4 ms·

I am more infuriated by the idea that if women are underrepresented in technical fields, it must be the fault of the men in those technical fields. After all,

I am more infuriated by the idea that if women are underrepresented in technical fields, it must be the fault of the men in those technical fields. After all, if men would just treat women equally, then women would represent half the workforce in those fields, right? Women are underrepresented in applications to engineering school. Are adults who are already in the workforce responsible for that? Do high school girls somehow sense the "hostile environment" in engineering schools before they spend a single day there? If we want to actually solve this problem, we need to go all the way to the beginning: middle school, where girls mysteriously start losing interest in technical fields.

Morendil 13y ago
> I am more infuriated by the idea that if women are underrepresented in technical fields, it must be the fault of the men in those technical fields. Who's saying that? > If we want to actually solve this problem, we need to go all the way to the beginning: middle school, where girls mysteriously start losing interest in technical fields. What do you mean by "go to middle school" - who do you suggest should take what action in that particular venue? > mysteriously What's mysterious about it? What expectations do you have that this observation runs counter to? What needs to be changed in our mental model of this system, so that instead of this being a mystery it becomes a predictable of the system's properties? (At which point we can start asking "how to change the system so that we get different outcomes".) (This is me being curious, not Socratic, BTW.)
- betterunix 13y ago
  "> I am more infuriated by the idea that if women are underrepresented in technical fields, it must be the fault of the men in those technical fields. Who's saying that?" Well, the article itself: Promoting equality in your organization If you start actively working to attack inequality in your organization, I guarantee you’ll realize you were already a feminist. When your heart’s in the right place and you’re constantly examining your own actions and your organization’s, you start to notice bias and prejudice in more and more places. Most disturbingly, you notice it in yourself. The implication in all of this is that there is inequality in our field that is due to our behavior i.e. the behavior of adults in the workforce. It is simply assumed that if we promote equality in our profession, and make it a team effort, then we will get equality. "What do you mean by "go to middle school" - who do you suggest should take what action in that particular venue?" I did not claim to have a solution, I was just pointing out where the problem lies. At some point in a girl's life, long before she is even thinking about college, something happens to undermine her interest in science and math. Years down the road, she winds up majoring in something that is not engineering or computer science, and fails to acquire the technical skills needed for a career in such fields by any other means. Obviously this is not something that all girls experience, but to a large extent it is the reason that engineering schools have so few women and so many men. Maybe it is something girls are seeing on TV. Maybe it is something they are reading on the Internet. It is pretty clear that a young teenager is not seeing whatever prejudice exists in the workplace (how often do middle schoolers wander into your office?). "What's mysterious about it? What expectations do you have that this observation runs counter to?" Absent some reason to think otherwise, why would anyone assume that girls who have a talent and interest in math before a certain age would suddenly abandon their interest upon reaching that age? If puberty is the answer, why does it not happen to boys? For that matter, why does it seem to happen to a different degree in our country than in others?
  - Morendil 13y ago
    > the behavior of adults in the workforce Not the same as "the men in the workforce", agreed?
  - Dewie 13y ago
    The OP might mean it in a more general sense in that we all have our biases, men and women included. It's just that men's biases might be more problematic in this case, since they're the majority in this field so any common bias they may have gets compounded.
  - Jtsummers 13y ago
    > The implication in all of this is that there is inequality in our field that is due to our behavior i.e. the behavior of adults in the workforce. It is simply assumed that if we promote equality in our profession, and make it a team effort, then we will get equality. I feel like you're getting something else out of this article than I did. The previous section, heading: Wanting equality isn’t enough, seems entirely contrary to the conclusion that you're drawn. The author is indicating that promoting/wanting isn't enough. We have to develop an understanding of why the situation is what it is, and actively work on shifting our culture to rectify it (assuming you think it's a problem in the first place, many around me don't).
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    Social pressures both to differentiate and conform to a particular sub-group during adolescence, and the kinds of groups that girls and boys tend to form. At least in part.
- Jtsummers 13y ago
  I'm only replying to the second question. In the US at least, it seems (and at one point I might have been able to point to the studies) that interest in STEM drops off[1] for female students around middle school, same for minority students. Many efforts at outreach, then, have tried to focus on introducing extracurricular academic programs at those students (often by targetting schools with higher female or minority populations) in an effort to cultivate their interest and maintain it through high school, in the hopes that it can increase the number participating in STEM in college and, later, the workforce. At this point, however, I don't know what measurable impact those programs have had, I should probably talk to the folks I know that are still participating in the programs at a level where they monitor the trends. Regarding who: Anyone working in STEM with the patience to deal with 12 year olds. Volunteer with FIRST Robotics teams or other after school or summer programs. Female and minority volunteers, in particular, as knowing that there are female and minority STEM workers isn't the same as knowing female and minority STEM workers, it can make a huge difference for kids. [1] EDIT: It may not be a drop off. It's been too long since I was involved with this, but perhaps instead of them losing interest it's that they don't develop the interest at this point?
  - tedunangst 13y ago
    You know what's a guaranteed method for killing a 12 year old's interest in a subject? Have a 40 year old tell them how cool it is.
    - Jtsummers 13y ago
      Show, don't tell. Provide an opportunity, guide them through solving interesting problems, set up the problems in ways that can appeal to them: competitions like FIRST Robotics; real world connections like rudimentary or introductory mechanical and electrical engineering and how it can solve their problems. I can tell my functional programming hating program lead all day that it's great and very applicable to what we do, or I can write up a program we've been needing for months in two days and 200 clear lines versus the 2000 line C# version that's still got bugs in it.
dllthomas 13y ago
> Do high school girls somehow sense the "hostile environment" in engineering schools before they spend a single day there? Quite possibly, potentially in cultural portrayals of what goes on there. This isn't to say that necessarily is the cause, but you've by no means clearly demonstrated the lack of causal relationship you seem to think you have.
- betterunix 13y ago
  I think there is a difference between what girls are being told (by entertainment, by teachers, by parents, etc.) happens in engineering schools and what actually happens. The real point is that we can bend over backwards to fix whatever prejudices women encounter in engineering schools or as professional engineers and still accomplish nothing in terms of the disproportionate representation of women in our field. In other words, if the problem is the environment within an engineering school, we should expect the trend to be a sudden, sharp change in female representation at the end of the first semester of the first year of college. Instead, we see poor representation in applications to engineering programs. I think that suggests the problem is earlier, and my own experience in engineering schools has been exactly that (my undergrad EE class had no women at all; in grad school, the vast majority of women I met were foreign, which might suggest something about our own culture versus others).
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    There is a difference, but there is also a relationship. Consider a world (and ignore, for the moment, whether it corresponds to reality) where professional technical environments just genuinely are really awful to female employees. In that case, the teachers and parents are probably doing what's best for the individual girls (though potentially with some long-term tragedy of the commons). Would you condemn, there, the honesty of the well-intentioned messengers? We should also consider an alternative fictional world, where women never have any issues in technical fields, and the cultural myth has arisen by whatever historical accident. In that case, I agree that it's quite legitimate to lay much of the blame at the feet of those perpetuating the incorrect myth. Reality, of course, looks absolutely nothing like either hypothetical. FWIW, my wife says she was turned off of technical studies after getting to Berkeley (having enjoyed physics in high school) by her impressions of the technical students on arrival.
rayiner 13y ago
> Do high school girls somehow sense the "hostile environment" in engineering schools before they spend a single day there? My wife, who has a solid head for mathematics but majored in German once explained to me why she didn't go into engineering: 1) because she didn't want to be surrounded by dudes all day; 2) because she didn't want to enter a field where she wouldn't have women bosses and mentors. So if you're a high-school girl doing even a minimal bit of career planning, yes, of course you take into account the fact hat you'll be a minority in your field if you go into engineering, with all of the career hurdles that being a minority in any field entails.
- betterunix 13y ago
  Perhaps so, but there is nothing people working in the field can do about that. If women are a minority because they are unwilling to join a field where they are a minority, then nothing that men do to change their behavior, attitude, or whatever else will solve the problem. I also have some doubts about this being the sole issue. As an undergrad, I watched my school work hard to try to play up the fact that there were female students, female professors, and famous women in engineering. This was done whenever potential students were visiting. This was done in pamphlets sent out to high schools. The effect was not even measurable. I see the same pattern in my graduate program, and the same pattern in other engineering schools, and even among recruiters for corporations. I am not sure what else people in the field can do to try to dispel the notion; if indeed this is a cause, I suspect that girls are learning to dislike engineering from somewhere else, but I think that something happens earlier in life, at least if we believe the research on when girls lose interest in technical fields (somewhere around middle school or early high school).
  - rayiner 13y ago
    > Perhaps so, but there is nothing people working in the field can do about that. If women are a minority because they are unwilling to join a field where they are a minority, then nothing that men do to change their behavior, attitude, or whatever else will solve the problem. Sure they can. They can simply hire more women. Once the gender ratio is sorted out, the new equilibrium will be self-sustaining.
jaibot 13y ago
I don't think anyone's saying men are to blame - this is a systematic problem. The important thing is not to blame someone, but to _fix it_. This post offers insight into the problem so people have a better shot at _fixing it_. So we can fight about who's evil or exactly what volume is ideal for talking about the problem, or we can Just. Fix. It.
- Jtsummers 13y ago
  I don't like doing this, but "systematic" when you mean "systemic" is one of my pet peeves. Systematic things are deliberate, if the bias is intentionally done then it could be systematic. In this case, it's not clear that anyone is trying to drive women from the field so it's systemic, a property of the system, or culture in this case. To discuss your comment, I didn't feel that the post brought any particular insight to fixing it, but rather was trying to encourage discussion. Sadly this post seems to have been flagged and is now buried on this discussion site. This problem is not one that we have a handle on yet, and discussion/analysis is key to determining why it exists. Of course, we can't discuss forever, at some point organizations and individuals need to act, experiment with different things and rectify the problems they can (and hopefully not shift them to darker corners).
  - aaronem 13y ago
    Three comma splices in two paragraphs? Good Lord.
    - Jtsummers 13y ago
      Two days ago I was very tired. My grammar (particularly written) goes to shit at that point. If you're trying to nitpick someone who was nitpicking, I anticpated that so I rarely make these sorts of comments. I've just noticed a trend of "systematic" being used for "systemic", even though they have very different meanings. It confuses the discussion when vocabulary is used incorrectly like this.
  - jaibot 13y ago
    You are absolutely right - thanks for pointing this out, I probably would have gone on making the same mistake for years otherwise.

Morendil 13y ago

> I am more infuriated by the idea that if women are underrepresented in technical fields, it must be the fault of the men in those technical fields. Who's saying that? > If we want to actually solve this problem, we need to go all the way to the beginning: middle school, where girls mysteriously start losing interest in technical fields. What do you mean by "go to middle school" - who do you suggest should take what action in that particular venue? > mysteriously What's mysterious about it? What expectations do you have that this observation runs counter to? What needs to be changed in our mental model of this system, so that instead of this being a mystery it becomes a predictable of the system's properties? (At which point we can start asking "how to change the system so that we get different outcomes".) (This is me being curious, not Socratic, BTW.)

betterunix 13y ago
"> I am more infuriated by the idea that if women are underrepresented in technical fields, it must be the fault of the men in those technical fields. Who's saying that?" Well, the article itself: Promoting equality in your organization If you start actively working to attack inequality in your organization, I guarantee you’ll realize you were already a feminist. When your heart’s in the right place and you’re constantly examining your own actions and your organization’s, you start to notice bias and prejudice in more and more places. Most disturbingly, you notice it in yourself. The implication in all of this is that there is inequality in our field that is due to our behavior i.e. the behavior of adults in the workforce. It is simply assumed that if we promote equality in our profession, and make it a team effort, then we will get equality. "What do you mean by "go to middle school" - who do you suggest should take what action in that particular venue?" I did not claim to have a solution, I was just pointing out where the problem lies. At some point in a girl's life, long before she is even thinking about college, something happens to undermine her interest in science and math. Years down the road, she winds up majoring in something that is not engineering or computer science, and fails to acquire the technical skills needed for a career in such fields by any other means. Obviously this is not something that all girls experience, but to a large extent it is the reason that engineering schools have so few women and so many men. Maybe it is something girls are seeing on TV. Maybe it is something they are reading on the Internet. It is pretty clear that a young teenager is not seeing whatever prejudice exists in the workplace (how often do middle schoolers wander into your office?). "What's mysterious about it? What expectations do you have that this observation runs counter to?" Absent some reason to think otherwise, why would anyone assume that girls who have a talent and interest in math before a certain age would suddenly abandon their interest upon reaching that age? If puberty is the answer, why does it not happen to boys? For that matter, why does it seem to happen to a different degree in our country than in others?
- Morendil 13y ago
  > the behavior of adults in the workforce Not the same as "the men in the workforce", agreed?
- Dewie 13y ago
  The OP might mean it in a more general sense in that we all have our biases, men and women included. It's just that men's biases might be more problematic in this case, since they're the majority in this field so any common bias they may have gets compounded.
- Jtsummers 13y ago
  > The implication in all of this is that there is inequality in our field that is due to our behavior i.e. the behavior of adults in the workforce. It is simply assumed that if we promote equality in our profession, and make it a team effort, then we will get equality. I feel like you're getting something else out of this article than I did. The previous section, heading: Wanting equality isn’t enough, seems entirely contrary to the conclusion that you're drawn. The author is indicating that promoting/wanting isn't enough. We have to develop an understanding of why the situation is what it is, and actively work on shifting our culture to rectify it (assuming you think it's a problem in the first place, many around me don't).
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  Social pressures both to differentiate and conform to a particular sub-group during adolescence, and the kinds of groups that girls and boys tend to form. At least in part.
Jtsummers 13y ago
I'm only replying to the second question. In the US at least, it seems (and at one point I might have been able to point to the studies) that interest in STEM drops off[1] for female students around middle school, same for minority students. Many efforts at outreach, then, have tried to focus on introducing extracurricular academic programs at those students (often by targetting schools with higher female or minority populations) in an effort to cultivate their interest and maintain it through high school, in the hopes that it can increase the number participating in STEM in college and, later, the workforce. At this point, however, I don't know what measurable impact those programs have had, I should probably talk to the folks I know that are still participating in the programs at a level where they monitor the trends. Regarding who: Anyone working in STEM with the patience to deal with 12 year olds. Volunteer with FIRST Robotics teams or other after school or summer programs. Female and minority volunteers, in particular, as knowing that there are female and minority STEM workers isn't the same as knowing female and minority STEM workers, it can make a huge difference for kids. [1] EDIT: It may not be a drop off. It's been too long since I was involved with this, but perhaps instead of them losing interest it's that they don't develop the interest at this point?
- tedunangst 13y ago
  You know what's a guaranteed method for killing a 12 year old's interest in a subject? Have a 40 year old tell them how cool it is.
  - Jtsummers 13y ago
    Show, don't tell. Provide an opportunity, guide them through solving interesting problems, set up the problems in ways that can appeal to them: competitions like FIRST Robotics; real world connections like rudimentary or introductory mechanical and electrical engineering and how it can solve their problems. I can tell my functional programming hating program lead all day that it's great and very applicable to what we do, or I can write up a program we've been needing for months in two days and 200 clear lines versus the 2000 line C# version that's still got bugs in it.

dllthomas 13y ago

> Do high school girls somehow sense the "hostile environment" in engineering schools before they spend a single day there? Quite possibly, potentially in cultural portrayals of what goes on there. This isn't to say that necessarily is the cause, but you've by no means clearly demonstrated the lack of causal relationship you seem to think you have.

betterunix 13y ago
I think there is a difference between what girls are being told (by entertainment, by teachers, by parents, etc.) happens in engineering schools and what actually happens. The real point is that we can bend over backwards to fix whatever prejudices women encounter in engineering schools or as professional engineers and still accomplish nothing in terms of the disproportionate representation of women in our field. In other words, if the problem is the environment within an engineering school, we should expect the trend to be a sudden, sharp change in female representation at the end of the first semester of the first year of college. Instead, we see poor representation in applications to engineering programs. I think that suggests the problem is earlier, and my own experience in engineering schools has been exactly that (my undergrad EE class had no women at all; in grad school, the vast majority of women I met were foreign, which might suggest something about our own culture versus others).
- dllthomas 13y ago
  There is a difference, but there is also a relationship. Consider a world (and ignore, for the moment, whether it corresponds to reality) where professional technical environments just genuinely are really awful to female employees. In that case, the teachers and parents are probably doing what's best for the individual girls (though potentially with some long-term tragedy of the commons). Would you condemn, there, the honesty of the well-intentioned messengers? We should also consider an alternative fictional world, where women never have any issues in technical fields, and the cultural myth has arisen by whatever historical accident. In that case, I agree that it's quite legitimate to lay much of the blame at the feet of those perpetuating the incorrect myth. Reality, of course, looks absolutely nothing like either hypothetical. FWIW, my wife says she was turned off of technical studies after getting to Berkeley (having enjoyed physics in high school) by her impressions of the technical students on arrival.

rayiner 13y ago

> Do high school girls somehow sense the "hostile environment" in engineering schools before they spend a single day there? My wife, who has a solid head for mathematics but majored in German once explained to me why she didn't go into engineering: 1) because she didn't want to be surrounded by dudes all day; 2) because she didn't want to enter a field where she wouldn't have women bosses and mentors. So if you're a high-school girl doing even a minimal bit of career planning, yes, of course you take into account the fact hat you'll be a minority in your field if you go into engineering, with all of the career hurdles that being a minority in any field entails.

betterunix 13y ago
Perhaps so, but there is nothing people working in the field can do about that. If women are a minority because they are unwilling to join a field where they are a minority, then nothing that men do to change their behavior, attitude, or whatever else will solve the problem. I also have some doubts about this being the sole issue. As an undergrad, I watched my school work hard to try to play up the fact that there were female students, female professors, and famous women in engineering. This was done whenever potential students were visiting. This was done in pamphlets sent out to high schools. The effect was not even measurable. I see the same pattern in my graduate program, and the same pattern in other engineering schools, and even among recruiters for corporations. I am not sure what else people in the field can do to try to dispel the notion; if indeed this is a cause, I suspect that girls are learning to dislike engineering from somewhere else, but I think that something happens earlier in life, at least if we believe the research on when girls lose interest in technical fields (somewhere around middle school or early high school).
- rayiner 13y ago
  > Perhaps so, but there is nothing people working in the field can do about that. If women are a minority because they are unwilling to join a field where they are a minority, then nothing that men do to change their behavior, attitude, or whatever else will solve the problem. Sure they can. They can simply hire more women. Once the gender ratio is sorted out, the new equilibrium will be self-sustaining.

jaibot 13y ago

I don't think anyone's saying men are to blame - this is a systematic problem. The important thing is not to blame someone, but to _fix it_. This post offers insight into the problem so people have a better shot at _fixing it_. So we can fight about who's evil or exactly what volume is ideal for talking about the problem, or we can Just. Fix. It.

Jtsummers 13y ago
I don't like doing this, but "systematic" when you mean "systemic" is one of my pet peeves. Systematic things are deliberate, if the bias is intentionally done then it could be systematic. In this case, it's not clear that anyone is trying to drive women from the field so it's systemic, a property of the system, or culture in this case. To discuss your comment, I didn't feel that the post brought any particular insight to fixing it, but rather was trying to encourage discussion. Sadly this post seems to have been flagged and is now buried on this discussion site. This problem is not one that we have a handle on yet, and discussion/analysis is key to determining why it exists. Of course, we can't discuss forever, at some point organizations and individuals need to act, experiment with different things and rectify the problems they can (and hopefully not shift them to darker corners).
- aaronem 13y ago
  Three comma splices in two paragraphs? Good Lord.
  - Jtsummers 13y ago
    Two days ago I was very tired. My grammar (particularly written) goes to shit at that point. If you're trying to nitpick someone who was nitpicking, I anticpated that so I rarely make these sorts of comments. I've just noticed a trend of "systematic" being used for "systemic", even though they have very different meanings. It confuses the discussion when vocabulary is used incorrectly like this.
- jaibot 13y ago
  You are absolutely right - thanks for pointing this out, I probably would have gone on making the same mistake for years otherwise.