6 ms·

Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences

198 points by gr__or 9y ago

peacetreefrog 9y ago
"In the year 1850, women were locked out of almost every major field, with a few exceptions like nursing and teaching. The average man of the day would have been equally confident that women were unfit for law, unfit for medicine, unfit for mathematics, unfit for linguistics, unfit for engineering, unfit for journalism, unfit for psychology, and unfit for biology. He would have had various sexist justifications – women shouldn’t be in law because it’s too competitive and high-pressure; women shouldn’t be in medicine because they’re fragile and will faint at the sight of blood; et cetera. "As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female. "And everyone says “Aha! I bet it’s because of negative stereotypes!” "This makes no sense. There were negative stereotypes about everything! Somebody has to explain why the equal and greater negative stereotypes against women in law, medicine, etc were completely powerless, yet for some reason the negative stereotypes in engineering were the ones that took hold and prevented women from succeeding there."
- RodericDay 9y ago
  Here's an explanation. Doctors and lawyers make for great television and movies, because of the drama involved and the ease of portraying it. Pretty girls are also a requirement for entertainment, for <reasons>. So many doctor and lawyer TV shows were cast with women in them. And then many girls aspired to be doctors and lawyers, because they saw a viable path that way. Also, secretaries and nurses worked close to doctors and lawyers and businessmen, tech was more isolated. Again, less bridge, less role model. Culture > everything.
  - peacetreefrog 9y ago
    It's definitely a hypothesis, seems testable too. Not a ton of vet or linguistic or biology shows though.
- edmccard 9y ago
  why the equal and greater negative stereotypes against women in law, medicine, etc were completely powerless They weren't powerless; it took several class-action lawsuits and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints in the 70's to increase the number of women lawyers.[1] I've also heard, for example from some comments by 'rayiner here on HN, that law schools made deliberate changes to their admission policies yet for some reason the negative stereotypes in engineering were the ones that took hold and prevented women from succeeding there Maybe because tech, both industry and academia, hasn't made the same efforts that the legal profession did? [1] http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=facpub http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... (p.14 ff)
- my_first_acct 9y ago
  > In the year 1850... The first women were admitted to Harvard Business School in 1963 [1], which is a couple of years after Yuri Gagarin first orbited the earth. The first women were admitted as undergraduates to Caltech in 1970 [2], which is a year after the first moon landing. > As the feminist movement gradually took hold... "Gradually" seems to be the right word. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Business_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Business_School [2] http://archives.caltech.edu/about/fastfacts.html http://archives.caltech.edu/about/fastfacts.html
  - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
    He's also talking about a field being "conquered" by quoting stats on graduating students. I would guess the split in law is less for Judges, in business for CEOs etc. so if this process is happening, then it's still in progress in all of those fields, and I'd guess you could look into each one in turn and find that some started earlier and progressed faster than others. Be interesting to see what the common points for the laggards are. I don't see any great case being made for computing to be an outlier that's different in kind rather than simply degree. I googled some stats on judges, I was correct that it lags student numbers (I say "lags" on the optimistic assumption that those students will eventually go on to be judges in similar quantities. Possibly a judge will release a 10 page manifesto about how the marxist left is forcing women to be judges when they're rather be baking cakes though, so maybe we shouldn't count our chickens until they've hatched): http://gavelgap.org/ http://gavelgap.org/ in particular this infographic which points out that women have been 50% of the students for 2 decades now, but still only 36% of the profession, and only 30% of state judges. http://gavelgap.org/assets/infographic-3-c78b5c8147005783a23e4bef667a804feb2b52bb357ec10ad984c3bec12c6a6c.jpg http://gavelgap.org/assets/infographic-3-c78b5c8147005783a23... So it seems my use of "lags" was over optimistic and student numbers aren't a great predictor, even after two decades.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ve55 9y ago
If you enjoyed this post you should read a few others that have been posted by Scott recently (on the linked website). If any chance were to be made, the least that I would hope for is that people stop responding to every argument with nothing but hatred. Just pure, unfiltered, hatred. It's very difficult nowadays to find communities, or even individuals, who are good at this.
- peacetreefrog 9y ago
  Particularly apt: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
  - ve55 9y ago
    That's a good example that's a bit further back in the archive, but hopefully shouldn't be too hard to find due to how influential it was. Probably better just to read the entire site, some really amazing posts there.
    - petters 9y ago
      That particular post is listed by Scott as one of his "top posts." at http://slatestarcodex.com/about/ http://slatestarcodex.com/about/
- smsm42 9y ago
  > If you enjoyed this post you should read a few others that have been posted by Scott recently (on the linked website). In fact, you should read all posts in that blog (only joking a little here). I am saying this as a person who disagrees with Scott on many political views. If everybody approached to controversial topics the same way as he does, Internet would be the best place ever for political discussions.
  - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
    Interesting you say that, as this seems to be one of his weaker entries, precisely because he's taking a mocking tone without sufficiently backing up his case.
whatrusmoking 9y ago
If this makes sense to you, you haven't actually talked to women in this field who trust you. Scott has a bad habit of setting up bad strawmen and doing literature reviews without talking to domain experts. (Frankly the weakness of the arguments he's choosing to debunk make me doubt that he even engaged in this topic with good faith. If you think the opposing view point is summarized by ' "And everyone says “Aha! I bet it’s because of negative stereotypes!” ', then you're not serious about this conversation.)
- sparky_z 9y ago
  Feel free to get specific.
luu 9y ago
Am I missing part of the argument here? At the beginning of section IV, Scott argues that stereotypes can’t explain the gender gap in engineering because of the differential rate at which people major in math vs. engineering (45% women in math, 20% women in engineering). He says: > Might girls be worried not by stereotypes about computers themselves, but by stereotypes that girls are bad at math and so can’t succeed in the math-heavy world of computer science? No. About 45% of college math majors are women, compared to (again) only 20% of computer science majors. Undergraduate mathematics itself more-or-less shows gender parity. This can’t be an explanation for the computer results. Later, he introduces the thing-people interest spectrum and makes a case that it’s inherent. He then breaks down the gender gap in various medical fields in way that’s suggestive that the differences are due to the thing-people idea. But, how does that apply math vs engineering or math vs. programming? Or for that matter, programming vs. chemical engineering or electrical engineering vs. chemical engineering? During undergrad, my recollection was that there were proportionally fewer women in electrical engineering than in chemical engineering in the classes I saw, and some quick googling seems to bear this out. If math vs. engineering is a mystery that can't be explained by streotypes, it also appears to be a mystery that can't be explained by thing-people. Although I think it's a long stretch, maybe you can argue that computers are more "thing-like" than math, but I don't think you can really push that argument through to explain the relative ratios in CS, math, EE, CivE, AE, MSE, and ChemE? BTW, the reason I think it's a stretch is because you could also argue that computers are more "people-like" than math, so you could flip the arugment around if the ratios were reversed. For EE vs. ChemE, maybe EE rates are depressed because there's a lot of cross-over between EE and BME classwork and BME is arguably more people-like, so the would-be EEs go into BME, but if there's crossover, maybe that makes EE more BME-like and therefore more people-like. I don't think you can give an explanation that's much stronger than a just-so story for some other set of observed ratios. Sure, you can pick a subset of fields where thing-people appears to explain the variance[1], but you can also pick a set of fields where it doesn’t appear to explain the variance. Scott seems to view a set of counter-examples as a knockdown argument against stereotypes. But then why doesn’t this other set of examples invalidate the thing-people explanation he argues for? Why can’t you apply the exact same line of reasoning he applied to stereotypes to thing-people? This line of reasoning seems internally inconsistent to me. Am I missing something that would make this line of reasoning consistent? One line of reasoning is that Scott is merely rebutting someone else's argument and that he therefore doesn't need to explain what's going on and he only needs to explain why the other explanation is wrong. But in that case, there isn't a need to bring up thing-people. It seems like it's been brought up because Scott believes thing-people has more explanatory power than sterotypes and Scott is making a positive argument about thing-people, not just knocking down someone else's argument. [1] Even within the fields he picks, one example he gives is the rate at which women go pediatrics at a higher rate than any other specialization he lists other than ob/gyn. But why is the rate in pediatrics so different than in psychiatry? He argues that they're both "people" fields, which sounds reasonable. But there's one field is 25% male and the other is 43% male. That's almost the same as the math/engineering difference he cites earlier with the genders flipped. Is dealing with babies somehow more people-like or less thing-like than talking to adults? It's certainly a strong stereotype that women are more interested in babies than men, but this is cited as an example of the explanatory power of thing-people, not of the explanatory power of stereotypes.
pinaceae 9y ago
does it not strike anyone here a bit odd that only white men are rushing to defend the manifesto guy? isn't any employee that needs to write a 10 page manifesto about anything on the wtf side? and now a practicing psychiatrist from the midwest who really likes to pontificate on the web about anything rushes in to gloriously defend the rights of the eternally oppressed - men. who can't just shut the fuck up and compete. no, it has to be endless verbal diarrhea. sometimes i wish actual alpha males would exist.
- FeepingCreature 9y ago
  He's rushing in to gloriously defend the rights of the eternally oppressed. Sounds like he's competing to me.
- exolymph 9y ago
  I'm a woman and I defended him, even though I don't entirely agree with what he wrote.

198 points by gr__or 9y ago

"In the year 1850, women were locked out of almost every major field, with a few exceptions like nursing and teaching. The average man of the day would have been equally confident that women were unfit for law, unfit for medicine, unfit for mathematics, unfit for linguistics, unfit for engineering, unfit for journalism, unfit for psychology, and unfit for biology. He would have had various sexist justifications – women shouldn’t be in law because it’s too competitive and high-pressure; women shouldn’t be in medicine because they’re fragile and will faint at the sight of blood; et cetera. "As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female. "And everyone says “Aha! I bet it’s because of negative stereotypes!” "This makes no sense. There were negative stereotypes about everything! Somebody has to explain why the equal and greater negative stereotypes against women in law, medicine, etc were completely powerless, yet for some reason the negative stereotypes in engineering were the ones that took hold and prevented women from succeeding there."

RodericDay 9y ago
Here's an explanation. Doctors and lawyers make for great television and movies, because of the drama involved and the ease of portraying it. Pretty girls are also a requirement for entertainment, for <reasons>. So many doctor and lawyer TV shows were cast with women in them. And then many girls aspired to be doctors and lawyers, because they saw a viable path that way. Also, secretaries and nurses worked close to doctors and lawyers and businessmen, tech was more isolated. Again, less bridge, less role model. Culture > everything.
- peacetreefrog 9y ago
  It's definitely a hypothesis, seems testable too. Not a ton of vet or linguistic or biology shows though.
edmccard 9y ago
why the equal and greater negative stereotypes against women in law, medicine, etc were completely powerless They weren't powerless; it took several class-action lawsuits and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints in the 70's to increase the number of women lawyers.[1] I've also heard, for example from some comments by 'rayiner here on HN, that law schools made deliberate changes to their admission policies yet for some reason the negative stereotypes in engineering were the ones that took hold and prevented women from succeeding there Maybe because tech, both industry and academia, hasn't made the same efforts that the legal profession did? [1] http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=facpub http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... (p.14 ff)
my_first_acct 9y ago
> In the year 1850... The first women were admitted to Harvard Business School in 1963 [1], which is a couple of years after Yuri Gagarin first orbited the earth. The first women were admitted as undergraduates to Caltech in 1970 [2], which is a year after the first moon landing. > As the feminist movement gradually took hold... "Gradually" seems to be the right word. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Business_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Business_School [2] http://archives.caltech.edu/about/fastfacts.html http://archives.caltech.edu/about/fastfacts.html
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  He's also talking about a field being "conquered" by quoting stats on graduating students. I would guess the split in law is less for Judges, in business for CEOs etc. so if this process is happening, then it's still in progress in all of those fields, and I'd guess you could look into each one in turn and find that some started earlier and progressed faster than others. Be interesting to see what the common points for the laggards are. I don't see any great case being made for computing to be an outlier that's different in kind rather than simply degree. I googled some stats on judges, I was correct that it lags student numbers (I say "lags" on the optimistic assumption that those students will eventually go on to be judges in similar quantities. Possibly a judge will release a 10 page manifesto about how the marxist left is forcing women to be judges when they're rather be baking cakes though, so maybe we shouldn't count our chickens until they've hatched): http://gavelgap.org/ http://gavelgap.org/ in particular this infographic which points out that women have been 50% of the students for 2 decades now, but still only 36% of the profession, and only 30% of state judges. http://gavelgap.org/assets/infographic-3-c78b5c8147005783a23e4bef667a804feb2b52bb357ec10ad984c3bec12c6a6c.jpg http://gavelgap.org/assets/infographic-3-c78b5c8147005783a23... So it seems my use of "lags" was over optimistic and student numbers aren't a great predictor, even after two decades.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ve55 9y ago

If you enjoyed this post you should read a few others that have been posted by Scott recently (on the linked website). If any chance were to be made, the least that I would hope for is that people stop responding to every argument with nothing but hatred. Just pure, unfiltered, hatred. It's very difficult nowadays to find communities, or even individuals, who are good at this.

peacetreefrog 9y ago
Particularly apt: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
- ve55 9y ago
  That's a good example that's a bit further back in the archive, but hopefully shouldn't be too hard to find due to how influential it was. Probably better just to read the entire site, some really amazing posts there.
  - petters 9y ago
    That particular post is listed by Scott as one of his "top posts." at http://slatestarcodex.com/about/ http://slatestarcodex.com/about/
smsm42 9y ago
> If you enjoyed this post you should read a few others that have been posted by Scott recently (on the linked website). In fact, you should read all posts in that blog (only joking a little here). I am saying this as a person who disagrees with Scott on many political views. If everybody approached to controversial topics the same way as he does, Internet would be the best place ever for political discussions.
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  Interesting you say that, as this seems to be one of his weaker entries, precisely because he's taking a mocking tone without sufficiently backing up his case.

whatrusmoking 9y ago

If this makes sense to you, you haven't actually talked to women in this field who trust you. Scott has a bad habit of setting up bad strawmen and doing literature reviews without talking to domain experts. (Frankly the weakness of the arguments he's choosing to debunk make me doubt that he even engaged in this topic with good faith. If you think the opposing view point is summarized by ' "And everyone says “Aha! I bet it’s because of negative stereotypes!” ', then you're not serious about this conversation.)

sparky_z 9y ago
Feel free to get specific.

luu 9y ago

Am I missing part of the argument here? At the beginning of section IV, Scott argues that stereotypes can’t explain the gender gap in engineering because of the differential rate at which people major in math vs. engineering (45% women in math, 20% women in engineering). He says: > Might girls be worried not by stereotypes about computers themselves, but by stereotypes that girls are bad at math and so can’t succeed in the math-heavy world of computer science? No. About 45% of college math majors are women, compared to (again) only 20% of computer science majors. Undergraduate mathematics itself more-or-less shows gender parity. This can’t be an explanation for the computer results. Later, he introduces the thing-people interest spectrum and makes a case that it’s inherent. He then breaks down the gender gap in various medical fields in way that’s suggestive that the differences are due to the thing-people idea. But, how does that apply math vs engineering or math vs. programming? Or for that matter, programming vs. chemical engineering or electrical engineering vs. chemical engineering? During undergrad, my recollection was that there were proportionally fewer women in electrical engineering than in chemical engineering in the classes I saw, and some quick googling seems to bear this out. If math vs. engineering is a mystery that can't be explained by streotypes, it also appears to be a mystery that can't be explained by thing-people. Although I think it's a long stretch, maybe you can argue that computers are more "thing-like" than math, but I don't think you can really push that argument through to explain the relative ratios in CS, math, EE, CivE, AE, MSE, and ChemE? BTW, the reason I think it's a stretch is because you could also argue that computers are more "people-like" than math, so you could flip the arugment around if the ratios were reversed. For EE vs. ChemE, maybe EE rates are depressed because there's a lot of cross-over between EE and BME classwork and BME is arguably more people-like, so the would-be EEs go into BME, but if there's crossover, maybe that makes EE more BME-like and therefore more people-like. I don't think you can give an explanation that's much stronger than a just-so story for some other set of observed ratios. Sure, you can pick a subset of fields where thing-people appears to explain the variance[1], but you can also pick a set of fields where it doesn’t appear to explain the variance. Scott seems to view a set of counter-examples as a knockdown argument against stereotypes. But then why doesn’t this other set of examples invalidate the thing-people explanation he argues for? Why can’t you apply the exact same line of reasoning he applied to stereotypes to thing-people? This line of reasoning seems internally inconsistent to me. Am I missing something that would make this line of reasoning consistent? One line of reasoning is that Scott is merely rebutting someone else's argument and that he therefore doesn't need to explain what's going on and he only needs to explain why the other explanation is wrong. But in that case, there isn't a need to bring up thing-people. It seems like it's been brought up because Scott believes thing-people has more explanatory power than sterotypes and Scott is making a positive argument about thing-people, not just knocking down someone else's argument. [1] Even within the fields he picks, one example he gives is the rate at which women go pediatrics at a higher rate than any other specialization he lists other than ob/gyn. But why is the rate in pediatrics so different than in psychiatry? He argues that they're both "people" fields, which sounds reasonable. But there's one field is 25% male and the other is 43% male. That's almost the same as the math/engineering difference he cites earlier with the genders flipped. Is dealing with babies somehow more people-like or less thing-like than talking to adults? It's certainly a strong stereotype that women are more interested in babies than men, but this is cited as an example of the explanatory power of thing-people, not of the explanatory power of stereotypes.

pinaceae 9y ago

does it not strike anyone here a bit odd that only white men are rushing to defend the manifesto guy? isn't any employee that needs to write a 10 page manifesto about anything on the wtf side? and now a practicing psychiatrist from the midwest who really likes to pontificate on the web about anything rushes in to gloriously defend the rights of the eternally oppressed - men. who can't just shut the fuck up and compete. no, it has to be endless verbal diarrhea. sometimes i wish actual alpha males would exist.

FeepingCreature 9y ago
He's rushing in to gloriously defend the rights of the eternally oppressed. Sounds like he's competing to me.
exolymph 9y ago
I'm a woman and I defended him, even though I don't entirely agree with what he wrote.