3 ms·

Or why not say "men are naturally more attracted than women to programming", and human beings have a decent track record of becoming skilled at what they're int

Or why not say "men are naturally more attracted than women to programming", and human beings have a decent track record of becoming skilled at what they're interested in. There's a big difference between not being interested in doing something and not being as capable at doing something.

gwern 16y ago
I don't put it that way because it makes the causality sound wrong. If you think about men being attracted, then it all sounds neutral and due only to one factor, when it's that men being skewed to STEM makes the fields untenable to women who are, if anything, skewed away from STEM (consider the well-established superiority of women at verbal tasks and interpersonal skills). The question is not why are the other occupations that Greenspun characterizes as attracting women - doctor, psychologist, lawyer, etc. - so well paid, but why STEM occupations are so poorly paid. If we thought about it from the perspective of a Martian who has just landed, we might say, 'programming, especially in its niches like embedded or highly distributed scalable, is an intensely demanding task which can be profoundly alien to the human mind, and often requires years of training and experience starting as a child-user just to begin to grok things; therefore, I would expect it to be highly professionalized and to have salaries for its accomplished specialists quite commensurate with specialists in other fields like medicine.' The Martian, of course, would be quite wrong. In case you didn't bother to read my Greenspun links, he says that a motivated and very intelligent person - the sort of women whose absence is noted in STEM - could expect in their 40s to collect salaries in specialist medicine in the neighborhood of $300,000, or $500,000 as a law firm partner, or $90,000 as a tenured teacher; he didn't cover child psychologists, though I could swear he did somewhere, but those have similar or higher salaries. Assuming you're even able to get tenure in STEM, your salary will be nowhere near any of that... A software engineer elite enough to make it into Google will earn - while he's employed there - somewhere around $100,000. (http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm) So yeah.

gwern 16y ago

I don't put it that way because it makes the causality sound wrong. If you think about men being attracted, then it all sounds neutral and due only to one factor, when it's that men being skewed to STEM makes the fields untenable to women who are, if anything, skewed away from STEM (consider the well-established superiority of women at verbal tasks and interpersonal skills). The question is not why are the other occupations that Greenspun characterizes as attracting women - doctor, psychologist, lawyer, etc. - so well paid, but why STEM occupations are so poorly paid. If we thought about it from the perspective of a Martian who has just landed, we might say, 'programming, especially in its niches like embedded or highly distributed scalable, is an intensely demanding task which can be profoundly alien to the human mind, and often requires years of training and experience starting as a child-user just to begin to grok things; therefore, I would expect it to be highly professionalized and to have salaries for its accomplished specialists quite commensurate with specialists in other fields like medicine.' The Martian, of course, would be quite wrong. In case you didn't bother to read my Greenspun links, he says that a motivated and very intelligent person - the sort of women whose absence is noted in STEM - could expect in their 40s to collect salaries in specialist medicine in the neighborhood of $300,000, or $500,000 as a law firm partner, or $90,000 as a tenured teacher; he didn't cover child psychologists, though I could swear he did somewhere, but those have similar or higher salaries. Assuming you're even able to get tenure in STEM, your salary will be nowhere near any of that... A software engineer elite enough to make it into Google will earn - while he's employed there - somewhere around $100,000. (http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm) So yeah.