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Comment by deaddodo | Hacker News Reader

I worked at a company a few years back where the hiring manager for the engineering and product teams proudly exclaimed that she would actively go against hiring a man, until the teams were at minimum 50% women and would maintain this ratio once she reached that goal.

Totally admirable intention, for sure (if only viewed from the lens of strict equality). But I’m sure the 90% of applicants that were male wouldn’t see it that way. So, poor execution.

Edit: clarified some incendiary phrasing

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> STEM is 100% historically discriminatory to women

Is this a Western/US thing? Woman STEM graduates outnumber man in a number of countries. Mine and Iran for example but most Muslim countries have strong woman numbers.

I don't think STEM in the west is discriminatory to women, out of the blue. It can't be more discriminatory than Iran? Unless, there is data and research that suggests otherwise.

Not just Muslim countries but Asia’s numbers are more even too. Not sure what happened but the West got leapfrogged by a lot of the rest of the world in this regard. We like to think we’re the shining light of progressivism but the reality may be more complicated than that.

There's a study showing more progressive countries have fewer women in tech. Because when people don't have to worry about putting a roof over their head, affording food and medical bills, they're more likely to pick the career that interests them. And fewer women are interested in STEM. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... In Asia and the middle east people are generally poorer and with fewer opportunities (and there's much less social welfare there), so they need to prioritise economics over interest when choosing a career.

I can only speak of my country (still a Muslim country though more liberal than your average). The reason woman study super-hard is that it gives them freedom. It's not accepted, socially, for a woman, for example, to take a trip to another city and stay alone in a hotel. However, it's totally okay if she is a medical doctor or an engineer in a mission. The same for travelling outside of the country.

These might be strong incentives for woman to pursue STEM degrees. These same incentives don't exist for Western woman since they already have their freedoms unquestioned. Also, a little note: This is just a speculation from me (less than an opinion) might be completely wrong.

Asian countries developed much later. That is why some countries also have mobile payments instead of credit cards. Because credit cards never became the incumbent in the first place. Many western countries have a relatively unbroken history from early industrialism to post-WWII development to home computers in the 80s to early Internet startups. Japan, which developed earlier than India or China, doesn't have a high percentage of women in STEM. The US used to have a higher percentage of women in computer science in the 80s when it was a less popular field. If you instead look at gender distribution in something older like politics or the military western countries often do a lot better than the rest of the world.

I think the issue is one of hiring, promotion, and pay. It's widely reported in the USA that women generally do better in school than men.

> STEM is 100% historically discriminatory to women

So that women prefer to pick other fields is STEM's fault?

That women face negative pressure when they go into STEM is a real and documented problem.

Negative pressure from who?

From the peers.

The main reason why girls are not choosing STEM is because it doesn't intrest them as much. You can try to put the blame on anything you want, but that's reality.

I love technical things and am the father of 1 son and 3 girls. I of course would love to do technical things with all of them. With my son it's easy to get him excited about lego and such. With my girls? Well, maybe you should give it a try. I decided to play with my kids the things they like to play with. And with my girls it's (unfortunately for me) non technical things.

This preference is also highly documented in gender equal societies. So do us all a favor and stop talking bullshit while it's obvious why women don't select STEM: they don't want to.

PS: My oldest daughter is going to follow STEM next year. I'm happy, but mainly wish her to be happy. If she continues it, fine. If she decides she wants to do something else, also fine. She's good at math so that's the main reason she picked it.

Are your girls representative of the entire female population?

Seems like it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox#:~:tex....

This whole thread is nothing but documentation of the reverse; men being discriminated against left right and center, women being given fake interviews where they're guaranteed to get hired anyway due to Diversity! managers, team re-orgs where the explicitly feminist manager somehow totally by coincidence selects every single woman to be a TL and creates exactly enough teams for them to lead, etc.

In contrast this "real and documented" is just an assertion. I never saw any evidence of it.

“Totally admirable intention”

What? That’s not admirable at all. That’s blatant sexism.

“(STEM is 100% historically discriminatory to women)”

Lol no, if anything it’s clearly discriminatory towards men in the false assumption that low female population isn’t an internal cause

I posted these links elsewhere in the thread, but I'll post them again. Pretty much every job has a gender imbalance to some degree or another.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/E...

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/software-deve...

Gender imbalance on it's own doesn't say everything. You should actually talk with women in STEM. Many of them shared their horrible experiences so far.

Source?

I agree we should work to reduce horrible experiences.

My point is that we shouldn't be surprised by a gender imbalance on priors. By itself, a gender imbalance only goes to show that software engineering is like a lot of other jobs.

BTW, my suspicion is that similar experiences happen in many industries, and industries vary according to (a) how horrible a given experience is said to be and (b) social norms around registering a complaint.

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