11 ms·

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,

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...

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...