What is up with the obsession to get women coding? Why does it matter? You don't see anything like this in female-dominated professions.
Nursing: http://www.minoritynurse.com/tags/men-nursing
Teaching: http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2013/mar/23/advocates-say...
".. who bring a different perspective to the job, may connect better with some children and can provide positive male figures in their lives."
Same goes for women in technology or any other misrepresented field.
This is one of the ways in which you recognize that something weird is going on with American politics. While it's a good thing to have lawyers in Congress, it's kinda weird that they're overwhelmingly lawyers.
What are you basing that assumption on? You are 100% certain that there is no possible way that men and women could have different preferences, priorities or interests?
In regards to Congress, it kind of makes sense to me they would be overwhelmingly from a law background - after all, the ones who know law best and are interested in law are most likely to want to have the ability to change it.
That's not quite what I'm supposing.
I'm supposing that the choices of individual people without external pressures will always choose things unpredictably. In other words, correlation between individual choice and any particular demographic facet of a person should be pure chance.
This is how random number generators work. You want to provide as even a distribution as possible. That doesn't change the fact that, given a certain seed, the generator will always return the same "random" result.
The analogy comes back around like this: if you can reliably predict that a random number generator will return a number divisible by 3 if the input is odd, there's something weird going on even if some results are not divisible by 3. Chances are, if you look at the RNG's algorithm, you'll find something that creates that bias.
Do you care? Is that an issue? Is that a vulnerability? That's an entirely different question. As software engineers, we'd call it a business or design decision. In the wider world, we call it morality or ethics.
Edit to add: One of the consequences of this perspective is that it factors in any demographic variety, not just "men and women". If someone has a chromosomal set of XXY, then it still makes sense to consider their representation. That it's vanishingly small, such that they rarely register a blip on populations smaller than "the entire world", is part of the same analysis.
Would you like a) a beer, b) a hot chocolate ...
Hmm, I'm sure it'll be a random distribution with equal weighting of men and women.
Is it really that weird that lawyers predominant in a legislative field? It seems like it would be the least weird tendency - like if street cleaners, dental hygenists or pop-stars were predominant that would be weird.
Nah. Usually I'm actually arguing on the other side of this one. But it seemed like a good example for illustrating how biases can be systemic to ethics-illiterate techies, since a remarkably large number of HNers are allergic to having respect for lawyers.
And teachers? That has to be the MOST important group where we should absolutely have equal representation.
I would mostly agree with that. A lot of people probably would. But we don't see a huge number of "guys who teach" or "black guys teach" type programs popping up all over. We don't see article after article full of disdain for the "girls club" that is teaching. It is not just a gender thing. We don't see many "girls who drive trucks" programs either. I think it is some what of a phenomenon having such a large push to specifically get women into coding specifically. It just seems quite disproportionate. I'd like to see more push from other "one gender dominated" fields. [EDIT] Maybe there is and I just don't see it since I'm not in one of those other fields.
Sounds like your uncle is finally realizing a desire he's had for many years. Best of luck to him.
You don't see a huge number of "girls code" programs, either, you just think you do because some of them have press and you're pretty deep in the culture of software development. Not a bad thing, mind you! But we have to keep in mind observational bias.
And we pay our teachers like crap. Which confuses me even more about the teachers that clearly don't care for teaching by the way they half-ass the job. Clearly they are not in it for the money.
As a "traditionally female" occupation, K-12 teaching is woefully underpaid relative to, say, police or firemen. In the SF Bay Area, teaching is just not a middle-class profession at all.
Someone made the point long before I did that while we are grateful that women have so many more professional possibilities, it does mean a loss of many of the best women for the traditionally-female professions of nursing, "librarian-ing" and above all teaching. Just as engineering and science and medicine lose STEM minds to Wall Street and app-design shops.
Where I live, cops make $150K. Teachers make a lot less.
I'd really disagree with that. It means the best women are heads of those departments, not that they are lost from the profession.
His post directly contradicts that statement, period. The supposed reputability of those sites are irrelevant, especially considering the basis for your own statement is the HN tech bubble.
I can get behind that cause.
The remainder of it though, in my opinion, is a bouillabaisse of "it's never enough-ism" from a small group of hardcore feminists, hand-wringing from me-tooers, approval-seekers and undecideds, and some genuinely decent people who have nevertheless been hurt by specific cases of sexism and disproportionately react.
It is cyclical. It is a well-intentioned cause, but many times it is myopic.
I'd like to think that females could have a similar experience in CS degrees at some point.
Given that approximately 50% of the population (and ~60% of the "educated" population) are women, it's abnormal for a sector to be so heavily male. This indicates that women are being discouraged, in some way, from entering the sector. Women who might otherwise have contributed a great deal to our industry.
Think of it more about (nearly) doubling the potential number of excellent software engineers than about "encouraging women to code".
So, you're saying that aside from the numerical value, a set of people with an average testosterone level of ~500ng/dL are exactly the same as a set of people with an average testosterone level of ~20?
To deny that hormones exert a tremendous influence over our behaviors and motivations is absurd.
Possibly so, but there's plenty of evidence that testosterone levels affect someone's willingness to work long, tedious hours in isolation in exchange for a higher salary, and give up their personal time for career advancement.
> to learn how all of those studies have proven flawed/heavily biased
Notice the extreme impression you've gotten from this book. She does not "prove" flaws in all research on this topic, though often her criticisms are valid she chooses areas to criticize and hints that it's representative of all research that show gender differences.
She could have also chosen to criticize studies which attempt to disprove gender differences, which are often just as flawed.
Touted as such by whom? It sounds like just Baron-Cohen et al. Your comment gave the impression that "all" studies of gender differences have been refuted.
The most well-known, replicated, large effect study that I'm aware of I searched for and didn't find any reference to in her book. http://www.elainehatfield.com/79.pdf
You absolutely do. K-8 teaching and psychotherapy come to mind. Anecdotally, the ratios are the inverse of what we see in tech. Men are in huge demand.
Because computer geeks don't push back hard enough against overtime requests (a social skills issue again), and so have a hard time meeting anyone they don't work with?
Because unlike many jobs, much of computer programming also makes for good hobbies, so we spend a greater fraction of our time associating with like-minded people (and would like for said group to include women)?
You don't see anything like this in female-dominated professions.
But only because we're too insular to notice (again, a social skills issue).
Anyway, if the shoe were on the other foot, as a male feminist I would be in favor of getting more men coding.