4 ms·

Not quite - the question is posed with a historical context that has since changed. It is certainly the case that history lacks female authors, but that’s not s

by jl6 3y ago

Not quite - the question is posed with a historical context that has since changed. It is certainly the case that history lacks female authors, but that’s not so true today. Writing is one discipline where women have substantially levelled the playing field. Other fields do still suffer a deficit of female participation, and the reasons for that are highly debated of course. Notably for this site, there are vanishingly few female engineers compared to the male population. My pop explanation is that engineers are produced in a pipeline that starts with games (particularly video games) which are stigmatized in the typical socialization that young girls are subject to.

DeathArrow 3y ago
>Writing is one discipline where women have substantially levelled the playing field. If we look at quantity the assertion is true.
defrost 3y ago
The article behind https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39600642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39600642 suggests that women did a great deal of coding until home computers became widespread and heavily marketed towards males.
- jl6 3y ago
  Spot on. “Computers are for boys” is exactly the socialization I’m talking about. “So when Ordóñez got to Johns Hopkins University in the '80s, she figured she would study computer science or electrical engineering. Then she took her first intro class — and found that most of her male classmates were way ahead of her because they'd grown up playing with computers.” A programmer is not so different to a tennis player: training begins before age 10. Anyone entering a compsci university course at age 18 without substantial experience of computing has a mountain to climb.
  - jl6 3y ago
    As a further anecdotal observation, I believe elite programming (but not mainstream programming) to be an autistic spectrum trait. Males are diagnosed with ASDs in a 4:1 ratio over females.
- Jensson 3y ago
  Women did a great deal of coding after that as well, they didn't disappear it just added a lot of boys who wanted to program their own games. If you look at the absolute numbers graph that is obvious, women continued the same path it already had, men had a massive spike with the growth of home gaming. And that is still true today, extremely few girls dream of making their own games even though many of them play games and many games are marketed to women.
lynx23 3y ago
After 30 years of being highly positive towards more women in CS, and only seeing a handful of actual good examples, I can't get around the observation that women by large can't be bothered with tasks where they have to go deep and invest a lot of time learning new stuff. I just recently had the example in my friend circles. She used to work in a different field, and decided to switch to working with computers as a new job. The original argument was something like "I know how to use MS Word, so I am going to be a computer expert." Then there were 3 intenships, which all ended the same way. And once she was asked to learn Python to do a little coding, she dropped the ball completely and is now trying to become a singer. No joke. And she is not alone. I would love to have different experiences, but anecdotally, females are not willing to invest as much time as males when it comes to tech jobs.
- defrost 3y ago
  Probably generational, in my experience women have written control systems for the Concorde, full geophysical aquisition and control systems, developed robotic control libraries in the 1980s for bleeding edge technology, built systems for recognising sign language in real time, backends for medical imaging, abstract algebraic engines that have broken proposed quantuum computer proof encryption candidates, and more. I guess our anecdata varies by the people we surround ourselves with.
  - lynx23 3y ago
    Well, reading between the lines it seems like you are working as a coder, given what people you know. Me is just an admin. So that alone explains the difference between our perceived stories.
- ciiicici 3y ago
  Perhaps it is sexist attitudes like yours that discourage women from staying in tech. Being targeted by misogyny day in day out isn't exactly a positive work environment.
  - lynx23 3y ago
4gotunameagain 3y ago
It does not seem like men and women are exactly the same tabula rasa to be shaped by society and socialisation. We are shaped to a great degree of course, but I believe in innate differences (on average), and I believe that the first step towards achieving true equality and peace will be understanding those innate differences, appreciating them, and realising that not only they have nothing to do with our intrinsic values, but make us complimentary in a beautiful way.
- jl6 3y ago
  Absolutely - you don’t even need to venture far into the murky territory of psychological tendencies to observe that the male and female experience is massively shaped by obvious biological differences. These differences are what give rise to the sociological phenomenon of gender stereotypes. Some of these stereotypes have a strong connection to the underlying biology (“women are good at caring for babies”), others might have a small kernel of truth but are mostly obsolete hindrances (“women aren’t good at programming”).
  - pelagicAustral 3y ago
    I guess you didn't get the memo. We don't talk about biology anymore.
    - jl6 3y ago
      What do you mean?
      - inemesitaffia 3y ago
        Likely James Damore
  - 4gotunameagain 3y ago
    My personal point of view is that men are on average innately better in programming and in general in logic involving tasks. A parallel can be drawn to the much higher prevalence of autism in males, which some studies attribute to a less sensitive mirror neuron system. In contrast, women are much more empathetic and able to acknowledge, process and understand emotions both in others and themselves.
belorn 3y ago
I prefer lifting up explanations for gender segregation in society that provide a bit more explanation of the whole spectrum rather than one work category that happen to sit at very average numbers. The equality paradox in particular is a large hint of a much stronger phenomenon than the pipeline problem. Group identity is my personal favorite. People self filter on every possible aspect in life, and work choice has gender segregation on a very large number of layers. The teacher profession has gender segregation at the initial start of the pipeline, during the training phase, during the first professional years, during the specialization phase, during the senior phase, and so on. They segregate on which schools they pick, country vs city, and so on. Sweden has public available statistics on work profession, and it is gathered as part of tax collection so it has very high accuracy. Guess which profession has highest gender segregation, and how high it is. There are no engineer jobs that sits at the 99%, or the 99.8% that is ratio of the single most gender segregated profession.

by jl6 3y ago

DeathArrow 3y ago

>Writing is one discipline where women have substantially levelled the playing field. If we look at quantity the assertion is true.

defrost 3y ago

The article behind https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39600642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39600642 suggests that women did a great deal of coding until home computers became widespread and heavily marketed towards males.

jl6 3y ago
Spot on. “Computers are for boys” is exactly the socialization I’m talking about. “So when Ordóñez got to Johns Hopkins University in the '80s, she figured she would study computer science or electrical engineering. Then she took her first intro class — and found that most of her male classmates were way ahead of her because they'd grown up playing with computers.” A programmer is not so different to a tennis player: training begins before age 10. Anyone entering a compsci university course at age 18 without substantial experience of computing has a mountain to climb.
- jl6 3y ago
  As a further anecdotal observation, I believe elite programming (but not mainstream programming) to be an autistic spectrum trait. Males are diagnosed with ASDs in a 4:1 ratio over females.
Jensson 3y ago
Women did a great deal of coding after that as well, they didn't disappear it just added a lot of boys who wanted to program their own games. If you look at the absolute numbers graph that is obvious, women continued the same path it already had, men had a massive spike with the growth of home gaming. And that is still true today, extremely few girls dream of making their own games even though many of them play games and many games are marketed to women.

lynx23 3y ago

After 30 years of being highly positive towards more women in CS, and only seeing a handful of actual good examples, I can't get around the observation that women by large can't be bothered with tasks where they have to go deep and invest a lot of time learning new stuff. I just recently had the example in my friend circles. She used to work in a different field, and decided to switch to working with computers as a new job. The original argument was something like "I know how to use MS Word, so I am going to be a computer expert." Then there were 3 intenships, which all ended the same way. And once she was asked to learn Python to do a little coding, she dropped the ball completely and is now trying to become a singer. No joke. And she is not alone. I would love to have different experiences, but anecdotally, females are not willing to invest as much time as males when it comes to tech jobs.

defrost 3y ago
Probably generational, in my experience women have written control systems for the Concorde, full geophysical aquisition and control systems, developed robotic control libraries in the 1980s for bleeding edge technology, built systems for recognising sign language in real time, backends for medical imaging, abstract algebraic engines that have broken proposed quantuum computer proof encryption candidates, and more. I guess our anecdata varies by the people we surround ourselves with.
- lynx23 3y ago
  Well, reading between the lines it seems like you are working as a coder, given what people you know. Me is just an admin. So that alone explains the difference between our perceived stories.
ciiicici 3y ago
Perhaps it is sexist attitudes like yours that discourage women from staying in tech. Being targeted by misogyny day in day out isn't exactly a positive work environment.
- lynx23 3y ago

4gotunameagain 3y ago

It does not seem like men and women are exactly the same tabula rasa to be shaped by society and socialisation. We are shaped to a great degree of course, but I believe in innate differences (on average), and I believe that the first step towards achieving true equality and peace will be understanding those innate differences, appreciating them, and realising that not only they have nothing to do with our intrinsic values, but make us complimentary in a beautiful way.

jl6 3y ago
Absolutely - you don’t even need to venture far into the murky territory of psychological tendencies to observe that the male and female experience is massively shaped by obvious biological differences. These differences are what give rise to the sociological phenomenon of gender stereotypes. Some of these stereotypes have a strong connection to the underlying biology (“women are good at caring for babies”), others might have a small kernel of truth but are mostly obsolete hindrances (“women aren’t good at programming”).
- pelagicAustral 3y ago
  I guess you didn't get the memo. We don't talk about biology anymore.
  - jl6 3y ago
    What do you mean?
    - inemesitaffia 3y ago
      Likely James Damore
- 4gotunameagain 3y ago
  My personal point of view is that men are on average innately better in programming and in general in logic involving tasks. A parallel can be drawn to the much higher prevalence of autism in males, which some studies attribute to a less sensitive mirror neuron system. In contrast, women are much more empathetic and able to acknowledge, process and understand emotions both in others and themselves.

belorn 3y ago

I prefer lifting up explanations for gender segregation in society that provide a bit more explanation of the whole spectrum rather than one work category that happen to sit at very average numbers. The equality paradox in particular is a large hint of a much stronger phenomenon than the pipeline problem. Group identity is my personal favorite. People self filter on every possible aspect in life, and work choice has gender segregation on a very large number of layers. The teacher profession has gender segregation at the initial start of the pipeline, during the training phase, during the first professional years, during the specialization phase, during the senior phase, and so on. They segregate on which schools they pick, country vs city, and so on. Sweden has public available statistics on work profession, and it is gathered as part of tax collection so it has very high accuracy. Guess which profession has highest gender segregation, and how high it is. There are no engineer jobs that sits at the 99%, or the 99.8% that is ratio of the single most gender segregated profession.