Hacker News Reader

Comment by discolemonade | Hacker News Reader

The answer to why there are more female founders in New York than the Valley is easy: Valley startups tend to be a lot more tech-heavy than NYC startups as a whole. And women in general aren't drawn to deep technology. I find it interesting how whenever issues of women and technology come up, everyone gets all pc and pretends not to know what the root of the gender gap is. But then if you ask them to count the number of women they know who are fascinated by technology, mathematics and deep, impersonal abstraction, they can't. Human nature doesn't change just because we pump a few billion dollars into figuring out how to get girls to love STEM. It'll never change. Tech heavy centers like Silicon Valley will always have a preponderence of male entrepreneurs and less tech heavy centers like NYC will always be more appealing to female entrepreneurs. Boys will be boys and girls will be girls.

View on HN

Human nature doesn't change just because we pump a few billion dollars into figuring out how to get girls to love STEM. It'll never change.

If women's interest in CS is purely fixed by human nature, how do you account for the precipitous drop over the past decades? Women got 37% of the CS degrees in 1984 but get way fewer now.[1]

[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~women/resources/aroundTheWeb/hostedPa...

To understand what really motivates people, it's much better to look at what they do in the real world. Sure, there have always been women getting CS degrees, but how many of them go out and become programmers or tinker with technology, electronics and hardware late at night because they want to? The people who do that have been the engines behind technological advancement and growth throughout human history. And they've been mostly males. Saying that men tend to be more interested in technology than women doesn't mean that women's interest in CS is purely fixed. It just means that there will always be statistically more males tinkering with technology than females. And those statistical disparities will always ensure that the majority of tech-heavy, companies, and inventions will be led by men.

that's great dude but you didn't actually answer the question.

"If women's interest in CS is purely fixed by human nature, how do you account for the precipitous drop over the past decades?"

a 37% drop over a few decades is a pretty dramatic change.

your argument is based on zero data and a whole bunch of rhetoric. not only that, it completely ignores the question.

if it's all about human nature, how do you explain a dramatic recent change? (and realize that if you really want to take the discussion to the grand, sweeping level of human nature, three decades becomes a tiny, tiny timespan for such a sharp drop.)

>if it's all about human nature, how do you explain a dramatic recent change?

It's difficult to tell if you're trolling or if you truly don't get it. At no point did the parent poster claim that 100% of a person's likelihood to found a tech start-up was nurture.

Consider this situation: Nurture (U) and Nature (A) are both factors in a person's likelihood to start-up (L). If L = UxA, then a 37% drop in U would cause a 37% drop in L regardless of differences in natural abilities.

A good starting point if you're interested in the interplay between nurture and nature in human psychology is Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate.

I don't need help finding a book, and I don't appreciate your condescension.

Comparing 1984 to 2002 in CS is ridiculous. Nothing dropped precipitously. CS grew astronomically, and it attracted more new males than females, but still there are far more women doing CS now than then.

As a woman in a technical field who is fascinated by 'deep' technology, and mentors other girls to foster their own interests towards a technical career, your comment serves to isolate and offend. Please keep divisive gender-based comments out of this forum unless you have some very hard data to back this up.

So any explanation besides "Oh my they're being oppressed" is deeply offensive?

Any explanation aiming towards "we're just born better" is.

Not that I particularly agree with his argument, but your comment really doesn't follow from what he said, unless you think that being interested in deep technology makes someone 'better', rather than just different.

There are two main problems with that thought. First is that, more often than not, lack of interest is used as an excuse to imply lack of skill. Which is why I used to wording "aiming towards". And second, falsely attributing lack of interest in itself can be considered offensive to many people. Maybe you wouldn't think it's offensive yourself, but it's clear many people do. On the very least, it's discriminating.

To make both points a bit more clear. Imagine that if I told you, that "it's not that I think you're bad at coding. But I just think that you're not interested in hard problems. You rather solve easy ones instead." I'm not (directly) attacking your skills, I'm just falsely discriminating your interests. But hopefully you can understand why this sentence would sound offensive to many people.

I can see how someone might take offense, but at the same time accurate statements aren't always palatable.

I'm not sure your comparison is completely fair - you make it purely about deep technical problems vs 'easy' technical problems. My experience when I was a CS grad student was that the women there were interested in very difficult, important problems (particularly UX, for example), but weren't generally fascinated by, say, fundamental data structures research. Obviously there's notable counterexamples, and I am speaking in generalisations.

The reason I distance myself from the comment that sparked this discussion is not that I think it's wrong with respect to what men/women are, on average, interested in (it's hard to argue with basic statistics), but because I have no idea whether that's purely because of cultural influences or it's something more fundamental as well.

Your post is the first one that mentions being "better". Plenty of women don't think computer projects are better or for better people than non-computer projects. In fact, men of the past twenty years were more likely than women to pursue computer projects, a trend that is changing now in part because computers are becoming more sophisticated and capable of more modes of interaction, some of which women find more interesting than men.

Do non-divisive comments not require "very hard data"?

You realize that we create bias if we adopt stricter scrutiny of some hypothesis over others.

All these statements about human nature, the gender gap, and the motivation for 'tinkering late at night' are quite baseless.

Go on, you have a lot of ground to cover before you're going to convince anyone that this is more than just another angry pre-coffee rant.

Other highly technical areas, such as medicine, don't seem to have this problem. The average doctor has a better handle on science and mathematics that the most computer professionals ever had.

I don't think that statement is supported by the facts; for example, only 6 of more than 100 Nobel Prize winners in Medicine are women[0].

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Phys...

If that justifies the argument that "girls dont get math" to you, good luck to you.

Many medical schools have female enrollments in the 40-50% range.

"Computer professionals" are not regulated or licensed, so the term may be too ambiguous to have a meaningful discussion.

But your average engineering or computer science major at a reputable program has to take far more difficult math than your typical premed.

Look through the requirements for medical school admission, and you'll see many do not require more than a single year of calculus.

UCSD, for instance, even provides an easier track of calculus and physics for biology majors, perfectly acceptable for medical school, but unacceptable for math, physics, or most computer science or engineering majors.

http://ucsd.edu/catalog/curric/BIOL-ug.html#major

Yes, I know that anyone is allowed to read a book on PHP and hang out a shingle as a "computer professional", so if you're including them, then sure, I guess the average doctor has a better handle on math. And honestly, I'm glad that this kind of freedom exists in the world of software. But I hope you realize that the math background of a typical CS major from a good university greatly exceeds what is required to go to med school.

This is false.

Any data to contradict GP?

I graduated last May with a degree in CS. I had several friends who were Bio (Pre-Med). The math I was required to take started at a number higher than their highest math requirement. Likewise with statistics -- I saw some of their stat class work, and seemed like a joke to me. Incidentally, in my statistics course, we talked about how doctors don't (as shown by studies) grasp basic principles.

EDIT: I went to a fairly small, but locally very well respected school.

Math is one letter of the STEM acronym that you threw out there. CS is a essentially a branch of applied math, so sure, you have a deeper math background if you have a BS from a rigorous program.

I guess your point is that girls can't hack diff eq? Whatever -- most CS majors know jack about organic chemistry, biology, or other premed programs in undergrad, and know nothing about what is taught in med school.

I guess your point is that girls can't hack diff eq?

No, and it's remarkable that you would conclude that this is my point when all I have addressed, in any way, is the difference in mathematics requirements for college majors typical of "computer professionals" (CS and "related fields") and pre-med or life science programs.

most CS majors know jack about organic chemistry, biology, or other premed programs in undergrad, and know nothing about what is taught in med school.

Right, and most premeds or physicians know very little about differential equations, mathematical optimization or stochastic processes. I didn't claim that CS majors have a better background in life sciences than physicians, but you did make the claim that your average doctor has a better grasp on math than most computer professionals ever had.

I can't figure out if this guy is trolling or not.

count the number of women they know who are fascinated by technology, mathematics and deep, impersonal abstraction

Classic nature vs nurture debate. You have no evidence to support the claim that women are inherently less inclined towards tech (instead of say, conditioned by society to be tech averse).

These social conditioning arguments are always non-sequiters. At some point you have to ask yourself, what conditions society? Something has to create the condition where people begin to notice that engineering and tech is kind of a male thing and, say, nursing, is kind of a female thing on average. Something must have created that original pattern for people to notice it. It doesn't just come out of the ether. Once the pattern exists, it's probably reinforced, but you can't tell me that with all the effort that goes into getting girls into STEM, the tide wouldn't have been turned by now had the phenomenon been based purely on nurture. Plus, you see this pattern all over the world. And it's always evident that there's bias in this argument because nobody gets upset when somebody points out that most elementary school teachers are women. And that leads me to think that there's a lot of people (of the female variety) who deep down believe that what men do is superior to what women do. And that's sad, because it's entirely untrue.

Something has to create the condition where people begin to notice that engineering and tech is kind of a male thing and, say, nursing, is kind of a female thing on average.

Yes, our disagreement is about the cause of those conditions. You've observed a correlation between sex and interest in STEM, but that correlation does not prove that sex is intrinsically linked to interest in STEM. Do you also consider black men to be naturally averse to education because black women graduate college 2:1 compared to black men?

but you can't tell me that with all the effort that goes into getting girls into STEM, the tide wouldn't have been turned by now had the phenomenon been based purely on nurture

It does not follow that women are less inclined towards STEM because efforts to increase women in STEM careers has not "turned the tide"

Women are just as mentally capable as men with regard to STEM, trying to link a nebulous concept such as "natural interest" to sex is absurd.

Talk to a woman from Russia or Eastern Europe about how women don't learn college-level math or how personal individual preferences have anything to do with educational outcomes.

Bio-truths on HN. Why is this not suprising in the least?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com