Comment by lambdaphage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lambdaphage | Hacker News Reader

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The interesting thing about medicine and law is that they are professions that deal with human needs and social relationships. As formal barriers were removed, the percentage of law and medical degrees awarded to women steadily increased to parity:

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/hua_hsu/cohen_do...

The graph doesn't show the last few years, but I believe medicine is over 50% women now.

Compare this to computer science. I can't find easily find data for Ph.D.s or master's degrees, so here is bachelor's degrees over roughly the same period:

http://core0.staticworld.net/images/idge/imported/article/ct...

Lastly, for contrast, look what happened to vet school:

https://www.avma.org/News/JAVMANews/PublishingImages/100215g...

(NB: technically enrollment rather than completion.) That looks to me pretty clearly like a thumb lifting off the scale.

I do not think the quantity of sexism in CS is zero. Yet from my experience of CS and law, I have a hard time believing that there is more bad behavior, (on the order of a 200-300% difference) among computer scientists than among lawyers. Maybe I'm wrong about that?

In any case I think comparisons to medicine and law actually raise more questions than they answer.

At some level of scale medicine and law are about human and social needs, but at that same level of scale, programming is about social and consumer needs. Yet by that chart you posted, the level of CS degrees awarded to women in the era of Twitter is half of what it was in the era of Lotus 123. And what about accounting? Big 4 accounting firms are close to parity. And I'm not sure how different the professions are at the lowest levels. Poring through a spreadsheet trying to tie-up a number that's off isn't much different than poring over a core dump. Yet half the people who do the former are women.

I debated how to present the CS data, because there are a few things going on there. Here are the raw counts:

http://images.techhive.com/images/idge/imported/article/ctw/...

The two spikes circa 1985 and 2003 are also present in the men's data.

What we see is not women checking out of CS, but much more men getting into it, hence the percentage of degrees awarded to women goes down.

Your point about accounting is an interesting one. I suspect it's explained by this: http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students...

Your first point is a non-explanation. If the conjecture is that the preference for CS is based on inherent factors, that doesn't explain why the preference ratio would change over time. Did the nature of programming change in 1985 and 2003 to make it more attractive to men?

Disclaimer: the sources below are controversial. The below is not necessarily an endorsement of these conclusions, but an attempt to address them on their own terms.

Regarding your second point. At the ranges in question, the male-female disparity is not enough to explain the observed results. I'm going to rely on SAT Math data, because that's more rigorously studied than what you posted. The male-female disparity among people with perfect SAT Math scores is less than 2-1: http://www.aei.org/publication/2013-sat-test-results-show-th.... So that might explain why only 40%+ of math majors are women. It doesn't explain why less than 20% of CS majors are women, or why that ratio has fallen by half even as the field has become less mathematically rigorous.

Also, there is quite a lot of evidence that women outperform their SAT Math scores relative to men: http://esd.mit.edu/Headline/widnall_presentation.html ("He found that women outperform their predictions. That is, that women perform better as students than their math SAT scores would predict. The effective predictive gap is about 30 points.") It is interesting to note that men also outperform women at the upper range of MCAT and LSAT scores, by similar margins. Yet, differences in observed performance in medical and law school by gender are slim to non-existant, and those professions have an even number of men and women, at least at the degree and entry level.

I don't think aptitude explains the disparity if you actually delve into the data. I think it can be explained by: http://iangent.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-petrie-multiplier-wh...

> medicine is over 50% women now.

medicine is over 50% women now (everyone at every level) or doctors are over 50% women now? If it's the former, I'm wondering if it has more to do with the industry becoming more equal or if the demand for nurses has gone up much faster than the demand for doctors.

This is not to say that doctors are more likely to be men than women (I happen to think it's roughly equal based on my own experiences), but that nurses are far more likely to be women because nursing is a profession that has been overwhelmingly female, and one in which men are discouraged from participating.

I was referring to M.D.'s.

Male physicians outnumber female physicians in the United States. 66% are male.

source: http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/physicians-by-gender/

Worldwide, it varies from country to country, but the are more male physicians than female physicians in every country except Algeria, Cabo Verde, Czech Republic, Estonia, Guinea and Mongolia.

source: http://apps.who.int/gho/data/?theme=main&vid=92400

Are you only referring to recent m.d. licenses? If so, what are the numbers there? I couldn't find them.

Software development at the highest level and at scale has everything to do with human needs and social relationships.

Maybe if you're writing an app solo in your bedroom it doesn't, but that's not how the vast majority of industrial software gets written.

All jobs require some dealing with people and some dealing with things. Does that imply no difference between the fractions of the day that software engineers and social workers spend systematizing vs. empathizing?

But let's examine the point more closely: what is the name for the department that is explicitly in charge of managing human needs and social relationships at a large software development company? Who tends to prefer those jobs?

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