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Comment by throwaway2245 | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway2245

Can you imagine an article on the BBC or on HN front page saying:

"Girls are trailing boys in engineering jobs: why?"

implicitly identifying that as a problem which needed to be fixed.

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Sure, here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37254851

Not really sure what you're implying

I'm implying that "a gender difference which ostensibly disadvantages boys in education" will get more attention than "a gender difference which ostensibly disadvantages women in engineering".

On a forum which is organised around engineering.

And people will claim that the latter gets more attention, despite being shown evidence to the contrary. That's pretty average sexism.

(I also would note that this hasn't been up for long enough for people to be up-voting for the content, given that you can only access it as a 23-minute podcast.)

> And people will claim that the latter gets more attention, despite being shown evidence to the contrary.

Except this has not been demonstrated at all. The BBC has both covered the topic and it has been discussed in highly upvoted posts on Hacker News.

As discussed above - despite widening the goalposts to include any article with 'women' and 'engineering' in the title, there is now only one such article which matches the popularity of this one - and based on the trajectory, that is unlikely to remain the case.

Never submitted to HN.

Based on the search results and point scores, I'd wager that no article with "women" and "engineering" has ever been at the top of the front page, as this presently is.

You're moving the goalposts set in your original post, but a quick search[1] shows many articles on Hacker News about the gap between men and women in engineering. Many with more points than this post currently has.

It does seem like this post is growing more quickly than these did, but perhaps because this is a more surprising/novel development, whereas the gap of women in engineering roles is much more commonly known?

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=women+engineering

There are 4 such articles with more points, at the time of your writing (and I expect there will soon be 0 or 1).

There are also 4 such articles with more points referencing boys and education (not including this one).

I've seen many discussions like that. The title sounds a bit weird because everyone already knows that many engineering fields are mostly male, so nobody would write a headline as if this was news.

I don’t know what point you’re making, but it’s certainly not uncommon to see articles noting that women lag men in certain professions, even insinuating strongly that the cause is discrimination without a shard of evidence.

If you listen to it the gap between them is growing which is why there's concern, 1:45 onwards.

The gap has grown also in engineering professions.

Do you maybe mean what if they were reporting about trailing in job performance?

Because the headline you gave seems pretty close to what is in fact reported all the time.

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