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Coming from one of these countries to America, the answer seems obvious. STEM jobs have a HUGE differential in stability and status in those countries, so women

Coming from one of these countries to America, the answer seems obvious. STEM jobs have a HUGE differential in stability and status in those countries, so women put up up with much more patriarchal BS at the workplace to hold on to them. My sister was a STEM worker in India. When she moved to America, she looked around to see writers with relatively safe, high-status job and switched out immediately. Yes, women in America are "organically" picking non-STEM jobs, but that is because the jobs suck, the environments suck and people are assholes at these jobs. My sister loved the core STEM aspects of her job, but hated the culture of the companies she was stuck working with. This is not "equality", its hostile corporate culture. tl;dr: Ask Women.

DuskStar 7y ago
The problem I always have with this argument is "Why not medicine? Why not Law?" Why is it that two professions that you'd naively expect to be just as sexist, if not far more sexist than STEM (Higher status, more of an "old boys club", established hierarchy that has positions like nurses for women, etc) have achieved gender parity, while STEM hasn't?
- nervousvarun 7y ago
  Not necessarily disagreeing or commenting on your point, but doesn't medicine typically fall under STEM?
  - maxnoe 7y ago
    NOOO. Science, Technics, Engineering, Math. The M is not for Medicine
    - diffeomorphism 7y ago
      But science includes biology, chemistry, pharmacy and medical research (e.g. molecular biology, neurology,...). So just because it is not the M does not say it is not part of STEM. Actually, I am unsure how country specific this is and where to put medicine with respect to hard sciences, soft sciences, social sciences etc.
      - bakuninsbart 7y ago
        > Actually, I am unsure how country specific It is kind of hilarious how different this works in a lot of countries. For example in German, the translation of science is 'Wissenschaft'. It would literally translate to "the thing you do to make knowledge". Humanities are called 'Geistes'wissenschaft and Law is called 'Rechts'wissenschaft'. Math is generally considered to be part of the humanities, and CS is usually either part of the math-department or very closely settled to the engineering department. There's many more differences between the german and anglo academic culture, let alone all the other ones out there.
        diffeomorphism 7y ago
        > Math is generally considered to be part of the humanities Hm, not always. In my experience it was a B.Sc., M. Sc. and Dr. rer. nat. and in the math-nat department, but it can also be associated with philosophy and of course there is no scientific method in math. For medicine you also have the (again country specific?) question whether a medical doctorate is comparable to a hard science one, e.g. for the purpose of grants in medical research.
    - reroute1 7y ago
      Let's think liberally and not confine this concept to a strict acronym that seems overly narrow
    - cortesoft 7y ago
      I would think medicine falls under the science category.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    Not that I'm aware - Science Technology Engineering Math is the definition of STEM I see most frequently. I'd consider Medicine to be heavily STEM adjacent, particularly in the US where most doctors get a bachelors in a STEM field before heading to med school, but not a part of it. Googling around seems that it's contentious, and that a lot of people consider nurses, physicians etc to be STEM careers under the 'science' heading. But this doesn't seem all that core to me. (And you have to draw the line somewhere - are psychiatrists STEM? How about psychologists?)
    - cortesoft 7y ago
      Engineering and Math are the only two of those letters that have an actual college major with the same name..... you can't major in 'science', you major in one of the subfields of science. In fact, medicine isn't even an undergraduate major (although some universities will offer a 'pre-med' major, but not many). Many people who go on to go to medical school will major in a STEM subject in undergrad (like biology or something)
      - bakuninsbart 7y ago
        > In fact, medicine isn't even an undergraduate major (although some universities will offer a 'pre-med' major, but not many). This is a US-centric view - most people do in fact study medicine right out of school. It is interesting though that the definition of what constitutes a field vary quite greaty around the globe.
        cortesoft 7y ago
        It was using the example of US colleges to make the point that it is too narrow a definition to say only fields that are pure science count as STEM. There are very few pure science or math fields, but I don't think you need to be 'pure' to be considered STEM.
    - bakuninsbart 7y ago
      Honestly, the definition of STEM can go in a lot of directions. CS is basically a field of engineering with a heavy slant of maths. Medicine shares a lot of characteristics with engineering, as it is very practical and result-focused, and it shares a lot of the methodology with the Sciences. I think it is quite firmly in the STEM spectrum.
  - michaelt 7y ago
    Some people use STEMM for “science technology engineering mathematics and medicine” Medicine-aligned subjects do a lot to improve the gender ratio, if one wants to improve the gender equality figures...
  - eindiran 7y ago
    It depends who you ask, but typically not. STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (ie the 'M' isn't 'medicine', which is what a lot of people think).
    - nervousvarun 7y ago
      Right I definitely knew it was math (have 2 engineering degrees myself :) )...but still assumed it was commonly assumed to fall on the spectrum of STEM (definitely on the opposite end from say...physics...but still on the spectrum). How can anyone get a qualifying score on the MCAT without significant exposure to science? Disclaimer: I'm definitely coming at this from a U.S. point of view which someone mentioned in another comment effectively (not always but definitely in the overwhelming majority of cases) requires STEM undergrad degrees to get into medicine.
      - eindiran 7y ago
        Some branches of medical research are basic sciences (eg endocrinology), and some are applied sciences (those broadly construed as 'health science', eg dietetics). But the practice of medicine in a clinical setting (healthcare) is both a science and an art (ie a skill learned by practicing it), and I think most would say that the knowledge it requires is scientific but much of the day-to-day work is an art. So people tend to disagree about where to put medicine. But overall, most major public institutions in the US don't include medicine in STEM: * US Department of Labor (Bureau of Labor Statistics) -- No. (https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2007/spring/art04.pdf https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2007/spring/art04.pdf) * US Department of Commerce (Economics and Statistics Administration) -- No. (https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED522129.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED522129.pdf) * NSF -- No. "The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering."
    - cortesoft 7y ago
      Right, but medicine is part of science.... would you argue that a Physics major isn't in STEM because P is not one of the letters of STEM?
- deleted 7y ago
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- rayiner 7y ago
  The legal profession is far ahead of STEM in addressing sexism. Many law firms have adopted the Mansfield Rule, which requires the pools of promotion candidates to comprise 30-50% women or other underrepresented groups: https://www.law.com/dailyreportonline/2019/09/06/more-firms-in-atlanta-hit-mansfield-rule-diversity-benchmark-this-year https://www.law.com/dailyreportonline/2019/09/06/more-firms-.... Major clients are imposing diversity criteria on outside counsel hired for their matters. Many major firms have 20% or more women in the equity partnership ranks. About a third of newly promoted partners are women. More than 30% of Fortune 500 GCs are now women. That’s the result of decades of work, which started with affirmative efforts by law schools to achieve gender parity at the beginning of the pipeline. (Those efforts proved self sustaining. Once women didn’t have to swim upstream to choose law school—facing years of being in a small minority at the outset of their careers—efforts to recruit them specifically became unnecessary.) There is a ways to go yet before we hit parity, but I feel like in STEM folks are still litigating the issue of whether numeric parity should even be the goal. That question was settled in the legal field a long time ago.
  - commandlinefan 7y ago
    > promotion candidates to comprise 30-50% women or other underrepresented groups I think most tech companies would go into a full-blown panic if you imposed a quota of non-asians (who are something like 5% of the U.S. population) for technical positions.
  - masteranza 7y ago
    From quite long time ago women are accepted to universities. Yet to prove your point about "law being fixed long time ago" you refer to news from few months ago.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      I didn’t say law was “fixed.” (To paraphrase Justice Ginsberg, law will be “fixed” when there are nine women on the Supreme Court.) What I said was that recent progress is the result of work that started decades ago. Harvard law graduated its first women in 1953. But back then top women law graduates were still getting offers to be secretaries. (Justice Ginsberg’s story was not at all atypical for her cohort.) That, along with the prospect of joining a 90%+ male class in and of itself dissuaded women from pursing law. Law schools fixed that by making 50-50 classes an express goal, and then achieving that goal. Then law firms made 50-50 classes of incoming associates an express goal, and achieved that goal. Gender parity was achieved not simply by accepting women to law schools, but by actively seeking to admit gender balanced classes. But once that happened, the new ratio became self-perpetuating. When being a woman lawyer no longer meant being part of a tiny minority in law school, a firm, etc., women self-selected into it when previously they had opted out. I strongly suspect the same factors are in play in STEM: women who would be good programmers self-select out of the field because they don’t want to be the 1-2 women in a class of 20 men, or the 1-2 women programmers on a team of 20 men.
- lifeformed 7y ago
  I think STEM just has a much lower barrier to entry than med and law. It's a lot more accessible in terms of cost and number of opportunities available, and doesn't require spending a third of your life in school.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  In case of medicine - because it's a large field full of career paths that are very different from each other. The daily realities of being a pediatrician, a surgeon, a psychiatrist or a radiologist have very little in common. There's this hypothesis that men statistically tend to pick jobs involving working with and treating patients as things, and women tend to pick jobs involving people and socializing. Medicine as a field is full of high-status jobs of both kind, so - under this hypothesis - gender parity of the overarching field is entirely unsurprising. And, as predicted, individual specializations tend to show strong gender skew. Law is also a very large field, so I suspect the profession probably shows a similar dynamic. Viewed through this lens, our industry is less like "medicine", and more like "radiology". And I suspect - but didn't check - that if you expand the definition of "software" to include supporting fields like design, UX and testing, the overall gender ratio will be much closer to 1:1.
  - commandlinefan 7y ago
    > There's this hypothesis that men statistically tend to pick jobs involving working with and treating patients as things, and women tend to pick jobs involving people and socializing. Data to support this hypothesis here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge... ObGyns are 85% female, Pediatrics 75%, while radiology is 72% male and anesthesiology 63%.
    - Herodotus38 7y ago
      One caveat is that OB-GYN falls under much more of a surgical specialty so it doesn't really fit that hypothesis.
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    > And I suspect - but didn't check - that if you expand the definition of "software" to include supporting fields like design, UX and testing, the overall gender ratio will be much closer to 1:1. Could also look at careers like "developer evangelist" and "solutions engineer", both of which are technical but much more people-oriented than being a regular software engineer.
- mindslight 7y ago
  You're talking right past the comment you're replying to. "Why not medicine? Why not Law?" is straightforwardly explained by the original theory (higher status/stability), yet you're bringing them up as if they're counter examples.
- stubybubs 7y ago
  Medicine is, in fact, absolutely brutal with misogyny and every other kind of discrimination. People just can't leave it because they are $200k deep in debt, and just have to put up with it. It can be better if you end up as an attending with autonomy, but you still have problem with hospital management etc. Even straight white men hate medicine and can't leave because of debt... so it's not a great comparison.
- swagtricker 7y ago
  Perhaps the biases around the home PC and video games from the 80's is still embedded today? It's my personal favorite theory: the girls were told they couldn't play in our forts 30+ years ago. This became part of modern western culture with respect to computers & gaming and became applied to computers in general. 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...
jhedwards 7y ago
This kind of confirms a hunch I have which is that macro social beliefs change faster than corporate cultures. So a society as a whole might decide "men and women can work wherever they want" and start to teach children these values, but that doesn't mean the employees at a law or accounting firm are going to change their behaviors (not to mention their policies) at the same rate. My father was a postal worker and described to me the process that the USPS used to improve their culture, and it involved new policies, procedures, and training for all employees.
kleer001 7y ago
> tl;dr: Ask Women. This would be an amazing survey. I look forward to its publishing. I wouldn't be surprised if someone is doing it as we speak. It shouldn't be too hard or cost that much. Though, I do have to say, your sample of one is not sufficiently convincing to me.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  I don’t know how such a survey could control for projection, though. I remember reading Susan Fowler’s “blog post that was heard around the world” that ended up taking down Uber’s CEO (and nearly Uber itself) and being surprised how little of it had anything to do with being a woman - most of the frustrations she expressed were things that I’ve been frustrated by, too. It seems to me that she just experienced what every developer experienced (other than the thing about the T-shirts) and attributed all of it to her being a women, assuming that the grass must be greener on the other side.
  - kleer001 7y ago
    Hmmm, I wouldn't think that it would be a fact finding mission, but a plain old survey of opinion.
reroute1 7y ago
You mean Ask People? What does any of that have to do with being a woman? Just blanket 'patriarchy bs'?
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Well, you know, if the question is "Why are there so few women in STEM?", then specifically asking women might make some sense...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - reroute1 7y ago
    I understand, but it's referencing the environment in a workplace that applies to both sexes not just women. Her complaint may have also applied to the men there, so really we should get both sides opinion shouldn't we?
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      That's fair. Her comments about her country of origin include "patriarchal BS at the workplace", which is gender-specific, but her complaints about the US were "the jobs suck, the environments suck and people are assholes at these jobs". The first two may (or may not) be felt more strongly by women in the same circumstances. The last one may (or may not) actually be different for women. But you'd have to ask both men and women to find out.
  - funcDropShadow 7y ago
    Not, necessarily. The question could also be, why are there so many men in STEM? Because, the perceived problem, some activists try to fix is, the ratio of women vs. men in STEM. The silent assumption is often, that a ration far away from 1:1 is an indicator for blatant sexism.
masteranza 7y ago
You're right about one thing "patriarchal BS". The theory that there should be more women at some particular job sector has now reached a tipping point where it no longer makes sense because it is non-disprovable. Really, is there any kind of evidence that can hope for that would disprove this bad idea? Or will you always try to come up with some excuses? Preferential treatment (positive discrimination) in hard science not only makes the mistake of treating women as handicapped (they're surely not), but also makes the situation worse by skewing meritocracy.
zarkov99 7y ago
Here is a theory, perhaps you could comment on how if fits your experience: Women are less inclined than men to choose STEM Fields, for biological reasons, that is they tend to be more interested in people than things. Because of this STEM fields are dominated by men, who, because of sheer numbers alone, end up shaping the culture to be more masculine. This makes STEM even less appealing for the relatively rare women who do have some degree of passion for STEM. If we were to accept this theory, how would we go about improving matters for society?
- Doingmything123 7y ago
  Robert Martin talks about how in the 60's and 70's women made up a large amount of the worlds programmers. It would seem somewhere along the way we found ways to significantly reduce the number of women entering the profession. I would argue that any biological reasons have little to no influence compared to social factors. If we accept this alternative theory, then the solution is to change the social culture around STEM to not be so exclusionary.
  - chongli 7y ago
    In the early days, programming was more of a secretarial position. The computer scientists and mathematicians who created the algorithms couldn’t be bothered to write the code and type everything up on the punchcard machines. This sort of job for women is basically a continuation of the days when women were human computers, hired to do loads of calculations for mathematicians and scientists. The fact that women took these jobs has more to do with their limited opportunities elsewhere than anything else.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    > Robert Martin talks about how in the 60's and 70's women made up a large amount of the worlds programmers. It would seem somewhere along the way we found ways to significantly reduce the number of women entering the profession. I would argue that any biological reasons have little to no influence compared to social factors. If we accept this alternative theory, then the solution is to change the social culture around STEM to not be so exclusionary. First of all, the peak of women's representation in computing was ~35% - not all that much different from today's 20-25%. Second, even if we accept that social changes are what prompted the change in women's representation (and I would agree) it is erroneous to assume that this was due to exclusionary culture in technology. In fact, the data suggests the opposite - reductions in sexism result in reductions in the share of women in tech. This is likely what played out in the united states. Women were displayed into computing due to sexism in other fields. Several of the women interviewed in Clive Thompson's book Coders, explained that they chose to study computer science because law firms told them explicitly that they would not let women be trial lawyers. The reduction in the share of women in computing was due to the opening of opportunities in other fields like law and medicine, which in turn meant that women who would have been displaced into computing now have the opportunity to study the field of their choice.
Reedx 7y ago
Ask women and you'll find that most aren't interested in programming a computer all day. Which one could argue is a sane choice. If anything it's more sane. Stop trying to make them feel like something is wrong if they don't have this inclination. Males and females have different preferences on average, some as early as birth[1]. This is not a bad thing. For the ones that want to program all day, obviously they should be welcomed and any company that doesn't is doing themselves a huge disservice. In fact the best programmer I've ever worked with is a woman. 1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222673203_Sex_Differences_in_Human_Neonatal_Social_Perception https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222673203_Sex_Diffe...
- rayiner 7y ago
  > Males and females have different preferences on average, and do from birth[1]. This is not a bad thing. I feel like this is a “??? Profit!” argument. Accepting that girl infants prefer faces and boy infants prefer trucks—what does that have to do with programming? Even within the context of traditional stereotypes about male/female preferences, what makes programming a “male” thing? The analogy that programmers “build things” is just that—your typical programmer is certainly not cut out to be a construction worker.
  - banads 7y ago
    >Accepting that girl infants prefer faces and boy infants prefer trucks—what does that have to do with programming? Programming jobs often involve extremely minimal face to face interactions
    - FeepingCreature 7y ago
      Ime this is completely untrue.
    - tptacek 7y ago
      I've spent the last 15 years of my life working with engineering teams, hundreds of them, and I've never met a single one that worked this way. The opposite thing is true, unless you're fixated on literal in-the-same-room face-to-face interactions, in which case, what's your point?
TulliusCicero 7y ago
> she looked around to see writers with relatively safe, high-status job She did? Where did she find these writers with safe, high status jobs? Maybe PR?
metalforever 7y ago
I am a woman in software and I agree with this.
datashow 7y ago
I can't believe this comment get voted up. > women in America are "organically" picking non-STEM jobs, but that is because the jobs suck, the environments suck and people are assholes at these jobs Very general assessment without any supporting evidence. Your sister is not sufficient evidence to make this kind of assessment. Neither is "Ask Women". By the way, I will be very surprised to hear women in general are treated better in India than in America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_inequality_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_inequality_in_India
hailk 7y ago
My gf is in a community oriented job here in India. Dominated by women. Men are criticized much harshly, the environment is outright unprofessional with sex talk and gossip constantly at work. Every other day there is another girl crying because her work was criticized (fairly). Maybe try looking outside populist narratives with a more nuanced view, toxicity flows both ways. tl;dr: Ask Men and Women.
youngteacher 7y ago
Fuck training people that are older than me, have higher credentials than me but still expect me to handhold them and then cry that its a hostile environment while they fail to do the job they obtained a 5 year degree for and then in the end some third party like an intern with even less experience than me redoes the job better. Said intern is not a man so clearly the damn problem is not the gender. It's complete disinterest in the job.

DuskStar 7y ago

The problem I always have with this argument is "Why not medicine? Why not Law?" Why is it that two professions that you'd naively expect to be just as sexist, if not far more sexist than STEM (Higher status, more of an "old boys club", established hierarchy that has positions like nurses for women, etc) have achieved gender parity, while STEM hasn't?

nervousvarun 7y ago
Not necessarily disagreeing or commenting on your point, but doesn't medicine typically fall under STEM?
- maxnoe 7y ago
  NOOO. Science, Technics, Engineering, Math. The M is not for Medicine
  - diffeomorphism 7y ago
    But science includes biology, chemistry, pharmacy and medical research (e.g. molecular biology, neurology,...). So just because it is not the M does not say it is not part of STEM. Actually, I am unsure how country specific this is and where to put medicine with respect to hard sciences, soft sciences, social sciences etc.
    - bakuninsbart 7y ago
      > Actually, I am unsure how country specific It is kind of hilarious how different this works in a lot of countries. For example in German, the translation of science is 'Wissenschaft'. It would literally translate to "the thing you do to make knowledge". Humanities are called 'Geistes'wissenschaft and Law is called 'Rechts'wissenschaft'. Math is generally considered to be part of the humanities, and CS is usually either part of the math-department or very closely settled to the engineering department. There's many more differences between the german and anglo academic culture, let alone all the other ones out there.
      - diffeomorphism 7y ago
        > Math is generally considered to be part of the humanities Hm, not always. In my experience it was a B.Sc., M. Sc. and Dr. rer. nat. and in the math-nat department, but it can also be associated with philosophy and of course there is no scientific method in math. For medicine you also have the (again country specific?) question whether a medical doctorate is comparable to a hard science one, e.g. for the purpose of grants in medical research.
  - reroute1 7y ago
    Let's think liberally and not confine this concept to a strict acronym that seems overly narrow
  - cortesoft 7y ago
    I would think medicine falls under the science category.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  Not that I'm aware - Science Technology Engineering Math is the definition of STEM I see most frequently. I'd consider Medicine to be heavily STEM adjacent, particularly in the US where most doctors get a bachelors in a STEM field before heading to med school, but not a part of it. Googling around seems that it's contentious, and that a lot of people consider nurses, physicians etc to be STEM careers under the 'science' heading. But this doesn't seem all that core to me. (And you have to draw the line somewhere - are psychiatrists STEM? How about psychologists?)
  - cortesoft 7y ago
    Engineering and Math are the only two of those letters that have an actual college major with the same name..... you can't major in 'science', you major in one of the subfields of science. In fact, medicine isn't even an undergraduate major (although some universities will offer a 'pre-med' major, but not many). Many people who go on to go to medical school will major in a STEM subject in undergrad (like biology or something)
    - bakuninsbart 7y ago
      > In fact, medicine isn't even an undergraduate major (although some universities will offer a 'pre-med' major, but not many). This is a US-centric view - most people do in fact study medicine right out of school. It is interesting though that the definition of what constitutes a field vary quite greaty around the globe.
      - cortesoft 7y ago
        It was using the example of US colleges to make the point that it is too narrow a definition to say only fields that are pure science count as STEM. There are very few pure science or math fields, but I don't think you need to be 'pure' to be considered STEM.
  - bakuninsbart 7y ago
    Honestly, the definition of STEM can go in a lot of directions. CS is basically a field of engineering with a heavy slant of maths. Medicine shares a lot of characteristics with engineering, as it is very practical and result-focused, and it shares a lot of the methodology with the Sciences. I think it is quite firmly in the STEM spectrum.
- michaelt 7y ago
  Some people use STEMM for “science technology engineering mathematics and medicine” Medicine-aligned subjects do a lot to improve the gender ratio, if one wants to improve the gender equality figures...
- eindiran 7y ago
  It depends who you ask, but typically not. STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (ie the 'M' isn't 'medicine', which is what a lot of people think).
  - nervousvarun 7y ago
    Right I definitely knew it was math (have 2 engineering degrees myself :) )...but still assumed it was commonly assumed to fall on the spectrum of STEM (definitely on the opposite end from say...physics...but still on the spectrum). How can anyone get a qualifying score on the MCAT without significant exposure to science? Disclaimer: I'm definitely coming at this from a U.S. point of view which someone mentioned in another comment effectively (not always but definitely in the overwhelming majority of cases) requires STEM undergrad degrees to get into medicine.
    - eindiran 7y ago
      Some branches of medical research are basic sciences (eg endocrinology), and some are applied sciences (those broadly construed as 'health science', eg dietetics). But the practice of medicine in a clinical setting (healthcare) is both a science and an art (ie a skill learned by practicing it), and I think most would say that the knowledge it requires is scientific but much of the day-to-day work is an art. So people tend to disagree about where to put medicine. But overall, most major public institutions in the US don't include medicine in STEM: * US Department of Labor (Bureau of Labor Statistics) -- No. (https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2007/spring/art04.pdf https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2007/spring/art04.pdf) * US Department of Commerce (Economics and Statistics Administration) -- No. (https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED522129.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED522129.pdf) * NSF -- No. "The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering."
  - cortesoft 7y ago
    Right, but medicine is part of science.... would you argue that a Physics major isn't in STEM because P is not one of the letters of STEM?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 7y ago
The legal profession is far ahead of STEM in addressing sexism. Many law firms have adopted the Mansfield Rule, which requires the pools of promotion candidates to comprise 30-50% women or other underrepresented groups: https://www.law.com/dailyreportonline/2019/09/06/more-firms-in-atlanta-hit-mansfield-rule-diversity-benchmark-this-year https://www.law.com/dailyreportonline/2019/09/06/more-firms-.... Major clients are imposing diversity criteria on outside counsel hired for their matters. Many major firms have 20% or more women in the equity partnership ranks. About a third of newly promoted partners are women. More than 30% of Fortune 500 GCs are now women. That’s the result of decades of work, which started with affirmative efforts by law schools to achieve gender parity at the beginning of the pipeline. (Those efforts proved self sustaining. Once women didn’t have to swim upstream to choose law school—facing years of being in a small minority at the outset of their careers—efforts to recruit them specifically became unnecessary.) There is a ways to go yet before we hit parity, but I feel like in STEM folks are still litigating the issue of whether numeric parity should even be the goal. That question was settled in the legal field a long time ago.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  > promotion candidates to comprise 30-50% women or other underrepresented groups I think most tech companies would go into a full-blown panic if you imposed a quota of non-asians (who are something like 5% of the U.S. population) for technical positions.
- masteranza 7y ago
  From quite long time ago women are accepted to universities. Yet to prove your point about "law being fixed long time ago" you refer to news from few months ago.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    I didn’t say law was “fixed.” (To paraphrase Justice Ginsberg, law will be “fixed” when there are nine women on the Supreme Court.) What I said was that recent progress is the result of work that started decades ago. Harvard law graduated its first women in 1953. But back then top women law graduates were still getting offers to be secretaries. (Justice Ginsberg’s story was not at all atypical for her cohort.) That, along with the prospect of joining a 90%+ male class in and of itself dissuaded women from pursing law. Law schools fixed that by making 50-50 classes an express goal, and then achieving that goal. Then law firms made 50-50 classes of incoming associates an express goal, and achieved that goal. Gender parity was achieved not simply by accepting women to law schools, but by actively seeking to admit gender balanced classes. But once that happened, the new ratio became self-perpetuating. When being a woman lawyer no longer meant being part of a tiny minority in law school, a firm, etc., women self-selected into it when previously they had opted out. I strongly suspect the same factors are in play in STEM: women who would be good programmers self-select out of the field because they don’t want to be the 1-2 women in a class of 20 men, or the 1-2 women programmers on a team of 20 men.
lifeformed 7y ago
I think STEM just has a much lower barrier to entry than med and law. It's a lot more accessible in terms of cost and number of opportunities available, and doesn't require spending a third of your life in school.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
In case of medicine - because it's a large field full of career paths that are very different from each other. The daily realities of being a pediatrician, a surgeon, a psychiatrist or a radiologist have very little in common. There's this hypothesis that men statistically tend to pick jobs involving working with and treating patients as things, and women tend to pick jobs involving people and socializing. Medicine as a field is full of high-status jobs of both kind, so - under this hypothesis - gender parity of the overarching field is entirely unsurprising. And, as predicted, individual specializations tend to show strong gender skew. Law is also a very large field, so I suspect the profession probably shows a similar dynamic. Viewed through this lens, our industry is less like "medicine", and more like "radiology". And I suspect - but didn't check - that if you expand the definition of "software" to include supporting fields like design, UX and testing, the overall gender ratio will be much closer to 1:1.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  > There's this hypothesis that men statistically tend to pick jobs involving working with and treating patients as things, and women tend to pick jobs involving people and socializing. Data to support this hypothesis here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge... ObGyns are 85% female, Pediatrics 75%, while radiology is 72% male and anesthesiology 63%.
  - Herodotus38 7y ago
    One caveat is that OB-GYN falls under much more of a surgical specialty so it doesn't really fit that hypothesis.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  > And I suspect - but didn't check - that if you expand the definition of "software" to include supporting fields like design, UX and testing, the overall gender ratio will be much closer to 1:1. Could also look at careers like "developer evangelist" and "solutions engineer", both of which are technical but much more people-oriented than being a regular software engineer.
mindslight 7y ago
You're talking right past the comment you're replying to. "Why not medicine? Why not Law?" is straightforwardly explained by the original theory (higher status/stability), yet you're bringing them up as if they're counter examples.
stubybubs 7y ago
Medicine is, in fact, absolutely brutal with misogyny and every other kind of discrimination. People just can't leave it because they are $200k deep in debt, and just have to put up with it. It can be better if you end up as an attending with autonomy, but you still have problem with hospital management etc. Even straight white men hate medicine and can't leave because of debt... so it's not a great comparison.
swagtricker 7y ago
Perhaps the biases around the home PC and video games from the 80's is still embedded today? It's my personal favorite theory: the girls were told they couldn't play in our forts 30+ years ago. This became part of modern western culture with respect to computers & gaming and became applied to computers in general. 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...

jhedwards 7y ago

This kind of confirms a hunch I have which is that macro social beliefs change faster than corporate cultures. So a society as a whole might decide "men and women can work wherever they want" and start to teach children these values, but that doesn't mean the employees at a law or accounting firm are going to change their behaviors (not to mention their policies) at the same rate. My father was a postal worker and described to me the process that the USPS used to improve their culture, and it involved new policies, procedures, and training for all employees.

kleer001 7y ago

> tl;dr: Ask Women. This would be an amazing survey. I look forward to its publishing. I wouldn't be surprised if someone is doing it as we speak. It shouldn't be too hard or cost that much. Though, I do have to say, your sample of one is not sufficiently convincing to me.

commandlinefan 7y ago
I don’t know how such a survey could control for projection, though. I remember reading Susan Fowler’s “blog post that was heard around the world” that ended up taking down Uber’s CEO (and nearly Uber itself) and being surprised how little of it had anything to do with being a woman - most of the frustrations she expressed were things that I’ve been frustrated by, too. It seems to me that she just experienced what every developer experienced (other than the thing about the T-shirts) and attributed all of it to her being a women, assuming that the grass must be greener on the other side.
- kleer001 7y ago
  Hmmm, I wouldn't think that it would be a fact finding mission, but a plain old survey of opinion.

reroute1 7y ago

You mean Ask People? What does any of that have to do with being a woman? Just blanket 'patriarchy bs'?

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Well, you know, if the question is "Why are there so few women in STEM?", then specifically asking women might make some sense...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- reroute1 7y ago
  I understand, but it's referencing the environment in a workplace that applies to both sexes not just women. Her complaint may have also applied to the men there, so really we should get both sides opinion shouldn't we?
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    That's fair. Her comments about her country of origin include "patriarchal BS at the workplace", which is gender-specific, but her complaints about the US were "the jobs suck, the environments suck and people are assholes at these jobs". The first two may (or may not) be felt more strongly by women in the same circumstances. The last one may (or may not) actually be different for women. But you'd have to ask both men and women to find out.
- funcDropShadow 7y ago
  Not, necessarily. The question could also be, why are there so many men in STEM? Because, the perceived problem, some activists try to fix is, the ratio of women vs. men in STEM. The silent assumption is often, that a ration far away from 1:1 is an indicator for blatant sexism.

masteranza 7y ago

You're right about one thing "patriarchal BS". The theory that there should be more women at some particular job sector has now reached a tipping point where it no longer makes sense because it is non-disprovable. Really, is there any kind of evidence that can hope for that would disprove this bad idea? Or will you always try to come up with some excuses? Preferential treatment (positive discrimination) in hard science not only makes the mistake of treating women as handicapped (they're surely not), but also makes the situation worse by skewing meritocracy.

zarkov99 7y ago

Here is a theory, perhaps you could comment on how if fits your experience: Women are less inclined than men to choose STEM Fields, for biological reasons, that is they tend to be more interested in people than things. Because of this STEM fields are dominated by men, who, because of sheer numbers alone, end up shaping the culture to be more masculine. This makes STEM even less appealing for the relatively rare women who do have some degree of passion for STEM. If we were to accept this theory, how would we go about improving matters for society?

Doingmything123 7y ago
Robert Martin talks about how in the 60's and 70's women made up a large amount of the worlds programmers. It would seem somewhere along the way we found ways to significantly reduce the number of women entering the profession. I would argue that any biological reasons have little to no influence compared to social factors. If we accept this alternative theory, then the solution is to change the social culture around STEM to not be so exclusionary.
- chongli 7y ago
  In the early days, programming was more of a secretarial position. The computer scientists and mathematicians who created the algorithms couldn’t be bothered to write the code and type everything up on the punchcard machines. This sort of job for women is basically a continuation of the days when women were human computers, hired to do loads of calculations for mathematicians and scientists. The fact that women took these jobs has more to do with their limited opportunities elsewhere than anything else.
- manfredo 7y ago
  > Robert Martin talks about how in the 60's and 70's women made up a large amount of the worlds programmers. It would seem somewhere along the way we found ways to significantly reduce the number of women entering the profession. I would argue that any biological reasons have little to no influence compared to social factors. If we accept this alternative theory, then the solution is to change the social culture around STEM to not be so exclusionary. First of all, the peak of women's representation in computing was ~35% - not all that much different from today's 20-25%. Second, even if we accept that social changes are what prompted the change in women's representation (and I would agree) it is erroneous to assume that this was due to exclusionary culture in technology. In fact, the data suggests the opposite - reductions in sexism result in reductions in the share of women in tech. This is likely what played out in the united states. Women were displayed into computing due to sexism in other fields. Several of the women interviewed in Clive Thompson's book Coders, explained that they chose to study computer science because law firms told them explicitly that they would not let women be trial lawyers. The reduction in the share of women in computing was due to the opening of opportunities in other fields like law and medicine, which in turn meant that women who would have been displaced into computing now have the opportunity to study the field of their choice.

Reedx 7y ago

Ask women and you'll find that most aren't interested in programming a computer all day. Which one could argue is a sane choice. If anything it's more sane. Stop trying to make them feel like something is wrong if they don't have this inclination. Males and females have different preferences on average, some as early as birth[1]. This is not a bad thing. For the ones that want to program all day, obviously they should be welcomed and any company that doesn't is doing themselves a huge disservice. In fact the best programmer I've ever worked with is a woman. 1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222673203_Sex_Differences_in_Human_Neonatal_Social_Perception https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222673203_Sex_Diffe...

rayiner 7y ago
> Males and females have different preferences on average, and do from birth[1]. This is not a bad thing. I feel like this is a “??? Profit!” argument. Accepting that girl infants prefer faces and boy infants prefer trucks—what does that have to do with programming? Even within the context of traditional stereotypes about male/female preferences, what makes programming a “male” thing? The analogy that programmers “build things” is just that—your typical programmer is certainly not cut out to be a construction worker.
- banads 7y ago
  >Accepting that girl infants prefer faces and boy infants prefer trucks—what does that have to do with programming? Programming jobs often involve extremely minimal face to face interactions
  - FeepingCreature 7y ago
    Ime this is completely untrue.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    I've spent the last 15 years of my life working with engineering teams, hundreds of them, and I've never met a single one that worked this way. The opposite thing is true, unless you're fixated on literal in-the-same-room face-to-face interactions, in which case, what's your point?

TulliusCicero 7y ago

> she looked around to see writers with relatively safe, high-status job She did? Where did she find these writers with safe, high status jobs? Maybe PR?

metalforever 7y ago

I am a woman in software and I agree with this.

datashow 7y ago

I can't believe this comment get voted up. > women in America are "organically" picking non-STEM jobs, but that is because the jobs suck, the environments suck and people are assholes at these jobs Very general assessment without any supporting evidence. Your sister is not sufficient evidence to make this kind of assessment. Neither is "Ask Women". By the way, I will be very surprised to hear women in general are treated better in India than in America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_inequality_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_inequality_in_India

hailk 7y ago

My gf is in a community oriented job here in India. Dominated by women. Men are criticized much harshly, the environment is outright unprofessional with sex talk and gossip constantly at work. Every other day there is another girl crying because her work was criticized (fairly). Maybe try looking outside populist narratives with a more nuanced view, toxicity flows both ways. tl;dr: Ask Men and Women.

youngteacher 7y ago

Fuck training people that are older than me, have higher credentials than me but still expect me to handhold them and then cry that its a hostile environment while they fail to do the job they obtained a 5 year degree for and then in the end some third party like an intern with even less experience than me redoes the job better. Said intern is not a man so clearly the damn problem is not the gender. It's complete disinterest in the job.