Equality of opportunity does not necessarily imply equality of outcome. This isn't a paradox. Why are still people still confused about this?
(Actually, people aren't confused about this, but it makes for great clickbait articles and ad revenue because it fans the flames of both sides of the argument.)
Preferences aren't static, and are part of a dynamical system. It needs to be explained why preferences are the way they are. Environment could be changed to address causes of preference
Most studies on this seem to show that gender based preferences can be at least partially explained from birth before any environmental factors play a part in it. People have been doing these studies for a long time now, but they get ignored because we don't like the results.
They don't? AFAIK explanation of one of the factors is not even that complicated:
lower physical strength (on average) => more focus on social skills (on average) => higher agreeableness (one of the Big-5 traits) and preference for avoiding conflict (on average) => less risk but also less upside (on average) => less extreme career choices but also less extreme rewards (on average)
No. But preferences do explain why women don't emphasize money in their career choice, whereas men do.
The vast majority of women will not continue dating a man who earns less than they do. Two thirds of young women in Germany expect their future partners to take care of them financially.
So for men, earning money and status is absolutely essential.
(1) Actually, I didn't even mention biology. I just wrote "preferences".
(2) What makes you think it wouldn't? After all, it affects everyone in society. And motivation is a pretty powerful force, it is basically how our entire economy is structured.
"...it typically takes a lot less money to get women to say they are satisfied with their work than it does to get men to say it."
"Women were more likely to tell PayScale that say they find their jobs “very meaningful” than men were, with 35 percent of women and 27 percent of men describing their jobs this way."
So women have more freedom to find meaningful jobs. Men less so.
I'm not entirely sure on which angle you're trying to discuss here. That biological preferences don't impact on the free market choice of employee-employer contracts? Or that biological preferences aren't overridden by a desire to earn higher wages?
For free market choice on which jobs pay more -- I think this one is pretty clear. Do you think differently?
As for biological preference, I don't think it takes into account the average pay at all. Career path is usually chosen at a younger and more idealistic age, and probably more importantly - poorer countries have women overriding their preferences and going into higher paid lines of work, while richer countries let women do what they want. As per this very study. In the case where money doesn't matter because your family is rich, biological preferences become more important and people stop choosing based on average pay. So the biological differences seem to explain it really well.
But it is also possible that the biology is affecting our inclinations, temper, or skills. After all modern psychiatry is attempting to look at the brain mechanically or to influence it with drugs. And intuitively, I find it hard to believe that our genes that affect so much of our physical abilities, likelyhood of illness, etc would stop at the brain and our behavior would be completely independent of our nature and purely a function of our environment.
Sure, and the study quoted in the article shows that. Environment is a factor, it just points in the other direction.
So if you assert that discrimination is the cause for the imbalance, the evidence shows that your assertion is wrong, because it makes the wrong prediction.
This is not just a matter of degrees it is a matter of sign (the arrow is pointing in the wrong direction).
Personally the reason I'm hesitant to entertain this argument is that code is so awesome - you can reach a billion (1,000,000,000) people practically overnight if your idea is good enough. While women traditionally are more interested in the design/social impact of what they're doing, if the engineering environment is easy enough there's no reason they can't code it themselves. And they are highly incentivized to do so.
I personally look at the outcome (you can reach a billion people just by having a cool idea and sitting down and doing it) then look at the hurdles to that outcome.
One of the hurdles is that engineers love wasting literally hundreds of each others' hours. If I were building something as a newbie, people have no trouble sending me off on a wild goose chase to spend a hundred hours with my head in documentation. When an alternative ecosystem lets me literally type a single line and it's done. (In this case the first ecosystem hates my time and the second one respects it.)
This isn't really related to gender, but it's another hurdle. So when you look at the incentive (reaching people, fame, fortune, money), if there is a highly unequal distribution you have to look at some of the hurdles.
By the way no one knows your gender online when you're learning stuff, you can use a non-gendered username and get treated exactly the same asking stuff online and so forth.
In this case the hurdle is artificial: being cooped up with a computer while the tools you're trying to use waste thousands of your hours. But it's still a hurdle that impacts genders in a different way, and that matters.
One of the many simplifications in this debate. Another one: if someone is arguing that there is a difference in the distribution of a particular character between men and women. Immediatly I read comments jumping to the conclusion “my god it says women are more/less [whatever] than men”, as in “all women”. Lots of people seem to be incapable of thinking in term of distributions, which makes it really hard to have any discussion.
Therein lie the dangers of categorical thinking, https://www.newyorker.com/business/james-surowiecki/categori.... Gender is probably the most loaded category there is (except for the other one). There is some movement on this front with acceptance of different gender identities but until society (in all its forms) can ditch categorical thinking and accept that all things in nature exist in distributions, I don't think there will be much progress on this - there's simply too capital to be made by perpetuating strict divisions which everybody must be crammed into in order to simplify the debate and upset everyone in the process.
> Lots of people seem to be incapable of thinking in term of distributions, which makes it really hard to have any discussion.
Most people seem very capable of thinking statistically, but they don't communicate in distributions.
For two people communicating in good faith, the two statements (1) "Boys are taller than girls" and (2) "Anne is taller than Sean" don't prompt talk about how both can't be true at the same time, sexist. People communicate statistical differences as "absolutes", but when communicating in good faith, everybody knows what everybody means.
Look at stereotype research. Most stereotypes are statistically true. People communicate them "as if" absolute, but nobody's head explodes when individual examples don't "conform" to the stereotype. That's because people can think in distributions.
That's not surprising, it's how to survive in a stochastic environment.
This gap between thought and speech only becomes problematic ("makes it really hard to have any discussion") because we can rhetorically exploit the fact that most people can't explicitly communicate about distributions. Just tell them they're bigoted, and they don't know how to refute you. Yay, you win.
I am entirely capable of thinking in terms of distribution. It is people who suggest that small differences in biology would lead to large differences in outcomes that are incapable of that thinking and ignoring the large overlap between groups. Few people are protesting that marginal differences between sexes exist. It is just not relevant as a scientific explanation for gender distribution in e.g. CS.
This is a common talking point of the dominant narrative but simply not true.
When you average all women and all men, you get a "gap". However, like the imbalance in fields, this is almost entirely due to different choices. When you control for factors such as field, hours worked, years worked the gap effectively disappears.
Yeah, isn't it wonderful that when you factor out the discriminating variables, discrimination all but disappears?
Choices made by women are influenced by the glass ceiling, society expectations that women will take care of children and the elderly, and the traditional fields where they're expected to work. The decision to measure the gender gap by comparing equal working hours and equal job positions is not innocent, is itself a politically motivated and comforting way to make rational people think "I told you, there's nothing to see here". You need to evaluate what causes women to have those less hours in less paying jobs, to see whether there's discrimination or not.
Yet the salary wages discrimination reappears when you factor in hours dedicated to domestic work (the "second shift"), differences in salary between fields with equal risks (exposition to chemicals, hardship) where workers are majority women vs those with more men, or companies' (irrational) tendency to default in promoting male workers over females in similar situations.
If women choose to take less lucrative careers, make less lucrative family roles, and negotiate their salaries less than men, than that's fine with me. Personal freedom and equal opportunity will not always mean equality of outcome, especially in richer countries where women are free to live the life and career they want instead of the life and career they need to survive.
For some definition of "choose", a significant part of the choice is imposed from external forces, not freely decided. You're saying that you're OK with people not offering the more lucrative jobs to some people just because they're women, paying less for comparable works that are traditionally done by women, and men expecting that their wives - mothers - female relatives will adopt caretaking roles in addition to their professional careers; i.e. you're OK with the societal factors that make a high percentage of women put up with less income.
These aren't the 1950's anymore. The career choices of women _are_ freely decided nowadays. They have the ability to go to college, get a STEM degree, and become computer scientists if they want. Equal opportunity will not mean equal outcome when there are broad physical and psychological differences between the genders.
You're missing the part where those free decisions are made with less options from which to choose, because the people that would otherwise collaborate with women are restricting their options because of irrational factors like their gender alone (without physical and psychological differences having anything to do). You're missed to take prejudice into account.
I'm confused. Are you saying that women are kept from going into STEM careers? Because they have every incentive to do so currently, yet still choose other career paths.
Can people downvoting explain what part of my post you disagree with? I'd like to have a rational debate and maybe learn if there's something wrong in my assumptions, rather than discussion being suppressed by knee-jerk reactions.
I wonder how much of this is a result of female sexual selection pressure?
It is seen in human beings and animals that statistically females mate sidewards or upwards in terms of providability. This in turn applies a pressure on males to compete for more and accumulate more resources, whereas females are not measured by males on their providability hence have no pressure on them to fight for the same resources. So, men will always compete more to get a greater share of the pie, this combined with capitalism explains whatever income gap remains after attaining equality of opportunity.
Shouldn't the underlying metrics of mating preferences also be taken into account before putting it all under male sexism and patriarch umbrella ?
You would first need to achieve equality of opportunity, which is not the current starting point.
You can't ignore that we come from a culture with a tradition of 60+ centuries of male-favouring sexism and patriarchy, which has not vanished merely because of a theoretical solution to it (legal equality) has been formally declared. There's a lot of social inertia introducing biases in the opportunities available to women.
You can take into account mating preferences all you want, but how do those affect choices of job positions other than very indirectly? On the other hand, irrational prejudices in recruitment and career advancement processes have a direct impact on the quality of job positions that women have access to, and therefore in their opportunities. Unless you're downright denying that such prejudices exist, this cultural factor would have a larger influence than biology.
When two people make two opposing theories it is often best to judge each based on their ability to predict, how it match current data sets, and how well it works out in experimental studies.
The incentive models, which take data from both biology and culture, claims a prediction that as you measure equality of opportunity and compare nations it will correlate to inverse gender segregation in the work force. The more equality of opportunity the higher gender segregation will be, caused by incentives that is derived from gender roles, sexual strategies, and sexual dimorphism.
The prejudices model make the opposite prediction. It claims that when measuring the equality of opportunity the higher it is the lower the gender segregation should be.
In order to resolve the question one measure equality of opportunity and gender segregation, creating data. This create a scientific valid argument in favor of one model over the other.
That is one aspect of the theory. An other aspect would be to measure difference in prejudices between different professions. If the model is correct then it should be able to predict based on such measure which professions are gender segregated and which are not, and inversely predict the level of prejudices exist per profession given any country. The incentive model claim that incentives are a large influence and such you could not make a predictive model based on measuring prejudices.
The incentive model also predict that nation where the incentives are different (based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs), you should see a correlated change in gender segregation. Incentives such as reproduction is listed last among the physiological need, so nations where water and food is scare for women should result in higher incentive to seek professions where those are easier achievable. The prejudices model would argue that there is no such correlation.
This is of course just a small sample in order to scientifically evaluate the two different theories. There is also matching philosophy theories (their names escape me right now), arguing in different direction to explain the data.
Thanks for the approach, I'll need to read about those models and how they correlate with real data. It seems likely that the gender gap appears from a combination of incentives and prejudices, so ideally we should use a combined model that describes how much each factor affects the final outcome.
a radical thought along the lines you are going....instead of striving to bring up the numbers of underrepresented group X in field Y, how about we strive to bring up the salaries/status of field Z (etc.) where group X is over represented?
Let's assume we're not all disingenious a----les, trying for clickbait and gotchas, but still disagree on some points.
I would say that you're right, and this means that specific outcome equality is not indicative of equality of opportunity.
But, it's also true that equality before the law and other measures that have been tKe over the last 3 generations do not guarantee equality of opportunity. Opportunity is in itself a sticky concept.
If you grow up in a family/community where a lot of people are tradesmen then you'll be more likely to be a tradesman. Same for long term welfare dependance, academia, public services, fireman/police, housewives, medicine...
The dynamics are complex and not fully understood. People form an idea about what's normal, possible and such. This is a socially based phenomenon.
I would argue that it is important to the concept of opportunity. The boxes that you put yourself into by default, and others put you in.
There aren't necessarily physical barriers. Lots of people don't end up on the default paths, maybe even most. But, defaults matter.
Anyway, let's think about it in reverse. Let's say we are abolishing sexism, racism, caste systems or some other form of big societal discrimination. A generation later, no change in outcomes. Did we succeed?
OTOH, it's hard to know what to do with specifics like women in tech. It's not inherently bad for women to have different average preferences and that will cause unequal outcomes. But, we also can't ignore outcomes (imo) entirely either. There must be actual outcome changes.
There's also the issue of feedback loops. If certain spheres are male realms, with women in a tiny minority this makes it harder for women to enter in the future.
> The findings will likely seem controversial, since the idea that men and women have different inherent abilities is often used as a reason...to argue we should forget trying to recruit more women into the stem fields. But...that’s not quite what’s happening here.
> In wealthy nations, [women] believe that they have the freedom to pursue [other] alternatives and not worry so much that they pay less.
The research does not seem to find that it is gender aptitude or interest differences that accounts for the disparity in STEM graduates.
> ...the percentage of girls who did excel in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with stem degrees. That means there’s something in even the most liberal societies that’s nudging women away from math and science, even when those are their best subjects.
> That means there’s something in even the most liberal societies that’s nudging women away from math and science, even when those are their best subjects.
I didn't glean it from the article but if you have can you tell if they suggested a reason for this? What is this "something" that’s nudging women away from math and science?
> But when it comes to their relative strengths, in almost all the countries—all except Romania and Lebanon—boys’ best subject was science, and girls’ was reading
> And the more gender-equal the country, as measured by the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, the larger this gap between boys and girls in having science as their best subject.
The research seems pretty clear.
> ...the percentage of girls who did excel in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with stem degrees.
This quote is not related to whether there are interest differences or not. They may be equally good in science/math and something else and decide they want to do the other thing without that automatically implying "society is causing this preference" (and by the way, medicine is not "STEM" for some reason, but no one is becoming a doctor without strong aptitude for math/science).
If the research results I quoted above are to be believed, regarding aptitude, someone may excel in A (say girls in these countries get "very good" scores in math at the same rate as boys) and be much better in B (they excel in reading/other skills at a higher rate than boys) and it would be natural for this person to pursue B in that case, no?
Well they might act differently, unless they're from a country like Hungary, Russia, or Sweden, and then they are just like men in math. Nurture or Nucleotides... the experiment has already been run. The results are in, accepted or not.
In those countries women succeed in math and sciences at the same rate as men... Hungary is known for its mathematicians, and just about half are women. Unfortunately, they have to undergo genetic modification at the border.
'The gap in reading “is related at least in part to girls’ advantages in basic language abilities and a generally greater interest in reading; they read more and thus practice more,” Geary told me.'
I'm sorry, I couldn't read past this bit. I know men who are good readers so this can't be true. I'm going to wilfully pretend I don't understand probability distributions. I need this person to be fired immediately. Someone contact Google HR.
I just discovered that where i work (Algeria) there is hidden rule in hiring new devs that wasn't known publicly it's simply no women, seriously i work with 20 men for more than two years and i just discovered that our head of recruitment doesn't hire woman at all no matter how she's talented because of so many reason most of them are racist but kind are hard to argue with him like if woman get married she will stop working and yes like 70% of this happened all time when women get married her husband will force her to stop working, even if she doesn't when she have kids she start working less hours i mean like 50% less
and the big reason that they can't handle pressure at all specifically if production server is down she simply get cracked down and where i live woman never work full time never that is like freaking problem and they never work for additional hours (despite we pay for those hours). so if he invest in woman she's going to get him like 30% productivity of men.
In a free market such companies would be at disadvantage versus the ones who also attract top talent regardless of gender or race or any other demographic criteria whatsoever.
I don't think the myth of a theoretical "free" market holds any water and can be applied sensibly to any real world scenario. In the actual free market a giant megacorp would swoop all promising hires and suppress all competition by selling at a loss until nobody else dares to enter the field.
In actual free market selling at loss is a very short-sighted strategy: you may cause the bankruptcy of your current competitors, but bariers to entry are low, so once you raise your prices back to profitable levels the new competition arises. You would have to sell at loss most of the time which would eventually bankrupt your megacorp. That’s why monopolies can only exist in regulated markets.
How do you swoop all promising new hires if you have a free market? its not like all of them want to work in the same place and the same culture. Even right now we have tons of startups despite the existence of Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
By nipping competition in the bud and starting company towns. When you're an unregulated monopoly with no danger of anti-trust, lots of things are possible.
> unregulated monopoly with no danger of anti-trust, lots of things are possible.
It's far from being proven yet. Even with anti-trust laws, breaking out companies in smaller entities does not challenge their market position that much, and anti-trust laws have a nasty effect: they encourage companies which are close to monopoly to let a weak competitor survive just to say "hey, at least there is one competitor left so we are not a monopoly". It's just not working well.
I disagree. With a large enough pool of applicants, you tend to get adequately talented people. If there were only 10 people who are capable to do what I am hiring for, I'd be at a disadvantage if I discriminated against men/women. But if there are 10 million such people, I can discriminate all I want and I'll still get acceptable results.
Only if they could easily assess ability. It sounds like gender is a fairly reliable indicator of performance in Algeria, so it probably helps to just use it. They might miss some occasional great women but will save themselves from the majority of low performing ones. I'm not saying it's right to discriminate like this, just that it could be competitive to do so.
That's assuming an internal company culture couldn't be created based on shared understanding that would lead to competitive advantage. Eg, if you create a company with only black women, you may not necessarily get the very best individuals, but you could create a very unique culture. That culture could empower the whole team to work better with each other with the end result being a more productive team even though individuals may be less productive alone. It could also reduce turnover and increase job satisfaction, leading to less time spent training and cheaper and more productive overtime for the company.
Such a company could be at an advantage in a free market where there were no rules on employment discrimination.
That's right! But the same applies the other way around. The argument that a company that doesn't hire that one guy because he's Malasian may allow your competitor to beat you in a free market is also very much a "may, could, would" scenario.
There's only one way to know: get a free market and see whether the companies that hires all Malasians or no Malasians or a mix of Malasians and non-Malasians comes out on top in aggregate.
(Malasians used as an example, not because of anything specific about Malasians. Feel free to replace with Lithuanians if you want. Although the specific cultures involved are probably very important. A culture that has a focus on technology and work ethic would likely beat out a culture that focuses on extended deep sea fishing when it comes to building a startup.)
I tend to use a simple method to analyze a post. Switch the races and genders around.
If in your post one would switch the term black woman into white man it would become "If you create a company with only white men.... you could create a very unique culture.". etc
That kind of post would cause a massive uproar for rather obvious reasons.
Yet it's interesting that these kind of posts don't.
Yeah, it's unfortunate and that kind of uproar doesn't do anybody much good. I chose black female on purpose for that reason, obviously, as it's acceptable to consider such things intellectually in today's world.
We've stopped discussing some key concepts just because it's not allowed anymore. I guess we need the bravery of enlightenment era philosophers once again - to stand up to social pressure in the name of open ideas.
Why should it be an either-or proposition? There's lots of evidence that young boys are falling behind to girls in early to college education. Maybe both genders need encouraging words? And if we're collectively going to dish out negative articles about men, maybe that should cut both ways too
It's definitely not coordinated. It's an emergent phenomenon that was created by the engagement-maximizing feed and recommendation algorithms we're plugged into
If we insist on reporting by gender (that is questionable in itself) reporting must be truthful, otherwise we risk that these reports are not taken seriously.
I am sure women are better than men at a lot of things, and equally good at other things. What are men better at? We know men are better at some things than women, but currently nobody is willing/interested/daring to report on this.
Does it matter who is better? It seems yes, since lots of news are talking about how much better women are.
Come on, I am extremely positive about equality; if you are starting to antagonize people like me, something is going really wrong.
Yep, the "women are wonderful" trope is extremely widespread in the media. I've seen dozens of articles with a headline like "women are better than men at investing" or "women make for better leaders". You never read anything saying "men are better than women at X", not that they'd be any more socially beneficial than the toxic male-bashing that occurs today.
You don't have to read about it. Most people already think men are better at everything. Most CEOs, established scientists, famous chefs, and philosophers are almost all men.
Buzzfeed and HuffPo have an agenda to be very liberal and uses sensational articles to get attention because it goes against what most people historically think
This phenomenon isn't entirely new. Some man have seen it as "Scandinavian gender paradox".
Still, why are we surprised? We know instinctively, that there will never web 50/50 in some fields, because man/women just don't like it as much. It's sad that some people have to pretend to agree with the feminist narrative
Except some studies have shown countries with more equal rights country have worse gender stereotypes overall. And even if the studied were to be flawed, your "men and women have different tasted" theory is pure narrative as well. No study with any solid methodology has ever shown women and men have inherently different tastes when it comes to STEMs, and it's pretty much impossible considering the intertwined nature of nature and nurture and the very cultural nature of STEMs.
Career Successful women in stem told me that she would have pursed for a different career if she wasn't the daughter of immigrants. She was destined to be an engineer or a doctor.
These are both STEM fields (Science, technology, engineering, mathematics). Doctor is a crossover in my view, anyway. Sounds like she would like more autonomy with her career choices, rather than not be in a STEM field.
I think GP means that she felt like engineer and doctor were the only options she could choose from, and therefore she was effectively dragooned into a STEM career. That is, if she'd been dealt a different hand, she would've preferred a career in something other than engineering or medicine.
One reason could be - in poor/developing countries STEM is understood as the escape path from the poverty, while in developed countries people seem assured in their future even if they go in humanities or any other non-tech field - thus following their interests/hobbies rather than the need.
Anecdotal +1 to this thesis, which is also presented in the article:
I come from Morocco (quite similar to Algeria/Tunisia, which seem to have the highest % of women in STEM), and people are first looking for a job that will guarantee financial freedom. STEM jobs seem to be the most likely to guarantee this, and as such there's more women interested in these fields.
Looking at the graph however, this doesn't seem to explain the full variance (many developing countries have lower levels of representation).
this would not only explain why less women go into stem, but also why more guys go into it, as it is common for a guy to feel the onus of securing financial safety for his family.
And not gonna lie, even I, a guy, picked STEM partly because I see it as the best escape route from this country, I would have picked something more fun and less demanding otherwise
> it is common for a guy to feel the onus of securing financial safety for his family
In other words, this is not about what the article claims (girls are just not interested, presumably for biological reasons) but about expectations hammered into all of us by society.
Securing financial prospects is also highly associated with dating success for men but not women. One might wonder how important dating success is during the ages in which young men decide to go into stem.
The absence of a good welfare/healthcare system is one of the main reason I'm reluctant to moving to US - while personally I might be well off, assuming "big 4" (or 10, whatever) provide good insurance for developers - what if my children won't want to became developers but e.g. musician, literature school teacher, artist, etc... they would be doomed in US. So yes, when it comes to healthcare and affordable education, and gun control - US is really poor/undeveloped country, worse - they aren't even moving in the right direction.
If they want to become teachers, they will have very good social benefits in terms of pensions, affordable health insurance, and many work protections. Our government sector in most states is generally quite good on the benefits side, relatively speaking.
The equality situation cross-culture is different.
I think the US exceptionalises female STEM careers (as a proxy for discrimination) which can then add more pressure.
And just because women have an explicit right to choose STEM work, doesn't mean that the discrimination doesn't put them off entry, as they're still painted in the same fashion as they were for the last fifty years. As seen in google-guys all staff memo-rant.
I've been in the industry for 20 years and haven't seen any relaxation of the bigotry and ignorance towards some people in IT. In fact, I'd say it has got worse of late, with the current trend of having the right to voice an "unpopular opininon" creating a platform for casual discrimination.
This, and similar research I'd seen before seems to point to women being equal or better at STEM than men (and also being better at non-STEM stuff), but actively avoiding it as a low-status role when they have better options.
Slightly baffling to see this celebrated by men in these careers as some kind of vindication.
The data appears to be saying you (we) suck, but that's a win if you think the data was going to show that one gender sucked (and you ignore that you secretly thought it was them).
I think men celebrate it in the hope that this may trigger a culture change where they don't have to be seen as less desirables or inherently sexist members of the patriarchy.
Nah, a lot of guys are just weak and will do anything if they think it'll get chicks to like them. It's all good saying you're a male feminist until you realise girls don't want a pussy as a boyfriend. If you want to get a girl hot, act like a man.
Being good and being capable are different things: I am very capable of cleaning toilets, but I am not very good at it since I do not do it with a passion.
Edit: and I obviously do not imply with my tongue in cheek joke that women are the ones cleaning toilets. Just going the extra mile here to avoid offending anybody.
You joke, but women are the nest-makers biologically. You can see it in their typical enjoyment of shopping (which many guys aren't bothered about), and typically higher desire for cleanliness. Both these behaviours are beneficial from a survival perspective.
> This, and similar research I'd seen before seems to point to women being equal or better at STEM than men (and also being better at non-STEM stuff)
What I find onerous is that it's perfectly acceptable to make blanket statements about women being better at things than men, while it's now literally a sackable offense at many major tech companies to even imply the opposite. This doesn't seem like "progress towards equality" to me.
Variations of this has been growing for a long while. You can't be proud to be man or white; and you shouldn't be proud of success if you belong to that group. Unless your success is something that has benefited someone not in that group.
I said that women usually have a lower understanding of mechanics than men do in conversation and the other person looked at me shocked like I had just killed a puppy. I then said that very often dad's will teach their sons how to mechanically work on things as a basis for this conclusion and they where understanding of that, but not my original point. I find it frustrating that I can't make a statement without first explaining the examples too.
The way I see it, society is kind of like a person.
When an individual is going through a difficult time, it's normal and considerate to be sensitive to that.
Society is currently going through a difficult period of transformation regarding its perspective on women. During this time, sensitivity is much appreciated. It might be frustrating in some cases, but viewing society as a person makes this more understandable, at least for me.
One easy way to have done this is by starting with your explanation before saying the thing that could be perceived poorly in the current context.
In the future, when this current period has mostly ended, it may be easier to speak more frankly on formerly sensitive topics.
> Slightly baffling to see this celebrated by men in these careers as some kind of vindication.
An amusing and insightful observation.
I would say it's baffling until you realize that the alternative is that the whole the gap in female STEM employment continues to be attributed solely to male sexism. It's better to be perceived as stupid than evil.
Also, are we all now in agreement that there are likely cognitive differences between men and women, and that it is beneficial to explore those differences scientifically? Honest question.
> are we all now in agreement that there are likely
> cognitive differences between men and women
Alas, far from it I am afraid.
Which is very puzzling. Not many will argue that men and women have different physiology, different physical build. But god forbid from making the assumption that cognitive interests may also differ.
Not sure why you're down voted. You just need to read The Guardian and other liberal press to read how illiberal and intolerant many active feminists are.
I thought the three alternatives were "women are bad at it", "women don't enjoy it", "women are being actively put off it by the men being even more sexist than the sexism baseline of men in other career options".
If this is claiming they're actually better skilled than the men, then it opens up more space for the comparative sexism option I would have thought?
Just the fact that it contradicts the common wisdom that "women aren't capable of STEM" seems to lend some support to sexism clouding people's objective evaluations.
> I thought the three alternatives were "women are bad at it", "women don't enjoy it", "women are being actively put off it by the men being even more sexist than the sexism baseline of men in other career options".
It seemed like it was "women don't enjoy it" was largely the point. That even if women are just as good at math and science as men, that they are even better at other things, and that in societies with greater equality of opportunity women prefer to work at those other things.
> If this is claiming they're actually better skilled than the men, then it opens up more space for the comparative sexism option I would have thought?
Again, it the article emphasizes that women are better at other things, not necessarily science or mathematics (in some countries they are, but not all).
> Just the fact that it contradicts the common wisdom that "women aren't capable of STEM" seems to lend some support to sexism clouding people's objective evaluations.
Perhaps people are misreading a lack of interest as a lack of ability. In any case, it weakens the notion of sexism as a causal factor in the employment gap.
Perhaps they are celebrating the possibility that certain people will ease up on the angle that we're all complicit in perpetuating a culture of misogyny and harassment that drives women out of tech.
This article simply means when equal opportunity is offered, there are still fewer women choose to take STEM as their career.
Vindictive? No really. The research seems to suggest woman prefers STEM more, when there is no other viable economic opportunity, which makes such choice a conscious calculation, and do render the past accusation that there is an systematic oppression in the society to keep women away from taking the initiative, groundless.
This at least speaks some volume, the current diversity program is incapable to achieve its own goal, thus further enforcing such agenda might not be fruitful.
> the current diversity program is incapable to achieve its own goal
What exactly is the goal of this "diversity program"? Maybe they are completely capable of achieving their goal, it's just not the one you think it is.
(This is the curse of technical people: when you spend so much time thinking and solving problems rationally, it's easy to assume all situations can be approached in this way.)
Counterproductive for what? Individual happiness? Yeah, maybe. But that's not the only possibility.
50/50 is the "goal", but what's the motivation? Let's assume that we're talking increase in people, i.e. you want more women in STEM/tech/whatever, not simply less men (for some reason this option is rarely mentioned. You could fire enough men to get to 50/50, mathematically that's equally valid). Say I wanted more qualified employees without paying more - I can't think of a better to achieve this.
Of course, I have no evidence for this and it's super paranoid, but it's just one example how the goal might still make sense.
Another, less paranoid, motivation to consider, some might argue that STEM is important to civilization and having more of it is a good thing, even if people could go into other careers that are more personally lucrative, but are more zero-sum in their potential for benefitting the human race. Making the pie bigger rather than fighting for the biggest slice of a diminished pie.
If maximizing the STEM workforce is the goal, then aiming for a 50:50 gender balance seems like an unintuitive way to get there. If not enough women apply for a job, the incentive is to stop hiring men, and the number of STEM professionals goes down.
> actively avoiding it as a low-status role when they have better options.
So why don't men avoid it? It's hardly a high-status role for them, either. I hope my kids don't go into tech, regardless of gender.
The most cynical part of me thinks that this "equality" agenda isn't put forward to further humanity, but simply to get more people into the job market and drive wages down. Then I realise I should probably lay off the drugs, or become a lobbyist (or worse).
To be clear, this is the research I'm paraphrasing, but they seem to be suggesting that the men have the STEM skills to compare with women, but they don't have the non-STEM skills to compete as well in something like Law or Medicine or whatever. So they have a comparitive advantage, not an absolute advantage in STEM fields.
(I also just replied to someone else to point out that "putting more people into STEM" could be considered good for the human race. I personally think that more people should be allowed into Medicine for example, because there's some monopolies there that are driving costs up. Probably feels like an attack if you're a highly paid doctor though).
Being a highly paid professional in an extremely intellectual field is a "low-status role"? Where?
Let’s not pretend that cranking out CRUD apps is in any way intellectual, outside of Silly Valley the pay is nothing special and “geek” is synonymous with “total loser”.
>This, and similar research I'd seen before seems to point to women being equal or better at STEM than men
I'm not sure that was the conclusion of the research:
"But when it comes to their relative strengths, in almost all the countries—all except Romania and Lebanon—boys’ best subject was science, and girls’ was reading. (That is, even if an average girl was as good as an average boy at science, she was still likely to be even better at reading.) Across all countries, 24 percent of girls had science as their best subject, 25 percent of girls’ strength was math, and 51 percent excelled in reading. For boys, the percentages were 38 for science, 42 for math, and 20 for reading."
That being said, you could also read this as boys are so much worse than girls at verbal skills that by default, their best subject was science or math.
Forcing people to change their interests based on an agenda only results in them being even less interested than they were in the first place. There is also the backlash to the nonstop pushing of politically-based hiring instead of meritocratic practices. Some even state "meritocracy" is outright oppressive and should never be applied.
> Some even state "meritocracy" is outright oppressive and should never be applied.
"Oppressive" only because they don't like to face reality, no matter whether it is told gently, supportively or bluntly. All they can do is self-deny, and then project their pain and self-blame onto others, because it is too much to accept, push through and go beyond, because that is the beginning of self-healing.
Maybe because these people realized meritocracy is an outright lie and that in any instance there are gender/racial/class/geographical/... inequality, or even biological inequality you right-wingers are so keen to point at, so there's no way to actually talk about merit ?
A meritocracy isn't unfair by definition. It is an ideology based around what people can achieve. These achievements don't have to be grand or anything. They can be small and incremental. It is an ideology about empowering people, no matter who they are.
Even those who don't have equal capability compared to others can contribute in small ways, and so, they can indeed achieve merit based on merely doing what they can do, even if it is small.
But, it is many small things that add up to massive changes, and that is what a meritocracy is ~ just chip in where you can contribute, and you can make a difference, no matter who you are.
However, there are issues where a meritocracy cannot be of use, and that is in a system designed deliberately to exclude merit, and instead empower those who prefer there be imbalance, injustice, and unfairness. SJW ideologies which seek to belittle and mute those they consider the "enemy" are like this.
Why are we telling women do do STEM if that's not what they want to do, we should be supporting women want to do that. For example more entry level roles and considering women for those.
Isn't treating women differently from men sexist by definition?
If we want equality, let's treat everyone equally. No special programs for any gender.
We're constantly told that men and women are the same, and that you can even switch between them any time you want, but then we hear the complaints that gender X does better/worse at task Z. This narrative doesn't make any sense to me.
Men and women obviously aren't the same, no matter how much gnashing of teeth of matter occurs, because both have their strengths in different areas, according to their overall psychology.
Men and women are psychologically-different, and no amount of trying to force a desperate sameness will change that. In fact, it might even cause people to want to be even more different than before.
The SJWs campaign for "sameness" but act like the complete opposite.
Maybe they're just in denial of who they truly are, and are unconsciously asking for help and recognition that they truly matter, but cannot help but unconsciously portray this in a destructive manner for all to see, except themselves and their blind peer group.
It's not just the SJWs, but also companies and corporations that cooperate with the ridiculous bullshit of the utterly divisive and politically-correct gender/race insanity that's corroding various aspects of Western culture.
I've been verbose enough, because I'm quite fed up with how much this utter crap is infesting culture and causing so much trouble for innocent people who don't remotely deserve to have be treated like they have been.
"men and women are different" is such a broad statement you sure could say it and then say "duh anyone who disagrees is bullshit". Here's big news : blue eyed and brown eyed people are different. As for the rest of your text, it's all just broad statements with very little scientific value, since theybare then again broad claims. Girls prefer pink, y'know. So natural.
The SJWs have no evidence for their broad and vague claims either, which are almost completely exaggerated for personal gain, and have nothing to do with actual social justice, which they seek to deny to those they hate, attack and defame.
Don't try and drag science into this, when this is a set of social issues based on a bunch of people's mental health issues and how they're taking it out on other people.
There are consistent, globally found physical[1] and psychological differences[2] between the sexes, so it's a bit more complicated than comparing people with different eye colors.
Drawing conclusions about "innate" differences between men and women from this data doesn't seem valid. There's a lot of research left to eliminate confounding effects on participation that aren't covered or investigated by the "Global Gender Gap Index" (e.g. cultural attitudes towards women in STEM, or on-the-job discrimination). Scatter-plotting two datasets available on the internet doesn't feel like enough research for me to dismiss reports from women that they are discouraged from CS before, and during, their careers.
The trendline cited in the article isn't even conclusive, either—eliminating outliers would reduce it almost to noise. Even if it were, there hasn't, to date, been any reasonable explanation for why women's "innate" biology would make them any less interested in professions whose parameters and limitations are purely human-constructed and invented in the past century. Whatever happened during the evolution of the sexes was certainly not informed by the interestingness of C++.
maybe not biology, but personality wise (either due to social upbringing/expectations or genetic imprinting etc) I noticed far more men then women who are of the type who are more comfortable to work with things rather then people. I know I fall into this category.
Evolution was opinionated enough to create measurable differences in spatial ability, personality, drives and so on, between genders and within genders. Its velocity is directly proportional to the variance that exists in the population: you need something to differentiate in order to have differential selection pressure.
Your hypothesis is in fact the radical one: that programming is somehow such an unseen before ability, that evolution until now has not evolved any machinery to repurpose for its realization. Given everything we know about the very obvious cognitive limits we do have, and where they come from, that seems implausible.
The common reasoning by the way does dismiss reports from men and women alike that all this diversity mongering has poisoned the workplace atmosphere and mostly serves to enrich and flatter the egos of people who wouldn't show up unless they got special treatment for their own demographic, with special segregated events, hiring pipelines and accolades. The old "women in X" spiel. These things are most definitely constructed, and not for the reason they advertise. The standards of evidence demanded to abolish them are sky high compared to the spurious reasoning that spawned them.
I have often wondered if one day, the skill of underwater basket weaving was suddenly prized by society as highly as STEM jobs are today....would we see the same pressure to have more more X in underwater basket weaving (where X is your underrepresented group of choice).
A follow up question then to people pursuing STEM fields....are you in it because you're interested in the subject or because of the promise of money/status? An age old question I've heard since I was a young boy.
As someone in university and talking to a lot of both genders why they want to join engineering I get a lot of nebulous answers that don't really traceback to a main character trait or reason. Which is fine you don't have a totally define answer but I am kinda perplexed by the desire to do something with seeming no reason.
As a side note I see a lot of women engineers start out as saying they want to do Biomed and the switching to something else. Not totally sure why but I find it interesting.
No. After having removed outliers, I still see a clear line & slope like shown in the diagram. Maybe you don't see it, because you don't want to see it?
Also, you cannot call all of Sweden, Norway and Finland "outliers"? To me, that looks more like you deliberately destroying data, until the remaining data set fits your world view. Hmm I live in Scandinavia and I feel mildly annoyed that you apparently want to ignore this part of the world :- P
Women breast feed babies. To me it's natural and obvious that evolution has therefore made them feel happy when they take care of others, and that a bit more women like working as doctors, nurses, psychiatrists and such things.
(With that said, I think it's a good idea to encourage more women to choose STEM jobs. The article seems to agree with this and that they're good at it.)
I like your scare quotes around "innate" biology :-) What an outdated concept, innateness, right?
Please don't confuse your personal ignorance with a lack of publicly available research.
The (population, statistical) biological differences between men and women are well established, documented and non-controversial at this point, except in looney circles. (Hint: biological differences in child-bearing and physical abilities get reflected in different social aptitude and risk-management strategies, which are in turn reflected in occupational choices)
Unless you deny there are gender differences in physical strength and child-bearing, of course. In which case there isn't much left to say.
Statistics say boys are more heavily inclined to have a STEM career. Does this mean they feel they cannot consider a career in other fields like teaching, nursing or other female-dominated fields?
As a woman I often wonder, what's so great about STEM aside from the paycheck? It depends on your bosses (or being your own if you are lucky and that way inclined), but I don't think we've shown many girls that STEM is really rewarding and it looks on TV like it involves a lot of staring at computer screens. Boring! So I expect that will change when we get to use more interactive interfaces. Also, I hope society does more work to let boys grow up feeling STEM isn't their only hope.
Given that there are consistent biological[1] and psychological[2] differences between the sexes globally, I'm not sure this would be an achievable goal without hormonal modification, which would wreck the quality of life of one or both genders.
I humbly suggest its none of our damn business how the women choose marriage patterns (if they choose to marry at all). Its definitely not "our responsibility".
I believe you read that the wrong way around. I'm not suggesting women change their marriage patterns.
I'm saying it is irresponsible to advice boys to make live choices that are at odds with female mating behaviour, because it adversely affects their life outcomes.
I don't understand whats patriarchal about my comment, care to elaborate? If you have a more solid data point than "thats not my personal experience", I'd be certainly interested in it.
>>> Income is a more important factor in rating men's attractiveness compared to women.
>>> I don't understand whats patriarchal about my comment, care to elaborate
I mean seriously, the answer is in your own comment.
Edit: I don't understand the downvotes.
His own comment implies income is an important factor to attractiveness for men then asks why is that a patriarchal thing. I'm not being patronising but it's obvious that it's expected for the man to be the bread winner which is patriarchal in nature. The man doesn't have to be the bread winner.
> patriarchal/societal expectations .. main breadwinner
Let's be clear who expects this: women do.
Most women will stop dating a man if they discover he makes less than they do. When I was still in the Bay Area I was on match.com for a bit. >90% of the women's profiles stated they expected their match to make more than they do (even having this information in the form felt a bit weird for me).
And no, this is not because of the "pay gap", which is a myth, or because they can't. In fact, the unwillingness actually increases with income levels, so the women who could most afford it are least willing to date a guy who makes less than they do.
Yes thank you, people seem
to forget that the reason why STEM gets a higher paycheck is because there's less people willing to go for it, both female and male, the paycheck is not a prize you get for being male, it's a prize you get for the sacrifice you make. Look at it this way: no one is complaining about the lack of girls in the blue collar industry.
Or capable. I imagine the IQ bar is set quite a bit higher for STEM-like courses and careers... Also, there's much less room for bullshit (at least in programming - your code either works, or it doesn't work, and that's really easy to verify at university and when applying to jobs - as opposed to e.g. marketing, where it's much harder to quantify someone's skill).
Citation needed; I don't buy that men in STEM generally consider it a sacrifice compared to working other jobs. I am lucky to have an entertaining IT job that happens to be extremely well paid. I never wish I was a nurse working my ass off on a night shift, or any other less well paid profession.
>Look at it this way: no one is complaining about the lack of girls in the blue collar industry.
Actually, I remember hearing quite a bit of complaining back when I was in middle and high school. However, it occurred alongside a concerted effort by the Province of Ontario to increase the supply of tradespeople at a time when there was a shortage of 'qualified' (read: certified by provincial licensing bodies) ones in Ontario, which led to exorbitant prices on associated goods and services. So, to be cynical, this could be much more about price correction than anything else.
Obviously I cannot speak for others, but for me tech and coding was and still is inspired almost entirely by the “mathematical beauty” and “creative” aspects of the tech itself; it has little to nothing to do with pay, social reasons, or anything else.
It really does involve a lot of “staring at a screen” (or paper/whiteboard brainstorming) though, and just talking about it excites me, still — it’s the intellectual/mathematical beauty and creative potential of what is being sketched on those “authoring mediums” that is so very stimulating.
When I first started coding, I was 8 years old, and I didn’t even know the first thing about whether this field would pay well, whether it would be socially engaging, etc. In fact to some extent I was actively doscourage from it, rather than joining the family gardening business (manual labor care of plants — just not for me).
None of the circumstantial reasons for or against programming mattered to me. It was the coding, the very process of staring at a screen with complex patterns and ideas as they’re authored, that excited me. It still does; creating beautiful code that does intricately complex things, that all work correctly every single time to produce the designed results, feels almost like being a modern day wizard creating magic.
Because the work itself is intrinsically motivating, it never gets old, and no amount of social pressures could sway me away from doing this.
There is a significant prestige factor to working in most STEM professions. The barrier isn't just that it's boring; it's exacting, requires significant foundational knowledge and builds in levels of understanding, and not getting any easier in terms of the work demands for things to be better, smaller, more efficient, and cheaper.
Iran has more women engineers and graduates overall. I'm told it can be as much as 75%. I half suspect that it's two things. The society at large is very gender unequal but applied engineering wants outcomes enough that it overcomes societal distortion to get capable women into roles for mutual benefit.
The second reason is that highly skilled Iranian women stem graduates qualify for immigration points in receiving economies like Australia.
I've worked with some, and know some. They're good. The system works for them as individuals if not in the wider sense of what we'd want in an equal society.
I certainly know girls in medicine who struggle to find guys. Some seem to be intimidated by them, especially guys from Asian cultures where they want to have higher status jobs than their wives.
I would add though that in fact neither of two particular girls I know wanted to go into medicine. They were pushed in by their parents. One wanted to work in fashion, the other media.
Whenever such studies or analyses come up in the media, I find that people are often eager to jump to causative conclusions on the lines of "oh females must have a natural inclination towards 'softer' fields" or (as in case of this article) "In wealthy nations, they believe that they have the freedom to pursue those alternatives and not worry so much that they pay less." However, even if we ignore the obvious correlation vs causation fallacy at play here, these conclusions conveniently ignore a million other societal factors that affect such decisions. For instance, as much of a gender-equality-utopia Scandinavian countries are, they're certainly not free of gender roles and the societal institutions that enforce those. While of course anecdotal, several of my friends from these countries have talked about how they faced invisible, passive-aggressive forms of bullying from fellow students (a large majority of them reportedly female) for having 'geeky' interests such as math. When presented with other options that may eventually be equally or slightly less fulfilling, but come without the social pressure, it makes sense to most people to go with the flow. So much for "natural inclinations"...
Oh no I'm sorry for the lack of clarity, that was certainly not what I'm implying. They do, and it's an extremely unfortunate problem that we ought to do something about. I was merely suggesting that these differences we tend to eagerly attribute to biology (a la James Damore) could very well be caused by a bunch of cultural and societal factors, of which bullying could be one.
Also, over the last two decades there has been a significant increase in cultural recognition and representation of male "nerds," as people who belonged to that category have gained positions of influence, thanks to the tech boom in the 90s, which can sometimes inspire students to pursue their interests despite the bullying. The lack of such representative role models for young females is disconcerting and could even cause some people to be slightly more affected by the bullying, because perhaps they don't know a female who works in STEM or know of anyone in recent years who made it big, and simply didn't know it was possible to go against the social tide (which happens all too frequently.)
All in all, I think there are a lot of factors at play here and reducing it to one cause seems like wilful ignorance at best.
How could you even know that it wasn't? Besides, kids never got bullied for wanting to become engineers, kids got bullied for all of the hyper-focused interests and trait expressions that makes them in to good engineers.
Because the cultural zeitgeist is pretty much entirely for the things stereotypically dumped on in past decades. Because STEM's importance is axiomatic in the same culture. Because the arts/humanities/SocSci outgroup is far more universally derided upon (the merits of that derision are not relevant to this discussion).
The culture you're describing sounds like something that might arise in SV, but trust me it doesn't really describe America... Propaganda campaigns rarely set what kids think is cool.
The impact of all of these weird pro-STEM programs is a really complicated discussion, but let me suggest that it doesn't really make high school any easier for the vast majority. (The social structure of kids doesn't really look to DuPont for ideas about which way is up...) Your response almost reminds me of how some people are feeling left out of minority help programs ("what did I do to deserve a landscape devoid of scholarships," that kind of thing.) without realizing exactly how little help those programs really provide. In a sense, overestimating the effectiveness of a response to privilege so harshly that you think the privilege has been reversed.
>The culture you're describing sounds like something that might arise in SV, but trust me it doesn't really describe America... Propaganda campaigns rarely set what kids think is cool.
I didn't mention my geographic location (Toronto) or the root causes of the cultural shift (I can't speak to that), so these are some strange assumptions to make. I'm also not really following the rest of your argument, tbh.
In any case, I stand by my argument that this:
>are you implying that male students who go for stem don't face bullying akin to being "geeky" or "nerds"? Please...
is a fairly tall order in 2018. Positioning yourself as someone who seeks a career in STEM, regardless of your gender, is not marking yourself out for bullying, and hasn't been for a long time.
> While of course anecdotal, several of my friends from these countries have talked about how they faced invisible, passive-aggressive forms of bullying from fellow students (a large majority of them reportedly female) for having 'geeky' interests such as math.
Sure, but we can also present similar anecdotal evidence of visible forms of bullying from fellow male students for having geeky interests. So, where does that leave us, really? Similar to your criticism about jumping to causative conclusions, you've determined that this passive-aggressive bullying is the case of gender roles rather than the more obvious case of bullying nerds.
Ask around in your social circle, both men an women: "Would you like to have a job where you sit all day at the computer?". Then calculate the percentages.
Sure, you may be right about a percentage disparity, but how do we know that the factors that caused this disparity were not cultural in the first place, instilled by society as they were growing up?
I also think that blanket questions such as "Would you like to have a job where you sit all day at the computer?" would be rather unhelpful because it really depends on the nature of the job. Both theoretical physicists and people working in building security have to sit at the computer all day, but that in no way implies that the nature of the job is similar.
The simple fact is that if your claim is that discrimination is the primary cause for the lack of representation of women in STEM fields, then these data show that you are wrong. Not because we can eliminate subtle pressures with 100% certainty, we don't need to do that.
The hypothesis is wrong because it makes the wrong prediction: if discrimination were the major cause, then more discrimination would lead to more unequal distribution. And the data show that it's the other way around: less discrimination leads to more unequal distribution.
It's not a matter of degrees, it's a matter of sign, of the direction of the change. And that's effectively boolean, the sign is either positive or negative. The "discrimination" hypothesis predicts the sign is positive, in reality the sign is negative. Can't really get any more clear-cut than that.
Sure, this question definitely deserves further probing for other causative factors. But about discrimination, what stage are we talking about? During early childhood when males tend to be pushed towards mechanical toys and construction sets, and females towards caring for dolls? During university when you're repeatedly singled out as the token female in a STEM class by the professor? At the workplace? Discrimination can exist independently at multiple stages and these data only talk about equality on some levels, and that too only overt discrimination. I'm not saying it is (or is not) the primary cause, but it may be too early to rule it out entirely.
No one is arguing to rule it out entirely. Not even James Damore.
The question is: how do we measure the problem of discrimination? Many people assume that we can measure discrimination by looking at the percentage of women in engineering and comparing it to the percentage of women in the general population. Many people believe that any difference between these numbers proves discrimination. But an increasing amount of evidence suggests that this a bad assumption.
> as much of a gender-equality-utopia Scandinavian countries are, they're certainly not free of gender roles and the societal institutions that enforce those
Compared to Algeria, Albania, Turkey, Tunisia, UAE, Romania, etc? Please get your head of western social "justice" bubble. The factors that you think the article doesn't take into consideration are not explicitly there because they are implicit to everybody who really knows these countries.
When I read the OP's paragraph it seems to be implying the opposite of what you seem to think. To me it's implying "Sweden isn't special, it has gender roles too..."
> Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there
So if women are choosing not to enter certain fields the "gender gap" is worse? That's to say some people are so idealistic that they would rather remove a woman's freedom to choose her career and force her into a job she doesn't want to do just to satisfy some BS ideology?
A "gender gap" is only bad if women are prevented from entering a field for some reason. If they simply don't want to, then more power to them. Surely the most important thing is the right to choose one's own career, not applying social pressure to women.
It's the same with the recent trend of getting rid of "track girls" at F1. So now pretty girls who want to be models can no longer find as much work they enjoy.
If you look closely at their scatter plot, you can see that the UAE, Turkey, Algeria, and Tunisia cluster in the lower right. Without them, the relationship would be considerably weaker. Is there something in particular about Middle Eastern culture that's skewing the results?
I'm not sure I understand the choice of countries in the regression either. Where are India and China, for example?
What could be so particular about the Middle Eastern culture that would result in a different treatment of women in these countries? Is it about the climate? Is it about the diet? The research must continue to resolve this mindboggling mystery.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 231 ms ] thread(Actually, people aren't confused about this, but it makes for great clickbait articles and ad revenue because it fans the flames of both sides of the argument.)
There's a couple places within the article that's more superficial though.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/
And of course, far more studies that have been going on for decades.
lower physical strength (on average) => more focus on social skills (on average) => higher agreeableness (one of the Big-5 traits) and preference for avoiding conflict (on average) => less risk but also less upside (on average) => less extreme career choices but also less extreme rewards (on average)
The vast majority of women will not continue dating a man who earns less than they do. Two thirds of young women in Germany expect their future partners to take care of them financially.
So for men, earning money and status is absolutely essential.
See also: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/02/a-lette...
(2) What makes you think it wouldn't? After all, it affects everyone in society. And motivation is a pretty powerful force, it is basically how our entire economy is structured.
See also:
https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/money-gender-a...
"...it typically takes a lot less money to get women to say they are satisfied with their work than it does to get men to say it."
"Women were more likely to tell PayScale that say they find their jobs “very meaningful” than men were, with 35 percent of women and 27 percent of men describing their jobs this way."
So women have more freedom to find meaningful jobs. Men less so.
For free market choice on which jobs pay more -- I think this one is pretty clear. Do you think differently?
As for biological preference, I don't think it takes into account the average pay at all. Career path is usually chosen at a younger and more idealistic age, and probably more importantly - poorer countries have women overriding their preferences and going into higher paid lines of work, while richer countries let women do what they want. As per this very study. In the case where money doesn't matter because your family is rich, biological preferences become more important and people stop choosing based on average pay. So the biological differences seem to explain it really well.
So if you assert that discrimination is the cause for the imbalance, the evidence shows that your assertion is wrong, because it makes the wrong prediction.
This is not just a matter of degrees it is a matter of sign (the arrow is pointing in the wrong direction).
Maybe because "positive discrimination" is pursued using equality of outcomes as a key indicator?
I personally look at the outcome (you can reach a billion people just by having a cool idea and sitting down and doing it) then look at the hurdles to that outcome.
One of the hurdles is that engineers love wasting literally hundreds of each others' hours. If I were building something as a newbie, people have no trouble sending me off on a wild goose chase to spend a hundred hours with my head in documentation. When an alternative ecosystem lets me literally type a single line and it's done. (In this case the first ecosystem hates my time and the second one respects it.)
This isn't really related to gender, but it's another hurdle. So when you look at the incentive (reaching people, fame, fortune, money), if there is a highly unequal distribution you have to look at some of the hurdles.
By the way no one knows your gender online when you're learning stuff, you can use a non-gendered username and get treated exactly the same asking stuff online and so forth.
In this case the hurdle is artificial: being cooped up with a computer while the tools you're trying to use waste thousands of your hours. But it's still a hurdle that impacts genders in a different way, and that matters.
Robert Sapolsky - we need you now more than ever, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky
Most people seem very capable of thinking statistically, but they don't communicate in distributions.
For two people communicating in good faith, the two statements (1) "Boys are taller than girls" and (2) "Anne is taller than Sean" don't prompt talk about how both can't be true at the same time, sexist. People communicate statistical differences as "absolutes", but when communicating in good faith, everybody knows what everybody means.
Look at stereotype research. Most stereotypes are statistically true. People communicate them "as if" absolute, but nobody's head explodes when individual examples don't "conform" to the stereotype. That's because people can think in distributions.
That's not surprising, it's how to survive in a stochastic environment.
This gap between thought and speech only becomes problematic ("makes it really hard to have any discussion") because we can rhetorically exploit the fact that most people can't explicitly communicate about distributions. Just tell them they're bigoted, and they don't know how to refute you. Yay, you win.
When you average all women and all men, you get a "gap". However, like the imbalance in fields, this is almost entirely due to different choices. When you control for factors such as field, hours worked, years worked the gap effectively disappears.
Choices made by women are influenced by the glass ceiling, society expectations that women will take care of children and the elderly, and the traditional fields where they're expected to work. The decision to measure the gender gap by comparing equal working hours and equal job positions is not innocent, is itself a politically motivated and comforting way to make rational people think "I told you, there's nothing to see here". You need to evaluate what causes women to have those less hours in less paying jobs, to see whether there's discrimination or not.
Yet the salary wages discrimination reappears when you factor in hours dedicated to domestic work (the "second shift"), differences in salary between fields with equal risks (exposition to chemicals, hardship) where workers are majority women vs those with more men, or companies' (irrational) tendency to default in promoting male workers over females in similar situations.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/women-...
It is seen in human beings and animals that statistically females mate sidewards or upwards in terms of providability. This in turn applies a pressure on males to compete for more and accumulate more resources, whereas females are not measured by males on their providability hence have no pressure on them to fight for the same resources. So, men will always compete more to get a greater share of the pie, this combined with capitalism explains whatever income gap remains after attaining equality of opportunity. Shouldn't the underlying metrics of mating preferences also be taken into account before putting it all under male sexism and patriarch umbrella ?
You can't ignore that we come from a culture with a tradition of 60+ centuries of male-favouring sexism and patriarchy, which has not vanished merely because of a theoretical solution to it (legal equality) has been formally declared. There's a lot of social inertia introducing biases in the opportunities available to women.
You can take into account mating preferences all you want, but how do those affect choices of job positions other than very indirectly? On the other hand, irrational prejudices in recruitment and career advancement processes have a direct impact on the quality of job positions that women have access to, and therefore in their opportunities. Unless you're downright denying that such prejudices exist, this cultural factor would have a larger influence than biology.
The incentive models, which take data from both biology and culture, claims a prediction that as you measure equality of opportunity and compare nations it will correlate to inverse gender segregation in the work force. The more equality of opportunity the higher gender segregation will be, caused by incentives that is derived from gender roles, sexual strategies, and sexual dimorphism.
The prejudices model make the opposite prediction. It claims that when measuring the equality of opportunity the higher it is the lower the gender segregation should be.
In order to resolve the question one measure equality of opportunity and gender segregation, creating data. This create a scientific valid argument in favor of one model over the other.
That is one aspect of the theory. An other aspect would be to measure difference in prejudices between different professions. If the model is correct then it should be able to predict based on such measure which professions are gender segregated and which are not, and inversely predict the level of prejudices exist per profession given any country. The incentive model claim that incentives are a large influence and such you could not make a predictive model based on measuring prejudices.
The incentive model also predict that nation where the incentives are different (based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs), you should see a correlated change in gender segregation. Incentives such as reproduction is listed last among the physiological need, so nations where water and food is scare for women should result in higher incentive to seek professions where those are easier achievable. The prejudices model would argue that there is no such correlation.
This is of course just a small sample in order to scientifically evaluate the two different theories. There is also matching philosophy theories (their names escape me right now), arguing in different direction to explain the data.
I would say that you're right, and this means that specific outcome equality is not indicative of equality of opportunity.
But, it's also true that equality before the law and other measures that have been tKe over the last 3 generations do not guarantee equality of opportunity. Opportunity is in itself a sticky concept.
If you grow up in a family/community where a lot of people are tradesmen then you'll be more likely to be a tradesman. Same for long term welfare dependance, academia, public services, fireman/police, housewives, medicine...
The dynamics are complex and not fully understood. People form an idea about what's normal, possible and such. This is a socially based phenomenon.
I would argue that it is important to the concept of opportunity. The boxes that you put yourself into by default, and others put you in.
There aren't necessarily physical barriers. Lots of people don't end up on the default paths, maybe even most. But, defaults matter.
Anyway, let's think about it in reverse. Let's say we are abolishing sexism, racism, caste systems or some other form of big societal discrimination. A generation later, no change in outcomes. Did we succeed?
OTOH, it's hard to know what to do with specifics like women in tech. It's not inherently bad for women to have different average preferences and that will cause unequal outcomes. But, we also can't ignore outcomes (imo) entirely either. There must be actual outcome changes.
There's also the issue of feedback loops. If certain spheres are male realms, with women in a tiny minority this makes it harder for women to enter in the future.
> The findings will likely seem controversial, since the idea that men and women have different inherent abilities is often used as a reason...to argue we should forget trying to recruit more women into the stem fields. But...that’s not quite what’s happening here. > In wealthy nations, [women] believe that they have the freedom to pursue [other] alternatives and not worry so much that they pay less.
The research does not seem to find that it is gender aptitude or interest differences that accounts for the disparity in STEM graduates.
> ...the percentage of girls who did excel in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with stem degrees. That means there’s something in even the most liberal societies that’s nudging women away from math and science, even when those are their best subjects.
Where's sexism in medicine, sociology, biology?
I didn't glean it from the article but if you have can you tell if they suggested a reason for this? What is this "something" that’s nudging women away from math and science?
> And the more gender-equal the country, as measured by the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, the larger this gap between boys and girls in having science as their best subject.
The research seems pretty clear.
> ...the percentage of girls who did excel in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with stem degrees.
This quote is not related to whether there are interest differences or not. They may be equally good in science/math and something else and decide they want to do the other thing without that automatically implying "society is causing this preference" (and by the way, medicine is not "STEM" for some reason, but no one is becoming a doctor without strong aptitude for math/science).
If the research results I quoted above are to be believed, regarding aptitude, someone may excel in A (say girls in these countries get "very good" scores in math at the same rate as boys) and be much better in B (they excel in reading/other skills at a higher rate than boys) and it would be natural for this person to pursue B in that case, no?
Could you clarify what does this mean (what is special about Hungary, Russia, Sweden)?
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/globally-women-tend-...
based on:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797617741719
Another Hungarian woman, Marianna Csörnyei, proved the equivalence of the zero measure notions of infinite dimensional Banach spaces.
I'm sorry, I couldn't read past this bit. I know men who are good readers so this can't be true. I'm going to wilfully pretend I don't understand probability distributions. I need this person to be fired immediately. Someone contact Google HR.
It's far from being proven yet. Even with anti-trust laws, breaking out companies in smaller entities does not challenge their market position that much, and anti-trust laws have a nasty effect: they encourage companies which are close to monopoly to let a weak competitor survive just to say "hey, at least there is one competitor left so we are not a monopoly". It's just not working well.
Such a company could be at an advantage in a free market where there were no rules on employment discrimination.
There's only one way to know: get a free market and see whether the companies that hires all Malasians or no Malasians or a mix of Malasians and non-Malasians comes out on top in aggregate.
(Malasians used as an example, not because of anything specific about Malasians. Feel free to replace with Lithuanians if you want. Although the specific cultures involved are probably very important. A culture that has a focus on technology and work ethic would likely beat out a culture that focuses on extended deep sea fishing when it comes to building a startup.)
If in your post one would switch the term black woman into white man it would become "If you create a company with only white men.... you could create a very unique culture.". etc
That kind of post would cause a massive uproar for rather obvious reasons.
Yet it's interesting that these kind of posts don't.
We've stopped discussing some key concepts just because it's not allowed anymore. I guess we need the bravery of enlightenment era philosophers once again - to stand up to social pressure in the name of open ideas.
I don’t think that means what you think it means
When you get all the time exclusively negative news about men, you could start thinking that this is a coordinated (or emergent?) campaign.
I'll take concrete, quantifiable rewards over nice words in an opinion piece any day.
I am sure women are better than men at a lot of things, and equally good at other things. What are men better at? We know men are better at some things than women, but currently nobody is willing/interested/daring to report on this.
Does it matter who is better? It seems yes, since lots of news are talking about how much better women are.
Come on, I am extremely positive about equality; if you are starting to antagonize people like me, something is going really wrong.
You don't have to read about it. Most people already think men are better at everything. Most CEOs, established scientists, famous chefs, and philosophers are almost all men.
Still, why are we surprised? We know instinctively, that there will never web 50/50 in some fields, because man/women just don't like it as much. It's sad that some people have to pretend to agree with the feminist narrative
These are both STEM fields (Science, technology, engineering, mathematics). Doctor is a crossover in my view, anyway. Sounds like she would like more autonomy with her career choices, rather than not be in a STEM field.
EDIT: unintentional tl;dr as it seems :)
> “Countries with the highest gender equality tend to be welfare states,”
> they write, “with a high level of social security.” Meanwhile, less
> gender-equal countries tend to also have less social support for people
> who, for example, find themselves unemployed. Thus, the authors
> suggest, girls in those countries might be more inclined to choose stem
> professions, since they offer a more certain financial future than,
> say, painting or writing.
I come from Morocco (quite similar to Algeria/Tunisia, which seem to have the highest % of women in STEM), and people are first looking for a job that will guarantee financial freedom. STEM jobs seem to be the most likely to guarantee this, and as such there's more women interested in these fields.
Looking at the graph however, this doesn't seem to explain the full variance (many developing countries have lower levels of representation).
And not gonna lie, even I, a guy, picked STEM partly because I see it as the best escape route from this country, I would have picked something more fun and less demanding otherwise
In other words, this is not about what the article claims (girls are just not interested, presumably for biological reasons) but about expectations hammered into all of us by society.
I've been in the industry for 20 years and haven't seen any relaxation of the bigotry and ignorance towards some people in IT. In fact, I'd say it has got worse of late, with the current trend of having the right to voice an "unpopular opininon" creating a platform for casual discrimination.
Slightly baffling to see this celebrated by men in these careers as some kind of vindication.
The data appears to be saying you (we) suck, but that's a win if you think the data was going to show that one gender sucked (and you ignore that you secretly thought it was them).
Edit: and I obviously do not imply with my tongue in cheek joke that women are the ones cleaning toilets. Just going the extra mile here to avoid offending anybody.
What I find onerous is that it's perfectly acceptable to make blanket statements about women being better at things than men, while it's now literally a sackable offense at many major tech companies to even imply the opposite. This doesn't seem like "progress towards equality" to me.
When an individual is going through a difficult time, it's normal and considerate to be sensitive to that.
Society is currently going through a difficult period of transformation regarding its perspective on women. During this time, sensitivity is much appreciated. It might be frustrating in some cases, but viewing society as a person makes this more understandable, at least for me.
One easy way to have done this is by starting with your explanation before saying the thing that could be perceived poorly in the current context.
In the future, when this current period has mostly ended, it may be easier to speak more frankly on formerly sensitive topics.
An amusing and insightful observation.
I would say it's baffling until you realize that the alternative is that the whole the gap in female STEM employment continues to be attributed solely to male sexism. It's better to be perceived as stupid than evil.
Also, are we all now in agreement that there are likely cognitive differences between men and women, and that it is beneficial to explore those differences scientifically? Honest question.
edit: missing word
If this is claiming they're actually better skilled than the men, then it opens up more space for the comparative sexism option I would have thought?
Just the fact that it contradicts the common wisdom that "women aren't capable of STEM" seems to lend some support to sexism clouding people's objective evaluations.
It seemed like it was "women don't enjoy it" was largely the point. That even if women are just as good at math and science as men, that they are even better at other things, and that in societies with greater equality of opportunity women prefer to work at those other things.
> If this is claiming they're actually better skilled than the men, then it opens up more space for the comparative sexism option I would have thought?
Again, it the article emphasizes that women are better at other things, not necessarily science or mathematics (in some countries they are, but not all).
> Just the fact that it contradicts the common wisdom that "women aren't capable of STEM" seems to lend some support to sexism clouding people's objective evaluations.
Perhaps people are misreading a lack of interest as a lack of ability. In any case, it weakens the notion of sexism as a causal factor in the employment gap.
Vindictive? No really. The research seems to suggest woman prefers STEM more, when there is no other viable economic opportunity, which makes such choice a conscious calculation, and do render the past accusation that there is an systematic oppression in the society to keep women away from taking the initiative, groundless.
This at least speaks some volume, the current diversity program is incapable to achieve its own goal, thus further enforcing such agenda might not be fruitful.
What exactly is the goal of this "diversity program"? Maybe they are completely capable of achieving their goal, it's just not the one you think it is.
(This is the curse of technical people: when you spend so much time thinking and solving problems rationally, it's easy to assume all situations can be approached in this way.)
50/50 is the "goal", but what's the motivation? Let's assume that we're talking increase in people, i.e. you want more women in STEM/tech/whatever, not simply less men (for some reason this option is rarely mentioned. You could fire enough men to get to 50/50, mathematically that's equally valid). Say I wanted more qualified employees without paying more - I can't think of a better to achieve this.
Of course, I have no evidence for this and it's super paranoid, but it's just one example how the goal might still make sense.
So why don't men avoid it? It's hardly a high-status role for them, either. I hope my kids don't go into tech, regardless of gender.
The most cynical part of me thinks that this "equality" agenda isn't put forward to further humanity, but simply to get more people into the job market and drive wages down. Then I realise I should probably lay off the drugs, or become a lobbyist (or worse).
(I also just replied to someone else to point out that "putting more people into STEM" could be considered good for the human race. I personally think that more people should be allowed into Medicine for example, because there's some monopolies there that are driving costs up. Probably feels like an attack if you're a highly paid doctor though).
How is it baffling when the dominant narrative is "men in STEM are such horrid creepy sexist misogynists that they are driving the women out"?
Now that was always risible, but still it is the dominant narrative.
I'm fine with it if that's what you're telling yourself to cope with why you in particular were unable to enter the field, though.
Let’s not pretend that cranking out CRUD apps is in any way intellectual, outside of Silly Valley the pay is nothing special and “geek” is synonymous with “total loser”.
I'm not sure that was the conclusion of the research:
"But when it comes to their relative strengths, in almost all the countries—all except Romania and Lebanon—boys’ best subject was science, and girls’ was reading. (That is, even if an average girl was as good as an average boy at science, she was still likely to be even better at reading.) Across all countries, 24 percent of girls had science as their best subject, 25 percent of girls’ strength was math, and 51 percent excelled in reading. For boys, the percentages were 38 for science, 42 for math, and 20 for reading."
That being said, you could also read this as boys are so much worse than girls at verbal skills that by default, their best subject was science or math.
"Oppressive" only because they don't like to face reality, no matter whether it is told gently, supportively or bluntly. All they can do is self-deny, and then project their pain and self-blame onto others, because it is too much to accept, push through and go beyond, because that is the beginning of self-healing.
Even those who don't have equal capability compared to others can contribute in small ways, and so, they can indeed achieve merit based on merely doing what they can do, even if it is small.
But, it is many small things that add up to massive changes, and that is what a meritocracy is ~ just chip in where you can contribute, and you can make a difference, no matter who you are.
However, there are issues where a meritocracy cannot be of use, and that is in a system designed deliberately to exclude merit, and instead empower those who prefer there be imbalance, injustice, and unfairness. SJW ideologies which seek to belittle and mute those they consider the "enemy" are like this.
Here's a link to the actual paper: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617741719
If we want equality, let's treat everyone equally. No special programs for any gender.
We're constantly told that men and women are the same, and that you can even switch between them any time you want, but then we hear the complaints that gender X does better/worse at task Z. This narrative doesn't make any sense to me.
Men and women are psychologically-different, and no amount of trying to force a desperate sameness will change that. In fact, it might even cause people to want to be even more different than before.
The SJWs campaign for "sameness" but act like the complete opposite.
Maybe they're just in denial of who they truly are, and are unconsciously asking for help and recognition that they truly matter, but cannot help but unconsciously portray this in a destructive manner for all to see, except themselves and their blind peer group.
It's not just the SJWs, but also companies and corporations that cooperate with the ridiculous bullshit of the utterly divisive and politically-correct gender/race insanity that's corroding various aspects of Western culture.
I've been verbose enough, because I'm quite fed up with how much this utter crap is infesting culture and causing so much trouble for innocent people who don't remotely deserve to have be treated like they have been.
Don't try and drag science into this, when this is a set of social issues based on a bunch of people's mental health issues and how they're taking it out on other people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology
(Upon skim, this does not seem to be a duplicate per se.)
The trendline cited in the article isn't even conclusive, either—eliminating outliers would reduce it almost to noise. Even if it were, there hasn't, to date, been any reasonable explanation for why women's "innate" biology would make them any less interested in professions whose parameters and limitations are purely human-constructed and invented in the past century. Whatever happened during the evolution of the sexes was certainly not informed by the interestingness of C++.
Your hypothesis is in fact the radical one: that programming is somehow such an unseen before ability, that evolution until now has not evolved any machinery to repurpose for its realization. Given everything we know about the very obvious cognitive limits we do have, and where they come from, that seems implausible.
The common reasoning by the way does dismiss reports from men and women alike that all this diversity mongering has poisoned the workplace atmosphere and mostly serves to enrich and flatter the egos of people who wouldn't show up unless they got special treatment for their own demographic, with special segregated events, hiring pipelines and accolades. The old "women in X" spiel. These things are most definitely constructed, and not for the reason they advertise. The standards of evidence demanded to abolish them are sky high compared to the spurious reasoning that spawned them.
A follow up question then to people pursuing STEM fields....are you in it because you're interested in the subject or because of the promise of money/status? An age old question I've heard since I was a young boy.
As a side note I see a lot of women engineers start out as saying they want to do Biomed and the switching to something else. Not totally sure why but I find it interesting.
Also, you cannot call all of Sweden, Norway and Finland "outliers"? To me, that looks more like you deliberately destroying data, until the remaining data set fits your world view. Hmm I live in Scandinavia and I feel mildly annoyed that you apparently want to ignore this part of the world :- P
Women breast feed babies. To me it's natural and obvious that evolution has therefore made them feel happy when they take care of others, and that a bit more women like working as doctors, nurses, psychiatrists and such things.
(With that said, I think it's a good idea to encourage more women to choose STEM jobs. The article seems to agree with this and that they're good at it.)
Please don't confuse your personal ignorance with a lack of publicly available research.
The (population, statistical) biological differences between men and women are well established, documented and non-controversial at this point, except in looney circles. (Hint: biological differences in child-bearing and physical abilities get reflected in different social aptitude and risk-management strategies, which are in turn reflected in occupational choices)
Unless you deny there are gender differences in physical strength and child-bearing, of course. In which case there isn't much left to say.
Statistics say boys are more heavily inclined to have a STEM career. Does this mean they feel they cannot consider a career in other fields like teaching, nursing or other female-dominated fields?
As a woman I often wonder, what's so great about STEM aside from the paycheck? It depends on your bosses (or being your own if you are lucky and that way inclined), but I don't think we've shown many girls that STEM is really rewarding and it looks on TV like it involves a lot of staring at computer screens. Boring! So I expect that will change when we get to use more interactive interfaces. Also, I hope society does more work to let boys grow up feeling STEM isn't their only hope.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology
I'm saying it is irresponsible to advice boys to make live choices that are at odds with female mating behaviour, because it adversely affects their life outcomes.
Your comments read as weirdly patriarchal, and dont reflect at all close to my experience with women.
Here is just one study I quickly dug up, there are others confirming this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726811...
Another one: https://etd.ohiolink.edu/pg_10?0::NO:10:P10_ETD_SUBID:113754
I don't understand whats patriarchal about my comment, care to elaborate? If you have a more solid data point than "thats not my personal experience", I'd be certainly interested in it.
>>> I don't understand whats patriarchal about my comment, care to elaborate
I mean seriously, the answer is in your own comment.
Edit: I don't understand the downvotes.
His own comment implies income is an important factor to attractiveness for men then asks why is that a patriarchal thing. I'm not being patronising but it's obvious that it's expected for the man to be the bread winner which is patriarchal in nature. The man doesn't have to be the bread winner.
Why isn't a high income woman attractive?
Let's be clear who expects this: women do.
Most women will stop dating a man if they discover he makes less than they do. When I was still in the Bay Area I was on match.com for a bit. >90% of the women's profiles stated they expected their match to make more than they do (even having this information in the form felt a bit weird for me).
And no, this is not because of the "pay gap", which is a myth, or because they can't. In fact, the unwillingness actually increases with income levels, so the women who could most afford it are least willing to date a guy who makes less than they do.
Or capable. I imagine the IQ bar is set quite a bit higher for STEM-like courses and careers... Also, there's much less room for bullshit (at least in programming - your code either works, or it doesn't work, and that's really easy to verify at university and when applying to jobs - as opposed to e.g. marketing, where it's much harder to quantify someone's skill).
Gender equality in STEM is more about just getting them in.
It's about social mobility for women. Which is why nobody cares about getting women as miners, plumbers and getting men as social workers.
Actually, I remember hearing quite a bit of complaining back when I was in middle and high school. However, it occurred alongside a concerted effort by the Province of Ontario to increase the supply of tradespeople at a time when there was a shortage of 'qualified' (read: certified by provincial licensing bodies) ones in Ontario, which led to exorbitant prices on associated goods and services. So, to be cynical, this could be much more about price correction than anything else.
It really does involve a lot of “staring at a screen” (or paper/whiteboard brainstorming) though, and just talking about it excites me, still — it’s the intellectual/mathematical beauty and creative potential of what is being sketched on those “authoring mediums” that is so very stimulating.
When I first started coding, I was 8 years old, and I didn’t even know the first thing about whether this field would pay well, whether it would be socially engaging, etc. In fact to some extent I was actively doscourage from it, rather than joining the family gardening business (manual labor care of plants — just not for me).
None of the circumstantial reasons for or against programming mattered to me. It was the coding, the very process of staring at a screen with complex patterns and ideas as they’re authored, that excited me. It still does; creating beautiful code that does intricately complex things, that all work correctly every single time to produce the designed results, feels almost like being a modern day wizard creating magic.
Because the work itself is intrinsically motivating, it never gets old, and no amount of social pressures could sway me away from doing this.
The second reason is that highly skilled Iranian women stem graduates qualify for immigration points in receiving economies like Australia.
I've worked with some, and know some. They're good. The system works for them as individuals if not in the wider sense of what we'd want in an equal society.
I would add though that in fact neither of two particular girls I know wanted to go into medicine. They were pushed in by their parents. One wanted to work in fashion, the other media.
Also, over the last two decades there has been a significant increase in cultural recognition and representation of male "nerds," as people who belonged to that category have gained positions of influence, thanks to the tech boom in the 90s, which can sometimes inspire students to pursue their interests despite the bullying. The lack of such representative role models for young females is disconcerting and could even cause some people to be slightly more affected by the bullying, because perhaps they don't know a female who works in STEM or know of anyone in recent years who made it big, and simply didn't know it was possible to go against the social tide (which happens all too frequently.)
All in all, I think there are a lot of factors at play here and reducing it to one cause seems like wilful ignorance at best.
The impact of all of these weird pro-STEM programs is a really complicated discussion, but let me suggest that it doesn't really make high school any easier for the vast majority. (The social structure of kids doesn't really look to DuPont for ideas about which way is up...) Your response almost reminds me of how some people are feeling left out of minority help programs ("what did I do to deserve a landscape devoid of scholarships," that kind of thing.) without realizing exactly how little help those programs really provide. In a sense, overestimating the effectiveness of a response to privilege so harshly that you think the privilege has been reversed.
I didn't mention my geographic location (Toronto) or the root causes of the cultural shift (I can't speak to that), so these are some strange assumptions to make. I'm also not really following the rest of your argument, tbh.
In any case, I stand by my argument that this:
>are you implying that male students who go for stem don't face bullying akin to being "geeky" or "nerds"? Please...
is a fairly tall order in 2018. Positioning yourself as someone who seeks a career in STEM, regardless of your gender, is not marking yourself out for bullying, and hasn't been for a long time.
Sure, but we can also present similar anecdotal evidence of visible forms of bullying from fellow male students for having geeky interests. So, where does that leave us, really? Similar to your criticism about jumping to causative conclusions, you've determined that this passive-aggressive bullying is the case of gender roles rather than the more obvious case of bullying nerds.
That's "natural inclinations" for you.
I also think that blanket questions such as "Would you like to have a job where you sit all day at the computer?" would be rather unhelpful because it really depends on the nature of the job. Both theoretical physicists and people working in building security have to sit at the computer all day, but that in no way implies that the nature of the job is similar.
The simple fact is that if your claim is that discrimination is the primary cause for the lack of representation of women in STEM fields, then these data show that you are wrong. Not because we can eliminate subtle pressures with 100% certainty, we don't need to do that.
The hypothesis is wrong because it makes the wrong prediction: if discrimination were the major cause, then more discrimination would lead to more unequal distribution. And the data show that it's the other way around: less discrimination leads to more unequal distribution.
It's not a matter of degrees, it's a matter of sign, of the direction of the change. And that's effectively boolean, the sign is either positive or negative. The "discrimination" hypothesis predicts the sign is positive, in reality the sign is negative. Can't really get any more clear-cut than that.
The question is: how do we measure the problem of discrimination? Many people assume that we can measure discrimination by looking at the percentage of women in engineering and comparing it to the percentage of women in the general population. Many people believe that any difference between these numbers proves discrimination. But an increasing amount of evidence suggests that this a bad assumption.
Compared to Algeria, Albania, Turkey, Tunisia, UAE, Romania, etc? Please get your head of western social "justice" bubble. The factors that you think the article doesn't take into consideration are not explicitly there because they are implicit to everybody who really knows these countries.
So if women are choosing not to enter certain fields the "gender gap" is worse? That's to say some people are so idealistic that they would rather remove a woman's freedom to choose her career and force her into a job she doesn't want to do just to satisfy some BS ideology?
A "gender gap" is only bad if women are prevented from entering a field for some reason. If they simply don't want to, then more power to them. Surely the most important thing is the right to choose one's own career, not applying social pressure to women.
It's the same with the recent trend of getting rid of "track girls" at F1. So now pretty girls who want to be models can no longer find as much work they enjoy.
I'm not sure I understand the choice of countries in the regression either. Where are India and China, for example?