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When I hear about this being a cultural thing, an important aspect people leave out is that men aren't exactly encouraged to be coders either. Writing code has

When I hear about this being a cultural thing, an important aspect people leave out is that men aren't exactly encouraged to be coders either. Writing code has pretty much no social cred until you're out of school, and pretty much automatically gets you tagged as a nerd. No coder I know started coding because it was cool, they just sort of enjoyed it and accepted the social consequences. I'm just going to throw this out here: only about 10% of nurses are male. Yet I rarely hear about the cultural problem of not having enough males in nursing, or how we can encourage more male nurses. Same goes for elementary school teachers. Why is that? Just because there's a gender imbalance doesn't necessarily mean anyone is keeping anyone out. And if a few insensitive comments can keep you from doing what you want to do in life, maybe that's something you have to deal with -- there's always going to be haters no matter what you want to do.

azakai 13y ago
> I'm just going to throw this out here: only about 10% of nurses are male. Yet I rarely hear about the cultural problem of not having enough males in nursing, or how we can encourage more male nurses. Perhaps because you mostly read tech news sites, and not nursing news sites. This stuff (in both tech and nursing) rarely reaches the mainstream news sources, so people not involved in the industry generally are unaware of it. Definitely it is well known that there is a shortage of men in nursing as well as in clinical psychology for example, and many in those industries think their industries would be better off with more men, and make efforts to change things. Some random links: https://asunews.asu.edu/20121130_meninnursing https://asunews.asu.edu/20121130_meninnursing http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/health/22therapists.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/health/22therapists.html?p... I have a background in psychology, so I know less about the nursing situation, but in psychology it's definitely a topic that comes up. Which is not surprising, the gender disparity is very large: When I was an undergrad, I was in a small minority, somewhere in 10-20%, and it can be an odd feeling.
- ceol 13y ago
  Psychology is still very male-dominated, at least in terms of employers, teachers, and researchers — i.e. people in power in the industry.
- 2muchcoffeeman 13y ago
  Perhaps because you mostly read tech news sites, and not nursing news sites. This stuff (in both tech and nursing) rarely reaches the mainstream news sources, so people not involved in the industry generally are unaware of it. That's a good point. However, I was watching something on TV just yesterday about getting women into programming. My perception is that trying to get more women into programming is a much more popular issue than getting men into nursing. If we kept up with industry news would we observe more "get women to be garbage collectors" and "get men into preschool education" news?
  - azakai 13y ago
    One thing to realize here is that the industries are not symmetrical. There are billionaires and billion-dollar companies in the tech industry (as well as many many non-rich but still very well off engineers that can each donate money), but nothing like that in nursing or psychology or garbage collection or preschool education. So the tech industry, if it want to, can pour large sums of money into its causes (as we see in the topic of this discussion, but also many others). And it can make sure the mainstream press notices them. Whereas even if the psychology community wants desperately to get more men to join its ranks, it just doesn't have the resources the tech industry has. It also is not just money. The tech industry is the industry that makes websites, that builds twitter and facebook and all that. Initiatives in the tech industry have an inherent advantage over initiatives in other industries, which have to make the effort to find some tech person to build their online presence. So it is not surprising to me at all that initiatives in the tech industry are more noticeable than from other industries. The tech industry is special in many ways. Edit: An example of an industry with even more power and noticeability than tech is hollywood, which has both money and famous+popular people in it. That's why we hear about all the various initiatives this or that actor is up to.
  - dinkumthinkum 13y ago
    Have you ever heard the phrase "one thing is not like the other?" I think that might apply here.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > However, I was watching something on TV just yesterday about getting women into programming. My perception is that trying to get more women into programming is a much more popular issue than getting men into nursing. Sure, you see it on TV more because it better fits a canned mass media narrative about the progress of women into male-dominated, well-paid, percieved-as-high-status professions. That doesn't mean its considered more of a focus in the relevant professions. Its a mistake to assume that the frequency and intensity with which something appears in the mass media is somehow a reliable guide to anything about its significance outside mass media. > If we kept up with industry news would we observe more "get women to be garbage collectors" and "get men into preschool education" news? Garbage collectors I'm less sure of, but, yes, getting more men into most all levels of secondary-and-earlier education is a not-insignificant issue.
newnewnew 13y ago
Men do better than women at the Math SAT[1]. The male/female ratio is especially high in the higher Math percentiles, where you would expect your best engineers to come from. The polite way to explain this is some kind of "expectations effect", which is possible, but females do dominate at all other aspects of education. We cannot rule out simple innate ability, combined with higher male interest in abstract things. [1] http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/09/2012-sat-test-results-a-huge-gender-math-gap-persists-with-a-33-point-advantage-for-high-school-boys/ http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/09/2012-sat-test-results-a-hug...
- ama729 13y ago
  > where you would expect your best engineers to come from. I frequently see this assertion but I never see it sourced. Most programming use nothing more than simple math or just re-implementation of known algorithms (and we know how it turned out for Telegram to invent their own), why would you need hardcore math skills then? If you said "above average", that would have been understandable, but then there isn't much data to support that point of view since as point out, the effect is especially important in the higher percentiles.
  - newnewnew 13y ago
    Startups try to keep a "high bar", only hiring people with sterling academic credentials or proven work in the field. So I would expect the gender ratio to be less equal at startups that draw from the far right-hand side of the graph, and more equal at big firms that are willing to hire from the middle.
    - eropple 13y ago
      > Startups try to keep a "high bar", only hiring people with sterling academic credentials or proven work in the field. Your "high bar" is everyone else's "they're like us."
  - ericd 13y ago
    Math and programming both require a facility in thinking abstractly, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a correlation between math ability and programming ability.
parennoob 13y ago
Yep, and a series of uncomfortable truths about how things work against men (specially Asian men) who are trying to learn to code: 1. At school and such, no one tries to encourage you to code. People naturally think, "Oh, male and Asian, screw him, the world doesn't need another Asian dude coding. Let's try and teach Rails to that cute girl -- we need more of her kind." 2. People assume you are better at coding, math, and suchlike, and are more strident in their criticism of you when you fail to live up to their standards. I have had people tell me "yeah, if you can't understand this, you might not be smart enough". Think of the brouhaha that would result (gasp!) if someone said that to a girl. 3. You are naturally left out of all of the outreach events. Everyone is trying to get more women into coding, for some yet-as-undefined goal (getting exactly 51% women, maybe?). But you -- you are just another male nerd, and you have apparently had a red carpet laid out for you to the world of coding, so you must be privileged. There are tons of jobs that are female dominated. Nursing? Teaching? Fashion? Yet no one's complaining that there aren't enough men on the editorial staff of Cosmopolitan magazine, or starting movements for "Men Who Are Interested In Fashion". Draw your own conclusions from this.
- judk 13y ago
  Are you joking? The fashion world has massively outreached to men in recent couple of decades. Axe and chest shaving and all that other metrosexual stuff. And the lack of male teachers is a persistent concern in the education world, especially with respect to the need to provide male role models for kids of single moms.
  - parennoob 13y ago
    > The fashion world has massively outreached to men in recent couple of decades. Axe and chest shaving and all that other metrosexual stuff. I mean men working in fashion, not being marketed to. And Axe is not fashion, thank you very much. > And the lack of male teachers is a persistent concern in the education world... Show me the equivalent of "Rails Girls" or "Girls Who Code" for male teachers or fashion designers. For example, the list of sponsors on this page (http://www.girlswhocode.com/about-us/ http://www.girlswhocode.com/about-us/).
RivieraKid 13y ago
> I'm just going to throw this out here: only about 10% of nurses are male. I think this is partly caused by the fact that men and women have a different natural tendency to enjoy nursing. (Honest question – is this belief politically incorrect?) If you completely filter out cultural effects, the tendency to incline to a specific profession will differ between genders, at least very slightly (that's just statistics). Of course, the very hard question is how big is this difference.
- ps4fanboy 13y ago
  To suggest that men are some how different to women is incredibly sexist, check your privilege.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    Men are obviously biologically different than women in a large number of ways; the exact degree to which those biological differences affect behavior and attitudes is unclear, but we know that differences in, e.g., hormone levels within a gender have behavioral and attitude impacts, so its at least likely that there is some degree of such impact from that and other biological differences between genders. If you define sexism broadly enough, that may be "sexist", but it doesn't stop it from being well supported by the facts we know about the world.
    - RivieraKid 13y ago
      Well, men and women are different. As hopefullly everyone knows, they have different bodies, including the brain (there are obvious psychological and behavioral differences).
  - RivieraKid 13y ago
    Just to be sure (one can never know nowdays) – that's sarcasm right?
    - ps4fanboy 13y ago
vacri 13y ago
Yet I rarely hear about the cultural problem of not having enough males in nursing, or how we can encourage more male nurses.... Why is that? Because you're not reading the discussions in the nursing industry. It's a recognised problem there and they do want more men involved. The technical world also has a much larger online presence, unsurprisingly. Same goes for elementary school teachers. Same goes for elementary school teachers.
- berrypicker 13y ago
  >they do want more men involved. Why is it so important in modern society that every area has an even split of men and women and the right quota of every ethnicity?
  - vacri 13y ago
    I personally don't think an even split in every area is the right way to go. But the percentage of men in nursing is in the single digits - far from 'an even split'. There are concrete benefits to having more male nurses - some patients respond better to being handled by a member of a given gender. Same thing with teachers for young children, in that more male teachers means having a broader, better range of role models. 'Matching the demographic proportions' is a stupid goal, but 'well-represented' isn't.
    - berrypicker 13y ago
      This is going to sound like an is-therefore-it-ought-to-be fallacious argument but it makes sense to me that there are more female nurses simply because women are better suited to the task and more importantly want to be nurses? I mean there are probably historical reasons for the low number of male nurses and other things to attribute the low ratio to but we didn't sit down one day and force females to be nurses. Healthcare and educations has way bigger problems than some patients responding better to male nurses. There's a lot of what I consider grasping at straws when it comes to this sort of discussion. Let's start by talking about the curriculum and spending and stuff that has way more of an impact on our society.
  - deleted 13y ago
codygman 13y ago
I... thought coding was cool.

azakai 13y ago

> I'm just going to throw this out here: only about 10% of nurses are male. Yet I rarely hear about the cultural problem of not having enough males in nursing, or how we can encourage more male nurses. Perhaps because you mostly read tech news sites, and not nursing news sites. This stuff (in both tech and nursing) rarely reaches the mainstream news sources, so people not involved in the industry generally are unaware of it. Definitely it is well known that there is a shortage of men in nursing as well as in clinical psychology for example, and many in those industries think their industries would be better off with more men, and make efforts to change things. Some random links: https://asunews.asu.edu/20121130_meninnursing https://asunews.asu.edu/20121130_meninnursing http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/health/22therapists.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/health/22therapists.html?p... I have a background in psychology, so I know less about the nursing situation, but in psychology it's definitely a topic that comes up. Which is not surprising, the gender disparity is very large: When I was an undergrad, I was in a small minority, somewhere in 10-20%, and it can be an odd feeling.

ceol 13y ago
Psychology is still very male-dominated, at least in terms of employers, teachers, and researchers — i.e. people in power in the industry.
2muchcoffeeman 13y ago
Perhaps because you mostly read tech news sites, and not nursing news sites. This stuff (in both tech and nursing) rarely reaches the mainstream news sources, so people not involved in the industry generally are unaware of it. That's a good point. However, I was watching something on TV just yesterday about getting women into programming. My perception is that trying to get more women into programming is a much more popular issue than getting men into nursing. If we kept up with industry news would we observe more "get women to be garbage collectors" and "get men into preschool education" news?
- azakai 13y ago
  One thing to realize here is that the industries are not symmetrical. There are billionaires and billion-dollar companies in the tech industry (as well as many many non-rich but still very well off engineers that can each donate money), but nothing like that in nursing or psychology or garbage collection or preschool education. So the tech industry, if it want to, can pour large sums of money into its causes (as we see in the topic of this discussion, but also many others). And it can make sure the mainstream press notices them. Whereas even if the psychology community wants desperately to get more men to join its ranks, it just doesn't have the resources the tech industry has. It also is not just money. The tech industry is the industry that makes websites, that builds twitter and facebook and all that. Initiatives in the tech industry have an inherent advantage over initiatives in other industries, which have to make the effort to find some tech person to build their online presence. So it is not surprising to me at all that initiatives in the tech industry are more noticeable than from other industries. The tech industry is special in many ways. Edit: An example of an industry with even more power and noticeability than tech is hollywood, which has both money and famous+popular people in it. That's why we hear about all the various initiatives this or that actor is up to.
- dinkumthinkum 13y ago
  Have you ever heard the phrase "one thing is not like the other?" I think that might apply here.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > However, I was watching something on TV just yesterday about getting women into programming. My perception is that trying to get more women into programming is a much more popular issue than getting men into nursing. Sure, you see it on TV more because it better fits a canned mass media narrative about the progress of women into male-dominated, well-paid, percieved-as-high-status professions. That doesn't mean its considered more of a focus in the relevant professions. Its a mistake to assume that the frequency and intensity with which something appears in the mass media is somehow a reliable guide to anything about its significance outside mass media. > If we kept up with industry news would we observe more "get women to be garbage collectors" and "get men into preschool education" news? Garbage collectors I'm less sure of, but, yes, getting more men into most all levels of secondary-and-earlier education is a not-insignificant issue.

newnewnew 13y ago

Men do better than women at the Math SAT[1]. The male/female ratio is especially high in the higher Math percentiles, where you would expect your best engineers to come from. The polite way to explain this is some kind of "expectations effect", which is possible, but females do dominate at all other aspects of education. We cannot rule out simple innate ability, combined with higher male interest in abstract things. [1] http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/09/2012-sat-test-results-a-huge-gender-math-gap-persists-with-a-33-point-advantage-for-high-school-boys/ http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/09/2012-sat-test-results-a-hug...

ama729 13y ago
> where you would expect your best engineers to come from. I frequently see this assertion but I never see it sourced. Most programming use nothing more than simple math or just re-implementation of known algorithms (and we know how it turned out for Telegram to invent their own), why would you need hardcore math skills then? If you said "above average", that would have been understandable, but then there isn't much data to support that point of view since as point out, the effect is especially important in the higher percentiles.
- newnewnew 13y ago
  Startups try to keep a "high bar", only hiring people with sterling academic credentials or proven work in the field. So I would expect the gender ratio to be less equal at startups that draw from the far right-hand side of the graph, and more equal at big firms that are willing to hire from the middle.
  - eropple 13y ago
    > Startups try to keep a "high bar", only hiring people with sterling academic credentials or proven work in the field. Your "high bar" is everyone else's "they're like us."
- ericd 13y ago
  Math and programming both require a facility in thinking abstractly, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a correlation between math ability and programming ability.

parennoob 13y ago

Yep, and a series of uncomfortable truths about how things work against men (specially Asian men) who are trying to learn to code: 1. At school and such, no one tries to encourage you to code. People naturally think, "Oh, male and Asian, screw him, the world doesn't need another Asian dude coding. Let's try and teach Rails to that cute girl -- we need more of her kind." 2. People assume you are better at coding, math, and suchlike, and are more strident in their criticism of you when you fail to live up to their standards. I have had people tell me "yeah, if you can't understand this, you might not be smart enough". Think of the brouhaha that would result (gasp!) if someone said that to a girl. 3. You are naturally left out of all of the outreach events. Everyone is trying to get more women into coding, for some yet-as-undefined goal (getting exactly 51% women, maybe?). But you -- you are just another male nerd, and you have apparently had a red carpet laid out for you to the world of coding, so you must be privileged. There are tons of jobs that are female dominated. Nursing? Teaching? Fashion? Yet no one's complaining that there aren't enough men on the editorial staff of Cosmopolitan magazine, or starting movements for "Men Who Are Interested In Fashion". Draw your own conclusions from this.

judk 13y ago
Are you joking? The fashion world has massively outreached to men in recent couple of decades. Axe and chest shaving and all that other metrosexual stuff. And the lack of male teachers is a persistent concern in the education world, especially with respect to the need to provide male role models for kids of single moms.
- parennoob 13y ago
  > The fashion world has massively outreached to men in recent couple of decades. Axe and chest shaving and all that other metrosexual stuff. I mean men working in fashion, not being marketed to. And Axe is not fashion, thank you very much. > And the lack of male teachers is a persistent concern in the education world... Show me the equivalent of "Rails Girls" or "Girls Who Code" for male teachers or fashion designers. For example, the list of sponsors on this page (http://www.girlswhocode.com/about-us/ http://www.girlswhocode.com/about-us/).

RivieraKid 13y ago

> I'm just going to throw this out here: only about 10% of nurses are male. I think this is partly caused by the fact that men and women have a different natural tendency to enjoy nursing. (Honest question – is this belief politically incorrect?) If you completely filter out cultural effects, the tendency to incline to a specific profession will differ between genders, at least very slightly (that's just statistics). Of course, the very hard question is how big is this difference.

ps4fanboy 13y ago
To suggest that men are some how different to women is incredibly sexist, check your privilege.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  Men are obviously biologically different than women in a large number of ways; the exact degree to which those biological differences affect behavior and attitudes is unclear, but we know that differences in, e.g., hormone levels within a gender have behavioral and attitude impacts, so its at least likely that there is some degree of such impact from that and other biological differences between genders. If you define sexism broadly enough, that may be "sexist", but it doesn't stop it from being well supported by the facts we know about the world.
  - RivieraKid 13y ago
    Well, men and women are different. As hopefullly everyone knows, they have different bodies, including the brain (there are obvious psychological and behavioral differences).
- RivieraKid 13y ago
  Just to be sure (one can never know nowdays) – that's sarcasm right?
  - ps4fanboy 13y ago

vacri 13y ago

Yet I rarely hear about the cultural problem of not having enough males in nursing, or how we can encourage more male nurses.... Why is that? Because you're not reading the discussions in the nursing industry. It's a recognised problem there and they do want more men involved. The technical world also has a much larger online presence, unsurprisingly. Same goes for elementary school teachers. Same goes for elementary school teachers.

berrypicker 13y ago
>they do want more men involved. Why is it so important in modern society that every area has an even split of men and women and the right quota of every ethnicity?
- vacri 13y ago
  I personally don't think an even split in every area is the right way to go. But the percentage of men in nursing is in the single digits - far from 'an even split'. There are concrete benefits to having more male nurses - some patients respond better to being handled by a member of a given gender. Same thing with teachers for young children, in that more male teachers means having a broader, better range of role models. 'Matching the demographic proportions' is a stupid goal, but 'well-represented' isn't.
  - berrypicker 13y ago
    This is going to sound like an is-therefore-it-ought-to-be fallacious argument but it makes sense to me that there are more female nurses simply because women are better suited to the task and more importantly want to be nurses? I mean there are probably historical reasons for the low number of male nurses and other things to attribute the low ratio to but we didn't sit down one day and force females to be nurses. Healthcare and educations has way bigger problems than some patients responding better to male nurses. There's a lot of what I consider grasping at straws when it comes to this sort of discussion. Let's start by talking about the curriculum and spending and stuff that has way more of an impact on our society.
- deleted 13y ago

codygman 13y ago

I... thought coding was cool.