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“ Without teachers’ bias in favor of girls, the gender gap in choosing a science track would be 12.5% larger in favor of boys.” Does this not mean we have a ge

“ Without teachers’ bias in favor of girls, the gender gap in choosing a science track would be 12.5% larger in favor of boys.” Does this not mean we have a gender bias towards females in STEM at the education level? If so it’d turn around a long held belief that STEM education is biased towards men. At least in grade school.

mdorazio 6y ago
Yes, it does. It also implies that women not seeking engineering degrees likely has other factors that go mostly ignored or dismissed today.
- etempleton 6y ago
  Girls typically abandon STEM at the high school / undergraduate level. I do not pretend to know all of the factors that go into that, but one such reason I have heard is that the gender bias in STEM tends to strongly favor boys at this level and perhaps a bigger component to that is not the teachers' bias, but the bias of peers and society that students at the high school level will be increasingly aware of.
  - jl2718 6y ago
    I don't see any specific age when women abandon STEM as individual contributors; it seems to be constant throughout all life stages at a moderately higher rate than men. Until high school, however, there is no choice, and female grades are generally higher in everything, so they stick with it until they have to make a prioritization choice. I see it naively like this: life is a long process of eliminating options that don't meet your interests or best chances at success. Women in general have more options in life than men, career being only one aspect of that, which means that over time, any one of those options is going to be chosen less and less. Sociology distinguishes itself from economics in the assumption that people's choices are the result of stupidity or victimization. I just looked up the top math student in my 5th grade class. She's a 5th grade public school teacher after attending an Ivy for Geography. I have not the slightest clue why one would ever study Geography in college, nor would I find it financially prudent in my situation to be a public elementary schoolteacher, but I also know this person to be quite smart and fully-capable of making her own choices. I talk to female H1B engineers that came here for a better life, which was not STEM work, so they often quit as soon as they get a green card. I see women retiring earlier to start new careers. Female attrition is a constant feature of the entire STEM pipeline. If I try to be honest with myself, I will admit that I was not at all intellectually interested in my engineering degree. Computers were always about creation and expression and social possibilities to me, not the pedantism and rigor that I practiced for financial reasons. I think we all just saw it as a test to see whether we could make it, or how well we could do, a game. It might as well have been pinball, and it never ends. 30-year SWE veterans still play leetcode. I am constantly being told that the opportunity to unleash my creativity and wonder upon the world is just around the corner. I should have dispensed with all that and started out as an artist. All the STEM greats quit this game early. That says something. If Gates, Zuck, Musk, Jobs, etc. had never taken DiffEq, would they have been any less capable or motivated? I doubt it. The women that abandon STEM may have more in common with them than we admit. They're probably doing something better with their lives. Maybe women leave STEM because they can.
    - formerly_proven 6y ago
      > Maybe women leave STEM because they can. !
      - Hnaomyiph 6y ago
        Are men not allowed to do this as well?
        tupputuppu 6y ago
        Men have worse grades than women, so women get all the more desired non-STEM jobs. Men don't dominate STEM fields, it's actually that women dominate NON-STEM fields and men are only left With STEM jobs
    - anon9001 6y ago
      I think what's actually happening is that we're eliminating all non-STEM pipelines for building a career. The truly adventurous can go start their own businesses, but STEM has become the default pipeline for everyone because it's the only thing that pays well. Everything else, even being a lawyer or doctor, is much more of a "calling" than a career play. Other necessary professions like teaching or nursing are considered lower tier, when the really shouldn't be. Because everyone is pushed into STEM, I believe that the bar for engineering has been lowered. I'm a SWE and over the last few years, I've realized that more and more of my coworkers don't have any idea how computers work. Most can't use a shell, don't understand unix, never wrote a line of C, are unclear what a pointer is, that sort of thing. It's no longer a requirement to understand computers and computer culture to be employed as a developer. I think a lot of older SWEs probably recall stereotypes of women and minorities not being able to do computers because most of them didn't grow up with the culture. In the 80s and 90s, it was much less common for those demographics to have a computer in the home and to have internet access. We tried to fix that by promoting diversity, especially in the STEM pipeline. In reality, that diversity just killed the culture by sinking it to the lowest common denominator, which looks a lot like leetcode. > I should have dispensed with all that and started out as an artist. Then you'd be poor, which is why you didn't dispense with all of that. > Maybe women leave STEM because they can. I can't wait to join them.
  - rtx 6y ago
    Do you thik all women STEM colleges will improve this.
    - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      I'm not sure. My niece was on an all-women STEM floor of her college dormitory. After 2 semesters, she was the only woman still in STEM. The rest had all convinced each other to do something easier. Not the success story you might imagine.
      - rewq4321 6y ago
        I have no idea either way, but this amount of data probably shouldn't sway predictions too much.
        SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        Anecdotes aren't data for sure, but they can be helpful to build a mental model or explain a hypothesis. The argument would be much less clear if JoeAltmaier had simply said "I'm not sure" with no elaboration.
  - etempleton 6y ago
    I find it interesting and perhaps telling that this comment is being down voted. I am wondering what an individual could take offense to. As far as I can tell I made two assertions: 1. Girls who are interested in STEM tend to abandon it at the high school / undergraduate level [factual] 2. That one factor in that may be a gender bias favoring males during this period in a students education. [well supported by academic research, though I presented the information casually and without citation] If we can believe the research that there is a gender bias against males at the middle school level surely the opposite may also be true at the high school / college level where there are more male teachers.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      > If we can believe the research that there is a gender bias against males at the middle school level surely the opposite may also be true at the high school / college level where there are more male teachers. The sex/gender of the teacher didn't play a role at the middle school level though. I find it hard to keep up the narrative of "society doesn't want girls to go into STEM" when there's a lot of affirmative action, selective media representation, lots of programs etc. "But it's only to offset the invisible bias" I'm sure some might argue, but I think they overlook the possibility that there is nothing keeping them down and they just make different choices. I didn't downvote your previous comment, but it did sound like you were a bit reaching for straws to turn an observation into the desired outcome by filling in the middle.
      - etempleton 6y ago
        And I think it is valid to not agree with that narrative or to think my argument weak (as I admitted, my observation was casual and lacked citation). However, gender bias and lack of representation are, from anecdotal observation, the most cited reason in academic journals for the lack of women in STEM. Take that for what you will. And by all means make a counter argument, edify me, cite sources, but burying a comment for even the nascent mention of a connection between gender bias and the lack of women in STEM seems to demonstrate a lack of willingness of some on HN to even engage with the idea, which, funnily enough, could give credence to the existence of gender bias against women in STEM.
  - nitwit005 6y ago
    If you "abandon STEM" in high school or undergrad, you're likely seeing people who are just completing prerequisites for the courses they actually want to take.
- caseysoftware 6y ago
  If women freely choose to pursue other areas of interest - no matter the area's importance or the women's interests - we've reached the point where the only acceptable cause to claim is "sexism". It's disappointing because it takes away agency and becomes a form of control.
  - brabel 6y ago
    Why do you find it disappointing that women choose certain careers while men choose others when they have fully free choice on the matter? We know that by nature, men and women MUST have different interests on average, otherwise they wouldn't be interested in each other and our species would die :). Can't we just accept that we make different choices sometimes and try as best as we can to make things progress to the best of our capabilities, regardless of how much each gender contributes to each human endeavour?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - edmundsauto 6y ago
      Except we use statistic about the gender makeup of a field to determine if there is sexism. Which is flawed, but often feels rational.
      - flashyfaffe2 6y ago
        I can't find the article describing it but the gender bias tends to be disregarded when you add one additional parameter: place of birth. In third world countries, women reprensent 50% of the students in engineering classes ( for reasons that are easily understandable). Actually, the bias observed applyies in countries where freedom of choice is given to everyone.
    - caseysoftware 6y ago
      Read my comment again.
    - 6y ago
sprt 6y ago
> If so it’d turn around a long held belief that STEM education is biased towards men. At least in grade school. No, you can't infer this conclusion from that paper. Yes, the paper claims that there exists some bias towards girls (from teachers' grading). And the sentence you quote claims that without that specific bias, the gender gap would be in favor of boys ("12.5% larger"). However, we do not know if this figure is free of bias (IMO, fair to say probably not). Therefore, there might be other biases in STEM in favor of boys that could explain the gender gap in their favor.
- tupputuppu 6y ago
  It's unlikely. You're suggesting there's an even bigger bias but one which we've been unable to quantify scientifically to even a limited extent (compared to this study, which provides clear evidence)
throwawayay02 6y ago
There are a number of misconceptions with that common belief. First, it's a US experience only, there are many countries where females are in similar numbers of other students in engineering courses. Second, it depends widely on course: it is not uncommon to have a male majority in computer science and mechanical eng., and a female majority in chemical eng., physics, math, aerospace eng., medicine, pharmacy, etc
- baskire 6y ago
  Is there a country with balanced gender ratios in STEM employment? I wasn’t aware of such
  - cnorthwood 6y ago
    India is closer to 60/40 versus the 80/20 in most western nations
    - noetokyo 6y ago
      Yea but that doesn't mean anything when 99% of them can't find jobs.
  - brabel 6y ago
    There is one, actually: Algeria... also, Oman and Morocco are not far behind! This is according to this[1] report from Plan International Norway (whose author's "focus is on gender, technology and social justice"), which has the objective of finding ways to actually increase the participation of girls in STEM in Scandinavian countries, where their participation, paradoxically, is just about the average of the world at around 30% female, against 19% in the USA. From the paper itself: "More recently, Stoet and Geary’s (2018) paper on the «gender equality paradox» demonstrated that, perhaps surprisingly, the more «gender equal» a country is, the larger the gender gap in STEM education and careers." Despite that statistic, the Scientific American[2] claims that this is NOT due to women choosing differently than mean, but because "Early in school, teachers’ unconscious biases subtly push girls away from STEM". I don't know how they came up with this conclusion (they link to a paper[3] correlating student's mothers biases with the student's later choices - which is NOT what they had just claimed and seems to only weakly give the argument any substance), but that goes directly against the new research we're discussing, which seems to point to the exact opposite conclusion. [1] https://www.telenor.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/The-Gender-Gap-in-Technology-in-Scandinavia_Full-report.pdf https://www.telenor.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/The-Gende... [2] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/countries-with-less-gender-equity-have-more-women-in-stem-huh/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/countries-with-l... [3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232604569_Achievement_in_Math_and_Science_Do_Mothers'_Beliefs_Matter_12_Years_Later https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232604569_Achieveme...
centimeter 6y ago
That belief is only held by people who are deeply programmed to expect equal outcomes across any arbitrary demographic partition - i.e. they expect that career interest and fitness is completely independent of cultural background, sex, etc. For people who weren’t successfully beaten over the head with a standard US progressive education, this is obviously a priori very unlikely.
- baskire 6y ago
  People beaten over the head with a progressive education is concerning. The leaders of today are the bigots of tomorrow. The future requires us to think for ourselves

mdorazio 6y ago

Yes, it does. It also implies that women not seeking engineering degrees likely has other factors that go mostly ignored or dismissed today.

etempleton 6y ago
Girls typically abandon STEM at the high school / undergraduate level. I do not pretend to know all of the factors that go into that, but one such reason I have heard is that the gender bias in STEM tends to strongly favor boys at this level and perhaps a bigger component to that is not the teachers' bias, but the bias of peers and society that students at the high school level will be increasingly aware of.
- jl2718 6y ago
  I don't see any specific age when women abandon STEM as individual contributors; it seems to be constant throughout all life stages at a moderately higher rate than men. Until high school, however, there is no choice, and female grades are generally higher in everything, so they stick with it until they have to make a prioritization choice. I see it naively like this: life is a long process of eliminating options that don't meet your interests or best chances at success. Women in general have more options in life than men, career being only one aspect of that, which means that over time, any one of those options is going to be chosen less and less. Sociology distinguishes itself from economics in the assumption that people's choices are the result of stupidity or victimization. I just looked up the top math student in my 5th grade class. She's a 5th grade public school teacher after attending an Ivy for Geography. I have not the slightest clue why one would ever study Geography in college, nor would I find it financially prudent in my situation to be a public elementary schoolteacher, but I also know this person to be quite smart and fully-capable of making her own choices. I talk to female H1B engineers that came here for a better life, which was not STEM work, so they often quit as soon as they get a green card. I see women retiring earlier to start new careers. Female attrition is a constant feature of the entire STEM pipeline. If I try to be honest with myself, I will admit that I was not at all intellectually interested in my engineering degree. Computers were always about creation and expression and social possibilities to me, not the pedantism and rigor that I practiced for financial reasons. I think we all just saw it as a test to see whether we could make it, or how well we could do, a game. It might as well have been pinball, and it never ends. 30-year SWE veterans still play leetcode. I am constantly being told that the opportunity to unleash my creativity and wonder upon the world is just around the corner. I should have dispensed with all that and started out as an artist. All the STEM greats quit this game early. That says something. If Gates, Zuck, Musk, Jobs, etc. had never taken DiffEq, would they have been any less capable or motivated? I doubt it. The women that abandon STEM may have more in common with them than we admit. They're probably doing something better with their lives. Maybe women leave STEM because they can.
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    > Maybe women leave STEM because they can. !
    - Hnaomyiph 6y ago
      Are men not allowed to do this as well?
      - tupputuppu 6y ago
        Men have worse grades than women, so women get all the more desired non-STEM jobs. Men don't dominate STEM fields, it's actually that women dominate NON-STEM fields and men are only left With STEM jobs
  - anon9001 6y ago
    I think what's actually happening is that we're eliminating all non-STEM pipelines for building a career. The truly adventurous can go start their own businesses, but STEM has become the default pipeline for everyone because it's the only thing that pays well. Everything else, even being a lawyer or doctor, is much more of a "calling" than a career play. Other necessary professions like teaching or nursing are considered lower tier, when the really shouldn't be. Because everyone is pushed into STEM, I believe that the bar for engineering has been lowered. I'm a SWE and over the last few years, I've realized that more and more of my coworkers don't have any idea how computers work. Most can't use a shell, don't understand unix, never wrote a line of C, are unclear what a pointer is, that sort of thing. It's no longer a requirement to understand computers and computer culture to be employed as a developer. I think a lot of older SWEs probably recall stereotypes of women and minorities not being able to do computers because most of them didn't grow up with the culture. In the 80s and 90s, it was much less common for those demographics to have a computer in the home and to have internet access. We tried to fix that by promoting diversity, especially in the STEM pipeline. In reality, that diversity just killed the culture by sinking it to the lowest common denominator, which looks a lot like leetcode. > I should have dispensed with all that and started out as an artist. Then you'd be poor, which is why you didn't dispense with all of that. > Maybe women leave STEM because they can. I can't wait to join them.
- rtx 6y ago
  Do you thik all women STEM colleges will improve this.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    I'm not sure. My niece was on an all-women STEM floor of her college dormitory. After 2 semesters, she was the only woman still in STEM. The rest had all convinced each other to do something easier. Not the success story you might imagine.
    - rewq4321 6y ago
      I have no idea either way, but this amount of data probably shouldn't sway predictions too much.
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        Anecdotes aren't data for sure, but they can be helpful to build a mental model or explain a hypothesis. The argument would be much less clear if JoeAltmaier had simply said "I'm not sure" with no elaboration.
- etempleton 6y ago
  I find it interesting and perhaps telling that this comment is being down voted. I am wondering what an individual could take offense to. As far as I can tell I made two assertions: 1. Girls who are interested in STEM tend to abandon it at the high school / undergraduate level [factual] 2. That one factor in that may be a gender bias favoring males during this period in a students education. [well supported by academic research, though I presented the information casually and without citation] If we can believe the research that there is a gender bias against males at the middle school level surely the opposite may also be true at the high school / college level where there are more male teachers.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > If we can believe the research that there is a gender bias against males at the middle school level surely the opposite may also be true at the high school / college level where there are more male teachers. The sex/gender of the teacher didn't play a role at the middle school level though. I find it hard to keep up the narrative of "society doesn't want girls to go into STEM" when there's a lot of affirmative action, selective media representation, lots of programs etc. "But it's only to offset the invisible bias" I'm sure some might argue, but I think they overlook the possibility that there is nothing keeping them down and they just make different choices. I didn't downvote your previous comment, but it did sound like you were a bit reaching for straws to turn an observation into the desired outcome by filling in the middle.
    - etempleton 6y ago
      And I think it is valid to not agree with that narrative or to think my argument weak (as I admitted, my observation was casual and lacked citation). However, gender bias and lack of representation are, from anecdotal observation, the most cited reason in academic journals for the lack of women in STEM. Take that for what you will. And by all means make a counter argument, edify me, cite sources, but burying a comment for even the nascent mention of a connection between gender bias and the lack of women in STEM seems to demonstrate a lack of willingness of some on HN to even engage with the idea, which, funnily enough, could give credence to the existence of gender bias against women in STEM.
- nitwit005 6y ago
  If you "abandon STEM" in high school or undergrad, you're likely seeing people who are just completing prerequisites for the courses they actually want to take.
caseysoftware 6y ago
If women freely choose to pursue other areas of interest - no matter the area's importance or the women's interests - we've reached the point where the only acceptable cause to claim is "sexism". It's disappointing because it takes away agency and becomes a form of control.
- brabel 6y ago
  Why do you find it disappointing that women choose certain careers while men choose others when they have fully free choice on the matter? We know that by nature, men and women MUST have different interests on average, otherwise they wouldn't be interested in each other and our species would die :). Can't we just accept that we make different choices sometimes and try as best as we can to make things progress to the best of our capabilities, regardless of how much each gender contributes to each human endeavour?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - edmundsauto 6y ago
    Except we use statistic about the gender makeup of a field to determine if there is sexism. Which is flawed, but often feels rational.
    - flashyfaffe2 6y ago
      I can't find the article describing it but the gender bias tends to be disregarded when you add one additional parameter: place of birth. In third world countries, women reprensent 50% of the students in engineering classes ( for reasons that are easily understandable). Actually, the bias observed applyies in countries where freedom of choice is given to everyone.
  - caseysoftware 6y ago
    Read my comment again.
  - 6y ago

sprt 6y ago

> If so it’d turn around a long held belief that STEM education is biased towards men. At least in grade school. No, you can't infer this conclusion from that paper. Yes, the paper claims that there exists some bias towards girls (from teachers' grading). And the sentence you quote claims that without that specific bias, the gender gap would be in favor of boys ("12.5% larger"). However, we do not know if this figure is free of bias (IMO, fair to say probably not). Therefore, there might be other biases in STEM in favor of boys that could explain the gender gap in their favor.

tupputuppu 6y ago
It's unlikely. You're suggesting there's an even bigger bias but one which we've been unable to quantify scientifically to even a limited extent (compared to this study, which provides clear evidence)

throwawayay02 6y ago

There are a number of misconceptions with that common belief. First, it's a US experience only, there are many countries where females are in similar numbers of other students in engineering courses. Second, it depends widely on course: it is not uncommon to have a male majority in computer science and mechanical eng., and a female majority in chemical eng., physics, math, aerospace eng., medicine, pharmacy, etc

baskire 6y ago
Is there a country with balanced gender ratios in STEM employment? I wasn’t aware of such
- cnorthwood 6y ago
  India is closer to 60/40 versus the 80/20 in most western nations
  - noetokyo 6y ago
    Yea but that doesn't mean anything when 99% of them can't find jobs.
- brabel 6y ago
  There is one, actually: Algeria... also, Oman and Morocco are not far behind! This is according to this[1] report from Plan International Norway (whose author's "focus is on gender, technology and social justice"), which has the objective of finding ways to actually increase the participation of girls in STEM in Scandinavian countries, where their participation, paradoxically, is just about the average of the world at around 30% female, against 19% in the USA. From the paper itself: "More recently, Stoet and Geary’s (2018) paper on the «gender equality paradox» demonstrated that, perhaps surprisingly, the more «gender equal» a country is, the larger the gender gap in STEM education and careers." Despite that statistic, the Scientific American[2] claims that this is NOT due to women choosing differently than mean, but because "Early in school, teachers’ unconscious biases subtly push girls away from STEM". I don't know how they came up with this conclusion (they link to a paper[3] correlating student's mothers biases with the student's later choices - which is NOT what they had just claimed and seems to only weakly give the argument any substance), but that goes directly against the new research we're discussing, which seems to point to the exact opposite conclusion. [1] https://www.telenor.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/The-Gender-Gap-in-Technology-in-Scandinavia_Full-report.pdf https://www.telenor.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/The-Gende... [2] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/countries-with-less-gender-equity-have-more-women-in-stem-huh/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/countries-with-l... [3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232604569_Achievement_in_Math_and_Science_Do_Mothers'_Beliefs_Matter_12_Years_Later https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232604569_Achieveme...

centimeter 6y ago

That belief is only held by people who are deeply programmed to expect equal outcomes across any arbitrary demographic partition - i.e. they expect that career interest and fitness is completely independent of cultural background, sex, etc. For people who weren’t successfully beaten over the head with a standard US progressive education, this is obviously a priori very unlikely.

baskire 6y ago
People beaten over the head with a progressive education is concerning. The leaders of today are the bigots of tomorrow. The future requires us to think for ourselves