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> As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was "just like planning a dinner. I have no doubt that Grace Hopper turned out to be a gr

> As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was "just like planning a dinner. I have no doubt that Grace Hopper turned out to be a great programmer and made many great contributions to the field, but it turns out she was in the army, and she was ordered to go work on a computing effort, it wasn't her choice: "In 1944, Lt. Grace Hopper was ordered to report to Harvard University to work on the Mark I, the behemoth digital computer that had been conceived by Harvard's Howard" The idea that there may be some natural differences in preferences (things that interest you the most) between men and women is controversial for some reason, but this idea shouldn't be seen as sexist. If it turns out that men really are more drawn to engineering (on average, this is obviously not true for everyone) because of some underlying biological development factors, shouldn't we try to understand why? Being more drawn to engineering doesn't mean you're automatically better at it. It just means you're probably more likely to go into the field and more likely to spend long hours studying it. Right now the politically correct thing to do is to just reject that hypothesis and insist that all of these differences have to be nurture. I mean, why spend precious capital studying these things when we've already decided what is the correct answer, right?

rrose 5y ago
I think the problem is that there isn't really any compelling evidence to suggest that men are more drawn to engineering because of biology. I would actually invert your last paragraph: there are so many plausible extrinsic reasons that men are more likely to go into STEM than women that it doesn't make sense to try to explain away these gender gaps as being due to some intrinsic difference. I think it's fair to say that you can believe that the difference is biological without it being sexist. But it is also true that many people who hold this belief are sexist (in fact most misogynists probably do believe this), so people being hesitant to give a platform to people taking this angle is understandable.
- snek_case 5y ago
  > there isn't really any compelling evidence to suggest that men are more drawn to engineering because of biology. That's completely false. There's lots of published research on this subject. The existence of said evidence is routinely being denied, but there have been numerous studies. One of the most famous studies established that female infants tend to be more interested in looking at human faces than boy infants, and boys generally more interested in looking at things. This is generally referred to as a "things vs people" preference. With women generally being more people oriented, and men being more "thing" oriented. Again, there is no relationship to performance here. Nobody is claiming that either of these is better than the other. It's just a very consistent finding across many many studies, and the fact that this is still controversial boggles the mind. Politics are preventing us, as a species, from properly understanding ourselves. This is a meta-analysis of infant sex vs toy preference: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-01624-7 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-01624-7 If you think this preference for things vs people is due to culture, consider that this kind of toy preference exists in monkeys as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm9xXyw2f7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm9xXyw2f7g
- isitdopamine 5y ago
  > there isn't really any compelling evidence to suggest that men are more drawn to engineering because of biology. It’s a well established fact that, even in children as young as a few weeks old, males and females have different preferences.
rjsw 5y ago
She was competing with fewer men for that job in 1944, most of them were busy getting shot at.
danShumway 5y ago
> she was ordered to go work on a computing effort, it wasn't her choice To be clear, Dr. Grace Hopper is not the only woman who worked on computers. This was a general field post-WW2 that women were encouraged to go into because they were seen as natural fits, even as men started to come home from the war. It was only after computing started to become more "respectable" that it started to shift into a more male-dominated industry. There may well be natural differences between sexes in preferences (either biological or social), but if your arguments about how those differences are "obvious" aren't actually predictive, and if historically those exact same arguments have been used almost verbatim to explain trends that skewed in the exact opposite direction -- then at that point I think you're talking about a pseudoscience. You want to research sex difference? Well, part of examining a hypothesis is looking at whether it actually holds true and is useful as a predictive tool. If you balk at the idea of questioning whether the trends you're trying to explain are actually universal or whether they're cultural, then that you're not really doing science.
- Jensson 5y ago
  Women didn't leave the field of computer science, men just joined it in droves when they realized that you can build tons of cool shit with computers and it isn't just a big calculator. Men joining the field shifted the gender balance, but they didn't drive out any women when they did it.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    That's an interesting theory, but absent some kind of evidence it still seems like post hoc rationalization to me. > and it isn't just a big calculator I'm not sure you've thought this argument through. Are you suggesting that women are naturally better-suited to mathematics and theoretical engineering then men are? You think that the male shift in CS was because the field became less theoretical, and men realized that the field wasn't only offering analytic/abstract challenges? I'd love if in these types of debates we could all standardize on what the inherent biological differences are that we're talking about, but it always seems to me like proponents have a hard time doing that. The theories fluidly evolve, flip around, and transform to meet every example and statistic, their only constant being the belief that cultural solutions to how fields are presented, taught, and managed should be off the table. Hence the pseudoscience concerns I have above. ---- The point I brought up in my original comment was that all of these arguments: - that women don't like analytic/abstract thinking - that women don't like practical/applied thinking jobs - that women prefer fuzzy-creative tasks instead of hard-creative tasks - that women care about people more than concepts - that women prefer social jobs and men prefer isolated work - that women naturally avoid careers with high amounts of conflict like upper management positions they're all brought up by their proponents as if they're obvious conclusions, despite the fact that they're often mutually exclusive claims, and despite the fact that even when they do contradict each other they still all use the exact same evidence and justifications as "proof" for their obvious-ness. Most of these theories aren't the result of real scientific research, they're rationalizations for current outcomes that start from a position that the outcomes necessarily must have a biological explanation. It's hard for me to have a lot of respect for that. And these people want to claim that the people who are actually testing social theories about gender gaps are the unscientific ones. Their definition of the "scientific" way to approach gender is to just assume everything is biological and to never question the status quo.
psyc 5y ago
Small point, but she was in the navy reserves. Larger point - she already had a PhD in math, so it isn’t as though she was ordered to take up an interest in STEM.

rrose 5y ago

I think the problem is that there isn't really any compelling evidence to suggest that men are more drawn to engineering because of biology. I would actually invert your last paragraph: there are so many plausible extrinsic reasons that men are more likely to go into STEM than women that it doesn't make sense to try to explain away these gender gaps as being due to some intrinsic difference. I think it's fair to say that you can believe that the difference is biological without it being sexist. But it is also true that many people who hold this belief are sexist (in fact most misogynists probably do believe this), so people being hesitant to give a platform to people taking this angle is understandable.

snek_case 5y ago
> there isn't really any compelling evidence to suggest that men are more drawn to engineering because of biology. That's completely false. There's lots of published research on this subject. The existence of said evidence is routinely being denied, but there have been numerous studies. One of the most famous studies established that female infants tend to be more interested in looking at human faces than boy infants, and boys generally more interested in looking at things. This is generally referred to as a "things vs people" preference. With women generally being more people oriented, and men being more "thing" oriented. Again, there is no relationship to performance here. Nobody is claiming that either of these is better than the other. It's just a very consistent finding across many many studies, and the fact that this is still controversial boggles the mind. Politics are preventing us, as a species, from properly understanding ourselves. This is a meta-analysis of infant sex vs toy preference: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-01624-7 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-01624-7 If you think this preference for things vs people is due to culture, consider that this kind of toy preference exists in monkeys as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm9xXyw2f7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm9xXyw2f7g
isitdopamine 5y ago
> there isn't really any compelling evidence to suggest that men are more drawn to engineering because of biology. It’s a well established fact that, even in children as young as a few weeks old, males and females have different preferences.

rjsw 5y ago

She was competing with fewer men for that job in 1944, most of them were busy getting shot at.

danShumway 5y ago

> she was ordered to go work on a computing effort, it wasn't her choice To be clear, Dr. Grace Hopper is not the only woman who worked on computers. This was a general field post-WW2 that women were encouraged to go into because they were seen as natural fits, even as men started to come home from the war. It was only after computing started to become more "respectable" that it started to shift into a more male-dominated industry. There may well be natural differences between sexes in preferences (either biological or social), but if your arguments about how those differences are "obvious" aren't actually predictive, and if historically those exact same arguments have been used almost verbatim to explain trends that skewed in the exact opposite direction -- then at that point I think you're talking about a pseudoscience. You want to research sex difference? Well, part of examining a hypothesis is looking at whether it actually holds true and is useful as a predictive tool. If you balk at the idea of questioning whether the trends you're trying to explain are actually universal or whether they're cultural, then that you're not really doing science.

Jensson 5y ago
Women didn't leave the field of computer science, men just joined it in droves when they realized that you can build tons of cool shit with computers and it isn't just a big calculator. Men joining the field shifted the gender balance, but they didn't drive out any women when they did it.
- danShumway 5y ago
  That's an interesting theory, but absent some kind of evidence it still seems like post hoc rationalization to me. > and it isn't just a big calculator I'm not sure you've thought this argument through. Are you suggesting that women are naturally better-suited to mathematics and theoretical engineering then men are? You think that the male shift in CS was because the field became less theoretical, and men realized that the field wasn't only offering analytic/abstract challenges? I'd love if in these types of debates we could all standardize on what the inherent biological differences are that we're talking about, but it always seems to me like proponents have a hard time doing that. The theories fluidly evolve, flip around, and transform to meet every example and statistic, their only constant being the belief that cultural solutions to how fields are presented, taught, and managed should be off the table. Hence the pseudoscience concerns I have above. ---- The point I brought up in my original comment was that all of these arguments: - that women don't like analytic/abstract thinking - that women don't like practical/applied thinking jobs - that women prefer fuzzy-creative tasks instead of hard-creative tasks - that women care about people more than concepts - that women prefer social jobs and men prefer isolated work - that women naturally avoid careers with high amounts of conflict like upper management positions they're all brought up by their proponents as if they're obvious conclusions, despite the fact that they're often mutually exclusive claims, and despite the fact that even when they do contradict each other they still all use the exact same evidence and justifications as "proof" for their obvious-ness. Most of these theories aren't the result of real scientific research, they're rationalizations for current outcomes that start from a position that the outcomes necessarily must have a biological explanation. It's hard for me to have a lot of respect for that. And these people want to claim that the people who are actually testing social theories about gender gaps are the unscientific ones. Their definition of the "scientific" way to approach gender is to just assume everything is biological and to never question the status quo.

psyc 5y ago

Small point, but she was in the navy reserves. Larger point - she already had a PhD in math, so it isn’t as though she was ordered to take up an interest in STEM.