Without engaging in any of the rest of your comment, I'm going to call out again the attempt to shift goalposts from tech to STEM in general. Tech people want to believe that the gender disparity in their field is shared among all the STEM fields, but, of course, it is not: women are far better represented in other STEM fields. Computer science, physics, and engineering have similarly acute gender disparity. The rest of the STEM fields --- including mathematics --- have closer to 50/50, and some STEM fields, like molecular biology, have better than 50% representation of women.
> The rest of the STEM fields --- including mathematics --- have closer to 50/50
Citation needed for this. From a quick look from a paper:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06196.pdf
it seems like this statement is true at the undergraduate major level, but certainly not true at the doctoral level.
This is particularly relevant as unlike engineering/tech, where a Bachelor's (or less) suffices for the majority of work, the same is certainly not true in mathematics.
As an illustration of this, note that for many people graduate school in mathematics is spent trying to come up to speed with the current research efforts of the community, unlike engineering where one is (generally) expected to be a "producer" once one hits graduate school.
Anecdotal from female friends who have started down the path to PHD in stem fields, you basically have to forgo having children until you are in your 30's.
The current path of ~10 years of schooling through women's 'best' biological time to have a child is, I imagine, a reason for some of the discrepancy between male and female post undergrad.
It's not even that niche though is it? A lot of the women I work with have started having kids in their mid-30s. In the US, I think overall people are marrying later and having kids later, IIRC.
"Tech people want to believe that the gender disparity in their field is shared among all the STEM fields"
It's convenient for both women's studies departments and tech recruiters to pretend other fields don't exist. It is taboo to talk about it, to the point that I haven't come across any serious piece of writing that dared to seriously contemplate the question of "what are the girls choosing to do instead?", but I don't think it has much to do with psychoanalytic undercurrents.
I don't think you mean that >50% is better, but your general point is right. Other STEM fields are not as male dominated. Even physics is not as bad as CS. I had several women TAs in physics, but none in CS/programming.
When you say "others" it's helpful to convey the distribution. Overwhelmingly, STEM has better gender parity than CS. And MechE might be the only STEM field worse than CS.
In India. Mechanical engineering sees least enrollment from women. Many times there no girls in the Mech eng class at all. Or worse, 1 or 2 who go and tell other girls not to take up Mech ever.
The issue isn't discrimination at all. You regularly have to do physically demanding work. Welding, Metal cutting work with a myriad other stuff. Of course you may argue Women do physically demanding work all the time. But the point is such women come from a background of poverty which demands such a lifestyle.
If you come from anywhere a above lower-middle class lifestyle the overall lifestyle of your family never prepares you for this.
I don't care how many lego sets you buy for your girl. Nothing prepares for you for a certain things.
Since molecular biology has something like a 54/46 distribution and tech has something like a 19/81 distribution I'd probably tell anyone who told me I should focus on the injustices of molecular biology to shove it up their ass.
54/46 is considered gender equal ratio in Sweden as its within the 40%/40% line.
However the argument that we should put our focus based on how high the gender unequal distribution is is an fascinating argument since here in Sweden we have a perfect record of every employed person profession (as part of the tax record). We can list every professions and their gender distribution, and naturally very few of the stem professions are at top or even in the top 20. Worst two professions (of each gender) had midwife and floor tile worker at both >99.4% of each representative gender.
The data for female dominated professions was midwife and dentist at 99.6% and above, with pediatric at 98%. For male dominated profession at 99%-98% it is tile worker, mechanic, thin plate worker, carpenter, concrete worker, electrician, and last plumber. With 90% of people working in a profession with less than 40% women or 40% men, IT with a distribution of 81%/19% is quite average and unremarkable on the list. molecular biology, being in that small 10%, is much more remarkable because it actually has a gender equal distribution.
In case this needs to be spelled out for you, and I apologize if it doesn't, but the subtext of there being a unique gender disparity in tech not shared by thematically similar STEM fields, let alone STEM in general, is that the causal agent is misogyny.
If you have any facts to back up that strong assertion, I am sure people are interested. Otherwise, a blanket accusal of 'misogyny' is asinine and nonproductive.
I wasn't the one who downvoted you but I'm sure you're aware that the other side of the argument (that claim it's not misogyny) also cites Occam's razor.
Therefore, for either side to claim that the "simplest explanation is misogyny" or "simplest explanation is preferences" is seen as unconvincing to the opponent.
My personal rule is that anyone who deigns to use latin in their arguments also has to use all English words in their dictionary form, and not their colloquial expression.
As per that, your use of misogyny to mean something apart from ingrained dislike or contempt for women is wrong.
You're using misogyny as if its a synonym for any expression of differing attitudes to men and women, regardless of if the outcome is good or bad, and if the participants feel happy or poorly about the situation.
That colloquial usage is utterly disqualified if you want to turn this into a formal argument.
I'm aware that you are a celebrity here and I'm a nobody.
And I agree with you in a lot of things, including that we should make workplaces more inclusive.
But being right does not entitle you to be rude, passive agressive, using various tricks to silence everyone.
Think about this: if someone else behaved like you are doing now (edit: in this whole thread) - and wasn't a celebrity or otherwise safe - they might very well have to face unpleasant consequences (edit: was something like might very well have to find a new job).
People who care about a 19/81 split in one field in college when college as a whole is a 66/33 split should... well you already offered a suggestion at what they should do.
Or we could stop acting as if the metric at the end is what we need to equalize, look at it only as an indicator, and then find issues to fix. If 19/81 is caused by some actual sort of discrimination, we can fix which ever issues we identify. Just as we can with the 66/33 split.
This rebuttal is so tired that it's actually (search for it in Dan and Scott's comments) banned from the site, but I think that's a mistake, because it is in fact a huge problem that there is a 91/9 split in nursing. A bigger problem than tech's disparity. The status-shifting we've done with "nursing" has resulted in scarce and expensive medical doctors being (almost always pointlessly) our first line of health care in the US. We should rename "nurse practitioners" to "associate physicians", discarding the gender-inflected term "nurse".
Yes, and that's recognized as a huge problem in that field. Were we in a nursing-focussed discussion forum, there's probably be a lot of talk about it.
It is a direct result of patriarchal social attitudes combined with the fact that nursing is perceived as a subordinate role to medicine, and therefore beneath men.
So it's actually a manifestation of the same broad social problem as the disparity in tech, rather than the mirror image.
Where are you going to expend your energy? The whole world is full of misogency, do you spend your time trying to fix that, or worry about the compartively small number of times men face unfairness?
Hmmmmm, that's a really good point. I suppose I agree that in general an argument that there is worse shit in the world is probably a bad reason to ignore other problems. In this case however it'd be difficult to do anything about biases against men without exacerbating sexism further.
If you can think of a way of making things fairer for men, without making things worse for women at the same time I'm all for it.
Do you have a citation re:mathematics? As a person in mathematical physics, I would be /very/ surprised to hear that math is a more gender balanced field than physics.
I do somewhere; I'll track it down and relay the numbers. But also I'll say that this matches my own personal experience: go to an academic cryptography conference sometime and note how many more women you see than in a generic CS conference. There are more women mathematicians than computer scientists and physicists.
I haven't attended any crypto conferences but, I do work a bit with high school STEM programs and I can tell you.. higher ratio of male to female, BUT, those female students are far more interested in the math / crypto fields than the males (which leads me to believe they will stick to it career wise vs the male students. So it's not too surprising your observations.
I hesitate to hold up mathematics as a good example. There are an encouraging number of female majors but further down the pipeline the numbers get much worse. For tenured faculty positions the latest number [1] I've seen is 14%.
If women are represented in the rest of STEM but not the T - doesn't that challenge the narrative of "social conditioning" being the root cause?
What I mean is, there isn't anyone out there telling women that physics is cool whereas programming is not. My bet is that anyone encouraging their little girl to be a physicists would be equally enthused about electrical engineering.. but I could be wrong.
I think when people decide what a good career would be, they're going off what little knowledge they have. And programmers aren't displayed on TV as big earners - but rather scrawny stinky anti-social dorks. And sadly there's a source of truth to this..
Software just isn't cool. It's actually pretty un-cool. I don't know how to change that.
> Software just isn't cool. It's actually pretty un-cool. I don't know how to change that.
I'm currently as an exchange student in China, and every time I tell someone that I'm studying CS, they are like "Oh my god, that's so cool!".
Somehow I'm still completely surprised when I hear that reaction. I have no idea what causes this perception, I need to remember to ask next time.
The gender distribution in my classes is still 90%+ male, though. Somehow the different image of the field does not translate into more female students.
Balance isn't the goal. Equal opportunity is the goal.
If the imbalance is due to a lack of interest in a field by one gender or another that's perhaps regrettable but not a moral issue. If the imbalance is due to obstacles or prejudices faced by one gender over another then would you agree that is a moral issue that is more important for society to rectify?
The problem is the inane assumption, which is now taken as a fact (without rigorous substantiation) that any male heavy gender ratio is a result of bias by white men (not even necessarily the majority, mind you, we simply ignore fields where women are over represented).
Not to mention the conflation of equality of opportunity with equality of achievement.
In our society it has become a taboo to even consider that stratification by gender and/or race of achievement could possibly be related to group wide differences in behavior or ability. This is, ironically, causing immense bias in modern culture; but it seems bias is OK when its the en vogue kind.
Did you read the article? If it were just an assumption and no effort had been put into investigating the reasons for it and if/how those reasons can be addressed you would be right. From the article:
"A new study from Microsoft sheds some light...gender stereotypes, few female role models, peer pressure and a lack of encouragement from parents and teachers largely to blame."
So no assumptions are being made, this has been researched. This discussion is even about some of that research and it turns out girls are being discouraged by factors that are completely addressable.
> we simply ignore fields where women are over represented
Nobody's ignoring anything. My wife is a registered nurse here in the UK and encouraging men to get into nursing is definitely a thing. It turns out that men who do go into nursing have a significantly higher chance of promotion, which you'd hope would encourage them to and is it's own issue. But please, go off on a 'whataboutist' tangent as though the legitimate answer to every uncomfortable problem in the world is 'whatabout' some other problem.
Would it be plausible that young girls are encouraged to see happiness, and personally fulfilling careers, whilst young boys are encouraged to seek money or a specific career choice?
If this were the case, then the participation of women currently entering the workplace would represent the baseline distribution of inclination, whereas men represent a modified distribution caused by hostile attitudes (e.g. men are classically discouraged from becoming nurses, or teachers to young children).
There's often a view that whatever condition men have is the correct one, and ought to be emulated in the female population. For somethings maybe this is true (yes, suffrage is pretty good), but for things like work-life balance and professional-inclinations, I am not so sure.
Why are we talking about prejudice from hostile white men in the industry? Who brought up that topic? Are you aware of studies on that? Do you have any links to them? It seems like a complete digression from the article and the thread to this point, but if you really want to discuss it I'm game. What opinion on that do you feel like arbitrarily ascribing to me?
> do you seriously mean to suggest
I didn't suggest any such thing. Where are you getting this stuff? I presented what I think is a perfectly good test as to whether unequal gender representation is an issue and an example of one example of under-representation of men I'm aware of. What is it with making up opinions for me?
I said 'faced by one gender over another', because one gender faces them more than the other. No mention of white men oppressing anybody (despite all the press Uber has been getting recently ;)
But fair enough. I am not all-knowing. As you're so keen to change the subject I am happy to oblige, what gender imbalances in which men are outnumbered by women are due to prejudice and are being ignored?
The same trite point - "what about women in nursing? Are they oppressing men" ignores the fact that nursing is generally a low status job and that men in nursing get paid more and promoted faster than women, which is not what happens to women in tech.
You're missing the point that in all those other threads someone asks this tired question, and then other people give multiple answers linking to all the programmes to get women into mining or construction or men into teaching or nursing - the question has been asked and answered, and the only reason it keeps being asked is because people keep asking the same question without bothering to do any searches at all for answers.
> notice how you immediately presume that men are choosing not to go into nursing because of a lack of interest
I haven't said that. Please don't put words in my mouth.
Since you've done this it's obvious you're not interested in a good faith discussion.
These threads follow a predictable pattern.
Every single time people say "What about women in contruction?" or "what about men in teaching?", and every single time they do it in the same "AHA!" way.
But, if they'd bothered to plug it into any fucking search engine they'd have seen that considerable effort is spent in these other trades to change the gender balance.
Respectfully, why are you framing this as a question? You don't need anyone's permission to observe that prejudice is an important moral issue --- and the only people who would answer "no" to your question don't sincerely acknowledge moral imperatives in the first place.
That's a perfectly fair question. I asked in order to try and find common ground, and in case the poster has some other reason for caring particularly about imbalance instead of opportunity, or in case the poster doesn't think that the imbalance is due to differences in opportunity as described in the original article. However I could have phrased it more clearly.
This article is literally about research that has identified inequalities in opportunity. Is expecting you to even know what we're talking about really too much to ask?
But off you go and take a look. I'll sure you'll find something in the research you don't even seem aware exists, linked above, to complain about. At least we'll have something to discuss instead of just slinging mud around.
Also, please, point out anywhere in my posts where I asked for equality of outcome? Which of my posts are you even talking about?
