I notice that Engineering and Math/CS are still heavily male-dominated, though.
So are these departments particularly hostile to women, or are women less interested in pursuing these subjects? If so -- in either case, actually -- why might that be?
So are these departments particularly hostile to women, or are women less interested in pursuing these subjects? If so -- in either case, actually -- why might that be?
On the other side my wife always say, that if she would have job like I have she would shoot herself. It looks like the most boring thing on earth. And you always have all these issues and bugs to fix. Nothing ever works as expected…
She also never really wants to tinker with stuff. When something is broken, she just wants it fixed.
Also from what I’ve read, the most ‘equal’ countries in the world are nowhere near 50/50 distribution.
So while we should fight all discrimination and try to give access to education to everyone. I think we should also respect, that people have different interests and don’t pressure them to pursue career they don’t really want. Just so we have 50/50 distribution that ideal world should have.
Can we use the same reasoning to explain why more women earn degrees than men? Men are not interested in education? If I were a woman, I'd tell you about how my husband thinks reading books is the most boring thing ever and just want to watch sports on tv. :)
We shouldn't pressure them to pursue higher education. If men are happy being uneducated working menial jobs, we should let them while highly educated women serve leading roles in society.
I really want to hear the people in the comments making claims that women just aren't interested in tech and that boys are being failed by the education system answer this.
This is not my experience. I know several women that dropped out of the tech industry because of discrimination.
No matter how much I tried to get my daughter into "boy stuff", she would just want the pink pretty things, even from a very young age.
Growing up she spent most of her time with her male cousins, so it's not like she wasn't exposed to lots of boy's toys.
Not that I mind get being into girly things... In fact it is pretty awesome :)
You really don't think any cultural messaging that girls are supposed to like "pink pretty things" has any influence?
Did you know that in the early 20th century, blue was prescribed as the normative color for girls and pink for boys? [1] Huh, now how do you reconcile that with your view that your daughter's love of pink is because her brain is just gosh darn different? Is your response that the brains of girls 100 years ago were the complete opposite of girl brains today? Or maybe that they just had the colors all wrong, and that clearly, based on your daughter's brain, you're glad society finally has it biologically right?
[1] https://www.britannica.com/story/has-pink-always-been-a-girl...
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12512-women-may-be-ha...
I was just speaking from a parent who also thought it was cultural that girls preferred pink sparkly things, but then experienced parenthood and it's clear as day they do.
I'm sure there are lots of girls who don't care for pink...but so what if the majority do?
This has always been the case. Just as men are less likely to be nurses/grade school teachers, they don't play to each sex's strengths. And that's ok
It can often be a surprising exercise to look at the history of fields that are supposed to play to "natural" gender strengths and examine how they've evolved over time.
> As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was "just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it's ready when you need it... Women are 'naturals' at computer programming." James Adams, the director of education for the Association for Computing Machinery, agreed: "I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there's as much opportunity for a woman."
Swap out some of the specifics, and the general tone of argument hasn't changed much since back then. It's just that we've now decided to substitute in other "obvious" conclusions about who is suited for which jobs.
I have no doubt that Grace Hopper turned out to be a great programmer and made many great contributions to the field, but it turns out she was in the army, and she was ordered to go work on a computing effort, it wasn't her choice:
"In 1944, Lt. Grace Hopper was ordered to report to Harvard University to work on the Mark I, the behemoth digital computer that had been conceived by Harvard's Howard"
The idea that there may be some natural differences in preferences (things that interest you the most) between men and women is controversial for some reason, but this idea shouldn't be seen as sexist.
If it turns out that men really are more drawn to engineering (on average, this is obviously not true for everyone) because of some underlying biological development factors, shouldn't we try to understand why? Being more drawn to engineering doesn't mean you're automatically better at it. It just means you're probably more likely to go into the field and more likely to spend long hours studying it.
Right now the politically correct thing to do is to just reject that hypothesis and insist that all of these differences have to be nurture. I mean, why spend precious capital studying these things when we've already decided what is the correct answer, right?
To be clear, Dr. Grace Hopper is not the only woman who worked on computers. This was a general field post-WW2 that women were encouraged to go into because they were seen as natural fits, even as men started to come home from the war. It was only after computing started to become more "respectable" that it started to shift into a more male-dominated industry.
There may well be natural differences between sexes in preferences (either biological or social), but if your arguments about how those differences are "obvious" aren't actually predictive, and if historically those exact same arguments have been used almost verbatim to explain trends that skewed in the exact opposite direction -- then at that point I think you're talking about a pseudoscience.
You want to research sex difference? Well, part of examining a hypothesis is looking at whether it actually holds true and is useful as a predictive tool. If you balk at the idea of questioning whether the trends you're trying to explain are actually universal or whether they're cultural, then that you're not really doing science.
I'm happy for all the women who choose to go into STEM, who enjoy doing that work, and who succeed. I still think that it's problematic to explain away the huge gender imbalances in STEM fields based on the idea that it's all because of oppression or social norms.
Consider the medical field. Those used to be very much male-dominated, but nowadays, there are more women graduating out of med school than men, and AFAIK, under a certain age, most young doctors are female. Women are also going into law at a higher rate than they are in CS. Law has a reputation for being macho and toxic as hell, but that's not stopping women from entering the field. Why do we blame the gender imbalance in CS purely on oppression, discrimination or social norms?
As far as there being more women in STEM during WWII than there are now, and that disproving the idea that there could be natural differences in preferences (again, on average, this is not absolute), and that somehow disproving the idea of sex differences in preferences... Many young men were sent to war during WWII and women were given extra incentives to enter the field. It wasn't exactly a situation where people were just choosing things based on their own free will. After WWII, you had a situation where a few million young men had died, and the women who were now working in those fields kept doing so.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-01624-7
> Consider the medical field. Those used to be very much male-dominated, but nowadays, there are more women graduating out of med school than men, and AFAIK, under a certain age, most young doctors are female. Women are also going into law at a higher rate than they are in CS.
To look at multiple fields that used the exact same statistics and arguments to justify their gender gaps, and that have since been proven wrong, and to argue that CS/STEM is the one field where that's never going to happen -- is just a wild leap in logic to me.
There is, of course, some decent research on infant preferences. How that relates to abstract code is an exercise left to the reader. But it should give you some pause that after the doctors pointed at infant preferences and said, "that's why there aren't women doctors", and after the lawyers pointed at infant preferences and said, "that's why women don't want to be in high-stress environments", and after both of those fields were proven wrong, you're now using practically the same arguments verbatim and claiming that this time the link is real and not just projection.
----
Secondly though, I want to talk about the overall context of the conversation we're having. The idea that sex differences contribute (both socially and biologically) to different experiences and development is not what this debate is about. The criticism of of biological explanations for gender gaps is not a denial of biology, it is an assertion that biology on its own is not sufficient to explain current gaps.
So I want to push back on the inevitable claim that always comes up in these threads that this is a fight over whether biology is real or whether sex can possibly have an impact on preferences. If that's what the claim was, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation; biological differences between sexes is a completely uncontroversial idea even in the majority of feminist circles. Equality activists are not against looking at biology as part of their research into gender gaps.
What proponents of biological want in practice is not acknowledgement that biological differences exist, but a denial that other social differences exist. Look over this thread; what are the actual arguments that are being made?
> Just as men are less likely to be nurses/grade school teachers, they don't play to each sex's strengths. And that's ok
> Politics are preventing us, as a species, from properly understanding ourselves.
> There is everything about nursing that is gender specific. Men are interested in things, women are interested in people
> Unfortunately HR departments just look at the employment statistics and decide that the numbers need to be 50/50, for some reason
The overwhelming sentiment I see every time I get into one of these conversations isn't "biological differences exist", it's "gender gaps are fine because biology exists, and we shouldn't look into the social aspects because biology is a good enough explanation."
Maybe you're not in that camp. If not, then I apologize, I don't mean to just lump you in with other commenters. But I think it's short-sighted to look at fields that by your own admittance have seen large demographic shifts because of social changes, and to argue that the people suggesting that Computer Science might have similar problems are being unreasonable or denying that sex exists.
If anything the situation is the opposite; we know, very observably, that culture shapes interest during early development. If we can have a conversation about equity while acknowledging that sex exists and has physical effects on people, we also should be able to acknowledge that culture exists without people immediately bristling and complaining about "politics".
> and it isn't just a big calculator
I'm not sure you've thought this argument through.
Are you suggesting that women are naturally better-suited to mathematics and theoretical engineering then men are? You think that the male shift in CS was because the field became less theoretical, and men realized that the field wasn't only offering analytic/abstract challenges?
I'd love if in these types of debates we could all standardize on what the inherent biological differences are that we're talking about, but it always seems to me like proponents have a hard time doing that. The theories fluidly evolve, flip around, and transform to meet every example and statistic, their only constant being the belief that cultural solutions to how fields are presented, taught, and managed should be off the table. Hence the pseudoscience concerns I have above.
----
The point I brought up in my original comment was that all of these arguments:
- that women don't like analytic/abstract thinking
- that women don't like practical/applied thinking jobs
- that women prefer fuzzy-creative tasks instead of hard-creative tasks
- that women care about people more than concepts
- that women prefer social jobs and men prefer isolated work
- that women naturally avoid careers with high amounts of conflict like upper management positions
they're all brought up by their proponents as if they're obvious conclusions, despite the fact that they're often mutually exclusive claims, and despite the fact that even when they do contradict each other they still all use the exact same evidence and justifications as "proof" for their obvious-ness. Most of these theories aren't the result of real scientific research, they're rationalizations for current outcomes that start from a position that the outcomes necessarily must have a biological explanation.
It's hard for me to have a lot of respect for that. And these people want to claim that the people who are actually testing social theories about gender gaps are the unscientific ones. Their definition of the "scientific" way to approach gender is to just assume everything is biological and to never question the status quo.
> Are you suggesting that women are naturally better-suited to mathematics and theoretical engineering then men are?
I have thought it through, but thanks for your concern. Mathematics is close to gender parity, engineering is not. When computer science shifted from being closer to math to being closer to engineering you saw the population attending shift to match engineering rather than math ratios. It is that simple, and it matches observed data perfectly with how CS curve went upwards matching the curve for math but in the late 80's it took a quick nose dive and followed the curve for engineering ever since.
I am not sure why you bring up suitability to study a field though, nowhere did I say that men are better at anything than women and vice versa. People study what they find interesting, not necessarily what they are good at.
But you are right, we know that women are more willing to study the purer more theoretical classes over the engineering versions. I don't see how that would contradict anything.
Where are you getting this data from? Mathematics has a pretty noticeable gender gap, it's not at all close to parity.
Besides, if your theory is correct, we shouldn't see parity. We should see women dominate the field, the same way that they dominated early computing. Even in a world with an actual 50/50 split in mathematics (which again, is not the current world), your theory still doesn't explain why women were over-represented in early computing, even after WW2 when men had returned home.
----
Let's make some other predictions based on your theory while we're at it.
If what you're saying is correct and women are primed to find theoretical fields more interesting than men do, we might expect to see a higher proportion of women in research positions for hospitals than in practical positions like nursing, and similarly we might expect to see a higher proportion of men in practical medical fields like nursing and direct care.
Do we see that? No.
If your theory is correct and women are inherently more interested in theoretical fields, we should expect to see a gender inbalance in teaching fields based on education levels and practicality of subject. So for example, we should expect to see more men teaching lower-level mathematics and intro programming where their work has a direct impact on people's day-to-day life, and more women teaching higher-level mathematics and abstract programming courses in higher education settings.
Do we see that? No.
You've globbed onto an explanation based on one statistic because it might explain that statistic. You haven't formed a widely applicable explanation that can be used across the board to explain the different statistics that we see throughout multiple fields, or that can be used to predict what statistics we will see in the future.
That is a lie, they were never over-represented in computer science. It is based on a small uptick in the 80's, math made an uptick at the same time and is now close to parity while computer science didn't follow the math curve.
There where a lot of women working on the first computers since at the time most computers were women and they had to hand off their work, but the field computer science was always male.
> Where are you getting this data from? Mathematics has a pretty noticeable gender gap, it's not at all close to parity.
Are you arguing without even knowing about the data?
You can see curves here, math is 40%, computer science made an uptick in the 80's for women at the same time women started to go into physical sciences and maths and engineering. Then Computer science made the anomalous dive down to engineering levels. When people say that women disappeared from computer science they are talking about that short uptick in the 80's, that is all it is based on:
> You can see curves here, math is 40%
A 40/60 split in mathematics does not support your claim that women prefer abstract thinking more than men do, and also incidentally is a pretty noticeable gender gap to most people, hence the large amount of discussion you can find online about gender gaps in mathematics fields and mathematics testing.
I never claimed that women prefer abstract thinking more than men do. I claimed that women prefer abstract thinking more than they prefer working with machines relative men. It would be massive if women in engineering or computer science were anything close to 40/60.
> Come on. Your graph starts in 1971 and you're using that to argue about differences in the 1960s.
You have provided no data supporting your claim. I wont dig up more data just because you can't look for it yourself. You are obviously ignorant about this topic and don't want to educate yourself.
I think it's fair to say that you can believe that the difference is biological without it being sexist. But it is also true that many people who hold this belief are sexist (in fact most misogynists probably do believe this), so people being hesitant to give a platform to people taking this angle is understandable.
That's completely false. There's lots of published research on this subject. The existence of said evidence is routinely being denied, but there have been numerous studies. One of the most famous studies established that female infants tend to be more interested in looking at human faces than boy infants, and boys generally more interested in looking at things.
This is generally referred to as a "things vs people" preference. With women generally being more people oriented, and men being more "thing" oriented. Again, there is no relationship to performance here. Nobody is claiming that either of these is better than the other. It's just a very consistent finding across many many studies, and the fact that this is still controversial boggles the mind. Politics are preventing us, as a species, from properly understanding ourselves.
This is a meta-analysis of infant sex vs toy preference: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-01624-7
If you think this preference for things vs people is due to culture, consider that this kind of toy preference exists in monkeys as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm9xXyw2f7g
It’s a well established fact that, even in children as young as a few weeks old, males and females have different preferences.
I don't think programming was a field that used to be about people skills and slowly morphed into something analytic and technical today, programming today seems to me to be much more user-friendly and social.
There is everything about nursing that is gender specific.
Men are interested in things, women are interested in people
Why is it different when a woman is taking vitals and walking through a diagnostic checklist than when a man is doing it? Is there something special about being a women that makes the better at drawing blood or placing IVs?
They don't, physicians are close to gender parity. What you see is that Physicians used to skew male a long time ago, but that isn't the case any more in younger generations.
And Physicians isn't about people, Physicians is about seeing people as things you can fix, so it tickles both the "people" and the "thing" aspects at the same time, which would explain why gender ratio is about equal.
If you remove the "things" aspect from physicians you are left with nurse, which skews extremely female.
"Countries with greater gender equality see a smaller proportion of women taking degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), a new study has found.
Dubbed the “gender equality paradox”, the research found that countries such as Albania and Algeria have a greater percentage of women amongst their STEM graduates than countries lauded for their high levels of gender equality, such as Finland, Norway and Sweden.
The researchers, from Leeds Beckett University and the University of Missouri, believe this might be because countries with less gender equality often have little welfare support, making the choice of a relatively high-paid STEM career more attractive."
Basically finding that specialities with less patient contact have a higher proportion of male doctors.
Though I suspect there probably is more going on with nursing than differences in interest in people.
With advanced degrees becoming more and more common, it's also more and more likely the nurse seeing you has the same number of years of schooling as the doctor.
I don't think anyone looks down on nurses in the UK if they have spent anytime in hospital.
The tech world is notoriously unwelcoming to women, tons of unconscious biases push women away from STEM, societal pressure/general atmosphere tends to encourage women to focus on things other than their career, etc. In light of all that it is hard to say whether women don't want to get into STEM because of some natural disinclination, or simply because all of these other things make STEM less desirable for them.
There are fully theoretical CS degrees out there, but that isn't the norm. Look at Stanford for example, one of the top rated schools in the world on this subject, and you can graduate with less theory courses than a typical engineer has to take.
So you'd expect CS to have a gender balance similar to most engineer degrees, which is what we see.
https://cs.stanford.edu/degrees/undergrad/Requirements.shtml
Edit: Just want to note that I am not correcting you on this, just noting the difference between the subjects.
I feel like students complain a lot about how tough theoretical CS can be. When I was in school, a lot of former CS staple courses were moved into the graduate program and replaced with lighter, more practical courses in undergrad (i.e., compiler theory replace with a comparative programming languages course that touched on JVM bytecode). They event went so far as to split BSCS and BACS by reducing the math requirements even further for the BA degree.
In order to bridge that gap you'd need to tie programming to something women love as much as men loves working on machines that has moving parts.
Edit: And I've seen CS degree variants with heavy UX focus that tends to get 50/50 gender balance. It is really easy to shift gender balance in degrees this way, just shift it more to humans and you get more women, more to moving things and you get more men.
What are you talking about, people with chemistry PhD's are by definition doctors. Are you talking about physicians? You don't need to be a physician to develop medicine, a chemistry phd is more than enough to join a pharma company.
However, in order to get a PhD you must face much harder challenges. Whoever left engineering because of that comment is not fit for a PhD.
HN, by and large, also happily insists that men are naturally better than women at logical thinking. You'll see it all over this thread.
It's not hard to challenge this belief once one starts looking outside the US. We had female poster here, a couple of months ago, who said that in Gaza the computer science courses were 60-70% female. It's hard to reconcile that with hand-wavey statements about 'brain chemicals' so it's easy to ignore.
The disparity with places like the middle east is an example of the gender equality paradox [1]. The more patriarchal and oppressive a place is, the greater women's interest are in high paying fields as it provides a path to security and independence. In more egalitarian societies, women are more free to pursue fields in accordance with their own iterests.
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
Easy example - any girl who started reading the HN message boards at a young age would probably give up on a future career in engineering. Why try when a bunch of educated men don't think you can succeed?
The article is interesting but not definitive. Even granting ( which I wouldn't ) that girls have a greater aptitude for reading instead of science and math, being a good _engineer_ is also about being a good reader. If boys are naturally better at math, that doesn't at all mean they are better professionals. If they can't read the instructions for using Vivado to design firmware, than they are in the wrong profession.
I've also rarely encountered commenters on hacker news saying women cannot succeed in engineering, and it's downvote heavily in the rare instances it does appear. You claim it's present in this thread, in your previous comment, yet don't link to any instances of this alleged disparagement. It strikes me as the kind of statement that stems from assumptions rather than concrete observations.
I haven't seen a single person on HN say that women can't succeed in this field.
Not as a rule exactly: these days, anyone reasonable savvy person can learn CS well enough to be employed in tech and any math-savvy person can certainly end up in CS research. But it is, I think, _super_ hard to start learning programming in college and actually end up good at _low_-level computing like Kernel/Systems level stuff, which really requires like total immersion in the space, similar to learning a language by living in the country. In my program this meant that the really technical classes were filled with the students who came in already very computer-literate and into programming, and they tended to be 90+% male.
(There are exceptions. I'd characterize Charles Severance's MOOC from UMich as a true beginner class. But, by contrast, I think I'd find MIT's intro class in the CS department (6.001) impossibly difficult if I was having to basically learn to actually learn simple programming on the side.)
[1] https://www2.seas.gwu.edu/~kaufman1/FortranColoringBook/Colo...
[1]https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-the-declinin...
If CS was mandatory from grades 1-12 then things might be a lot less skewed in those first year introductory CS courses. Of course you're still going to run into the issue of kids who take up programming as a hobby at a young age and arrive at university with a large lead in skills. On the other hand I've seen math students who have done the same thing.
I actually did well in math throughout high school but it wasn't a particularly strong skill of mine in university. And I could have no more majored in math (or physics) than I could have flapped my arms and flown.
My secondary point still stands. Just as there are kids out there who grew up programming in their bedrooms who come into first year CS and crush it, there are kids out there studying extra math and writing math contests etc who will come into first year with a big advantage.
Man and women having different interests had innate, biological roots. It has been observed in children only a few weeks old.
I am not saying this explains the whole imbalance, but for sure it can explain part of it.