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Comment by Nadya | Hacker News Reader

Completely meaningless statistics without factoring in the experience and education of the people surveyed. It's one thing to say you're interested and another to go through the effort required [0].

I'm interested in being a pilot - but I lack any of the education or credentials to actually become a pilot. So my interest compared to the possibility of employment would be meaningless.

How many of the females are interested in Engineering but majored in Gender or Women's Studies and effectively slashed any chances they had of working as an engineer? Surveying for level of education and major (if applicable) as well as previous work experience would make the apparent disparity more meaningful. Now, whether or not their choice of education (and thus chance of employment) was due to a gender bias or gender discrimination is another question.

[0] https://www.asee.org/papers-and-publications/publications/11...

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/me sighs

Where to start?

First, to your (horribly sexist) implication that women opt out of the workforce by studying "Gender or Women's Studies": it isn't even in the top 10 majors for women. You know what the #1 major for women is? Business. http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/02/top-10-college-majors-women...

Biology, math, and physics are all also popular majors for women: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/28/359419934/who-s...

Calling out "previous work experience" is similarly just so much BS. If women are excluded through systematic bias in hiring (hint: they are!) then they literally can't earn that experience. Furthermore there's a compounded effect, as fewer and fewer women make it up through each tier of the hiring/promotion filter.

Even the article you cited calls out gender disparities in academia. While only 22% of CS PhDs were given to women, they made up an even more minuscule 14% of CS faculty.

tl;dr: the system is rigged and women don't get a fair shake. Stop victim-blaming.

Don't more women attend college than men?

Hasn't that been true for 40 years?

As someone who majored in Physics and minored in Math, there was quite a bit of women in the Math department and a few women in Physics, but both had much more women than the entry level CS class I took, and I'm not sure there were any that I can remember in the one, large, entry-level EE class I took.

I did graduate 2008/2009, and tried to find a job for a while without much luck, partially because employers were (short-sightedly) specifically looking for EE/CS degrees.

That's where I think the second part of this problem lies: Majoring in math and physical sciences, specifically with only a BS, doesn't get you very far in a job market when even entry level positions are heavily favoring CS and EE degrees... even though most STEM degrees usually share a common pedigree of math, sciences, and basic programming skills. In many cases, students who are able to do any kind of research as an undergrad in math or physical sciences will have quite adequate and advanced programming skills, but that's still harder to market than a engineering degree.

>While only 22% of CS PhDs were given to women, they made up an even more minuscule 14% of CS faculty.

Not everyone who obtains a degree later chooses to enter their field of study. A degree also does not guarantee a job. This is yet another example of trying to misuse statistics as a form of confirmation bias.

Looking at statistics from this Slate article [0], since 2003 only <50%~ of Engineer PHD's are employed. What that means is that of those 22% CS PhDs roughly 11% would be the the number who are employed in the end assuming no gender discrimination beyond obtaining the degree.

Given the data is 3 years out of date, it's possible employment rate has jumped to 63% (the highest its been since 1998!) and that 14% is exactly on-par for the course for having no gender discrimination (against or in favor of) women. A more realistic estimate is that the employment rate is still at 50% or below and 14% is actually discrimination in favor of hiring women given less than 11% should be hired at current employment rates.

>First, to your (horribly sexist) implication that women opt out of the workforce by studying "Gender or Women's Studies": it isn't even in the top 10 majors for women.

It was one example of a major dominated by women that is useless for holding any of the jobs listed as "liked". They also "opt out of the Engineering work force" by majoring in Biology, Business, and Psychology and not Engineering if you feel that using Gender Studies was somehow sexist.

[0] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/07/empl...

I know I'm feeding the trolls here, but this just demands an answer:

"Given the data is 3 years out of date, it's possible employment rate has jumped to 63% (the highest its been since 1998!) and that 14% is exactly on-par for the course for having no gender discrimination (against or in favor of) women."

This is basically middle-school level math and you're doing it wrong.

Whatever percentage of newly-minted CS PhDs go on to teach, the ratios of men and women working as professions should be roughly the same as those earning degrees: 78% and 22%, respectively. Instead, it appears that a disproportionate number of women are "somehow" not ending up in teaching positions.

In a truly fair world those numbers would be much closer to 50/50, but that's a separate discussion.

Wow, I had a mental failure there (way to add up to 50% instead of 100% Nadya!) I apologize for that and thank you for pointing out that bullshit. Juggling work and a few convos and did indeed make a major blunder in my math there. (Embarrassingly so...)

>In a truly fair world those numbers would be much closer to 50/50, but that's a separate discussion.

This completely disregards any and all preference for genders when it comes to these positions. There are personal preference for jobs and only in a truly unfair and heavily regulated world that does not account for human factors and gender preferences would it ever be 50/50.

Sighing in text and accusing people of trolling make me assume your point needs bolstering by emotional resonance.

Your hypothesis of naive proportions may well be correct, but you certainly didn't make much an argument beyond stating the premise.

I personally see no particular reason that interest in engineering has a need to be distributed equally across any human grouping. Fairness as a concept aside, there are clear differences in humans that are driven by gender. Desiring to assume these differences can't affect interests is fine, but it's far from proven by any empirical data. In fact, this article potentially contradicts that notion with actual numbers - although it's impossible to draw a line between inbuilt differences and external influence here.

I majored in aerospace engineering at a pretty good state school. My major was probably 10% women. However, if you look at the pool of people with a 700+ SAT Math score, which was pretty representative of my classmates, it's over 35%. And apparently, the interest among women in mechanical engineering is up around that too.

So where did those women who are good at math and interested in being engineers go? I think a lot of them make the sensible decision to go into careers where they won't spend the rest of their lives fighting an uphill battle as a minority.

A sad and worrisome trend over the past few decades has been fewer rather than more women in engineering fields (especially computers). I haven't seen well-researched explanations for this, but it's a measurable and observable phenomenon.

    > So my interest compared to the possibility of employment
    > would be meaningless.

I haven't really read the article yet, but this isn't true, depending on what they're actually measuring. For example, if people who are interested in the field are systemically denied access to the education to actually get into that field, this kind of measurement would account for that, no?

It's hard to measure the right thing.

>Now, whether or not their choice of education (and thus chance of employment) was due to a gender bias or gender discrimination is another question.

I later clarified that I don't discard that line of reasoning.

I will further clarify that I don't personally think this is the case though. Roughly 30% more women are attending tertiary education than men (at least in the US and other "western world" nations) and through affirmative action they even have the upper hand in being biased in favor of further education [0].

[0] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ENR.TERT.FM.ZS/countr...

But is any of that education actually resulting in changes in the income of women and career projections in comparison with equally or less-educated men?

I imagine it will - over a very long term. And I imagine faculties like CS will take even longer to evolve, but will eventually follow the same pattern.

When there's such a divergence in post-secondary attendance (as there apparently is), I think the effects are somewhat unavoidable.

It's not meaningless at all. It directly refutes the constant argument that "women don't do engineering because they aren't interested in it".

With a majority of majors going to Health professions, Psychology, English, Biology, Arts, Social Sciences, etc and few going to Engineering. It's not a big surprise that, although many claim an "interest" in Engineering that many are also unqualified to hold a position as an Engineer [0].

Having an interest in something and being qualified for the position are two entirely different things. Being qualified has a large factor in whether or not you get a job related to your interest.

[0] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor...

What about careers that don't require academic credentials? I gave the example earlier of my own daughter, and the gender bias she faces working in a professional kitchen. That's not an academics-driven field. Kitchen advancement comes from apprenticeship and personal relationships.

If gender bias (observable in staff behavior) plays a role in opportunity, then it stands to reason that women are less likely than men to advance in the field, given similar effort and experience.

So your proposition is that interest is 100% irrelevant to eventual career path? That's the only scenario where this data is irrelevant. I didn't notice the article saying "interest should correlate 100% with career and any difference is just sexism", which seems to be the straw man you're putting up.

Perhaps my choice of using "irrelevant" wasn't the the best. I should have said "completely meaningless". Close meanings but the nuance is a bit different.

My proposition is that interest is only a small factor in eventual career path and that interest alone won't land you many jobs. You have to put effort into obtaining the necessary credentials (be it academic or otherwise). Did you put that effort in because of interest? Sure, I can't argue that interest would play a factor into motivation but interest alone is completely meaningless.

An even better example would be "astronaut". Everyone I know thinks its the damnest coolest job a human being could ever have! I'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in my office who wouldn't want to be an astronaut! But how many people become astronauts? Is it because it discriminates towards them or because its a lot of hard work and years of training that they haven't put the effort in to do? Or is it because interest alone is an irrelevant factor into eventual employment as an astronaut?

Ok, so what if I told you that "people in your office aren't astronauts because they aren't interested in being astronauts"? You'd say that was wrong, but could you prove it? That's what this article is trying to do - refute people who say "women aren't engineers because they aren't interested in being engineers". I don't understand why you are leaping straight over this point.

Anyone with an actual interest in a subject displays motivation to pursue that interest. A self-reported interest that shows no signs of being an actual interest isn't an interest worth accounting for. Therefore I would claim that, because nobody has pursued a job as an astronaut in my office, that 0% of the people in my office are truly interested in becoming an astronaut - regardless of their claims (yes, I'm calling them liars [0])

>That's what this article is trying to do - refute people who say "women aren't engineers because they aren't interested in being engineers".

I often see this argument more accurately represented as "women aren't engineers because they aren't choosing to be engineers" (which stems from a lack of interest in comparison to other fields)

How much do women like Engineering over Biology, Business, Psychology, and the myriad of other choices they are presented with? Is it wrong for women to prefer Biology over Engineering?

[0] I like strawberry icecream. I am presented three choices of icecream: chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry. I am allowed to pick two flavors. I pick chocolate and vanilla.

Not if the only measure of interest used is literally self-reporting a binary "interested/not interested", like it is here. This is deceptioneering through statistics.

>This is deceptioneering through statistics.

It seems that any statistics concerning gender should be treated as such until proven otherwise, regardless of which gender it is about.

Women are favored in child custody! Oh wait, when you consider how rarely men fight for their children, men are more favored! Oh wait, if you account for all variables except for gender, then...

Women are more likely to be raped. Oh wait, if you count being forced to penetrate, men are more likely to be victims. Oh wait, if you count out prisons as they are a special case that doesn't give information about the social trends of society, then women are still the primary victim.

Women get paid less for equal work. Wait, if you don't count all full time as equal but count overtime, they are paid equal. But if you look at raises based one experience then men are favored. But if you count experience based on hours worked instead of years (since someone working 80 hr/wk gets more experience in a given year) women are favored. But then if you...

In short, all of these issues are complex and you can manipulate the statistics to get the result you want.

> How many of the females are interested in Engineering but majored in Gender or Women's Studies and effectively slashed any chances they had of working as an engineer?

The guy who started this site majored in philosophy and identified as a painter for a long time.

My mother majored in psychology but runs a home business. My father majored in English but installs security cameras. A project manager I know majored in Audio Engineering.

It doesn't seem uncommon to work outside of your major. But the jobs are also generally jobs that don't require a major to be a serious candidate.

The number of salespeople and marketers who don't hold business-related degrees shows that being a salesperson does not typically require a degree. Being a chemist or an engineer largely requires a relevant degree to be a serious candidate.

Not all jobs require degrees. Many jobs that do really don't need to require them.

Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs didn't finish college.

Starting a business never requires a degree - or experience! That could also be why they have a high failure rate and only few go on to be extremely successful. Many entrepreneurs will go through several failed businesses in which they acquire more experience before "getting it right".

You'll find that being hired into a high level position with no education and no experience is an extreme rarity. You'd have more luck finding leprechaun's gold.

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