11 ms·

The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

129 points by wyuenho 9y ago

dvt 9y ago
Equality of opportunity does not necessarily imply equality of outcome. This isn't a paradox. Why are still people still confused about this? (Actually, people aren't confused about this, but it makes for great clickbait articles and ad revenue because it fans the flames of both sides of the argument.)
- latch 9y ago
  I'm not sure I'd say the headline is clickbait. It's describing a correlation from a new paper. Seems pretty non opinionated to me. There's a couple places within the article that's more superficial though.
- platz 9y ago
  Preferences aren't static, and are part of a dynamical system. It needs to be explained why preferences are the way they are. Environment could be changed to address causes of preference
  - RyanZAG 9y ago
    Most studies on this seem to show that gender based preferences can be at least partially explained from birth before any environmental factors play a part in it. People have been doing these studies for a long time now, but they get ignored because we don't like the results. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/ And of course, far more studies that have been going on for decades.
    - TuringTest 9y ago
      Biological preferences don't explain why careers preferred by women have less average pay than careers preferred by men.
      - LambdaAlmighty 9y ago
        They don't? AFAIK explanation of one of the factors is not even that complicated: lower physical strength (on average) => more focus on social skills (on average) => higher agreeableness (one of the Big-5 traits) and preference for avoiding conflict (on average) => less risk but also less upside (on average) => less extreme career choices but also less extreme rewards (on average)
      - mpweiher 9y ago
        No. But preferences do explain why women don't emphasize money in their career choice, whereas men do. The vast majority of women will not continue dating a man who earns less than they do. Two thirds of young women in Germany expect their future partners to take care of them financially. So for men, earning money and status is absolutely essential. See also: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/02/a-letter-to-my-wife-who-wont-get-a-job-while-i-work-myself-to-death https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/02/a-lette...
        TuringTest 9y ago
        What makes you think this is explained by biological preferences alone, or that those preferences scale to society-wide differences in salary?
        mpweiher 9y ago
        (1) Actually, I didn't even mention biology. I just wrote "preferences". (2) What makes you think it wouldn't? After all, it affects everyone in society. And motivation is a pretty powerful force, it is basically how our entire economy is structured. See also: https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/money-gender-and-job-satisfaction/ https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/money-gender-a... "...it typically takes a lot less money to get women to say they are satisfied with their work than it does to get men to say it." "Women were more likely to tell PayScale that say they find their jobs “very meaningful” than men were, with 35 percent of women and 27 percent of men describing their jobs this way." So women have more freedom to find meaningful jobs. Men less so.
  - cm2187 9y ago
    But it is also possible that the biology is affecting our inclinations, temper, or skills. After all modern psychiatry is attempting to look at the brain mechanically or to influence it with drugs. And intuitively, I find it hard to believe that our genes that affect so much of our physical abilities, likelyhood of illness, etc would stop at the brain and our behavior would be completely independent of our nature and purely a function of our environment.
  - mpweiher 9y ago
    Sure, and the study quoted in the article shows that. Environment is a factor, it just points in the other direction. So if you assert that discrimination is the cause for the imbalance, the evidence shows that your assertion is wrong, because it makes the wrong prediction. This is not just a matter of degrees it is a matter of sign (the arrow is pointing in the wrong direction).
- rdiddly 9y ago
  They're confused because they're starting from the end (the outcome) and working backward.
- ajuc 9y ago
  > Why are still people still confused about this? Maybe because "positive discrimination" is pursued using equality of outcomes as a key indicator?
- throwawaye4j 9y ago
  Personally the reason I'm hesitant to entertain this argument is that code is so awesome - you can reach a billion (1,000,000,000) people practically overnight if your idea is good enough. While women traditionally are more interested in the design/social impact of what they're doing, if the engineering environment is easy enough there's no reason they can't code it themselves. And they are highly incentivized to do so. I personally look at the outcome (you can reach a billion people just by having a cool idea and sitting down and doing it) then look at the hurdles to that outcome. One of the hurdles is that engineers love wasting literally hundreds of each others' hours. If I were building something as a newbie, people have no trouble sending me off on a wild goose chase to spend a hundred hours with my head in documentation. When an alternative ecosystem lets me literally type a single line and it's done. (In this case the first ecosystem hates my time and the second one respects it.) This isn't really related to gender, but it's another hurdle. So when you look at the incentive (reaching people, fame, fortune, money), if there is a highly unequal distribution you have to look at some of the hurdles. By the way no one knows your gender online when you're learning stuff, you can use a non-gendered username and get treated exactly the same asking stuff online and so forth. In this case the hurdle is artificial: being cooped up with a computer while the tools you're trying to use waste thousands of your hours. But it's still a hurdle that impacts genders in a different way, and that matters.
- cm2187 9y ago
  One of the many simplifications in this debate. Another one: if someone is arguing that there is a difference in the distribution of a particular character between men and women. Immediatly I read comments jumping to the conclusion “my god it says women are more/less [whatever] than men”, as in “all women”. Lots of people seem to be incapable of thinking in term of distributions, which makes it really hard to have any discussion.
  - smackay 9y ago
    Therein lie the dangers of categorical thinking, https://www.newyorker.com/business/james-surowiecki/categorical-thinking https://www.newyorker.com/business/james-surowiecki/categori.... Gender is probably the most loaded category there is (except for the other one). There is some movement on this front with acceptance of different gender identities but until society (in all its forms) can ditch categorical thinking and accept that all things in nature exist in distributions, I don't think there will be much progress on this - there's simply too capital to be made by perpetuating strict divisions which everybody must be crammed into in order to simplify the debate and upset everyone in the process. Robert Sapolsky - we need you now more than ever, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky
  - ajuc 9y ago
    In such discussions "most" is implied. Interpreting it as "all" is just a rhetoric trick to weaken the opponent's position.
  - YouAreGreat 9y ago
    > Lots of people seem to be incapable of thinking in term of distributions, which makes it really hard to have any discussion. Most people seem very capable of thinking statistically, but they don't communicate in distributions. For two people communicating in good faith, the two statements (1) "Boys are taller than girls" and (2) "Anne is taller than Sean" don't prompt talk about how both can't be true at the same time, sexist. People communicate statistical differences as "absolutes", but when communicating in good faith, everybody knows what everybody means. Look at stereotype research. Most stereotypes are statistically true. People communicate them "as if" absolute, but nobody's head explodes when individual examples don't "conform" to the stereotype. That's because people can think in distributions. That's not surprising, it's how to survive in a stochastic environment. This gap between thought and speech only becomes problematic ("makes it really hard to have any discussion") because we can rhetorically exploit the fact that most people can't explicitly communicate about distributions. Just tell them they're bigoted, and they don't know how to refute you. Yay, you win.
- rectang 9y ago
  Women get paid less than men for doing the same work, across all industries. Pay them the same and the "confusion" will diminish.
  - mpweiher 9y ago
    This is a common talking point of the dominant narrative but simply not true. When you average all women and all men, you get a "gap". However, like the imbalance in fields, this is almost entirely due to different choices. When you control for factors such as field, hours worked, years worked the gap effectively disappears.
    - TuringTest 9y ago
      Yeah, isn't it wonderful that when you factor out the discriminating variables, discrimination all but disappears? Choices made by women are influenced by the glass ceiling, society expectations that women will take care of children and the elderly, and the traditional fields where they're expected to work. The decision to measure the gender gap by comparing equal working hours and equal job positions is not innocent, is itself a politically motivated and comforting way to make rational people think "I told you, there's nothing to see here". You need to evaluate what causes women to have those less hours in less paying jobs, to see whether there's discrimination or not. Yet the salary wages discrimination reappears when you factor in hours dedicated to domestic work (the "second shift"), differences in salary between fields with equal risks (exposition to chemicals, hardship) where workers are majority women vs those with more men, or companies' (irrational) tendency to default in promoting male workers over females in similar situations. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/women-pay-gap/?utm_term=.ff49a7159e26 https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/women-...
      - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
        If women choose to take less lucrative careers, make less lucrative family roles, and negotiate their salaries less than men, than that's fine with me. Personal freedom and equal opportunity will not always mean equality of outcome, especially in richer countries where women are free to live the life and career they want instead of the life and career they need to survive.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  Let's assume we're not all disingenious a----les, trying for clickbait and gotchas, but still disagree on some points. I would say that you're right, and this means that specific outcome equality is not indicative of equality of opportunity. But, it's also true that equality before the law and other measures that have been tKe over the last 3 generations do not guarantee equality of opportunity. Opportunity is in itself a sticky concept. If you grow up in a family/community where a lot of people are tradesmen then you'll be more likely to be a tradesman. Same for long term welfare dependance, academia, public services, fireman/police, housewives, medicine... The dynamics are complex and not fully understood. People form an idea about what's normal, possible and such. This is a socially based phenomenon. I would argue that it is important to the concept of opportunity. The boxes that you put yourself into by default, and others put you in. There aren't necessarily physical barriers. Lots of people don't end up on the default paths, maybe even most. But, defaults matter. Anyway, let's think about it in reverse. Let's say we are abolishing sexism, racism, caste systems or some other form of big societal discrimination. A generation later, no change in outcomes. Did we succeed? OTOH, it's hard to know what to do with specifics like women in tech. It's not inherently bad for women to have different average preferences and that will cause unequal outcomes. But, we also can't ignore outcomes (imo) entirely either. There must be actual outcome changes. There's also the issue of feedback loops. If certain spheres are male realms, with women in a tiny minority this makes it harder for women to enter in the future.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
krat0sprakhar 9y ago
This article cites the same research that was discussed on HN a while ago as its basis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407678
tomcam 9y ago
It’s almost like... men and women are different.
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  careful. you can get fired for that
- cgearhart 9y ago
  The article addresses that idea. > The findings will likely seem controversial, since the idea that men and women have different inherent abilities is often used as a reason...to argue we should forget trying to recruit more women into the stem fields. But...that’s not quite what’s happening here. > In wealthy nations, [women] believe that they have the freedom to pursue [other] alternatives and not worry so much that they pay less. The research does not seem to find that it is gender aptitude or interest differences that accounts for the disparity in STEM graduates. > ...the percentage of girls who did excel in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with stem degrees. That means there’s something in even the most liberal societies that’s nudging women away from math and science, even when those are their best subjects.
  - funkythingss 9y ago
    so in STEM it's only sexism and not the fact that there are less women/ less women with interest? Where's sexism in medicine, sociology, biology?
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    > That means there’s something in even the most liberal societies that’s nudging women away from math and science, even when those are their best subjects. I didn't glean it from the article but if you have can you tell if they suggested a reason for this? What is this "something" that’s nudging women away from math and science?
  - pedrosorio 9y ago
    > But when it comes to their relative strengths, in almost all the countries—all except Romania and Lebanon—boys’ best subject was science, and girls’ was reading > And the more gender-equal the country, as measured by the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, the larger this gap between boys and girls in having science as their best subject. The research seems pretty clear. > ...the percentage of girls who did excel in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with stem degrees. This quote is not related to whether there are interest differences or not. They may be equally good in science/math and something else and decide they want to do the other thing without that automatically implying "society is causing this preference" (and by the way, medicine is not "STEM" for some reason, but no one is becoming a doctor without strong aptitude for math/science). If the research results I quoted above are to be believed, regarding aptitude, someone may excel in A (say girls in these countries get "very good" scores in math at the same rate as boys) and be much better in B (they excel in reading/other skills at a higher rate than boys) and it would be natural for this person to pursue B in that case, no?
gd1 9y ago
'The gap in reading “is related at least in part to girls’ advantages in basic language abilities and a generally greater interest in reading; they read more and thus practice more,” Geary told me.' I'm sorry, I couldn't read past this bit. I know men who are good readers so this can't be true. I'm going to wilfully pretend I don't understand probability distributions. I need this person to be fired immediately. Someone contact Google HR.
afroboy 9y ago
I just discovered that where i work (Algeria) there is hidden rule in hiring new devs that wasn't known publicly it's simply no women, seriously i work with 20 men for more than two years and i just discovered that our head of recruitment doesn't hire woman at all no matter how she's talented because of so many reason most of them are racist but kind are hard to argue with him like if woman get married she will stop working and yes like 70% of this happened all time when women get married her husband will force her to stop working, even if she doesn't when she have kids she start working less hours i mean like 50% less and the big reason that they can't handle pressure at all specifically if production server is down she simply get cracked down and where i live woman never work full time never that is like freaking problem and they never work for additional hours (despite we pay for those hours). so if he invest in woman she's going to get him like 30% productivity of men.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  In a free market such companies would be at disadvantage versus the ones who also attract top talent regardless of gender or race or any other demographic criteria whatsoever.
  - nukeop 9y ago
    I don't think the myth of a theoretical "free" market holds any water and can be applied sensibly to any real world scenario. In the actual free market a giant megacorp would swoop all promising hires and suppress all competition by selling at a loss until nobody else dares to enter the field.
    - mamon 9y ago
      In actual free market selling at loss is a very short-sighted strategy: you may cause the bankruptcy of your current competitors, but bariers to entry are low, so once you raise your prices back to profitable levels the new competition arises. You would have to sell at loss most of the time which would eventually bankrupt your megacorp. That’s why monopolies can only exist in regulated markets.
gonvaled 9y ago
I would take the whole equality movement more seriously if I had been able, in the past decade, to spot a negative news article / report on women. When you get all the time exclusively negative news about men, you could start thinking that this is a coordinated (or emergent?) campaign.
- michaelt 9y ago
  I get positive news about my place in STEM every month, in the form of a paycheck which is more than four times my country's median individual income. I'll take concrete, quantifiable rewards over nice words in an opinion piece any day.
  - golergka 9y ago
    But your salary is about your place individually, not about gigantic groups of people.
  - throwaway1748 9y ago
    Why should it be an either-or proposition? There's lots of evidence that young boys are falling behind to girls in early to college education. Maybe both genders need encouraging words? And if we're collectively going to dish out negative articles about men, maybe that should cut both ways too
- skjerns 9y ago
  coordinated by who? By negative reports you mean 'something that women do wrong'?
  - throwaway1748 9y ago
    It's definitely not coordinated. It's an emergent phenomenon that was created by the engagement-maximizing feed and recommendation algorithms we're plugged into
  - gonvaled 9y ago
    If we insist on reporting by gender (that is questionable in itself) reporting must be truthful, otherwise we risk that these reports are not taken seriously. I am sure women are better than men at a lot of things, and equally good at other things. What are men better at? We know men are better at some things than women, but currently nobody is willing/interested/daring to report on this. Does it matter who is better? It seems yes, since lots of news are talking about how much better women are. Come on, I am extremely positive about equality; if you are starting to antagonize people like me, something is going really wrong.
funkythingss 9y ago
This phenomenon isn't entirely new. Some man have seen it as "Scandinavian gender paradox". Still, why are we surprised? We know instinctively, that there will never web 50/50 in some fields, because man/women just don't like it as much. It's sad that some people have to pretend to agree with the feminist narrative
- tnzn 9y ago
  Except some studies have shown countries with more equal rights country have worse gender stereotypes overall. And even if the studied were to be flawed, your "men and women have different tasted" theory is pure narrative as well. No study with any solid methodology has ever shown women and men have inherently different tastes when it comes to STEMs, and it's pretty much impossible considering the intertwined nature of nature and nurture and the very cultural nature of STEMs.
dontcare25 9y ago
Career Successful women in stem told me that she would have pursed for a different career if she wasn't the daughter of immigrants. She was destined to be an engineer or a doctor.
- telesilla 9y ago
  >engineer or a doctor These are both STEM fields (Science, technology, engineering, mathematics). Doctor is a crossover in my view, anyway. Sounds like she would like more autonomy with her career choices, rather than not be in a STEM field.
  - groovy2shoes 9y ago
    I think GP means that she felt like engineer and doctor were the only options she could choose from, and therefore she was effectively dragooned into a STEM career. That is, if she'd been dealt a different hand, she would've preferred a career in something other than engineering or medicine.
zerr 9y ago
One reason could be - in poor/developing countries STEM is understood as the escape path from the poverty, while in developed countries people seem assured in their future even if they go in humanities or any other non-tech field - thus following their interests/hobbies rather than the need. EDIT: unintentional tl;dr as it seems :)
- nukeop 9y ago
  This could be true, assuming USA is a poor/developing country.
  - Valmar 9y ago
    Rich and prosperous corporations, and a trodden-on and money-deprived worker-class, not to mention the abused poor and homeless?
  - zerr 9y ago
    The absence of a good welfare/healthcare system is one of the main reason I'm reluctant to moving to US - while personally I might be well off, assuming "big 4" (or 10, whatever) provide good insurance for developers - what if my children won't want to became developers but e.g. musician, literature school teacher, artist, etc... they would be doomed in US. So yes, when it comes to healthcare and affordable education, and gun control - US is really poor/undeveloped country, worse - they aren't even moving in the right direction.
    - lr4444lr 9y ago
      If they want to become teachers, they will have very good social benefits in terms of pensions, affordable health insurance, and many work protections. Our government sector in most states is generally quite good on the benefits side, relatively speaking.
- archgoon 9y ago
  Possible. So possible in fact that is mentioned in the article itself, citing the original authors. > “Countries with the highest gender equality tend to be welfare states,” > they write, “with a high level of social security.” Meanwhile, less > gender-equal countries tend to also have less social support for people > who, for example, find themselves unemployed. Thus, the authors > suggest, girls in those countries might be more inclined to choose stem > professions, since they offer a more certain financial future than, > say, painting or writing.
thedonkeycometh 9y ago
The equality situation cross-culture is different. I think the US exceptionalises female STEM careers (as a proxy for discrimination) which can then add more pressure. And just because women have an explicit right to choose STEM work, doesn't mean that the discrimination doesn't put them off entry, as they're still painted in the same fashion as they were for the last fifty years. As seen in google-guys all staff memo-rant. I've been in the industry for 20 years and haven't seen any relaxation of the bigotry and ignorance towards some people in IT. In fact, I'd say it has got worse of late, with the current trend of having the right to voice an "unpopular opininon" creating a platform for casual discrimination.
ZeroGravitas 9y ago
This, and similar research I'd seen before seems to point to women being equal or better at STEM than men (and also being better at non-STEM stuff), but actively avoiding it as a low-status role when they have better options. Slightly baffling to see this celebrated by men in these careers as some kind of vindication. The data appears to be saying you (we) suck, but that's a win if you think the data was going to show that one gender sucked (and you ignore that you secretly thought it was them).
- mesozoic 9y ago
  I think men celebrate it in the hope that this may trigger a culture change where they don't have to be seen as less desirables or inherently sexist members of the patriarchy.
  - shostrift 9y ago
    Nah, a lot of guys are just weak and will do anything if they think it'll get chicks to like them. It's all good saying you're a male feminist until you realise girls don't want a pussy as a boyfriend. If you want to get a girl hot, act like a man.
- gonvaled 9y ago
  Being good and being capable are different things: I am very capable of cleaning toilets, but I am not very good at it since I do not do it with a passion. Edit: and I obviously do not imply with my tongue in cheek joke that women are the ones cleaning toilets. Just going the extra mile here to avoid offending anybody.
  - shostrift 9y ago
    You joke, but women are the nest-makers biologically. You can see it in their typical enjoyment of shopping (which many guys aren't bothered about), and typically higher desire for cleanliness. Both these behaviours are beneficial from a survival perspective.
- taneq 9y ago
nukeop 9y ago
Forcing people to change their interests based on an agenda only results in them being even less interested than they were in the first place. There is also the backlash to the nonstop pushing of politically-based hiring instead of meritocratic practices. Some even state "meritocracy" is outright oppressive and should never be applied.
- Valmar 9y ago
  > Some even state "meritocracy" is outright oppressive and should never be applied. "Oppressive" only because they don't like to face reality, no matter whether it is told gently, supportively or bluntly. All they can do is self-deny, and then project their pain and self-blame onto others, because it is too much to accept, push through and go beyond, because that is the beginning of self-healing.
- tnzn 9y ago
  Maybe because these people realized meritocracy is an outright lie and that in any instance there are gender/racial/class/geographical/... inequality, or even biological inequality you right-wingers are so keen to point at, so there's no way to actually talk about merit ?
  - Valmar 9y ago
    A meritocracy isn't unfair by definition. It is an ideology based around what people can achieve. These achievements don't have to be grand or anything. They can be small and incremental. It is an ideology about empowering people, no matter who they are. Even those who don't have equal capability compared to others can contribute in small ways, and so, they can indeed achieve merit based on merely doing what they can do, even if it is small. But, it is many small things that add up to massive changes, and that is what a meritocracy is ~ just chip in where you can contribute, and you can make a difference, no matter who you are. However, there are issues where a meritocracy cannot be of use, and that is in a system designed deliberately to exclude merit, and instead empower those who prefer there be imbalance, injustice, and unfairness. SJW ideologies which seek to belittle and mute those they consider the "enemy" are like this.
Pyxl101 9y ago
An article about this research was submitted to HN earlier today, and provoked vigorous discussion with 271 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407678 Here's a link to the actual paper: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617741719 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617741719
EddieSpeaks 9y ago
I refrained from posting this exact article because HN gets triggered by any gender realism
jlebrech 9y ago
Why are we telling women do do STEM if that's not what they want to do, we should be supporting women want to do that. For example more entry level roles and considering women for those.
- bufferoverflow 9y ago
  Isn't treating women differently from men sexist by definition? If we want equality, let's treat everyone equally. No special programs for any gender. We're constantly told that men and women are the same, and that you can even switch between them any time you want, but then we hear the complaints that gender X does better/worse at task Z. This narrative doesn't make any sense to me.
  - Valmar 9y ago
    Men and women obviously aren't the same, no matter how much gnashing of teeth of matter occurs, because both have their strengths in different areas, according to their overall psychology. Men and women are psychologically-different, and no amount of trying to force a desperate sameness will change that. In fact, it might even cause people to want to be even more different than before. The SJWs campaign for "sameness" but act like the complete opposite. Maybe they're just in denial of who they truly are, and are unconsciously asking for help and recognition that they truly matter, but cannot help but unconsciously portray this in a destructive manner for all to see, except themselves and their blind peer group.
    - bufferoverflow 9y ago
      It's not just the SJWs though. Google recently fired a talented developer for essentially saying "Men and women obviously aren't the same".
      - Valmar 9y ago
        Good point. I'll revise: It's not just the SJWs, but also companies and corporations that cooperate with the ridiculous bullshit of the utterly divisive and politically-correct gender/race insanity that's corroding various aspects of Western culture. I've been verbose enough, because I'm quite fed up with how much this utter crap is infesting culture and causing so much trouble for innocent people who don't remotely deserve to have be treated like they have been.
DoreenMichele 9y ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407678 (Upon skim, this does not seem to be a duplicate per se.)
thriftwy 9y ago
Still no charts. I don't see them communicating with me.
lsy 9y ago
Drawing conclusions about "innate" differences between men and women from this data doesn't seem valid. There's a lot of research left to eliminate confounding effects on participation that aren't covered or investigated by the "Global Gender Gap Index" (e.g. cultural attitudes towards women in STEM, or on-the-job discrimination). Scatter-plotting two datasets available on the internet doesn't feel like enough research for me to dismiss reports from women that they are discouraged from CS before, and during, their careers. The trendline cited in the article isn't even conclusive, either—eliminating outliers would reduce it almost to noise. Even if it were, there hasn't, to date, been any reasonable explanation for why women's "innate" biology would make them any less interested in professions whose parameters and limitations are purely human-constructed and invented in the past century. Whatever happened during the evolution of the sexes was certainly not informed by the interestingness of C++.
- moosekaka 9y ago
  maybe not biology, but personality wise (either due to social upbringing/expectations or genetic imprinting etc) I noticed far more men then women who are of the type who are more comfortable to work with things rather then people. I know I fall into this category.
- jochung 9y ago
  Evolution was opinionated enough to create measurable differences in spatial ability, personality, drives and so on, between genders and within genders. Its velocity is directly proportional to the variance that exists in the population: you need something to differentiate in order to have differential selection pressure. Your hypothesis is in fact the radical one: that programming is somehow such an unseen before ability, that evolution until now has not evolved any machinery to repurpose for its realization. Given everything we know about the very obvious cognitive limits we do have, and where they come from, that seems implausible. The common reasoning by the way does dismiss reports from men and women alike that all this diversity mongering has poisoned the workplace atmosphere and mostly serves to enrich and flatter the egos of people who wouldn't show up unless they got special treatment for their own demographic, with special segregated events, hiring pipelines and accolades. The old "women in X" spiel. These things are most definitely constructed, and not for the reason they advertise. The standards of evidence demanded to abolish them are sky high compared to the spurious reasoning that spawned them.
telesilla 9y ago
Let's turn the argument on it's head. Statistics say boys are more heavily inclined to have a STEM career. Does this mean they feel they cannot consider a career in other fields like teaching, nursing or other female-dominated fields? As a woman I often wonder, what's so great about STEM aside from the paycheck? It depends on your bosses (or being your own if you are lucky and that way inclined), but I don't think we've shown many girls that STEM is really rewarding and it looks on TV like it involves a lot of staring at computer screens. Boring! So I expect that will change when we get to use more interactive interfaces. Also, I hope society does more work to let boys grow up feeling STEM isn't their only hope.
- K0nserv 9y ago
  Boys desire for large pay checks could be explained by patriarchal/societal expectations that they must be the main bread winner in a household
  - telesilla 9y ago
    Right! I'm really supportive of working towards social change where a person's role in life is no longer defined by their gender.
    - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      Given that there are consistent biological[1] and psychological[2] differences between the sexes globally, I'm not sure this would be an achievable goal without hormonal modification, which would wreck the quality of life of one or both genders. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology
    - MrBuddyCasino 9y ago
      Encouraging boys to make non-traditional career choices without making sure female marriage patterns change as well does not sound responsible to me.
ggm 9y ago
Iran has more women engineers and graduates overall. I'm told it can be as much as 75%. I half suspect that it's two things. The society at large is very gender unequal but applied engineering wants outcomes enough that it overcomes societal distortion to get capable women into roles for mutual benefit. The second reason is that highly skilled Iranian women stem graduates qualify for immigration points in receiving economies like Australia. I've worked with some, and know some. They're good. The system works for them as individuals if not in the wider sense of what we'd want in an equal society.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
- shostrift 9y ago
  I certainly know girls in medicine who struggle to find guys. Some seem to be intimidated by them, especially guys from Asian cultures where they want to have higher status jobs than their wives. I would add though that in fact neither of two particular girls I know wanted to go into medicine. They were pushed in by their parents. One wanted to work in fashion, the other media.
hackpert 9y ago
Whenever such studies or analyses come up in the media, I find that people are often eager to jump to causative conclusions on the lines of "oh females must have a natural inclination towards 'softer' fields" or (as in case of this article) "In wealthy nations, they believe that they have the freedom to pursue those alternatives and not worry so much that they pay less." However, even if we ignore the obvious correlation vs causation fallacy at play here, these conclusions conveniently ignore a million other societal factors that affect such decisions. For instance, as much of a gender-equality-utopia Scandinavian countries are, they're certainly not free of gender roles and the societal institutions that enforce those. While of course anecdotal, several of my friends from these countries have talked about how they faced invisible, passive-aggressive forms of bullying from fellow students (a large majority of them reportedly female) for having 'geeky' interests such as math. When presented with other options that may eventually be equally or slightly less fulfilling, but come without the social pressure, it makes sense to most people to go with the flow. So much for "natural inclinations"...
- howlgram 9y ago
  are you implying that male students who go for stem don't face bullying akin to being "geeky" or "nerds"? Please...
  - hackpert 9y ago
    Oh no I'm sorry for the lack of clarity, that was certainly not what I'm implying. They do, and it's an extremely unfortunate problem that we ought to do something about. I was merely suggesting that these differences we tend to eagerly attribute to biology (a la James Damore) could very well be caused by a bunch of cultural and societal factors, of which bullying could be one. Also, over the last two decades there has been a significant increase in cultural recognition and representation of male "nerds," as people who belonged to that category have gained positions of influence, thanks to the tech boom in the 90s, which can sometimes inspire students to pursue their interests despite the bullying. The lack of such representative role models for young females is disconcerting and could even cause some people to be slightly more affected by the bullying, because perhaps they don't know a female who works in STEM or know of anyone in recent years who made it big, and simply didn't know it was possible to go against the social tide (which happens all too frequently.) All in all, I think there are a lot of factors at play here and reducing it to one cause seems like wilful ignorance at best.
shostrift 9y ago
> Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there So if women are choosing not to enter certain fields the "gender gap" is worse? That's to say some people are so idealistic that they would rather remove a woman's freedom to choose her career and force her into a job she doesn't want to do just to satisfy some BS ideology? A "gender gap" is only bad if women are prevented from entering a field for some reason. If they simply don't want to, then more power to them. Surely the most important thing is the right to choose one's own career, not applying social pressure to women. It's the same with the recent trend of getting rid of "track girls" at F1. So now pretty girls who want to be models can no longer find as much work they enjoy.
soVeryTired 9y ago
If you look closely at their scatter plot, you can see that the UAE, Turkey, Algeria, and Tunisia cluster in the lower right. Without them, the relationship would be considerably weaker. Is there something in particular about Middle Eastern culture that's skewing the results? I'm not sure I understand the choice of countries in the regression either. Where are India and China, for example?
- nukeop 9y ago
  What could be so particular about the Middle Eastern culture that would result in a different treatment of women in these countries? Is it about the climate? Is it about the diet? The research must continue to resolve this mindboggling mystery.
  - soVeryTired 9y ago
    Not sure I understand the reason for the sarcasm there.
al_form2000 9y ago
There oughta be a law to force women into STEM.
tnzn 9y ago
This paradox has been highlighted at another level : a study which I read in the book "Psychologie sociale : perspective multiculturelle" by Serge Guimond showed that countries with the highest gender/sex equality in terms of RIGHTS also had the highest gender gap in terms of STEREOTYPES.

129 points by wyuenho 9y ago

dvt 9y ago

Equality of opportunity does not necessarily imply equality of outcome. This isn't a paradox. Why are still people still confused about this? (Actually, people aren't confused about this, but it makes for great clickbait articles and ad revenue because it fans the flames of both sides of the argument.)

latch 9y ago
I'm not sure I'd say the headline is clickbait. It's describing a correlation from a new paper. Seems pretty non opinionated to me. There's a couple places within the article that's more superficial though.
platz 9y ago
Preferences aren't static, and are part of a dynamical system. It needs to be explained why preferences are the way they are. Environment could be changed to address causes of preference
- RyanZAG 9y ago
  Most studies on this seem to show that gender based preferences can be at least partially explained from birth before any environmental factors play a part in it. People have been doing these studies for a long time now, but they get ignored because we don't like the results. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/ And of course, far more studies that have been going on for decades.
  - TuringTest 9y ago
    Biological preferences don't explain why careers preferred by women have less average pay than careers preferred by men.
    - LambdaAlmighty 9y ago
      They don't? AFAIK explanation of one of the factors is not even that complicated: lower physical strength (on average) => more focus on social skills (on average) => higher agreeableness (one of the Big-5 traits) and preference for avoiding conflict (on average) => less risk but also less upside (on average) => less extreme career choices but also less extreme rewards (on average)
    - mpweiher 9y ago
      No. But preferences do explain why women don't emphasize money in their career choice, whereas men do. The vast majority of women will not continue dating a man who earns less than they do. Two thirds of young women in Germany expect their future partners to take care of them financially. So for men, earning money and status is absolutely essential. See also: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/02/a-letter-to-my-wife-who-wont-get-a-job-while-i-work-myself-to-death https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/02/a-lette...
      - TuringTest 9y ago
        What makes you think this is explained by biological preferences alone, or that those preferences scale to society-wide differences in salary?
        mpweiher 9y ago
        (1) Actually, I didn't even mention biology. I just wrote "preferences". (2) What makes you think it wouldn't? After all, it affects everyone in society. And motivation is a pretty powerful force, it is basically how our entire economy is structured. See also: https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/money-gender-and-job-satisfaction/ https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/money-gender-a... "...it typically takes a lot less money to get women to say they are satisfied with their work than it does to get men to say it." "Women were more likely to tell PayScale that say they find their jobs “very meaningful” than men were, with 35 percent of women and 27 percent of men describing their jobs this way." So women have more freedom to find meaningful jobs. Men less so.
- cm2187 9y ago
  But it is also possible that the biology is affecting our inclinations, temper, or skills. After all modern psychiatry is attempting to look at the brain mechanically or to influence it with drugs. And intuitively, I find it hard to believe that our genes that affect so much of our physical abilities, likelyhood of illness, etc would stop at the brain and our behavior would be completely independent of our nature and purely a function of our environment.
- mpweiher 9y ago
  Sure, and the study quoted in the article shows that. Environment is a factor, it just points in the other direction. So if you assert that discrimination is the cause for the imbalance, the evidence shows that your assertion is wrong, because it makes the wrong prediction. This is not just a matter of degrees it is a matter of sign (the arrow is pointing in the wrong direction).
rdiddly 9y ago
They're confused because they're starting from the end (the outcome) and working backward.
ajuc 9y ago
> Why are still people still confused about this? Maybe because "positive discrimination" is pursued using equality of outcomes as a key indicator?
throwawaye4j 9y ago
Personally the reason I'm hesitant to entertain this argument is that code is so awesome - you can reach a billion (1,000,000,000) people practically overnight if your idea is good enough. While women traditionally are more interested in the design/social impact of what they're doing, if the engineering environment is easy enough there's no reason they can't code it themselves. And they are highly incentivized to do so. I personally look at the outcome (you can reach a billion people just by having a cool idea and sitting down and doing it) then look at the hurdles to that outcome. One of the hurdles is that engineers love wasting literally hundreds of each others' hours. If I were building something as a newbie, people have no trouble sending me off on a wild goose chase to spend a hundred hours with my head in documentation. When an alternative ecosystem lets me literally type a single line and it's done. (In this case the first ecosystem hates my time and the second one respects it.) This isn't really related to gender, but it's another hurdle. So when you look at the incentive (reaching people, fame, fortune, money), if there is a highly unequal distribution you have to look at some of the hurdles. By the way no one knows your gender online when you're learning stuff, you can use a non-gendered username and get treated exactly the same asking stuff online and so forth. In this case the hurdle is artificial: being cooped up with a computer while the tools you're trying to use waste thousands of your hours. But it's still a hurdle that impacts genders in a different way, and that matters.
cm2187 9y ago
One of the many simplifications in this debate. Another one: if someone is arguing that there is a difference in the distribution of a particular character between men and women. Immediatly I read comments jumping to the conclusion “my god it says women are more/less [whatever] than men”, as in “all women”. Lots of people seem to be incapable of thinking in term of distributions, which makes it really hard to have any discussion.
- smackay 9y ago
  Therein lie the dangers of categorical thinking, https://www.newyorker.com/business/james-surowiecki/categorical-thinking https://www.newyorker.com/business/james-surowiecki/categori.... Gender is probably the most loaded category there is (except for the other one). There is some movement on this front with acceptance of different gender identities but until society (in all its forms) can ditch categorical thinking and accept that all things in nature exist in distributions, I don't think there will be much progress on this - there's simply too capital to be made by perpetuating strict divisions which everybody must be crammed into in order to simplify the debate and upset everyone in the process. Robert Sapolsky - we need you now more than ever, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky
- ajuc 9y ago
  In such discussions "most" is implied. Interpreting it as "all" is just a rhetoric trick to weaken the opponent's position.
- YouAreGreat 9y ago
  > Lots of people seem to be incapable of thinking in term of distributions, which makes it really hard to have any discussion. Most people seem very capable of thinking statistically, but they don't communicate in distributions. For two people communicating in good faith, the two statements (1) "Boys are taller than girls" and (2) "Anne is taller than Sean" don't prompt talk about how both can't be true at the same time, sexist. People communicate statistical differences as "absolutes", but when communicating in good faith, everybody knows what everybody means. Look at stereotype research. Most stereotypes are statistically true. People communicate them "as if" absolute, but nobody's head explodes when individual examples don't "conform" to the stereotype. That's because people can think in distributions. That's not surprising, it's how to survive in a stochastic environment. This gap between thought and speech only becomes problematic ("makes it really hard to have any discussion") because we can rhetorically exploit the fact that most people can't explicitly communicate about distributions. Just tell them they're bigoted, and they don't know how to refute you. Yay, you win.
rectang 9y ago
Women get paid less than men for doing the same work, across all industries. Pay them the same and the "confusion" will diminish.
- mpweiher 9y ago
  This is a common talking point of the dominant narrative but simply not true. When you average all women and all men, you get a "gap". However, like the imbalance in fields, this is almost entirely due to different choices. When you control for factors such as field, hours worked, years worked the gap effectively disappears.
  - TuringTest 9y ago
    Yeah, isn't it wonderful that when you factor out the discriminating variables, discrimination all but disappears? Choices made by women are influenced by the glass ceiling, society expectations that women will take care of children and the elderly, and the traditional fields where they're expected to work. The decision to measure the gender gap by comparing equal working hours and equal job positions is not innocent, is itself a politically motivated and comforting way to make rational people think "I told you, there's nothing to see here". You need to evaluate what causes women to have those less hours in less paying jobs, to see whether there's discrimination or not. Yet the salary wages discrimination reappears when you factor in hours dedicated to domestic work (the "second shift"), differences in salary between fields with equal risks (exposition to chemicals, hardship) where workers are majority women vs those with more men, or companies' (irrational) tendency to default in promoting male workers over females in similar situations. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/women-pay-gap/?utm_term=.ff49a7159e26 https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/women-...
    - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      If women choose to take less lucrative careers, make less lucrative family roles, and negotiate their salaries less than men, than that's fine with me. Personal freedom and equal opportunity will not always mean equality of outcome, especially in richer countries where women are free to live the life and career they want instead of the life and career they need to survive.
dalbasal 9y ago
Let's assume we're not all disingenious a----les, trying for clickbait and gotchas, but still disagree on some points. I would say that you're right, and this means that specific outcome equality is not indicative of equality of opportunity. But, it's also true that equality before the law and other measures that have been tKe over the last 3 generations do not guarantee equality of opportunity. Opportunity is in itself a sticky concept. If you grow up in a family/community where a lot of people are tradesmen then you'll be more likely to be a tradesman. Same for long term welfare dependance, academia, public services, fireman/police, housewives, medicine... The dynamics are complex and not fully understood. People form an idea about what's normal, possible and such. This is a socially based phenomenon. I would argue that it is important to the concept of opportunity. The boxes that you put yourself into by default, and others put you in. There aren't necessarily physical barriers. Lots of people don't end up on the default paths, maybe even most. But, defaults matter. Anyway, let's think about it in reverse. Let's say we are abolishing sexism, racism, caste systems or some other form of big societal discrimination. A generation later, no change in outcomes. Did we succeed? OTOH, it's hard to know what to do with specifics like women in tech. It's not inherently bad for women to have different average preferences and that will cause unequal outcomes. But, we also can't ignore outcomes (imo) entirely either. There must be actual outcome changes. There's also the issue of feedback loops. If certain spheres are male realms, with women in a tiny minority this makes it harder for women to enter in the future.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

krat0sprakhar 9y ago

This article cites the same research that was discussed on HN a while ago as its basis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407678

tomcam 9y ago

It’s almost like... men and women are different.

oculusthrift 9y ago
careful. you can get fired for that
cgearhart 9y ago
The article addresses that idea. > The findings will likely seem controversial, since the idea that men and women have different inherent abilities is often used as a reason...to argue we should forget trying to recruit more women into the stem fields. But...that’s not quite what’s happening here. > In wealthy nations, [women] believe that they have the freedom to pursue [other] alternatives and not worry so much that they pay less. The research does not seem to find that it is gender aptitude or interest differences that accounts for the disparity in STEM graduates. > ...the percentage of girls who did excel in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with stem degrees. That means there’s something in even the most liberal societies that’s nudging women away from math and science, even when those are their best subjects.
- funkythingss 9y ago
  so in STEM it's only sexism and not the fact that there are less women/ less women with interest? Where's sexism in medicine, sociology, biology?
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  > That means there’s something in even the most liberal societies that’s nudging women away from math and science, even when those are their best subjects. I didn't glean it from the article but if you have can you tell if they suggested a reason for this? What is this "something" that’s nudging women away from math and science?
- pedrosorio 9y ago
  > But when it comes to their relative strengths, in almost all the countries—all except Romania and Lebanon—boys’ best subject was science, and girls’ was reading > And the more gender-equal the country, as measured by the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, the larger this gap between boys and girls in having science as their best subject. The research seems pretty clear. > ...the percentage of girls who did excel in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with stem degrees. This quote is not related to whether there are interest differences or not. They may be equally good in science/math and something else and decide they want to do the other thing without that automatically implying "society is causing this preference" (and by the way, medicine is not "STEM" for some reason, but no one is becoming a doctor without strong aptitude for math/science). If the research results I quoted above are to be believed, regarding aptitude, someone may excel in A (say girls in these countries get "very good" scores in math at the same rate as boys) and be much better in B (they excel in reading/other skills at a higher rate than boys) and it would be natural for this person to pursue B in that case, no?

gd1 9y ago

'The gap in reading “is related at least in part to girls’ advantages in basic language abilities and a generally greater interest in reading; they read more and thus practice more,” Geary told me.' I'm sorry, I couldn't read past this bit. I know men who are good readers so this can't be true. I'm going to wilfully pretend I don't understand probability distributions. I need this person to be fired immediately. Someone contact Google HR.

afroboy 9y ago

I just discovered that where i work (Algeria) there is hidden rule in hiring new devs that wasn't known publicly it's simply no women, seriously i work with 20 men for more than two years and i just discovered that our head of recruitment doesn't hire woman at all no matter how she's talented because of so many reason most of them are racist but kind are hard to argue with him like if woman get married she will stop working and yes like 70% of this happened all time when women get married her husband will force her to stop working, even if she doesn't when she have kids she start working less hours i mean like 50% less and the big reason that they can't handle pressure at all specifically if production server is down she simply get cracked down and where i live woman never work full time never that is like freaking problem and they never work for additional hours (despite we pay for those hours). so if he invest in woman she's going to get him like 30% productivity of men.

ekianjo 9y ago
In a free market such companies would be at disadvantage versus the ones who also attract top talent regardless of gender or race or any other demographic criteria whatsoever.
- nukeop 9y ago
  I don't think the myth of a theoretical "free" market holds any water and can be applied sensibly to any real world scenario. In the actual free market a giant megacorp would swoop all promising hires and suppress all competition by selling at a loss until nobody else dares to enter the field.
  - mamon 9y ago
    In actual free market selling at loss is a very short-sighted strategy: you may cause the bankruptcy of your current competitors, but bariers to entry are low, so once you raise your prices back to profitable levels the new competition arises. You would have to sell at loss most of the time which would eventually bankrupt your megacorp. That’s why monopolies can only exist in regulated markets.

gonvaled 9y ago

I would take the whole equality movement more seriously if I had been able, in the past decade, to spot a negative news article / report on women. When you get all the time exclusively negative news about men, you could start thinking that this is a coordinated (or emergent?) campaign.

michaelt 9y ago
I get positive news about my place in STEM every month, in the form of a paycheck which is more than four times my country's median individual income. I'll take concrete, quantifiable rewards over nice words in an opinion piece any day.
- golergka 9y ago
  But your salary is about your place individually, not about gigantic groups of people.
- throwaway1748 9y ago
  Why should it be an either-or proposition? There's lots of evidence that young boys are falling behind to girls in early to college education. Maybe both genders need encouraging words? And if we're collectively going to dish out negative articles about men, maybe that should cut both ways too
skjerns 9y ago
coordinated by who? By negative reports you mean 'something that women do wrong'?
- throwaway1748 9y ago
  It's definitely not coordinated. It's an emergent phenomenon that was created by the engagement-maximizing feed and recommendation algorithms we're plugged into
- gonvaled 9y ago
  If we insist on reporting by gender (that is questionable in itself) reporting must be truthful, otherwise we risk that these reports are not taken seriously. I am sure women are better than men at a lot of things, and equally good at other things. What are men better at? We know men are better at some things than women, but currently nobody is willing/interested/daring to report on this. Does it matter who is better? It seems yes, since lots of news are talking about how much better women are. Come on, I am extremely positive about equality; if you are starting to antagonize people like me, something is going really wrong.

funkythingss 9y ago

This phenomenon isn't entirely new. Some man have seen it as "Scandinavian gender paradox". Still, why are we surprised? We know instinctively, that there will never web 50/50 in some fields, because man/women just don't like it as much. It's sad that some people have to pretend to agree with the feminist narrative

tnzn 9y ago
Except some studies have shown countries with more equal rights country have worse gender stereotypes overall. And even if the studied were to be flawed, your "men and women have different tasted" theory is pure narrative as well. No study with any solid methodology has ever shown women and men have inherently different tastes when it comes to STEMs, and it's pretty much impossible considering the intertwined nature of nature and nurture and the very cultural nature of STEMs.

dontcare25 9y ago

Career Successful women in stem told me that she would have pursed for a different career if she wasn't the daughter of immigrants. She was destined to be an engineer or a doctor.

telesilla 9y ago
>engineer or a doctor These are both STEM fields (Science, technology, engineering, mathematics). Doctor is a crossover in my view, anyway. Sounds like she would like more autonomy with her career choices, rather than not be in a STEM field.
- groovy2shoes 9y ago
  I think GP means that she felt like engineer and doctor were the only options she could choose from, and therefore she was effectively dragooned into a STEM career. That is, if she'd been dealt a different hand, she would've preferred a career in something other than engineering or medicine.

zerr 9y ago

One reason could be - in poor/developing countries STEM is understood as the escape path from the poverty, while in developed countries people seem assured in their future even if they go in humanities or any other non-tech field - thus following their interests/hobbies rather than the need. EDIT: unintentional tl;dr as it seems :)

nukeop 9y ago
This could be true, assuming USA is a poor/developing country.
- Valmar 9y ago
  Rich and prosperous corporations, and a trodden-on and money-deprived worker-class, not to mention the abused poor and homeless?
- zerr 9y ago
  The absence of a good welfare/healthcare system is one of the main reason I'm reluctant to moving to US - while personally I might be well off, assuming "big 4" (or 10, whatever) provide good insurance for developers - what if my children won't want to became developers but e.g. musician, literature school teacher, artist, etc... they would be doomed in US. So yes, when it comes to healthcare and affordable education, and gun control - US is really poor/undeveloped country, worse - they aren't even moving in the right direction.
  - lr4444lr 9y ago
    If they want to become teachers, they will have very good social benefits in terms of pensions, affordable health insurance, and many work protections. Our government sector in most states is generally quite good on the benefits side, relatively speaking.
archgoon 9y ago
Possible. So possible in fact that is mentioned in the article itself, citing the original authors. > “Countries with the highest gender equality tend to be welfare states,” > they write, “with a high level of social security.” Meanwhile, less > gender-equal countries tend to also have less social support for people > who, for example, find themselves unemployed. Thus, the authors > suggest, girls in those countries might be more inclined to choose stem > professions, since they offer a more certain financial future than, > say, painting or writing.

thedonkeycometh 9y ago

The equality situation cross-culture is different. I think the US exceptionalises female STEM careers (as a proxy for discrimination) which can then add more pressure. And just because women have an explicit right to choose STEM work, doesn't mean that the discrimination doesn't put them off entry, as they're still painted in the same fashion as they were for the last fifty years. As seen in google-guys all staff memo-rant. I've been in the industry for 20 years and haven't seen any relaxation of the bigotry and ignorance towards some people in IT. In fact, I'd say it has got worse of late, with the current trend of having the right to voice an "unpopular opininon" creating a platform for casual discrimination.

ZeroGravitas 9y ago

This, and similar research I'd seen before seems to point to women being equal or better at STEM than men (and also being better at non-STEM stuff), but actively avoiding it as a low-status role when they have better options. Slightly baffling to see this celebrated by men in these careers as some kind of vindication. The data appears to be saying you (we) suck, but that's a win if you think the data was going to show that one gender sucked (and you ignore that you secretly thought it was them).

mesozoic 9y ago
I think men celebrate it in the hope that this may trigger a culture change where they don't have to be seen as less desirables or inherently sexist members of the patriarchy.
- shostrift 9y ago
  Nah, a lot of guys are just weak and will do anything if they think it'll get chicks to like them. It's all good saying you're a male feminist until you realise girls don't want a pussy as a boyfriend. If you want to get a girl hot, act like a man.
gonvaled 9y ago
Being good and being capable are different things: I am very capable of cleaning toilets, but I am not very good at it since I do not do it with a passion. Edit: and I obviously do not imply with my tongue in cheek joke that women are the ones cleaning toilets. Just going the extra mile here to avoid offending anybody.
- shostrift 9y ago
  You joke, but women are the nest-makers biologically. You can see it in their typical enjoyment of shopping (which many guys aren't bothered about), and typically higher desire for cleanliness. Both these behaviours are beneficial from a survival perspective.
taneq 9y ago

nukeop 9y ago

Forcing people to change their interests based on an agenda only results in them being even less interested than they were in the first place. There is also the backlash to the nonstop pushing of politically-based hiring instead of meritocratic practices. Some even state "meritocracy" is outright oppressive and should never be applied.

Valmar 9y ago
> Some even state "meritocracy" is outright oppressive and should never be applied. "Oppressive" only because they don't like to face reality, no matter whether it is told gently, supportively or bluntly. All they can do is self-deny, and then project their pain and self-blame onto others, because it is too much to accept, push through and go beyond, because that is the beginning of self-healing.
tnzn 9y ago
Maybe because these people realized meritocracy is an outright lie and that in any instance there are gender/racial/class/geographical/... inequality, or even biological inequality you right-wingers are so keen to point at, so there's no way to actually talk about merit ?
- Valmar 9y ago
  A meritocracy isn't unfair by definition. It is an ideology based around what people can achieve. These achievements don't have to be grand or anything. They can be small and incremental. It is an ideology about empowering people, no matter who they are. Even those who don't have equal capability compared to others can contribute in small ways, and so, they can indeed achieve merit based on merely doing what they can do, even if it is small. But, it is many small things that add up to massive changes, and that is what a meritocracy is ~ just chip in where you can contribute, and you can make a difference, no matter who you are. However, there are issues where a meritocracy cannot be of use, and that is in a system designed deliberately to exclude merit, and instead empower those who prefer there be imbalance, injustice, and unfairness. SJW ideologies which seek to belittle and mute those they consider the "enemy" are like this.

Pyxl101 9y ago

An article about this research was submitted to HN earlier today, and provoked vigorous discussion with 271 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407678 Here's a link to the actual paper: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617741719 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617741719

EddieSpeaks 9y ago

I refrained from posting this exact article because HN gets triggered by any gender realism

jlebrech 9y ago

Why are we telling women do do STEM if that's not what they want to do, we should be supporting women want to do that. For example more entry level roles and considering women for those.

bufferoverflow 9y ago
Isn't treating women differently from men sexist by definition? If we want equality, let's treat everyone equally. No special programs for any gender. We're constantly told that men and women are the same, and that you can even switch between them any time you want, but then we hear the complaints that gender X does better/worse at task Z. This narrative doesn't make any sense to me.
- Valmar 9y ago
  Men and women obviously aren't the same, no matter how much gnashing of teeth of matter occurs, because both have their strengths in different areas, according to their overall psychology. Men and women are psychologically-different, and no amount of trying to force a desperate sameness will change that. In fact, it might even cause people to want to be even more different than before. The SJWs campaign for "sameness" but act like the complete opposite. Maybe they're just in denial of who they truly are, and are unconsciously asking for help and recognition that they truly matter, but cannot help but unconsciously portray this in a destructive manner for all to see, except themselves and their blind peer group.
  - bufferoverflow 9y ago
    It's not just the SJWs though. Google recently fired a talented developer for essentially saying "Men and women obviously aren't the same".
    - Valmar 9y ago
      Good point. I'll revise: It's not just the SJWs, but also companies and corporations that cooperate with the ridiculous bullshit of the utterly divisive and politically-correct gender/race insanity that's corroding various aspects of Western culture. I've been verbose enough, because I'm quite fed up with how much this utter crap is infesting culture and causing so much trouble for innocent people who don't remotely deserve to have be treated like they have been.

DoreenMichele 9y ago

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407678 (Upon skim, this does not seem to be a duplicate per se.)

thriftwy 9y ago

Still no charts. I don't see them communicating with me.

lsy 9y ago

Drawing conclusions about "innate" differences between men and women from this data doesn't seem valid. There's a lot of research left to eliminate confounding effects on participation that aren't covered or investigated by the "Global Gender Gap Index" (e.g. cultural attitudes towards women in STEM, or on-the-job discrimination). Scatter-plotting two datasets available on the internet doesn't feel like enough research for me to dismiss reports from women that they are discouraged from CS before, and during, their careers. The trendline cited in the article isn't even conclusive, either—eliminating outliers would reduce it almost to noise. Even if it were, there hasn't, to date, been any reasonable explanation for why women's "innate" biology would make them any less interested in professions whose parameters and limitations are purely human-constructed and invented in the past century. Whatever happened during the evolution of the sexes was certainly not informed by the interestingness of C++.

moosekaka 9y ago
maybe not biology, but personality wise (either due to social upbringing/expectations or genetic imprinting etc) I noticed far more men then women who are of the type who are more comfortable to work with things rather then people. I know I fall into this category.
jochung 9y ago
Evolution was opinionated enough to create measurable differences in spatial ability, personality, drives and so on, between genders and within genders. Its velocity is directly proportional to the variance that exists in the population: you need something to differentiate in order to have differential selection pressure. Your hypothesis is in fact the radical one: that programming is somehow such an unseen before ability, that evolution until now has not evolved any machinery to repurpose for its realization. Given everything we know about the very obvious cognitive limits we do have, and where they come from, that seems implausible. The common reasoning by the way does dismiss reports from men and women alike that all this diversity mongering has poisoned the workplace atmosphere and mostly serves to enrich and flatter the egos of people who wouldn't show up unless they got special treatment for their own demographic, with special segregated events, hiring pipelines and accolades. The old "women in X" spiel. These things are most definitely constructed, and not for the reason they advertise. The standards of evidence demanded to abolish them are sky high compared to the spurious reasoning that spawned them.

telesilla 9y ago

Let's turn the argument on it's head. Statistics say boys are more heavily inclined to have a STEM career. Does this mean they feel they cannot consider a career in other fields like teaching, nursing or other female-dominated fields? As a woman I often wonder, what's so great about STEM aside from the paycheck? It depends on your bosses (or being your own if you are lucky and that way inclined), but I don't think we've shown many girls that STEM is really rewarding and it looks on TV like it involves a lot of staring at computer screens. Boring! So I expect that will change when we get to use more interactive interfaces. Also, I hope society does more work to let boys grow up feeling STEM isn't their only hope.

K0nserv 9y ago
Boys desire for large pay checks could be explained by patriarchal/societal expectations that they must be the main bread winner in a household
- telesilla 9y ago
  Right! I'm really supportive of working towards social change where a person's role in life is no longer defined by their gender.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    Given that there are consistent biological[1] and psychological[2] differences between the sexes globally, I'm not sure this would be an achievable goal without hormonal modification, which would wreck the quality of life of one or both genders. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology
  - MrBuddyCasino 9y ago
    Encouraging boys to make non-traditional career choices without making sure female marriage patterns change as well does not sound responsible to me.

ggm 9y ago

Iran has more women engineers and graduates overall. I'm told it can be as much as 75%. I half suspect that it's two things. The society at large is very gender unequal but applied engineering wants outcomes enough that it overcomes societal distortion to get capable women into roles for mutual benefit. The second reason is that highly skilled Iranian women stem graduates qualify for immigration points in receiving economies like Australia. I've worked with some, and know some. They're good. The system works for them as individuals if not in the wider sense of what we'd want in an equal society.

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shostrift 9y ago
I certainly know girls in medicine who struggle to find guys. Some seem to be intimidated by them, especially guys from Asian cultures where they want to have higher status jobs than their wives. I would add though that in fact neither of two particular girls I know wanted to go into medicine. They were pushed in by their parents. One wanted to work in fashion, the other media.

hackpert 9y ago

Whenever such studies or analyses come up in the media, I find that people are often eager to jump to causative conclusions on the lines of "oh females must have a natural inclination towards 'softer' fields" or (as in case of this article) "In wealthy nations, they believe that they have the freedom to pursue those alternatives and not worry so much that they pay less." However, even if we ignore the obvious correlation vs causation fallacy at play here, these conclusions conveniently ignore a million other societal factors that affect such decisions. For instance, as much of a gender-equality-utopia Scandinavian countries are, they're certainly not free of gender roles and the societal institutions that enforce those. While of course anecdotal, several of my friends from these countries have talked about how they faced invisible, passive-aggressive forms of bullying from fellow students (a large majority of them reportedly female) for having 'geeky' interests such as math. When presented with other options that may eventually be equally or slightly less fulfilling, but come without the social pressure, it makes sense to most people to go with the flow. So much for "natural inclinations"...

howlgram 9y ago
are you implying that male students who go for stem don't face bullying akin to being "geeky" or "nerds"? Please...
- hackpert 9y ago
  Oh no I'm sorry for the lack of clarity, that was certainly not what I'm implying. They do, and it's an extremely unfortunate problem that we ought to do something about. I was merely suggesting that these differences we tend to eagerly attribute to biology (a la James Damore) could very well be caused by a bunch of cultural and societal factors, of which bullying could be one. Also, over the last two decades there has been a significant increase in cultural recognition and representation of male "nerds," as people who belonged to that category have gained positions of influence, thanks to the tech boom in the 90s, which can sometimes inspire students to pursue their interests despite the bullying. The lack of such representative role models for young females is disconcerting and could even cause some people to be slightly more affected by the bullying, because perhaps they don't know a female who works in STEM or know of anyone in recent years who made it big, and simply didn't know it was possible to go against the social tide (which happens all too frequently.) All in all, I think there are a lot of factors at play here and reducing it to one cause seems like wilful ignorance at best.

shostrift 9y ago

> Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there So if women are choosing not to enter certain fields the "gender gap" is worse? That's to say some people are so idealistic that they would rather remove a woman's freedom to choose her career and force her into a job she doesn't want to do just to satisfy some BS ideology? A "gender gap" is only bad if women are prevented from entering a field for some reason. If they simply don't want to, then more power to them. Surely the most important thing is the right to choose one's own career, not applying social pressure to women. It's the same with the recent trend of getting rid of "track girls" at F1. So now pretty girls who want to be models can no longer find as much work they enjoy.

soVeryTired 9y ago

If you look closely at their scatter plot, you can see that the UAE, Turkey, Algeria, and Tunisia cluster in the lower right. Without them, the relationship would be considerably weaker. Is there something in particular about Middle Eastern culture that's skewing the results? I'm not sure I understand the choice of countries in the regression either. Where are India and China, for example?

nukeop 9y ago
What could be so particular about the Middle Eastern culture that would result in a different treatment of women in these countries? Is it about the climate? Is it about the diet? The research must continue to resolve this mindboggling mystery.
- soVeryTired 9y ago
  Not sure I understand the reason for the sarcasm there.

al_form2000 9y ago

There oughta be a law to force women into STEM.

tnzn 9y ago

This paradox has been highlighted at another level : a study which I read in the book "Psychologie sociale : perspective multiculturelle" by Serge Guimond showed that countries with the highest gender/sex equality in terms of RIGHTS also had the highest gender gap in terms of STEREOTYPES.