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Breaking News: Girls don't become engineers because they don't want to
- projectileboy 18y agoSeems a pretty childish analysis... The question is - why do girls "not want to" by the time they reach age 18?
- Prrometheus 18y agoMy general feeling from the articles I have read on the issue is that there seems to be a significant biological factor and a significant cultural factor. That being said, I'm not sure that there is anything "wrong" with a world with few woman engineers, or that we should be doing something to address it outside of fighting concrete instances of negative discrimination.
- rufo 18y agoDevil's advocate: What's wrong with them not wanting to? Assuming there is no discrimination or other judgement going on in the workplace causing them to choose a different career, and women simply choose not to enter IT/engineering fields, what's the problem with that?
- projectileboy 18y agoThere's absolutely nothing wrong with them not wanting to. What's wrong is a society that for 18 years tells them "you don't want to do this, you want to do that".
- yummyfajitas 18y ago"Society" is a concept we need to banish from these discussions. "Society" exists at a higher level of abstraction than what we are discussing. A particular woman may want babies because women around her said "babies rock, all women want babies." Was it wrong for her mother to discuss the rewards of motherhood? A particular man may like computers because his father told him how cool it is to bend machines to your will. Was that wrong? If neither of those acts is wrong, then what is wrong with "society" telling people stuff?
- silencio 18y agoThose two are not wrong, but from personal experience, what's been happening is too many people telling me that CS is a bad choice based on my gender and not my interests or anything else. That is wrong.
- yummyfajitas 18y agoI've been told by many people that I should play basketball not based on my abilities (I have terrible eye-hand coordination) but based on my height. Was that wrong in any moral or normative sense? I'll grant that the underlying positive belief is incorrect, but what makes giving out well intentioned (if bad) advice wrong?
- demallien 18y agoWhat's wrong? Fr each individual, nothing, but for the country as a whole, this is a quick path to economic disaster. These are exactly the types of skills needed to maintain an economic advantage against large countries such as India and China.
- Prrometheus 18y ago>What's wrong? Fr each individual, nothing, but for the country as a whole, this is a quick path to economic disaster. These are exactly the types of skills needed to maintain an economic advantage against large countries such as India and China. How does female engineering differ from male engineering? Why wouldn't male engineering allow us to maintain an economic advantage over India and China? And why does relative economic prosperity matter? As long as we're all getting better, shouldn't we be happy?
- demallien 18y agoSorry I didn't reply earlier - there's nothing wrong (well, mostly! :-) ) with male engineers, except that there just aren't enough of them. Encourage women into the career, and you double the number of engineers you can put into industry each year... Sorry if you got the impression that I had something against male engineers :-)
- Goladus 18y agoFewer ideas, not as much innovation, and more difficulty creating products and services with broad appeal. So long as they're more productive in fields like medicine and epidemiology it may not be a net loss. Note though that a couple of my friends work for scientists and claim gender discrimination is pretty bad. The picture they described of a scientific research company is nothing like what I've seen in the IT industry for the past 8 years or so.
- jcl 18y agoDevil's advocate: What's wrong with them not wanting to? I think the reason people are uncomfortable with the gender imbalance in IT is because of earlier studies showing that women tended to get paid less in jobs where they are doing the same work as men. Now whenever we hear of a gender inequality, we assume -- perhaps incorrectly, in this case -- that the inequality is due to a hidden, unfair bias. So there is nothing wrong with women preferring non-IT jobs, per se. But I think we are right to feel cautious about conclusions in this area: Someone could take this general result and erroneously apply it to specific women, thereby assuming that female IT employees are less interested in their jobs than men and thus less deserving of raises or promotions... which creates a new source of gender bias.
- m0nty 18y ago'The question is - why do girls "not want to" by the time they reach age 18?' For the same reason not many men become maternity nurses or kindergarten teachers? Frankly, you couldn't have kept me away from IT if you'd tried. Despite low wages (when I started, at least), poor conditions, working on short-term contracts, being required to educate myself, putting up with being treated like some kind of idiot savant, etc, etc -- still, I wanted it very, very badly. Now, for people who don't feel that way, we're supposed to engage in this collective hand-wringing exercise: "Oh dear! Not enough wimmin in IT!" If they don't want it, I would seriously question the morality of (so to speak) tricking them into joining the profession on the basis of a collection of half-truths. Either you want to play with the shiny toys or you don't. And if you don't, good luck, because 90% of the time it's not exactly what you'd call fun anyway. Incidentally, I've been around a bit and I have never, ever witnessed any indication of prejudice against women in IT. Where I've worked with female engineers, they've always been welcomed and treated with respect. Maybe we should just accept what any parent can tell you: there are gender differences, and we need to accept those rather than pretend we're all the same. /rant. calming down now ;) talk amongst yourselves...
- projectileboy 18y agoI actually agree with everything you said - I, too, have never felt or seen bias against women in IT, once we're all adults. My perspective is that of the parent of a six-year-old girl, and if you actually believe that society doesn't start drilling into girls' heads from day one that their mission in life is to play with dolls, put on make up, and do little else... well, then you don't see much mainstream media.
- m0nty 18y agoPlease don't think I was ranting at you, I really didn't mean it to come across like that :) It's just this daft idea that there should be a 50/50 M/F split across any profession, let alone IT. I have two children (1 boy, 1 girl) and they have very different interests, so I'm approaching this from a parent's viewpoint as well. As for encouraging them into the profession, I always say "do something you like and ignore computers, because it will grind you down in a relentless, soul-destroying fashion." I'm being a bit cynical and if they showed a genuine interest I'd encourage it, but I'll be damned if I say it's the most rewarding, happy profession out there. Cos it ain't.
- axod 18y agoSame reason most men don't want to be midwives?
- apstuff 18y agoEnrollment by young Americans, both boys and girls, is dropping in all fields of engineering. The nation doesn't need that many hedge fund managers does it?
- aggieben 18y agoI'm not so sure a simple drop in enrollment is such a bad thing. I recently taught a couple of graduate level courses in a nearby CS department, and I can tell you that they should "un-enroll" about half of their graduate students, and it would vastly improve the quality of the department almost overnight. (I can only speak to the graduate program - I haven't been in much contact with undergrads). The U.S. will never graduate as many "engineers" as China and India, and we shouldn't try. We should graduate the best engineers and scientists.
- nostrademons 18y agoChances are, "un-enrolling" about half the graduate students would improve a department no matter how big it is. Sturgeon's Law - "90% of everything is crap". But if you have a bigger pool to draw from, the 10% that's not crap will amount to more engineers. And the 0.01% that's really spectacular will be more spectacular. That's the way a bell-curve works - if you raise the area under the curve, the tips spread out as well. There're a lot of smart people in finance whose talents are being wasted making sure that the market reflects all information within microseconds instead of within minutes. If the economic incentives were such that they started companies or did basic research instead, I bet you'd see quite a few more breakthroughs.
- aggieben 18y agoI can't say I agree. We have increased our pool by accepting sub-par students, and it seems to be shifting the entire curve backwards, rather than "spreading the tips". I don't know what the right answer is (or if there is one); what feels right is to raise the standards of admission.
- cdr 18y ago
- asnyder 18y ago"Women who are mathematically gifted are more likely than men to have strong verbal abilities as well; men who excel in math, by contrast, don't do nearly as well in verbal skills." Hmm, all the men I know that excel in math and science have excellent verbal abilities. I'd be curious to see their research on this.
- spydez 18y agoI excel in math and science but do not have excellent verbal abilities. There. I ruined your statistic. :P
- sealedidentity 18y agoWell it boils down to the simplest of things: Boys generally are interested in things while girls are interested in relationships and people. That explains why there are more guys as engineers than girls. It's not a question of smartness, more of interest and personality.
- silencio 18y agoStop generalizing. I hate people, I am antisocial until I need to be nice (networking?), I'm with friends, or I'm drunk. Relationships I can stand because I really like cuddling and sex. I also know some guys who are the complete opposite, and it's sort of amusing because of how much I had to deal with as a kid for being what I am just because I was a different gender and I didn't meet society's stereotypical views on it.
- modoc 18y agoThe whole point of statistical trends is that they ARE generalizations. Yes, you can find individual cases which buck the trend, but across a large sample group, these are the tendencies... How could you talk about gender roles and differences without generalizing? Or really talk about any demographic larger than a handful of people? Just because it's a generalization, doesn't mean it's not a useful piece of information.
- silencio 18y agoMy problem with discussing gender differences in engineering is that there isn't enough research into it. It can be a useful piece of information in the correct context, but I didn't believe the above was. There are women in IT who are interested in people and relationships and they are still engineers. There are women who hate people and are engineers. There are men....you get the idea.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- sealedidentity 18y ago
- etal 18y agoConsider the following analogy: psychology researchers : gender differences :: moths : flame Rosalind Chait Barnett at the bottom of the article has it right. Investigating gender differences is the first quest every psych grad student embarks on, and 19 times out of 20, they're disappointed to find nothing significant. (The other 1/20 is the false positive that comes with 95% confidence testing.) It bothers me that this article pursues so many hypotheses at once -- planning for career flexibility; language aptitude; discrimination; women fulfilled through biology, men through machines. None of them is a satisfactory answer because in a properly controlled gender-differences experiment, having filtered out the noise, there's no signal left. On the surface, the differences are there, but it's not due to anything innate. The East-versus-West comparison in the article should make that obvious. (The article claims it's because we're more "free".) It's cultural. Duh. I don't see anything wrong with that, either; it doesn't mean there should be a 50:50 gender split in every field. But looking for the explanation in biology is a dead end that enough researchers have run into already.
- Tichy 18y agoCould you point us to some examples, please? Not saying you are wrong, but the researcher cited in the article didn't convince me. She just said "there are so many factors we can't possibly interpret them", but didn't really give a counter-argument. Sounded more political correctness to me.
- etal 18y agoMy fiancee is a psych researcher; this is just what she's told me (via rant) a number of times. Plenty of studies showing significant gender differences show up on sagepub.com, but the findings usually have culture mixed in as well, and they aren't nearly as strong as Cosmo and the rest of pop culture would have us believe. More precisely, the variation within a gender group is much larger than the variation between genders.
- attack 18y ago> variation within a gender group is much larger than the variation between genders. You're measuring the wrong thing. If you look at the top percentage of performers in these fields then the differences become striking.
- xlnt 18y ago"Don't read too much; no one will want to marry you." Lost the source but not making this up.
- mamama 18y agoI can confirm that you're not making it up.
- Tichy 18y agoGirls always have a plan B: get pregnant and stop working altogether. Just ask some random female students whether income perspectives had any bearings on their choice of profession. More often than not, the answer is no (they might not even know what salary they can expect). It would make sense if men thought about that some more (since families need money), so they might tend to pick the more prospective subjects.
- mechanical_fish 18y agoAttention, Projectileboy: upthread, you said I, too, have never felt or seen bias against women in IT, once we're all adults. I hope you enjoyed that while it lasted.
- Tichy 18y agoSo I displayed bias against women in IT how exactly? Also, is bias always wrong? Would it be biased to say "women tend to have boobs"?
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- llimllib 18y agoYou presented an irrelevant argument which is based on imagined evidence; therefore it's easy to assume that bias underlies the argument. Whether it does or not, I won't judge.
- Tichy 18y agoWhat makes you think it is irrelevant? It's true that I didn't conduct and publish a study for this though. But if the article says "girls just do what they like", I feel my argument is relevant, because it could explain why they can do what they like.
- DougBTX 18y agoYour comment reads as: "go ask some women if they've ever thought about their future, and they'll say no because they can always just get pregnant." And now you've just asked, "isn't it equally true that women don't think about their future as to say that women have boobs?" This explains why you've, "never felt or seen bias against women in IT." You can't hear it even while you're saying it.
- giles_bowkett 18y agoGirls who go to all-girls schools do better in math. If I ever have a daughter I'll send her to an all-girls school. Boys are going to find her either way, and I'd prefer her "wanting" to do X or Y to be based on her skills and brains, not peer pressure.
- mamama 18y agoI don't think it will make much of a difference; people always succumb to peer pressure when they are with other people. Another point to ponder on: would I accept a CS professorship at MIT? Hell, yeah! Would I accept one at Wellesley? I don't think so - I'll possibly end up being called a pussy.
- carterschonwald 18y agonow i just have to say WTF, that makes no sense, either way you're in boston, have intelligent students, and you're a prof at one of the best schools in the world. Yes, ones a liberal arts college and the others a research university and there are fundamental differences in ones time allocation and day to day priorities as a consequence thereof, but that doesn't justify your remark at all!
- jimbokun 18y agoThe point of the article is NOT that boys do better at math. The point is that girls who DO excel at math choose non-technical (or less technical) careers. Specifically, careers that involve more human interaction, or at least deal with living things in some form (biological sciences).
- giles_bowkett 18y agoYes, I know that, and I'm insulted by your misinterpretation. My point still stands. The article is tautological fluff. "If we explore the most obvious implications of a known phenomenon, and pad it with numbers, people will know we were awake, we'll still have jobs, and really foolish people will think we've discovered something."
- mamama 18y agoThese pointless "women in computer science" articles really make my trigger finger itchy.
- DaniFong 18y agoThere may be a rock unturned here. Neither women nor men have anything close to perfect information about what their careers might be like down years of a prospective path. Many career decisions are influenced by the crudest of stereotypes. If the stars of the computing world (who barely receive much press anyway) seem to be mostly introverted men, and if those already into computers seem lacking in either social grace or extraversion, then who's to blame them for choosing careers which would appear to help them be more socially engaged. So women flock to fields like nursing, and teaching. Who told them that both operate in an often stiflingly apathetic bureaucracy? Of computers and engineering, they've in many cases never had the joy of being able to make something work on their own. For all they know, cooking is more creative. They have no idea how exciting the startup world is, how gratifying to work on something new, how empowering it feels to have the wind of social benefit at your back, how freeing it is to be able to choose your work to be most important, as opposed to being most externally justifiable. Extraverted women and men have shied away from computers and related fields for a long time. But perhaps it's not so much a function of the nature of our field. Perhaps we just have bad press.
- llimllib 18y ago> choosing careers which would appear to help them be more socially engaged... it's not so much a function of the nature of our field Are you questioning which career is in fact more socially engaged? Can you name a field which is less socially engaged than CS/Math? It seems to me that it is a function of the nature of our field, which demands long stretches of unbroken attention, that draws people who desire large amounts of social activity away.
- DaniFong 18y agoUndoubtably some tech jobs are suitable only for hermits. But the variance within fields, as is the variance within genders, dwarfs by far the variance between them.
- llimllib 18y ago> the variance within fields, as is the variance within genders, dwarfs by far the variance between them. This is a slightly weaker statement than the one made above, but I still don't agree with it. Surely there is variance, but the median programmer is far far less social than the median (for example) doctor. Yes, there are Tim Brays on our side who are quite socially oriented and radiologists and virologists who never see actual patients on their side, but every real programming job requires you to be alone and focused on a computer for long stretches of time. Is this incorrect somehow? What programming positions don't require this? (My fiancee is a resident, and I assure you that she does not spend long stretches of time on singularly focused tasks like programmers do - you will have to have a spectacularly convincing argument to convince me otherwise)
- menloparkbum 18y agoWomen are more sensible than men. Unless you start a successful startup, or are in the top 1% of engineers, having a typical engineering job is pretty lame. Statistically you will make more money with less effort by choosing a medical or legal related field. Greenspun said it best here: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science This article is about science careers. Just switch a few things in his career path and it is the same argument for engineering careers.
- tx 18y agoTypical engineering job is pretty lame? That's very American, if you ask me, because you're measuring everything around youself in dollars. I've become an engineer because I create things: every day something starts spinning, cranking, rotating and pumping because I build it, while 100% of lawyers (without exceptions) are useless parasites eating off our own deficiencies. Having an average engineering job isn't lame, your (and Greenspun's) line of thinking IS lame. In fact, it's pretty disgusting. That also explains why there aren't many women in the field: generalizing, they're simply more bottom-line oriented, as numerous studies have proven: they don't spend 6 years to get a Master's and build robots in a garage in their spare time for free, instead they'll "wipe ass" overtime in a nearest hospital with an associate degree, because overtime pays double rate.
- scott_s 18y agoThe most important sentence from the article, emphasis mine: "The researchers are not suggesting that sexism and cultural pressures on women don't play a role, and they don't yet know why women choose the way they do."
- krschultz 18y agoFrom my experience not a large percentage of the guys who sign up for engineering programs actually WANT to become engineers. It sounds like a socially acceptable major, and sure maybe they like mechanical things, but a huge number of the guys washed out from mechanical engineering, (we started with 140, we are down to 80, of the 80 there are 15 girls, we started with 17 girls, the rest of the wash outs were guys). I think few girls go into engineering as a default major, so if they are there they really want to be there. In the end, the only ones who can get through it are those who really want to be there, so why encourage people who aren't committed?
- Xichekolas 18y ago> Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women - highly qualified for the work - stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else. Am I the only one not startled by this? My reasoning was as follows... I can think of a ton of jobs that are traditionally dominated by females (elementary school teacher, housekeepers, talk-show hosts) that I happen to not want to do. It has nothing to do with me being male or some perceived descrimination against me by the females in the field. I just don't have any interest in being those things. I would assume the same thing holds true for a female and some professions that just happen to be historically dominated by males. I mean, some of the disparity probably is because of gender-based slight, but it seems rational to expect that some jobs just aren't interesting enough to attract people in droves of equal and politically correct gender ratios. > The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. In countries with less economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, she writes, the number of women in physics is as high as 30 to 35 percent, versus 5 percent in Canada, Japan, and Germany. My guess is this is because they have the option to choose careers, rather than being forced to accept whatever pays well and is safe. > Benbow and Lubinski, at Vanderbilt, found that high-achieving women often pick their careers based on the idea that they'll eventually take time off, and thus avoid fields in which that absence will exact a larger penalty. In humanities or philosophy, for instance, taking a year or two off won't affect one's skill set very much. But in quickly evolving technical fields, a similar sabbatical can be a huge career setback. I have seen this in talking with my girlfriend about her career goals. She is a chemical engineer, and often fears that taking time off to raise kids will doom her career.
- strlen 18y agoTwo reasons: FUD and the fact that women are more rational (as someone said "more sensible"). Purely statistically speaking, you are more likely to do work that's both interesting and well paid if you go into medicine versus software engineering. Medicine takes much longer and steeper learning curve, but once you climb that an average job requiring an MD is more interesting than an average job requiring a BS in CS and pays better (while if you fail to get an MD, an average job requiring a BS/MS in Bio-Chemistry is at least as interesting and still decently paying). The FUD part is pretty self explanatory: introversion doesn't mean lack of social skills (the latter are learned and eventually most geeks do end up learning them one way or another) and given the amount of team work involved in any real engineering projects there are plenty opportunities for extroverts to re-charge. The way to encourage women to go into these fields is to provide dual degree programs (no opportunity cost for seeking a CS degree and applying to engineering jobs as an undergraduate) and combating the FUD.
- aswanson 18y agoSmart choice, ladies. Should have listened to you.
- undetected 18y agoLet me give another perspective. I'm from one of the developing (an optimistic term) countries mentioned. While I was still in my home country, I worked in an IT consulting firm. My boss' boss was female, her boss (a VP) was female. A lot of the other bosses were female. More than half my teammates were female. 30% female / 70% male seems awfully low, it was more like 45%-55% female. The company would occassionally send people to the US. Over time, over a hundred of us have moved here to the US. So you have a sample of men and women who are good at math and picked IT while they were in a country with few economic opportunities, and took them to a nation with financial stability - the two environments the article mentioned. What's happened so far? In time, some of the women changed careers. Some went to medicine, going back to school in order to switch. Some went to completely non-science fields, like real estate. None of the men have switched careers. I know some men still dabble in computers in their spare time - open source projects, linux, etc. None of the women do. From what I've observed, the article is spot on.
- attack 18y agoSmall open source projects are a far better measure of this phenomenon. It's completely unaffected by salary, no one gets paid, completely free of bias, you have to do everything yourself. And yet the disparity is enormous.
- helveticaman 18y agoBreaking News: it's not necessarily or completely men's fault.
- jaaron 18y agoWhat a horribly mangled headline. Why not say, "Girl's don't want to become engineers?"
- tlrobinson 18y agoOk, but why don't girls want to become engineers?