when men feel anxiety, depression, or insecurity, they express it in the socially acceptable way for men: anger and irritability. Presumably women feel angry a lot more frequently than they show, and have to find other ways to channel it. However, the latter is changing, because it is becoming much more acceptable for women to be angry and aggressive than it used to be.
I feel like creative pursuits tend be more collaborative and thrives better when there is more inter personal energy. Study(for me at least) is solitary. Artists and creative people flourish when there is a lot of back and forth of energies and they birth something from those interactions.
Within my circle of friends and acquaintances, I find that Uber-STEM thinking people are either asexual and/or autistic.(is there a correlation there? I don’t know..I haven’t looked into any studies about that) In my mind, I visualize both characteristics as though it is the blunt end of the emotional/social quotient. Obviously there are many who are in the middle and balanced, as it were..I am just picking on the ones see-sawing on both spectrums.
To clarify: I am not saying that education must be segregated. I am just saying that spaces...personal spaces must be segregated. I am suggesting this because how/what women consider ‘personal space’ is different from how/what men consider ‘personal space’.
Speaking for myself..I can focus and concentrated better when my personal space is my domain..physical space as well as emotional/mental domain. I draw concentric circles around me and assign people there so they won’t cross the threshold of their boundaries. I have noticed that if they cross the assigned boundaries, my sense of everything becomes confusing and I am befuddled. There is tremendous loss of mental energy and time to rearrange everything back to where it belongs for optimal functioning.
I'm mostly just trying to understand how this is applicable within my circle of friends.
I also think gender segregation should be an option. It is not a clear line demarcating the genders and separating them at the work place. Many men and women work well together in the same work place. My original comments were towards higher education in high school and college to remove the distraction of genders competition with different core strengths towards the same goal/standard.
I am listening = I am not contradicting you.
That each gender has its own set of pathologies is exactly my point. When they don’t complement each other, why not create an environment where each of us can be our best?
(Others have brought to non binary individuals but I have to confess that I can’t make assumptions about their dynamics.)
Sometimes I feel the same way with problem solving as I do when I am attracted to a person. It makes me wonder if competition and inter personal romantic chemistry are related wrt how our brain perceives it.
And there is limited/fixed mental bandwidth that we can only focus on one at a time? Just wool gathering..off the top of my head. What do you think?
Female managers I know and under who I worked don't seem to face these problems. Did you consider the possibility, that the problems you face aren't caused by your gender but rather by your skills as a manager?
I also don't think that the sort of screaming you described is ever an appropriate activity in which any manager should engage. If you don't like the work he's doing, fire him; a "a voice quivering, temple throbbing, blue vein screaming episode" is never appropriate.
To clarify: this wasn’t an office environment. This person was a tradesman and we were working alone with a lot of heavy tools around.
It’s an example of how I don’t have this added aggression and hassle if I worked with an all female team. Things just get done quicker if I work in all women team. It’s like we have a hive mind.
I've heard some folks have difficulty working with one gender in particular, usually due to personality conflicts of some sort.
What is important is that 1. Work gets done. 2. We extract maximum efficiency for maximum reward 3. Minimize conflict and increase productivity + work satisfaction.
If this can be achieved with gender segregation at work/school, then why fight it in the name of gender equality.
Saudi culture is sort of orthogonal to American culture, but it was an interesting comment.
That's probably the right general idea, but I think you have the time frame wrong. Separate classes starting around 5th grade (10 years old), joining back after high school.
I base this on brain development stages. After several years of childhood, your brain starts reorganizing itself. It prunes a bunch of connections, and strengthens others. This processes takes several years. It generally starts earlier in girls, around 10 or 11 years old, and later, around 15, in boys.
So starting around age 10 or 11, we have boys and girls of the same age at significantly different stages of brain development, which I suspect means that teaching methods that are best for the boys aren't best for the girls, and vice versa. Hence, separate classes would be better.
Once it starts in boys, the initial changes are more rapid than they were in the girls, so boys do catch up although in some areas it does take a long time. So probably no need to separate classes by gender at college or beyond.
There are absolutely toxic, hermetic, unpleasant environments. But we should at least permit considering the idea that people of different sexes have different abilities. I get sexist comments all the time (men can't distinguish colors, men can't multitask) and there are no white knights riding to my rescue.
Essentially my exact words don't mean that this is also your bug, but there is an (un)intended implication that you're a crappy developer. You're probably gonna latch on to that at the speed of light rather than giving a Data like logical response. That's the problem with bringing up such alternatives.
It alludes that women or minority will right away fall back to their gender or whatever when convenient. It also alludes that they don't know the weight of one such allegation, they aren't thinking about the effect it is going to have on their future employment opportunities (It so happens this kind of allegations true or not seriously affect your career, everyone starts to tiptoe around you at the least in your new job) - essentially attributes a lack of integrity and foresight.
IOW - I do agree that there is a very interesting question around what do we do about incompetent employees who happen to be a minority. I also know this line of responses are probably not going to be productive :)
But regardless of the cause, if there is an inverse correlation then pursuing gender parity in STEM is at best a huge waste of effort and at worst counterproductive for all parties involved.
The graph in the article doesn't look too far removed from a cloud though, so I question the strength of the correlation.