4 ms·

This actually explains why more women do not get into tech careers. In the same way that this young woman felt alienated from her schoolmates, many women who ar

by nhebb 13y ago

This actually explains why more women do not get into tech careers. In the same way that this young woman felt alienated from her schoolmates, many women who are not into geek culture would feel alienated by CS classmates and the tech industry. There's been a lot of talk about getting more women into this industry, and it's often looked at as a failing of the industry itself. What's plainly obvious to me is that many (most?) women just aren't interested in the field.

overgryphon 13y ago
This is how I feel. I love my job, and find computer science interesting. Why does that mean that I have to also be knowledgeable about the nuances of magic cards, star trek, or Dr. Who? The idea that every software developer must also identify as a geek is rather immature.
- paddy_m 13y ago
  I agree. I don't read comic books, barely watch sci-fi, play board games. I play sports and do stuff outside. I often feel like an outcast when I'm talking to a bunch of programmers and they veer off into sci-fi talk.
vec 13y ago
> What's plainly obvious to me is that many (most?) women just aren't interested in the field. Which is exactly the problem. There's no strong reason to suggest that this difference is due to anything other than social pressure. Something in the way we socialize children is convincing half the potential talent pool that they shouldn't develop an interest in technology fields, almost certainly because they see few if any adult role models. It's not really a failing of the industry, in the sense that we're probably not the ones who originally caused it. But it is a problem for the industry, and one that industry insiders are in a unique position to solve.
- SPSteinbeck 13y ago
  There's no strong reason to suggest that this difference is due to anything other than social pressure. The fact that such social pressure to enforce gender roles exists and the fact that such pressure independently arose in every advanced civilization to ever exist overwhelmingly suggests it is an intrinsic feature of the human race. Certainly, this would suggest the only way to overthrow the gender roles you despise is for some governing apparatus to coerce behaviour (which we already do to some extent); organically, humans will organize themselves in what you would call a "sexist" way. Of course, even then, the shelf life on the sexless world you envision is short. American hegemony is waning and none of the candidates to fill the power vacuum will have much time for the 'isms that so occupy your mind.
- lgieron 13y ago
  I've read about studies [1] which shown that boys and girls under 1 year old already show preferences which we attribute with stereotypical gender roles (boys were more appealed to mechanical objects while girls were more interested in human faces (=>social interactions)). [1] Since there are also studies which show that a nontrivial part of results in social science papers are not replicable, it has to be taken with a tiny grain of salt.
- jcrites 13y ago
  > There's no strong reason to suggest that this difference is due to anything other than social pressure. Not entirely true. Differences between male and female behavior and interest can be demonstrated on the first day of life in humans, and can even be demonstrated in other species of animals such as rodents. > In summary, we have demonstrated that at 1 day old, human neonates demonstrate sexual dimorphism in both social and mechanical perception. Male infants show a stronger interest in mechanical objects, while female infants show a stronger interest in the face. At such an age, these sex differences cannot readily be attributed to postnatal experience, and are instead consistent with a biological cause, most likely neurogenetic and/or neuroendocrine in nature. http://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf http://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf There are physical differences between the structure of male and female brains: > Using magnetic resonance imaging, we assessed gray matter volumes in several cortical regions in 17 women and 43 men. Women had 23.2% (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and 12.8% (superior temporal gyrus) greater gray matter percentages than men in a language-related cortical region, but not in a more visuospatially related cortical region. These data seem to establish sexually dimorphic structural differences in the cerebral cortex, consistent with ptior cerebral blood flow reports. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/092549279502634A http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/09254927950... > The really significant difference, however, shows up in where language is processed in the male and female brains. The left and right hemispheres of women process language almost equally; while in men, language is processed almost exclusively by the left hemisphere. This symmetrical processing by the female brain is not limited to language applications, and is probably a result of a corpus callosum that is 20% larger in females than in males. (Eliot 1999:380-81,432; Kommer 2006: 248) > Spatial tasks are among those other applications females process bilaterally. For men, however, spatial tasks are processed in the right hemisphere. (Rilea 2008:2) http://www.erha.org/buettner/spatial.htm http://www.erha.org/buettner/spatial.htm Based on current research it seems premature to conclude that the differences in performance or personal interest are /entirely/ social. Some research on the topic of performance differences between boys and girls: > More than 50 years of psychological testing and research have yielded the consensus that "the most persistent of individual differences on mutlifactor tests of psychological functioning is a sex difference in spatial ability. Males have decidedly better spatial skill than females" (Harris 1978). In a detailed meta-analysis of the studies of cognitive sex differences, Rosenthal and Rubin (1982) concluded that, although the magnitude of such differences has declined in recent years, sex differences in cognitive functioning are still nontrivial and of real practical importance. The few nonhuman species for which there are comparative data suggest the generality of this phenomenon: among both wild and laboratory rodents males perform significantly better than females on spatial tasks. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2461648?uid=3739256&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21101956617163 http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2461648?uid=3739256&#3... > For instance, men and women perform comparably on such language skills as verbal reasoning and vocabulary, and men actually outperform women on verbal analogies. Women, despite their supposed mathematical shortcomings, are better at numerical calculations. (Eliot 1999:380, 431) > Men do perform better on certain spatial tasks; for example, mentally rotating objects in space and reading maps/locating landmarks. Women, researchers have found, are better at remembering the location of objects in a large array. (Eliot 1999: 221; Understanding the Brain 2007:103; Sherry 1997:50) > A large sex difference in mathematical ability in favor of boys was observed in every talent search. It is notable that we observed sizable sex differences in mathematical reasoning ability in 7th grade students. Until that grade, boys and girls have presumably had essential the same amount of formal training in mathematics. Thus, the sex difference in mathematical reasoning ability we found was observed before girls and boys started to differ significantly in the number and types of mathematics courses taken. http://www.vanderbilt.edu/peabody/smpy/ScienceFactOrArtifact.pdf http://www.vanderbilt.edu/peabody/smpy/ScienceFactOrArtifact... > Sizable performance and participation rate differences have existed between male and female candidates on the College Board Admissions Testing Program's (ATP) Physics Achievement Test for many years (Pfeiffenberger, 1974) http://research.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/publications/2012/7/researchreport-1981-4-comparison-male-female-atp-physics.pdf http://research.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/publica... (this report concludes that the performance difference vanishes when comparing boys and girls with many semesters of physics training, but notes that far fewer girls undertake the training than boys).
dcalacci 13y ago
Many women not being interested in the field is not a _cause_ of the male-oriented tech culture; it's a symptom (although it is self-perpetuating) The idea that 'most women just aren't interested in the field' because they're women, and not because the male-dominated culture _makes_ most women uninterested in the field, is harmful. Making that statement on a male-dominated community site perpetuates and constructs that culture that makes women uncomfortable in the field. Comments like that are _the reason why_ many women 'just aren't interested in the field'. The only way that this culture can change is if individual people work to stop perpetuating it. The first step is to stop making comments like that. (Would a woman feel comfortable on this site if they read that statement?)
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > The idea that 'most women just aren't interested in the field' because they're women, and not because the male-dominated culture _makes_ most women uninterested in the field, is harmful. I suspect that most women aren't interested in the field the same reason most men aren't. Despite how interesting it is to those of us -- women and men -- who have chosen the field, the fact is that most people just don't see (or share) the attraction, for reasons which have nothing to do with either their own sex or their perception of the culture of the field. The minority of women interested in the field may be a smaller minority than the minority of men, and that may be because of either perception (accurate or not) of the welcomingness of the culture of the field by women (and, for that matter, men) or actual sex differences, or both, but that is a whole different set of things than the reason most women aren't interested in the field.
  - dcalacci 13y ago
    The language I used was not clear. most women are not interested in the field because most people aren't interested in the field. I was speaking more towards the fact that less women go into STEM than basically any other major field. Suggesting that it could be because of actual sex differences is ignorant and totally preposterous. The hypotheses that a) the culture is male-dominated[1] and b)that the gap is due to that culture is well supported by sociological research. [1]http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?hl=en&q=http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0432.00079/full&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm3-ntWS5Ml1XRG6_SfNN8ayt8jbfg&oi=scholarr http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?hl=en&q=http://onl...
magwildwood 13y ago
I agree with the first part of your comment, but am confused by your conclusion. As a woman in technology (yes, one who codes, not a marketer or lawyer), I have my own views on this. I am a nerd when it comes to technology. I have a passion for it and could talk about it all day. I don't however, have a significant interest in sci-fi or fantasy films. From first glance, I appear to be stereotypically female: I'd rather talk about make-up than Tolkien--but that has no bearing on my interest in technology. I can understand why someone might think being interested in science fiction would be correlated with an interest in technology. But technology has become an important part of an individual's world. With women being huge consumers of modern technology, it's not difficult to see how some would be interested in the creation of it too. I don't have the issue this article discusses--feeling alienated from other women. I don't feel alienated from most men either. It comes from people who believe these interests to be important qualifiers for being a "nerd." I think the article is somewhat interesting, but it's difficult for me to see how her fellow women not being interested in her "geeky" activities is a barrier from entering engineering. In fact, it seems as if she is drawn there because she feels she'll be more accepted, and that her issue is with too many marketers at an IT event. Perhaps some of those women would actually be interested on the side of creating technology, but felt there would be more acceptance of their interests in marketing? It appears to me that these associations (that engineers and programmers love Star Wars) may be its own barrier.
- klipt 13y ago
  > I appear to be stereotypically female: I'd rather talk about make-up than Tolkien What's interesting is the majority of fantasy readers are women (in fact, the majority of fiction readers in general). I know a quite a few female lit geeks who care about Tolkien (or Harry Potter) but not particularly about technology. The definition of geek is pretty vague at times. I've met socially awkward geeks who are obsessed about one thing and incapable of talking about anything else; and then I've met socially awesome geeks who have a burning curiosity about everything and just talking to them makes you feel amazed at the sheer wonder and variety of life.

by nhebb 13y ago

overgryphon 13y ago

This is how I feel. I love my job, and find computer science interesting. Why does that mean that I have to also be knowledgeable about the nuances of magic cards, star trek, or Dr. Who? The idea that every software developer must also identify as a geek is rather immature.

paddy_m 13y ago
I agree. I don't read comic books, barely watch sci-fi, play board games. I play sports and do stuff outside. I often feel like an outcast when I'm talking to a bunch of programmers and they veer off into sci-fi talk.

vec 13y ago

> What's plainly obvious to me is that many (most?) women just aren't interested in the field. Which is exactly the problem. There's no strong reason to suggest that this difference is due to anything other than social pressure. Something in the way we socialize children is convincing half the potential talent pool that they shouldn't develop an interest in technology fields, almost certainly because they see few if any adult role models. It's not really a failing of the industry, in the sense that we're probably not the ones who originally caused it. But it is a problem for the industry, and one that industry insiders are in a unique position to solve.

SPSteinbeck 13y ago
There's no strong reason to suggest that this difference is due to anything other than social pressure. The fact that such social pressure to enforce gender roles exists and the fact that such pressure independently arose in every advanced civilization to ever exist overwhelmingly suggests it is an intrinsic feature of the human race. Certainly, this would suggest the only way to overthrow the gender roles you despise is for some governing apparatus to coerce behaviour (which we already do to some extent); organically, humans will organize themselves in what you would call a "sexist" way. Of course, even then, the shelf life on the sexless world you envision is short. American hegemony is waning and none of the candidates to fill the power vacuum will have much time for the 'isms that so occupy your mind.
lgieron 13y ago
I've read about studies [1] which shown that boys and girls under 1 year old already show preferences which we attribute with stereotypical gender roles (boys were more appealed to mechanical objects while girls were more interested in human faces (=>social interactions)). [1] Since there are also studies which show that a nontrivial part of results in social science papers are not replicable, it has to be taken with a tiny grain of salt.
jcrites 13y ago
> There's no strong reason to suggest that this difference is due to anything other than social pressure. Not entirely true. Differences between male and female behavior and interest can be demonstrated on the first day of life in humans, and can even be demonstrated in other species of animals such as rodents. > In summary, we have demonstrated that at 1 day old, human neonates demonstrate sexual dimorphism in both social and mechanical perception. Male infants show a stronger interest in mechanical objects, while female infants show a stronger interest in the face. At such an age, these sex differences cannot readily be attributed to postnatal experience, and are instead consistent with a biological cause, most likely neurogenetic and/or neuroendocrine in nature. http://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf http://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf There are physical differences between the structure of male and female brains: > Using magnetic resonance imaging, we assessed gray matter volumes in several cortical regions in 17 women and 43 men. Women had 23.2% (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and 12.8% (superior temporal gyrus) greater gray matter percentages than men in a language-related cortical region, but not in a more visuospatially related cortical region. These data seem to establish sexually dimorphic structural differences in the cerebral cortex, consistent with ptior cerebral blood flow reports. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/092549279502634A http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/09254927950... > The really significant difference, however, shows up in where language is processed in the male and female brains. The left and right hemispheres of women process language almost equally; while in men, language is processed almost exclusively by the left hemisphere. This symmetrical processing by the female brain is not limited to language applications, and is probably a result of a corpus callosum that is 20% larger in females than in males. (Eliot 1999:380-81,432; Kommer 2006: 248) > Spatial tasks are among those other applications females process bilaterally. For men, however, spatial tasks are processed in the right hemisphere. (Rilea 2008:2) http://www.erha.org/buettner/spatial.htm http://www.erha.org/buettner/spatial.htm Based on current research it seems premature to conclude that the differences in performance or personal interest are /entirely/ social. Some research on the topic of performance differences between boys and girls: > More than 50 years of psychological testing and research have yielded the consensus that "the most persistent of individual differences on mutlifactor tests of psychological functioning is a sex difference in spatial ability. Males have decidedly better spatial skill than females" (Harris 1978). In a detailed meta-analysis of the studies of cognitive sex differences, Rosenthal and Rubin (1982) concluded that, although the magnitude of such differences has declined in recent years, sex differences in cognitive functioning are still nontrivial and of real practical importance. The few nonhuman species for which there are comparative data suggest the generality of this phenomenon: among both wild and laboratory rodents males perform significantly better than females on spatial tasks. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2461648?uid=3739256&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21101956617163 http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2461648?uid=3739256&#3... > For instance, men and women perform comparably on such language skills as verbal reasoning and vocabulary, and men actually outperform women on verbal analogies. Women, despite their supposed mathematical shortcomings, are better at numerical calculations. (Eliot 1999:380, 431) > Men do perform better on certain spatial tasks; for example, mentally rotating objects in space and reading maps/locating landmarks. Women, researchers have found, are better at remembering the location of objects in a large array. (Eliot 1999: 221; Understanding the Brain 2007:103; Sherry 1997:50) > A large sex difference in mathematical ability in favor of boys was observed in every talent search. It is notable that we observed sizable sex differences in mathematical reasoning ability in 7th grade students. Until that grade, boys and girls have presumably had essential the same amount of formal training in mathematics. Thus, the sex difference in mathematical reasoning ability we found was observed before girls and boys started to differ significantly in the number and types of mathematics courses taken. http://www.vanderbilt.edu/peabody/smpy/ScienceFactOrArtifact.pdf http://www.vanderbilt.edu/peabody/smpy/ScienceFactOrArtifact... > Sizable performance and participation rate differences have existed between male and female candidates on the College Board Admissions Testing Program's (ATP) Physics Achievement Test for many years (Pfeiffenberger, 1974) http://research.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/publications/2012/7/researchreport-1981-4-comparison-male-female-atp-physics.pdf http://research.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/publica... (this report concludes that the performance difference vanishes when comparing boys and girls with many semesters of physics training, but notes that far fewer girls undertake the training than boys).

dcalacci 13y ago

Many women not being interested in the field is not a _cause_ of the male-oriented tech culture; it's a symptom (although it is self-perpetuating) The idea that 'most women just aren't interested in the field' because they're women, and not because the male-dominated culture _makes_ most women uninterested in the field, is harmful. Making that statement on a male-dominated community site perpetuates and constructs that culture that makes women uncomfortable in the field. Comments like that are _the reason why_ many women 'just aren't interested in the field'. The only way that this culture can change is if individual people work to stop perpetuating it. The first step is to stop making comments like that. (Would a woman feel comfortable on this site if they read that statement?)

dragonwriter 13y ago
> The idea that 'most women just aren't interested in the field' because they're women, and not because the male-dominated culture _makes_ most women uninterested in the field, is harmful. I suspect that most women aren't interested in the field the same reason most men aren't. Despite how interesting it is to those of us -- women and men -- who have chosen the field, the fact is that most people just don't see (or share) the attraction, for reasons which have nothing to do with either their own sex or their perception of the culture of the field. The minority of women interested in the field may be a smaller minority than the minority of men, and that may be because of either perception (accurate or not) of the welcomingness of the culture of the field by women (and, for that matter, men) or actual sex differences, or both, but that is a whole different set of things than the reason most women aren't interested in the field.
- dcalacci 13y ago
  The language I used was not clear. most women are not interested in the field because most people aren't interested in the field. I was speaking more towards the fact that less women go into STEM than basically any other major field. Suggesting that it could be because of actual sex differences is ignorant and totally preposterous. The hypotheses that a) the culture is male-dominated[1] and b)that the gap is due to that culture is well supported by sociological research. [1]http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?hl=en&q=http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0432.00079/full&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm3-ntWS5Ml1XRG6_SfNN8ayt8jbfg&oi=scholarr http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?hl=en&q=http://onl...

magwildwood 13y ago

I agree with the first part of your comment, but am confused by your conclusion. As a woman in technology (yes, one who codes, not a marketer or lawyer), I have my own views on this. I am a nerd when it comes to technology. I have a passion for it and could talk about it all day. I don't however, have a significant interest in sci-fi or fantasy films. From first glance, I appear to be stereotypically female: I'd rather talk about make-up than Tolkien--but that has no bearing on my interest in technology. I can understand why someone might think being interested in science fiction would be correlated with an interest in technology. But technology has become an important part of an individual's world. With women being huge consumers of modern technology, it's not difficult to see how some would be interested in the creation of it too. I don't have the issue this article discusses--feeling alienated from other women. I don't feel alienated from most men either. It comes from people who believe these interests to be important qualifiers for being a "nerd." I think the article is somewhat interesting, but it's difficult for me to see how her fellow women not being interested in her "geeky" activities is a barrier from entering engineering. In fact, it seems as if she is drawn there because she feels she'll be more accepted, and that her issue is with too many marketers at an IT event. Perhaps some of those women would actually be interested on the side of creating technology, but felt there would be more acceptance of their interests in marketing? It appears to me that these associations (that engineers and programmers love Star Wars) may be its own barrier.

klipt 13y ago
> I appear to be stereotypically female: I'd rather talk about make-up than Tolkien What's interesting is the majority of fantasy readers are women (in fact, the majority of fiction readers in general). I know a quite a few female lit geeks who care about Tolkien (or Harry Potter) but not particularly about technology. The definition of geek is pretty vague at times. I've met socially awkward geeks who are obsessed about one thing and incapable of talking about anything else; and then I've met socially awesome geeks who have a burning curiosity about everything and just talking to them makes you feel amazed at the sheer wonder and variety of life.