4 ms·

If I had to guess, I'd say Silicon Valley would be among the easiest for women to penetrate In the average relationship, the male is 4 years older than the fem

If I had to guess, I'd say Silicon Valley would be among the easiest for women to penetrate In the average relationship, the male is 4 years older than the female. That means that women (as a group, even if their individual dating patterns differ) have a "look-ahead" insight into which careers turn out well (medicine, law) and which promise the moon but fall flat (startups, academia). Among a group of 21-22 year-old college-senior women, at least a few have dated 24-27 year-old guys, so they know a lot more about the career landscape than the 21-year-old men, who've been dating 18- to 20-year-old women. That's why there are no women (except for hand-picked pretty tokens) playing the VC-funded game. They have the look-ahead information, and they're smart enough to see the VC-funded "tech world" as a fraud and not get involved. It's clueless men who get in, wreck their careers, and find themselves with no other options.

a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
This is the goofiest theory. By and large women are bad at career planning. Hordes of 23 year old women march off every year to get graduate degrees with zero payoff potential.
nostrademons 12y ago
Law is a terrible career these days. Talk to folks just getting out of law school about what their career prospects are like, don't talk to folks who are lawyers. The latter have already cleared numerous weed-out processes (getting into law school, getting through law school, getting a job after law school) that chew people up and spit them out. About 20-25% of T14 law students (and virtually none from lower-tier law schools) make it to BigLaw positions paying $160K/year. The rest become small-town attorneys, public defenders, assistants in the DA's office, or go to work for boutique law firms. These positions pay about $40-75K/year, barely more than a public schoolteacher, and yet they have law school loans to pay off. Even if you do get a BigLaw position, it involves being some partner's bitch for 7-10 years until (if) you make partner yourself. Medicine is a decent career if you get through it and can deal with the hours, but it also has a massive weed-out funnel. At my (top liberal-arts college) alma mater, the admissions department had a joke: "95% of you are pre-med. By graduation, about 2% of you will be pre-med." This is also why your main thesis, about women having an information advantage about the career world because of their relationship partners being older, doesn't hold. There is a strong selection bias in relationship partners. Lawyers find it much easier to find girlfriends than unemployed law-school graduates who went back to live with their parents. Anyone who uses their personal relationship choices as data on how the employed population as a whole functions is getting seriously biased data.
- geebee 12y ago
  I can't really disagree that law is an unappealing career choice these days. However, I'd say getting getting through law or med school at the elite is pretty well assured once you get in. Here are the numbers for boalt http://berkeley.lawschoolnumbers.com/ http://berkeley.lawschoolnumbers.com/ First Year : 2.0% Second Year : 1.7% Third Year : 0.3% Fourth Year : 0.0% here they are for stanford https://www.law.stanford.edu/facts/enrollment-data-transfer-and-attrition-rates https://www.law.stanford.edu/facts/enrollment-data-transfer-... 1st year 0 3 3 1.7 2nd year 0 2 2 1 3rd year 0 0 0 0 4th year 0 0 0 0 Here are the graduation rates for UCSF med school http://saa.ucsf.edu/sites/saa.ucsf.edu/files/PDF/WASC/Appendix%2033.%20Program%20Graduation%20Rates%202006-2009.pdf http://saa.ucsf.edu/sites/saa.ucsf.edu/files/PDF/WASC/Append... (UCSF-medicine has a 99% graduation rate).
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    Yeah, I should probably de-emphasize "getting through" law school in favor of getting into law school and getting a job after. Last I heard getting into a T14 law school was still quite challenging, and even then getting a well-paying job was far from assured.
    - geebee 12y ago
      I'm, very, very late responding to this, so apologies for that. I agree that getting into a top law or medical school is exceptionally difficult. Here's the admissions page for ucsf http://meded.ucsf.edu/admissions/successful-applicant-profile-class-2017 http://meded.ucsf.edu/admissions/successful-applicant-profil... Interestingly, they don't give admissions rates, but we can see that only 6% even get an interview. The numbers themselves are high, too. Looks like about 95%ile MCAT scores, and a high (nearly 3.8) GPA overall and in the sciences. Law has similar numbers, though LSAT scores tend to be a bit higher - above 98%ile. My guess is that this is because law doesn't have the "weeder" courses in pre-med, so you do have a lot of high GPAs in history or other relatively easy majors. Engineering is a very, very difficult comparison to make, because it truly is not the same thing. Licensure is unusual, largely limited to a couple of specialties, and happens (with exceptions) at the undergrad level anyway. Legally speaking, you don't need an MS or PhD for anything, and you rarely need a BS either. This of course is a big factor when thinking about admissions and attrition rates. Still, there is a large PR effort in the US to convince the public and young people that there is a shortage of US Citizens going into "STEM" graduate programs. I've posted a link to a RAND study that concludes that this aversion is rational and market driven when you consider the pay and career prospects relative to the "professions" (medicine and law, as well as dentistry, MBA programs, even nursing and pharmacy... in SF, dental hygienists earn, on average, about 98% of a software developer's median salary). Here's a link the RAND study http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html It's very difficult to compare with graduate engineering programs, since they tend to be specialized at the degree level (rather than through residency in medicine or career choices later with law). But looking at entering class profiles, top engineering programs appear to be very selective. Not as selective in terms of admissions rates as medicine or law, but I think this is more a function of very heavy course requirements for admission (you can major in anything for law, and you can do pre-med in 2 years, whereas to apply to an MS or PhD program in engineering, you tend to need essentially 4 years of exceptionally difficult specialized coursework). So admissions aren't really notably easier for graduate work in engineering, undergrad prep is very hard... and yet, attrition rates are brutal. Overall, engineering is the best of the bunch where PhD attrition rates are concerned, at about 35%. In hard sciences, these typically go up to about 50%. This is for a cohort that has gotten top grades in majors like physics and scored at least above the 90%ile on standardized tests, usually quite a bit higher. In short - I'm willing to agree that getting into law school is tough, but not any tougher than getting in to a top grad school in engineering (probably much easier, when you consider the coursework you need to take for engineering), and getting through law school, based on attrition rates, appears to be far, far easier. Even med school appears far easier from an attrition rate point of view. They're hard working, sure, but so are grad students in STEM. I just don't think hard work can explain a difference in attrition rates between 50-100 times higher. Of course, like I said, you don't need a PhD or an MS to do anything in engineering, so maybe they're not really useful as a point of analysis here. The reason I bring it up is that there is still a strong PR push to get more young US citizens (or these days, women) into STEM graduate programs, and yet the numbers are horrendous for that path. Difficult coursework, sky high attrition, and - at the elite level, since we're talking about "best and brightest" - mediocre outcomes compared to medicine and, at the elite level, perhaps law as well (and many other fields).

a8da6b0c91d 12y ago

This is the goofiest theory. By and large women are bad at career planning. Hordes of 23 year old women march off every year to get graduate degrees with zero payoff potential.

nostrademons 12y ago

Law is a terrible career these days. Talk to folks just getting out of law school about what their career prospects are like, don't talk to folks who are lawyers. The latter have already cleared numerous weed-out processes (getting into law school, getting through law school, getting a job after law school) that chew people up and spit them out. About 20-25% of T14 law students (and virtually none from lower-tier law schools) make it to BigLaw positions paying $160K/year. The rest become small-town attorneys, public defenders, assistants in the DA's office, or go to work for boutique law firms. These positions pay about $40-75K/year, barely more than a public schoolteacher, and yet they have law school loans to pay off. Even if you do get a BigLaw position, it involves being some partner's bitch for 7-10 years until (if) you make partner yourself. Medicine is a decent career if you get through it and can deal with the hours, but it also has a massive weed-out funnel. At my (top liberal-arts college) alma mater, the admissions department had a joke: "95% of you are pre-med. By graduation, about 2% of you will be pre-med." This is also why your main thesis, about women having an information advantage about the career world because of their relationship partners being older, doesn't hold. There is a strong selection bias in relationship partners. Lawyers find it much easier to find girlfriends than unemployed law-school graduates who went back to live with their parents. Anyone who uses their personal relationship choices as data on how the employed population as a whole functions is getting seriously biased data.

geebee 12y ago
I can't really disagree that law is an unappealing career choice these days. However, I'd say getting getting through law or med school at the elite is pretty well assured once you get in. Here are the numbers for boalt http://berkeley.lawschoolnumbers.com/ http://berkeley.lawschoolnumbers.com/ First Year : 2.0% Second Year : 1.7% Third Year : 0.3% Fourth Year : 0.0% here they are for stanford https://www.law.stanford.edu/facts/enrollment-data-transfer-and-attrition-rates https://www.law.stanford.edu/facts/enrollment-data-transfer-... 1st year 0 3 3 1.7 2nd year 0 2 2 1 3rd year 0 0 0 0 4th year 0 0 0 0 Here are the graduation rates for UCSF med school http://saa.ucsf.edu/sites/saa.ucsf.edu/files/PDF/WASC/Appendix%2033.%20Program%20Graduation%20Rates%202006-2009.pdf http://saa.ucsf.edu/sites/saa.ucsf.edu/files/PDF/WASC/Append... (UCSF-medicine has a 99% graduation rate).
- nostrademons 12y ago
  Yeah, I should probably de-emphasize "getting through" law school in favor of getting into law school and getting a job after. Last I heard getting into a T14 law school was still quite challenging, and even then getting a well-paying job was far from assured.
  - geebee 12y ago
    I'm, very, very late responding to this, so apologies for that. I agree that getting into a top law or medical school is exceptionally difficult. Here's the admissions page for ucsf http://meded.ucsf.edu/admissions/successful-applicant-profile-class-2017 http://meded.ucsf.edu/admissions/successful-applicant-profil... Interestingly, they don't give admissions rates, but we can see that only 6% even get an interview. The numbers themselves are high, too. Looks like about 95%ile MCAT scores, and a high (nearly 3.8) GPA overall and in the sciences. Law has similar numbers, though LSAT scores tend to be a bit higher - above 98%ile. My guess is that this is because law doesn't have the "weeder" courses in pre-med, so you do have a lot of high GPAs in history or other relatively easy majors. Engineering is a very, very difficult comparison to make, because it truly is not the same thing. Licensure is unusual, largely limited to a couple of specialties, and happens (with exceptions) at the undergrad level anyway. Legally speaking, you don't need an MS or PhD for anything, and you rarely need a BS either. This of course is a big factor when thinking about admissions and attrition rates. Still, there is a large PR effort in the US to convince the public and young people that there is a shortage of US Citizens going into "STEM" graduate programs. I've posted a link to a RAND study that concludes that this aversion is rational and market driven when you consider the pay and career prospects relative to the "professions" (medicine and law, as well as dentistry, MBA programs, even nursing and pharmacy... in SF, dental hygienists earn, on average, about 98% of a software developer's median salary). Here's a link the RAND study http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html It's very difficult to compare with graduate engineering programs, since they tend to be specialized at the degree level (rather than through residency in medicine or career choices later with law). But looking at entering class profiles, top engineering programs appear to be very selective. Not as selective in terms of admissions rates as medicine or law, but I think this is more a function of very heavy course requirements for admission (you can major in anything for law, and you can do pre-med in 2 years, whereas to apply to an MS or PhD program in engineering, you tend to need essentially 4 years of exceptionally difficult specialized coursework). So admissions aren't really notably easier for graduate work in engineering, undergrad prep is very hard... and yet, attrition rates are brutal. Overall, engineering is the best of the bunch where PhD attrition rates are concerned, at about 35%. In hard sciences, these typically go up to about 50%. This is for a cohort that has gotten top grades in majors like physics and scored at least above the 90%ile on standardized tests, usually quite a bit higher. In short - I'm willing to agree that getting into law school is tough, but not any tougher than getting in to a top grad school in engineering (probably much easier, when you consider the coursework you need to take for engineering), and getting through law school, based on attrition rates, appears to be far, far easier. Even med school appears far easier from an attrition rate point of view. They're hard working, sure, but so are grad students in STEM. I just don't think hard work can explain a difference in attrition rates between 50-100 times higher. Of course, like I said, you don't need a PhD or an MS to do anything in engineering, so maybe they're not really useful as a point of analysis here. The reason I bring it up is that there is still a strong PR push to get more young US citizens (or these days, women) into STEM graduate programs, and yet the numbers are horrendous for that path. Difficult coursework, sky high attrition, and - at the elite level, since we're talking about "best and brightest" - mediocre outcomes compared to medicine and, at the elite level, perhaps law as well (and many other fields).