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Are you sure about that? I think the difference is that the pioneering women who opened the doors of fields such as medicine and law did so over 100 years ago.

Are you sure about that? I think the difference is that the pioneering women who opened the doors of fields such as medicine and law did so over 100 years ago. The minority gender had lots of trouble entering, and up until recent times suffered from many of the same things that women complain about in the programming community.

yummyfajitas 11y ago
Software is well past the point that medicine was at in 1915. In fact, computing specifically had lots of women in it's early days - probably more than medicine had at the same time. Any theory which predicts that math/physics/cs/EE has few women is inherently flawed if it doesn't also predict that medicine/law/advertising have plenty of women.
- pron 11y ago
  > Any theory which predicts that math/physics/cs/EE has few women is inherently flawed if it doesn't also predict that medicine/law/advertising have plenty of women. I am not sure where you're going with this, but you can't make such a comparison at a given moment in time. The reason is that struggles usually follow power, and so it is likely that at any point in time, a marginalized group would concentrate its efforts to penetrate positions that imbue power. As the power structure shifts, so does the struggle. You can't equate professions that hold different amounts of power at different times. Certainly up until some decades ago, law and medicine carried much more prestige and influence -- and hence, power -- than math and the physical sciences. In fact, software's gain of prestige correlates quite well with the drop in women participation. It is quite anomalous in that the existence of the field long predated its power. Law and medicine, OTOH, are professions that have been seats of power for almost a millennium. A model that correlates low female participation with high power -- and later, increased participation after a struggle -- predicts both observations. It is not such a surprising or sophisticated theory; historians have seen this pattern so often that it is almost banal. This pattern is so regular, that it's relatively easy for us to predict the future: fifty years from now, assuming the power wielded by software remains high, women participation will equal men's, and it will be hard for people to believe that that hasn't always been the case. Unfortunately, even though the result of the fight is certain, we still need to fight it. That is the price history exacts from us.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    Can you state your theory clearly enough that I can directly apply it? I have no idea what you are trying to say. Make sure to include a clear definition of "power", and make sure this definition is clear enough that I can at the very least evaluate "more" and "less" power. (I.e., I have no idea why you consider academic physics to have more power than academic biology.) I also have no idea what you mean by "a marginalized group would concentrate its efforts". Are you implying that women don't make individual career choices based on their interest and aptitude, but instead "concentrate [their] efforts" in some sort of collectivist power grab? That's a bit scary. I always thought women were just people like me, making selfish individual decisions to maximize their money/lifestyle/career enjoyment.
    - pron 11y ago
      > Can you state your theory clearly enough that I can directly apply it? Certainly. Non-hegemonic groups are marginalized from seats of power. After a long struggle, they may increase participation. Put another way: groups with more power tend to preserve and increase the power difference between them and less powerful groups, while the less-powerful groups may gain a share of the power after a struggle. Sadly, it's not my theory, but one of the most elementary theories -- backed by countless evidence -- of the social sciences, supported by studies in anthropology, sociology and history (with some backup from social psychology, too). Can you state your theory clearly, or, at the very least, state what evidence compels you to doubt the current scientific consensus? > Make sure to include a clear definition of "power", and make sure this definition is clear enough that I can at the very least evaluate "more" and "less" power. I have done so on numerous occasions in the past in our conversations. Please refer to them or look up "power" on Wikipedia. The short description is influence, and if you'd like a description with a more quantitative "feel", I'd say the power a person has is the number of people they can influence indirectly (i.e. graph reach) summed over the magnitude in the change of behavior they cause in each affected individual. > I.e., I have no idea why you consider academic physics to have more power than academic biology I don't. See my other response to you. > Are you implying that women don't make individual career choices based on their interest and aptitude, but instead "concentrate [their] efforts" in some sort of collectivist power grab? I'm stating the much-observed, well-known fact, that society pushes and directs us in various directions. What we see as "free choice" is, in fact, "free choice under societal pressures and restrictions". That behavior is not collective but individual, only biased. Just like any fair coin is free to make a choice how to land, yet we can make very accurate predictions on the result of a thousand coin tosses. Collective behavior is not always the result of collective decisions. > I always thought women were just people like me, making selfish individual decisions to maximize their money/lifestyle/career enjoyment. All of us make selfish individual decisions, but the (probabilistic) fitness function is largely determined by large-scale, emergent properties of the system. Think of individual particle movement and temperature or of Brownian motion. There are no collective decisions involved -- only individual "decisions" and local interaction -- yet the end result is that global factors heavily influence the distribution in behavior of the individuals. The effect of social influence on personal choice has been heavily studied in social psychology, and, in fact, in zoology too.

yummyfajitas 11y ago

Software is well past the point that medicine was at in 1915. In fact, computing specifically had lots of women in it's early days - probably more than medicine had at the same time. Any theory which predicts that math/physics/cs/EE has few women is inherently flawed if it doesn't also predict that medicine/law/advertising have plenty of women.

pron 11y ago
> Any theory which predicts that math/physics/cs/EE has few women is inherently flawed if it doesn't also predict that medicine/law/advertising have plenty of women. I am not sure where you're going with this, but you can't make such a comparison at a given moment in time. The reason is that struggles usually follow power, and so it is likely that at any point in time, a marginalized group would concentrate its efforts to penetrate positions that imbue power. As the power structure shifts, so does the struggle. You can't equate professions that hold different amounts of power at different times. Certainly up until some decades ago, law and medicine carried much more prestige and influence -- and hence, power -- than math and the physical sciences. In fact, software's gain of prestige correlates quite well with the drop in women participation. It is quite anomalous in that the existence of the field long predated its power. Law and medicine, OTOH, are professions that have been seats of power for almost a millennium. A model that correlates low female participation with high power -- and later, increased participation after a struggle -- predicts both observations. It is not such a surprising or sophisticated theory; historians have seen this pattern so often that it is almost banal. This pattern is so regular, that it's relatively easy for us to predict the future: fifty years from now, assuming the power wielded by software remains high, women participation will equal men's, and it will be hard for people to believe that that hasn't always been the case. Unfortunately, even though the result of the fight is certain, we still need to fight it. That is the price history exacts from us.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  Can you state your theory clearly enough that I can directly apply it? I have no idea what you are trying to say. Make sure to include a clear definition of "power", and make sure this definition is clear enough that I can at the very least evaluate "more" and "less" power. (I.e., I have no idea why you consider academic physics to have more power than academic biology.) I also have no idea what you mean by "a marginalized group would concentrate its efforts". Are you implying that women don't make individual career choices based on their interest and aptitude, but instead "concentrate [their] efforts" in some sort of collectivist power grab? That's a bit scary. I always thought women were just people like me, making selfish individual decisions to maximize their money/lifestyle/career enjoyment.
  - pron 11y ago
    > Can you state your theory clearly enough that I can directly apply it? Certainly. Non-hegemonic groups are marginalized from seats of power. After a long struggle, they may increase participation. Put another way: groups with more power tend to preserve and increase the power difference between them and less powerful groups, while the less-powerful groups may gain a share of the power after a struggle. Sadly, it's not my theory, but one of the most elementary theories -- backed by countless evidence -- of the social sciences, supported by studies in anthropology, sociology and history (with some backup from social psychology, too). Can you state your theory clearly, or, at the very least, state what evidence compels you to doubt the current scientific consensus? > Make sure to include a clear definition of "power", and make sure this definition is clear enough that I can at the very least evaluate "more" and "less" power. I have done so on numerous occasions in the past in our conversations. Please refer to them or look up "power" on Wikipedia. The short description is influence, and if you'd like a description with a more quantitative "feel", I'd say the power a person has is the number of people they can influence indirectly (i.e. graph reach) summed over the magnitude in the change of behavior they cause in each affected individual. > I.e., I have no idea why you consider academic physics to have more power than academic biology I don't. See my other response to you. > Are you implying that women don't make individual career choices based on their interest and aptitude, but instead "concentrate [their] efforts" in some sort of collectivist power grab? I'm stating the much-observed, well-known fact, that society pushes and directs us in various directions. What we see as "free choice" is, in fact, "free choice under societal pressures and restrictions". That behavior is not collective but individual, only biased. Just like any fair coin is free to make a choice how to land, yet we can make very accurate predictions on the result of a thousand coin tosses. Collective behavior is not always the result of collective decisions. > I always thought women were just people like me, making selfish individual decisions to maximize their money/lifestyle/career enjoyment. All of us make selfish individual decisions, but the (probabilistic) fitness function is largely determined by large-scale, emergent properties of the system. Think of individual particle movement and temperature or of Brownian motion. There are no collective decisions involved -- only individual "decisions" and local interaction -- yet the end result is that global factors heavily influence the distribution in behavior of the individuals. The effect of social influence on personal choice has been heavily studied in social psychology, and, in fact, in zoology too.