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I have seen data presented multiple times showing the relation between a country’s wealth and/or economic freedom and women’s participation in stem fields. It’s

I have seen data presented multiple times showing the relation between a country’s wealth and/or economic freedom and women’s participation in stem fields. It’s a negative correlation. I often wonder if we should just be focused on maximizing individual freedom and let the chips fall where they may. This will result in some professions with extreme sex imbalance, and we should accept that outcome.

ivan_gammel 2y ago
It is important to understand the reasons for that negative correlation. If you do, your conclusions would be quite the opposite - sex imbalance is not something to accept, but rather to fix. Many authoritarian regimes are expanding their economic base by enabling women to pursue professional careers. In some developed countries there’s no such pressure, so they are simply stuck in the past. They are not doing better because women are enslaved in the kitchen or take only stereotypical jobs. It’s just ideological and/or religious trap.
- gspencley 2y ago
  > It is important to understand the reasons for that negative correlation. Agreed 100% > If you do, your conclusions would be quite the opposite This is where you lose me. Your statement here suggests the following: 1. That you know, for a conclusive fact, what those reasons are 2. That the reasons suggest something ominous Furthermore, you haven't explained what you consider to be the reasons, let alone offered explanation or citations that would support why you think those are the particular reasons. You implied that the reasons are sexism and discrimination, but you left that quite open for interpretation. Moving on, you then suggest that minority groups that do not pursue careers in STEM are "stuck in the past." I have two daughters who are in their early, going on mid twenties. My youngest daughter is one of the smartest and brightest people that I have ever met. Obviously I'm biased, but this is a kid that found ways to get herself into all sorts of trouble as a toddler by solving problems that I would have thought no toddler was capable of. In her late teens she had no idea what she wanted to do, but she expressed some interest in learning to code. Being a software engineer myself, I gave her all of the support and resources that I could. I offered to teach her myself. I bought her Udemy courses and books. I invited her to sit with me at work to see what what life as a coder is like. I made it as accessible for her as possible. What has she decided to do with her life? She works in a professional kitchen and is on the career path to becoming a chef and possibly a restauranteur. People with your attitude would snub your nose at her life choices, look down at what she's passionate about and claim that she is a 'slave' living in the 'past' because she's currently working in a low-paid service industry. You would then blame sexism or classism despite the fact that she was raised in a progressive, well to do family that gave her every opportunity to succeed at whatever she chose to do. Of course, one anectode does not refute statistics. But you have not offered statistics. You came out with assumptions, accusations and a snobbish attitude towards people who would make personal life choices that you don't understand or approve of. The beautiful thing about freedom, however, is that no one needs your approval or understanding.
  - rysertio 2y ago
    Both boys and girls from Asian countries tend to be more interested in STEM.
    - LargeWu 2y ago
      Because it's a commodity job where they can provide value to western corporations without having to be physically located there, and there's huge demand for them because of their low cost.
      - Jensson 2y ago
        Japan isn't low cost.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - em-bee 2y ago
    She works in a professional kitchen and is on the career path to becoming a chef and possibly a restauranteur. which to my knowledge is a male dominated profession. so good on her!
  - ivan_gammel 2y ago
    How about calming down and keeping your emotions in check? Your whole comment is triggered by a wrong idea of what I meant and who I am. It is also ignorant of all the data that exists about gender inequality and the root causes. It is not something that you can learn from a single link to statistics. You need to do your own research, read some books and meet gender equality advocates to understand better the world in which your daughter lives. Individual free choices are valid and as a father you did a good job showing the opportunities you know about and then not pushing towards certain career. A woman absolutely can and should be able to choose to be an engineer, a nurse or a fulltime mother and housekeeper, as long as this is free choice. All those jobs are important and respected. However I’m not talking about them or diminishing them. I’m talking about the society as a whole and sexism so deeply rooted in the culture that even with proper education it is still not easy to uncover and combat all biases. Gender discrimination starts very early when metaphorically speaking boys get cars and girls get dolls. Children are programmed by the society to have certain interests and play certain gender roles. The share of girls who will choose a profession traditionally dominated by men is already lower because of that. Then it extends to university and first career steps. Women too often have to deal with sexism and harassment in academia or on workplace. Too often they are told (still!) that men can do better. Choosing a more traditional role they avoid it, but is it really a freedom of choice? And we even have not started talking about childcare where exists institutional disparity forcing to make a choice between the family and career. For example, how long was your parental leave compared to your wife? Freedom for all but white men in countries like America is only theoretical. On practice the circumstances of life do not leave many women a choice. The outcomes are speaking for themselves. There are many women who are perfectly fit for the most sophisticated jobs, yet there are only few who make it there. In Germany we at least had Merkel. America, the so-called leader of the free world, never had a woman as a president. Fortune 500 CEOs? Startup founders? Billionaires? Nobel prize winners? You can easily find those numbers. There’s no genetic predisposition for women to not being able to get there. There’s only ignorance of people like you who think that they have done enough and it’s the matter of choice.
- cm2012 2y ago
  The countries with the most female empowerment and equality in the nordics have some of the smallest percentage of women in STEM in the world.
  - ivan_gammel 2y ago
    And? Have you looked at any research why this is happening? Out of context this can tell anything.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Of course, there are a variety of roles that are heavily female-weighted: nurses, K-12 teachers, executive assistants, etc. So there are at least some forces driving gender preferences for roles that probably can't/shouldn't just be wiped out in the West.
- em-bee 2y ago
  i don't know the real reasons, but i have the impression that in those countries STEM careers give women more freedom, and that would be why they pursue them. the added freedom makes it worth the potential downsides. in the west they already have more freedom, and so the downside of having to endure sexism does not make it worth the effort. not sure if that is true, but it makes sense to me
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    > in the west they already have more freedom, and so the downside of having to endure sexism does not make it worth the effort. This is a great point. I think a lot of HN simply takes as given that tech is a great, pleasant industry to work in, for everyone. Let's say that it isn't. If it isn't, then that might explain why people who have a good degree of financial/employment freedom would not choose to work in tech, leaving people with not a lot of financial/employment freedom (but good tech skills) as the ones who grin and bear a tech job.
    - vundercind 2y ago
      I dunno about everyone else, but if “campground manager” had comp as good as tech, that’s sure as shit what I’d be doing instead. Goes for a lot of other options, actually. Clerking a small store is often way more pleasant (depends on the store) than even relatively-good tech jobs, at least to me. But the pay’s not there.
  - ivan_gammel 2y ago
    It depends. In some countries (eg Iran) this is probably true from what I remember, in others there are other reasons.
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  My wife spends around an hour a day in the kitchen. I spend close to eight chained to my computer. If one of us is a slave, it's not her. She's not attending daily stand-ups to report how teaching our daughter the alphabet is going; she chooses how to spend each day with no external pressures at all. Her work taking care of the kids is still more exhausting than mine, but it's also obviously more fulfilling and engaging. When we meet all of our financial goals, we'll both be full time parents. As it is now, I make more than enough for her to take care of the kids full time and still make progress toward our goals. Why wouldn't she take that deal? Consider that when you talk about women doing what makes them happy and what they see as important work (because it is) as being "stuck in the past" or in a form of slavery, it might be you who's devaluing them. We both received a lot of that rhetoric growing up, and it took until well into adulthood to really understand how wrong and harmful it is.
  - daseiner1 2y ago
    This dovetails with my central critique, which is that the current state of feminism, in my opinion, tends to insidiously subscribe to the tenets of the “late stage capitalism” that many self-proclaimed x-wave feminists (again, in my experience) claim to denounce, as it is oriented around viewing people first and foremost as economic agents. Yes, individual income affords freedoms to both men and women, which is not to be discounted. But then you hear criticisms of women such as your wife, essentially demeaning them for not striving to be the fittest individual economic agents possible. As if being an AE for Yelp is the pinnacle of the human experience. Again, by no means a black & white issue. I have simply have a distaste for such an individualist philosophy and fear it inevitably leads to an “us v. them” mentality.
    - autoexec 2y ago
      > But then you hear criticisms of women such as your wife, essentially demeaning them for not striving to be the fittest individual economic agents possible. to some extent I think that pressure is put on everyone. There's a lot of pressure to always be making/spending more money. There's also a lot of jealousy. Almost every person I know with children, man or woman, would rather be with their kids, and be there for their kids as they grow up. Very few couples are fortunate enough to be able to afford a good life on just one income. That leads to people being resentful that they are missing out on what they want for themselves and their children. They're stuck missing all the once in a lifetime experiences they could be having because they are chained to a desk for 8-10 hours a day 5 or more days a week. That can cause people to resent the few men and women who do get to stay home and be with their family. They'll make others feel bad for not spending their time working for someone else because misery loves company. It's crab bucket mentality.
cultofmetatron 2y ago
> I have seen data presented multiple times showing the relation between a country’s wealth and/or economic freedom and women’s participation in stem fields. This lines up with my experiences as well. I know plenty of eastern european women, asians and latinas working as programmers. on top of that I've talked to many that didn't know how to code but would ask me to teach them as soon as they heard I was a programmer. yet I have met only a small handful of white women from america that are software engineers. furthermore, the ones that aren't engineers (in general) seem more dismissive of my line of work as if its somehow beneath them.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  If those folks from outside of the USA had been from economically prosperous backgrounds, they too would try to become nurses or caregivers instead of programmers. Gender parity in STEM is a sign of the economic desperation of a countries people. This is a sociological fact which ruffles feathers when it’s stated out loud.
  - callalex 2y ago
    Do you have any citations to back up this “fact”?
    - rsanek 2y ago
      take a look at the gender breakdowns for employment in the Nordics. probably the best social support structures / 'equality' in the world, and yet the ratios are among the most extreme anywhere. when you're taken care of, you do what you like. when you have an economic need, you'll take the job that pays and will pull you out of poverty, even if you don't care for it.
      - ivan_gammel 2y ago
        This argument is pretty common, but blaming the victim is wrong. It is not like Nordics solved the problem but women still choose different jobs. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190831-the-paradox-of-working-in-the-worlds-most-equal-countries https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190831-the-paradox-of...
itsoktocry 2y ago
>This will result in some professions with extreme sex imbalance, and we should accept that outcome. We do accept it, for the most part. I don't see many Men-as-Teachers or Men-in-Nursing advocacy groups.
- cultofmetatron 2y ago
  >or Men-in-Nursing advocacy groups. thats been changing. mostly because there are more obese people now so you need male nurses to help them move around.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    Ozempic solves this problem in 10 years.
- KittenInABox 2y ago
  There's literally an American Association of Men In Nursing. Just googling "male teachers" gives me a ton of articles about the importance of hiring more men in teaching. Apparently NYC recently announced a huge investment into hiring more black/latino men in teaching or something? I'm always suspicious of "you don't see much of x" in spaces where x isn't the demographic being catered to. This isn't Nursing News or Teacher News, not to say that Nurses and Teachers can't also be hackers, technologists, etc. but this is clearly not a space oriented towards all things teaching or nursing, so questioning community advocacy within their communities strikes me as the wrong place.
- goalonetwo 2y ago
  That's because their woman advocacy is really a not-so-hidden lobby to have woman making more money under the pretense of equal representation in all jobs.
- simplicio 2y ago
  There's a lot of Men-in-Teaching advocacy, in part because its thought having male teachers tends to be beneficial for male students[1]. I think stuff like that is the main reason to be worried about gender imbalances. A 40-60 imbalance probably isn't a big deal, but once you get to like, 90-10 or worse, as is the case with early education, you start to get a bunch of secondary social problems. Kids who associate learning as a woman only thing, or the culture around engineering or software becoming "boys clubs" that become uncomfortable for the women who do want to work in those fields https://www.cuny.edu/academics/academic-programs/teacher-education-programs/nyc-men-teach/ https://www.cuny.edu/academics/academic-programs/teacher-edu...
marcosdumay 2y ago
The idea that social sciences can pinpoint a single cause on something as full of confounding factors as this... it's extremely arrogant. But then, the same applies to the people that immediately explain it as discrimination.

ivan_gammel 2y ago

It is important to understand the reasons for that negative correlation. If you do, your conclusions would be quite the opposite - sex imbalance is not something to accept, but rather to fix. Many authoritarian regimes are expanding their economic base by enabling women to pursue professional careers. In some developed countries there’s no such pressure, so they are simply stuck in the past. They are not doing better because women are enslaved in the kitchen or take only stereotypical jobs. It’s just ideological and/or religious trap.

gspencley 2y ago
> It is important to understand the reasons for that negative correlation. Agreed 100% > If you do, your conclusions would be quite the opposite This is where you lose me. Your statement here suggests the following: 1. That you know, for a conclusive fact, what those reasons are 2. That the reasons suggest something ominous Furthermore, you haven't explained what you consider to be the reasons, let alone offered explanation or citations that would support why you think those are the particular reasons. You implied that the reasons are sexism and discrimination, but you left that quite open for interpretation. Moving on, you then suggest that minority groups that do not pursue careers in STEM are "stuck in the past." I have two daughters who are in their early, going on mid twenties. My youngest daughter is one of the smartest and brightest people that I have ever met. Obviously I'm biased, but this is a kid that found ways to get herself into all sorts of trouble as a toddler by solving problems that I would have thought no toddler was capable of. In her late teens she had no idea what she wanted to do, but she expressed some interest in learning to code. Being a software engineer myself, I gave her all of the support and resources that I could. I offered to teach her myself. I bought her Udemy courses and books. I invited her to sit with me at work to see what what life as a coder is like. I made it as accessible for her as possible. What has she decided to do with her life? She works in a professional kitchen and is on the career path to becoming a chef and possibly a restauranteur. People with your attitude would snub your nose at her life choices, look down at what she's passionate about and claim that she is a 'slave' living in the 'past' because she's currently working in a low-paid service industry. You would then blame sexism or classism despite the fact that she was raised in a progressive, well to do family that gave her every opportunity to succeed at whatever she chose to do. Of course, one anectode does not refute statistics. But you have not offered statistics. You came out with assumptions, accusations and a snobbish attitude towards people who would make personal life choices that you don't understand or approve of. The beautiful thing about freedom, however, is that no one needs your approval or understanding.
- rysertio 2y ago
  Both boys and girls from Asian countries tend to be more interested in STEM.
  - LargeWu 2y ago
    Because it's a commodity job where they can provide value to western corporations without having to be physically located there, and there's huge demand for them because of their low cost.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      Japan isn't low cost.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- em-bee 2y ago
  She works in a professional kitchen and is on the career path to becoming a chef and possibly a restauranteur. which to my knowledge is a male dominated profession. so good on her!
- ivan_gammel 2y ago
  How about calming down and keeping your emotions in check? Your whole comment is triggered by a wrong idea of what I meant and who I am. It is also ignorant of all the data that exists about gender inequality and the root causes. It is not something that you can learn from a single link to statistics. You need to do your own research, read some books and meet gender equality advocates to understand better the world in which your daughter lives. Individual free choices are valid and as a father you did a good job showing the opportunities you know about and then not pushing towards certain career. A woman absolutely can and should be able to choose to be an engineer, a nurse or a fulltime mother and housekeeper, as long as this is free choice. All those jobs are important and respected. However I’m not talking about them or diminishing them. I’m talking about the society as a whole and sexism so deeply rooted in the culture that even with proper education it is still not easy to uncover and combat all biases. Gender discrimination starts very early when metaphorically speaking boys get cars and girls get dolls. Children are programmed by the society to have certain interests and play certain gender roles. The share of girls who will choose a profession traditionally dominated by men is already lower because of that. Then it extends to university and first career steps. Women too often have to deal with sexism and harassment in academia or on workplace. Too often they are told (still!) that men can do better. Choosing a more traditional role they avoid it, but is it really a freedom of choice? And we even have not started talking about childcare where exists institutional disparity forcing to make a choice between the family and career. For example, how long was your parental leave compared to your wife? Freedom for all but white men in countries like America is only theoretical. On practice the circumstances of life do not leave many women a choice. The outcomes are speaking for themselves. There are many women who are perfectly fit for the most sophisticated jobs, yet there are only few who make it there. In Germany we at least had Merkel. America, the so-called leader of the free world, never had a woman as a president. Fortune 500 CEOs? Startup founders? Billionaires? Nobel prize winners? You can easily find those numbers. There’s no genetic predisposition for women to not being able to get there. There’s only ignorance of people like you who think that they have done enough and it’s the matter of choice.
cm2012 2y ago
The countries with the most female empowerment and equality in the nordics have some of the smallest percentage of women in STEM in the world.
- ivan_gammel 2y ago
  And? Have you looked at any research why this is happening? Out of context this can tell anything.
ghaff 2y ago
Of course, there are a variety of roles that are heavily female-weighted: nurses, K-12 teachers, executive assistants, etc. So there are at least some forces driving gender preferences for roles that probably can't/shouldn't just be wiped out in the West.
em-bee 2y ago
i don't know the real reasons, but i have the impression that in those countries STEM careers give women more freedom, and that would be why they pursue them. the added freedom makes it worth the potential downsides. in the west they already have more freedom, and so the downside of having to endure sexism does not make it worth the effort. not sure if that is true, but it makes sense to me
- ryandrake 2y ago
  > in the west they already have more freedom, and so the downside of having to endure sexism does not make it worth the effort. This is a great point. I think a lot of HN simply takes as given that tech is a great, pleasant industry to work in, for everyone. Let's say that it isn't. If it isn't, then that might explain why people who have a good degree of financial/employment freedom would not choose to work in tech, leaving people with not a lot of financial/employment freedom (but good tech skills) as the ones who grin and bear a tech job.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    I dunno about everyone else, but if “campground manager” had comp as good as tech, that’s sure as shit what I’d be doing instead. Goes for a lot of other options, actually. Clerking a small store is often way more pleasant (depends on the store) than even relatively-good tech jobs, at least to me. But the pay’s not there.
- ivan_gammel 2y ago
  It depends. In some countries (eg Iran) this is probably true from what I remember, in others there are other reasons.
ndriscoll 2y ago
My wife spends around an hour a day in the kitchen. I spend close to eight chained to my computer. If one of us is a slave, it's not her. She's not attending daily stand-ups to report how teaching our daughter the alphabet is going; she chooses how to spend each day with no external pressures at all. Her work taking care of the kids is still more exhausting than mine, but it's also obviously more fulfilling and engaging. When we meet all of our financial goals, we'll both be full time parents. As it is now, I make more than enough for her to take care of the kids full time and still make progress toward our goals. Why wouldn't she take that deal? Consider that when you talk about women doing what makes them happy and what they see as important work (because it is) as being "stuck in the past" or in a form of slavery, it might be you who's devaluing them. We both received a lot of that rhetoric growing up, and it took until well into adulthood to really understand how wrong and harmful it is.
- daseiner1 2y ago
  This dovetails with my central critique, which is that the current state of feminism, in my opinion, tends to insidiously subscribe to the tenets of the “late stage capitalism” that many self-proclaimed x-wave feminists (again, in my experience) claim to denounce, as it is oriented around viewing people first and foremost as economic agents. Yes, individual income affords freedoms to both men and women, which is not to be discounted. But then you hear criticisms of women such as your wife, essentially demeaning them for not striving to be the fittest individual economic agents possible. As if being an AE for Yelp is the pinnacle of the human experience. Again, by no means a black & white issue. I have simply have a distaste for such an individualist philosophy and fear it inevitably leads to an “us v. them” mentality.
  - autoexec 2y ago
    > But then you hear criticisms of women such as your wife, essentially demeaning them for not striving to be the fittest individual economic agents possible. to some extent I think that pressure is put on everyone. There's a lot of pressure to always be making/spending more money. There's also a lot of jealousy. Almost every person I know with children, man or woman, would rather be with their kids, and be there for their kids as they grow up. Very few couples are fortunate enough to be able to afford a good life on just one income. That leads to people being resentful that they are missing out on what they want for themselves and their children. They're stuck missing all the once in a lifetime experiences they could be having because they are chained to a desk for 8-10 hours a day 5 or more days a week. That can cause people to resent the few men and women who do get to stay home and be with their family. They'll make others feel bad for not spending their time working for someone else because misery loves company. It's crab bucket mentality.

cultofmetatron 2y ago

> I have seen data presented multiple times showing the relation between a country’s wealth and/or economic freedom and women’s participation in stem fields. This lines up with my experiences as well. I know plenty of eastern european women, asians and latinas working as programmers. on top of that I've talked to many that didn't know how to code but would ask me to teach them as soon as they heard I was a programmer. yet I have met only a small handful of white women from america that are software engineers. furthermore, the ones that aren't engineers (in general) seem more dismissive of my line of work as if its somehow beneath them.

Der_Einzige 2y ago
If those folks from outside of the USA had been from economically prosperous backgrounds, they too would try to become nurses or caregivers instead of programmers. Gender parity in STEM is a sign of the economic desperation of a countries people. This is a sociological fact which ruffles feathers when it’s stated out loud.
- callalex 2y ago
  Do you have any citations to back up this “fact”?
  - rsanek 2y ago
    take a look at the gender breakdowns for employment in the Nordics. probably the best social support structures / 'equality' in the world, and yet the ratios are among the most extreme anywhere. when you're taken care of, you do what you like. when you have an economic need, you'll take the job that pays and will pull you out of poverty, even if you don't care for it.
    - ivan_gammel 2y ago
      This argument is pretty common, but blaming the victim is wrong. It is not like Nordics solved the problem but women still choose different jobs. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190831-the-paradox-of-working-in-the-worlds-most-equal-countries https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190831-the-paradox-of...

itsoktocry 2y ago

>This will result in some professions with extreme sex imbalance, and we should accept that outcome. We do accept it, for the most part. I don't see many Men-as-Teachers or Men-in-Nursing advocacy groups.

cultofmetatron 2y ago
>or Men-in-Nursing advocacy groups. thats been changing. mostly because there are more obese people now so you need male nurses to help them move around.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  Ozempic solves this problem in 10 years.
KittenInABox 2y ago
There's literally an American Association of Men In Nursing. Just googling "male teachers" gives me a ton of articles about the importance of hiring more men in teaching. Apparently NYC recently announced a huge investment into hiring more black/latino men in teaching or something? I'm always suspicious of "you don't see much of x" in spaces where x isn't the demographic being catered to. This isn't Nursing News or Teacher News, not to say that Nurses and Teachers can't also be hackers, technologists, etc. but this is clearly not a space oriented towards all things teaching or nursing, so questioning community advocacy within their communities strikes me as the wrong place.
goalonetwo 2y ago
That's because their woman advocacy is really a not-so-hidden lobby to have woman making more money under the pretense of equal representation in all jobs.
simplicio 2y ago
There's a lot of Men-in-Teaching advocacy, in part because its thought having male teachers tends to be beneficial for male students[1]. I think stuff like that is the main reason to be worried about gender imbalances. A 40-60 imbalance probably isn't a big deal, but once you get to like, 90-10 or worse, as is the case with early education, you start to get a bunch of secondary social problems. Kids who associate learning as a woman only thing, or the culture around engineering or software becoming "boys clubs" that become uncomfortable for the women who do want to work in those fields https://www.cuny.edu/academics/academic-programs/teacher-education-programs/nyc-men-teach/ https://www.cuny.edu/academics/academic-programs/teacher-edu...

marcosdumay 2y ago

The idea that social sciences can pinpoint a single cause on something as full of confounding factors as this... it's extremely arrogant. But then, the same applies to the people that immediately explain it as discrimination.