Women in Science | Hacker News Reader

Women in Science

philip.greenspun.com

29 pointsacangiano35 comments

As an actual woman in computing, who's not particularly interested in having kids and chose her career for practical reasons, I find this article (and many other articles and comments like it, written by men and relying on stereotypes and blatant assumption) to be offensive.

And before you tell me to grow a thicker skin: by calling this offensive, I don't intend to squash anyone's ability to speak. But I absolutely have the right to be pissed off when someone pretends to speak for me. It makes me lose respect for the person who thinks they can pontificate about someone else's experience and motivations.

I'm an actual woman in computing WITH kids, and I found the article offensive, as well. There's something in there for all of us to dislike.

Didn't he explicitly not speak about women like you (who go into science/engineering), but about women who choose a different way of life?

Yes, based on stereotypes and blatant assumptions. Do you really think a significant portion of people in this world make a conscious choice to survive on child support rather than following an interesting career?

He's talking about the CHOICE of whether to enter a STEM career as a woman. I faced that choice just as any other woman did, and believe me that most of the purported reasons mentioned in that article weren't part of the equation at all.

Regardless, the fact that I'm in computer science doesn't make the author any more qualified to talk about women's experiences and motivations.

Is it offensive to assume somebody is acting rationally? Some would consider the opposite offensive (and thereby the author also offends men in his article).

I think the "planned alimony" accusation is offensive, but it should be easy to check (statistics on women living off alimony and their average income). I'm sure some women plan that way, but they might not be a significant fraction. I still remember reading advice on how to best become an "alimony mother" in a popular women's magazine (allegedly pick a married man, he can't afford a big fuss and will silently pay up). Not sure if it was meant as satire, but the idea has certainly crossed women's minds. I also know women who planned to become single moms from the start.

However, if you include the classic plan to become a stay at home mother, I'm sure a lot of women plan that way. For sure women take into account family friendliness when planning their career.

Also, you seem to assume that being a mother is not interesting.

I think you being in Computer Science might not have any bearings on the authors qualifications at all.

Right, my being in computer science has no bearing on the author's fitness to speak about other people's experiences and motivations. That he does so based on pop psychology, stereotype, and traditional gender roles rather than based on personal experience as a woman or far better, data about the personal experiences of a large random sample of women is what makes it offensive.

> Is it offensive to assume somebody is acting rationally?

Insofar as that involves making offensive assumptions about values by assuming that the (always flawed) perfect knowledge of future utilities aspect of the rational choice model is fulfilled, yes.

That section of the article is not about "alimony" (may require years of marriage to obtain) but about "child support" (requires one night of work to obtain).

One night, nine months, and a potentially fatal medical condition.

I think the central argument is worth spending more time on: women have options that men don't.

Even in choosing colleges women have more and in many ways better options. An engineering school trying to attract females has to compete with about 50 all girls colleges across the country where the girls will be treated quite well for four years. Guys don't have that path available so it's easier to sell them on the idea of four-and-a-half to five difficult years to earn a four year degree.

That wasn't the central argument I perceived. Based on how the piece was introduced, I perceived an argument that biases (which have been demonstrated over and over in scientific studies) and hostile environment have less to do with gender ratios in STEM than <long list of stereotypes about values weakly linked to data that are related only if you make some major assumptions backed only by pop psychology>.

Maybe if instead of buying into traditional assumptions about gender roles we questioned them; maybe if we encouraged people to step outside traditional roles rather than spending our effort trying to insist their existence is justified; maybe then men would have more choices too (like being stay at home dads, for instance).

We have a very selective and one-sided conversation about traditional gender roles that generally hinges upon notions of male privilege and patriarchy. That's not very helpful when trying to understand why men are more likely to overwork and undervalue themselves since being privileged and overvalued (for their masculinity, of course) predicts they would do the opposite. (You can shoe-horn this into a feminist critique by saying the men who become scientists do so because they fail to meet their gender expectations, but the guys down in the coal mines or dying in wars are as manly as it gets, and they're also overworked and undervalued.)

I'm not just questioning traditional gender roles, I'm also questioning the feminist framework I used for years to understand those gender roles.

I realize this is a "no true Scotsman" argument, but... The feminism I was brought up in sees the limitations of male gender roles as the other face of the same coin. Women will never truly have equality of opportunity and expectation until traditional male gender roles and expectations are also dissolved - both because male gender roles can't exist without female gender roles and because women's opportunity in the workplace is limited by the need for their partners to take on more responsibility in the home. Unfortunately, this assertion often runs into accusations of attempts to "feminize" men.

It sounds like you don't care about male problems because they're inherently important to you, but they're just a stepping stone to fixing the real problems which are the female problems.

I see a lot of political will and capital devoted towards the few areas of society where women lag behind men: STEM, C-level/board positions, and being billionaires. But what about the areas where women are doing better than men, like education in general? What about the gender gaps of being a war casualty (90%+ male), dying at work (90%+ male) or being incarcerated (90%+ male)? Are these things really only worth dealing with because as a side effect women will have more opportunities in the workplace?

I agree that we need to be honest about gender roles and both their good and bad aspects. I disagree that feminism is leading the way.

I do care about men and I agree that those are problems that need to be fixed, but they're outside the scope of feminism. (Although one could argue that if certain flavors of feminism succeeded they would become much less lopsidedly male problems because a side effect would be that women would represent a higher percent of war casualties and job fatalities, but I'm not sure anyone would call that in itself progress.) Feminism isn't about fixing all the things that are wrong with the world, it's about fixing the problems that hold women back, which btw are not just about things like c-level board positions.

Women are less likely to get proper followup care after heart attacks, for instance, even though they experience them nearly as frequently as men. Sexual assault and rape still affect women at such a higher rate than men it's staggering. Women are also far more likely than men to experience crippling depression (how much of that is due to biological vs cultural factors is unknown), although men tend to be more successful at committing suicide. And the growing restrictions on abortion access WILL cause women's deaths just as they did before Roe v Wade.

There are other movements that address other problems with the world (pacifism, labor rights, and more). Being a feminist doesn't preclude also believing or participating in those movements. But just as sex trafficking is outside the scope of labor rights, improving safety precautions for dangerous jobs is outside the scope of feminism. Does that make sense?

> Sexual assault and rape still affect women at such a higher rate than men it's staggering.

This depends on who you trust to gather the data and who is included in that data. I really don't want to have the rape/sexual assault discussion because it's never productive, but I will say that I'm not at all impressed with how feminism has handled the subject and that it's created barriers to male victims getting help and support.

There are no large scale movements that deal with specifically male problems. Men's Rights is trying but it's labeled 'hate speech' by feminists. If we're being honest there are no feminists in the Men's Rights movement, there are no feminists who give equal weight to men's problems in general because feminism is based on the idea that women's problems are more serious, more important and more urgent. That may have been reasonable in 1915 when women couldn't vote, in 2015 I'm not buying it, not even close.

Have you even looked at, for example, education numbers recently? Women get more degrees per field except for the hard STEM fields[0], women go to college more than men in general[1] and the individual group that needs the most help in education is a subset of males[2]. It's been since 1991 that women have been graduating college more than men[3]. But instead of dealing with the majority of the education system where men are doing worse than women, we constantly hear about the few areas where women aren't doing as well and we're told it's because of sexism, micro-aggressions, oppression, etc. and we all need to take a stand together c'mon we can do it!

There's no effort to close the high school graduation gender gap, the college enrollment or graduation gaps, it's only where women are behind that changes need to be made. If we changed the numbers to what feminists want - STEM fields evenly split male-female - we wouldn't have equality in education, it would be female domination in education. It already is female domination in education, adding STEM would just make it worse.

[0] - http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor... [1] - http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/03/06/womens-colle... [2] - http://blackboysreport.org/national-summary/black-male-gradu... [3] - http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2011/gender-gap-in-...

I have a lot of trouble getting behind a men's rights movement that feels like an extremely bitter backlash. People claiming association with it have been behind some extremely frightening threats and intimidation towards women who dare to discuss bias and misogynistic online cultures. And it feels even more reactionary when no legitimate discussion can be had about the struggles women face without an attempted derail into "but men have problems too!"

What do you think this thread is? The author wrote an article looking at why men are more willing to be exploited by the academic system and the top comment, which is yours, is "but women have problems too!" You didn't even realize what the article was about, to you it was just another unenlightened man who was had offended you.

The central thesis of the piece is controversial but I think it's merits discussion. However when you show up and label it 'offensive' that discourages discourse and encourages the marginalization of the article's author and the article's points. It's a common feminist complaint that conversations about women's issues are derailed, but 1) you guys do it too and 2) I've found that the accusation is often just a quick way to silence dissenting opinions and to avoid engaging on points that don't fit the agenda.

I'm not asking you to get behind a men's rights movement, I'm not even part of it. I'm pointing out why men need it, or something similar to it. You can judge it by its worst members if you want but that's never been a good way to understand any group.

Replying to self to add:

A real live woman did some real, hard research about the same topic, inspired by the same Summers quote, and backed by actual studies (although wrapped in a boatload of anecdote - which even on its own would be more convincing than the OP's unsupported speculation):

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/why-are-there-...

And a quote that sums it up:

> As so many studies have demonstrated, success in math and the hard sciences, far from being a matter of gender, is almost entirely dependent on culture — a culture that teaches girls math isn’t cool and no one will date them if they excel in physics; a culture in which professors rarely encourage their female students to continue on for advanced degrees; a culture in which success in graduate school is a matter of isolation, competition and ridiculously long hours in the lab; a culture in which female scientists are hired less frequently than men, earn less money and are allotted fewer resources.

But you too seem to be pretending that your individual experiences make you an authority on women in science. No amount of pushing for women in science has worked, in fact, more gender quality is associated with more stereotypical occupation choices. We see measurable differences in newly born babies that relate gender to an interest in people vs things. We know hormones in the uterus affect the onset of the development of language skills.

There's an insane amount of evidence stacking up that "women are being dissuaded from going into science" is not as big of a deal as it is, and furthermore, that it's actually women doing this.

It's a funny thing I've noticed with feminism. When they can blame men, they blame men. When they would logically have to blame women, they blame society.

Where did I claim to be an authority on women in science? Where am I blaming men for anything? All I said is that I lose respect for people who make assumptions and draw conclusions about other people's experiences and motivations based primarily on speculation and stereotype.

And I do not claim to be an expert on women in science, only that I am a woman in STEM and in the absence of evidence to the contrary that gives me good reason to think that the man who wrote the article is even less qualified than I to speak about women's experiences trying to enter traditionally make fields.

As for the rest, I suggest you read the NY Times article I linked to in another post. Even if there is some innate component (which assertion I take with a certain amount of skepticism - and potential flaws have been pointed out in the studies with newborns), the research and experiences detailed there very strongly support the existence of a cultural component to gender imbalances in STEM.

If your upset is about stereotypes and speculation, why did you bother to specify the gender of the author?

"It makes me lose respect for the person who thinks they can pontificate about someone else's experience and motivations."

Except this is what men have to contend with all the frickin' time. Apparently when I do it, I'm not "sharing my lived experiences", I'm "mansplaining".

I also didn't deny the existence of a cultural component, merely that it is not the entire story. If the cultural component was the dominant factor, you would see cultures where the situation is reversed. We don't.

I specify the gender of the author because he's purporting to explain the gender specific experiences and motivations of the gender that he is not. He's trying to speak for someone else. This bothers me even more than usual because he does it in such a way as to attempt to dismiss an aspect of those experiences that is reported by a lot of individual women, supported by research, and inconvenient and apparently uncomfortable for many men in STEM to acknowledge.

If you're talking about your own experiences as a man, there is nothing wrong with that. If you try to draw conclusions about women's gendered experiences based on your experiences as a man then yeah, that's mansplaining and some people will call you out on it.

There are a lot of different cultures in this world, even traditionally matriarchical ones. It just so happens that those (along with a lot of patriarchical cultures in adjacent locales) were not the ones that developed modern science and thus not the ones that frame this particular debate. I hate using those terms because now you're probably going to accuse me of railing against patriarchy, which is not something I like to do.

Here's the thing: even if there are slight innate differences in interests, both men's and women's innate levels of interest in and aptitude for STEM can almost certainly be mapped to Gaussian distributions. And even if those curves nearly completely overlap, people seem to assume that non-identical centers mean that all women are less interested in and capable of involvement in those fields than all men.

And here's the part you're going to consider rant-ish but is based on personal experience, the experiences of women I know, the experiences of women who write articles in newspapers, magazines, and online, as well as extensive academic research that I make a habit of informing myself about whenever it percolates out to the non-academic community:

The effect is that from childhood adults are more surprised at our expressions of interest, they don't push us as hard into those fields or encourage us as much when we do express interest in entering them. As a result we find ourselves skeptical of the notion that science or math or engineering is "for someone like me".

We have to be far better in order to have a hope of disproving the default assumption that we're worse. We're less likely to get interviews and are suggested lower starting salaries with a female name on an otherwise identical resume. We face assumptions that we only succeeded because of affirmative action even when we had to be better than the men around us to get any respect at all.

My conclusion, based on a combination of experience, anecdote, and data, is that many women who would enjoy and be good at such careers don't even consider them because they were never given any reason to consider them. That many women who do consider them wrongly conclude that they're not capable of pursuing them based not on actual failure but on lack of encouragement and recognition. And that those who persist nonetheless face a steeper climb than men, all else being equal.

I don't seem to be the only one with access to such personal experiences and data who's reached that conclusion.

It doesn't have to be alimony - you can also remain happily married and live off the income of your spouse.

According to this googled article, 29% percent of mothers of children under 18 are stay at home mothers: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/08/women-s...

Two thirds of them are supposedly married, so I guess the alimony case might be around 10 percent of all mothers.

http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/106-children-in-... says that about 35 percent of U.S. children live in single-parent families or 25 million children total. In any case, the fewer the number of women competing to collect child support from high-income men the higher will be the returns to that strategy and the more attractive it will be compared to working for wages.

Honest question: So how's the architect biz? It seems like architect is one of those vaguely aspirational occupations (like lawyer) that could have gotten swamped in recent decades with folks such as Bill. People just looking for a good job, not necessarily on fire with passion for it. (Not that I'm saying you have to be full of passion for something in order to do it as a job - quite the contrary.)

Wow, it was hard to look past all the offensive crap to get angry at all the logic holes. Let me see if I can keep this PG.

>age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month >age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year

Actually the median total time to degree is far lower for STEM than it is for other fields. TTD in Physics and Astronomy is 7.0 years compared to 10.2 in the Humanities

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf06312/nsf06312.pdf

>compensation for executives at public companies is reported every year.

Yes, becaues Forbes executive positions are SO much more open to women that academic scientific careers, it makes total sense to compare them.

>Consider taking the same high IQ and work ethic, going into business, and being put on the fast track at a company such as General Electric. Rather than being fired at age 44, this is about the time that she will be handed ever-larger divisions to operate, with ever-larger bonuses and stock options.

A tenured academic has the same chance of being fired as GE employee. Or it's just as easy to be a postdoc as a GE stock-option executive. Yeah right.

> At age 22, the schoolteacher is earning a living wage and can begin making plans to get married and have children.

Because every woman aspires to have babies at 22.

> "I'm not sure if I'll be able to get any job at all.

Note that when a grad student says that, there is ALWAYS an implicit "... on what I would prefer doing".

Unemployment rate for Physics PhDs is just under 10% - this is rough the same for any occupation in the "professional" sector if you consider involuntary part-time workers (not many part time science jobs)

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/technology/t...

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat21.htm

> A woman who is smart and organized enough to earn a PhD in science would also likely be smart and organized enough to find a higher-income co-parent. What is the profit potential when suing someone earning more than $250,000 per year?

Yes, because (a) women use their career skills in finding husbands and (b) being a physicist and suing a rich ex for alimony are comparable choices - after all, why else would you be marrying? You have to be effing kidding me.

> The most serious concern is that the field that a youngster found fascinating at age 20 will no longer be fascinating after 20 or 25 years.

Yes, because only scientists get bored with their careers. Every person who decided to do advertising sales on the other hand, is still having a blast.

> A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals

Right, guys do science cause they are too dumb to know better. And people become petty criminals as a career choice. And don't forget women don't do anything as pointless as playing video games (I mean ha ha ha, next you're going to tell me that women PLAY videogames, imagine).

Look, the postdoc system ubiquitous in STEM is exploitative. Every person working in science, man or woman, knows this. And it's a perverse outcome of a funding and success model based on citation rate.

But to say women don't go into science because they're too smart for that is the same as saying that African Americans don't go into IT because they too smart want to hang around geeks and carry a pager. It's insulting to everybody concerned and completely and utterly inaccurate.

Yeah, this article was terrible - both full of some serious holes in its actual facts, and then dripping with sloppy reasoning.

Its most serious flaw is the assumption that everyone cares about money as much as he does.

The stuff about child support is actively gross and totally incorrect. Median child support in the US is ~$500/mo; vanishingly few people have the kind of money he's talking about.

http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p60-246.pdf

That the average person who pursues a job is not very successful economically does not mean that the job is not worth pursuing for someone who is thoughtful and talented. As noted above, if the median child support is only $6000 tax-free dollars per year that suggests that high-income potential fathers are an underutilized resource.

http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/c... shows that the median computer programmer gets paid $75,000 per year. That doesn't stop thoughtful and talented programmers from earning a lot more (though collusion by employers, e.g., Apple, has interfered with what would have been a market).

"Unemployment rate for Physics PhDs is just under 10%" -- that sounds pretty bad if you assume that someone with a physics PhD is smarter than average and has more years of education than average.

> If you are extremely introverted, you might prefer to work as a computer programmer.

??? Really?

Yes.

Pose a simple question, get a simple answer.

What is so surprising about this assertion ?

I resent the implication. Programming != introverted activity.

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