What women in technology really think (150 of them at least)
jvns.ca
jvns.ca
I am a woman and recently moved from San Francisco to Portland. The tech community feels totally different here. I've gone to a few meetups and haven't dealt with any of the small (but annoying, insulting and constant) issues I'd learned to try to ignore in San Francisco. It's really re-energized my love for the industry and what I do. If I had taken this survey before and after my move my answers would have been drastically different.
Why?
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
Not that I would consider a google-link evidence of anything; the only thing that it is evidence of is what is "common wisdom". Secondly, a google search is different for everyone: mine showed a lot of links about how women are bigger users of social media, which hardly helps answer any questions in this context. Thirdly, the question is not whether they are more social in general, but whether they are more social in a context of mostly mutual strangers. Even though women might be more social in general, that doesn't necessarily imply that they are more social with strangers.
I don't view the google-link as evidence; more like a way of saying let-me-google-that-for-you-(that wasn't so hard, was it?). You know... kind of like so many other "women are different from men" are "obvious".
I guess you wouldn't like it here.
Break down those barriers! Just walk up to random people and try to find out what makes them tick. It will expand your horizons and make your life more interesting.
Stop making excuses about some perceived need to have an "excuse" and just be friendly to your neighbors. We'll all benefit.
Sure maybe in YOUR culture and place of residence that could be good advice but it could be horrible advice for other cultures/places.
People are also different. Situations are different. In some situations being approached by a stranger can be friendly and some situations it can be very very hostile. Depending on a lot of factors. There is a very serious need to understand when your approach might be hostile to the other party.
I find it interesting that I've been reading a lot of "in my culture/city/experience X therefore X is a universal truth" comments lately.
I am talking about things like this- Friendliness does not make friends in Japan - http://www.uri.edu/iaics/content/2000v10n1/06%20Blaine%20Gos...
The other implication was friendliness is a Good Thing and more friendliness is Better.
The idea that friendliness is even desired with [varying levels of] strangers is cultural specific. Or how much friendliness is acceptable or too much.
I am an oddity in my culture because i wish for much much less friendliness with strangers than my culture dictates is appropriate. I could go for far less stranger friendliness in my life. [Depending on the degree of stranger].
The most important feature of Bell Labs was the long hallway that forced all these very smart people to interact with each other on a regular basis. The reason "everyone" looks back on their college days with nostalgia is the connections they made so readily with others.
The article you linked to states: In all actions, Japanese prefer kindness over friendliness. Friendships form through kindness... I'm honestly not sure what the difference between the two is. The article seems to indicate it's mostly about smiling and over-sharing. Ok, so don't smile too much, remain courteous and kind. I don't see that being too far off, and the article also mentions there are more commonalities in the dynamics of friendships across cultures than there are differences.
Feel free to continue to live your life the way you see fit, the way that makes you the most comfortable and doesn't challenge you. I don't mean for this to sound judgmental; I really do believe you'll be missing out, but it's your choice to make and I don't at all fault you for making it.
The original comment I was replying to was this: People need an actual "excuse" to engage someone, like being at the same event or working together or practising the same sport. That's simply not true, but it is a quite common misconception. I thought I would disabuse the poster of that notion, but I didn't mean to imply that my own way of living life is the only one.
And i am CERTAINLY not opposed to engaging with strangers or challenging myself, in fact that is how i meet my partner, i approached a random stranger.
Connecting with other humans IS a good thing, but asking random strangers "what makes them tick" isn't culturally appropriate in some places and may lead to ostracism and embarrassment, not connection. Depending on your culture.
In any case, I'll make sure to inform others of what they're doing wrong, and that they don't need to be be "oppressed" by these "barriers". And to think, what we all wanted the same thing all along; we just needed you to remind us.
Nor how I live, so where is this mythical "culture" we're all so beholden to? Culture is just the actions and beliefs of a group of people. Historically humans have tended to be pleasant with people in their own group and remarkably unpleasant to "others". Usually this is because they don't understand anyone outside their own group, because they've never explicitly tried to understand them.
So yes, reaching out to others, learning from them, preventing the next world war, preventing the next oppression of a group because they are seen as somehow different from those in power, yes, that is a Good Thing.
- As a man, am I just less clever?
- Where will my job go, if women are apt to take over all our management jobs since they're smarter in relationships and equally good at technical stuff?
- We all agree it's extremely bad when we hear: "Ah no, women aren't clever enough for programming", so what about the opposite?
- Personnaly I have a terrible lack of confidence when it comes to certain tasks. When women experience it, we help them overcome it. Can someone help me also, even though I'm a man?
Stereotyping women on being more social is just unfair, because while we think this way, we fail to see something positive in men.
Edit: You're allowed to downvote, yes, but it would work on excluding me. If you want to do something good to society and something inclusive, you could rather add a comment attaching positive stigma to men, because we rarely hear positive things about men, and that's probably a key cornerstone of the resistence to helping women more.
That's because when it comes to society, data can sometimes be dangerous. Data tells us how the world looks, but whereas in nature the laws are fixed (or so we hope), society is very fluid. This can confuse people. Any data about society is a snapshot of current conditions: it doesn't mean that things have never been different or won't be different, and it most certainly does not tell us that this is how things should be (the latter is the biggest difference between the natural and the social sciences -- in nature there's only "is" while in society there's "is" and "ought" and the two are rarely the same; also, we have at least some power over the structure of our society, while changing nature can be tricky).
This is why data means very different things in physics and sociology, and why -- at least by default, or until proven otherwise -- any sociological data should be understood as: this is how things currently are; should we try to change them?
At any point of time we're trying to force society to be something other than it is.
In 1700 we're assimilating natives. In 1800 we're converting slaves to Christianity. In 1900 we're banishing jews from countries. In 2000 we're enacting laws that favour some over others.
None of these attempts at societal change were ever complete.
Today we're sure changes society tried to make in 1700, 1800, 1900 were misguided and harmful.
I wouldn't be surprised if society in a hundred years will have a different again perspective to what we're doing now.
I would, because the things are completely opposite. One is about subjugating the weak, and the other is about freeing them. I'm surprised you can compare the two! We're not "enacting laws that favor some over others", but laws intended to help communities or groups that have, for centuries or millennia been put down. If you think for one second that women or minorities are somehow "favored" in modern Western society, then you're either blind or delusional. They are still very much disfavored, and some laws are trying to ever-so-lightly tilt the scales a little bit in their favor, and a lot less than they deserve.
In 1700's, europeans thought they were raising the natives to their level. In 1900's, some germans thought they saw jews as having excess privileges and need to be brought down. In 2000's, feminists think men have an excess of privileges in society, and that they need to tilt the scales in women's favor.
> I would, because the things are completely opposite.
They're all instances of trying to pull society from what it is to what it thinks it ought to be.
Also, of all the ways women may be disadvantaged, I don't think freedom is one of them, at least in developed countries. Also, women were never put in chains. If they thought they were being put down, there were many opportunities for them to have thrown down the metaphorical chains and shackles men have placed on them, and overcome their male masters, in the past thousands of years, just like the various native aboriginals who fought against European invaders, as Jews having the tenacity to form dominant minorities in hostile nations and organising to form their own country, and as slaves had done throughout history in various rebellions since the Ancient Roman Empire as well as participating in the fight against American South in the Civil War. Instead all we have is a relatively benign tweaking of laws in their favour. Many of the new laws are definitely beneficial of course; I'd just thought I'd point out a comparison between todays and historical attempts to bridge the difference between what society is and ought to be.
They really didn't. They might have thought they were raising them a bit but never up to their level.
> In 1900's, some germans thought they saw jews as having excess privileges and need to be brought down.
They really didn't. Such propaganda was simply used to make people feel better about the hatred they felt, and to channel it wherever the Nazis wanted.
> In 2000's, feminists think men have an excess of privileges in society, and that they need to tilt the scales in women's favor.
They don't think it; they know it because that's scientifically proven. If you want to put it another way, women have a dearth of privilege.
> They're all instances of trying to pull society from what it is to what it thinks it ought to be.
Yes, in opposite directions.
> Also, women were never put in chains.
Seriously?
> If they thought they were being put down
They don't think, they know.
> there were many opportunities for them to have thrown down the metaphorical chains and shackles men have placed on them
And that's exactly what they're trying to, and have been doing at least since 1848, but it's slow work -- just like those other examples. Have blacks achieved parity with whites in America yet?
> Instead all we have is a relatively benign tweaking of laws in their favour.
First, it's not in their favor, but a little less against it. Second -- the problem of sexism is very different from racism in that women, while subjugated, have never been considered "foreign", and so the power struggle wears a different shape in either direction.
> ... historical attempts to bridge the difference between what society is and ought to be.
Of course it's everyone's duty to help shape society in the form they think it should take, but that doesn't mean the content of those attempts can be compared -- at least not so haphazardly.
The problem with that thinking is it ignores the way women are socialize by society and culture. The way people view themselves is influenced by the culture they grew up in and how society views them in their formative years and the influences they have from the media. These are subtle and not intentional.
You are only looking through your cultural lense.
Is there a reason for this that's more interesting than "Men have, historically and to some extent in the present, been more likely to have the freedom and the resources to accomplish what they set their minds on"? For instance, is there a study that investigates people's dispositions to genius-like behavior and criminal-like behavior, doing everything they can to control for social factors?
There are plenty of truths that aren't very meaningful. I'm totally willing to believe that this one is, I'd just like to see some research on it.
(In particular, if either of these are contingent on structural inequality, then we'd expect both of these to get less true if the arc of history keeps bending the same way, and long-term social designs should not expect these to be reliable.)
I know almost nothing about this subject and this theory could very will be bullshit. Just something I've read.
Men are socialized to 'be smart', competitive, ect. Being a social, caregiver is what women are socialized to do. I never said that either gender, men included, can't do things outside of their roles.
With various spherical-cow-in-a-vaccum-ish assumptions, if women and men are equally qualified, then, by logical implication fully half of all women are below-average, and there are millions of women who are more qualified than every single software engineer at several companies. Neither of these facts are really the point of comparing women and men as an aggregate group.
As a man, as a person on Hacker News, as a person with whatever hair color you have, how clever you are is just how clever you are. That's it. (And this is exactly why we wish to reduce subconscious discrimination: unless there's an actual statistical difference, nobody should be thinking you're more or less clever knowing just your gender, any more than knowing just your hair color.)
Your job is yours, and up to your ambition and capability. The existence of millions of qualified people who don't have your hair color -- and, frankly, millions of qualified, more social people who don't have your hair color -- isn't keeping you out of your job today.
It's bad to hear "Women aren't clever enough for programming" because years of research have failed to find rational basis for this belief. If there is rational basis for a belief (and if the belief is stated in a way that doesn't cause most people to react to it irrationally), then sure, let's say it.
I'd be thrilled to help you with lack of confidence in anything I'm qualified to help with. I'm not particularly likely to do so in a subgroup situation, since this is something you yourself say is "personally" yours, but yes. I'm also happy to support organizations that do help groups where the group is relevant, and definitely happy to support all people with confidence in group situations where there isn't any definition of the group.
Worse yet. We claim women are social in a positive manner, and then claim men being social are promoting a negative "bro" culture, something that isn't inclusive of women or has an explicit agenda if it is.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/more-women-... [2] http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/08/28/google_mater...
Very much agree that learning from other industries should happen, and I've asked myself the same question. Why is computer science moving backwards, when other traditionally male fields have become much more gender balanced?
You also have to take into consideration that some people simply don't have ambition for anything beyond their current job.
As for "computer science" moving backwards, I suspect the gender distribution would be similar in any other STEM related major. Nowadays, I question the validity of a CS major entirely. Yes, you will formalize your knowledge, but I think actually coding on your own will teach you more practical knowledge. Women historically tend not to be very well represented in disciplines with formal domains of knowledge, though this trend is changing, albeit slowly. People also tend to forget the pioneers of AI and formal CS theory had women who made great strides in the fields. So I'm not sure the industry is necessarily moving backwards. Perhaps it's not moving as fast as you want it to :)
You'd be wrong:
http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor....
The percentage of degrees conferred to women in CS is down from 35% in the mid-1980's to under 20% today. The field is in fact moving backwards. Meanwhile, over 40% of the degrees conferred in math & statistics and physical sciences (the "S" and "M" in "STEM") go to women.
That's my long-winded way of saying that CS "moving backwards" is not as accurate as "failing to fix problems that were already there, but not affecting CS as much until it grew up as an industry".
I think one of the hardest things for people in tech to admit is that an uneven gender ratio is by itself a deterrent to talented women considering the profession. You can say that people shouldn't care about same-gender mentors and co-workers, etc, but at the end of the day, people care about fitting in and they don't want to have to ride against the current their whole career. A bright young woman considering law school, where she'll be in a 50-50 environment, or engineering school, where she'll be in a 20-80 environment, has a natural disinclination to choose the latter.
In my time at university, I have never seen a female computer science major have trouble finding opportunities, even if they were miserable coders. The fact that they bring "balance and diversity" to a team apparently is already enough of a qualification for some companies.
That being said, I think the undersupply of programmers is so severe that even if this subconscious bias was corrected it wouldn't increase the supply of people enough that it would necessitate "hiring less men as a result."
But that doesn't mean that the solution is to do nothing.
The solution is to higher more women and at the same time taking steps to destroy the gender roles that stop them from going into STEM fields and encouraging them to join STEM fields.
There is a very good reason for at least part of this (read the tables not the titles):
http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf
By the time we finished the degree, there were no women.
And yet tech companies are now being told that in order to bring about equality, they must hire the comparatively tiny number of women making it through these courses over similarly qualified men, simply for the sake of doing so.
Man, I wonder how we're managing to hire so many competent female engineers. It must be rough for all you poor companies that women don't want to apply to.
I agree, but law and medicine weren't always ~50% male/female and the comment you're replying to was suggesting we [tech] learn from them. So you can't dismiss it as an unsolvable problem that feeds itself (there aren't many female developers so it deters women to become developers) since this has been solved in law and medicine.
OTOH a male doctor is probably not as likely to encourage his son to become a nurse because that is generally perceived as a step down in terms of prestige and pay.
To quote nytimes: Some college psychology programs cannot even attract male applicants, much less students. And at many therapists’ conferences, attendees with salt-and-pepper beards wander the hallways as lonely as peaceniks at a gun fair.
It seems eerily familiar, and the reports from male student feeling excluded seems to echo the exact same statement we can find in the tech profession from female students.
What is not similar in the article is how the tech profession look at the result from gender distribution. The nytime article states that: the impact on the value of therapy is negligible. A good therapist is a good therapist, male or female, and a mediocre one is a mediocre one.
Women dominate PR, Nursing, Child care and Therapy? No problem, women are better at these jobs anyway
Men dominate engineering? Patriarchy!
The tech industry is considered a much more significant source of power than psychotherapy (this is probably objectively true, but even if it weren't, being considered to hold more power makes it so), and so the underrepresentation of women in blacks in that industry is much more concerning and much more important. It's also the reason why the under-representation of whites in basketball is less concerning than that of blacks in Congress. Whites aren't marginalized away from power by being mostly absent from basketball, but the same cannot be said about blacks in politics.
But I guess actual consumers don't count.
Further, your talk of power is silly. As obamacare demonstrates ("mental health parity"), therapists and such do have power.
And I wasn't saying therapists don't have any power. But I think even you will agree that Google, Apple and Facebook have a lot more power over the world than a psychiatrist. Note how in tech, power can be concentrated in a few corporations, while in therapy, power is a lot more distributed. Also, in therapy, teaching, and nursing, most central authorities are often democratically elected, and in any case are a lot more open than private corporations. It's a more diffuse kind of power.
Also, the mention of nursing, education and even psychotherapy (though the last may be different) is a little disingenuous because a major reason for the under-representation of men in those fields is also sexism -- Those professions aren't considered "manly" -- rather than any discrimination against men.
Finally, my talk of power isn't silly, but in line with the humongous body of research done on the subject. In other words, it's informed.
Unless you can articulate why something is actually bad for human beings, as opposed to "society" or "large groups", it'll be pretty hard to convince thinking people that there is any reason to care.
Note that the political theory that society should unify and govern to benefit the "corporates" (power groups) and that the individual is irrelevant went out of fashion a long time ago. I'm deliberately not using the name of this theory since it provokes strong emotional reactions in people.
For any reasonable definition of power (which you haven't provided), Google has more power than an individual therapist. So what? You might as well say that any individual Google engineer has less power than than the AMA or other medical lobbying groups. That's also a true statement.
If you really believe tech companies have power comparable to the medical establishment, can you name the last time tech orchestrated a giveaway of other people's money comparable in scale to "mental health parity" (to name one example coming out of medicine)?
And I don't understand what your personal political opinions about taxes and private property have to do with sociology. The discussion about access to central power in a democratic nation is an interesting one, but irrelevant here.
vs
But I think even you will agree that Google, Apple and Facebook have a lot more power over the world than a psychiatrist.
Saying that the fields are recruiting men is no more to the point than saying CS departments are recruiting women: it doesn't matter if you don't address the toxic social environment as well.
Yes, people do think its a problem, but the efforts to counter that problem is not even close as with women in technical fields. It easier to just put the blame on men, claiming that they do not want to do those jobs.
Speaking of minnows, I can't say I have ever heard of a female conference or affirmative action ever being suggested to solve the gender distribution in the commercial fishing industry. No-one is creating female-only commercial fishing licences. No politician is dedicating budgets in order to fix it. Commercial fishing is a bigger and more lucrative profession than therapy, yet there's no work towards affirmative action there.
So what does it mean that we can find specific, small industries here and there that don't have explicit action in these areas? Shall we continue to base arguments on the minnows, avoiding the larger stories about the bigger fish?
I think one of the hardest things for people in tech to admit is that an uneven gender ratio is by itself a deterrent to talented women considering the profession.
It is indeed hard for activists/SJWs to admit that women's choices and intolerance of difference are partly the cause for women being underrepresented. But I suspect activists aren't the group you were referring to.
Anecdotally I also don't think you statement "people care about" is correct, at least w.r.t. gender/race. Most of the white and asian men I know are far more likely to have a problem joining a group of Windows users or IDE users than a demographically different group.
I'm equally impressed but do we a) know what they did and b) is their solution transferable to other professions?
And with regards to school[2]: "Research finds that men engage in more abstract thinking about many topics—using categories, generalizations—while women are more disposed to context-specific thinking—in terms of concrete situations and relationships. This is evident, for one thing, in how some psychologists contrast the moral reasoning of males and females. Males’ moral judgments tend to be governed by abstract principles of justice, duty, and fairness that apply to all people and situations (e.g., whether a law is broken, whether justice is served). Females’ moral judgments give more weight to specific relationships between people and extenuating circumstances in a given situation; moral judgments are made through subjective feelings (e.g., whether someone feels betrayed or harmed) rather than abstract principles."
And we know from other research, that people who fail in introductory programming classes, fail on that point exactly - they have problems with working with programs that manipulate variables without some meaning.
Add to that that in many fields of study women choose, there's relatively a lot of human interactions, and the goals are towards helping humans,one would see why CS doesn't have the biggest appeal for females ,and why the story of other professions evolved differently.
And that might guide us to some changes in CS curriculum - like maybe teaching in a more concrete way. But one wonders , isn't good CS mostly about abstraction ?
[1]http://onlinelaw.wustl.edu/women-law-infographic/
[2]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-roles-and-seei...
But you're right, it's not fair. But I don't think this particular problem is isolated to tech.
But you're right, the disparity in most of these movies tends to be more central to the plot than when it's an older man dating a younger woman.
Personal example: I'm recently married, and you wouldn't believe the time my wife has had getting her username changed to reflect her new last name (an issue because her employer bases usernames/emails on their first + last names). This means she gets to explain every single time she gives out her email (internally) why its not the expected pattern, but rather a seemingly arbitrary string.
Its not the end of the world of course, or even that big of a deal when you consider it individually. But its one more thing that's not accessibly designed, and its hard to get a male dominated culture to care.
FWIW, I changed my last name too, but I own my company, and we use first names for our emails anyway, so I was lucky.
If you own your company, make sure you're getting this right. If you let people choose their usernames, and change them easily, you can cover this case and many others. [1]
[1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
Really? I can't imagine that being the case in a workplace. Particularly considering that name is the one that'd be set on their email account.
I reverted it a few months later when I felt the joke was tired, but people can do pretty whimsical things with their company channels if you let them.
Example:
I want the email address john@... clearly that should not be allowed, because potentially sensitive emails might be directed at the wrong John.
This happened all the time at my company, and people got irritated at me for disallowing first name login names. I even had the example, at one point, of 3 David's working for us.
So, all this push back on my original statement has me really thinking the replies are completely disingenuous. It's just too easy to come up with a reasonable case where a name should not be allowed.
When you are large enough first names no longer work.
-regular checkins -coaches/mentors -make sure that everyone participates in meetings/dev huddles. Often toxic environments stem from just a few individuals who are louder than everyone else. No one else is ever heard and doesn't feel like part of the team. -make sure people feel empowered to do their job and more. get rid of micromanagers. -management should be open to feedback and act on it.
Feedback is the key ingredient. Make sure employees have a channel to voice their opinions and that it is acted on.
An inclusive work place also points out and immediately acts when teammates do things that are NOT inclusive e.g. racist or sexist jokes. That's a way of showing that you care about your teammates and their work environment.
early socialization is key, be it puppies or children. The fact of life is that tech is statistically male populated environment and by the college graduation time it is just too late (after 20 years of separate pink cuteness for girls and blue coolness for boys one can only wonder what synergy would get unleashed once a pink cutie venture into the blue pack territory). Girls should be exposed to sciences/tech and working together with their male peers on complex projects very early in the K-12 system. That would also naturally adjust males behavior too. And thus just 20 years down the road ...
I think most people here agree with that statement. The problem is realizing how difficult that is to accomplish when the field is almost in a paradox of male control. The key will always be early exposure to STEM and people that aren't like yourself, but currently this is difficult for women because they are forced into lower self esteem on average than men.
Once women feel like they have the same amount of power in society as men, that's when we start to focus on social adjustment at an early age. Until then, it remains very hard for female-identified persons to "adjust themselves" when they lack adequate role models.
It isn't though. Being mostly male does not make it male controlled. There is no evil cabal of men trying to keep us out. The vast majority of men in the CS world are falling all over themselves trying to cater to women.
>but currently this is difficult for women because they are forced into lower self esteem on average than men.
What are you basing that on?
>Once women feel like they have the same amount of power in society as men
As long as we refuse to acknowledge reality, that will never happen. We have more power in society than men. We elect the government, we set the agenda, the laws are catered to us. Men still haven't even escaped from basic gender norms.
I'm not saying there's an evil cabal. To the contrary, nearly all of sexism is subconscious. There are a few people that consciously hate women. We call these people misogynists. Most people are sexist. Most people are not, however, misogynists. And falling over themselves trying to cater to women? Why is it, then, that when Jeff Atwood posted his "What Men Can Do" article, and was called out by feminists for mansplaining, (and Mr. Atwood himself was very deliberately sexist in the comments to boot) that the feminists were viciously attacked by a sea of technically oriented white men?
>What are you basing that on?
Why do you think there are fewer women in STEM fields to begin with? Because they genuinely aren't capable? No, it's because from a very early age most people who are born female are forced into the female gender role. Males are forced into the typical male gender role. And yes, the female gender role includes low self esteem and male dependance.
>As long as we refuse to acknowledge reality, that will never happen. We have more power in society than men. We elect the government, we set the agenda, the laws are catered to us. Men still haven't even escaped from basic gender norms.
So you make the claim that women have more power in society than men, but go on to claim that you singlehandedly elect the government, set the agenda, AND cater the laws to yourself? Then why exactly is the country in the process of taking a very anti-feminist approach to reproductive rights? Why is government so male dominated? Why are so many fields dominated by one gender, be it male or female? Putting aside the fact that you don't quite understand what gender roles/norms are, is it not concerning to you that government is an extremely male dominated field and yet you believe you're in power?
You also seem to imply that I identify as female. I do not.
And you are basing that on what?
>Why is it, then, that when Jeff Atwood posted his "What Men Can Do" article, and was called out by feminists for mansplaining, (and Mr. Atwood himself was very deliberately sexist in the comments to boot) that the feminists were viciously attacked by a sea of technically oriented white men?
What an absurdly loaded question. Because feminists were attacking an ally over nothing. "Mansplaining" is not a thing, it is a term made up specifically by sexists to dismiss people they do not wish to be heard.
>Why do you think there are fewer women in STEM fields to begin with?
Because most women do not wish to be in STEM fields.
>No, it's because from a very early age most people who are born female are forced into the female gender role
Again, what are you basing that on? All scientific evidence suggests that gender roles are deeply rooted in our genes. There is absolutely no evidence to support the widely discredited nurture only hypothesis.
>And yes, the female gender role includes low self esteem and male dependance.
No it does not.
>Then why exactly is the country in the process of taking a very anti-feminist approach to reproductive rights?
It isn't. And why do you conflate "anti-feminist" with anti woman? Most women are not feminists, and do not support feminism.
>Why is government so male dominated?
Because few women wish to be in government. Notice how often we get elected when we run?
>Putting aside the fact that you don't quite understand what gender roles/norms are, is it not concerning to you that government is an extremely male dominated field and yet you believe you're in power?
Putting aside your condescending lie, no, why would that concern me? I do not care what sex organs the people I elect posses, I care that they do what we elect them to do. They overwhelmingly introduce, support, and vote for things that women want. Even when they are outright sexist things that women should not be seeking like remedies to the mythological wage gap.
>You also seem to imply that I identify as female.
I seem to do no such thing.
No personal attacks on Hacker News, please, regardless of how provocative someone else may have been.
All: Please keep this thread civil and substantive.
Guess how much I care?
The term "feminist" is being tossed around pretty casually, too. That's convenient for both sides of the argument but unfortunate for truth-seeking, since the term can mean whatever the arguer wants it to be. I presume most women do in fact want equal rights, for instance. Most women probably don't want the end of all men.
The term "STEM" is also being used haphazardly. Your assertion that "most women do not wish to be in STEM fields" doesn't square with the facts. What would have been more accurate would be to say that most women don't want to work in computer science. But that's a less defensible gap; it's hard to come up with a compelling reason why women would want to be chemists, doctors, or actuaries, but not computer scientists.
That aside: yes, I was intending to suggest that your previous argument was fallacious. I don't believe the premise of your argument was valid. But even had it been, it would still not answer the question it pretends to answer.
One the one hand, we have a female who has a very accurate understanding of evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, genetics, and logic. Her arguments are logically coherent and validated by centuries of empirical science.
On the other hand, we have a male who has violated Occam's Razor so many times that he has completely annihilated any hope of a coherent hypothesis. His arguments imply conspiracy theories behind the formation of family, society, government, and history itself. All reason is abandoned, and science ignored.
Now the question is...does it really matter which position the male took vs. the female? One of these arguments is far more coherent than the other. Which position an individual supports reveals far more about the person than about the true nature of sexual dimorphism, since the laws of the universe do not suddenly change to cater to the opinions of a few misinformed primates.
EDIT: Hello tctapek! Thanks for the downvote. In case you one day want to educate yourself about the science behind human biology (and its numerous resultant consequences), here are a few books you'll no doubt find elucidating:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Queen:_Sex_and_the_Evol...
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Animal
For some advanced reading, you can move onto the Extended Phenotype by Dawkins, and the references contained therein.
Enjoy, and remember, the world is yours to discover! Science will always be waiting.
EDIT 2: If you lack the patience for all that, here (http://edge.org/memberbio/helena_cronin) is an expert in the field who explains all of imanaccount247's assertions in video format. Enjoy!
It is typical position of an "enlightened reasonable conservative". A very successful and stable position in modern society (and on this site in particular). At first look one may think that extremal morons are the ones presenting main obstacle to progress, yet looking just a bit more one can see that it is the reasonable conservatives in the middle who form the humongous main unmovable mass.
>One the one hand, we have a female who has a very accurate understanding of evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, genetics, and logic. Her arguments are logically coherent and validated by centuries of empirical science.
all these coherent arguments are just like waves splashing against the stone. No chance. It isn't a game of logic and reason, even though it may look so.
So I guess programming must be a girl thing, according to this logic.
I think the parent's (and general) argument against that is that we are socialized early on to have biases. That if you grow up exposed to a situation were a majority of those in a field are unlike you in some very obvious way, you are less likely to want to be in the field.
The argument is that traditionally underrepresented groups ( obvious things like race, gender) might benefit from being exposed to prominent figures in the desired field early on.
I don't think we can accurately claim "few women wish to be in X field" without some form of empirical data to back it up. And even if it was true that fewer women wanted to be in STEM fields, is this simply a reinforcement of the fact that few exist in the field to begin with?
Yes, but there is strong evidence that it is more nature than nurture.
>That if you grow up exposed to a situation were a majority of those in a field are unlike you in some very obvious way, you are less likely to want to be in the field.
Except I did grow up like that, and it did not influence what fields I was interested in at all.
>I don't think we can accurately claim "few women wish to be in X field" without some form of empirical data to back it up.
Many studies have shown innate gender preferences begin before socialization. It seems unlikely that STEM is somehow uniquely affected by it. Especially since the number of women in CS has been going down as we've been making such a big fuss about women in CS.
Is there? Where? And if it truly is nature over nurture, then why is it that women are interested in STEM at all? Why isn't the field entirely male instead of majority male? And the answer is, because people are different. Yes, they have different preferences. Yes, those preferences differ by gender. No, it is not solidly linked to genetics.
Do you mind providing links/references that support the claim? That would be very helpful for the overall argument.
I also grew up in a similar fashion. But I don't think we can accurately extrapolate our anecdotal data over an entire population, no?
I agree that it is hard to tell whether something is nature vs nurture and it is rather short-sighted for us to blindly assume that all disinterest by a group in a field is due to nurture, but I don't have hard data backing it up. Mind sharing if you have any?
In fact, the most logical explanation for systemic gender bias in the industry involves virtually no intentionality on the part of men, and is still deeply damaging to women.
Gingerly, I'd like also to remind you that you haven't responded to the core point of my comment, which is that the argument you chose to rebut the grandparent comment was fallacious on its face. Even if you don't believe in the concept of "privilege", which is a hot-button word, it's still not valid to argue that the lack of an evil cabal means women aren't systematically disfavored by the technology industry.
why "privilege"? it is just recently so happened that due to some quirks of human economical and technological organization the job [blue collar job of 21st century really] is relatively well paid today in some geographical areas of well developed countries. Just a sheer luck (if not count for significantly damaged eyesight). May easily be not such luck tomorrow - just ask the guys who held the good paying middle-class jobs in Detroit when it was all the rage.
>accorded unintentionally
well, yes. 25 years ago i didn't see any girl wanting to sneak with us at night into the University datacenter to get some machine time (on USSR clone of IBM-360), smoke cheap unfiltered cigarettes, drink watered down ethanol while gaming or reading through meters of printed out memory hex-dumps ... Definitely the environment wasn't attractive to girls [or to anybody else except us fascinated by computers], and honestly i can't even imagine how it could have been otherwise even theoretically ...
That to me is the reason why there are not much women senior-level engineers around. Because one needs to sow long before one can harvest. You wanna women doing that job 20 years from now - you need to start working toward that goal at least today, if not yesterday, preferably starting at early school.
Some rando upthread accused me of violating Occam's Razor.
To the contrary: CS seems especially social compared to the hard sciences --- people work on teams and discuss trivia endlessly in a variety of venues.
The participation of women in other STEM fields is very inconvenient to your argument, which you've made clearly and repeatedly, that the gender gap in computer science owes largely to a preference among women to avoid CS.
Partly because people want more people that are like themselves. Which is ironically the problem with this whole gender imbalance thing in the first place.
That's a broad brush. Go to any biological sciences program and you'll see that woman are by far the majority. Even when I was doing it 20 years ago.
Can I ask for some opinions on this...
What if we took this approach, which is one I personally support as I don't think trying to retrofit equality into the industry by way of gender quotas is right at all, but yet the outcome is the same? What if, after investing time and effort into getting children into technology at a very young age, regardless of demographic, we still see white and asian males dominate the field 20 years down the line?
Do we accept that outcome? Or how much harder will we push to force equality in this area?
Correlation between the answers to "If you were to leave tech" question also wn't hurt.
Finds: - The most frustrating thing is not seeing the career path. I guess it's for men too. - Around half of respondents need help in fighting imposter syndrome. This is weird. I mean, we all sometimes doubt ourself, but there's nobody better than us there.
",hbmnbvh" provided as an employer - any luck in decoding that? I thought this is cyrillic in the wrong keyboard layout but it resolves to garbage too.
Maybe I'm too geeky and other people actually need physical humans like themself to cling to? :) That's a weird idea.
A huge issue is that many, many people don't recognize that not everyone has the same needs as them. It's actually very refreshing to see someone point this out, even if it's in a sarcastic way.
Too often conversation take a turn into "Well I did X without help, why should anyone else need help to accomplish the same thing". It's counterproductive to learning in general.
Except that imposter syndrome is just as common in men.
"Clance & Imes (1978) postulated that the experience would be more prevalent among females because of societal stereotyping of women as less capable than men ... Studies of college students (Harvey, 1981; Bussotti, 1990; Langford, 1990), college professors (Topping, 1983), and successful professionals (Dingman, 1987) have all failed, however, to reveal any sex differences in impostor feelings"
My point is that a handful of studies decades ago may have been correct: then. However, I think any sane person would agree that the conclusions drawn from that era have very little bearing on how the world operates today. Information asymmetry was extremely high in academia back then, because academics were not really scrutinized as they are today.
More recent studies affirm a gender gap in "impostor syndrome"; it was easy to find one from 2008 on Google Scholar, and I quickly stopped looking.
That's always the first thing to go out the window unfortunately. Everyone wants their opinion to be more than just their opinion, so they pretend it is the opinion.