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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

> Many women I meet today simply did not consider the possibility of an engineering career

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?

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Well it's certainly an open question, although here's something that's just struck me. Careers that were dominated by women were in the orbit of doctors and lawyers, those being nurses, paralegals and secretaries. If you're thinking about being a nurse, why not consider being a doctor? I'm not sure STEM professions had these associated careers.

Media representation? Female lawyers and female doctors are fairly common in media. Female engineers, not so much, and definitely not in a context where the women are not deviating from social norms (you need to be a tomboy, you need to be geeky, you need to be "not like those other girls" etc.)

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.

> Female lawyers and female doctors are fairly common in media.

Now, yes, but what about in the 60's and 70's?

How many engineers are represented in the media in general? Has there been a hit TV show with male engineers as the main character?

How big a hit? Halt and Catch Fire fictionalized a lot but two of the four leads were software and hardware engineers, The Expanse has the primary hardware/software hacker on the ship as one of the four main characters but it's a woman, Person of Interest had two of the four main characters be software programmers, one a man and one a woman, Mr Robot has software developers for most roles besides gangster and law enforcement, one of the four or five primary characters on 12 Monkeys was a scientist/engineer but a woman, Westworld has the scientist as the main human character for the first season and a different one for the second, most of what they do looks like software programming, Chernobyl showed a lot of engineers in the nuclear control room, trying to fix things afterwards.

There's also McGyver, Neo & Trinity, Rey also doesn't seem to have her thumb in the middle of her hand, David Lightman, Tony Stark--in fact, Marvel is chock full of male engineering types; Beast, Hulk, Reed Richards, Peter Parker.

The examples are legion.

You can add in Fast and Furious 6+ (lol)

There are plenty of female lawyers and doctors who aren't main characters in television shows, and where being a lawyer or doctor is not a defining characteristic of how feminine they are.

The same cannot be said for the legion "quirky female hacker" characters that exist in many TV shows.

Big bang theory, for example, has mostly male nerds. The core Silicon Valley engineering team is male. There are of course exceptions but male and female engineers are not represented equally in media.

Big Bang Theory first season maybe. Ultimately they were almost parity.

But what should they represent? The real world, some fictional idealistic world? If so, whose idealistic world should tv shows represent?

Depending on exactly what you mean, mythbusters or Mr. Robot count.

>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.

STEM hasn't made serious efforts to counter sexism? That starkly contrasts with my observations. For the entirety of my life (I'm over 25) that I can remember I've encountered programs and initiatives working towards getting women into STEM. All of the companies I've worked at instituted hiring policies that favor women (e.g. giving women 2 chances to pass a technical phone screen instead of one). And we're not alone in this. Microsoft and Intel have both instituted policies of witholding bonuses unless diversity quotas are met, and Facebook gives recruiters more points - which count towards performance reviews - for recruiting diverse candidates[1].

1. https://www.payscale.com/compensation-today/2019/03/tie-bonu...

> For the entirety of my life (I'm over 25)

Mine, too, and I'm over 45.

These kinds of top-down initiatives are well and good, but the real problem is cultural. You only have to read this discussion to see why women don't want to work in STEM.

Elaborate. What are the "serious efforts" made by medical and law industries that got women into these professions that STEM has not employed?

Furthermore, do you care to identify what in this discussion makes it so clear why women would not go into STEM?

> What are the "serious efforts" made by medical and law industries that got women into these professions that STEM has not employed?

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.

Medicine and Law have made serious efforts to counter sexism? Like what?

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.

Woman lawyer from Wall Street here. That’s about as “Old Boys Club” as it gets. When I left law to pursue tech I figured it couldn’t possibly be as bad as what I was leaving behind. I was so wrong. Silicon Valley is infinitely more difficult to navigate and less welcoming.

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.

Would you care to give some examples, what behaviour is so unwelcoming in the tech world?

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.

Given the rampant discrimination against men that exists in the modern tech sector and that even stating "maybe women naturally prefer to do other jobs than tech" gets you fired, what exactly do you have in mind that would make it even more welcoming?

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. Your comment here broke several of the site guidelines. Would you please review them and stick to the rules when posting here?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Are you... insisting that tech is welcoming to women?

Hm. I guess it was all in my head.

What it means to be "welcoming" is rather subjective. But there has been widespread adoption of discriminatory policies designed to make women get offers more frequently than men as I have shared in a previous comment [1]. I think this is what was being referred to when the above commenter talked about companies being more welcoming to women.

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.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21776455

Perhaps the ironic, unintended result that you describe is part of the reason for her experience?

I'm not saying that law and medicine are perfect. But they were once just as stereotypically male as tech is now, and yet have radically shifted their gender balance. Fifty years ago people would no doubt have told you that women just weren't interested in becoming lawyers or doctors. Now a majority of attorneys in the US are women, and more women are enrolling in medical school than men.

> But they were once just as stereotypically male as tech is now, and yet have radically shifted their gender balance.

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.

I think you are reading a lot into my comment that isn't there. I don't know exactly why women fifty years ago made the decisions that they did. You don't, either.

You're being vague and deflecting here. In one comment you suggest that the cause is law and medicine being relatively less sexist, and here you just say, "well, we don't know why they did what they did." Well, which is it? What basis do you have for your earlier point?

> 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.

>. In one comment you suggest that the cause is law and medicine being relatively less sexist

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.

So you're suggesting the lawyers and doctors in charge back in the 60's and 70's were more progressive and less sexist than engineers in 2019? Really? That's what you're going with?

No? Where do I say that?

TulliusCicero is saying that the 60s and 70s were the period when women entered those fields en masse. Hence you should compare the state of those fields in the 60s/70s to the CS field now if you wanna determine sexism as the cause of entering/not-entering a given field.

It's implied by saying that those other fields made serious efforts to combat sexism back then, but CS hasn't made an equivalent effort now. What other reason would there be for such a discrepancy, other than being motivated by sexism?

You've made this point elsewhere in the thread, but it doesn't really make any sense. See the responses to your other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21775710

> The fields you mention made serious efforts to counter sexism.

Do you have any references on what those efforts were?

I've served multiple times at SheTech (an event where we invite thousands of highschool girls to come learn about tech and jobs), and I've helped host at least five Hour of Code events at Adobe where we make sure half of those invited are female where we teach robotics. I've also spent a couple years teaching refugees how to code, and we make sure half of those students are female, as well.

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.

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