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Why Women Choose Differently at Work

210 points by dnetesn 9y ago

cimmanom 9y ago
This article still assumes that the preferences themselves are inherent rather than the result of gender socialization. Even where you see girls excel more at verbal and arts and boys at STEM, how much of that is due to what they were encouraged to be interested in and spend their time on when younger? I don't remember exactly which study it was, but there's evidence that in some cultures (IIRC China?) girls do better than boys at math. That suggests there's a significant cultural/social element at play.
- jm__87 9y ago
  Everyone's preferences are going to have some social element. Why is this a bad thing? The only thing that should matter is that people are free to pursue whatever life they are interested in, whatever the reason.
  - cimmanom 9y ago
    In practice it's a problem because there are so many people who the the difference in numbers as an indicator of an inherent (i.e. biological) lack of aptitude. See also: Google Memo. Socially influenced preferences aren't necessarily a bad thing in theory. Personally, as a woman in software, I loathe that we socialize our children to have different interests based on gender even when their aptitudes are the same. It means that a lot of girls who might find STEM careers fulfilling don't even consider investigating let alone pursuing them, because they think of STEM as being "not for me".
    - jm__87 9y ago
      The fact that you currently understand that lower aptitude is not the reason there are fewer women in STEM, in spite of the numbers, tells me that this problem could be solved by giving people the correct facts regarding the situation and showing how the arguments for aptitude being the reason for the imbalance are flawed. Secondly, there could very well be some evolutionary basis for differences in preferences between men and women when it comes to liking "things" vs "people" (in addition to culture being a factor - just want to note I'm not trying to argue there is no cultural factor here). I am currently reading a book called "Behave" by Robert Sapolsky that in one part discusses a study where they put chimps in a room full of toys and observed which type of toy the male and female chimps went for. If my memory is correct, the female chimps more often went for the dolls and the male chimps went for the cars (I don't have the name/authors of the study handy, but I can dig it up. The fact that Sapolsky, a respected primatologist from Stanford, thinks this study is legitimate enough to mention in his book indicates to me that the study doesn't have any serious flaws). Clearly the female chimps were never culturally predisposed to prefer playing with dolls, so there is something else going on here.
- rimliu 9y ago
  I still laugh at the argument that there are fewer women in tech because computers were marketed as a toy for boys. The thing is: when I started with the computers (some thirty years ago) almost nobody had them at home in my country, and they sure were not advertised as any kind of toy for anyone. Actually, back then even the concept of advertising was new to us. Yet the computers at the university computer labs were all occupied by guys. Interestingly enough my computer science teacher at the school was a woman. I am grateful to her, because she tught me to program without even having access to computer (the course was about basics: variables, algorithms, control flow, etc. By the time I was able to access the computer all I needed was syntax for that particular language). My computer science teacher in the university was also a woman. And one of the best known computer science educator in my country, author of many books was also a woman. And nobody thought that was somehow peculiar or strange. My degree was in hard science (BS in chemistry and physics, then MS in physics and astronomy). I think the had about an equal split between men and women as our professors. Once again, nobody thought twice about that. But it was still exclusively guys spending their free time in the computer labs.
- toasterlovin 9y ago
  IIRC, boys and girls have similar overall mental abilities. There are a few specific abilities where boys are slightly better and a few specific abilities where girls are slightly better. But abilities are not the same as preferences. Regarding preferences: boys and girls show distinct preferences for toys and style of play from an early age (basically, before they could possibly be socialized). Even chimpanzee children show distinct toy preferences by sex (and they match human toy preferences). Speaking anecdotally: I often speculate that the only people who could possibly believe that boys and girls do not have fundamentally different preferences are the childless. I live in Portland, OR. This is one of the most liberal, politically correct subcultures in the entire world. My kids are enrolled in a program at the local park and the person administering the program made sure to specify their gender pronouns. They had a discussion about the gender of a species of worm that is a hermaphrodite. And yet, everywhere I go, the boys are into monster trucks and super heroes and the girls are into dolls and princesses. As the culture wars have heated up over the last few years, I have started asking parents we encounter about how they socialized their kids. Basically ever single one tells the same story: we went out of our way to make everything as non-gendered as possible, but our boy wanted to play with trucks and our girl wanted to play with dolls.
  - ldiracdelta 9y ago
    Even boy and girl _monkeys_ display the same truck vs doll preference that human boys and girls display. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys-toys/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-pr...
    - alphydan 9y ago
      A sample size of 11 males? With over 14 choices? Actually codifying 15 different possible behaviours from which an "interactions" score is determined by researchers? not blind, let alone double blind? It reminds me of the chocolate paper [1] Come on! If you actually open the paper, https://michaelfergusonphd.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/sex-differences-in-rhesus-monkey-toy-preferences-parallel-those-of-children.pdf https://michaelfergusonphd.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/sex-d... You will see that the "total interactions" with boy toys is the same for male and female. You might say: No, the women's one is lower. Well, that's what error bars are for. Error bars tell you: Be honest, you actually don't know. So for all intents and purposes they are equal. It's also surprising that they are comparing humans and monkeys, but the don't use the same metric. The paper for humans uses "Mean seconds of play-time", but the study for monkeys had to come up with a new metric "total interactions" to achieve a similar looking graph. Why? For the plush toy, the female result was 1.5 minutes, ... but the standard deviation was 3.8 minutes ... so ... what does that tell us? It tells me, design a better experiment! Here's a better methodology: Take 2 "gendered" toys with accelerometers and take 200 monkeys one-by-one, with trackers. Then automatically measure (in a fully blind study) how long each monkey spends which each type of toy presented. I'm not saying the effect does not exist. But this paper does not show it does. [1] https://io9.gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800 https://io9.gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-choc...
- brighteyes 9y ago
  > I don't remember exactly which study it was, but there's evidence that in some cultures (IIRC China?) girls do better than boys at math. Nothing special about China there: girls do better than boys at math pretty much everywhere. But the difference (in girls' favor) is even bigger at verbal tasks. The article talks about this specifically, and the implications from it. Aside from that, sure, preferences are influenced by both society and by biology. The article states that directly: > "It’s simplistic and scientifically untrue to say it’s one or the other."
montrose 9y ago
"But when they examined individual students’ strengths more closely, they found that the girls, though successful in STEM, had even higher scores in reading. The boys’ strengths were more likely to be in STEM areas. The skills of the boys, in other words, were more lopsided—a finding that confirms several previous studies. If boys chose careers based on their own strengths—the approach usually suggested by parents and guidance counselors—they would be most likely to land in a STEM discipline or another field drawing on the same sorts of skills. Girls could choose more widely, based on their own strengths."
NiklasMort 9y ago
For the same reason why there are more female kindergarten teachers than male ones. Equal distribution of gender across jobs is nonsense, equal opportunity is welcome though (see Scandinavian countries)
- rayiner 9y ago
  Do you really mean “equality of opportunity?” It seems self-evident that the term requires substitutability: someone would have the same experience going into STEM if you switched around the gender. My recollection of engineering school was that the experience was not substitutable. The five women in a class did not have the same experience as the 45 men. For example, as a man I never tried to make a professional connection with someone, but then realized that they wanted a date instead.
  - NiklasMort 9y ago
    Maybe my English is off there, I meant that there should be no restrictions based on gender for jobs/studies etc. I think you get my point. Everybody should have the same options to choose from
    - rayiner 9y ago
      “We won’t formally discriminate against you” is a pretty watered definition of “equality.” It’s like saying everyone has an equal chance to win the race” because the rules allow anyone to win. But there could still be rocks in one of the lanes and not in the others. For a race, nobody would say each racer had an equal chance unless there was substitutability: your race experience is the same no matter which lane you start in.
      - NiklasMort 9y ago
        But that is not only about gender, discrimination is everywhere...male as female suffer from that
        9y ago
curiousgal 9y ago
Tunisian female here. The answer is simple for Tunisian women. The highest paying jobs are in Engineering and Medicine and all of the other jobs are miserable. That combined with a free-ish education where you can choose any field, makes the choice obvious. I personally see the lack of women in STEM in Western countries as a good thing, it means that they are doing well economically and don't have to deal with the tedious STEM education and workload.
- montrose 9y ago
  The article makes exactly that point: "I asked Wendy Williams, founder and director of the Cornell Institute for Women in Science, what she makes of these findings. She wrote that if girls expect they can "live a good life" while working in the arts, health or sciences, then girls choose to pursue what they are best at—which could be STEM, or it could be law or psychology. She added, "However, if the environment offers limited options, and the best ones are in STEM, girls focus there...""
  - jimmies 9y ago
    Even being a medical doctor means having a very good life, I wouldn't go for it in a million years. I have a blog and a youtube channel that talks about raspberry pi, open source, embedded, and other programming projects that I do for fun in my spare time. I checked the youtube stats yesterday and my female audience was 0% (not rounded down, it was 0.0% according to Youtube) among about 10K people who watched them last week - globally. When I had google analytics on my site, it reported the same thing. Because my channel is new and no one knows whether I am a sexist person or not, so we can safely filter out the reputation problem. Also, I have a foreign name so people can't guess my gender by looking at my name. I think that anyone who watches my video has to be curious about what I do, not because they are used to me talking in a certain way. Now my channel is a small sample, but I have a feeling that not many girls find tech (or at least what I do) fun and appealing the current way it is while many boys do. So it's just about an opportunity, money and job and whatnot as it is a hobby, a thing to have fun with that attracts certain demographic to a profession.
dudul 9y ago
"Given that there’s an overall female advantage in school—one largest in language courses, smallest in math courses, according to the paper—why isn’t there a corresponding advantage, in terms of pay and high-powered positions, for females later, at work?" Maybe simply because the workplace has nothing to do with how school is organized?
- malvosenior 9y ago
  There’s definitely some truth to this. In my experience sales and negotiation skills play a huge part in compensation. I don’t recall those ever being taught in school. Also basic financial management is sorely lacking.
- home_boi 9y ago
  Also priorities and context/time. The benefits of doing well in school is different from the benefits of high pay and power positions and people have different goals in their teens/early 20s compared to their mid 20s-50s.
imjustsayin 9y ago
Someone ping this over to YouTube's recruiters
taeric 9y ago
My knee jerk to the headline, "because they are taught to." More than just them, we teach each other that there has to be a reason. Often that it has to be a singular one. It is tough, because headlines and short articles like this are easy to twist into misguided views. Too easy. And yet, I definitely want these fields researched. I can't imagine anyone doesn't want it. Having the patience to get real answers is not easy. :(
- coldtea 9y ago
  >My knee jerk to the headline, "because they are taught to." More than just them, we teach each other that there has to be a reason. More often than not, today, we teach each other that there can't possibly be a reason -- other than "taught to".
  - taeric 9y ago
    Do we? I see more justifications on intrinsic differences than I see otherwise.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      Back in the day or today? Because today you can even be fired for talking about intrinsic differences. Let's put it this way: such talk wont make you very popular in the mainstream media and progressive urban folks. At best you have a chance on FOX and in the Bible Belt.
      - taeric 9y ago
        The problem, I think, is that you are phrasing it such that the intrinsic differences are assumed. Could there be intrinsic differences? I don't know anything that precludes them. The evidence seems fairly strong otherwise, though. Lots of it. More, most of the people rhetorically asking about the differences, do so in a way that is clearly not in good faith. Now, I am a little worried about the damage for people looking in good faith. But, by and large, the evidence doesn't appear to support this actually being a problem. Most of the complaints about not being "very popular" with these sorts of views are fairly weak when put into perspective of actual persecution. Edit: Forgot to explicitly answer. I meant today. I have seen a lot of search for intrinsic differences. I'll try and pay more attention for a bit. I realize confirmation bias can easily paint what I see.
_emacsomancer_ 9y ago
My impression is that in the West, there used to be more women in computer science (than there are now) at least until sometime in the 80s, if not a bit later.
- pacala 9y ago
  In the current climate, I'd suggest approaching such data with a pinch of salt. Historically, computer work originated in Electrical Engineering field. Dedicated Computer Science departments appeared later on. It is entirely possible that focusing on "people with Computer Science degrees in the '70s" to give a skewed perspective of the period workplace demographics.
  - _emacsomancer_ 9y ago
    There are a number of articles on this theme from 2014. Here's one: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
    - pacala 9y ago
      Pinch of salt. The data for electrical engineering is conspicuously missing. Furthermore, the article mentions two universities, Carnegie Mellon University and Johns Hopkins University. The CMU CS department was founded in 1988 [0] and JHU CS was founded in 1986 [1]. The article claims peak female ratio of enrollment in CS in 1984, before at least two prestigious CS departments were even founded. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Mellon_School_of_Computer_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Mellon_School_of_Comp... [1] https://www.facebook.com/pg/jhuengineering/about/ https://www.facebook.com/pg/jhuengineering/about/ Edit. The NPR article [2] links to the raw NSF data [3]. EE gender data for 1984: BS, M: 19,252 F: 2,289 MS, M: 5,081 F: 438 PhD, M: 579 F: 14 CS gender data for 1984: BS, M: 20,369 F: 12,066 MS, M: 4,379 F: 1,811 PhD, M: 258 F: 37 EE BS male enrollment drops from 19k in 1984 to 10k in 2010, while CS BS male enrollment increases from 20k in 1984 to 32k in 2010, as if part of highly male dominated EE departments, about 10k, changed affiliation to CS. We can also observe a decline in CS BS female enrollment, from 12k in 1984 [peaking at 15k in 1986, 2003, 2004] to 7k in 2010. Unclear what the causes are, but we can't dismiss the shifts in CS meaning itself that happens during this period. Alas, in the current climate, it is unlikely we can have an unbiased public analysis of this trend. [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when... [3] https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/content.cfm?pub_id=4266&id=2 https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/content.cfm?pub_id=4...
Fomite 9y ago
Note that "Women naturally choose STEM less" and "The women who choose STEM are eventually driven out due to it's culture" are not mutually exclusive processes.
- xor1 9y ago
  I know four women with CS degrees who all realized that they hated programming for a living less than two years into their careers. Two of them were done after their first internship, before they'd graduated and started looking for their first full-time job. All four of them switched to design, and they're all Photoshop/Sketch experts now. They're extremely happy with their decisions. They stayed in tech, and still work/interact with the "culture" on a daily basis. I wonder how many people just assume they were driven out when they find out that they did CS but didn't pursue a career in software development/engineering, when in reality they just didn't like it and wanted to do something else.
  - jschwartzi 9y ago
    I wonder how much of it is how they were managed. I'm a man working in a technical field, but I tend to be more emotional/intuitive than other people I find in Engineering roles(yes, even women). But other engineers tend to assume that I'm motivated by the same things they are when that's patently false. I gravitate to the kinds of roles that your four examples gravitate to because there's more room for intuition and more opportunities to connect with people there than in software engineering. The best manager I ever had was a woman, because she managed by connecting and by learning about me. Contrast this with the male engineer managers that I've had, who've all been average or sub-par because they assume that the only correct way to motivate me is to give me more money, and they assume that all I want to do is work on "interesting" problems. In short, they don't take the time to actually learn who I am or to connect with me, they just assume that I work exactly like them. It's a very cookie-cutter approach to management that fails to create diversity. If your friends' management is similar then it doesn't surprise me that they left the field. The job I'm leaving made me question on a weekly basis whether I belonged in software engineering despite management telling me I was a good engineer repeatedly. And I'm a lot more interested in the types of problems UI/UX designers solve than I am in solving traditional software problems. Luckily I'm moving to a company where management is less "technical" and more intuitive/connected. If it pans out I'll stay in the field.
rdiddly 9y ago
Another way to look at the same question: Why are there so many males in these fields? My one data point: I'm basically in it for the money. In fact the state, through child support enforcement, made it very clear that at least in my case, the meaning of my life is and shall be, to earn as much money as possible to support the children. If I had a spouse supporting me, I would probably be doing something fun and artistic. (Not that there aren't fun and artistic elements in my work sometimes. And not that there aren't elements of methodical discipline required to be a good artist.)
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  Sorry to go off on a tangent, but I wanted to ask your opinion since you're in a similar state to me. For my first marriage I felt like my wife was with me and part of building my career. So I felt no pause whatsoever about our differing pay scale. Now that I've been divorced 6-ish years differential income is one of my biggest hurdles. I feel like virtually any long term relationship I'm in will mean significantly subsidizing someone. From an economic standpoint there's so very few options where we're on an even footing. And frankly, women who make the same as me are likely going to be looking for mates who make even more. It's made it very difficult to find a relationship I feel is equitable and/or equally beneficial to us both. I've tried to "get over it" but haven't been able to. Women are fine, but women + the state is terrifying to me. Now I have a daughter to protect my assets for. Have you struggled with any of the same things?
  - rdiddly 9y ago
    Well it sounds like you were traumatized by the experience a bit. Me too! But do I struggle with it still? I'd say yes and no. Shit I hate mobile. Hang on I'll move to a real keyboard, BRB OK. When I met my current wife, who is much more supportive than the first one, I didn't even have a bank account and was living paycheck to paycheck, and literally cashing them at the check-cash place. She also was just scraping by, as a student. So that put us on a more even footing economically I guess. We're also neither one, especially materialistic in the first place. So I think that allowed us to not put money concerns first & foremost in our evaluation of each other. Which I would say might be a prerequisite or at least a help, for that mysterious and random-ass thing called love to take hold. (On the other hand we probably both could tell that both of us were smart & discerning enough to know how to get money and what to do, and not do, with it if we had it. And we were probably both giving off innumerable small cues that we each came from the same socioeconomic class, which might be more important than anybody wants to admit, especially after the previous paragraph.) Anyway we just went with it. Over time I continued on my technical path until I was making decent money, while she continued on her non-technical one and basically... isn't. So now, strictly speaking, I'm "subsidizing" her. So am I struggling with it? Kind of. But she helps me too in a lot of ways that are both practical and intangible. I dunno at some point you have to make the decision to be generous. If you find someone you can trust, that is a lot easier. But then again trusting is kind of up to you too. I mean there's a certain level of basic trustworthiness needed on their end obviously, but you do sort of have to decide to trust someone. Or don't, but it sounds like you do want to. Anyway bottom line, you can't live your life in fear of what might happen, that's too shitty! So I guess the TL;DR from all this nonsense is: find someone from your own socioeconomic class but otherwise ignore money. Make sure you share important values, and establish trust. Don't let money fears make you lonely. Final note: Those who want money from you, that's all they can get from you is money. Which at the end of the day is not much.
twic 9y ago
I had a quick read of the actual paper (after seeing it covered much more thoroughly in The Atlantic last month). Two things that leapt out at my fairly untrained eyes are that the correlations are really weak, and there was no attempt to account for other factors which vary across the world. If you look at the scatter plots and (visually, unscientifically!) pull out subsets of countries in the same region (southeast Asia, the nordics, mediterranean Europe, southeast Europe, etc), there appears to be no correlation between general equality and STEM bias. For example, Vietnam has about the same level of inequality as Thailand, but 50% more women STEM graduates. That makes me suspect that there's some other factor at play. I could be completely wrong about that - but i didn't see anything in the paper which rules it out. Please do correct me if i missed it - it was a quick read, i'm not a social scientist, and i have a cold.
- brighteyes 9y ago
  > That makes me suspect that there's some other factor at play. That gender preferences explain much of the STEM gender gap is worth reporting on, as the article does, because it's not well known. That doesn't mean there aren't other factors, which of course there are. Susan Pinker even addresses the larger issue very specifically: > Q: Are these differences the result of biological or cultural differences? A: I think that both play a role. It’s simplistic and scientifically untrue to say it’s one or the other.
allthenews 9y ago
I came here prepared to rant on the ridiculousness of typical modern journalistic attempts at explaining gender gaps while avoiding the taboo of biological influence. This was a refreshing, relatively balanced perspective. I'm glad to see an article acknowledging both nature and nurture, and not blindly insisting that all differences are purely social constructs.
- kelukelugames 9y ago
  Whenever people want to discuss nature along with nurture, I'm reminded of what Neil Degrasse Tyson said about biological influence on gender roles in science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-Mwtkod_VM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-Mwtkod_VM
justinpombrio 9y ago
I can't read the article (paywall), so in classic HN style I'll just comment on the title. The NSF keeps track of "Science and Engineering Degrees" in higher-education in the US, which basically translates to STEM degrees [0]. Assuming I'm interpreting this correctly, 50% of STEM bachelor's degrees are awarded to women [1], and 40% of STEM phds are awarded to women [2]. However, CS and engineering stand out: they are closer to 20% (for both bachelors and phds). So this isn't really a STEM issue, it's a CS and engineering issue. [0] https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15326/#chp2 https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15326/#chp2 [1] https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15326/pdf/tab11.pdf https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15326/pdf/tab11.pdf [2] https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15326/pdf/tab25.pdf https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15326/pdf/tab25.pdf (For some reason, these tables group CS and math together. There's a separate table that breaks them down, and shows that most of the gender imbalance comes from CS; math is closer to balanced.)
- dang 9y ago
  > in classic HN style I'll just comment on the title. Please don't! That makes HN worse. It leads to the sort of generic, predictable threads that sink discussion into mediocrity and which we're most trying to avoid here. Plenty of explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20generic https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... if anyone wants more. (People generally post workarounds to paywalls in the threads, which means that it's ok to submit such articles, as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 and in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.)
- WalterSobchak 9y ago
  https://outline.com/http://nautil.us/issue/58/self/why-women-choose-differently-at-work https://outline.com/http://nautil.us/issue/58/self/why-women...
arialeks 9y ago
If given the choice people will usually pick the field they find interesting. If however you live in an impoverished country where getting a job in a STEM field could be the ticket out, you are way more likely to consider picking those fields. My (original) country is rather poor for example, but the education is free and a lot of people in college that were studying with me picked EE & CS just because it could give them a good paying job, they didn't care about the field nor did they in most cases enjoy it all that much, those who didn't change their mindset usually didn't graduate or it took them more because they were forcing themselves, anyhow in those living conditions the male to female ratio in STEM fields was always close to 1 : 1. But that might not be the case were OP lives, because in a rich country people get to choose with far less pressure and in the end it still holds true that most girls just don't find those fields to be interesting.
lobotryas 9y ago
I think what's really missing from the discussion is the simple fact that if creative jobs (artist, writer) or less technical jobs paid as well as Soft Eng jobs then we wouldn't be having this discussion. Alternatively, we wouldn't be having this discussion if our society did not largely judge a man's success in life by his wealth (and the things money can buy, like a nice car). I guess what I'm saying is that, if I had the choice, I would rather be a sculptor making the same salary as a Senior Soft Eng than an engineer at a large company. Too bad our society isn't set up like that, eh?
- scarmig 9y ago
  It's kind of sad. There are jobs I'd rather do, but I've consciously chosen one that I like less because it has more status and pays more, in significant part because it has improved my dating prospects. It'd be interesting to see what proportion of the pay gap/high status job gap comes from different sociosexual incentives, though I have a hard time imagining a good way to measure that.
  - badestrand 9y ago
    > It'd be interesting to see what proportion of the pay gap/high status job gap comes from different sociosexual incentives Obviously this is highly speculative but for quite some time now I have the theory that the former Sowiet Union states (Russia et al) and large parts of Latin America don't progress as much simply because male financial success isn't tied as much to better dating options. At least to me as a traveler it seems that many men in those countries have a wide choice of attractive girls, regardless of how well they are off. This would also explain the rise of the Chinese economy in the recent decades, as they have a surplus of men and I heard that they need to own at least a flat and a car to have chances on the dating market.
    - badpun 9y ago
      > Sowiet Union states (Russia et al) and large parts of Latin America don't progress as much simply because male financial success isn't tied as much to better dating options. At least to me as a traveler it seems that many men in those countries have a wide choice of attractive girls, regardless of how well they are off. I am from an ex-Soviet block country (Poland). I agree that people in here are less obsessed with success and money than the Westernerns. This also translates into dating/marriage choices of women. Obviously, this is a huge generalization, but I think it can be justified by looking at our history. Over time, so much terrible things happened here that people learned not to create too strong attachments to material things and societial hierarchies (which disappear when you're invaded by another country). It was wiser to try to find joy in family, human connection and simple things that cannot be taken away from you so easily.
dang 9y ago
This is an interview with Susan Pinker. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510442 is an op-ed by Susan Pinker. I'm going to merge these threads as soon as I've eaten breakfast. Which article is better? Edit: the Nautilus article wins. We moved most comments from the other thread hither.
- neonate 9y ago
  WSJ article can be read at https://outline.com/7vHrgS https://outline.com/7vHrgS
malvosenior 9y ago
”If we focus our telescope on what men have traditionally valued, which is high-income and STEM jobs and long work-hours, say over 60 or 70 hours a week, then yes, women are not there, at 50/50, and I don’t think they will ever be—even if we had the most gender-neutral society possible. But if we aim our lens on lifespan, career satisfaction, and close personal relationships nurtured over decades—relationships that have been shown to protect cognition, resilience, and immunity—then men, on average, trail well behind women. If men want to live longer, happier lives, they have a lot of catching up to do. It all depends on the outcomes you value most.” It’s extremely refreshing to see this discussed. It seems intersectional feminism is laser focused on prioritizing career and monetary success and nothing else. There’s so much more to life than spending your life earning a paycheck. Raising a healthy family, building a community and many other non-career based objectives seem entirely missing from the conversation. Instead the goal seems to be everyone becoming an office worker and mass consumer. I’d love to see other dimensions recognized as success.
- OiNG 9y ago
  i dunno, i would argue that people generally do see these other things as successes. its just that paychecks are much more easily quantifiable/comparable that leads to a skew in emphasis.
Alex3917 9y ago
What does the income to children ratio look like for men and women? E.g. how does each extra dollar earned effect the number of children that men versus women can expect to have?
- ldiracdelta 9y ago
  If you use education as a proxy for salary, more education for the man predicts slightly fewer children, but more education for the woman predicts _significantly_ fewer children. https://anepigone.blogspot.com/2011/01/educational-attainment-and-fecundity-in.html https://anepigone.blogspot.com/2011/01/educational-attainmen...
  - Alex3917 9y ago
    I don’t think educational attainment would be a good proxy. A lot of the best jobs, like CEO or hedge fund manager, don’t require even a college degree.
golemiprague 9y ago
So basically what people like Jordan Peterson or James Damore were claiming, lucky for this woman she is not working for Google. Also, why success in high school should indicate anything about success in work? High school is easy for anybody who is willing to put the time and effort unlike university or just doing your own project in your garage which is typically a male thing. High school is ticking boxes, it doesn't indicate ability to innovate, to create new businesses and to push knowledge forward, this was always the male domain and still is. I also don't like the assertion that being a lawyer or a doctor or a teacher means helping society. The technology created by men helped society much more than a lot of those professions which are just a perpetuation of what women used to do in the family to the workforce. Men create the real value in the economy, women take care of kids and adults as in teachers, social workers doctors or they move the value male created around as in lawyers, bankers and sales persons.
dang 9y ago
All: some comments below were originally replies to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510442, a WSJ op-ed by the same author. We merged the two threads. So, for example, if you see quotes that aren't in the OP, it's because they came from the other OP.
nitwit005 9y ago
One thing that bothers me is that fact that STEM degrees are consistently more difficult. Sure, there's a lot to learn, and the amount has increased as we've moved forward, but the same should be true of an English major. There has been an explosion of writing and more than ever to learn about. It feels like we must be letting the liberal arts majors down by setting lower expectations.
- hrktb 9y ago
  Expectations are in relation with the money involved. Even in engineering for instance, mechanical engineering was way more strict and difficult than CS, as screwing up industrial machines or physical artifacts (at school and on the job) had a bigger impact than bugs in a CRUD app. I think as long as the English course is not directly linked to an activity that costs to screw up, (like law school for instance) expectations won’t change.
  - nitwit005 9y ago
    That's true in the case of English, but some of the "easy" majors tend to include things like business and teaching, where you directly get responsibility for other people. If the knowledge has value, we should be trying to cram it in, but we don't.
alphaalpha101 9y ago
>female advantage in school marks If this were the other way around, it would be decried as a biased system and enormous effort would be put into 'fixing it'. As it is, it's just assumed to be normal and expected.
epx 9y ago
And for a decade I had to swallow the "explanation" that men CONSPIRED to put women out of STEAM jobs... Who's gonna reimburse me?
- ntuch 9y ago
  What's more infuriating is that this explanation persisted in spite of women's gains in the fields of psychology, law, and medicine, just to name a few. The idea that computer science men perpetrated some special and successful conspiracy against women in their field that doctors and lawyers were unable to do in their field is so patently ridiculous as to be on the level of flat earthers.
- pentae 9y ago
  Take it as a learning experience to never blindly listen to the proponents of the turbocharged game of gender politics. Like most things, ask who benefits from pushing a narrative and do your own independent research.
devit 9y ago
The best theory is based on the fact that males can have an unlimited number of children while females can only have one every nine months. Hence, being an extremely sexually successful male is much more rewarding for the propagation of their genes than being an extremely sexually successful female. Thus, males evolved to take more risks than females since there is a much bigger payoff for them: if a male can become an "omnipotent king" he can father children with every woman and spread his genes a lot, while a female "omnipotent queen" still can only make one child for every nine months. Hence, males have more variance, meaning that the top in any field are very likely to be males, but also there are going to be much more men who are extremely unsuccessful. This also means that women are probably better off on average, since psychological (as opposed to genetic-propagation-related) utility is logarithmic and thus reducing variance is advantageous for the individual.
- gumby 9y ago
  How does this comment relate to any issue raised in the article?
- yters 9y ago
  Even though the stereotype of STEM is single men who cannot get dates? That does not sound like "omnipotent king", but it does sound like a story we might tell ourselves.
  - kelukelugames 9y ago
    As someone who grabbed coffee with women who churned through a lot of coffee dates with dudes from Amazon, I concur. My current partner had 3-4 coffee dates lined back to back every weekend. Other girls told me similar stories. I could tell when someone tried to slot me into one of her slots and I didn't appreciate it. My buddy in SF went through the same thing. Single women are so efficient in tech dominated areas like the Silicon Valley and Seattle. PS one of the most entertaining things to do is grab the girl's phone and read through the messages on her dating app. We men write some hilariously shitty messages. None of us are becoming an omnipotent king anytime soon.
blendo 9y ago
"... educated women’s career trajectories often have a different shape—based on their wider interests and a common desire to have flexible or part-time work when their families are young—and an accelerated pace later on." She's getting to a point I'd like to emphasize. A new pregnancy changes a woman into what's almost a third kind of biological human: a mother. A father? Meh. But meanwhile, our economic paymasters can only promise a new mother "If you take an unpaid 6 mos absence, we'll probably hire you back for a full-time (only) position". This seems unfair at best, and diabolical at worst. But that's the US. I'm struggling to get across my true thoughts on this, but I think we should pay more attention to the mother-child dynamic.
hbk 9y ago
Do we really have to discuss this every single week? It's the same thing over and over.
cyphunk 9y ago
Cordola Fine's Delusions of Gender is an excellent counter to Pinker's naturalist essentialism. Pinker tends to lean to the side of nature rather than nuture in debate around gender influence. The article assumes the readers believe the same. Perhaps Pinker's prior research justifies this language. But after reading Cordola Fine's works, which I think definitely throws salt on nature assumptions, id call assuming this language are held by most to be very bold of Pinker. Susan Pinker Vs Cordelia Fine: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/sep/10/gender-gap-myth-cordelia-fine https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/sep/10/gender-gap-m...
ipsocannibal 9y ago
I wonder if Google would ever bring the author of this book on to their campus for a talk about some of the biological differences between the sexes? I'd love to be in the audience for that presentation.

210 points by dnetesn 9y ago

This article still assumes that the preferences themselves are inherent rather than the result of gender socialization. Even where you see girls excel more at verbal and arts and boys at STEM, how much of that is due to what they were encouraged to be interested in and spend their time on when younger? I don't remember exactly which study it was, but there's evidence that in some cultures (IIRC China?) girls do better than boys at math. That suggests there's a significant cultural/social element at play.

jm__87 9y ago
Everyone's preferences are going to have some social element. Why is this a bad thing? The only thing that should matter is that people are free to pursue whatever life they are interested in, whatever the reason.
- cimmanom 9y ago
  In practice it's a problem because there are so many people who the the difference in numbers as an indicator of an inherent (i.e. biological) lack of aptitude. See also: Google Memo. Socially influenced preferences aren't necessarily a bad thing in theory. Personally, as a woman in software, I loathe that we socialize our children to have different interests based on gender even when their aptitudes are the same. It means that a lot of girls who might find STEM careers fulfilling don't even consider investigating let alone pursuing them, because they think of STEM as being "not for me".
  - jm__87 9y ago
    The fact that you currently understand that lower aptitude is not the reason there are fewer women in STEM, in spite of the numbers, tells me that this problem could be solved by giving people the correct facts regarding the situation and showing how the arguments for aptitude being the reason for the imbalance are flawed. Secondly, there could very well be some evolutionary basis for differences in preferences between men and women when it comes to liking "things" vs "people" (in addition to culture being a factor - just want to note I'm not trying to argue there is no cultural factor here). I am currently reading a book called "Behave" by Robert Sapolsky that in one part discusses a study where they put chimps in a room full of toys and observed which type of toy the male and female chimps went for. If my memory is correct, the female chimps more often went for the dolls and the male chimps went for the cars (I don't have the name/authors of the study handy, but I can dig it up. The fact that Sapolsky, a respected primatologist from Stanford, thinks this study is legitimate enough to mention in his book indicates to me that the study doesn't have any serious flaws). Clearly the female chimps were never culturally predisposed to prefer playing with dolls, so there is something else going on here.
rimliu 9y ago
I still laugh at the argument that there are fewer women in tech because computers were marketed as a toy for boys. The thing is: when I started with the computers (some thirty years ago) almost nobody had them at home in my country, and they sure were not advertised as any kind of toy for anyone. Actually, back then even the concept of advertising was new to us. Yet the computers at the university computer labs were all occupied by guys. Interestingly enough my computer science teacher at the school was a woman. I am grateful to her, because she tught me to program without even having access to computer (the course was about basics: variables, algorithms, control flow, etc. By the time I was able to access the computer all I needed was syntax for that particular language). My computer science teacher in the university was also a woman. And one of the best known computer science educator in my country, author of many books was also a woman. And nobody thought that was somehow peculiar or strange. My degree was in hard science (BS in chemistry and physics, then MS in physics and astronomy). I think the had about an equal split between men and women as our professors. Once again, nobody thought twice about that. But it was still exclusively guys spending their free time in the computer labs.
toasterlovin 9y ago
IIRC, boys and girls have similar overall mental abilities. There are a few specific abilities where boys are slightly better and a few specific abilities where girls are slightly better. But abilities are not the same as preferences. Regarding preferences: boys and girls show distinct preferences for toys and style of play from an early age (basically, before they could possibly be socialized). Even chimpanzee children show distinct toy preferences by sex (and they match human toy preferences). Speaking anecdotally: I often speculate that the only people who could possibly believe that boys and girls do not have fundamentally different preferences are the childless. I live in Portland, OR. This is one of the most liberal, politically correct subcultures in the entire world. My kids are enrolled in a program at the local park and the person administering the program made sure to specify their gender pronouns. They had a discussion about the gender of a species of worm that is a hermaphrodite. And yet, everywhere I go, the boys are into monster trucks and super heroes and the girls are into dolls and princesses. As the culture wars have heated up over the last few years, I have started asking parents we encounter about how they socialized their kids. Basically ever single one tells the same story: we went out of our way to make everything as non-gendered as possible, but our boy wanted to play with trucks and our girl wanted to play with dolls.
- ldiracdelta 9y ago
  Even boy and girl _monkeys_ display the same truck vs doll preference that human boys and girls display. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys-toys/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-pr...
  - alphydan 9y ago
    A sample size of 11 males? With over 14 choices? Actually codifying 15 different possible behaviours from which an "interactions" score is determined by researchers? not blind, let alone double blind? It reminds me of the chocolate paper [1] Come on! If you actually open the paper, https://michaelfergusonphd.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/sex-differences-in-rhesus-monkey-toy-preferences-parallel-those-of-children.pdf https://michaelfergusonphd.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/sex-d... You will see that the "total interactions" with boy toys is the same for male and female. You might say: No, the women's one is lower. Well, that's what error bars are for. Error bars tell you: Be honest, you actually don't know. So for all intents and purposes they are equal. It's also surprising that they are comparing humans and monkeys, but the don't use the same metric. The paper for humans uses "Mean seconds of play-time", but the study for monkeys had to come up with a new metric "total interactions" to achieve a similar looking graph. Why? For the plush toy, the female result was 1.5 minutes, ... but the standard deviation was 3.8 minutes ... so ... what does that tell us? It tells me, design a better experiment! Here's a better methodology: Take 2 "gendered" toys with accelerometers and take 200 monkeys one-by-one, with trackers. Then automatically measure (in a fully blind study) how long each monkey spends which each type of toy presented. I'm not saying the effect does not exist. But this paper does not show it does. [1] https://io9.gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800 https://io9.gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-choc...
brighteyes 9y ago
> I don't remember exactly which study it was, but there's evidence that in some cultures (IIRC China?) girls do better than boys at math. Nothing special about China there: girls do better than boys at math pretty much everywhere. But the difference (in girls' favor) is even bigger at verbal tasks. The article talks about this specifically, and the implications from it. Aside from that, sure, preferences are influenced by both society and by biology. The article states that directly: > "It’s simplistic and scientifically untrue to say it’s one or the other."

montrose 9y ago

"But when they examined individual students’ strengths more closely, they found that the girls, though successful in STEM, had even higher scores in reading. The boys’ strengths were more likely to be in STEM areas. The skills of the boys, in other words, were more lopsided—a finding that confirms several previous studies. If boys chose careers based on their own strengths—the approach usually suggested by parents and guidance counselors—they would be most likely to land in a STEM discipline or another field drawing on the same sorts of skills. Girls could choose more widely, based on their own strengths."

NiklasMort 9y ago

For the same reason why there are more female kindergarten teachers than male ones. Equal distribution of gender across jobs is nonsense, equal opportunity is welcome though (see Scandinavian countries)

rayiner 9y ago
Do you really mean “equality of opportunity?” It seems self-evident that the term requires substitutability: someone would have the same experience going into STEM if you switched around the gender. My recollection of engineering school was that the experience was not substitutable. The five women in a class did not have the same experience as the 45 men. For example, as a man I never tried to make a professional connection with someone, but then realized that they wanted a date instead.
- NiklasMort 9y ago
  Maybe my English is off there, I meant that there should be no restrictions based on gender for jobs/studies etc. I think you get my point. Everybody should have the same options to choose from
  - rayiner 9y ago
    “We won’t formally discriminate against you” is a pretty watered definition of “equality.” It’s like saying everyone has an equal chance to win the race” because the rules allow anyone to win. But there could still be rocks in one of the lanes and not in the others. For a race, nobody would say each racer had an equal chance unless there was substitutability: your race experience is the same no matter which lane you start in.
    - NiklasMort 9y ago
      But that is not only about gender, discrimination is everywhere...male as female suffer from that
      - 9y ago

curiousgal 9y ago

Tunisian female here. The answer is simple for Tunisian women. The highest paying jobs are in Engineering and Medicine and all of the other jobs are miserable. That combined with a free-ish education where you can choose any field, makes the choice obvious. I personally see the lack of women in STEM in Western countries as a good thing, it means that they are doing well economically and don't have to deal with the tedious STEM education and workload.

montrose 9y ago
The article makes exactly that point: "I asked Wendy Williams, founder and director of the Cornell Institute for Women in Science, what she makes of these findings. She wrote that if girls expect they can "live a good life" while working in the arts, health or sciences, then girls choose to pursue what they are best at—which could be STEM, or it could be law or psychology. She added, "However, if the environment offers limited options, and the best ones are in STEM, girls focus there...""
- jimmies 9y ago
  Even being a medical doctor means having a very good life, I wouldn't go for it in a million years. I have a blog and a youtube channel that talks about raspberry pi, open source, embedded, and other programming projects that I do for fun in my spare time. I checked the youtube stats yesterday and my female audience was 0% (not rounded down, it was 0.0% according to Youtube) among about 10K people who watched them last week - globally. When I had google analytics on my site, it reported the same thing. Because my channel is new and no one knows whether I am a sexist person or not, so we can safely filter out the reputation problem. Also, I have a foreign name so people can't guess my gender by looking at my name. I think that anyone who watches my video has to be curious about what I do, not because they are used to me talking in a certain way. Now my channel is a small sample, but I have a feeling that not many girls find tech (or at least what I do) fun and appealing the current way it is while many boys do. So it's just about an opportunity, money and job and whatnot as it is a hobby, a thing to have fun with that attracts certain demographic to a profession.

dudul 9y ago

"Given that there’s an overall female advantage in school—one largest in language courses, smallest in math courses, according to the paper—why isn’t there a corresponding advantage, in terms of pay and high-powered positions, for females later, at work?" Maybe simply because the workplace has nothing to do with how school is organized?

malvosenior 9y ago
There’s definitely some truth to this. In my experience sales and negotiation skills play a huge part in compensation. I don’t recall those ever being taught in school. Also basic financial management is sorely lacking.
home_boi 9y ago
Also priorities and context/time. The benefits of doing well in school is different from the benefits of high pay and power positions and people have different goals in their teens/early 20s compared to their mid 20s-50s.

imjustsayin 9y ago

Someone ping this over to YouTube's recruiters

taeric 9y ago

My knee jerk to the headline, "because they are taught to." More than just them, we teach each other that there has to be a reason. Often that it has to be a singular one. It is tough, because headlines and short articles like this are easy to twist into misguided views. Too easy. And yet, I definitely want these fields researched. I can't imagine anyone doesn't want it. Having the patience to get real answers is not easy. :(

coldtea 9y ago
>My knee jerk to the headline, "because they are taught to." More than just them, we teach each other that there has to be a reason. More often than not, today, we teach each other that there can't possibly be a reason -- other than "taught to".
- taeric 9y ago
  Do we? I see more justifications on intrinsic differences than I see otherwise.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    Back in the day or today? Because today you can even be fired for talking about intrinsic differences. Let's put it this way: such talk wont make you very popular in the mainstream media and progressive urban folks. At best you have a chance on FOX and in the Bible Belt.
    - taeric 9y ago
      The problem, I think, is that you are phrasing it such that the intrinsic differences are assumed. Could there be intrinsic differences? I don't know anything that precludes them. The evidence seems fairly strong otherwise, though. Lots of it. More, most of the people rhetorically asking about the differences, do so in a way that is clearly not in good faith. Now, I am a little worried about the damage for people looking in good faith. But, by and large, the evidence doesn't appear to support this actually being a problem. Most of the complaints about not being "very popular" with these sorts of views are fairly weak when put into perspective of actual persecution. Edit: Forgot to explicitly answer. I meant today. I have seen a lot of search for intrinsic differences. I'll try and pay more attention for a bit. I realize confirmation bias can easily paint what I see.

_emacsomancer_ 9y ago

My impression is that in the West, there used to be more women in computer science (than there are now) at least until sometime in the 80s, if not a bit later.

pacala 9y ago
In the current climate, I'd suggest approaching such data with a pinch of salt. Historically, computer work originated in Electrical Engineering field. Dedicated Computer Science departments appeared later on. It is entirely possible that focusing on "people with Computer Science degrees in the '70s" to give a skewed perspective of the period workplace demographics.
- _emacsomancer_ 9y ago
  There are a number of articles on this theme from 2014. Here's one: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
  - pacala 9y ago
    Pinch of salt. The data for electrical engineering is conspicuously missing. Furthermore, the article mentions two universities, Carnegie Mellon University and Johns Hopkins University. The CMU CS department was founded in 1988 [0] and JHU CS was founded in 1986 [1]. The article claims peak female ratio of enrollment in CS in 1984, before at least two prestigious CS departments were even founded. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Mellon_School_of_Computer_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Mellon_School_of_Comp... [1] https://www.facebook.com/pg/jhuengineering/about/ https://www.facebook.com/pg/jhuengineering/about/ Edit. The NPR article [2] links to the raw NSF data [3]. EE gender data for 1984: BS, M: 19,252 F: 2,289 MS, M: 5,081 F: 438 PhD, M: 579 F: 14 CS gender data for 1984: BS, M: 20,369 F: 12,066 MS, M: 4,379 F: 1,811 PhD, M: 258 F: 37 EE BS male enrollment drops from 19k in 1984 to 10k in 2010, while CS BS male enrollment increases from 20k in 1984 to 32k in 2010, as if part of highly male dominated EE departments, about 10k, changed affiliation to CS. We can also observe a decline in CS BS female enrollment, from 12k in 1984 [peaking at 15k in 1986, 2003, 2004] to 7k in 2010. Unclear what the causes are, but we can't dismiss the shifts in CS meaning itself that happens during this period. Alas, in the current climate, it is unlikely we can have an unbiased public analysis of this trend. [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when... [3] https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/content.cfm?pub_id=4266&id=2 https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/content.cfm?pub_id=4...

Fomite 9y ago

Note that "Women naturally choose STEM less" and "The women who choose STEM are eventually driven out due to it's culture" are not mutually exclusive processes.

xor1 9y ago
I know four women with CS degrees who all realized that they hated programming for a living less than two years into their careers. Two of them were done after their first internship, before they'd graduated and started looking for their first full-time job. All four of them switched to design, and they're all Photoshop/Sketch experts now. They're extremely happy with their decisions. They stayed in tech, and still work/interact with the "culture" on a daily basis. I wonder how many people just assume they were driven out when they find out that they did CS but didn't pursue a career in software development/engineering, when in reality they just didn't like it and wanted to do something else.
- jschwartzi 9y ago
  I wonder how much of it is how they were managed. I'm a man working in a technical field, but I tend to be more emotional/intuitive than other people I find in Engineering roles(yes, even women). But other engineers tend to assume that I'm motivated by the same things they are when that's patently false. I gravitate to the kinds of roles that your four examples gravitate to because there's more room for intuition and more opportunities to connect with people there than in software engineering. The best manager I ever had was a woman, because she managed by connecting and by learning about me. Contrast this with the male engineer managers that I've had, who've all been average or sub-par because they assume that the only correct way to motivate me is to give me more money, and they assume that all I want to do is work on "interesting" problems. In short, they don't take the time to actually learn who I am or to connect with me, they just assume that I work exactly like them. It's a very cookie-cutter approach to management that fails to create diversity. If your friends' management is similar then it doesn't surprise me that they left the field. The job I'm leaving made me question on a weekly basis whether I belonged in software engineering despite management telling me I was a good engineer repeatedly. And I'm a lot more interested in the types of problems UI/UX designers solve than I am in solving traditional software problems. Luckily I'm moving to a company where management is less "technical" and more intuitive/connected. If it pans out I'll stay in the field.

rdiddly 9y ago

Another way to look at the same question: Why are there so many males in these fields? My one data point: I'm basically in it for the money. In fact the state, through child support enforcement, made it very clear that at least in my case, the meaning of my life is and shall be, to earn as much money as possible to support the children. If I had a spouse supporting me, I would probably be doing something fun and artistic. (Not that there aren't fun and artistic elements in my work sometimes. And not that there aren't elements of methodical discipline required to be a good artist.)

Consultant32452 9y ago
Sorry to go off on a tangent, but I wanted to ask your opinion since you're in a similar state to me. For my first marriage I felt like my wife was with me and part of building my career. So I felt no pause whatsoever about our differing pay scale. Now that I've been divorced 6-ish years differential income is one of my biggest hurdles. I feel like virtually any long term relationship I'm in will mean significantly subsidizing someone. From an economic standpoint there's so very few options where we're on an even footing. And frankly, women who make the same as me are likely going to be looking for mates who make even more. It's made it very difficult to find a relationship I feel is equitable and/or equally beneficial to us both. I've tried to "get over it" but haven't been able to. Women are fine, but women + the state is terrifying to me. Now I have a daughter to protect my assets for. Have you struggled with any of the same things?
- rdiddly 9y ago
  Well it sounds like you were traumatized by the experience a bit. Me too! But do I struggle with it still? I'd say yes and no. Shit I hate mobile. Hang on I'll move to a real keyboard, BRB OK. When I met my current wife, who is much more supportive than the first one, I didn't even have a bank account and was living paycheck to paycheck, and literally cashing them at the check-cash place. She also was just scraping by, as a student. So that put us on a more even footing economically I guess. We're also neither one, especially materialistic in the first place. So I think that allowed us to not put money concerns first & foremost in our evaluation of each other. Which I would say might be a prerequisite or at least a help, for that mysterious and random-ass thing called love to take hold. (On the other hand we probably both could tell that both of us were smart & discerning enough to know how to get money and what to do, and not do, with it if we had it. And we were probably both giving off innumerable small cues that we each came from the same socioeconomic class, which might be more important than anybody wants to admit, especially after the previous paragraph.) Anyway we just went with it. Over time I continued on my technical path until I was making decent money, while she continued on her non-technical one and basically... isn't. So now, strictly speaking, I'm "subsidizing" her. So am I struggling with it? Kind of. But she helps me too in a lot of ways that are both practical and intangible. I dunno at some point you have to make the decision to be generous. If you find someone you can trust, that is a lot easier. But then again trusting is kind of up to you too. I mean there's a certain level of basic trustworthiness needed on their end obviously, but you do sort of have to decide to trust someone. Or don't, but it sounds like you do want to. Anyway bottom line, you can't live your life in fear of what might happen, that's too shitty! So I guess the TL;DR from all this nonsense is: find someone from your own socioeconomic class but otherwise ignore money. Make sure you share important values, and establish trust. Don't let money fears make you lonely. Final note: Those who want money from you, that's all they can get from you is money. Which at the end of the day is not much.

twic 9y ago

I had a quick read of the actual paper (after seeing it covered much more thoroughly in The Atlantic last month). Two things that leapt out at my fairly untrained eyes are that the correlations are really weak, and there was no attempt to account for other factors which vary across the world. If you look at the scatter plots and (visually, unscientifically!) pull out subsets of countries in the same region (southeast Asia, the nordics, mediterranean Europe, southeast Europe, etc), there appears to be no correlation between general equality and STEM bias. For example, Vietnam has about the same level of inequality as Thailand, but 50% more women STEM graduates. That makes me suspect that there's some other factor at play. I could be completely wrong about that - but i didn't see anything in the paper which rules it out. Please do correct me if i missed it - it was a quick read, i'm not a social scientist, and i have a cold.

brighteyes 9y ago
> That makes me suspect that there's some other factor at play. That gender preferences explain much of the STEM gender gap is worth reporting on, as the article does, because it's not well known. That doesn't mean there aren't other factors, which of course there are. Susan Pinker even addresses the larger issue very specifically: > Q: Are these differences the result of biological or cultural differences? A: I think that both play a role. It’s simplistic and scientifically untrue to say it’s one or the other.

allthenews 9y ago

I came here prepared to rant on the ridiculousness of typical modern journalistic attempts at explaining gender gaps while avoiding the taboo of biological influence. This was a refreshing, relatively balanced perspective. I'm glad to see an article acknowledging both nature and nurture, and not blindly insisting that all differences are purely social constructs.

kelukelugames 9y ago
Whenever people want to discuss nature along with nurture, I'm reminded of what Neil Degrasse Tyson said about biological influence on gender roles in science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-Mwtkod_VM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-Mwtkod_VM

justinpombrio 9y ago

I can't read the article (paywall), so in classic HN style I'll just comment on the title. The NSF keeps track of "Science and Engineering Degrees" in higher-education in the US, which basically translates to STEM degrees [0]. Assuming I'm interpreting this correctly, 50% of STEM bachelor's degrees are awarded to women [1], and 40% of STEM phds are awarded to women [2]. However, CS and engineering stand out: they are closer to 20% (for both bachelors and phds). So this isn't really a STEM issue, it's a CS and engineering issue. [0] https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15326/#chp2 https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15326/#chp2 [1] https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15326/pdf/tab11.pdf https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15326/pdf/tab11.pdf [2] https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15326/pdf/tab25.pdf https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15326/pdf/tab25.pdf (For some reason, these tables group CS and math together. There's a separate table that breaks them down, and shows that most of the gender imbalance comes from CS; math is closer to balanced.)

dang 9y ago
> in classic HN style I'll just comment on the title. Please don't! That makes HN worse. It leads to the sort of generic, predictable threads that sink discussion into mediocrity and which we're most trying to avoid here. Plenty of explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20generic https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... if anyone wants more. (People generally post workarounds to paywalls in the threads, which means that it's ok to submit such articles, as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 and in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.)
WalterSobchak 9y ago
https://outline.com/http://nautil.us/issue/58/self/why-women-choose-differently-at-work https://outline.com/http://nautil.us/issue/58/self/why-women...

arialeks 9y ago

If given the choice people will usually pick the field they find interesting. If however you live in an impoverished country where getting a job in a STEM field could be the ticket out, you are way more likely to consider picking those fields. My (original) country is rather poor for example, but the education is free and a lot of people in college that were studying with me picked EE & CS just because it could give them a good paying job, they didn't care about the field nor did they in most cases enjoy it all that much, those who didn't change their mindset usually didn't graduate or it took them more because they were forcing themselves, anyhow in those living conditions the male to female ratio in STEM fields was always close to 1 : 1. But that might not be the case were OP lives, because in a rich country people get to choose with far less pressure and in the end it still holds true that most girls just don't find those fields to be interesting.

lobotryas 9y ago

I think what's really missing from the discussion is the simple fact that if creative jobs (artist, writer) or less technical jobs paid as well as Soft Eng jobs then we wouldn't be having this discussion. Alternatively, we wouldn't be having this discussion if our society did not largely judge a man's success in life by his wealth (and the things money can buy, like a nice car). I guess what I'm saying is that, if I had the choice, I would rather be a sculptor making the same salary as a Senior Soft Eng than an engineer at a large company. Too bad our society isn't set up like that, eh?

scarmig 9y ago
It's kind of sad. There are jobs I'd rather do, but I've consciously chosen one that I like less because it has more status and pays more, in significant part because it has improved my dating prospects. It'd be interesting to see what proportion of the pay gap/high status job gap comes from different sociosexual incentives, though I have a hard time imagining a good way to measure that.
- badestrand 9y ago
  > It'd be interesting to see what proportion of the pay gap/high status job gap comes from different sociosexual incentives Obviously this is highly speculative but for quite some time now I have the theory that the former Sowiet Union states (Russia et al) and large parts of Latin America don't progress as much simply because male financial success isn't tied as much to better dating options. At least to me as a traveler it seems that many men in those countries have a wide choice of attractive girls, regardless of how well they are off. This would also explain the rise of the Chinese economy in the recent decades, as they have a surplus of men and I heard that they need to own at least a flat and a car to have chances on the dating market.
  - badpun 9y ago
    > Sowiet Union states (Russia et al) and large parts of Latin America don't progress as much simply because male financial success isn't tied as much to better dating options. At least to me as a traveler it seems that many men in those countries have a wide choice of attractive girls, regardless of how well they are off. I am from an ex-Soviet block country (Poland). I agree that people in here are less obsessed with success and money than the Westernerns. This also translates into dating/marriage choices of women. Obviously, this is a huge generalization, but I think it can be justified by looking at our history. Over time, so much terrible things happened here that people learned not to create too strong attachments to material things and societial hierarchies (which disappear when you're invaded by another country). It was wiser to try to find joy in family, human connection and simple things that cannot be taken away from you so easily.

dang 9y ago

This is an interview with Susan Pinker. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510442 is an op-ed by Susan Pinker. I'm going to merge these threads as soon as I've eaten breakfast. Which article is better? Edit: the Nautilus article wins. We moved most comments from the other thread hither.

neonate 9y ago
WSJ article can be read at https://outline.com/7vHrgS https://outline.com/7vHrgS

malvosenior 9y ago

”If we focus our telescope on what men have traditionally valued, which is high-income and STEM jobs and long work-hours, say over 60 or 70 hours a week, then yes, women are not there, at 50/50, and I don’t think they will ever be—even if we had the most gender-neutral society possible. But if we aim our lens on lifespan, career satisfaction, and close personal relationships nurtured over decades—relationships that have been shown to protect cognition, resilience, and immunity—then men, on average, trail well behind women. If men want to live longer, happier lives, they have a lot of catching up to do. It all depends on the outcomes you value most.” It’s extremely refreshing to see this discussed. It seems intersectional feminism is laser focused on prioritizing career and monetary success and nothing else. There’s so much more to life than spending your life earning a paycheck. Raising a healthy family, building a community and many other non-career based objectives seem entirely missing from the conversation. Instead the goal seems to be everyone becoming an office worker and mass consumer. I’d love to see other dimensions recognized as success.

OiNG 9y ago
i dunno, i would argue that people generally do see these other things as successes. its just that paychecks are much more easily quantifiable/comparable that leads to a skew in emphasis.

Alex3917 9y ago

What does the income to children ratio look like for men and women? E.g. how does each extra dollar earned effect the number of children that men versus women can expect to have?

ldiracdelta 9y ago
If you use education as a proxy for salary, more education for the man predicts slightly fewer children, but more education for the woman predicts _significantly_ fewer children. https://anepigone.blogspot.com/2011/01/educational-attainment-and-fecundity-in.html https://anepigone.blogspot.com/2011/01/educational-attainmen...
- Alex3917 9y ago
  I don’t think educational attainment would be a good proxy. A lot of the best jobs, like CEO or hedge fund manager, don’t require even a college degree.

golemiprague 9y ago

So basically what people like Jordan Peterson or James Damore were claiming, lucky for this woman she is not working for Google. Also, why success in high school should indicate anything about success in work? High school is easy for anybody who is willing to put the time and effort unlike university or just doing your own project in your garage which is typically a male thing. High school is ticking boxes, it doesn't indicate ability to innovate, to create new businesses and to push knowledge forward, this was always the male domain and still is. I also don't like the assertion that being a lawyer or a doctor or a teacher means helping society. The technology created by men helped society much more than a lot of those professions which are just a perpetuation of what women used to do in the family to the workforce. Men create the real value in the economy, women take care of kids and adults as in teachers, social workers doctors or they move the value male created around as in lawyers, bankers and sales persons.

dang 9y ago

All: some comments below were originally replies to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510442, a WSJ op-ed by the same author. We merged the two threads. So, for example, if you see quotes that aren't in the OP, it's because they came from the other OP.

nitwit005 9y ago

One thing that bothers me is that fact that STEM degrees are consistently more difficult. Sure, there's a lot to learn, and the amount has increased as we've moved forward, but the same should be true of an English major. There has been an explosion of writing and more than ever to learn about. It feels like we must be letting the liberal arts majors down by setting lower expectations.

hrktb 9y ago
Expectations are in relation with the money involved. Even in engineering for instance, mechanical engineering was way more strict and difficult than CS, as screwing up industrial machines or physical artifacts (at school and on the job) had a bigger impact than bugs in a CRUD app. I think as long as the English course is not directly linked to an activity that costs to screw up, (like law school for instance) expectations won’t change.
- nitwit005 9y ago
  That's true in the case of English, but some of the "easy" majors tend to include things like business and teaching, where you directly get responsibility for other people. If the knowledge has value, we should be trying to cram it in, but we don't.

alphaalpha101 9y ago

>female advantage in school marks If this were the other way around, it would be decried as a biased system and enormous effort would be put into 'fixing it'. As it is, it's just assumed to be normal and expected.

epx 9y ago

And for a decade I had to swallow the "explanation" that men CONSPIRED to put women out of STEAM jobs... Who's gonna reimburse me?

ntuch 9y ago
What's more infuriating is that this explanation persisted in spite of women's gains in the fields of psychology, law, and medicine, just to name a few. The idea that computer science men perpetrated some special and successful conspiracy against women in their field that doctors and lawyers were unable to do in their field is so patently ridiculous as to be on the level of flat earthers.
pentae 9y ago
Take it as a learning experience to never blindly listen to the proponents of the turbocharged game of gender politics. Like most things, ask who benefits from pushing a narrative and do your own independent research.

devit 9y ago

The best theory is based on the fact that males can have an unlimited number of children while females can only have one every nine months. Hence, being an extremely sexually successful male is much more rewarding for the propagation of their genes than being an extremely sexually successful female. Thus, males evolved to take more risks than females since there is a much bigger payoff for them: if a male can become an "omnipotent king" he can father children with every woman and spread his genes a lot, while a female "omnipotent queen" still can only make one child for every nine months. Hence, males have more variance, meaning that the top in any field are very likely to be males, but also there are going to be much more men who are extremely unsuccessful. This also means that women are probably better off on average, since psychological (as opposed to genetic-propagation-related) utility is logarithmic and thus reducing variance is advantageous for the individual.

gumby 9y ago
How does this comment relate to any issue raised in the article?
yters 9y ago
Even though the stereotype of STEM is single men who cannot get dates? That does not sound like "omnipotent king", but it does sound like a story we might tell ourselves.
- kelukelugames 9y ago
  As someone who grabbed coffee with women who churned through a lot of coffee dates with dudes from Amazon, I concur. My current partner had 3-4 coffee dates lined back to back every weekend. Other girls told me similar stories. I could tell when someone tried to slot me into one of her slots and I didn't appreciate it. My buddy in SF went through the same thing. Single women are so efficient in tech dominated areas like the Silicon Valley and Seattle. PS one of the most entertaining things to do is grab the girl's phone and read through the messages on her dating app. We men write some hilariously shitty messages. None of us are becoming an omnipotent king anytime soon.

blendo 9y ago

"... educated women’s career trajectories often have a different shape—based on their wider interests and a common desire to have flexible or part-time work when their families are young—and an accelerated pace later on." She's getting to a point I'd like to emphasize. A new pregnancy changes a woman into what's almost a third kind of biological human: a mother. A father? Meh. But meanwhile, our economic paymasters can only promise a new mother "If you take an unpaid 6 mos absence, we'll probably hire you back for a full-time (only) position". This seems unfair at best, and diabolical at worst. But that's the US. I'm struggling to get across my true thoughts on this, but I think we should pay more attention to the mother-child dynamic.

hbk 9y ago

Do we really have to discuss this every single week? It's the same thing over and over.

cyphunk 9y ago

Cordola Fine's Delusions of Gender is an excellent counter to Pinker's naturalist essentialism. Pinker tends to lean to the side of nature rather than nuture in debate around gender influence. The article assumes the readers believe the same. Perhaps Pinker's prior research justifies this language. But after reading Cordola Fine's works, which I think definitely throws salt on nature assumptions, id call assuming this language are held by most to be very bold of Pinker. Susan Pinker Vs Cordelia Fine: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/sep/10/gender-gap-myth-cordelia-fine https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/sep/10/gender-gap-m...

ipsocannibal 9y ago

I wonder if Google would ever bring the author of this book on to their campus for a talk about some of the biological differences between the sexes? I'd love to be in the audience for that presentation.