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Holy stereotypes, batman. > Women can be great engineers, we just rarely care to become them How do you presume to know what the majority of women care to be?

• deleted 9y ago
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• vings 9y ago
  Allow me to clarify some things in my post: I intentionally worked on the basis of stereotypes or generalisations. If 60% of group A wants prefers X over Y while only 40% of group B prefers X over Y, it's accurate to speak in general terms, even if there are many individual exceptions. Any discussion of women in technology _in general_, as opposed to individual women in tech, inherently relies on the ability to make generalisations. As to how I presume it, I was basing my thoughts on the the science of gender differences. Take a look for example here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Things_Women_and_People_A_Meta-Analysis_of_Sex_Differences_in_Interests https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th... In particular, "Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d = 0.93) on the Things-People dimension." By "care to become them", I meant less the _desire_ to be a good engineer, and more _actually_ enjoying the hours spent in lone engineering. It's one thing to want to be a good engineer in the abstract, or to enjoy holding an engineering role at a company (and some engineering roles in some company cultures are much more people-oriented than other engineering roles), and it's another thing to be somebody who would happily spend a weekend understanding some algorithm, and evenings developing some new open source library as a side project. There are definitely some women who will enjoy these over the alternatives, but not many, and far fewer than there are men, as shown by the huge differences in the Things-People dimension and the huge differences in how many men versus women actually do those things. And I'll speak just for myself: sitting away at a screen chopping away at some problem often just isn't emotionally fulfilling. And I don't think women who are not engineers really envy those who spend their time this way. I definitely support initiatives to expose more girls and women to technology, and to raise the profiles of minority group role models in tech. And perhaps the lesson of the Things-People difference is not that engineering isn't for most women, but rather that engineering needs to be done in a more emotionally connected and social way, for example with pair programming.
  • sudosteph 9y ago
    > I don't think women who are not engineers really envy those who spend their time this way Again, you are presuming to know what the majority of women feel. Your personal preference for "emotionally fulfilling" work is just that, personal preference. As for the study you linked, it's impossible to seperate the influence of gendered socialization and inequal exposure to potential interests from "biological" sources as causes for the differences. Applying these types of weak generalizations to justify differences which are better explained by sexism is not helping women in any way. Maybe if you had experienced childhood as a a female you would understand how toxic female socialization really can be. Stop telling other women what we prefer to be or care about, and just help make a world where girls are not told they need to be "emotionally fulfilled" to enjoy a job. Because that's the one that still exists and prevents women from exploring technical work. Many girls worldwide are still groomed for being caretakers responsible for doing emotional labor and household labor for family when they could be exploring their own interests. I know women, in America, who were raised in this manner and it was very hard for them to to break away from that expectation and work for themselves instead. They wrestled with guilt and their family accused them of selfishness, but they decided rightly that their destiny is theirs and it was wrong for their family to treat them like a servant (notably their brothers were not treated that way). It's easy to conflate the effects of that type of socialization with biological dispositions, but nobody is helped by doing so.
    • vings 9y ago
      I really appreciate your perspective, and agree that I could grow in my empathy for the harmful aspects of female socialisation. It's admittedly hard for me to not view it as butterflies, rainbows and dance classes, but that's just the "grass is greener" effect from my own experience. (I also had no sisters and didn't observe it directly in my own family.) I support everyone liberating themselves in the way that they need to. I can totally agree that all of the studies and data that we have are taken from within the culture itself, and so it's pretty much impossible to see the biology through the culture. I often notice myself that biological explanations are used by dominant groups in order to reduce their responsibility, even if they may not be the most scientifically accurate ways of looking at things.