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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

In many subfields of biology, women have achieved numerical parity at all levels (IE, there are roughly 50% women in entry and leadership positions). It seems like some highly quantitative fields which have traditionally been male-dominated (CS, physics) may very well be practicing some sort of entry discrimination. It's unclear what the full set of contributing factors are.

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You also can’t have mathematical equality with some fields dominated by women, like nursing.

If every field is 50% or better in women, you need a heck of a lot more women.

This is often forgotten. In aggregate, for every woman persuaded to become a bricklayer instead of a kindergarten teacher, a man must be persuaded to do the reverse. This is just never going to happen across all industries.

Unless you just have a lot of incarcerated and jobless men.

I think the training environment at the undergraduate level is still toxic for women. I graduated 4 years ago, and while I wasn't in the CS program I had a female friend who was and she often lamented how isolating that program could be. This was a huge program at a huge school (50k undergrad), yet she was often one of only a few women in the program, and as she progressed she became even more of a minority as others switched majors. Of course there were hardly any women professors or role models as well.

Engineering is a field that selects for a certain personality, not all the time, but I think everyone here knows at least a couple classmates like this who are pretty arrogant, stubborn, self validating, the type to argue with the TA over their wrong homework answer for half the class, and never one to admit shortcomings. It's also a major that encourages regular group projects, where you might be stuck with personalities like this, or legitimately total creeps with questionable hygiene (I've seen all of this even outside CSE in my program). I think we all remember a few creeps from the undergrad days, too. Frankly, many of these men, especially in that age between 18-22 when you are basically a high schooler in maturity and might never had a female friend before due to social awkwardness, are overtly misogynistic, maybe without even knowing it just by cracking dumb jokes for cheap laughs among their male friends.

In majors with more representation among women, you are less likely to be saddled with these personalities (or even have to do massively weighted capstone group projects), and more likely to have camaraderie among people in the same boat as you, and are more likely to see through the major without switching to another one.

How do you know 50% is the correct amount of women at all levels?

They didn't say it is.

> It seems like some highly quantitative fields which have traditionally been male-dominated (CS, physics) may very well be practicing some sort of entry discrimination

Maybe I misread, but I interpreted this follow up statement as "50% is correct, here's why (CS, physics) may not be at this level".

About 20% of people in CS are women. Ordinary male variability, difference in median aptitude, and employer selectivity could explain some of the disparity. But 20% is extraordinary. And people rationalized the disparity in biology the same ways people rationalize the disparity in CS.

I didn't mean to imply that at all, although it does seem like the first reasonable target: all job categories, except for ones that require people to be a specific gender for some reason, should have participation roughly proportional to the proportion of that gender (or other attribute) in society.

I'm not certain that's the right goal, but what I said above was working a model where 50% women participation seemed like the expected amount.

Would you consider kindergarten teaching to require a specific gender? Or carpentry? If not, please explain how you are going to persuade a huge number of women who wanted to be kindergarten teachers to instead become carpenters, while also persuading an equal number of men to do the reverse. That is what your target requires (across many occupations). It will never happen.

I'm not trying to push people into roles they don't want (I think I've made clear that the approach I described is a simple one to start at, not a good policy). My model in this case (which doesn't really map to reality) is "gender preference for roles is unbiased uniform random".

I don't really think job preferences are that strongly encoded in gender, I think far more men could be kindergarten teachers and more women carpenters, although men who try to become teachers face a huge amount of extra work because people don't trust men with kids as much.

Where is the free will of individuals factored in? I mean, if people in group A don't want to do job B, should we force them to reach parity?

I think it's better to ensure equal opportunities and let people decide.

that is one of the reasons I said my approach was a good start.

It's unclear, in a truly equal opportunity society, what the gender preference breakdowns for specific job roles would be. A simple first order approximation is "no preference".

I agree! I think trying to apply a high level value will result in more discrimination, however. i.e, if we see X group of society under/overrepresented by Y%, we do not have enough understanding to draw any meaningful conclusions from this. Large enough discrepancies should be investigated as possibly a canary for discrimination, but in some cases there may not be any (NFL lineman will likely always be men).

I think the correct answer is to evaluate people as individuals on their merits. However, this is expensive (in many ways) and still flawed. My view is that we are much close to coming up with a "fair interview" than we are with understanding the massive amounts of complexity explaining discrepancies in human populations.

> A simple first order approximation is "no preference".

That's a reasonable first-order approximation, but it seems not to be reflected in the data, which show that as societies become more equal, gender disparities in field choice increase.

See: "Countries with greater gender equality have a lower percentage of female STEM graduates" (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180214150132.h...)

Funnily proponent of the theory 'make everything 50%' tendd to think of an individuals free will as the most feeble thing that can be broken oh so easily by almost anything.

I don't know if they actually perceive this, but, the fact that some people can automatically assume bias without deeper investigation when their whole fight is, trying to fight preconceived notions, its sort of ironic.

Sure, study WHY certain fields are underrepresented and try to fix systematic problems. But if your blind go to answer is, 'certain group of people are to blame' - just maybe you're exibiting behaviors that you are try to reduce in others and it may not lead to real solutions..

> all job categories, except for ones that require people to be a specific gender for some reason, should have participation roughly proportional to the proportion of that gender (or other attribute) in society.

Why?

Maybe linguistics vs. philosophy is a good example. They are not too different from each other and I've studied both of them. My impression has always been that male vs. female linguistics professors were roughly 50:50, whereas at least in the past there were way more male than female philosophy professors. It seems to be getting better now in philosophy, though.

However, I could be totally wrong about this, as I've never bothered to check the figures.

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