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Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

257 points by daenz 9y ago

NegativeLatency 9y ago
Never forget: causation does not necessarily imply correlation
- blfr 9y ago
  What would that mean in this context? A pretty reasonable explanation is that men and women have different interests. Egalitarian countries generally provide an environment where people are free to express these differences in preferences. A mechanism that would make it causal.
- shar3333f 9y ago
  Not sure if on purpose, but think you got that the wrong way around.
- stygianguest 9y ago
  Did you accidentally reverse the arrow? Or is there a smart joke sailing over my head?
- trendia 9y ago
  Totally irrelevant to this article, but you are technically correct. Let X = "angle" Let Y = sin(X) Then X has a causal relationship with Y, but Corr(X, Y) = 0. I doubt that's what you're saying, though!
  - kazinator 9y ago
    However, small deltas around a particular X correlate with corresponding small sigmas around the corresponding Y.
dudul 9y ago
I don't think it's a breakthrough, I remember seeing the exact same conclusion from a different research a few years ago already. It was even a little broader since it mentioned that countries with the most gender equality also had the most stay at home moms.
Mikeb85 9y ago
> Girls also tended to register a lower interest in science subjects. These differences were near-universal across all the countries and regions studied. So girls are less interested in these subjects, but in more unequal countries (read poorer) they do it for career prospects, while in more equal countries (read richer) they do what they want (not STEM subjects).
- gedy 9y ago
  No sure why you were down voted, it's a reasonable point that women have more economically viable career choices in countries with better gender equality.
  - vinay427 9y ago
    It's also very similar to the point raised in the original article: > The researchers, from Leeds Beckett University and the University of Missouri, believe this might be because countries with less gender equality often have little welfare support, making the choice of a relatively high-paid STEM career more attractive.
- friendly_chap 9y ago
  I think that's a perfectly reasonable explanation (obv. not the only one though). The downvoters should explain themselves.
  - TomMarius 9y ago
    Lately it's the fashion to just downvote.
- yesenadam 9y ago
  That sounds right to me. Anecdatally I've talked with a lot of latin American girls e.g. Colombians, who are studying engineering, (and busy with exams on maths and science subjects) who don't seem at all the type. I think it's an in-demand job with good prospects, where maybe there aren't so many competing career choices. (Interesting psychological study, why you're being downvoted for saying that. Maybe that people are nowadays conditioned to assume any talk of gender differences is sexism, I've noticed.)
stevenwoo 9y ago
Link to paper: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617741719 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617741719 Some analysis (source of link): https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
nicolashahn 9y ago
I wonder if it's possible that men and women, on average, have differing criteria for choosing careers, and artificially forcing the distributions towards the middle might do more harm than good.
- gsich 9y ago
  Correct
- geofft 9y ago
  I think it's certainly possible that different career preferences is true and that the current distribution in practice is still skewed. That is, perhaps the "right" distribution is something like 60/40 men/women, in which case both 50/50 men/women and 90/10 men/women would be skewed and pushing people out of careers they'd be happy with.
  - darawk 9y ago
    It is possible. But it's also possible that it's not skewed, or even skewed the other way. It's as though someone should investigate this question before embarking on programs to shift the distribution to arbitrary places.
    - geofft 9y ago
      > It's as though someone should investigate this question before embarking on programs to shift the distribution to arbitrary places. If the status quo is 90/10 or worse, I don't agree: 50/50 is the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis can certainly be disproven, but the amount of evidence needed to hold a belief that 50/50 is probably correct is much smaller than the amount of evidence needed to hold a belief that 90/10 is probably correct. I don't think the right approach is "We should let the status quo stay indefinitely until we've convinced ourself of what the right number is" - if we have evidence that the status quo is potentially right, that evidence should be plenteous and easy to gather. (That said, I do agree that programs focused on improving "the pipeline" and getting more girls interested in STEM are misguided and it would be better to focus on removing the barriers that cause women already interested in STEM careers to leave. But that's a little bit of a different subject.)
dominotw 9y ago
Too many political article today on HN. This, code of conduct, fake news, peter theil ect
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Just click on "flag". They disappear soon enough.
dudul 9y ago
It would have been interesting to control for wealth. Unless I missed it in the article, it could be valuable to analyze a group of countries deemed "rich", but with low gender equality (I don't really even know how the latter is calculated).
js8 9y ago
"If governments want to increase women’s participation in STEM, a more effective strategy might be to target the girls who are clearly being lost from the STEM pathway – those for whom science and maths are their best subjects and who enjoy it but still don’t choose it" I don't understand why we should try to make somebody choose a subject they didn't choose to do.
- walshemj 9y ago
  well making Engineering and Science careers as well rewarded and give them the same social status as say the Law, Medicine are might help. Those young women with triple A's beloved of headline writers come exam time are making a rational decision not to go into a field where they are badly paid.
  - mpweiher 9y ago
    ...and the working conditions are generally...sub-par.
  - aoeusnth1 9y ago
    Are women more status-seeking than men? Are women more money-seeking than men? It seems to me that the assumptions which gave rise to your comment would imply that Wall Street traders should be dominated by women. Why is this not the case, in your opinion? Would increasing the pay and status of a job increase, or decrease the percentage of women? Should CEOs be paid more to increase their percentage of women?
    - walshemj 9y ago
      Well Traders do have this barrow boy image medicine or law has a much higher "social" status in the UK and I bet the USA also
      - aoeusnth1 9y ago
        Why do you suppose women dominate primary school teaching? Is it because it’s too high status and too well paid?
bluewave 9y ago
The defensive tone of this article is alarming. If you don't study computer science now you will likely be in the same boat 30 years from now with illiterate folks of today. Disparity in computer science education in Western countries puts women at a massive economic disadvantage and is a major geopolitical risk. Arguing that women naturally prefer non-STEM fields is sexist and dangerous. Helping drive up the numbers of women and other underrepresented populations in CS should be a major priority for developed countries.
- sannee 9y ago
  > If you don't study computer science now you will likely be in the same boat 30 years from now with illiterate folks of today. "Studying computer science" and "using a computer" are worlds apart. And the distance seems to be increasing even further.
- BirdieNZ 9y ago
  If women do actually naturally prefer non-STEM fields on average then is the science on the subject being sexist? I am more interested in the truth than in making the numbers between men and women be exactly 50/50 in everything.
  - bluewave 9y ago
    Women don't prefer non-STEM fields on average, this is an artifact of Western countries. There's no disparity in many developing countries including China. It's not about 50/50, it's about 100% of the population being literate with respect to complexities of modern economy.
    - BirdieNZ 9y ago
      Developing countries have different influences on job choice than wealthier/Western countries. Countries in Scandinavia typically have high gender disparity between the sexes in most occupations, because they are wealthy enough that men and women can choose what kind of jobs they take rather than doing whatever earns the most money. Developing countries are biased towards survival-jobs, as it were, rather than enjoyment-jobs. If this is correct then we can expect the developing countries to slowly increase in disparity as they become wealthier.
platz 9y ago
However you feel about Jordan Peterson, he brings up this fact all the time, esp w/ regards to Scandinavia, would define this phenomenon as the difference between equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome, and that the genders, when provided the option, tend towards different preferences (e.g. bricklayers vs nurses), and that environment factors can skew these natural preferences in either direction. raises the question of _why_ women in these egalitarian societies are currently are selecting against STEM. Because for example there are plenty of female accountants, which is not normally thought of as a "people" business. So perhaps the environmental factors could change the preferences. Whether the overall result is preferable for society, I have no idea.
- Baeocystin 9y ago
  I realize this is an anecdote, but one of my long-term clients is a tax/accounting office run and staffed almost entirely by women. When I started working there, I fully expected to find it tedious and drab. It turns out that it is surprisingly fun- they get clients that run all kinds of small businesses, we meet, talk about things, see what we can do to help them... Knowing the tax code & GAAP is important, but they turn out to be only the means to a far more social end. Really changed my mind in a positive way.
- kenning 9y ago
  > (e.g. bricklayers vs nurses) How about doctors vs nurses? I think this is a much more relevant comparison. In the united states (sorry) male doctors outnumber female by about 2:1 [1], while female nurses outnumber male nurses by more than 10:1 [2]. Comparing these two professions it's a lot easier to make the argument that women are implicitly encouraged to set their expectations lower than men, who actually may feel emasculated as a nurse. STEM jobs are seen as more difficult to train for and to achieve than non-STEM jobs, similar to the job of a doctor compared to the job of a nurse. If you're confused as to why women choose 'difficult' jobs less often, I hope this line of thinking is convincing... [1] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/physicians-by-gender/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/physicians-by-gend... [2] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/total-number-of-professionally-active-nurses-by-gender/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/total-number-of-pr...
seaknoll 9y ago
I wonder how much of this is related to parental leave policy versus generic social safety net. Countries with a strong safety net also have generous maternity leave but are behind on paternity. I imagine that at a large scale this does make many companies slightly less likely to hire women, and families much more likely to have the mother take time away from her job. The ultimate effect, albeit in a warm and fuzzy way, could be to deemphasize women’s careers by normalizing the idea that it’s best if you stay home with the kids. I don't suppose that this could have a larger effect than the gender inequality in many countries lacking a social safety net, but it could be a contributing factor. The idea that women, given the choice, generally would rather prioritize motherhood seems totally plausible. If that's the case, it could indicate that we need to think about diversity differently. But I'm uncomfortable with a side effect that some of these policies could have - subtly pressuring women to focus on motherhood. The solution is complicated though if the mere existence of a good maternity leave policy encourages sexism. Hopefully general parental leave can help address this.
- Baeocystin 9y ago
  As far as I know, all developed countries have birthrates that are below replacement values. Is it really so bad to think that motherhood is something that should be focused on? Of my family/friends that are women with children, every single one of them wants more flexibility with their work, because they want more time to spend with the children. Children certainly benefit from parental attention. Yet many workplace policies regarding childcare are downright draconian. Perhaps we should accept that prioritizing parenting is a good thing, and try and make it so that people can both work and have the support they need to help with their familial obligations.
- mrchicity 9y ago
  Possibly has to do with wealth? When you have little, you have to prioritize finding a job that pays as much as you can possibly make. STEM jobs top that list easily. If you have a lot, pursuing a more leisurely or personally rewarding job is possible. My family came to the US as fairly poor immigrants from Portugal. My mother worked at the time, went to college at night to earn more, which was unusual then. She didn't this out of some sense of pride or feminism, but because she simply had to. The area where I lived had other poor immigrants from Romania, Armenia, Soviet Union, etc. and many of the mothers worked very hard outside the home as well.
overcast 9y ago
I'll probably face wrath, and hell's fury for this, but maybe, men and women are different. Has forcing STEM upon the female population, driven any more of them towards the discipline? Taking the sampling size of every woman I've ever went on a date with in my 37 years, none of them were interested in anything related. The vast majority were teachers, psychologists, and nurses. Occupations based around nurturing others. One, was a designer/artist. None of the women in my huge family, sister, mother, none of them care about technology fields. My father, and male cousins on the other hand, are in various fields of tech and engineering.
- kyleschiller 9y ago
  Is it possible that your dating pool is subject to sampling bias? Empirically speaking, about 1/4 of people in STEM are women, so if you've met 0 women interested in STEM, it seems like your experience simply aren't an accurate reflection of reality. [0] I think it's incredibly ironic that you're highlighting your own relative interest in STEM while failing to apply any degree of scientific rigor to your own thinking. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
  - overcast 9y ago
    Oh brother, there's always that one guy on HN. None of this was supposed to "scientific", so relax. I'm giving you my 37 years of experience dating at least a couple hundred women, that's it.
    - dang 9y ago
      Please don't be rude, even if someone's reply seemed nitpicky.
    - malteof 9y ago
      That's fine as long as you don't try to draw any conclusions from your anecdote :-)
  - 9y ago
purple-again 9y ago
Has anyone ever looked at it from the network effect angle? I’m a software dev because I didn’t like being a CPA and my friend was a tech guy who got me into it. My wife went into the medical field because her sister turned her onto this speciality that was easy to get into and paid quite well. I tried to teach my smart wife to program and failed miserably because that’s not how our relationship works. Most people in even your industry are not die hard passionate live and breathe the code lifestyle types. They show up, work, and go back to their lives. We all know that ‘in general’ in the USA at least but I’m sure in other countries as well the genders tend to self segregate their peer networks. My close friends are men. Her close friends are women.
- kyleschiller 9y ago
  Yeah this is absolutely a large chunk of it. Especially when you consider how many jobs are filled through referrals [0]. At my last company, I only worked with male engineers, and so when I got a new job, I could only think of male engineers to refer to open positions. I think this is also why inertia is so hard to offset here, we have a strong self-reinforcing cycle that's going to take a lot of external force to break out of. [0] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-survey-reveals-85-all-jobs-filled-via-networking-lou-adler/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-survey-reveals-85-all-job...
omginternets 9y ago
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0956797617741719 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0956797617741719 Wonderful. Yet another publicly-funded research project with implications for public policy that is behind a paywall. I guess I'll never know the details of how "gender equality" was operationalized, and therefore never have an informed interpretation of these data. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- akvadrako 9y ago
  http://sci-hub.tw http://sci-hub.tw
  - omginternets 9y ago
    Ah, so it's .tw now. Do they announce their domain changes somewhere?
    - akvadrako 9y ago
      Wikipedia usually has the updated list.
curiousgal 9y ago
The actual title is 'A gender equality paradox': Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads. The findings only present a paradox if you believe that gender equality requires equal representation in all fields.
harunurhan 9y ago
In those countries which lack gender equality, in many cases people do not choose STEM because it's really difficult to find a job otherwise.
geofft 9y ago
For those of you who have some form of access, this appears to be the actual research paper: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617741719 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617741719 > The underrepresentation of girls and women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is a continual concern for social scientists and policymakers. Using an international database on adolescent achievement in science, mathematics, and reading (N = 472,242), we showed that girls performed similarly to or better than boys in science in two of every three countries, and in nearly all countries, more girls appeared capable of college-level STEM study than had enrolled. Paradoxically, the sex differences in the magnitude of relative academic strengths and pursuit of STEM degrees rose with increases in national gender equality. The gap between boys’ science achievement and girls’ reading achievement relative to their mean academic performance was near universal. These sex differences in academic strengths and attitudes toward science correlated with the STEM graduation gap. A mediation analysis suggested that life-quality pressures in less gender-equal countries promote girls’ and women’s engagement with STEM subjects. Their definition of "gender equality" is this: > The World Economic Forum publishes The Global Gender Gap Report annually. We used the 2015 data (World Economic Forum, 2015). For each nation, the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) assesses the degree to which girls and women fall behind boys and men on 14 key indicators (e.g., earnings, tertiary enrollment ratio, life expectancy, seats in parliament) on a 0.0 to 1.0 scale, with 1.0 representing complete parity (or men falling behind). For the countries participating in the 2015 PISA, GGGI scores ranged from 0.593 for the United Arab Emirates to 0.881 for Iceland. (One of the things I'd be curious about is whether that's just a proxy for Western cultural norms; the more commonly cited reasons for a gender gap in STEM fields in the US are things like harassment and misogyny, and it's certainly possible that those are correlated more strongly with Western culture than with cross-cultural structural inequality.)
pishpash 9y ago
The article posits that the affluence of a country (not gender equality itself, though correlated) affects how much the economic security that comes with high-paying STEM jobs is an incentive to purse those jobs. That can explain a gradient between countries, and doesn't affect the original, purely gender question either way.
thriftwy 9y ago
I don't like how there's not any charts anywhere. Numbers usually tell better tale than words.
depressedpanda 9y ago
Given a choice, more women than men will go for non-STEM careers, so in rich countries you will find way more STEM-proficient men than women. This has been known for quite some time. But take care not to mention this at workplaces where they use diversity hiring practices to try to artificially and unfairly inflate their percentage of women compared to the field as a whole. It will get you fired.
- srtjstjsj 9y ago
  This argument would be more interesting if we weren't seeing heavy female attrition due sexual harassment unrelated to work content.
  - depressedpanda 9y ago
    Is there female attrition? Is there female attrition due to sexual harassment? You're making a bold claim, which I am personally not seeing at all. Care to back it up with any references?
    - lkerrekfjk 9y ago
      Of course he cannot back anything he is saying. He just deems women eternal victims of "toxic masculinity", the basis for intersectional ideology.
- dkoubsky 9y ago
  This seems like it may be appropriate: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
datashovel 9y ago
I wonder if it's that fewer females prefer STEM, or is it that more men are doing things they would prefer not to?
- bitL 9y ago
  If I (male) had a chance to be on a permanent comfortable welfare, I would probably spend more time playing games, doing sports, socializing, traveling etc. instead of being in a noisy office with bad light around desperate people I often dislike, whipped by my boss in a constant rat race, being refused bonuses for great performance as a new car/boat/house is of a sudden interest to my superior.
princess-aslaug 9y ago
Maybe women that are free to choose more often don't want to graduate in STEM.
mc32 9y ago
Even if we do conclusively find that women on average prefer non STEM careers, I think for the good of our society, we should still make an effort to entice more women into STEM who otherwise would not. Not for dime immediate social justice reason, but because the advancement and progress of our own society needs more STEM grads, if we don't produce our own, we'll have to import them, which we should not have to, if we could develop policies of encouragement.
shar3333f 9y ago
I find the that those who use this as some sort of argument against feminism often are ignoring the emphasis feminists put on social conditioning as an influencing and oppressive factor on the behaviour of each gender. Just because a country, by law, affords women the same rights as men that doesn't mean it's a country which is free of the social conditioning which force certain expectations upon each gender. These are things that are inherited from previous generations and do not go away so easily. People use these results to imply something like "when people are free to do what they want they tend to their 'natural' gender role". But I don't believe this statement can be justified as countries with "more gender equality" (i.e. better women's rights) have yet to shed themselves of societal idioms and culture that feminist theory would call oppressive. I.e. traditional gender roles in the media, toys etc. I think a more accurate statement would be "when people are free to do what they want, they will tend to behaviours they're conditioned toward." After all, as we can see in the "less gender equality" countries, larger percentages of women in society can and do enjoy careers in STEM fields. What would be interesting is to see 10-20 years down the line how some countries progress and how these behaviours feedback into the next generation.
zerostar07 9y ago
Usually you get what you incentivize. If you go overboard on the equality of outcome, people will adapt to it, be it women or any kind of person.
globuous 9y ago
Whenever thinking of gender equality, I like to go back to Beauvoir. plato.stanford.edu's page [1] is fantastic, here's an extract: "Before The Second Sex, the sexed/gendered body was not an object of phenomenological investigation. Beauvoir changed that. Her argument for sexual equality takes two directions. First, it exposes the ways that masculine ideology exploits the sexual difference to create systems of inequality. Second, it identifies the ways that arguments for equality erase the sexual difference in order to establish the masculine subject as the absolute human type. Here Plato is her target. Plato, beginning with the premise that sex is an accidental quality, concludes that women and men are equally qualified to become members of the guardian class. The price of women’s admission to this privileged class, however, is that they must train and live like men. Thus the discriminatory sexual difference remains in play. Only men or those who emulate them may rule. Beauvoir’s argument for equality does not fall into this trap. She insists that women and men treat each other as equals and that such treatment requires that their sexual differences be validated. Equality is not a synonym for sameness." (emphasis mine) I find this paragraph particularly well written, but watch out, I've had an american writer read it and he understood the opposite of what is written. I had to make him read it again ^^ I don't know if it applies to this particular statistics. My personal interpretation of Beauvoir is that yes, this stat does make sense. In a gender equal society, you shouldn't find equal ratios everywhere because du-hu, we're actually not the same. But we should be equal. That being said, I don't like talking about these things because I generalize to much, and the question is way too complex for me to approach. I like reading other people's take on it though. Anyway, I just wanted to share Beauvoir's thoughts and my rough interpretation of it in this context. [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
lumberjack 9y ago
Not sure if this has been posted on HN before but I think this is a much more interesting article: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/why-brilliant-girls-tend-favor-non-stem-careers https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh... tl;dr Girls tend to be more well rounded intellectually, with both strong math skills and strong verbal skills, giving them more options, possibly more lucrative options, beyond just STEM. Boys tend to be more lacking in verbal skills limiting their options. A closely related theory is that girls outperform boys in both sciences and humanities, in HS, but they outperform boys in humanities by a much larger margin, and therefore see themselves as strongest in those subjects.
rtz12 9y ago
Countries with more gender equality are richer. Countries with less gender equality are poorer. In poorer countries, you are more inclined to choose careers based on paycheck, less on personal preference. In richer countries you are more inclined to choose careers based on your personal preferences and less on for the paycheck. It's pretty easy. EDIT: A good counter example to this correlation could be Japan. Low gender equality but also low female participation in STEM fields. Why? Because Japan is a rich country.
- ec109685 9y ago
  The study showed that adjusting for interest in STEM women were 10% less likely to chose that career than a male in gender equal countries, so personal preference (which you’d expect to match with interest) doesn’t entirely explain it. I don’t think the article cites anything that would support your Japan hypothesis.
- vilmosi 9y ago
  >>> In richer countries you are more inclined to choose careers based on your personal preferences and less on for the paycheck The same is true for men though.
rbehrends 9y ago
I can't help but think that the article/paper are overstating a statistical effect here by attempting to reduce a multicausal phenomenon to a monocausal one. If you look just at rich western countries, most of them occupy a fairly narrow strip on the graph. There are outliers, but they can go either way; Finland has a very low STEM graduation rate for women, Denmark a very high one (Figure 3b in the paper). Austria and Germany have fairly different outcomes, despite being culturally more similar than other countries that differ less. This is sort of obscured by throwing in many countries that honestly have very different cultures, very different academic systems, and different constraints for people of different genders that seem to be difficult to reduce to just a single number. For a simple example, there are countries where nursing is primarily taught at colleges and others where nursing is primarily taught through vocational programs. Given the gender disparity in nursing, that would affect the gender breakdown for STEM graduation rates (depending on whether you count nursing as part of the "M" in STEM or not, one way or the other). I'm honestly surprised that for most affluent western countries the numbers are not more spread out. If I had to guess – and we really have too few data points for that – I'd say we're simply looking at a normal distribution here, especially as (with the exception of the UK) the larger countries tend to be closer to the midpoint of the 20%-30% range and it's smaller countries that are at the fringes of the range.
- therealdrag0 9y ago
  Seems like a valid consideration. You should write a letter to the authors :)
tptacek 9y ago
This is on the front page of Hacker News because people here believe it bolsters arguments about the underlying fairness of our field, in which women make up something like 20% of the workforce. The article does not accomplish that. Despite an overall trend in STEM throughout the western world for greater male participation than female, computer science is uniquely low; it is rivaled only by physics and MechE for gender disparity. Throughout the rest of STEM, including hard fields like chemistry and mathematics, we see significantly improved participation among women. There are a bunch of STEM fields that have near parity, and a few (molecular biology, for instance) in which there are slightly more women. These are PhD numbers, not premed stats. Besides better gender parity, something all these fields have in common at the graduate level is that they are significantly more demanding than commercial computer science. We kid ourselves that our day-to-day work is so rarefied that we need the top of the intelligence curve, so much so that the supposed variance in intelligence between men and women might explain our staffing. That's ridiculous. We do a bog-standard symbol manipulation job, and, even at the elite level, we tend to do it slap-dash and ad-hoc. Whatever is keeping women to 20% of our field is artificial, and a travesty. It's also on the front page, I believe, because it's a cite followed from an article posted earlier this week making some of the same arguments. That post had a huge discussion, making this a needless duplicate. We don't need to keep re-litigating this on the front page of the site. I flagged it.
- wyager 9y ago
  > Whatever is keeping women to 20% of our field is artificial Sure, insofar as gender-aligned interests have some cultural basis, it’s definitely “artificial”. Do you think it’s something more than that? If so, why? > We don't need to keep re-litigating this on the front page of the site I notice that people who use this objection regularly are very selective about when they choose to raise it. I haven’t noticed anyone on this site raising this objection consistently - only when they feel they can get in the last word.
- mpweiher 9y ago
  > uniquely low; it is rivaled only by physics and MechE for gender disparity. So it is not, in fact, "uniquely" low. It is about the same as other engineering. Hmm...maybe because it is like other engineering? > Whatever is keeping women to 20% of our field is artificial, and a travesty. You claim without a shred of evidence, while poo-pooing the actual evidence to the contrary. It is a simple fact that most people regardless of gender aren't interested in computer science, girls just even less than boys. See for example: https://erzaehlmirnix.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/unterschiede-mc3a4nner-frauen-interessen-91.jpg https://erzaehlmirnix.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/unterschie...
dahart 9y ago
> Girls, even with their ability in science equalled or excelled that of boys, were often likely to be better overall in reading comprehensions, which relates to higher ability in non-STEM subjects. Why is reading comprehension non-STEM? I've read that success in STEM graduate degrees is highly predicted by language scores on the GRE, and not well predicted by the math part of the test at all.
- tnzn 9y ago
  It's just there's a Math "religion" in the West, and Math is pretty much a sort of holy discipline that's the basis of the hierarchized school system, and I guess it makes people believe such things. It's even more prevalent in France where up till now, general high school shared their students between 3 cursus which were scientifc, economic and litterary. They are hierarchized in the way you know, and pretty much defined by their degree... Of math.
greentuna 9y ago
One thing I have noticed is that male engineers are intrinsically motivated but female engineers, even highly capable ones, are extrinsically motivated. So you find very few female engineers in open source projects, under 3% by some estimates, although the percentage of female professional software engineers is much higher. Clearly this is not due to discrimination —- github doesn’t ask you your gender. So there must be some other explanation. When someone is intrinsically motivated (i.e., not motivated by salary alone) they are likely to be a better employee.
- ec109685 9y ago
  GitHub doesn’t ask for gender, yet you assume the 3% figure is accurate. Even if you do, it doesn’t make sense to correlate GitHub contributions with “intrinsic” motivation. You can still love to code but not want to contribute to Open Source. Also, what percentage of software engineers regularly contribute to a non-corporate sponsored GitHub open source project? I would bet it is a small number, which means you shouldn’t use it as a proxy to generalize for the industry and gender differences within it.
rayiner 9y ago
How do you define which countries have “more gender equality?” It seems like begging the question. My family immigrated from Bangladesh to America. In most ways, obviously, America is a lot more equal. But my mom and her sisters have STEM degrees, and that wasn’t all that unusual for a wealthy Bangladeshi family at the time. Bangladeshis perceive STEM as important, and encourage both girls and boys to pursue it (even if they don’t expect girls to stay in the work force after they get married). Raising a daughter in the US, my perception is that girls in America are taught about “princesses and fairies.” We impress upon boys the need to get practical education so they can support families but are more indulgent with girls. Last summer, I signed my then four-year old up for summer camp classes. There literally was classes for “princesses and fairies.” Of course I signed her up for “little engineers.” My daughter was quite upset to be the only girl in the class. That’s not innate. It’s somehing we’re choosing to do to our kids.
- kyleschiller 9y ago
  Yeah, you're absolutely right that by not taking into account things like STEM participating, the metric ignores exactly this kind of thing. Having said that, if you just want to know how it was literally defined here, I found this comment helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16408092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16408092
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    Women in the USSR were common in engineering degrees because many other high skill careers like law, medicine, philosophy and politics weren’t open to them. Bangladesh isn’t that different and rich families send their daughters to get a degree so they would be more appealing to prospective husbands. You can’t just pick random statistics and extrapolate data from them the fact is still that the more options women have the less they seem to go for specific fields which includes the engineering part of STEM. People ignore the fact that many many men chose STEM not because they want too but because it’s expectd it’s the default career path for the new blue/white colar worker. Myself and everyone else I know went into STEM as a career because it was “easy money” the amount of effort required to get into it is actually fairly low when compared to careers like law or medicine and the payout on average is much better. That said the career for most people in IT isn’t going to be exactly overly satisfying and fulfilling.
kyleschiller 9y ago
Here are three possible explanations for the observed behavior that don't require a belief in inherent biological differences: 1. Since countries with lower gender equality also tend to be poorer, STEM could be seen as a rare opportunity to escape poverty, and this motivation could outweighs any kind of societal bias agains female participation. 2. A quick glance at the graph of results in [0], shows that there's also a strong cultural division. Countries with more gender equality are mostly in Nordic Europe and Western Europe, while countries will less are mostly in the Middle East, Eastern Europe. It's possible for regions to develop cultural norms that reduce gender equality without also developing cultural norms that reduce female participation in STEM. 3. As a corollary to 1, and pulled directly from the article: "STEM careers are generally secure and well-paid but the risks of not following such a path can vary. In more affluent counties, where any choice of career feels relatively safe, women may feel able to make choices based on non-economic factors." To be clear, I don't have strong evidence that any of these are necessarily true, but I think the existing of possible alternatives should at least force a reconsideration of the immediate conclusion that this correlation proves anything about biological difference. I think it's troubling that as of writing this, none of the top comments do anything to suggest alternative explanations, and are quick to use this to confirm the existing narrative [1]. Again, I don't think I've done anything to disprove these claims, but it's indicative of a larger intellectual problem on HN if we would rather have discussions that confirm our beliefs than discussions that challenge and sharpen then. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... [1] https://imgur.com/a/1Diel https://imgur.com/a/1Diel
- hyperdunc 9y ago
  If a woman doesn't feel compelled to pursue STEM to escape poverty - if she can make a career choice based on non-economic factors - then it's reasonable to assume her more innate traits and desires will come into play. (One such trait that asserts is a preference for dealing with people over abstract systems.) These traits are at their root biological and only modulated by culture.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
thekashifmalik 9y ago
This link was top of hacker news and then suddenly disappeared. What's happened?
husmo 9y ago
I can't see this thread in the front page any more. Not even the first three pages.
- yetanother1980 9y ago
  Pretty standard. Political posts are heavily downwaited.
rapedangnow 9y ago
I hope you get raped dang
rapedangnow 9y ago
Dang don't be a fucking cunt. You ban people who promote tipping, the most privileged thing ever. You fucking cunt, I really hope you get raped and never find happiness in life. I hope your rape is very painful

257 points by daenz 9y ago

NegativeLatency 9y ago

Never forget: causation does not necessarily imply correlation

blfr 9y ago
What would that mean in this context? A pretty reasonable explanation is that men and women have different interests. Egalitarian countries generally provide an environment where people are free to express these differences in preferences. A mechanism that would make it causal.
shar3333f 9y ago
Not sure if on purpose, but think you got that the wrong way around.
stygianguest 9y ago
Did you accidentally reverse the arrow? Or is there a smart joke sailing over my head?
trendia 9y ago
Totally irrelevant to this article, but you are technically correct. Let X = "angle" Let Y = sin(X) Then X has a causal relationship with Y, but Corr(X, Y) = 0. I doubt that's what you're saying, though!
- kazinator 9y ago
  However, small deltas around a particular X correlate with corresponding small sigmas around the corresponding Y.

dudul 9y ago

I don't think it's a breakthrough, I remember seeing the exact same conclusion from a different research a few years ago already. It was even a little broader since it mentioned that countries with the most gender equality also had the most stay at home moms.

Mikeb85 9y ago

> Girls also tended to register a lower interest in science subjects. These differences were near-universal across all the countries and regions studied. So girls are less interested in these subjects, but in more unequal countries (read poorer) they do it for career prospects, while in more equal countries (read richer) they do what they want (not STEM subjects).

gedy 9y ago
No sure why you were down voted, it's a reasonable point that women have more economically viable career choices in countries with better gender equality.
- vinay427 9y ago
  It's also very similar to the point raised in the original article: > The researchers, from Leeds Beckett University and the University of Missouri, believe this might be because countries with less gender equality often have little welfare support, making the choice of a relatively high-paid STEM career more attractive.
friendly_chap 9y ago
I think that's a perfectly reasonable explanation (obv. not the only one though). The downvoters should explain themselves.
- TomMarius 9y ago
  Lately it's the fashion to just downvote.
yesenadam 9y ago
That sounds right to me. Anecdatally I've talked with a lot of latin American girls e.g. Colombians, who are studying engineering, (and busy with exams on maths and science subjects) who don't seem at all the type. I think it's an in-demand job with good prospects, where maybe there aren't so many competing career choices. (Interesting psychological study, why you're being downvoted for saying that. Maybe that people are nowadays conditioned to assume any talk of gender differences is sexism, I've noticed.)

stevenwoo 9y ago

Link to paper: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617741719 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617741719 Some analysis (source of link): https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

nicolashahn 9y ago

I wonder if it's possible that men and women, on average, have differing criteria for choosing careers, and artificially forcing the distributions towards the middle might do more harm than good.

gsich 9y ago
Correct
geofft 9y ago
I think it's certainly possible that different career preferences is true and that the current distribution in practice is still skewed. That is, perhaps the "right" distribution is something like 60/40 men/women, in which case both 50/50 men/women and 90/10 men/women would be skewed and pushing people out of careers they'd be happy with.
- darawk 9y ago
  It is possible. But it's also possible that it's not skewed, or even skewed the other way. It's as though someone should investigate this question before embarking on programs to shift the distribution to arbitrary places.
  - geofft 9y ago
    > It's as though someone should investigate this question before embarking on programs to shift the distribution to arbitrary places. If the status quo is 90/10 or worse, I don't agree: 50/50 is the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis can certainly be disproven, but the amount of evidence needed to hold a belief that 50/50 is probably correct is much smaller than the amount of evidence needed to hold a belief that 90/10 is probably correct. I don't think the right approach is "We should let the status quo stay indefinitely until we've convinced ourself of what the right number is" - if we have evidence that the status quo is potentially right, that evidence should be plenteous and easy to gather. (That said, I do agree that programs focused on improving "the pipeline" and getting more girls interested in STEM are misguided and it would be better to focus on removing the barriers that cause women already interested in STEM careers to leave. But that's a little bit of a different subject.)

dominotw 9y ago

Too many political article today on HN. This, code of conduct, fake news, peter theil ect

jessaustin 9y ago
Just click on "flag". They disappear soon enough.

dudul 9y ago

It would have been interesting to control for wealth. Unless I missed it in the article, it could be valuable to analyze a group of countries deemed "rich", but with low gender equality (I don't really even know how the latter is calculated).

js8 9y ago

"If governments want to increase women’s participation in STEM, a more effective strategy might be to target the girls who are clearly being lost from the STEM pathway – those for whom science and maths are their best subjects and who enjoy it but still don’t choose it" I don't understand why we should try to make somebody choose a subject they didn't choose to do.

walshemj 9y ago
well making Engineering and Science careers as well rewarded and give them the same social status as say the Law, Medicine are might help. Those young women with triple A's beloved of headline writers come exam time are making a rational decision not to go into a field where they are badly paid.
- mpweiher 9y ago
  ...and the working conditions are generally...sub-par.
- aoeusnth1 9y ago
  Are women more status-seeking than men? Are women more money-seeking than men? It seems to me that the assumptions which gave rise to your comment would imply that Wall Street traders should be dominated by women. Why is this not the case, in your opinion? Would increasing the pay and status of a job increase, or decrease the percentage of women? Should CEOs be paid more to increase their percentage of women?
  - walshemj 9y ago
    Well Traders do have this barrow boy image medicine or law has a much higher "social" status in the UK and I bet the USA also
    - aoeusnth1 9y ago
      Why do you suppose women dominate primary school teaching? Is it because it’s too high status and too well paid?

bluewave 9y ago

The defensive tone of this article is alarming. If you don't study computer science now you will likely be in the same boat 30 years from now with illiterate folks of today. Disparity in computer science education in Western countries puts women at a massive economic disadvantage and is a major geopolitical risk. Arguing that women naturally prefer non-STEM fields is sexist and dangerous. Helping drive up the numbers of women and other underrepresented populations in CS should be a major priority for developed countries.

sannee 9y ago
> If you don't study computer science now you will likely be in the same boat 30 years from now with illiterate folks of today. "Studying computer science" and "using a computer" are worlds apart. And the distance seems to be increasing even further.
BirdieNZ 9y ago
If women do actually naturally prefer non-STEM fields on average then is the science on the subject being sexist? I am more interested in the truth than in making the numbers between men and women be exactly 50/50 in everything.
- bluewave 9y ago
  Women don't prefer non-STEM fields on average, this is an artifact of Western countries. There's no disparity in many developing countries including China. It's not about 50/50, it's about 100% of the population being literate with respect to complexities of modern economy.
  - BirdieNZ 9y ago
    Developing countries have different influences on job choice than wealthier/Western countries. Countries in Scandinavia typically have high gender disparity between the sexes in most occupations, because they are wealthy enough that men and women can choose what kind of jobs they take rather than doing whatever earns the most money. Developing countries are biased towards survival-jobs, as it were, rather than enjoyment-jobs. If this is correct then we can expect the developing countries to slowly increase in disparity as they become wealthier.

platz 9y ago

However you feel about Jordan Peterson, he brings up this fact all the time, esp w/ regards to Scandinavia, would define this phenomenon as the difference between equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome, and that the genders, when provided the option, tend towards different preferences (e.g. bricklayers vs nurses), and that environment factors can skew these natural preferences in either direction. raises the question of _why_ women in these egalitarian societies are currently are selecting against STEM. Because for example there are plenty of female accountants, which is not normally thought of as a "people" business. So perhaps the environmental factors could change the preferences. Whether the overall result is preferable for society, I have no idea.

Baeocystin 9y ago
I realize this is an anecdote, but one of my long-term clients is a tax/accounting office run and staffed almost entirely by women. When I started working there, I fully expected to find it tedious and drab. It turns out that it is surprisingly fun- they get clients that run all kinds of small businesses, we meet, talk about things, see what we can do to help them... Knowing the tax code & GAAP is important, but they turn out to be only the means to a far more social end. Really changed my mind in a positive way.
kenning 9y ago
> (e.g. bricklayers vs nurses) How about doctors vs nurses? I think this is a much more relevant comparison. In the united states (sorry) male doctors outnumber female by about 2:1 [1], while female nurses outnumber male nurses by more than 10:1 [2]. Comparing these two professions it's a lot easier to make the argument that women are implicitly encouraged to set their expectations lower than men, who actually may feel emasculated as a nurse. STEM jobs are seen as more difficult to train for and to achieve than non-STEM jobs, similar to the job of a doctor compared to the job of a nurse. If you're confused as to why women choose 'difficult' jobs less often, I hope this line of thinking is convincing... [1] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/physicians-by-gender/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/physicians-by-gend... [2] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/total-number-of-professionally-active-nurses-by-gender/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/total-number-of-pr...

seaknoll 9y ago

I wonder how much of this is related to parental leave policy versus generic social safety net. Countries with a strong safety net also have generous maternity leave but are behind on paternity. I imagine that at a large scale this does make many companies slightly less likely to hire women, and families much more likely to have the mother take time away from her job. The ultimate effect, albeit in a warm and fuzzy way, could be to deemphasize women’s careers by normalizing the idea that it’s best if you stay home with the kids. I don't suppose that this could have a larger effect than the gender inequality in many countries lacking a social safety net, but it could be a contributing factor. The idea that women, given the choice, generally would rather prioritize motherhood seems totally plausible. If that's the case, it could indicate that we need to think about diversity differently. But I'm uncomfortable with a side effect that some of these policies could have - subtly pressuring women to focus on motherhood. The solution is complicated though if the mere existence of a good maternity leave policy encourages sexism. Hopefully general parental leave can help address this.

Baeocystin 9y ago
As far as I know, all developed countries have birthrates that are below replacement values. Is it really so bad to think that motherhood is something that should be focused on? Of my family/friends that are women with children, every single one of them wants more flexibility with their work, because they want more time to spend with the children. Children certainly benefit from parental attention. Yet many workplace policies regarding childcare are downright draconian. Perhaps we should accept that prioritizing parenting is a good thing, and try and make it so that people can both work and have the support they need to help with their familial obligations.
mrchicity 9y ago
Possibly has to do with wealth? When you have little, you have to prioritize finding a job that pays as much as you can possibly make. STEM jobs top that list easily. If you have a lot, pursuing a more leisurely or personally rewarding job is possible. My family came to the US as fairly poor immigrants from Portugal. My mother worked at the time, went to college at night to earn more, which was unusual then. She didn't this out of some sense of pride or feminism, but because she simply had to. The area where I lived had other poor immigrants from Romania, Armenia, Soviet Union, etc. and many of the mothers worked very hard outside the home as well.

overcast 9y ago

I'll probably face wrath, and hell's fury for this, but maybe, men and women are different. Has forcing STEM upon the female population, driven any more of them towards the discipline? Taking the sampling size of every woman I've ever went on a date with in my 37 years, none of them were interested in anything related. The vast majority were teachers, psychologists, and nurses. Occupations based around nurturing others. One, was a designer/artist. None of the women in my huge family, sister, mother, none of them care about technology fields. My father, and male cousins on the other hand, are in various fields of tech and engineering.

kyleschiller 9y ago
Is it possible that your dating pool is subject to sampling bias? Empirically speaking, about 1/4 of people in STEM are women, so if you've met 0 women interested in STEM, it seems like your experience simply aren't an accurate reflection of reality. [0] I think it's incredibly ironic that you're highlighting your own relative interest in STEM while failing to apply any degree of scientific rigor to your own thinking. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
- overcast 9y ago
  Oh brother, there's always that one guy on HN. None of this was supposed to "scientific", so relax. I'm giving you my 37 years of experience dating at least a couple hundred women, that's it.
  - dang 9y ago
    Please don't be rude, even if someone's reply seemed nitpicky.
  - malteof 9y ago
    That's fine as long as you don't try to draw any conclusions from your anecdote :-)
- 9y ago

purple-again 9y ago

Has anyone ever looked at it from the network effect angle? I’m a software dev because I didn’t like being a CPA and my friend was a tech guy who got me into it. My wife went into the medical field because her sister turned her onto this speciality that was easy to get into and paid quite well. I tried to teach my smart wife to program and failed miserably because that’s not how our relationship works. Most people in even your industry are not die hard passionate live and breathe the code lifestyle types. They show up, work, and go back to their lives. We all know that ‘in general’ in the USA at least but I’m sure in other countries as well the genders tend to self segregate their peer networks. My close friends are men. Her close friends are women.

kyleschiller 9y ago
Yeah this is absolutely a large chunk of it. Especially when you consider how many jobs are filled through referrals [0]. At my last company, I only worked with male engineers, and so when I got a new job, I could only think of male engineers to refer to open positions. I think this is also why inertia is so hard to offset here, we have a strong self-reinforcing cycle that's going to take a lot of external force to break out of. [0] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-survey-reveals-85-all-jobs-filled-via-networking-lou-adler/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-survey-reveals-85-all-job...

omginternets 9y ago

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0956797617741719 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0956797617741719 Wonderful. Yet another publicly-funded research project with implications for public policy that is behind a paywall. I guess I'll never know the details of how "gender equality" was operationalized, and therefore never have an informed interpretation of these data. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

akvadrako 9y ago
http://sci-hub.tw http://sci-hub.tw
- omginternets 9y ago
  Ah, so it's .tw now. Do they announce their domain changes somewhere?
  - akvadrako 9y ago
    Wikipedia usually has the updated list.

curiousgal 9y ago

The actual title is 'A gender equality paradox': Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads. The findings only present a paradox if you believe that gender equality requires equal representation in all fields.

harunurhan 9y ago

In those countries which lack gender equality, in many cases people do not choose STEM because it's really difficult to find a job otherwise.

geofft 9y ago

For those of you who have some form of access, this appears to be the actual research paper: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617741719 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617741719 > The underrepresentation of girls and women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is a continual concern for social scientists and policymakers. Using an international database on adolescent achievement in science, mathematics, and reading (N = 472,242), we showed that girls performed similarly to or better than boys in science in two of every three countries, and in nearly all countries, more girls appeared capable of college-level STEM study than had enrolled. Paradoxically, the sex differences in the magnitude of relative academic strengths and pursuit of STEM degrees rose with increases in national gender equality. The gap between boys’ science achievement and girls’ reading achievement relative to their mean academic performance was near universal. These sex differences in academic strengths and attitudes toward science correlated with the STEM graduation gap. A mediation analysis suggested that life-quality pressures in less gender-equal countries promote girls’ and women’s engagement with STEM subjects. Their definition of "gender equality" is this: > The World Economic Forum publishes The Global Gender Gap Report annually. We used the 2015 data (World Economic Forum, 2015). For each nation, the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) assesses the degree to which girls and women fall behind boys and men on 14 key indicators (e.g., earnings, tertiary enrollment ratio, life expectancy, seats in parliament) on a 0.0 to 1.0 scale, with 1.0 representing complete parity (or men falling behind). For the countries participating in the 2015 PISA, GGGI scores ranged from 0.593 for the United Arab Emirates to 0.881 for Iceland. (One of the things I'd be curious about is whether that's just a proxy for Western cultural norms; the more commonly cited reasons for a gender gap in STEM fields in the US are things like harassment and misogyny, and it's certainly possible that those are correlated more strongly with Western culture than with cross-cultural structural inequality.)

pishpash 9y ago

The article posits that the affluence of a country (not gender equality itself, though correlated) affects how much the economic security that comes with high-paying STEM jobs is an incentive to purse those jobs. That can explain a gradient between countries, and doesn't affect the original, purely gender question either way.

thriftwy 9y ago

I don't like how there's not any charts anywhere. Numbers usually tell better tale than words.

depressedpanda 9y ago

Given a choice, more women than men will go for non-STEM careers, so in rich countries you will find way more STEM-proficient men than women. This has been known for quite some time. But take care not to mention this at workplaces where they use diversity hiring practices to try to artificially and unfairly inflate their percentage of women compared to the field as a whole. It will get you fired.

srtjstjsj 9y ago
This argument would be more interesting if we weren't seeing heavy female attrition due sexual harassment unrelated to work content.
- depressedpanda 9y ago
  Is there female attrition? Is there female attrition due to sexual harassment? You're making a bold claim, which I am personally not seeing at all. Care to back it up with any references?
  - lkerrekfjk 9y ago
    Of course he cannot back anything he is saying. He just deems women eternal victims of "toxic masculinity", the basis for intersectional ideology.
dkoubsky 9y ago
This seems like it may be appropriate: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

datashovel 9y ago

I wonder if it's that fewer females prefer STEM, or is it that more men are doing things they would prefer not to?

bitL 9y ago
If I (male) had a chance to be on a permanent comfortable welfare, I would probably spend more time playing games, doing sports, socializing, traveling etc. instead of being in a noisy office with bad light around desperate people I often dislike, whipped by my boss in a constant rat race, being refused bonuses for great performance as a new car/boat/house is of a sudden interest to my superior.

princess-aslaug 9y ago

Maybe women that are free to choose more often don't want to graduate in STEM.

mc32 9y ago

Even if we do conclusively find that women on average prefer non STEM careers, I think for the good of our society, we should still make an effort to entice more women into STEM who otherwise would not. Not for dime immediate social justice reason, but because the advancement and progress of our own society needs more STEM grads, if we don't produce our own, we'll have to import them, which we should not have to, if we could develop policies of encouragement.

shar3333f 9y ago

I find the that those who use this as some sort of argument against feminism often are ignoring the emphasis feminists put on social conditioning as an influencing and oppressive factor on the behaviour of each gender. Just because a country, by law, affords women the same rights as men that doesn't mean it's a country which is free of the social conditioning which force certain expectations upon each gender. These are things that are inherited from previous generations and do not go away so easily. People use these results to imply something like "when people are free to do what they want they tend to their 'natural' gender role". But I don't believe this statement can be justified as countries with "more gender equality" (i.e. better women's rights) have yet to shed themselves of societal idioms and culture that feminist theory would call oppressive. I.e. traditional gender roles in the media, toys etc. I think a more accurate statement would be "when people are free to do what they want, they will tend to behaviours they're conditioned toward." After all, as we can see in the "less gender equality" countries, larger percentages of women in society can and do enjoy careers in STEM fields. What would be interesting is to see 10-20 years down the line how some countries progress and how these behaviours feedback into the next generation.

zerostar07 9y ago

Usually you get what you incentivize. If you go overboard on the equality of outcome, people will adapt to it, be it women or any kind of person.

globuous 9y ago

Whenever thinking of gender equality, I like to go back to Beauvoir. plato.stanford.edu's page [1] is fantastic, here's an extract: "Before The Second Sex, the sexed/gendered body was not an object of phenomenological investigation. Beauvoir changed that. Her argument for sexual equality takes two directions. First, it exposes the ways that masculine ideology exploits the sexual difference to create systems of inequality. Second, it identifies the ways that arguments for equality erase the sexual difference in order to establish the masculine subject as the absolute human type. Here Plato is her target. Plato, beginning with the premise that sex is an accidental quality, concludes that women and men are equally qualified to become members of the guardian class. The price of women’s admission to this privileged class, however, is that they must train and live like men. Thus the discriminatory sexual difference remains in play. Only men or those who emulate them may rule. Beauvoir’s argument for equality does not fall into this trap. She insists that women and men treat each other as equals and that such treatment requires that their sexual differences be validated. Equality is not a synonym for sameness." (emphasis mine) I find this paragraph particularly well written, but watch out, I've had an american writer read it and he understood the opposite of what is written. I had to make him read it again ^^ I don't know if it applies to this particular statistics. My personal interpretation of Beauvoir is that yes, this stat does make sense. In a gender equal society, you shouldn't find equal ratios everywhere because du-hu, we're actually not the same. But we should be equal. That being said, I don't like talking about these things because I generalize to much, and the question is way too complex for me to approach. I like reading other people's take on it though. Anyway, I just wanted to share Beauvoir's thoughts and my rough interpretation of it in this context. [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

lumberjack 9y ago

Not sure if this has been posted on HN before but I think this is a much more interesting article: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/why-brilliant-girls-tend-favor-non-stem-careers https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh... tl;dr Girls tend to be more well rounded intellectually, with both strong math skills and strong verbal skills, giving them more options, possibly more lucrative options, beyond just STEM. Boys tend to be more lacking in verbal skills limiting their options. A closely related theory is that girls outperform boys in both sciences and humanities, in HS, but they outperform boys in humanities by a much larger margin, and therefore see themselves as strongest in those subjects.

rtz12 9y ago

Countries with more gender equality are richer. Countries with less gender equality are poorer. In poorer countries, you are more inclined to choose careers based on paycheck, less on personal preference. In richer countries you are more inclined to choose careers based on your personal preferences and less on for the paycheck. It's pretty easy. EDIT: A good counter example to this correlation could be Japan. Low gender equality but also low female participation in STEM fields. Why? Because Japan is a rich country.

ec109685 9y ago
The study showed that adjusting for interest in STEM women were 10% less likely to chose that career than a male in gender equal countries, so personal preference (which you’d expect to match with interest) doesn’t entirely explain it. I don’t think the article cites anything that would support your Japan hypothesis.
vilmosi 9y ago
>>> In richer countries you are more inclined to choose careers based on your personal preferences and less on for the paycheck The same is true for men though.

rbehrends 9y ago

I can't help but think that the article/paper are overstating a statistical effect here by attempting to reduce a multicausal phenomenon to a monocausal one. If you look just at rich western countries, most of them occupy a fairly narrow strip on the graph. There are outliers, but they can go either way; Finland has a very low STEM graduation rate for women, Denmark a very high one (Figure 3b in the paper). Austria and Germany have fairly different outcomes, despite being culturally more similar than other countries that differ less. This is sort of obscured by throwing in many countries that honestly have very different cultures, very different academic systems, and different constraints for people of different genders that seem to be difficult to reduce to just a single number. For a simple example, there are countries where nursing is primarily taught at colleges and others where nursing is primarily taught through vocational programs. Given the gender disparity in nursing, that would affect the gender breakdown for STEM graduation rates (depending on whether you count nursing as part of the "M" in STEM or not, one way or the other). I'm honestly surprised that for most affluent western countries the numbers are not more spread out. If I had to guess – and we really have too few data points for that – I'd say we're simply looking at a normal distribution here, especially as (with the exception of the UK) the larger countries tend to be closer to the midpoint of the 20%-30% range and it's smaller countries that are at the fringes of the range.

therealdrag0 9y ago
Seems like a valid consideration. You should write a letter to the authors :)

tptacek 9y ago

This is on the front page of Hacker News because people here believe it bolsters arguments about the underlying fairness of our field, in which women make up something like 20% of the workforce. The article does not accomplish that. Despite an overall trend in STEM throughout the western world for greater male participation than female, computer science is uniquely low; it is rivaled only by physics and MechE for gender disparity. Throughout the rest of STEM, including hard fields like chemistry and mathematics, we see significantly improved participation among women. There are a bunch of STEM fields that have near parity, and a few (molecular biology, for instance) in which there are slightly more women. These are PhD numbers, not premed stats. Besides better gender parity, something all these fields have in common at the graduate level is that they are significantly more demanding than commercial computer science. We kid ourselves that our day-to-day work is so rarefied that we need the top of the intelligence curve, so much so that the supposed variance in intelligence between men and women might explain our staffing. That's ridiculous. We do a bog-standard symbol manipulation job, and, even at the elite level, we tend to do it slap-dash and ad-hoc. Whatever is keeping women to 20% of our field is artificial, and a travesty. It's also on the front page, I believe, because it's a cite followed from an article posted earlier this week making some of the same arguments. That post had a huge discussion, making this a needless duplicate. We don't need to keep re-litigating this on the front page of the site. I flagged it.

wyager 9y ago
> Whatever is keeping women to 20% of our field is artificial Sure, insofar as gender-aligned interests have some cultural basis, it’s definitely “artificial”. Do you think it’s something more than that? If so, why? > We don't need to keep re-litigating this on the front page of the site I notice that people who use this objection regularly are very selective about when they choose to raise it. I haven’t noticed anyone on this site raising this objection consistently - only when they feel they can get in the last word.
mpweiher 9y ago
> uniquely low; it is rivaled only by physics and MechE for gender disparity. So it is not, in fact, "uniquely" low. It is about the same as other engineering. Hmm...maybe because it is like other engineering? > Whatever is keeping women to 20% of our field is artificial, and a travesty. You claim without a shred of evidence, while poo-pooing the actual evidence to the contrary. It is a simple fact that most people regardless of gender aren't interested in computer science, girls just even less than boys. See for example: https://erzaehlmirnix.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/unterschiede-mc3a4nner-frauen-interessen-91.jpg https://erzaehlmirnix.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/unterschie...

dahart 9y ago

> Girls, even with their ability in science equalled or excelled that of boys, were often likely to be better overall in reading comprehensions, which relates to higher ability in non-STEM subjects. Why is reading comprehension non-STEM? I've read that success in STEM graduate degrees is highly predicted by language scores on the GRE, and not well predicted by the math part of the test at all.

tnzn 9y ago
It's just there's a Math "religion" in the West, and Math is pretty much a sort of holy discipline that's the basis of the hierarchized school system, and I guess it makes people believe such things. It's even more prevalent in France where up till now, general high school shared their students between 3 cursus which were scientifc, economic and litterary. They are hierarchized in the way you know, and pretty much defined by their degree... Of math.

greentuna 9y ago

One thing I have noticed is that male engineers are intrinsically motivated but female engineers, even highly capable ones, are extrinsically motivated. So you find very few female engineers in open source projects, under 3% by some estimates, although the percentage of female professional software engineers is much higher. Clearly this is not due to discrimination —- github doesn’t ask you your gender. So there must be some other explanation. When someone is intrinsically motivated (i.e., not motivated by salary alone) they are likely to be a better employee.

ec109685 9y ago
GitHub doesn’t ask for gender, yet you assume the 3% figure is accurate. Even if you do, it doesn’t make sense to correlate GitHub contributions with “intrinsic” motivation. You can still love to code but not want to contribute to Open Source. Also, what percentage of software engineers regularly contribute to a non-corporate sponsored GitHub open source project? I would bet it is a small number, which means you shouldn’t use it as a proxy to generalize for the industry and gender differences within it.

rayiner 9y ago

How do you define which countries have “more gender equality?” It seems like begging the question. My family immigrated from Bangladesh to America. In most ways, obviously, America is a lot more equal. But my mom and her sisters have STEM degrees, and that wasn’t all that unusual for a wealthy Bangladeshi family at the time. Bangladeshis perceive STEM as important, and encourage both girls and boys to pursue it (even if they don’t expect girls to stay in the work force after they get married). Raising a daughter in the US, my perception is that girls in America are taught about “princesses and fairies.” We impress upon boys the need to get practical education so they can support families but are more indulgent with girls. Last summer, I signed my then four-year old up for summer camp classes. There literally was classes for “princesses and fairies.” Of course I signed her up for “little engineers.” My daughter was quite upset to be the only girl in the class. That’s not innate. It’s somehing we’re choosing to do to our kids.

kyleschiller 9y ago
Yeah, you're absolutely right that by not taking into account things like STEM participating, the metric ignores exactly this kind of thing. Having said that, if you just want to know how it was literally defined here, I found this comment helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16408092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16408092
- dogma1138 9y ago
  Women in the USSR were common in engineering degrees because many other high skill careers like law, medicine, philosophy and politics weren’t open to them. Bangladesh isn’t that different and rich families send their daughters to get a degree so they would be more appealing to prospective husbands. You can’t just pick random statistics and extrapolate data from them the fact is still that the more options women have the less they seem to go for specific fields which includes the engineering part of STEM. People ignore the fact that many many men chose STEM not because they want too but because it’s expectd it’s the default career path for the new blue/white colar worker. Myself and everyone else I know went into STEM as a career because it was “easy money” the amount of effort required to get into it is actually fairly low when compared to careers like law or medicine and the payout on average is much better. That said the career for most people in IT isn’t going to be exactly overly satisfying and fulfilling.

kyleschiller 9y ago

Here are three possible explanations for the observed behavior that don't require a belief in inherent biological differences: 1. Since countries with lower gender equality also tend to be poorer, STEM could be seen as a rare opportunity to escape poverty, and this motivation could outweighs any kind of societal bias agains female participation. 2. A quick glance at the graph of results in [0], shows that there's also a strong cultural division. Countries with more gender equality are mostly in Nordic Europe and Western Europe, while countries will less are mostly in the Middle East, Eastern Europe. It's possible for regions to develop cultural norms that reduce gender equality without also developing cultural norms that reduce female participation in STEM. 3. As a corollary to 1, and pulled directly from the article: "STEM careers are generally secure and well-paid but the risks of not following such a path can vary. In more affluent counties, where any choice of career feels relatively safe, women may feel able to make choices based on non-economic factors." To be clear, I don't have strong evidence that any of these are necessarily true, but I think the existing of possible alternatives should at least force a reconsideration of the immediate conclusion that this correlation proves anything about biological difference. I think it's troubling that as of writing this, none of the top comments do anything to suggest alternative explanations, and are quick to use this to confirm the existing narrative [1]. Again, I don't think I've done anything to disprove these claims, but it's indicative of a larger intellectual problem on HN if we would rather have discussions that confirm our beliefs than discussions that challenge and sharpen then. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... [1] https://imgur.com/a/1Diel https://imgur.com/a/1Diel

hyperdunc 9y ago
If a woman doesn't feel compelled to pursue STEM to escape poverty - if she can make a career choice based on non-economic factors - then it's reasonable to assume her more innate traits and desires will come into play. (One such trait that asserts is a preference for dealing with people over abstract systems.) These traits are at their root biological and only modulated by culture.

deleted 9y ago

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thekashifmalik 9y ago

This link was top of hacker news and then suddenly disappeared. What's happened?

husmo 9y ago

I can't see this thread in the front page any more. Not even the first three pages.

yetanother1980 9y ago
Pretty standard. Political posts are heavily downwaited.

rapedangnow 9y ago

I hope you get raped dang

rapedangnow 9y ago

Dang don't be a fucking cunt. You ban people who promote tipping, the most privileged thing ever. You fucking cunt, I really hope you get raped and never find happiness in life. I hope your rape is very painful