Hacker News Reader

Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

Law and medicine are very competitive fields, with a higher representation of women. And tech/CS has not always been as competitive as it perhaps is today. Hence Damore's argument is somewhat subtler than this, and focuses on diverging interests that lead to having fewer women in the pipeline to begin with. Some people point to the boom in videogames and home computers throughout the 1970s and 1980s as a reason why this divergence was not apparent earlier.

View on HN

That is an interesting question. How are law and medicine different than CS career-wise? A couple additional thoughts, not intended to be exhaustive:

* CS is notorious for its solitary aspect. Stare at a screen juggling abstractions for hours on end.

* CS is notorious for lack of career paths. Between ageism and outsourcing, once you hit 40, the perception is you are relegated to the bottom of the pile.

> CS is notorious for its solitary aspect. Stare at a screen juggling abstractions for hours on end.

It's also false. Software is inherently collaborative, especially at senior levels. And it will likely stay that way as long as the job looks a lot like consulting due to lack of defined sub-specialities. There is no technician specializing in particular forms of testing in the software industry. In medicine, there is a whole host of these specialities. Point being "it's your job, so figure it out" is the rule. And that means working out not just solutions but well defined problems with peers, customers, superiors, and other stakeholders.

It's possible to do interesting Computer Science in relative isolation, but good luck making a career out if it without collaboration, publication, teaching, and other inherently social activities.

You might know all this, but I think it's important for the industry to push back on the nerd-bro in a basement imagery since it's absolutely not what actually happens.

Of course there is some social aspect to CS. That being said, comparatively, the interaction loop is waaay more abstract. Just walk into a medical practice vs a software engineering office.

As a medical professional, you get to interact face to face with several people every day, and have a direct observable positive impact in their lives.

As a CS professional, you spend half your waking time dealing with or dishing out style guide feedback nitpicks via email / irc / github [FAANG experience], interacting remotely with funny little avatars. You very rarely directly experience the impact of your work, and the impact itself is quite a bit less clear cut positive.

You raise a good point. We'll have to anecdotally study why that's the case. For instance, many women in the law and medicine fields end up marrying men in the same fields. So those women can then later on decide to either reduce their work hours or to outright stop when they have children.

It's more difficult to negotiate your hours in tech. How many people do you know who say want to only work 2-3 days a week for 5 hours a each day? The medical/dental field (especially if you have a clinic and don't do procedures or complex operations) tends to be "independent". Meaning, each case you get is a consultation, and your "productivity" is in how many patients you see in a given timeframe. This is much harder with programming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com