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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

by 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.
    - Izkata 7y ago
      Yeah, this is pretty much my thoughts as well. Even aside from the large range of topics out there, there's a massive gap from "can do something useful" to "can program well / in a maintainable way". One of my dormmates in college was in some engineering degree, I forget what, and decided to learn some programming from us, since so many of us were in CS. It was a pretty short time before he could do useful things, actually helping him finish his projects faster, but all that took was some very basic concepts: arrays, loops, conditionals. I think on the order of a week to get the concepts down and be able to write a C program from scratch, and another week or two before he had the concepts embedded in his mind enough to use it with his own work. Thing is, even that was far faster than I typically saw for those same concepts, as a Teacher's Assistant for the introductory CS courses. The engineering mindset seemed to give him some sort of foundation to pick it up faster, even having never done it before. And his code was absolutely terrible, he had a long, long way to go if he ever wanted to even consider programming as a profession.
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

by asjw 7y ago

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.
  - Izkata 7y ago
    Yeah, this is pretty much my thoughts as well. Even aside from the large range of topics out there, there's a massive gap from "can do something useful" to "can program well / in a maintainable way". One of my dormmates in college was in some engineering degree, I forget what, and decided to learn some programming from us, since so many of us were in CS. It was a pretty short time before he could do useful things, actually helping him finish his projects faster, but all that took was some very basic concepts: arrays, loops, conditionals. I think on the order of a week to get the concepts down and be able to write a C program from scratch, and another week or two before he had the concepts embedded in his mind enough to use it with his own work. Thing is, even that was far faster than I typically saw for those same concepts, as a Teacher's Assistant for the introductory CS courses. The engineering mindset seemed to give him some sort of foundation to pick it up faster, even having never done it before. And his code was absolutely terrible, he had a long, long way to go if he ever wanted to even consider programming as a profession.

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