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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

Not quite - the question is posed with a historical context that has since changed. It is certainly the case that history lacks female authors, but that’s not so true today. Writing is one discipline where women have substantially levelled the playing field.

Other fields do still suffer a deficit of female participation, and the reasons for that are highly debated of course.

Notably for this site, there are vanishingly few female engineers compared to the male population.

My pop explanation is that engineers are produced in a pipeline that starts with games (particularly video games) which are stigmatized in the typical socialization that young girls are subject to.

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The article behind

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39600642

suggests that women did a great deal of coding until home computers became widespread and heavily marketed towards males.

Spot on. “Computers are for boys” is exactly the socialization I’m talking about.

“So when Ordóñez got to Johns Hopkins University in the '80s, she figured she would study computer science or electrical engineering. Then she took her first intro class — and found that most of her male classmates were way ahead of her because they'd grown up playing with computers.”

A programmer is not so different to a tennis player: training begins before age 10. Anyone entering a compsci university course at age 18 without substantial experience of computing has a mountain to climb.

As a further anecdotal observation, I believe elite programming (but not mainstream programming) to be an autistic spectrum trait. Males are diagnosed with ASDs in a 4:1 ratio over females.

Women did a great deal of coding after that as well, they didn't disappear it just added a lot of boys who wanted to program their own games.

If you look at the absolute numbers graph that is obvious, women continued the same path it already had, men had a massive spike with the growth of home gaming. And that is still true today, extremely few girls dream of making their own games even though many of them play games and many games are marketed to women.

It does not seem like men and women are exactly the same tabula rasa to be shaped by society and socialisation. We are shaped to a great degree of course, but I believe in innate differences (on average), and I believe that the first step towards achieving true equality and peace will be understanding those innate differences, appreciating them, and realising that not only they have nothing to do with our intrinsic values, but make us complimentary in a beautiful way.

Absolutely - you don’t even need to venture far into the murky territory of psychological tendencies to observe that the male and female experience is massively shaped by obvious biological differences. These differences are what give rise to the sociological phenomenon of gender stereotypes. Some of these stereotypes have a strong connection to the underlying biology (“women are good at caring for babies”), others might have a small kernel of truth but are mostly obsolete hindrances (“women aren’t good at programming”).

I guess you didn't get the memo. We don't talk about biology anymore.

What do you mean?

Likely James Damore

My personal point of view is that men are on average innately better in programming and in general in logic involving tasks.

A parallel can be drawn to the much higher prevalence of autism in males, which some studies attribute to a less sensitive mirror neuron system.

In contrast, women are much more empathetic and able to acknowledge, process and understand emotions both in others and themselves.

I prefer lifting up explanations for gender segregation in society that provide a bit more explanation of the whole spectrum rather than one work category that happen to sit at very average numbers. The equality paradox in particular is a large hint of a much stronger phenomenon than the pipeline problem.

Group identity is my personal favorite. People self filter on every possible aspect in life, and work choice has gender segregation on a very large number of layers. The teacher profession has gender segregation at the initial start of the pipeline, during the training phase, during the first professional years, during the specialization phase, during the senior phase, and so on. They segregate on which schools they pick, country vs city, and so on.

Sweden has public available statistics on work profession, and it is gathered as part of tax collection so it has very high accuracy. Guess which profession has highest gender segregation, and how high it is. There are no engineer jobs that sits at the 99%, or the 99.8% that is ratio of the single most gender segregated profession.

>Writing is one discipline where women have substantially levelled the playing field.

If we look at quantity the assertion is true.

After 30 years of being highly positive towards more women in CS, and only seeing a handful of actual good examples, I can't get around the observation that women by large can't be bothered with tasks where they have to go deep and invest a lot of time learning new stuff. I just recently had the example in my friend circles. She used to work in a different field, and decided to switch to working with computers as a new job. The original argument was something like "I know how to use MS Word, so I am going to be a computer expert." Then there were 3 intenships, which all ended the same way. And once she was asked to learn Python to do a little coding, she dropped the ball completely and is now trying to become a singer. No joke. And she is not alone. I would love to have different experiences, but anecdotally, females are not willing to invest as much time as males when it comes to tech jobs.

Probably generational, in my experience women have written control systems for the Concorde, full geophysical aquisition and control systems, developed robotic control libraries in the 1980s for bleeding edge technology, built systems for recognising sign language in real time, backends for medical imaging, abstract algebraic engines that have broken proposed quantuum computer proof encryption candidates, and more.

I guess our anecdata varies by the people we surround ourselves with.

Well, reading between the lines it seems like you are working as a coder, given what people you know. Me is just an admin. So that alone explains the difference between our perceived stories.

Perhaps it is sexist attitudes like yours that discourage women from staying in tech. Being targeted by misogyny day in day out isn't exactly a positive work environment.

I am disabled. I am being targeted by random people who treat me like a subhuman on a daily basis. I am being subjected to patronisation on a regular basis. And I am still here, and doing my job. People like you naming me misogynistic is rather low on my list of insults. Dont lecture me about complications when dealing with peers. I know more about that then you will (luckily) ever experience yourself. So keep your accusations, I am not interested. IOW, I have no sympathy for whining. Life is hard, people need to own up, period.

I've always been very supportive of women interested in IT, and yet my experience is also that ... they just aren't as interested as men on average.

Just calling anyone with that experience a misogynist is not helping anyone except your own ego.

Wow, are you seriously generalizing out of your anecdotes? This is incredibly harmful, and reason why women don't feel welcome in CS.

So I guess I can tell you a couple of my anecdotes, to make up for that one, uh?

One: I am an expat in a country with a pretty difficult language. Within my circle of expat friends (all couples), only the women had taken the time, investment and effort to go deep and learn the local language. In ALL cases she knows the language better than her male partner.

Two: At last job I met a woman who moved from accounting to CS in her late 30's. It was her second CS job, and in 3 years she "overtook" me in the company technical ranks, very deservedly so.

I could make a very long list, but I'll leave it here. So please stop being a judging jerk.

Your experiences being positive while mine not so much automatically invalidates mine and makes your more valid? I believe not. I am happy that you have more positive experiences then mine, no worries. However, it is in the human nature that we can only extrapolate from personal experiences. You can believe in things which havent beeen confirmed by your experience, but that is mostly wishful thinking.

Wishful thinking: I believe that the earth is round, even if I have not confirmed it with my own experience by walking around it.

As I also believe that women are as willing and capable to learn "deep stuff" as men, regardless of my (or your) experiences.

Women likes language and things related to social experiences more than men, so you seeing women learning languages faster and better makes sense. You see girls outperforming boys in language classes throughout schools all over the world. But the other side of that coin, boys outperforming girls in technical classes is also a thing.

Both of those things are not true so.

It is 100% true according to all the data we have. Girls are relatively better at language, boys are relatively better at math everywhere.

Look at Figure 2 on page 7, shows every country has a massive gap where girls do much better on reading and boys do much better on maths relatively. The only effect you see is that more progressive countries the girls perform better and better on both, and the less progressive girls do worse and worse until boys are about as good as them at reading but massively better at math, but everywhere you see the same trend of girls preferring reading and boys preferring math.

https://docs.iza.org/dp6338.pdf

And all the studies done to understand those numbers show the difference in outcome is driven by tze social environment and esucation systems, and not the sexe.

You, of course, will ignore that I am sure. I hate it when the menoshpere invades HN, my last save place on the internet. If that continues, I'll just have to leave I guess.

> And all the studies done to understand those numbers show the difference in outcome is driven by tze social environment and esucation systems, and not the sexe.

No this is wrong, the studies done has shown that you can make girls do better and boys do worse by priming them. No study done has shown that you can eliminate this gap, just move it towards boys or girls being advantaged.

> You, of course, will ignore that I am sure

No, I read those studies. The stereotype threat paper just show that you can boost girls performance at the cost of boys performance and thus get equal performance at math, not that you can get relative equal performance at math and language. No such paper has shown that you can eliminate the language-math gap between girls and boys, and all data shows that the language-math divide for boys and girls stays the same.

So, all the progressive help to get girls better at math just made girls equal to boys at math, but now girls has an enormous advantage at language because they boosted girls score overall, they didn't make things equal.

The doing better part is correct, meaning there is no genetical basis for any difference in performance in MINT or language fields.

The part about making boys worse is something you made up.

If we continue this back and forth, I can play menoshpere / anti-feminism / incel talking piont bingo. I don't want to, so I think we can stop now.

> The part about making boys worse is something you made up.

Look at the data yourself, you clearly didn't read the paper, this is the data from the original stereotype threat paper, look at how much worse boys does.

https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C5612AQGW9DDN93toeA/articl...

Now can you please stop calling me ignorant, I clearly have better recollection of these studies than you do.

Recollection =|= Understanding

The point made is correct.

Your own link shows that the "math gap" was eliminated in Finland and Sweden, both countries with very equitable education standards, Finland in particular is often cited for having the best education system in the world.

The very study you linked makes the point that male V. female performance in education appears to be linked to differences in how the sexes are treated, not to innate differences between them

There are other studies, but that is the study that you linked.

Perhaps you fell prey to the "reading gap" ?

> Your own link shows that the "math gap" was eliminated in Finland and Sweden, both countries with very equitable education standards, Finland in particular is often cited for having the best education system in the world.

At the cost of creating a massive language gap. The math-language divide is still there, they just boosted girls score overall they didn't close the gap where girls do relatively better in language and boys math.

So what the poster above saw was that math-language gap in action, women dominated the men in language in their experience, just like the data says we should expect.

> And all the studies done to understand those numbers

Wait, you read "all the studies done to understand those numbers". Pretty huge task for a photographer, kudos!

Thank you! Just wait until you hear that I also have a day job, a family and other hobbies!

Let's rephrase it for the extremely pedandinc and semantic HN crowd: "All the reporting on those studies, and the executive summaries of the studies I read" Better to parse?

So you exaggretated your knowledge for the sake of winning an argument? That pretty much proof my point and experience.

Sometimes it feels like talking to a comoutet or a ginie on HN. Not the slightest ability to understand the meaning of what was said, even when the wording gets corrected, ignoring the whole point and moving the discusssion to input parameter semantics. And thinking this appriach is super smart and edgy.

Frustrating really, and a lazy, disengenious way of argueing a point.

Feel proven so, if it helps you.

Well, current results do not support your posotion. Totally out of chance, local news just reported that MINT-support programs are apparently not improving things. That is pretty much the contrary of what you are trying to claim, backed up by a news article released today

https://science.orf.at/stories/3223967/

But I am sure you will find ways to subsume all HN posters into a perceived partiarchy that is only trying to make your life harder. Go on, I no longer care.

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