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Men and women (biologically and socially) have different interests. This is different than capabilities. Countries with the most free choices see the most divis

Men and women (biologically and socially) have different interests. This is different than capabilities. Countries with the most free choices see the most division between sexes in different professions. Nobody seems to have a problem when it comes to auto mechanics, medical sciences, teachers, social services, lawyers, etc. Why are different interests such a controversial thing to accept?

ergothus 7y ago
1) I'd argue that you arent paying much attention to those other industries. I certainly see issue commonly raised in a few you mention that are in my circles. Things that still make me double-take. 2) tech is just the latest in a series. Comp sci degree enrollment for women DROPPED for recent decades - that's not a biological lack of interest. This has occurred in many professions - when the profession becomes high profile, the women are driven out. 3) you are proving the problem in the original memo. Instead of looking into any of the research on the topic, you are repeating what feels true. You speak with such confidence on the different interests of different genders, without considering how you know what the actual interests might be. (You're assuming what you see must be the result of interests, and use that to prove a difference of interests is the cause. That's a tautology) You assert that "no one seems to have a problem" with imbalances in other professions, when it is trivial to find people definitely have problems.
- manigandham 7y ago
  What other professions? What series? Computer science degrees and jobs are seeing a rise in women, but they're already the majority in biological sciences and other disciplines. Would you claim men are conditioned to not going into those fields? The research on the topic covers what I state about different countries and societies showing how different interests affect professions. Here are some links: https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different.html https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-... https://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-girls-3848156-Feb2018/ https://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-gir... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Things_Women_and_People_A_Meta-Analysis_of_Sex_Differences_in_Interests https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th... https://www.nber.org/papers/w22173 https://www.nber.org/papers/w22173
  - orwin 7y ago
    Nah, in the late 50s and until the 90s, there was around 25% on women in computer science in the US, and close to 50% in some countries like France an UK (i think a book was written on why in 2017). I've talked to Pr. Emeritus Mallard a lot three year ago, who was a biology researcher studying genotype and phenotype in animal/vegetal populations (for context, he got his degree around the time we discovered ADN). From what he remember, there was a lot more than 50% women when he started, at least as "programmers", although they were barely viewed as clever seamstress at the time. Each time he wanted to do a computer-assisted statistical study in the early days, the programmer was a woman (again, from what he remembers) and he always thought the field was dominated by them, at least for grunts work.
    - erik_seaberg 7y ago
      There was a time when it was "systems analysts" who gathered requirements and made decisions and wrote flowcharts, and "programmer" was a glorified data entry position translating a flowchart into assembly/FORTRAN/COBOL on punch cards that the system could run. As computers became more powerful, "programmer/analysts" began writing their own source code in "higher-level" compiled languages (this meant reentrant functions and loops and "if" blocks rather than globals and computed "goto") as the full-time "programmer" job became obsolete with automation.
      - Taniwha 7y ago
        That's a red herring, and also the 60s - I started my career in the late 70s, 1/3 of my CS class was female, my first job in the US (as a kernel hack) was almost 50% female, still some of the best engineers I've ever worked with, all doing the same job I was. I don't know what happened, by the time my daughter was doing CS the number of woman was < 10% and she and her compatriots were literally hounded out of the course by the bro-culture - personally I blame gamer culture, there's something terribly dysfunctional with kids these days
        cameronbrown 7y ago
- apta 7y ago
  > when the profession becomes high profile, the women are driven out Because of fierce competition, where males (primarily driven by testosterone) have a higher drive to compete. It's biological. This doesn't mean that there aren't going to be women who will compete with said men, just fewer of them.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    Law and medicine are very competitive fields, with a higher representation of women. And tech/CS has not always been as competitive as it perhaps is today. Hence Damore's argument is somewhat subtler than this, and focuses on diverging interests that lead to having fewer women in the pipeline to begin with. Some people point to the boom in videogames and home computers throughout the 1970s and 1980s as a reason why this divergence was not apparent earlier.
    - pacala 7y ago
      That is an interesting question. How are law and medicine different than CS career-wise? A couple additional thoughts, not intended to be exhaustive: * CS is notorious for its solitary aspect. Stare at a screen juggling abstractions for hours on end. * CS is notorious for lack of career paths. Between ageism and outsourcing, once you hit 40, the perception is you are relegated to the bottom of the pile.
      - humanrebar 7y ago
        > CS is notorious for its solitary aspect. Stare at a screen juggling abstractions for hours on end. It's also false. Software is inherently collaborative, especially at senior levels. And it will likely stay that way as long as the job looks a lot like consulting due to lack of defined sub-specialities. There is no technician specializing in particular forms of testing in the software industry. In medicine, there is a whole host of these specialities. Point being "it's your job, so figure it out" is the rule. And that means working out not just solutions but well defined problems with peers, customers, superiors, and other stakeholders. It's possible to do interesting Computer Science in relative isolation, but good luck making a career out if it without collaboration, publication, teaching, and other inherently social activities. You might know all this, but I think it's important for the industry to push back on the nerd-bro in a basement imagery since it's absolutely not what actually happens.
jhedwards 7y ago
> Countries with the most free choices see the most division between sexes in different professions I've seen this idea around and I think it's quite problematic. Some countries may have relatively "free choices", but that is just one cultural dimension. A culture is an inconceivably complex phenomenon. A culture also has education strategies, gender roles, specific kinds of toys and games, specific languages and sub-languages, a myriad of sub-cultures that youth will cluster around, cultural specific concepts and ideas and so on. I'm not ruling out that biological factors play a role, but I see biological factors as just one part of a complex, and, additionally, if you look at history, it's very clear that cultural factors can and will override just about any biological imperative, from the will to live to the will to procreate. This should make it clear that cultural factors need to be systematically ruled out before we can begin to consider that biology is to blame.
- fastball 7y ago
  Have cultural factors not been ruled out? Affirmative action policies literally make it easier for one group to get a spot in [insert institution here] than another group. And yet we still see discrepancies. We publicly shame and fire anyone who says "maybe biological differences play a role". And yet we still see discrepancies. If we haven't ruled out cultural factors in the West at this point, I'm not sure how we can. By effectively every metric, it is easier for a woman to become an engineer in 2020 than a man. There are many, many programs and initiatives which encourage women to get into STEM from an early age – the same do not really exist for men. Women get into (and graduate from) university at a higher rate. There is more funding available specifically to women that are pursuing STEM And yet still you have more men choosing to be engineers than women.
  - jhedwards 7y ago
    > Have cultural factors not been ruled out? How could they be? That is an intractable problem. Cultural factors permeate our existence from birth. You'd literally have to catalogue every single thing influencing an individual's life from birth to the time they enter the workforce. I have two daughters and I've seen just how powerful subconscious messages from media influence the way they think. My oldest daughter is only four and she is absolutely adamant that girls can _only_ marry boys. That's clearly because the Netflix shows and Disney movies she watches all have a "girl marries boy" narrative. Think about that: my daughter is only four, I've never talked to her about marriage, and she is already firm in her belief that same sex marriage is not OK. You are talking about funding and affirmative action, but have you considered gendered advertising towards toddlers? Have you considered gendered concepts in TV shows and movies? How about in toys? Do you know how elementary school teachers, not to mention parents, are subtly encouraging and discouraging boys and girls by their words and actions? Children absorb these things and they are solidified into semi-permanent activation pathways in their developing brains. There are a million factors here that we will never grasp. Affirmative action is useless if people's minds are already fully constructed by the time those programs take effect.

ergothus 7y ago

1) I'd argue that you arent paying much attention to those other industries. I certainly see issue commonly raised in a few you mention that are in my circles. Things that still make me double-take. 2) tech is just the latest in a series. Comp sci degree enrollment for women DROPPED for recent decades - that's not a biological lack of interest. This has occurred in many professions - when the profession becomes high profile, the women are driven out. 3) you are proving the problem in the original memo. Instead of looking into any of the research on the topic, you are repeating what feels true. You speak with such confidence on the different interests of different genders, without considering how you know what the actual interests might be. (You're assuming what you see must be the result of interests, and use that to prove a difference of interests is the cause. That's a tautology) You assert that "no one seems to have a problem" with imbalances in other professions, when it is trivial to find people definitely have problems.

manigandham 7y ago
What other professions? What series? Computer science degrees and jobs are seeing a rise in women, but they're already the majority in biological sciences and other disciplines. Would you claim men are conditioned to not going into those fields? The research on the topic covers what I state about different countries and societies showing how different interests affect professions. Here are some links: https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different.html https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-... https://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-girls-3848156-Feb2018/ https://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-gir... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Things_Women_and_People_A_Meta-Analysis_of_Sex_Differences_in_Interests https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th... https://www.nber.org/papers/w22173 https://www.nber.org/papers/w22173
- orwin 7y ago
  Nah, in the late 50s and until the 90s, there was around 25% on women in computer science in the US, and close to 50% in some countries like France an UK (i think a book was written on why in 2017). I've talked to Pr. Emeritus Mallard a lot three year ago, who was a biology researcher studying genotype and phenotype in animal/vegetal populations (for context, he got his degree around the time we discovered ADN). From what he remember, there was a lot more than 50% women when he started, at least as "programmers", although they were barely viewed as clever seamstress at the time. Each time he wanted to do a computer-assisted statistical study in the early days, the programmer was a woman (again, from what he remembers) and he always thought the field was dominated by them, at least for grunts work.
  - erik_seaberg 7y ago
    There was a time when it was "systems analysts" who gathered requirements and made decisions and wrote flowcharts, and "programmer" was a glorified data entry position translating a flowchart into assembly/FORTRAN/COBOL on punch cards that the system could run. As computers became more powerful, "programmer/analysts" began writing their own source code in "higher-level" compiled languages (this meant reentrant functions and loops and "if" blocks rather than globals and computed "goto") as the full-time "programmer" job became obsolete with automation.
    - Taniwha 7y ago
      That's a red herring, and also the 60s - I started my career in the late 70s, 1/3 of my CS class was female, my first job in the US (as a kernel hack) was almost 50% female, still some of the best engineers I've ever worked with, all doing the same job I was. I don't know what happened, by the time my daughter was doing CS the number of woman was < 10% and she and her compatriots were literally hounded out of the course by the bro-culture - personally I blame gamer culture, there's something terribly dysfunctional with kids these days
      - cameronbrown 7y ago
apta 7y ago
> when the profession becomes high profile, the women are driven out Because of fierce competition, where males (primarily driven by testosterone) have a higher drive to compete. It's biological. This doesn't mean that there aren't going to be women who will compete with said men, just fewer of them.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Law and medicine are very competitive fields, with a higher representation of women. And tech/CS has not always been as competitive as it perhaps is today. Hence Damore's argument is somewhat subtler than this, and focuses on diverging interests that lead to having fewer women in the pipeline to begin with. Some people point to the boom in videogames and home computers throughout the 1970s and 1980s as a reason why this divergence was not apparent earlier.
  - pacala 7y ago
    That is an interesting question. How are law and medicine different than CS career-wise? A couple additional thoughts, not intended to be exhaustive: * CS is notorious for its solitary aspect. Stare at a screen juggling abstractions for hours on end. * CS is notorious for lack of career paths. Between ageism and outsourcing, once you hit 40, the perception is you are relegated to the bottom of the pile.
    - humanrebar 7y ago
      > CS is notorious for its solitary aspect. Stare at a screen juggling abstractions for hours on end. It's also false. Software is inherently collaborative, especially at senior levels. And it will likely stay that way as long as the job looks a lot like consulting due to lack of defined sub-specialities. There is no technician specializing in particular forms of testing in the software industry. In medicine, there is a whole host of these specialities. Point being "it's your job, so figure it out" is the rule. And that means working out not just solutions but well defined problems with peers, customers, superiors, and other stakeholders. It's possible to do interesting Computer Science in relative isolation, but good luck making a career out if it without collaboration, publication, teaching, and other inherently social activities. You might know all this, but I think it's important for the industry to push back on the nerd-bro in a basement imagery since it's absolutely not what actually happens.

jhedwards 7y ago

> Countries with the most free choices see the most division between sexes in different professions I've seen this idea around and I think it's quite problematic. Some countries may have relatively "free choices", but that is just one cultural dimension. A culture is an inconceivably complex phenomenon. A culture also has education strategies, gender roles, specific kinds of toys and games, specific languages and sub-languages, a myriad of sub-cultures that youth will cluster around, cultural specific concepts and ideas and so on. I'm not ruling out that biological factors play a role, but I see biological factors as just one part of a complex, and, additionally, if you look at history, it's very clear that cultural factors can and will override just about any biological imperative, from the will to live to the will to procreate. This should make it clear that cultural factors need to be systematically ruled out before we can begin to consider that biology is to blame.

fastball 7y ago
Have cultural factors not been ruled out? Affirmative action policies literally make it easier for one group to get a spot in [insert institution here] than another group. And yet we still see discrepancies. We publicly shame and fire anyone who says "maybe biological differences play a role". And yet we still see discrepancies. If we haven't ruled out cultural factors in the West at this point, I'm not sure how we can. By effectively every metric, it is easier for a woman to become an engineer in 2020 than a man. There are many, many programs and initiatives which encourage women to get into STEM from an early age – the same do not really exist for men. Women get into (and graduate from) university at a higher rate. There is more funding available specifically to women that are pursuing STEM And yet still you have more men choosing to be engineers than women.
- jhedwards 7y ago
  > Have cultural factors not been ruled out? How could they be? That is an intractable problem. Cultural factors permeate our existence from birth. You'd literally have to catalogue every single thing influencing an individual's life from birth to the time they enter the workforce. I have two daughters and I've seen just how powerful subconscious messages from media influence the way they think. My oldest daughter is only four and she is absolutely adamant that girls can _only_ marry boys. That's clearly because the Netflix shows and Disney movies she watches all have a "girl marries boy" narrative. Think about that: my daughter is only four, I've never talked to her about marriage, and she is already firm in her belief that same sex marriage is not OK. You are talking about funding and affirmative action, but have you considered gendered advertising towards toddlers? Have you considered gendered concepts in TV shows and movies? How about in toys? Do you know how elementary school teachers, not to mention parents, are subtly encouraging and discouraging boys and girls by their words and actions? Children absorb these things and they are solidified into semi-permanent activation pathways in their developing brains. There are a million factors here that we will never grasp. Affirmative action is useless if people's minds are already fully constructed by the time those programs take effect.