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It's because Russia isn't a particularly nice place to live. From the article: > Most of the girls we talked to from other countries had a slightly playful ap

It's because Russia isn't a particularly nice place to live. From the article: > Most of the girls we talked to from other countries had a slightly playful approach to Stem, whereas in Russia, even the very youngest were extremely focused on the fact that their future employment opportunities were more likely to be rooted in Stem subjects. They do tech because it provides a way of getting a good life. In the West, where conditions are less harsh, women don't feel the need to go into tech to get a good life. Similar considerations explain why female university students are more likely to do STEM subjects in Iran than in Sweden. This, incidentally, blows out of the water the argument made by some feminists that women don't do STEM because of conditioning in nasty patriarchal societies.

tptacek 10y ago
Without engaging in any of the rest of your comment, I'm going to call out again the attempt to shift goalposts from tech to STEM in general. Tech people want to believe that the gender disparity in their field is shared among all the STEM fields, but, of course, it is not: women are far better represented in other STEM fields. Computer science, physics, and engineering have similarly acute gender disparity. The rest of the STEM fields --- including mathematics --- have closer to 50/50, and some STEM fields, like molecular biology, have better than 50% representation of women.
- stablemap 10y ago
  I hesitate to hold up mathematics as a good example. There are an encouraging number of female majors but further down the pipeline the numbers get much worse. For tenured faculty positions the latest number [1] I've seen is 14%. [1] http://www.ams.org/profession/data/annual-survey/ http://www.ams.org/profession/data/annual-survey/
- ohstopitu 10y ago
  so would you say those fields that have >50% women would need to work on their gender diversity to include more men?
  - tptacek 10y ago
    Since molecular biology has something like a 54/46 distribution and tech has something like a 19/81 distribution I'd probably tell anyone who told me I should focus on the injustices of molecular biology to shove it up their ass.
    - stagbeetle 10y ago
      What about registered nurses? It's a 91/9 spit.
      - tptacek 10y ago
        This rebuttal is so tired that it's actually (search for it in Dan and Scott's comments) banned from the site, but I think that's a mistake, because it is in fact a huge problem that there is a 91/9 split in nursing. A bigger problem than tech's disparity. The status-shifting we've done with "nursing" has resulted in scarce and expensive medical doctors being (almost always pointlessly) our first line of health care in the US. We should rename "nurse practitioners" to "associate physicians", discarding the gender-inflected term "nurse".
      - vermontdevil 10y ago
        And why do you think it came to this point? Hint - it has to do with getting in the medical school.
      - justin66 10y ago
        As far as I can tell, hospitals recognize it's a problem and are doing what they can in terms of recruitment.
        nommm-nommm 10y ago
        It's not even just hospitals The American Association of Men in Nursing: http://www.aamn.org/ http://www.aamn.org/ The Campaign for Nursing’s Future: https://www.discovernursing.com/men-in-nursing https://www.discovernursing.com/men-in-nursing Minority Nurse: http://minoritynurse.com/ http://minoritynurse.com/ Oregon Center for Nursing: http://oregoncenterfornursing.org/nursing-posters/ http://oregoncenterfornursing.org/nursing-posters/
- TorKlingberg 10y ago
  I don't think you mean that >50% is better, but your general point is right. Other STEM fields are not as male dominated. Even physics is not as bad as CS. I had several women TAs in physics, but none in CS/programming.
  - douche 10y ago
    Others are far worse than IT, like mechanical engineering.
    - tptacek 10y ago
      CS, EE, MechE, Physics. When you say "others" it's helpful to convey the distribution. Overwhelmingly, STEM has better gender parity than CS. And MechE might be the only STEM field worse than CS.
- 67726e 10y ago
  > some STEM fields, like molecular biology, have better than 50% representation of women. I hope those fields have scholarships and campaigns to get underrepresented men into those fields. Your downvotes only serve to highlight your hypocrisy. If balance is the goal, then that needs to occur for all groups in all fields or none at all. Otherwise it's obvious you're just pushing an agenda.
  - simonh 10y ago
    Balance isn't the goal. Equal opportunity is the goal. If the imbalance is due to a lack of interest in a field by one gender or another that's perhaps regrettable but not a moral issue. If the imbalance is due to obstacles or prejudices faced by one gender over another then would you agree that is a moral issue that is more important for society to rectify?
    - pottersbasilisk 10y ago
      Its clear that certain people here want equal results probably because equal opportunity is much harder to track or destroys certain agendas.
    - tptacek 10y ago
      Respectfully, why are you framing this as a question? You don't need anyone's permission to observe that prejudice is an important moral issue --- and the only people who would answer "no" to your question don't sincerely acknowledge moral imperatives in the first place.
      - 67726e 10y ago
        Considering you haven't proven any deliberate imbalance.
      - simonh 10y ago
        That's a perfectly fair question. I asked in order to try and find common ground, and in case the poster has some other reason for caring particularly about imbalance instead of opportunity, or in case the poster doesn't think that the imbalance is due to differences in opportunity as described in the original article. However I could have phrased it more clearly.
- sidek 10y ago
  Do you have a citation re:mathematics? As a person in mathematical physics, I would be /very/ surprised to hear that math is a more gender balanced field than physics.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    I do somewhere; I'll track it down and relay the numbers. But also I'll say that this matches my own personal experience: go to an academic cryptography conference sometime and note how many more women you see than in a generic CS conference. There are more women mathematicians than computer scientists and physicists.
    - spydum 10y ago
      I haven't attended any crypto conferences but, I do work a bit with high school STEM programs and I can tell you.. higher ratio of male to female, BUT, those female students are far more interested in the math / crypto fields than the males (which leads me to believe they will stick to it career wise vs the male students. So it's not too surprising your observations.
  - padthai 10y ago
    In Spain it is about 50-60%: http://www.rsme.es/comis/mujmat/estadisticas/facultades.htm http://www.rsme.es/comis/mujmat/estadisticas/facultades.htm Note that the problem it is specific only to some degrees, in general women are advancing in most western countries: http://politikon.es/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/4.png http://politikon.es/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/4.png
- htns 10y ago
  "Tech people want to believe that the gender disparity in their field is shared among all the STEM fields" It's convenient for both women's studies departments and tech recruiters to pretend other fields don't exist. It is taboo to talk about it, to the point that I haven't come across any serious piece of writing that dared to seriously contemplate the question of "what are the girls choosing to do instead?", but I don't think it has much to do with psychoanalytic undercurrents.
  - douche 10y ago
    > what are the girls choosing to do instead? https://nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsb20161/uploads/1/6/at03-12.pdf https://nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsb20161/uploads/1/6/at03-12...
    - cholantesh 10y ago
      Wow. I knew there was a disparity; I didn't think it was this stark.
    - htns 10y ago
      I'm aware that there are statistics. Nobody interprets them. (also the link doesn't even include medicine (edit: it does i just missed it D:))
      - falcolas 10y ago
        > the link doesn't even include medicine It does mention nurses, nurse practitioners, and technicians.
    - 77pt77 10y ago
      There are no female "Agricultural engineers"? I find that hard to believe.
    - Ajedi32 10y ago
      Interesting. Seems like the biggest ones are Nursing (83.4%) and Teaching (81.1%; kindergarten teachers in particular are 97.7% women!).
- smokeyj 10y ago
  If women are represented in the rest of STEM but not the T - doesn't that challenge the narrative of "social conditioning" being the root cause? What I mean is, there isn't anyone out there telling women that physics is cool whereas programming is not. My bet is that anyone encouraging their little girl to be a physicists would be equally enthused about electrical engineering.. but I could be wrong. I think when people decide what a good career would be, they're going off what little knowledge they have. And programmers aren't displayed on TV as big earners - but rather scrawny stinky anti-social dorks. And sadly there's a source of truth to this.. Software just isn't cool. It's actually pretty un-cool. I don't know how to change that.
  - yorwba 10y ago
    > Software just isn't cool. It's actually pretty un-cool. I don't know how to change that. I'm currently as an exchange student in China, and every time I tell someone that I'm studying CS, they are like "Oh my god, that's so cool!". Somehow I'm still completely surprised when I hear that reaction. I have no idea what causes this perception, I need to remember to ask next time. The gender distribution in my classes is still 90%+ male, though. Somehow the different image of the field does not translate into more female students.
  - ForHackernews 10y ago
    > doesn't that challenge the narrative of "social conditioning" being the root cause? > Software just isn't cool. It's actually pretty un-cool. I don't know how to change that. I don't see how you find this to be a conflict. If software is presented as "uncool", is that not social conditioning?
- kamaal 10y ago
  Not sure what you are talking about. In India. Mechanical engineering sees least enrollment from women. Many times there no girls in the Mech eng class at all. Or worse, 1 or 2 who go and tell other girls not to take up Mech ever. The issue isn't discrimination at all. You regularly have to do physically demanding work. Welding, Metal cutting work with a myriad other stuff. Of course you may argue Women do physically demanding work all the time. But the point is such women come from a background of poverty which demands such a lifestyle. If you come from anywhere a above lower-middle class lifestyle the overall lifestyle of your family never prepares you for this. I don't care how many lego sets you buy for your girl. Nothing prepares for you for a certain things.
- gajjanag 10y ago
  > The rest of the STEM fields --- including mathematics --- have closer to 50/50 Citation needed for this. From a quick look from a paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06196.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06196.pdf it seems like this statement is true at the undergraduate major level, but certainly not true at the doctoral level. This is particularly relevant as unlike engineering/tech, where a Bachelor's (or less) suffices for the majority of work, the same is certainly not true in mathematics. As an illustration of this, note that for many people graduate school in mathematics is spent trying to come up to speed with the current research efforts of the community, unlike engineering where one is (generally) expected to be a "producer" once one hits graduate school.
  - tashoecraft 10y ago
    Anecdotal from female friends who have started down the path to PHD in stem fields, you basically have to forgo having children until you are in your 30's. The current path of ~10 years of schooling through women's 'best' biological time to have a child is, I imagine, a reason for some of the discrepancy between male and female post undergrad.
    - JBlue42 10y ago
      It's not even that niche though is it? A lot of the women I work with have started having kids in their mid-30s. In the US, I think overall people are marrying later and having kids later, IIRC.
      - true_religion 10y ago
        You can, but then you would have complications. My friends in their later 30s are having more trouble conceiving and bringing children to term. On the other hand, my friends who had children in their early-20s had no issues.
- mtempleton 10y ago
  >better than 50% This wording reminds me of that which Obama also used with respect to gender in STEM & education: >In fact, more women as a whole now graduate from college than men. This is a great accomplishment -Barack Obama Source: http://www.newsweek.com/president-obama-reflects-impact-title-ix-65097 http://www.newsweek.com/president-obama-reflects-impact-titl...
- cabalamat 10y ago
  That's a valid criticism. As you say I was conflating one thing with another (wider) thing that it's part of.
moopling 10y ago
Just because representation is better in one patrialchal society doesn't really say anything. There may for instance be competing factors, for instance financial (as you have literally just suggested). This doesn't really give any evidence for or against the argument that women avoid stem because of conditioning.
- BrandonMarc 10y ago
  Indeed. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison. I'd be curious to know about other factors that are related to life choices and opportunities, such as: ... what's the social safety network like? Is there welfare? Are there government programs that will help with housing / food / healthcare for a single mom (working or not)? This absolutely influences things. ... what's the legal marital environment like? Are the laws regarding divorce more or less favorable to women in one place vs the other (property, child support, alimony, allowance of 'no-fault' divorces, burden of proof, etc)? This will also influence choices. In both of these tangents, actual risk and perceived risk in various life choices is different based on the answer to those questions.
rntz 10y ago
If this were true - if needing a good job for a good life predicted going into STEM among women - you'd expect poor women in western countries to flock to STEM training as well. Do they?
- rimliu 10y ago
  Do they flock to ANY kind of education?
  - douche 10y ago
    Quite often towards lower-level nursing and other medical tech fields. For instance, you can have a decent paying, stable, career as a CNA, with the potential to progress towards being an RN, with just an associate's degree from a local community college. A significant fraction of the young women I graduated from high school with have gone that route.
- hackinthebochs 10y ago
  Poor in a western country isn't equivalent to poor in an eastern europe or south asian country. You might expect higher rates, but not on par with what you see from Russia and the like.
- usrusr 10y ago
  Not if there are enough "more feminine" success models floating around in the public consciousness. Why aim for a Sheldon Cooper career if you can dream of becoming Rachel Green or Carrie Bradshaw? And those are not even pure fantasy: an economy that is far down the service economy road towards what would be better characterized as an ad economy offers quite a few career options far from male-dominated fields that are both "serious" enough to be considered a possible path to success (vs the make-ends-meet-until-marriage spirit of traditional female occupations, think nurse instead of doctor) and still sufficiently down-to-earth to not be considered starlet territory (like the traditional girly pipedream careers of acting, modeling, singing). Why aim for engineer if you can dream of VP for social media outreach? In an economy that is closer to industrial than to service/ad, evading male-dominated fields comes at a much bigger price in career options.
chrischen 10y ago
Just an anecdote but my female cousin from China wanted to be a vet, but economic pressure forced her to pursue CS in Canada instead.
nommm-nommm 10y ago
>This, incidentally, blows out of the water the argument made by some feminists that women don't do STEM because of conditioning in nasty patriarchal societies. No, it absolutely does not. You suggest "overall society might affect individual choices" and then from that premise reach the conclusion "overall society definitely does not affect individual choices." >[Women get into] tech [in Russia] because it provides a way of getting a good life. In the West, where conditions are less harsh, women don't feel the need to go into tech to get a good life. Consider hypothetical societal differences [that may be patriarchal] that may make "a good life" to a Russian woman a totally different thing than "a good life" to an American women. Consider, even if definitions were identical, societal differences [that may be patriarchal] that may make make pursuing a good life much harder (or even downright impossible, see Saudi Arabia) in one country vs another. I could go on. For one example, after Title IX of the Higher Education Act was passed in 1972 female enrollment in medical school went from around 10% to over 20% in just 2 years. It's now around 50%.
Cpoll 10y ago
> This, incidentally, blows out of the water the argument made by some feminists that women don't do STEM because of conditioning in nasty patriarchal societies. I don't understand your logic here. Isn't the more natural conclusion that the desire to get a good life is stronger than the conditioning?
deleted 10y ago
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anentropic 10y ago
> This, incidentally, blows out of the water the argument made by some feminists that women don't do STEM because of conditioning in nasty patriarchal societies. No it doesn't At most it suggests that in more desperate circumstances women will be motivated to climb that hill and struggle through it It doesn't mean there isn't a problem
milquetoastaf 10y ago
>This, incidentally, blows out of the water the argument made by some feminists that women don't do STEM because of conditioning in nasty patriarchal societies. Yep, that one anecdotal line from an article totally destroys the idea of any sort of patriarchy or sexism happening in the US. Sheesh, this is the top comment? Give me a break.
- RodericDay 10y ago
  The fact that this is the top comment is very related to the actual issue. I came from mech eng, and the cluelessness and defensiveness techies display when their field's hostility towards women is discussed is incredibly messed up.
  - rimliu 10y ago
    Maybe because there is no hostility towards women? Have you seen a bunch of programmers who were not happy about prospect of getting some girls among coworkers?
    - brango 10y ago
      Exactly. Who wouldn't want to work with some Russian hotties?
    - milquetoastaf 10y ago
      Yep there's no hostility at all towards women in any tech field, ever. It's all just a made up problem by feminists trying to spread cultural marxism
      - rimliu 10y ago
        I have never witnessed any. I'd even say that girls were treated with more respect. Maybe it has something to do with me living in exUSSR country. But for some reason there are mostly males talking about this problem, and for some reason they cannot except the possibility of women making the choice by themselves — there must always be some evil male forcing them and succeeding.
pottersbasilisk 10y ago
I wonder how many men are also choosing tech for the money. I know I did, I wanted to study sociology but that doesnt pay the bills.
wobbleblob 10y ago
> They do tech because it provides a way of getting a good life. In the West, where conditions are less harsh, women don't feel the need to go into tech to get a good life. But does it now? All of 'the West' isn't Silicon Valley. I live in 'the west', Western Europe to be exact, and while I probably make more than a plumber or a shoe salesperson, I'd say someone with a medicine, law or business degree tends to make a lot more than I do, under easier conditions, and in those fields, you're not considered old at 40, and you're not on call in the weekends. IN terms of 'a good life', tech isn't the best return on investing 5 or 6 years of your life in a degree. It's probably not a coincidence that these are the degrees women like to pursue. For a job that requires a college degree, 'tech' isn't that rewarding in terms of money or 'the good life'. It's rewarding in terms of getting to work in tech. You really need to want to work in tech to do it. This may be stupid prejudice of mine, but I get the impression guys tend to think more in terms of what they want, and girls tend to think more in terms of what would be smart of practical. Now I can imagine that for someone in India or Romania, a degree and skills in tech means you could work for customers in the west or even move there, and make a lot more money than you would otherwise, while a business or law degree and skills don't transfer as well across borders, so the same dynamic of choosing what you want versus what would be the smart choice leads to a different decision.
- ahuth 10y ago
  Hard to say that people in medicine, law, or business have easier conditions than you do. What do you do, that's in worse conditions than those fields?
  - BrandonMarc 10y ago
    Indeed. Medicine and law require far more schooling / apprenticeship before the rewards start to overcome the difficulties (such as debt), often far more than even 5-6 years. All 3 can easily require being on-call at inconvenient times, and definitely require well above 40 hours a week.
    - wobbleblob 10y ago
tekmate 10y ago
It's simply a remnant from the soviet union where women were expected to work and contribute the same way that men did
branchless 10y ago
This makes no sense, would men not also want to escape this hard life? Why would the ratios be different to elsewhere? It could be life is even worse for women but you don't say that.
korzun 10y ago
> It's because Russia isn't a particularly nice place to live. From the article: What does that have to do with anything? In what country do you get an engineering degree, heck a degree of any sort with a goal to be broke? Obviously, there is a financial motivation, but you can find the same motivation in the United States and women tend to avoid going down this path here. Russian women, in general, are more into this type of thing than the American counterparts. You are trying to downplay this and make it seem like they are doing it out of desperation. They are not, thank you very much. It's pretty ignorant and shortsighted, the educational system in Russia always favored math, engineering, and science sans gender bias.
- hackinthebochs 10y ago
  >Obviously, there is a financial motivation, but you can find the same motivation in the United States and women tend to avoid going down this path here. In societies with weaker social safety nets, the motivation to go into a field with high earning potential but that you have no inherent interest in is greater. Someone from the U.S. will be less motivated by financial security than someone from Russia.
redsummer 10y ago
The usual 'Not enough woman in STEM' argument is made by trivial and narcissistic Westerners. The reason why women in Iran, Russia, Romania etc choose STEM and woman in Sweden and the US don't is because it is deadly serious which profession they choose. The same seriousness in not in evidence in the West. In the US, people (often from rich families) are spending tens of thousands to study trivial subjects. Americans are infantilised to such a degree that they unable to recognise their infantilisation. The same impetus is seen in all the tech people from India. Do you think they are all really interested in Richard Stallman? No, they just need to eat.
dannypgh 10y ago
> This, incidentally, blows out of the water the argument made by some feminists that women don't do STEM because of conditioning in nasty patriarchal societies. It does no such thing, because there is no universally agreed upon metric by which we can rank the degree of any given form of "conditioning in nasty patriarchal socities." It could simply be the case that, in this regard / with your example, this is a dimension in which the West is more patriarchal than Iran.
avdicius 10y ago
I think Russia never was a classic patriarchal society. At the family level matriarchs always played as important and prominent role as patriarchs. Yes, in the past the official power institutions were almost completely male dominated. However there were notable exceptions such as semi-mythical princess Olga, emperatresses Anna I, Elisabeth, and Catherine II. Also Peter I came to power as the result of power-struggle with regent-princess Sophia Alekseyevna. Actually when the party of Peter I won, the actual power was grabbed by his mother Natalia Naryshkina whose nickname was she-bear. Peter became the true ruler of Russia only after her death. There were other notable historic women in Russian history such as princess Sophia Palaiologina. All in all throughout Russian history there were many much-revered and/or influential women. Also some folk fairy tales feature mighty female warriors. In particular there is a story about a knight Stavr Godinovich who was arrested by the king Vladimir and was rescued by his wife Vasislisa Mikulishna by winning in several contests ranging from wrestling to chess-playing. I believe gender biases for ages were weaker in Russia than in Western Europe let alone Middle East and you name it.

tptacek 10y ago

Without engaging in any of the rest of your comment, I'm going to call out again the attempt to shift goalposts from tech to STEM in general. Tech people want to believe that the gender disparity in their field is shared among all the STEM fields, but, of course, it is not: women are far better represented in other STEM fields. Computer science, physics, and engineering have similarly acute gender disparity. The rest of the STEM fields --- including mathematics --- have closer to 50/50, and some STEM fields, like molecular biology, have better than 50% representation of women.

stablemap 10y ago
I hesitate to hold up mathematics as a good example. There are an encouraging number of female majors but further down the pipeline the numbers get much worse. For tenured faculty positions the latest number [1] I've seen is 14%. [1] http://www.ams.org/profession/data/annual-survey/ http://www.ams.org/profession/data/annual-survey/
ohstopitu 10y ago
so would you say those fields that have >50% women would need to work on their gender diversity to include more men?
- tptacek 10y ago
  Since molecular biology has something like a 54/46 distribution and tech has something like a 19/81 distribution I'd probably tell anyone who told me I should focus on the injustices of molecular biology to shove it up their ass.
  - stagbeetle 10y ago
    What about registered nurses? It's a 91/9 spit.
    - tptacek 10y ago
      This rebuttal is so tired that it's actually (search for it in Dan and Scott's comments) banned from the site, but I think that's a mistake, because it is in fact a huge problem that there is a 91/9 split in nursing. A bigger problem than tech's disparity. The status-shifting we've done with "nursing" has resulted in scarce and expensive medical doctors being (almost always pointlessly) our first line of health care in the US. We should rename "nurse practitioners" to "associate physicians", discarding the gender-inflected term "nurse".
    - vermontdevil 10y ago
      And why do you think it came to this point? Hint - it has to do with getting in the medical school.
    - justin66 10y ago
      As far as I can tell, hospitals recognize it's a problem and are doing what they can in terms of recruitment.
      - nommm-nommm 10y ago
        It's not even just hospitals The American Association of Men in Nursing: http://www.aamn.org/ http://www.aamn.org/ The Campaign for Nursing’s Future: https://www.discovernursing.com/men-in-nursing https://www.discovernursing.com/men-in-nursing Minority Nurse: http://minoritynurse.com/ http://minoritynurse.com/ Oregon Center for Nursing: http://oregoncenterfornursing.org/nursing-posters/ http://oregoncenterfornursing.org/nursing-posters/
TorKlingberg 10y ago
I don't think you mean that >50% is better, but your general point is right. Other STEM fields are not as male dominated. Even physics is not as bad as CS. I had several women TAs in physics, but none in CS/programming.
- douche 10y ago
  Others are far worse than IT, like mechanical engineering.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    CS, EE, MechE, Physics. When you say "others" it's helpful to convey the distribution. Overwhelmingly, STEM has better gender parity than CS. And MechE might be the only STEM field worse than CS.
67726e 10y ago
> some STEM fields, like molecular biology, have better than 50% representation of women. I hope those fields have scholarships and campaigns to get underrepresented men into those fields. Your downvotes only serve to highlight your hypocrisy. If balance is the goal, then that needs to occur for all groups in all fields or none at all. Otherwise it's obvious you're just pushing an agenda.
- simonh 10y ago
  Balance isn't the goal. Equal opportunity is the goal. If the imbalance is due to a lack of interest in a field by one gender or another that's perhaps regrettable but not a moral issue. If the imbalance is due to obstacles or prejudices faced by one gender over another then would you agree that is a moral issue that is more important for society to rectify?
  - pottersbasilisk 10y ago
    Its clear that certain people here want equal results probably because equal opportunity is much harder to track or destroys certain agendas.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    Respectfully, why are you framing this as a question? You don't need anyone's permission to observe that prejudice is an important moral issue --- and the only people who would answer "no" to your question don't sincerely acknowledge moral imperatives in the first place.
    - 67726e 10y ago
      Considering you haven't proven any deliberate imbalance.
    - simonh 10y ago
      That's a perfectly fair question. I asked in order to try and find common ground, and in case the poster has some other reason for caring particularly about imbalance instead of opportunity, or in case the poster doesn't think that the imbalance is due to differences in opportunity as described in the original article. However I could have phrased it more clearly.
sidek 10y ago
Do you have a citation re:mathematics? As a person in mathematical physics, I would be /very/ surprised to hear that math is a more gender balanced field than physics.
- tptacek 10y ago
  I do somewhere; I'll track it down and relay the numbers. But also I'll say that this matches my own personal experience: go to an academic cryptography conference sometime and note how many more women you see than in a generic CS conference. There are more women mathematicians than computer scientists and physicists.
  - spydum 10y ago
    I haven't attended any crypto conferences but, I do work a bit with high school STEM programs and I can tell you.. higher ratio of male to female, BUT, those female students are far more interested in the math / crypto fields than the males (which leads me to believe they will stick to it career wise vs the male students. So it's not too surprising your observations.
- padthai 10y ago
  In Spain it is about 50-60%: http://www.rsme.es/comis/mujmat/estadisticas/facultades.htm http://www.rsme.es/comis/mujmat/estadisticas/facultades.htm Note that the problem it is specific only to some degrees, in general women are advancing in most western countries: http://politikon.es/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/4.png http://politikon.es/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/4.png
htns 10y ago
"Tech people want to believe that the gender disparity in their field is shared among all the STEM fields" It's convenient for both women's studies departments and tech recruiters to pretend other fields don't exist. It is taboo to talk about it, to the point that I haven't come across any serious piece of writing that dared to seriously contemplate the question of "what are the girls choosing to do instead?", but I don't think it has much to do with psychoanalytic undercurrents.
- douche 10y ago
  > what are the girls choosing to do instead? https://nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsb20161/uploads/1/6/at03-12.pdf https://nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsb20161/uploads/1/6/at03-12...
  - cholantesh 10y ago
    Wow. I knew there was a disparity; I didn't think it was this stark.
  - htns 10y ago
    I'm aware that there are statistics. Nobody interprets them. (also the link doesn't even include medicine (edit: it does i just missed it D:))
    - falcolas 10y ago
      > the link doesn't even include medicine It does mention nurses, nurse practitioners, and technicians.
  - 77pt77 10y ago
    There are no female "Agricultural engineers"? I find that hard to believe.
  - Ajedi32 10y ago
    Interesting. Seems like the biggest ones are Nursing (83.4%) and Teaching (81.1%; kindergarten teachers in particular are 97.7% women!).
smokeyj 10y ago
If women are represented in the rest of STEM but not the T - doesn't that challenge the narrative of "social conditioning" being the root cause? What I mean is, there isn't anyone out there telling women that physics is cool whereas programming is not. My bet is that anyone encouraging their little girl to be a physicists would be equally enthused about electrical engineering.. but I could be wrong. I think when people decide what a good career would be, they're going off what little knowledge they have. And programmers aren't displayed on TV as big earners - but rather scrawny stinky anti-social dorks. And sadly there's a source of truth to this.. Software just isn't cool. It's actually pretty un-cool. I don't know how to change that.
- yorwba 10y ago
  > Software just isn't cool. It's actually pretty un-cool. I don't know how to change that. I'm currently as an exchange student in China, and every time I tell someone that I'm studying CS, they are like "Oh my god, that's so cool!". Somehow I'm still completely surprised when I hear that reaction. I have no idea what causes this perception, I need to remember to ask next time. The gender distribution in my classes is still 90%+ male, though. Somehow the different image of the field does not translate into more female students.
- ForHackernews 10y ago
  > doesn't that challenge the narrative of "social conditioning" being the root cause? > Software just isn't cool. It's actually pretty un-cool. I don't know how to change that. I don't see how you find this to be a conflict. If software is presented as "uncool", is that not social conditioning?
kamaal 10y ago
Not sure what you are talking about. In India. Mechanical engineering sees least enrollment from women. Many times there no girls in the Mech eng class at all. Or worse, 1 or 2 who go and tell other girls not to take up Mech ever. The issue isn't discrimination at all. You regularly have to do physically demanding work. Welding, Metal cutting work with a myriad other stuff. Of course you may argue Women do physically demanding work all the time. But the point is such women come from a background of poverty which demands such a lifestyle. If you come from anywhere a above lower-middle class lifestyle the overall lifestyle of your family never prepares you for this. I don't care how many lego sets you buy for your girl. Nothing prepares for you for a certain things.
gajjanag 10y ago
> The rest of the STEM fields --- including mathematics --- have closer to 50/50 Citation needed for this. From a quick look from a paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06196.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06196.pdf it seems like this statement is true at the undergraduate major level, but certainly not true at the doctoral level. This is particularly relevant as unlike engineering/tech, where a Bachelor's (or less) suffices for the majority of work, the same is certainly not true in mathematics. As an illustration of this, note that for many people graduate school in mathematics is spent trying to come up to speed with the current research efforts of the community, unlike engineering where one is (generally) expected to be a "producer" once one hits graduate school.
- tashoecraft 10y ago
  Anecdotal from female friends who have started down the path to PHD in stem fields, you basically have to forgo having children until you are in your 30's. The current path of ~10 years of schooling through women's 'best' biological time to have a child is, I imagine, a reason for some of the discrepancy between male and female post undergrad.
  - JBlue42 10y ago
    It's not even that niche though is it? A lot of the women I work with have started having kids in their mid-30s. In the US, I think overall people are marrying later and having kids later, IIRC.
    - true_religion 10y ago
      You can, but then you would have complications. My friends in their later 30s are having more trouble conceiving and bringing children to term. On the other hand, my friends who had children in their early-20s had no issues.
mtempleton 10y ago
>better than 50% This wording reminds me of that which Obama also used with respect to gender in STEM & education: >In fact, more women as a whole now graduate from college than men. This is a great accomplishment -Barack Obama Source: http://www.newsweek.com/president-obama-reflects-impact-title-ix-65097 http://www.newsweek.com/president-obama-reflects-impact-titl...
cabalamat 10y ago
That's a valid criticism. As you say I was conflating one thing with another (wider) thing that it's part of.

moopling 10y ago

Just because representation is better in one patrialchal society doesn't really say anything. There may for instance be competing factors, for instance financial (as you have literally just suggested). This doesn't really give any evidence for or against the argument that women avoid stem because of conditioning.

BrandonMarc 10y ago
Indeed. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison. I'd be curious to know about other factors that are related to life choices and opportunities, such as: ... what's the social safety network like? Is there welfare? Are there government programs that will help with housing / food / healthcare for a single mom (working or not)? This absolutely influences things. ... what's the legal marital environment like? Are the laws regarding divorce more or less favorable to women in one place vs the other (property, child support, alimony, allowance of 'no-fault' divorces, burden of proof, etc)? This will also influence choices. In both of these tangents, actual risk and perceived risk in various life choices is different based on the answer to those questions.

rntz 10y ago

If this were true - if needing a good job for a good life predicted going into STEM among women - you'd expect poor women in western countries to flock to STEM training as well. Do they?

rimliu 10y ago
Do they flock to ANY kind of education?
- douche 10y ago
  Quite often towards lower-level nursing and other medical tech fields. For instance, you can have a decent paying, stable, career as a CNA, with the potential to progress towards being an RN, with just an associate's degree from a local community college. A significant fraction of the young women I graduated from high school with have gone that route.
hackinthebochs 10y ago
Poor in a western country isn't equivalent to poor in an eastern europe or south asian country. You might expect higher rates, but not on par with what you see from Russia and the like.
usrusr 10y ago
Not if there are enough "more feminine" success models floating around in the public consciousness. Why aim for a Sheldon Cooper career if you can dream of becoming Rachel Green or Carrie Bradshaw? And those are not even pure fantasy: an economy that is far down the service economy road towards what would be better characterized as an ad economy offers quite a few career options far from male-dominated fields that are both "serious" enough to be considered a possible path to success (vs the make-ends-meet-until-marriage spirit of traditional female occupations, think nurse instead of doctor) and still sufficiently down-to-earth to not be considered starlet territory (like the traditional girly pipedream careers of acting, modeling, singing). Why aim for engineer if you can dream of VP for social media outreach? In an economy that is closer to industrial than to service/ad, evading male-dominated fields comes at a much bigger price in career options.

chrischen 10y ago

Just an anecdote but my female cousin from China wanted to be a vet, but economic pressure forced her to pursue CS in Canada instead.

nommm-nommm 10y ago

>This, incidentally, blows out of the water the argument made by some feminists that women don't do STEM because of conditioning in nasty patriarchal societies. No, it absolutely does not. You suggest "overall society might affect individual choices" and then from that premise reach the conclusion "overall society definitely does not affect individual choices." >[Women get into] tech [in Russia] because it provides a way of getting a good life. In the West, where conditions are less harsh, women don't feel the need to go into tech to get a good life. Consider hypothetical societal differences [that may be patriarchal] that may make "a good life" to a Russian woman a totally different thing than "a good life" to an American women. Consider, even if definitions were identical, societal differences [that may be patriarchal] that may make make pursuing a good life much harder (or even downright impossible, see Saudi Arabia) in one country vs another. I could go on. For one example, after Title IX of the Higher Education Act was passed in 1972 female enrollment in medical school went from around 10% to over 20% in just 2 years. It's now around 50%.

Cpoll 10y ago

> This, incidentally, blows out of the water the argument made by some feminists that women don't do STEM because of conditioning in nasty patriarchal societies. I don't understand your logic here. Isn't the more natural conclusion that the desire to get a good life is stronger than the conditioning?

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anentropic 10y ago

> This, incidentally, blows out of the water the argument made by some feminists that women don't do STEM because of conditioning in nasty patriarchal societies. No it doesn't At most it suggests that in more desperate circumstances women will be motivated to climb that hill and struggle through it It doesn't mean there isn't a problem

milquetoastaf 10y ago

>This, incidentally, blows out of the water the argument made by some feminists that women don't do STEM because of conditioning in nasty patriarchal societies. Yep, that one anecdotal line from an article totally destroys the idea of any sort of patriarchy or sexism happening in the US. Sheesh, this is the top comment? Give me a break.

RodericDay 10y ago
The fact that this is the top comment is very related to the actual issue. I came from mech eng, and the cluelessness and defensiveness techies display when their field's hostility towards women is discussed is incredibly messed up.
- rimliu 10y ago
  Maybe because there is no hostility towards women? Have you seen a bunch of programmers who were not happy about prospect of getting some girls among coworkers?
  - brango 10y ago
    Exactly. Who wouldn't want to work with some Russian hotties?
  - milquetoastaf 10y ago
    Yep there's no hostility at all towards women in any tech field, ever. It's all just a made up problem by feminists trying to spread cultural marxism
    - rimliu 10y ago
      I have never witnessed any. I'd even say that girls were treated with more respect. Maybe it has something to do with me living in exUSSR country. But for some reason there are mostly males talking about this problem, and for some reason they cannot except the possibility of women making the choice by themselves — there must always be some evil male forcing them and succeeding.

pottersbasilisk 10y ago

I wonder how many men are also choosing tech for the money. I know I did, I wanted to study sociology but that doesnt pay the bills.

wobbleblob 10y ago

> They do tech because it provides a way of getting a good life. In the West, where conditions are less harsh, women don't feel the need to go into tech to get a good life. But does it now? All of 'the West' isn't Silicon Valley. I live in 'the west', Western Europe to be exact, and while I probably make more than a plumber or a shoe salesperson, I'd say someone with a medicine, law or business degree tends to make a lot more than I do, under easier conditions, and in those fields, you're not considered old at 40, and you're not on call in the weekends. IN terms of 'a good life', tech isn't the best return on investing 5 or 6 years of your life in a degree. It's probably not a coincidence that these are the degrees women like to pursue. For a job that requires a college degree, 'tech' isn't that rewarding in terms of money or 'the good life'. It's rewarding in terms of getting to work in tech. You really need to want to work in tech to do it. This may be stupid prejudice of mine, but I get the impression guys tend to think more in terms of what they want, and girls tend to think more in terms of what would be smart of practical. Now I can imagine that for someone in India or Romania, a degree and skills in tech means you could work for customers in the west or even move there, and make a lot more money than you would otherwise, while a business or law degree and skills don't transfer as well across borders, so the same dynamic of choosing what you want versus what would be the smart choice leads to a different decision.

ahuth 10y ago
Hard to say that people in medicine, law, or business have easier conditions than you do. What do you do, that's in worse conditions than those fields?
- BrandonMarc 10y ago
  Indeed. Medicine and law require far more schooling / apprenticeship before the rewards start to overcome the difficulties (such as debt), often far more than even 5-6 years. All 3 can easily require being on-call at inconvenient times, and definitely require well above 40 hours a week.
  - wobbleblob 10y ago

tekmate 10y ago

It's simply a remnant from the soviet union where women were expected to work and contribute the same way that men did

branchless 10y ago

This makes no sense, would men not also want to escape this hard life? Why would the ratios be different to elsewhere? It could be life is even worse for women but you don't say that.

korzun 10y ago

> It's because Russia isn't a particularly nice place to live. From the article: What does that have to do with anything? In what country do you get an engineering degree, heck a degree of any sort with a goal to be broke? Obviously, there is a financial motivation, but you can find the same motivation in the United States and women tend to avoid going down this path here. Russian women, in general, are more into this type of thing than the American counterparts. You are trying to downplay this and make it seem like they are doing it out of desperation. They are not, thank you very much. It's pretty ignorant and shortsighted, the educational system in Russia always favored math, engineering, and science sans gender bias.

hackinthebochs 10y ago
>Obviously, there is a financial motivation, but you can find the same motivation in the United States and women tend to avoid going down this path here. In societies with weaker social safety nets, the motivation to go into a field with high earning potential but that you have no inherent interest in is greater. Someone from the U.S. will be less motivated by financial security than someone from Russia.

redsummer 10y ago

The usual 'Not enough woman in STEM' argument is made by trivial and narcissistic Westerners. The reason why women in Iran, Russia, Romania etc choose STEM and woman in Sweden and the US don't is because it is deadly serious which profession they choose. The same seriousness in not in evidence in the West. In the US, people (often from rich families) are spending tens of thousands to study trivial subjects. Americans are infantilised to such a degree that they unable to recognise their infantilisation. The same impetus is seen in all the tech people from India. Do you think they are all really interested in Richard Stallman? No, they just need to eat.

dannypgh 10y ago

> This, incidentally, blows out of the water the argument made by some feminists that women don't do STEM because of conditioning in nasty patriarchal societies. It does no such thing, because there is no universally agreed upon metric by which we can rank the degree of any given form of "conditioning in nasty patriarchal socities." It could simply be the case that, in this regard / with your example, this is a dimension in which the West is more patriarchal than Iran.

avdicius 10y ago

I think Russia never was a classic patriarchal society. At the family level matriarchs always played as important and prominent role as patriarchs. Yes, in the past the official power institutions were almost completely male dominated. However there were notable exceptions such as semi-mythical princess Olga, emperatresses Anna I, Elisabeth, and Catherine II. Also Peter I came to power as the result of power-struggle with regent-princess Sophia Alekseyevna. Actually when the party of Peter I won, the actual power was grabbed by his mother Natalia Naryshkina whose nickname was she-bear. Peter became the true ruler of Russia only after her death. There were other notable historic women in Russian history such as princess Sophia Palaiologina. All in all throughout Russian history there were many much-revered and/or influential women. Also some folk fairy tales feature mighty female warriors. In particular there is a story about a knight Stavr Godinovich who was arrested by the king Vladimir and was rescued by his wife Vasislisa Mikulishna by winning in several contests ranging from wrestling to chess-playing. I believe gender biases for ages were weaker in Russia than in Western Europe let alone Middle East and you name it.