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This leaves me completely unsurprised. Every time sexists come out with "brain differences", we find they are culture differences. Girls leave STEM because the

This leaves me completely unsurprised. Every time sexists come out with "brain differences", we find they are culture differences. Girls leave STEM because they face creepiness, misogyny and unequal treatment from students and faculty.

asjw 7y ago
Or because they genuinely don't like it, like a study in Sweden where a lot of women are free to chose any career they won't and avoid STEM, because there are a lot of other ways to be successful when there is more equity than STEM (industrial military complex has its toll) Or because they aren't the only one leaving it in the first place! Thinking that any man or boy is the same, act the same, think the same and like the same things, and STEM faculties are the worst a woman can find, is naive at best. Men suffer as women. The survival bias make people think that only women leave STEM or leave it at bigger rates, but that's not true. Statistic says that less than 5% of boys and less than 1% of girls think of a career in STEM, it is already largely a field for a few (an élite if you like) and it's dominated by two kinds of people: people obsessed by the topic, in the autistic spectrum, that is mostly a male disease (people in the spectrum gravitate around STEM majors 14% more than neurotypical people - 22% Vs 36% - it means almost 2 times more). Competitive assholes who like other competitive assholes, who are mostly men. But the bulk of the students are regular folks like me, who just wanted to study the field but didn't like the academia shit and hence left (and I am in the spectrum as well).
- nxpnsv 7y ago
  I studied physics and mathematics in Sweden, with lots of female colleagues. At my Uni the 2 most segregated subjects were philosophy (only men) and gender studies (only women). Of course thinks may have changed since the nineties.
  - pdpi 7y ago
    Yeah, I had a similar experience — I studied Maths in Portugal , and that degree was about 50/50, as was Physics. A clear gender separation was visible in the (overwhelmingly female) chemistry department and the (overwhelmingly male) electrotechnic engineering department, though.
- tasogare 7y ago
  > it's dominated by two kinds of people: people obsessed by the topic, in the autistic spectrum People discussing the so-called gender gap* in software engineering education always forget a "little" details: learning to program takes a lot of time and dedication. Basically, at least two/three years of 10 hours+ a day (university classes and homework, plus personal reading and projects). Most of this time is spend alone, behind a computer. Very few people are willing to follow this lifestyle, girls even more so because of the lack of face to face human contact it implies. * which is not a real issue anyway: the software isn't worst because of the lack of women creating it. In addition, the same people are totally fine with 80-100% girls in language and humanities degrees which means their real goal isn't "equality", which is reached already because universities don't select people and education is free (speaking of France here; we hear the same gender-gap bullshit).
  - intarga 7y ago
    You're really overstating how hard it is to learn to program. I'm a woman who studied physics and astronomy at university. In my final year I taught myself programming in my spare time because I was interested in it, and knew the job prospects were better than in physics. I had other hobbies and an active dating life at the time, but I still managed to get a software job straight out of university, and it's evolving into a fruitful career. Learning to program in no way requires 3 years of monastic devotion.
    - tasogare 7y ago
      Function, parameters, modules, classes, objects, variables, interface, co and contravariance, structs, union... Functional programming, database (data normalization, SQL, no-sql), OS stuffs (process, scheduling, virtual memory), virtual machines, linkers and loaders, compilation, interpretation, compilers (language theory & implementation), HTML et al., networks (ip addressing, domain name, socket), software architecture, design patterns, security issues, memory management, IPC, containers, deployment, CI, encoding (Unicode, UTF8, ASCII), IO, various file formats... List, tree (binary, balanced, implementation), hashset, graph, stack, FIFO. Back-end, mobile, windowed app, game... etc, etc. I see there is a lot of genius in this thread, having come across all these concepts and got a working understanding of all these things in a few weeks/months. I'm 10 years in and I still learn weekly. Either Dunning–Kruger is in full effect or you internalized so many thing you don't see them anymore.
- marliechiller 7y ago
  no idea why this has been downvoted for merely stating easily accessible facts. JPeterson often points to the fact that men tend to gravitate towards professions that involve "things" (think engineering and tech etc) whilst woman tend towards professions that involve people. Medicine for example is now woman dominated in the UK. There is no use in ignoring the fact that men and woman might gravitate towards different things in terms of interest - thats vastly different than saying that men and woman are different in terms of their intellectual ability though. As the mentioned article unsurprisingly shows
  - tptacek 7y ago
    Well, if JPeterson says so... maybe it ties in with the "dragon of chaos" and the "king of order".
  - simion314 7y ago
    In my math group in Romania there were more women in the Math classes. I assume in US having a job as a Math teacher is not having such big appeal so this could explain the difference.
  - detcader 7y ago
    I mean that's just one choice of framing right? I could equally say that women gravitate toward professions that require kindness and compassion and relieve immediate suffering, while men gravitate toward more capitalist straightforward work-into-money jobs. That for me ties back to a culture where boys are raised to exploit women and thus becoming alienated from people in general. It's kind of a wildcard, how you connect your perception and big statistics to nature, nurture, and culture
dmichulke 7y ago
Care to explain e.g. the difference in size with men having larger brains on average? (between 8% and 13% larger) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sex_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sex_difference...
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  Going to actual citation in that article, "Males have on average larger overall absolute volumes (i.e. not corrected for body size) in each volume category (see Table 3), ranging from 8% to 13% larger volume in males." ... aren't males generally physically larger overall? Granted, 8-13% feels like it's disproportionate, but I'd want to check that before drawing any conclusions.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Is correcting for body size correct? If it takes X mass of brain to run the human body, than the larger brain has more cells free to do something other than run the body. Or in other words, how much of a larger brain is required to run a larger body - if the scale isn't linear then I'd expect the larger brain to be "smarter" As the other posters have said, size doesn't seem to correlate to anything. More than that I don't know.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
      That's a fair question. I'm given to understand that brain size doesn't directly scale with intelligence (consider sperm whale vs dolphin vs human), but for all I know that's only true between species? Actually now that I'm thinking about it, I'm pretty sure there are pathologies where the brain is too big, but one shouldn't conclude much on pathological cases. So.... I dunno. Maybe?
      - Nasrudith 7y ago
        Anyway one complication between species is we know that brains are composed and are laid out differently which affects density and distribution. Cephalopods for instance lack mylenation and appear to have their brain functions a bit more distributes to the point that they occasionally have "rogue arms" which act dysfunctional to the point the host decides to just chew it off and eventually regenerate a "sane" replacement.
Bostonian 7y ago
From the Wikipedia article "Neuroscience of sex differences": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sex_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sex_difference... Lateralization appears to differ between in the sexes with men having a more lateralized brain. This is based on differences in "left" and "right" brained abilities. One factor which contributes support to the idea that there is a sex difference in brain lateralization is that men are more likely to be left handed. However, it is unclear whether this is due to a difference in lateralization.[6] Meta-analysis of grey matter in the brain found sexually dimorphic areas of the brain in both volume and density. When synthesized, these differences show volume increases for males tend to be on the left side of systems, while females generally see greater volume in the right hemisphere.[2] However, based on a number of studies using different measurement techniques, there is no significant difference between male and female brain lateralization
- pjc50 7y ago
  .. isn't the relevance of this specifically what the top-of-thread article is arguing against? That the existence of brain dimorphism doesn't actually affect the problem solving?
- JulianMorrison 7y ago
  If you divided people into athletes and pianists, you would find dimorphic brain differences too, because 1. We learn 2. Learning is physical, because it occurs in the brain 3. Over time, learning is reflected in detectable physical differences in the brain The reason that studies like this one are looking at children is that they are trying to minimize the role of established patterns of use in creating brain differences. In other words, differences arising from culture.
ajsnigrutin 7y ago
Considering a lot of changes during puberty, and these tests done before onset of puberty, we don't know what happens later. Without looking at other age groups, we never know. Most teachers in those age groups are (in most countries) women, but I agree about inequality when one-gender-only scholarships are offered. More research has to be done on other age groups. There are ethics problems with active involvement, but brain differences have been observed in other animals too ( https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys-toys/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-pr... )
mc32 7y ago
I think some leave for some of the reasons you mentioned sometimes. We know that if the state demands it girls and later women will succeed in STEM. We could do better in STEM for girls and women, but also we could do better for boys and men too. Currently we import the deficit. That said, I think a lot of it is not what you listed (which is still a problem needed addressing) but the majority is social demand and how we as a society don’t make those careers necessary or cool. People get diverted into business and liberal arts in too great a number. If we used cultural tools to steer more girls and boys (with special emphasis for girls) into STEM we’d see better results.
- madengr 7y ago
  Maybe better pay and working conditions would help, along with the “obsolete by 40 stigma”. My wife just quit her STEM job because of a toxic work culture, brought on by a newly hired, sociopath manager (who happens to be female).
tsukurimashou 7y ago
jesus christ not this bullshit again
- DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
  I sympathize with your sentiment, but uncivil comments are likely to be downvoted / flagged.
belorn 7y ago
Here in Sweden women leave male dominated subjects in education at the same rate that men leave female dominated subjects. There is a lot of similarities when women leave a programming profession and when men leave the teacher profession. Both will say that they feel the social environment is unconformable. Both will say that there is an unequal treatment from students and faculty. Both will report of gender based bullying and harassment. And the similarities continue in how quickly people leave the profession. Both has a significant higher leave rate while student, during the first year as employed and after 10 years. Being a minority gender is leaky pipe, and if we look at work segregation in general using numbers from a few years ago, 84.3% men and 84.2% women worked in a gender segregated work place. From last year national workplace health survey, the industry with highest rate of bullying and sexual harassment was nursing, which swapped placed with construction which was the previous worst workplace. That those two professions are next to each other in toxic work environment makes perfect sense if we assume there is practically no difference biologically, socially and culturally between men and women.

asjw 7y ago

Or because they genuinely don't like it, like a study in Sweden where a lot of women are free to chose any career they won't and avoid STEM, because there are a lot of other ways to be successful when there is more equity than STEM (industrial military complex has its toll) Or because they aren't the only one leaving it in the first place! Thinking that any man or boy is the same, act the same, think the same and like the same things, and STEM faculties are the worst a woman can find, is naive at best. Men suffer as women. The survival bias make people think that only women leave STEM or leave it at bigger rates, but that's not true. Statistic says that less than 5% of boys and less than 1% of girls think of a career in STEM, it is already largely a field for a few (an élite if you like) and it's dominated by two kinds of people: people obsessed by the topic, in the autistic spectrum, that is mostly a male disease (people in the spectrum gravitate around STEM majors 14% more than neurotypical people - 22% Vs 36% - it means almost 2 times more). Competitive assholes who like other competitive assholes, who are mostly men. But the bulk of the students are regular folks like me, who just wanted to study the field but didn't like the academia shit and hence left (and I am in the spectrum as well).

nxpnsv 7y ago
I studied physics and mathematics in Sweden, with lots of female colleagues. At my Uni the 2 most segregated subjects were philosophy (only men) and gender studies (only women). Of course thinks may have changed since the nineties.
- pdpi 7y ago
  Yeah, I had a similar experience — I studied Maths in Portugal , and that degree was about 50/50, as was Physics. A clear gender separation was visible in the (overwhelmingly female) chemistry department and the (overwhelmingly male) electrotechnic engineering department, though.
tasogare 7y ago
> it's dominated by two kinds of people: people obsessed by the topic, in the autistic spectrum People discussing the so-called gender gap* in software engineering education always forget a "little" details: learning to program takes a lot of time and dedication. Basically, at least two/three years of 10 hours+ a day (university classes and homework, plus personal reading and projects). Most of this time is spend alone, behind a computer. Very few people are willing to follow this lifestyle, girls even more so because of the lack of face to face human contact it implies. * which is not a real issue anyway: the software isn't worst because of the lack of women creating it. In addition, the same people are totally fine with 80-100% girls in language and humanities degrees which means their real goal isn't "equality", which is reached already because universities don't select people and education is free (speaking of France here; we hear the same gender-gap bullshit).
- intarga 7y ago
  You're really overstating how hard it is to learn to program. I'm a woman who studied physics and astronomy at university. In my final year I taught myself programming in my spare time because I was interested in it, and knew the job prospects were better than in physics. I had other hobbies and an active dating life at the time, but I still managed to get a software job straight out of university, and it's evolving into a fruitful career. Learning to program in no way requires 3 years of monastic devotion.
  - tasogare 7y ago
    Function, parameters, modules, classes, objects, variables, interface, co and contravariance, structs, union... Functional programming, database (data normalization, SQL, no-sql), OS stuffs (process, scheduling, virtual memory), virtual machines, linkers and loaders, compilation, interpretation, compilers (language theory & implementation), HTML et al., networks (ip addressing, domain name, socket), software architecture, design patterns, security issues, memory management, IPC, containers, deployment, CI, encoding (Unicode, UTF8, ASCII), IO, various file formats... List, tree (binary, balanced, implementation), hashset, graph, stack, FIFO. Back-end, mobile, windowed app, game... etc, etc. I see there is a lot of genius in this thread, having come across all these concepts and got a working understanding of all these things in a few weeks/months. I'm 10 years in and I still learn weekly. Either Dunning–Kruger is in full effect or you internalized so many thing you don't see them anymore.
marliechiller 7y ago
no idea why this has been downvoted for merely stating easily accessible facts. JPeterson often points to the fact that men tend to gravitate towards professions that involve "things" (think engineering and tech etc) whilst woman tend towards professions that involve people. Medicine for example is now woman dominated in the UK. There is no use in ignoring the fact that men and woman might gravitate towards different things in terms of interest - thats vastly different than saying that men and woman are different in terms of their intellectual ability though. As the mentioned article unsurprisingly shows
- tptacek 7y ago
  Well, if JPeterson says so... maybe it ties in with the "dragon of chaos" and the "king of order".
- simion314 7y ago
  In my math group in Romania there were more women in the Math classes. I assume in US having a job as a Math teacher is not having such big appeal so this could explain the difference.
- detcader 7y ago
  I mean that's just one choice of framing right? I could equally say that women gravitate toward professions that require kindness and compassion and relieve immediate suffering, while men gravitate toward more capitalist straightforward work-into-money jobs. That for me ties back to a culture where boys are raised to exploit women and thus becoming alienated from people in general. It's kind of a wildcard, how you connect your perception and big statistics to nature, nurture, and culture

dmichulke 7y ago

Care to explain e.g. the difference in size with men having larger brains on average? (between 8% and 13% larger) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sex_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sex_difference...

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
Going to actual citation in that article, "Males have on average larger overall absolute volumes (i.e. not corrected for body size) in each volume category (see Table 3), ranging from 8% to 13% larger volume in males." ... aren't males generally physically larger overall? Granted, 8-13% feels like it's disproportionate, but I'd want to check that before drawing any conclusions.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Is correcting for body size correct? If it takes X mass of brain to run the human body, than the larger brain has more cells free to do something other than run the body. Or in other words, how much of a larger brain is required to run a larger body - if the scale isn't linear then I'd expect the larger brain to be "smarter" As the other posters have said, size doesn't seem to correlate to anything. More than that I don't know.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    That's a fair question. I'm given to understand that brain size doesn't directly scale with intelligence (consider sperm whale vs dolphin vs human), but for all I know that's only true between species? Actually now that I'm thinking about it, I'm pretty sure there are pathologies where the brain is too big, but one shouldn't conclude much on pathological cases. So.... I dunno. Maybe?
    - Nasrudith 7y ago
      Anyway one complication between species is we know that brains are composed and are laid out differently which affects density and distribution. Cephalopods for instance lack mylenation and appear to have their brain functions a bit more distributes to the point that they occasionally have "rogue arms" which act dysfunctional to the point the host decides to just chew it off and eventually regenerate a "sane" replacement.

Bostonian 7y ago

From the Wikipedia article "Neuroscience of sex differences": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sex_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sex_difference... Lateralization appears to differ between in the sexes with men having a more lateralized brain. This is based on differences in "left" and "right" brained abilities. One factor which contributes support to the idea that there is a sex difference in brain lateralization is that men are more likely to be left handed. However, it is unclear whether this is due to a difference in lateralization.[6] Meta-analysis of grey matter in the brain found sexually dimorphic areas of the brain in both volume and density. When synthesized, these differences show volume increases for males tend to be on the left side of systems, while females generally see greater volume in the right hemisphere.[2] However, based on a number of studies using different measurement techniques, there is no significant difference between male and female brain lateralization

pjc50 7y ago
.. isn't the relevance of this specifically what the top-of-thread article is arguing against? That the existence of brain dimorphism doesn't actually affect the problem solving?
JulianMorrison 7y ago
If you divided people into athletes and pianists, you would find dimorphic brain differences too, because 1. We learn 2. Learning is physical, because it occurs in the brain 3. Over time, learning is reflected in detectable physical differences in the brain The reason that studies like this one are looking at children is that they are trying to minimize the role of established patterns of use in creating brain differences. In other words, differences arising from culture.

ajsnigrutin 7y ago

Considering a lot of changes during puberty, and these tests done before onset of puberty, we don't know what happens later. Without looking at other age groups, we never know. Most teachers in those age groups are (in most countries) women, but I agree about inequality when one-gender-only scholarships are offered. More research has to be done on other age groups. There are ethics problems with active involvement, but brain differences have been observed in other animals too ( https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys-toys/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-pr... )

mc32 7y ago

I think some leave for some of the reasons you mentioned sometimes. We know that if the state demands it girls and later women will succeed in STEM. We could do better in STEM for girls and women, but also we could do better for boys and men too. Currently we import the deficit. That said, I think a lot of it is not what you listed (which is still a problem needed addressing) but the majority is social demand and how we as a society don’t make those careers necessary or cool. People get diverted into business and liberal arts in too great a number. If we used cultural tools to steer more girls and boys (with special emphasis for girls) into STEM we’d see better results.

madengr 7y ago
Maybe better pay and working conditions would help, along with the “obsolete by 40 stigma”. My wife just quit her STEM job because of a toxic work culture, brought on by a newly hired, sociopath manager (who happens to be female).

tsukurimashou 7y ago

jesus christ not this bullshit again

DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
I sympathize with your sentiment, but uncivil comments are likely to be downvoted / flagged.

belorn 7y ago

Here in Sweden women leave male dominated subjects in education at the same rate that men leave female dominated subjects. There is a lot of similarities when women leave a programming profession and when men leave the teacher profession. Both will say that they feel the social environment is unconformable. Both will say that there is an unequal treatment from students and faculty. Both will report of gender based bullying and harassment. And the similarities continue in how quickly people leave the profession. Both has a significant higher leave rate while student, during the first year as employed and after 10 years. Being a minority gender is leaky pipe, and if we look at work segregation in general using numbers from a few years ago, 84.3% men and 84.2% women worked in a gender segregated work place. From last year national workplace health survey, the industry with highest rate of bullying and sexual harassment was nursing, which swapped placed with construction which was the previous worst workplace. That those two professions are next to each other in toxic work environment makes perfect sense if we assume there is practically no difference biologically, socially and culturally between men and women.