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> Many women I meet today simply did not consider the possibility of an engineering career And I'm sure many men simply did not consider the possibility of a c

> Many women I meet today simply did not consider the possibility of an engineering career And I'm sure many men simply did not consider the possibility of a career in female dominated professions, like nursing or elementary education. I think there's certainly something to the idea that we internalize stereotypes and that can restrict our options, but I'm skeptical that it generally explains large differences in career preference today. For example, women were once stereotyped as not being doctors or lawyers, but that didn't seem to stop them from joining those fields en masse. If internalized stereotyping didn't matter enough to stop them then, for those fields, why does it matter now for engineering?

jayd16 7y ago
Well it's certainly an open question, although here's something that's just struck me. Careers that were dominated by women were in the orbit of doctors and lawyers, those being nurses, paralegals and secretaries. If you're thinking about being a nurse, why not consider being a doctor? I'm not sure STEM professions had these associated careers.
foldr 7y ago
>For example, women were once stereotyped as not being doctors or lawyers, but that didn't seem to stop them from joining those fields en masse. If internalized stereotyping didn't matter enough to stop them then, for those fields, why does it matter now for engineering? The fields you mention made serious efforts to counter sexism. STEM hasn't, yet.
- manfredo 7y ago
  STEM hasn't made serious efforts to counter sexism? That starkly contrasts with my observations. For the entirety of my life (I'm over 25) that I can remember I've encountered programs and initiatives working towards getting women into STEM. All of the companies I've worked at instituted hiring policies that favor women (e.g. giving women 2 chances to pass a technical phone screen instead of one). And we're not alone in this. Microsoft and Intel have both instituted policies of witholding bonuses unless diversity quotas are met, and Facebook gives recruiters more points - which count towards performance reviews - for recruiting diverse candidates[1]. 1. https://www.payscale.com/compensation-today/2019/03/tie-bonuses-to-diversity-goals https://www.payscale.com/compensation-today/2019/03/tie-bonu...
  - foldr 7y ago
    These kinds of top-down initiatives are well and good, but the real problem is cultural. You only have to read this discussion to see why women don't want to work in STEM.
    - manfredo 7y ago
      Elaborate. What are the "serious efforts" made by medical and law industries that got women into these professions that STEM has not employed? Furthermore, do you care to identify what in this discussion makes it so clear why women would not go into STEM?
      - naasking 7y ago
        > What are the "serious efforts" made by medical and law industries that got women into these professions that STEM has not employed? More than that, what "cultural changes" did they enact? From what I've read of the history, culture only shifted after women achieved rough gender parity. Cultural shifts follow demographic shifts, not vice versa. And even now, gender disparities exist that can't be explained by sexist theories. For instance, why is surgery dominated by men and pediatrics dominated by women? Sexist theories have a lot of holes like these gender disparities within fields and the gender equality paradox that's the subject of this article. And yet, there's a theory that explains all of the data we see: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00189/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018... This theory relegates sexism to a minor role, perhaps affecting single digit differences in gender disparities, not the double digits we actually see.
  - commandlinefan 7y ago
    > For the entirety of my life (I'm over 25) Mine, too, and I'm over 45.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  So you're suggesting the lawyers and doctors in charge back in the 60's and 70's were more progressive and less sexist than engineers in 2019? Really? That's what you're going with?
  - foldr 7y ago
    No? Where do I say that?
    - TulliusCicero 7y ago
      It's implied by saying that those other fields made serious efforts to combat sexism back then, but CS hasn't made an equivalent effort now. What other reason would there be for such a discrepancy, other than being motivated by sexism?
      - foldr 7y ago
        You've made this point elsewhere in the thread, but it doesn't really make any sense. See the responses to your other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21775710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21775710
    - bosie 7y ago
      TulliusCicero is saying that the 60s and 70s were the period when women entered those fields en masse. Hence you should compare the state of those fields in the 60s/70s to the CS field now if you wanna determine sexism as the cause of entering/not-entering a given field.
- oarabbus_ 7y ago
  Medicine and Law have made serious efforts to counter sexism? Like what? Law is essentially the definition of the "Old Boys Club" and as for Medicine... I used to work in the medical field for a while. Go ask any (female) surgical nurse about the supposed efforts to counter sexism in the OR. I don't believe your claim is true.
  - foldr 7y ago
    I'm not saying that law and medicine are perfect. But they were once just as stereotypically male as tech is now, and yet have radically shifted their gender balance. Fifty years ago people would no doubt have told you that women just weren't interested in becoming lawyers or doctors. Now a majority of attorneys in the US are women, and more women are enrolling in medical school than men.
    - TulliusCicero 7y ago
      > But they were once just as stereotypically male as tech is now, and yet have radically shifted their gender balance. You say this as if the fields themselves decided, but it could just as easily be that women pushed in harder. > Fifty years ago people would no doubt have told you that women just weren't interested in becoming lawyers or doctors. Again, what was the difference? You've suggested a relative difference in sexism at the time, but I've seen no data suggesting this. It just looks like a guess on your part.
      - foldr 7y ago
        I think you are reading a lot into my comment that isn't there. I don't know exactly why women fifty years ago made the decisions that they did. You don't, either.
        TulliusCicero 7y ago
        You're being vague and deflecting here. In one comment you suggest that the cause is law and medicine being relatively less sexist, and here you just say, "well, we don't know why they did what they did." Well, which is it? What basis do you have for your earlier point? > You don't, either. Why would you even say this? The comment you responded to didn't have me asserting a reason why. It's like you're attacking a strawman.
- losvedir 7y ago
  > The fields you mention made serious efforts to counter sexism. Do you have any references on what those efforts were?
  - knicholes 7y ago
    I've served multiple times at SheTech (an event where we invite thousands of highschool girls to come learn about tech and jobs), and I've helped host at least five Hour of Code events at Adobe where we make sure half of those invited are female where we teach robotics. I've also spent a couple years teaching refugees how to code, and we make sure half of those students are female, as well. I've never attended personally, but we also host an event yearly called "Girls Who Code." Adobe has also partnered with a local dev bootcamp to hire intern graduates-- I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty confident that there's an emphasis on female graduates.
bobthepanda 7y ago
Media representation? Female lawyers and female doctors are fairly common in media. Female engineers, not so much, and definitely not in a context where the women are not deviating from social norms (you need to be a tomboy, you need to be geeky, you need to be "not like those other girls" etc.) Representation is important - MLK convinced Nichelle Nichols to stay on Star Trek because she was, at the time, the only black educated woman in a leadership position on television.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  > Female lawyers and female doctors are fairly common in media. Now, yes, but what about in the 60's and 70's?
- briandear 7y ago
  How many engineers are represented in the media in general? Has there been a hit TV show with male engineers as the main character?
  - jayd16 7y ago
    Big bang theory, for example, has mostly male nerds. The core Silicon Valley engineering team is male. There are of course exceptions but male and female engineers are not represented equally in media.
    - funcDropShadow 7y ago
      But what should they represent? The real world, some fictional idealistic world? If so, whose idealistic world should tv shows represent?
    - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
      Big Bang Theory first season maybe. Ultimately they were almost parity.
  - stevenwoo 7y ago
    How big a hit? Halt and Catch Fire fictionalized a lot but two of the four leads were software and hardware engineers, The Expanse has the primary hardware/software hacker on the ship as one of the four main characters but it's a woman, Person of Interest had two of the four main characters be software programmers, one a man and one a woman, Mr Robot has software developers for most roles besides gangster and law enforcement, one of the four or five primary characters on 12 Monkeys was a scientist/engineer but a woman, Westworld has the scientist as the main human character for the first season and a different one for the second, most of what they do looks like software programming, Chernobyl showed a lot of engineers in the nuclear control room, trying to fix things afterwards.

jayd16 7y ago

Well it's certainly an open question, although here's something that's just struck me. Careers that were dominated by women were in the orbit of doctors and lawyers, those being nurses, paralegals and secretaries. If you're thinking about being a nurse, why not consider being a doctor? I'm not sure STEM professions had these associated careers.

foldr 7y ago

>For example, women were once stereotyped as not being doctors or lawyers, but that didn't seem to stop them from joining those fields en masse. If internalized stereotyping didn't matter enough to stop them then, for those fields, why does it matter now for engineering? The fields you mention made serious efforts to counter sexism. STEM hasn't, yet.

manfredo 7y ago
STEM hasn't made serious efforts to counter sexism? That starkly contrasts with my observations. For the entirety of my life (I'm over 25) that I can remember I've encountered programs and initiatives working towards getting women into STEM. All of the companies I've worked at instituted hiring policies that favor women (e.g. giving women 2 chances to pass a technical phone screen instead of one). And we're not alone in this. Microsoft and Intel have both instituted policies of witholding bonuses unless diversity quotas are met, and Facebook gives recruiters more points - which count towards performance reviews - for recruiting diverse candidates[1]. 1. https://www.payscale.com/compensation-today/2019/03/tie-bonuses-to-diversity-goals https://www.payscale.com/compensation-today/2019/03/tie-bonu...
- foldr 7y ago
  These kinds of top-down initiatives are well and good, but the real problem is cultural. You only have to read this discussion to see why women don't want to work in STEM.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    Elaborate. What are the "serious efforts" made by medical and law industries that got women into these professions that STEM has not employed? Furthermore, do you care to identify what in this discussion makes it so clear why women would not go into STEM?
    - naasking 7y ago
      > What are the "serious efforts" made by medical and law industries that got women into these professions that STEM has not employed? More than that, what "cultural changes" did they enact? From what I've read of the history, culture only shifted after women achieved rough gender parity. Cultural shifts follow demographic shifts, not vice versa. And even now, gender disparities exist that can't be explained by sexist theories. For instance, why is surgery dominated by men and pediatrics dominated by women? Sexist theories have a lot of holes like these gender disparities within fields and the gender equality paradox that's the subject of this article. And yet, there's a theory that explains all of the data we see: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00189/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018... This theory relegates sexism to a minor role, perhaps affecting single digit differences in gender disparities, not the double digits we actually see.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  > For the entirety of my life (I'm over 25) Mine, too, and I'm over 45.
TulliusCicero 7y ago
So you're suggesting the lawyers and doctors in charge back in the 60's and 70's were more progressive and less sexist than engineers in 2019? Really? That's what you're going with?
- foldr 7y ago
  No? Where do I say that?
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    It's implied by saying that those other fields made serious efforts to combat sexism back then, but CS hasn't made an equivalent effort now. What other reason would there be for such a discrepancy, other than being motivated by sexism?
    - foldr 7y ago
      You've made this point elsewhere in the thread, but it doesn't really make any sense. See the responses to your other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21775710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21775710
  - bosie 7y ago
    TulliusCicero is saying that the 60s and 70s were the period when women entered those fields en masse. Hence you should compare the state of those fields in the 60s/70s to the CS field now if you wanna determine sexism as the cause of entering/not-entering a given field.
oarabbus_ 7y ago
Medicine and Law have made serious efforts to counter sexism? Like what? Law is essentially the definition of the "Old Boys Club" and as for Medicine... I used to work in the medical field for a while. Go ask any (female) surgical nurse about the supposed efforts to counter sexism in the OR. I don't believe your claim is true.
- foldr 7y ago
  I'm not saying that law and medicine are perfect. But they were once just as stereotypically male as tech is now, and yet have radically shifted their gender balance. Fifty years ago people would no doubt have told you that women just weren't interested in becoming lawyers or doctors. Now a majority of attorneys in the US are women, and more women are enrolling in medical school than men.
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    > But they were once just as stereotypically male as tech is now, and yet have radically shifted their gender balance. You say this as if the fields themselves decided, but it could just as easily be that women pushed in harder. > Fifty years ago people would no doubt have told you that women just weren't interested in becoming lawyers or doctors. Again, what was the difference? You've suggested a relative difference in sexism at the time, but I've seen no data suggesting this. It just looks like a guess on your part.
    - foldr 7y ago
      I think you are reading a lot into my comment that isn't there. I don't know exactly why women fifty years ago made the decisions that they did. You don't, either.
      - TulliusCicero 7y ago
        You're being vague and deflecting here. In one comment you suggest that the cause is law and medicine being relatively less sexist, and here you just say, "well, we don't know why they did what they did." Well, which is it? What basis do you have for your earlier point? > You don't, either. Why would you even say this? The comment you responded to didn't have me asserting a reason why. It's like you're attacking a strawman.
losvedir 7y ago
> The fields you mention made serious efforts to counter sexism. Do you have any references on what those efforts were?
- knicholes 7y ago
  I've served multiple times at SheTech (an event where we invite thousands of highschool girls to come learn about tech and jobs), and I've helped host at least five Hour of Code events at Adobe where we make sure half of those invited are female where we teach robotics. I've also spent a couple years teaching refugees how to code, and we make sure half of those students are female, as well. I've never attended personally, but we also host an event yearly called "Girls Who Code." Adobe has also partnered with a local dev bootcamp to hire intern graduates-- I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty confident that there's an emphasis on female graduates.

bobthepanda 7y ago

Media representation? Female lawyers and female doctors are fairly common in media. Female engineers, not so much, and definitely not in a context where the women are not deviating from social norms (you need to be a tomboy, you need to be geeky, you need to be "not like those other girls" etc.) Representation is important - MLK convinced Nichelle Nichols to stay on Star Trek because she was, at the time, the only black educated woman in a leadership position on television.

TulliusCicero 7y ago
> Female lawyers and female doctors are fairly common in media. Now, yes, but what about in the 60's and 70's?
briandear 7y ago
How many engineers are represented in the media in general? Has there been a hit TV show with male engineers as the main character?
- jayd16 7y ago
  Big bang theory, for example, has mostly male nerds. The core Silicon Valley engineering team is male. There are of course exceptions but male and female engineers are not represented equally in media.
  - funcDropShadow 7y ago
    But what should they represent? The real world, some fictional idealistic world? If so, whose idealistic world should tv shows represent?
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Big Bang Theory first season maybe. Ultimately they were almost parity.
- stevenwoo 7y ago
  How big a hit? Halt and Catch Fire fictionalized a lot but two of the four leads were software and hardware engineers, The Expanse has the primary hardware/software hacker on the ship as one of the four main characters but it's a woman, Person of Interest had two of the four main characters be software programmers, one a man and one a woman, Mr Robot has software developers for most roles besides gangster and law enforcement, one of the four or five primary characters on 12 Monkeys was a scientist/engineer but a woman, Westworld has the scientist as the main human character for the first season and a different one for the second, most of what they do looks like software programming, Chernobyl showed a lot of engineers in the nuclear control room, trying to fix things afterwards.