9 ms·

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 m

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.)
    - darawk 9y ago
      I said that someone should investigate it. As in, actively. 50/50 is a null hypothesis. Another perfectly reasonable null hypothesis is the status quo. For instance, do you know that the proportion of female software engineers is approximately the same as the proportion of females that pass the AP computer science exam in high school? This implies strongly that if there is some effect that's shifting the distribution against women, it happens before high school. That is to say, it has nothing to do with workplace culture or discriminatory hiring practices. Of course, that doesn't mean that those things aren't important - they are. But they likely aren't causing under-representation of women in CS.
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  As to distribution, there are some fundamental biological differences that explain the skew that have been discovered. The largest pertinent difference being aptitude for mechanical reasoning in the general population. > 3233 young and old adolescents representative of the population > For the young adolescents, the observed difference in Mechanical Reasoning is equivalent to 10 IQ points, and this difference increases to 13 IQ points for the old adolescents. > Beyond the observed small average sex difference in the general factor of intelligence (g), the boys' large advantage in mechanical reasoning (MR) must be strongly underscored. This sex difference is not explained by g, and therefore the probable contributions of what is measured by relevant subtests such as abstract reasoning (AR) or spatial relations (SR) can be excluded. The MR difference is still present with almost the same magnitude when the general factor of intelligence (g) is removed. It is also noteworthy that, for the old adolescents, more than half of the variance associated with numerical reasoning (NR) cannot be attributed to g. Thus, we suggest that mental processes captured by these psychological measures are behind the documented male advantage in STEM disciplines http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometrics-psychology/sex-differences-on-g-and-non-g-intellectual-performance-reveal-potential-sources-of-stem-discrepancies/ http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri... This means that, at the average point in the distribution, the average everday man has a one standard deviation edge in measurements of mechanical reasoning over the average everyday woman. This explains why you would see such a large skew in the field of engineering.
  - geofft 9y ago
    What is "mechanical reasoning"? That paper gives examples of two standardized test questions about pulleys and levers - intuition about that sort of thing is important for some parts of STEM, sure, but I'm not sure it's a skill I've ever used in software engineering, except maybe when plugging in a second monitor on a crowded desk. There are fundamental biological differences, sure. What do those fundamental biological differences mean for specific career fields and why - and given the mean and standard deviation, which presumably we have, what's the right number, if it's not 50/50?
  - neaanopri 9y ago
    Sure, one standard deviation makes the ratio like 63% to 37%? That's not what we see in tech job ratios, it's worse than that. Everything past that is unjust and deserves effort to rectify
- dizzystar 9y ago
  There are more professions with skew than professions with parity. https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/occ_gender_share_em_1020_txt.htm https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/occ_gender_share_em_1020_txt.ht...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sergiotapia 9y ago
Careful.
- nicolashahn 9y ago
  Don't worry about me, I don't work for Google.
psyc 9y ago
I seem to recall a certain young engineer who wondered about this publicly not long ago, without concealing his identity. It impacted his career.
- mikejb 9y ago
  He said worse than that, IIRC. But his lawsuit will maybe bring more clarity on what he really thinks vs. what might have been mis-written or mis-read in various versions of 'the memo'.
  - Idontknowmyuser 9y ago
    what did he say worse than that?
    - ejstronge 9y ago
      His argument proposed that women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks[1]. I could find more questionable positions but have attached a copy of the memo below. Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things. We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this). More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics. Another point he raised was that Google's hiring initiatives 'lower the bar' for their targeted groups. Google has created several discriminatory practices: [...] Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170809220001/https://diversitymemo-static.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170809220001/https://diversity...
      - throwaway613834 9y ago
pishpash 9y ago
No, you cannot wonder. /s
Kenji 9y ago
Oh, really? What a groundbreaking idea! This sounds like heresy.
aspaceman 9y ago
As expected, this is the top comment on an article practically built for this argument. It may very well be that men and women have different criteria, but that is completely irrelevant, and I find this line of argumentation very frustrating as it completely ignores the actual complaints at hand. Women in STEM complain that they have less job prospects and feel uncomfortable in their positions. Many women feel they are disrespected, unrightfully criticized, and scrutinized to a degree unlike their male counterparts. As a whole, they have recognized that this is not the fault of individuals in their workplaces. It's "natural" to be more critical of the few women in your workplace because as a human, that's how your brain is built to work. Correcting that requires conscious effort on your part, and most are unwilling to correct themselves. Instead, as a group women have decided that the best way to make themselves more welcome in STEM - is to have more women in STEM. This will slowly correct the negatives by causing more individuals to come into contact with women and have to learn how to behave properly. But these same systemic issues prevent many women who would otherwise enter STEM from doing so. No one is claiming that a perfect 50/50 ratio is all we need and then "we're done, pack it up folks". Simply that making efforts to get women into tech is actually a good idea. Women are interested. Women want to do the work. Many that do are forced out for one reason or another, and this makes many not want to do it any longer. Claiming that men and women just have different criteria, and thus the problem should be ignored entirely completely misses the point.
- pacala 9y ago
  > as a group women have decided that the best way to make themselves more welcome in STEM I missed when the voting took place. You mean a group of activist women (and men) assumed to talk on behalf of all women in the field?
  - aspaceman 9y ago
    Yes. If you feel differently, and you are a woman then I highly encourage you to become more involved with activism because that is the only way to make your voice and opinions heard. It is not fair that all womens' positions have been decided by activists, and many women in tech have specifically noted this issue. However, activism is available for any individual interested in it.
ghostcluster 9y ago
> I wonder if it's possible that men and women, on average, have differing criteria for choosing careers Not only is this true, it has been fairly exhaustively researched. > Cross-cultural consistency of sex differences for four traits: extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and male-versus-female-typical occupational preferences. Men and women differed on all four traits. 200,000 participants from 53 nations. > Only sex predicted means for all four traits, and sex predicted trait means much more strongly than did gender equality or the interaction between sex and gender equality. These results suggest that biological factors may contribute to sex differences in personality and that culture plays a negligible to small role in moderating sex differences in personality. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-008-9380-7 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-008-9380-7
- geofft 9y ago
  That paper doesn't provide evidence for a biological basis for occupational preferences (which was an online BBC survey for a TV show "Secrets of the Sexes," asking people to self-report how interested they were in 10 professions, many of which are strongly culturally gendered or "male-versus-female-typical" as the author puts it). It seems pretty likely that there's a biological basis for differences in base personality traits and a cultural basis for careers and gender norms; the fact that the author found that sex predicts three personality traits and one career preference isn't really an argument that all four of them are biological. (Also I don't think a single paper counts as "exhaustively researched")
  - ghostcluster 9y ago
    Here's a meta-analysis then: http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Men-and-things-women-and-people-A-meta-analysis-of-sex-differences-in-interests.pdf http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Men-and-thing... > 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. Men showed stronger Realistic (d = 0.84) and Investigative (d = 0.26) interests, and women showed stronger Artistic (d = 0.35), Social (d = 0.68), and Conventional (d = 0.33) interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests. > The present study suggests that interests may play a critical role in gendered occupational choices and gender disparity in the STEM fields.
lvh 9y ago
How does that explain the difference between countries with more vs less gender equality?
InTheArena 9y ago
James! You are fired!
- dang 9y ago
  Please don't do this here.
mdimec4 9y ago
This shows that girls are more inclined to have different interests than boys. There is clearly not equal distribution in interests between genders. There is nothing wrong with that. We shudn't enforce equal distribution by some quotas. Instead we should allow everbody to have an equal chanche to achive their full potential.
dahart 9y ago
Men and women do have different criteria today. But how can you tell when they're cultural criteria, or when they're intrinsic and inherent gender differences? Are you assuming that the current differences in career choices aren't already artificially forced away from the middle by cultural biases and even perceived or real sexism? Sure, it is always "possible" to do harm by taking action, but is it likely? There is widely acknowledged bias that is not believed to be a natural intrinsic gender difference by many scientists who study this, so is it better to do nothing, or to try and address the issue? To me, this question seems a little like asking whether I should avoid erasing some files when my computer fills up, because I might delete something important. Yes, you could accidentally delete something you wanted to keep, but on the other hand, if you want to continue using it, you have no choice.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
NewEntryHN 9y ago
I agree about not forcing the distribution. I think positive action either solves no issue (no sexism in the industry and the current distribution is simply the "natural" one); or doesn't solve the deeper issue (sexism in the industry). However, until there's no scientific consensus about whether or not there's sexism in the workplace, the current state is not satisfying and we should continue until we clear out that concern, and if there is sexism, fix it. My personal guess would be that there's indeed sexism, particularly in the programming industry. This overall "not my problem" attitude from men about anything regarding this subject is a clear hint of it.

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.)
  - darawk 9y ago
    I said that someone should investigate it. As in, actively. 50/50 is a null hypothesis. Another perfectly reasonable null hypothesis is the status quo. For instance, do you know that the proportion of female software engineers is approximately the same as the proportion of females that pass the AP computer science exam in high school? This implies strongly that if there is some effect that's shifting the distribution against women, it happens before high school. That is to say, it has nothing to do with workplace culture or discriminatory hiring practices. Of course, that doesn't mean that those things aren't important - they are. But they likely aren't causing under-representation of women in CS.
ghostcluster 9y ago
As to distribution, there are some fundamental biological differences that explain the skew that have been discovered. The largest pertinent difference being aptitude for mechanical reasoning in the general population. > 3233 young and old adolescents representative of the population > For the young adolescents, the observed difference in Mechanical Reasoning is equivalent to 10 IQ points, and this difference increases to 13 IQ points for the old adolescents. > Beyond the observed small average sex difference in the general factor of intelligence (g), the boys' large advantage in mechanical reasoning (MR) must be strongly underscored. This sex difference is not explained by g, and therefore the probable contributions of what is measured by relevant subtests such as abstract reasoning (AR) or spatial relations (SR) can be excluded. The MR difference is still present with almost the same magnitude when the general factor of intelligence (g) is removed. It is also noteworthy that, for the old adolescents, more than half of the variance associated with numerical reasoning (NR) cannot be attributed to g. Thus, we suggest that mental processes captured by these psychological measures are behind the documented male advantage in STEM disciplines http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometrics-psychology/sex-differences-on-g-and-non-g-intellectual-performance-reveal-potential-sources-of-stem-discrepancies/ http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri... This means that, at the average point in the distribution, the average everday man has a one standard deviation edge in measurements of mechanical reasoning over the average everyday woman. This explains why you would see such a large skew in the field of engineering.
- geofft 9y ago
  What is "mechanical reasoning"? That paper gives examples of two standardized test questions about pulleys and levers - intuition about that sort of thing is important for some parts of STEM, sure, but I'm not sure it's a skill I've ever used in software engineering, except maybe when plugging in a second monitor on a crowded desk. There are fundamental biological differences, sure. What do those fundamental biological differences mean for specific career fields and why - and given the mean and standard deviation, which presumably we have, what's the right number, if it's not 50/50?
- neaanopri 9y ago
  Sure, one standard deviation makes the ratio like 63% to 37%? That's not what we see in tech job ratios, it's worse than that. Everything past that is unjust and deserves effort to rectify
dizzystar 9y ago
There are more professions with skew than professions with parity. https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/occ_gender_share_em_1020_txt.htm https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/occ_gender_share_em_1020_txt.ht...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

sergiotapia 9y ago

Careful.

nicolashahn 9y ago
Don't worry about me, I don't work for Google.

psyc 9y ago

I seem to recall a certain young engineer who wondered about this publicly not long ago, without concealing his identity. It impacted his career.

mikejb 9y ago
He said worse than that, IIRC. But his lawsuit will maybe bring more clarity on what he really thinks vs. what might have been mis-written or mis-read in various versions of 'the memo'.
- Idontknowmyuser 9y ago
  what did he say worse than that?
  - ejstronge 9y ago
    His argument proposed that women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks[1]. I could find more questionable positions but have attached a copy of the memo below. Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things. We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this). More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics. Another point he raised was that Google's hiring initiatives 'lower the bar' for their targeted groups. Google has created several discriminatory practices: [...] Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170809220001/https://diversitymemo-static.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170809220001/https://diversity...
    - throwaway613834 9y ago

pishpash 9y ago

No, you cannot wonder. /s

Kenji 9y ago

Oh, really? What a groundbreaking idea! This sounds like heresy.

aspaceman 9y ago

As expected, this is the top comment on an article practically built for this argument. It may very well be that men and women have different criteria, but that is completely irrelevant, and I find this line of argumentation very frustrating as it completely ignores the actual complaints at hand. Women in STEM complain that they have less job prospects and feel uncomfortable in their positions. Many women feel they are disrespected, unrightfully criticized, and scrutinized to a degree unlike their male counterparts. As a whole, they have recognized that this is not the fault of individuals in their workplaces. It's "natural" to be more critical of the few women in your workplace because as a human, that's how your brain is built to work. Correcting that requires conscious effort on your part, and most are unwilling to correct themselves. Instead, as a group women have decided that the best way to make themselves more welcome in STEM - is to have more women in STEM. This will slowly correct the negatives by causing more individuals to come into contact with women and have to learn how to behave properly. But these same systemic issues prevent many women who would otherwise enter STEM from doing so. No one is claiming that a perfect 50/50 ratio is all we need and then "we're done, pack it up folks". Simply that making efforts to get women into tech is actually a good idea. Women are interested. Women want to do the work. Many that do are forced out for one reason or another, and this makes many not want to do it any longer. Claiming that men and women just have different criteria, and thus the problem should be ignored entirely completely misses the point.

pacala 9y ago
> as a group women have decided that the best way to make themselves more welcome in STEM I missed when the voting took place. You mean a group of activist women (and men) assumed to talk on behalf of all women in the field?
- aspaceman 9y ago
  Yes. If you feel differently, and you are a woman then I highly encourage you to become more involved with activism because that is the only way to make your voice and opinions heard. It is not fair that all womens' positions have been decided by activists, and many women in tech have specifically noted this issue. However, activism is available for any individual interested in it.

ghostcluster 9y ago

> I wonder if it's possible that men and women, on average, have differing criteria for choosing careers Not only is this true, it has been fairly exhaustively researched. > Cross-cultural consistency of sex differences for four traits: extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and male-versus-female-typical occupational preferences. Men and women differed on all four traits. 200,000 participants from 53 nations. > Only sex predicted means for all four traits, and sex predicted trait means much more strongly than did gender equality or the interaction between sex and gender equality. These results suggest that biological factors may contribute to sex differences in personality and that culture plays a negligible to small role in moderating sex differences in personality. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-008-9380-7 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-008-9380-7

geofft 9y ago
That paper doesn't provide evidence for a biological basis for occupational preferences (which was an online BBC survey for a TV show "Secrets of the Sexes," asking people to self-report how interested they were in 10 professions, many of which are strongly culturally gendered or "male-versus-female-typical" as the author puts it). It seems pretty likely that there's a biological basis for differences in base personality traits and a cultural basis for careers and gender norms; the fact that the author found that sex predicts three personality traits and one career preference isn't really an argument that all four of them are biological. (Also I don't think a single paper counts as "exhaustively researched")
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  Here's a meta-analysis then: http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Men-and-things-women-and-people-A-meta-analysis-of-sex-differences-in-interests.pdf http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Men-and-thing... > 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. Men showed stronger Realistic (d = 0.84) and Investigative (d = 0.26) interests, and women showed stronger Artistic (d = 0.35), Social (d = 0.68), and Conventional (d = 0.33) interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests. > The present study suggests that interests may play a critical role in gendered occupational choices and gender disparity in the STEM fields.

lvh 9y ago

How does that explain the difference between countries with more vs less gender equality?

InTheArena 9y ago

James! You are fired!

dang 9y ago
Please don't do this here.

mdimec4 9y ago

This shows that girls are more inclined to have different interests than boys. There is clearly not equal distribution in interests between genders. There is nothing wrong with that. We shudn't enforce equal distribution by some quotas. Instead we should allow everbody to have an equal chanche to achive their full potential.

dahart 9y ago

Men and women do have different criteria today. But how can you tell when they're cultural criteria, or when they're intrinsic and inherent gender differences? Are you assuming that the current differences in career choices aren't already artificially forced away from the middle by cultural biases and even perceived or real sexism? Sure, it is always "possible" to do harm by taking action, but is it likely? There is widely acknowledged bias that is not believed to be a natural intrinsic gender difference by many scientists who study this, so is it better to do nothing, or to try and address the issue? To me, this question seems a little like asking whether I should avoid erasing some files when my computer fills up, because I might delete something important. Yes, you could accidentally delete something you wanted to keep, but on the other hand, if you want to continue using it, you have no choice.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

NewEntryHN 9y ago

I agree about not forcing the distribution. I think positive action either solves no issue (no sexism in the industry and the current distribution is simply the "natural" one); or doesn't solve the deeper issue (sexism in the industry). However, until there's no scientific consensus about whether or not there's sexism in the workplace, the current state is not satisfying and we should continue until we clear out that concern, and if there is sexism, fix it. My personal guess would be that there's indeed sexism, particularly in the programming industry. This overall "not my problem" attitude from men about anything regarding this subject is a clear hint of it.