6 ms·

Why not "women are just not as interested in math, logic and computer science to pursue it AS OFTEN as men"? Why are you not considering this possibility?

• trustmath 8y ago
  That's always the excuse but an algorithm that shows bias against women has nothing to do with who has what interest unless that's a variable included in the data set initially. You are inferring that relation implicitly due to the result of the algorithm, but it doesn't mean that value is measured in the original set of data. If the algorithm is skewed to imply that, there is at least the possiblity that the algorithm has been trained to yield that result. I wouldn't know unless I looked at all the data. But I'm not going to default to the popular opinion because that's literally half or more of the problem.
• village-idiot 8y ago
  They did in the medium past, they didn’t in the recent past, and maybe they will again in the near future.
• komali2 8y ago
  Ah, the Damore argument. Besides the fact that his psuedo science has been summarily handled[0], to consider his argument you then have to equally consider the possibility of sexism in academia pressuring women to not study these subjects and societal pressure their whole lives pressuring them to not persue these career paths. There's also the idea that lack of women scientist "heroes" can be limiting (lack of role models). Basically the idea that if you stack the cards against a population, you're gonna see population-wide effects. Given these data points, a biased hiring AI contributes to the problem. Therefore, it should be fixed, along with the above points. [0]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-40865261 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-40865261 [0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/13/james-damore-google-memo-youtube-white-men-radicalization https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/13/james-dam...
  • 21 8y ago
    > There's also the idea that lack of women scientist "heroes" can be limiting (lack of role models) This one is a bit weird, computer guys were always "nerds" and "geeks" to stay away from.
    • komali2 8y ago
      Wouldn't being an outcast make you even more attracted to heroes of your "outcast class?" Because, presumably, the hero had to overcome so much more for society to recognize them. Depending on the era, we had Einstein, Turing, feinman. Kids my age had Gates (literally the richest man on the planet for my entire formative years), Jobs, Bill Nye. Little further along are the myth busters crew, musk... We have plenty of heroes to pick from :)
    • SolaceQuantum 8y ago
      The rhetorical context here is that human children look for other human adults that they could potentially grow into in order to aim their own dreams and hopes for their adulthood. If a young human boy sees an adult human man pursuing computers, the young human boy learns that being interested in computers is a socially viable construct and this will affect how he pursues his interests in the future. In consequence, if a young human girl does not see any adult human women in computers, she may not understand that that option is available to her and this will affect how she pursues her interests. Although there is some fuzziness in determining this (some children grow up to be trailblazers, others pursue passions regardless of examples).
    • crooked-v 8y ago
      ...starting in the 80s, which is also when the percentage of women going into computer fields started dropping like a rock.
    • mcguire 8y ago
      That kinda stopped being the case when geeks and nerds started making 6-figure incomes.
  • kipchak 8y ago
• kaitai 8y ago
  If these women are applying for tech jobs at Amazon, they're by definition interested. The uninterested (male or female) are not relevant to this discussion. I must say, I am frustrated by this being brought up in every discussion of women & STEM. Want to discuss the leaky pipeline from physics PhDs to full professor in physics? "Maybe those women did a PhD in physics despite not being interested, and they just didn't notice before!"
• thoughtexplorer 8y ago
  Because that's an inconvenient truth that doesn't fit the oppressor vs oppressed narrative.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • trustmath 8y ago
    Truth over the belief of who is actually 'the best fit' for a job doesn't exist until the job is complete. This isn't about oppression. It's about discrimination magically becoming automated because no one bothers to look for these things pre-deployment.
• mcguire 8y ago
  Let's say you have two otherwise-identical resumes in front of you. * One says "executed concentration camp prisoners in Kosovo". (Yeah, ok, I'm kidding. How about "Executed a plan to reduce production costs by 30%"?) * The other says, "Won the Women's World Chess Championship 3 years in a row". The first has five stars (thanks to "executed") and the second has three (courtesy of "women's"). Which are you more interested in?
• tzs 8y ago
  I haven't seen anything suggesting women are less interested, but there is some support for the idea that before college girls who are interested in math., etc., are more likely than boys to have other subjects that interest them more. There was a study published a while back that looked at PISA data and found that girls and boys were pretty evenly represented among the kids who were at the top in STEM [1]. But it also found that for the boys in that group quite often STEM was the only thing they were outstanding at. In other areas they were average to good. For the girls, on the other hand, they were often excellent at something else in addition to STEM, with them often even being better at that something else than they were in STEM. People have a tendency to pursue a career in one of the areas they are very good at. This suggests that boys who are very good in math, etc., are more likely than similarly good girls to pursue it as a career because that is their only choice if they want to go into something they are very good at. The girls are more likely to have math, etc., as one of two or more possible careers in areas they are very good at. In pop culture terms, STEM boys are more like Martin Prince, and STEM girls are more like Lisa Simpson. [1] I didn't save the link and have failed to find it with Google. Anyone have it?
• UncleMeat 8y ago
  We did consider this possibility. Then we did research and the experts and they found that this isn't supported by evidence.