My general feeling from the articles I have read on the issue is that there seems to be a significant biological factor and a significant cultural factor. That being said, I'm not sure that there is anything "wrong" with a world with few woman engineers, or that we should be doing something to address it outside of fighting concrete instances of negative discrimination.
Devil's advocate: What's wrong with them not wanting to?
Assuming there is no discrimination or other judgement going on in the workplace causing them to choose a different career, and women simply choose not to enter IT/engineering fields, what's the problem with that?
There's absolutely nothing wrong with them not wanting to. What's wrong is a society that for 18 years tells them "you don't want to do this, you want to do that".
"Society" is a concept we need to banish from these discussions. "Society" exists at a higher level of abstraction than what we are discussing.
A particular woman may want babies because women around her said "babies rock, all women want babies." Was it wrong for her mother to discuss the rewards of motherhood?
A particular man may like computers because his father told him how cool it is to bend machines to your will. Was that wrong?
If neither of those acts is wrong, then what is wrong with "society" telling people stuff?
Those two are not wrong, but from personal experience, what's been happening is too many people telling me that CS is a bad choice based on my gender and not my interests or anything else. That is wrong.
What's wrong? Fr each individual, nothing, but for the country as a whole, this is a quick path to economic disaster. These are exactly the types of skills needed to maintain an economic advantage against large countries such as India and China.
>What's wrong? Fr each individual, nothing, but for the country as a whole, this is a quick path to economic disaster. These are exactly the types of skills needed to maintain an economic advantage against large countries such as India and China.
How does female engineering differ from male engineering? Why wouldn't male engineering allow us to maintain an economic advantage over India and China? And why does relative economic prosperity matter? As long as we're all getting better, shouldn't we be happy?
Sorry I didn't reply earlier - there's nothing wrong (well, mostly! :-) ) with male engineers, except that there just aren't enough of them. Encourage women into the career, and you double the number of engineers you can put into industry each year... Sorry if you got the impression that I had something against male engineers :-)
Fewer ideas, not as much innovation, and more difficulty creating products and services with broad appeal. So long as they're more productive in fields like medicine and epidemiology it may not be a net loss.
Note though that a couple of my friends work for scientists and claim gender discrimination is pretty bad. The picture they described of a scientific research company is nothing like what I've seen in the IT industry for the past 8 years or so.
Devil's advocate: What's wrong with them not wanting to?
I think the reason people are uncomfortable with the gender imbalance in IT is because of earlier studies showing that women tended to get paid less in jobs where they are doing the same work as men. Now whenever we hear of a gender inequality, we assume -- perhaps incorrectly, in this case -- that the inequality is due to a hidden, unfair bias.
So there is nothing wrong with women preferring non-IT jobs, per se. But I think we are right to feel cautious about conclusions in this area: Someone could take this general result and erroneously apply it to specific women, thereby assuming that female IT employees are less interested in their jobs than men and thus less deserving of raises or promotions... which creates a new source of gender bias.
'The question is - why do girls "not want to" by the time they reach age 18?'
For the same reason not many men become maternity nurses or kindergarten teachers?
Frankly, you couldn't have kept me away from IT if you'd tried. Despite low wages (when I started, at least), poor conditions, working on short-term contracts, being required to educate myself, putting up with being treated like some kind of idiot savant, etc, etc -- still, I wanted it very, very badly.
Now, for people who don't feel that way, we're supposed to engage in this collective hand-wringing exercise: "Oh dear! Not enough wimmin in IT!" If they don't want it, I would seriously question the morality of (so to speak) tricking them into joining the profession on the basis of a collection of half-truths. Either you want to play with the shiny toys or you don't. And if you don't, good luck, because 90% of the time it's not exactly what you'd call fun anyway.
Incidentally, I've been around a bit and I have never, ever witnessed any indication of prejudice against women in IT. Where I've worked with female engineers, they've always been welcomed and treated with respect. Maybe we should just accept what any parent can tell you: there are gender differences, and we need to accept those rather than pretend we're all the same.
/rant. calming down now ;) talk amongst yourselves...
I actually agree with everything you said - I, too, have never felt or seen bias against women in IT, once we're all adults. My perspective is that of the parent of a six-year-old girl, and if you actually believe that society doesn't start drilling into girls' heads from day one that their mission in life is to play with dolls, put on make up, and do little else... well, then you don't see much mainstream media.
Please don't think I was ranting at you, I really didn't mean it to come across like that :) It's just this daft idea that there should be a 50/50 M/F split across any profession, let alone IT.
I have two children (1 boy, 1 girl) and they have very different interests, so I'm approaching this from a parent's viewpoint as well. As for encouraging them into the profession, I always say "do something you like and ignore computers, because it will grind you down in a relentless, soul-destroying fashion." I'm being a bit cynical and if they showed a genuine interest I'd encourage it, but I'll be damned if I say it's the most rewarding, happy profession out there. Cos it ain't.
No offense taken, brother. My rant stems from how shocked I am each and every day at how strongly girls are encouraged to be submissive, or even just plain stupid. People I know without kids often act like it's not an issue, "just keep 'em away from TV", but they don't see that it's everywhere: TV, radio, product packaging, billboards, etc. I was pretty blind to it myself until I had a daughter.
"every day at how strongly girls are encouraged to be submissive, or even just plain stupid"
Yup, I agree with that. My daughter discovered Xena a few years ago, then Buffy, so she doesn't fit the submissive, stupid mold at all :-) Good role models, AFAIC. There's no TV and I've always taught them to be suspicious of advertising, so that helps. But, let's face it, we all fit some kind of cultural expectations even when we don't want to.
In the U.S. many more women are now attending college than men. In large U.S. cities, for the first time ever, young women are out-earning men.
I just don't buy that (U.S.) women are receiving and accepting a message that they are "submissive." There is still some overhang from the previous male dominated culture, but it is being rapidly eroded and may have already disappeared for the generation now attending college and/or entering the work force.
I am curious to see data indicating a trend in the opposite direction.
"Young women in New York and several of the nation’s other largest cities who work full time have forged ahead of men in wages, according to an analysis of recent census data."
Then a lot of "adults" really aren't adults. I've met lots of people from all walks of life, and there's really nothing separating the cretins from the nice folks.
Mainstream media can be pretty disturbing. I have a bunch of friends my age (19), and I'm quite possibly the only one that puts makeup on sparingly only at special events like a concert I'm performing at - like, covering up a small blemish and putting on a teeny bit of eyeshadow to be a bit more photogenic. Apparently you're not beautiful until your face is buried under a ton of makeup. :(
In regards to the first half of your comment, it's probably the case that a lot of professions are like that.
To the second half...I haven't even graduated college and I've dealt with more than I've wanted to. Sure, with some profs and at some of the places I've worked at it was awesome - people were friendly and treated me as an equal. But I've gotten my fair share of discrimination.
In fact, why do I end up writing so much about this. Lemme just copy and paste what I wrote on a similar reddit topic:
I was interested in computers and programming in particular since elementary school, and since then I've been harassed about it by the most unexpected people. My parents gave up the fight but not after more than a decade, and I get irked by the various types of people I end up talking to when my job/major comes up. "You're kidding, right? You're a woman, do you know what to do?" is not that uncommon to hear, despite the decent resume with good references or a word-of-mouth recommendation from some happy client who wouldn't shut up telling them about how much they liked me and my work.
Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there. Or maybe you just..don't notice it?
Well, you could argue that about the discrimination I've faced in my work. Or maybe I was just working with assholes, I don't know. Or maybe it's a cultural thing, comparing the US or India to the UK (where I live). I honestly don't know, but I can say that I have not once been aware of discrimination, at least in the immediate workplace. I can't speak about rates of pay or promotion prospects, or whatever, but that's my experience.
Enrollment by young Americans, both boys and girls, is dropping in all fields of engineering. The nation doesn't need that many hedge fund managers does it?
I'm not so sure a simple drop in enrollment is such a bad thing. I recently taught a couple of graduate level courses in a nearby CS department, and I can tell you that they should "un-enroll" about half of their graduate students, and it would vastly improve the quality of the department almost overnight. (I can only speak to the graduate program - I haven't been in much contact with undergrads). The U.S. will never graduate as many "engineers" as China and India, and we shouldn't try.
We should graduate the best engineers and scientists.
Chances are, "un-enrolling" about half the graduate students would improve a department no matter how big it is. Sturgeon's Law - "90% of everything is crap".
But if you have a bigger pool to draw from, the 10% that's not crap will amount to more engineers. And the 0.01% that's really spectacular will be more spectacular. That's the way a bell-curve works - if you raise the area under the curve, the tips spread out as well.
There're a lot of smart people in finance whose talents are being wasted making sure that the market reflects all information within microseconds instead of within minutes. If the economic incentives were such that they started companies or did basic research instead, I bet you'd see quite a few more breakthroughs.
I can't say I agree. We have increased our pool by accepting sub-par students, and it seems to be shifting the entire curve backwards, rather than "spreading the tips".
I don't know what the right answer is (or if there is one); what feels right is to raise the standards of admission.
Un-enrolling the /bottom/ 50% would probably improve a department, sure. But how do you get that bottom 50% without enrolling all of those students in the first place?
Your second point assumes that the relative percentage of "not crap" remains constant as enrollment increases, which is highly dubious.
And there's a lot of smart people being wasted at Google and Microsoft, too.
"Women who are mathematically gifted are more likely than men to have strong verbal abilities as well; men who excel in math, by contrast, don't do nearly as well in verbal skills."
Hmm, all the men I know that excel in math and science have excellent verbal abilities. I'd be curious to see their research on this.
Well it boils down to the simplest of things: Boys generally are interested in things while girls are interested in relationships and people. That explains why there are more guys as engineers than girls. It's not a question of smartness, more of interest and personality.
Stop generalizing. I hate people, I am antisocial until I need to be nice (networking?), I'm with friends, or I'm drunk. Relationships I can stand because I really like cuddling and sex.
I also know some guys who are the complete opposite, and it's sort of amusing because of how much I had to deal with as a kid for being what I am just because I was a different gender and I didn't meet society's stereotypical views on it.
The whole point of statistical trends is that they ARE generalizations. Yes, you can find individual cases which buck the trend, but across a large sample group, these are the tendencies...
How could you talk about gender roles and differences without generalizing? Or really talk about any demographic larger than a handful of people? Just because it's a generalization, doesn't mean it's not a useful piece of information.
My problem with discussing gender differences in engineering is that there isn't enough research into it. It can be a useful piece of information in the correct context, but I didn't believe the above was.
There are women in IT who are interested in people and relationships and they are still engineers. There are women who hate people and are engineers. There are men....you get the idea.
Exactly. In an important statistical sense, men are taller than women, despite the existence of short men and tall women. And so it goes with other gender generalizations.
ahem This is not saying anything about boys or girls in general. Let's be clear as to what we see evidence of - that boys raised in this society at this time are more interested in things while girls raised in this society at this time are more interested in relationships and people.
Don't be constrained to the fashions of your times. Less than a century ago, would you could have said "boys are generally interested in making money, while girls are generally interested in cooking"?
Rosalind Chait Barnett at the bottom of the article has it right. Investigating gender differences is the first quest every psych grad student embarks on, and 19 times out of 20, they're disappointed to find nothing significant. (The other 1/20 is the false positive that comes with 95% confidence testing.) It bothers me that this article pursues so many hypotheses at once -- planning for career flexibility; language aptitude; discrimination; women fulfilled through biology, men through machines. None of them is a satisfactory answer because in a properly controlled gender-differences experiment, having filtered out the noise, there's no signal left.
On the surface, the differences are there, but it's not due to anything innate. The East-versus-West comparison in the article should make that obvious. (The article claims it's because we're more "free".) It's cultural. Duh. I don't see anything wrong with that, either; it doesn't mean there should be a 50:50 gender split in every field. But looking for the explanation in biology is a dead end that enough researchers have run into already.
Could you point us to some examples, please? Not saying you are wrong, but the researcher cited in the article didn't convince me. She just said "there are so many factors we can't possibly interpret them", but didn't really give a counter-argument. Sounded more political correctness to me.
My fiancee is a psych researcher; this is just what she's told me (via rant) a number of times. Plenty of studies showing significant gender differences show up on sagepub.com, but the findings usually have culture mixed in as well, and they aren't nearly as strong as Cosmo and the rest of pop culture would have us believe.
More precisely, the variation within a gender group is much larger than the variation between genders.
If I recall, the article didn't mention any East-West differences, it mentioned GDP differences.
"The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. In countries with less economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, she writes, the number of women in physics is as high as 30 to 35 percent, versus 5 percent in Canada, Japan, and Germany."
Japan is listed as one of the countries where women don't don't pursue IT carriers. The common trait is economic, not social.
I think that we should deal with people on an individual basis and not a group basis. It does not matter why people choose the careers that they do, what matters is that they are happy where they are. If you find that a bunch of women are unhappy because they didn't choose or were denied a career in IT, then you have a cause. If you find a bunch of women who are unhappy because a bunch of other women didn't choose careers in IT, then you have a bunch of busybodies that don't have my sympathy.
You're right, I missed Japan in the other group. I'm always suspicious of industrialized-vs-developing groupings because the intersection of industrialized and Western is so large. What do the numbers look like in Latin America, for instance? And Russia seems to have a lot of respect for scientists, in particular.
Basically, the example countries look cherry-picked, where those researchers lined up the percentages of women in physics by country, then generalized about the high and low ends of the scale, rather than starting with a proper hypothesis and testing it.
It's totally possible that the countries are cherry picked.
Still, my own personal experience corroborates the theory. Examining just folks that I know, women seem to be more attuned to social pressures than do men. If this were even partly true of whole species, then it would more than explain the gap.
Still, as you said elsewhere, differences within the sexes are by all measures more significant than differences between the sexes. With this being the case, we could have a great deal of difficulty isolating specific differences and yet still have them exist subtly.
Girls always have a plan B: get pregnant and stop working altogether. Just ask some random female students whether income perspectives had any bearings on their choice of profession. More often than not, the answer is no (they might not even know what salary they can expect). It would make sense if men thought about that some more (since families need money), so they might tend to pick the more prospective subjects.
You presented an irrelevant argument which is based on imagined evidence; therefore it's easy to assume that bias underlies the argument. Whether it does or not, I won't judge.
Your comment reads as: "go ask some women if they've ever thought about their future, and they'll say no because they can always just get pregnant." And now you've just asked, "isn't it equally true that women don't think about their future as to say that women have boobs?"
This explains why you've, "never felt or seen bias against women in IT." You can't hear it even while you're saying it.
It wasn't me who wrote the "never felt bias" thing.
Of course not every women is the same, but I have heard many woman who were frustrated with their job say "maybe I'll just get pregnant". Among other things. Sure it is a bias. I am not ashamed to believe that men and women ARE different. I also did not say that every woman would be indifferent to financial prospects of her career, just that many would be.
Also I did not say "isn't it equally true", I was merely trying to make the point that bias is sometimes correct. Of course it doesn't prove my suggestion that women worry less about their career path. If I had a proof, I would not be writing here, I would publish a scientific paper.
Bias is not the same as "bias against", also I never even mentioned IT. What is your problem with bias? Also bias is merely an expectation, not a judgment. If I expect women to have longer hair than men on average, it is not the same as discriminating IT women at the workplace.
The way I was quoted, I interpreted as if I have some negative attitude towards women, which is not true.
As for women in IT, to be honest I haven't even met one for years now. Do they even exist?
You might find some at 3boobs.de, it's probably a site you're familiar with. As far as I'm concerned, that counts as showing a negative attitude towards women. You don't have to mention IT when you're showing bias against women in the workplace full-stop.
Meh, getting shades of "someone is wrong on the internet"[xkcd]. I don't think this thread is going anywhere productive. It's probably down to cultural differences, saying that most women don't want to think about their future careers because they are women in a culture which values financial independence sounds a lot like bias against women, and certainly doesn't jibe with my experiences.
"As far as I'm concerned, that counts as showing a negative attitude towards women."
Well that's fair enough, if that is your opinion. Nothing to argue about, just different viewpoints. The 3boobs women are not IT workers, though (not that I know, anyway).
Okay, so despite me being a girl with zero interest in having children (at most considering adoption), desperately wanting my girl bits out (if it wasn't going to be a hormonal disaster), being on hormonal contraceptives all the time and not sleeping with men, I have the option of getting pregnant and stop working?
Even if I were considering that preposterous option at any time, it sucks to say this but it is really hard to live off of one person's income today.
Obviously there also girls picking maths and so on, so your one example doesn't really prove anything (statistics). Sorry for your plight with the hormones. Hint: if you don't sleep with men, you could actually stop taking the contraceptives.
Also, what is preposterous about having kids and staying at home to take care of them?
The income issue is easily solved by trying to marry a man with more income, or making him work more.
If you don't have children then two people can live off of one person's income far more easily. It is children that are the huge money sink. Just saying.
Girls who go to all-girls schools do better in math.
If I ever have a daughter I'll send her to an all-girls school. Boys are going to find her either way, and I'd prefer her "wanting" to do X or Y to be based on her skills and brains, not peer pressure.
I don't think it will make much of a difference; people always succumb to peer pressure when they are with other people.
Another point to ponder on: would I accept a CS professorship at MIT? Hell, yeah! Would I accept one at Wellesley? I don't think so - I'll possibly end up being called a pussy.
now i just have to say WTF, that makes no sense, either way you're in boston, have intelligent students, and you're a prof at one of the best schools in the world. Yes, ones a liberal arts college and the others a research university and there are fundamental differences in ones time allocation and day to day priorities as a consequence thereof, but that doesn't justify your remark at all!
The point of the article is NOT that boys do better at math. The point is that girls who DO excel at math choose non-technical (or less technical) careers. Specifically, careers that involve more human interaction, or at least deal with living things in some form (biological sciences).
Yes, I know that, and I'm insulted by your misinterpretation. My point still stands. The article is tautological fluff. "If we explore the most obvious implications of a known phenomenon, and pad it with numbers, people will know we were awake, we'll still have jobs, and really foolish people will think we've discovered something."
Neither women nor men have anything close to perfect information about what their careers might be like down years of a prospective path. Many career decisions are influenced by the crudest of stereotypes. If the stars of the computing world (who barely receive much press anyway) seem to be mostly introverted men, and if those already into computers seem lacking in either social grace or extraversion, then who's to blame them for choosing careers which would appear to help them be more socially engaged.
So women flock to fields like nursing, and teaching. Who told them that both operate in an often stiflingly apathetic bureaucracy? Of computers and engineering, they've in many cases never had the joy of being able to make something work on their own. For all they know, cooking is more creative. They have no idea how exciting the startup world is, how gratifying to work on something new, how empowering it feels to have the wind of social benefit at your back, how freeing it is to be able to choose your work to be most important, as opposed to being most externally justifiable.
Extraverted women and men have shied away from computers and related fields for a long time. But perhaps it's not so much a function of the nature of our field. Perhaps we just have bad press.
> choosing careers which would appear to help them be more socially engaged... it's not so much a function of the nature of our field
Are you questioning which career is in fact more socially engaged? Can you name a field which is less socially engaged than CS/Math?
It seems to me that it is a function of the nature of our field, which demands long stretches of unbroken attention, that draws people who desire large amounts of social activity away.
Undoubtably some tech jobs are suitable only for hermits. But the variance within fields, as is the variance within genders, dwarfs by far the variance between them.
> the variance within fields, as is the variance within genders, dwarfs by far the variance between them.
This is a slightly weaker statement than the one made above, but I still don't agree with it. Surely there is variance, but the median programmer is far far less social than the median (for example) doctor.
Yes, there are Tim Brays on our side who are quite socially oriented and radiologists and virologists who never see actual patients on their side, but every real programming job requires you to be alone and focused on a computer for long stretches of time. Is this incorrect somehow? What programming positions don't require this?
(My fiancee is a resident, and I assure you that she does not spend long stretches of time on singularly focused tasks like programmers do - you will have to have a spectacularly convincing argument to convince me otherwise)
I actually didn't argue with that. Maybe the 'typical' programming job is a terrible fit for the 'typical' woman.
But there's a solution. Forget the 'typical' programming job. Even if the typical tech career would suck, it's still possible that of all possible careers, there a tech career that's the best for you. I think this is largely true in the startup world. And I think that if the press on startups focused less on founder youth, geekiness, and round-the-clock machismo, and more on the social benefit produced, the freedom gained, and the excitement experienced, we'd start to see very different people founding companies and working in computers. One might even suggest that's already starting to happen.
Many fields can have long periods spent alone, honing one's abilities. Lawyers can. Writers can. Musicians can. Housewifes can. It may be a defining hallmark of technical careers, but I think it's far overrepresented in both the media, and our own heads.
Electrical Engineering is the worst in my experience. Then Computer Science. Then physics. Then math.
Math people are probably as introverted as people from Electrical Engineering, but they don't proudly carry their social incompetence as a label.
Biologists who, say, monitor and log the behavior of animal life also wait for hours in pure concentration, so they won't miss anything when (or if) something happens. Usually introverted people sign up for that kind of thing, but not really socially awkward ones.
I remember long hours with difficult homework sets while my liberal arts major friends would go out and party. I only know a few engineers who could get their homework done and party. Engineering doesn't give you a lot of free time to party - I spent years of my life in the engineering building - liberal arts majors on the other hand...they can have a different college experience. Most of the girls who were in my program were smarter. Why would you choose a major that puts a major crimp in your social life?
It's not just bad press; engineers (of any stripe) are often frighteningly socially incompetent. In my experience, this is true far more often than for lawyers or medical doctors.
It's also a kind of stereotype to say that programming is about creation and empowerment; the existence of this forum (and most of what pg writes) seems to me a reaction to the utterly dismal, uncreative state of most programming jobs. So it's not really fair to say that people flock to other fields based on misinformation. Most computer-related jobs really do suck.
Perhaps I was insufficiently specific. The problem isn't that the conception of the median programming job is wrong. The problem is that technical people of both genders are often completely unaware of the existence of better jobs. Sometimes, when people talk of career prospects of becoming a programmer, they say it with such disdain that they might as well be talking about becoming a drone.
they say it with such disdain that they might as well be talking about becoming a drone
Not without good cause. Startups aside, the vast majority of programmers and engineers spend their careers implementing other people's ideas. Outliers that start their own companies are very rare. In law and medicine, it seems that running a startup (your own pratice) is the expected progression of a successful career. They are groomed to expect it. The typical tech/science track seems to be tailored to produce....drones. Judge them by their fruits.
Well said. Even in academic science, the presumption is that you will one day lead your own research group (however unlikely that may be)...and academia is not known for progressive organizational thinking.
Closer to your example: my dentist is in his mid-20s, and already owns a half share in two established practices. How many programmers own a half share in their own business at 25?
How many programmers own a half share in their own business at 25?
None.
I swear if none of my startups work out I will count my engineering degrees a complete waste of time. I found only 2 or three classes moderately interesting, and from a moneymaking standpoint, the brainpower required to make it through the curriculum versus the salary is a joke. I studied EE and use next to none of it.
I could have learned to code on my own, and even studied electronics in my own time like I did as a kid, and still ended up in cubicle land, or earned a professional degree to fall back on (medicine, law) probably having a better time in the process. Sometimes you have to separate business and pleasure.
I answered that question wrong. I should have stated "none that I know." But at any rate, I can rattle off far more lawyers, doctors, dentists, and for that matter CPA's that own businesses than programmers.
It's worse, actually; the vast majority of the programmers out there today aren't implementing squat, they're providing life support for the bad programmers who came before them.
(This has come very close to driving me entirely out of the field; the only thing that has kept me in it for so long is the paychecks.)
Women are more sensible than men. Unless you start a successful startup, or are in the top 1% of engineers, having a typical engineering job is pretty lame. Statistically you will make more money with less effort by choosing a medical or legal related field. Greenspun said it best here:
Typical engineering job is pretty lame? That's very American, if you ask me, because you're measuring everything around youself in dollars. I've become an engineer because I create things: every day something starts spinning, cranking, rotating and pumping because I build it, while 100% of lawyers (without exceptions) are useless parasites eating off our own deficiencies.
Having an average engineering job isn't lame, your (and Greenspun's) line of thinking IS lame. In fact, it's pretty disgusting. That also explains why there aren't many women in the field: generalizing, they're simply more bottom-line oriented, as numerous studies have proven: they don't spend 6 years to get a Master's and build robots in a garage in their spare time for free, instead they'll "wipe ass" overtime in a nearest hospital with an associate degree, because overtime pays double rate.
The most important sentence from the article, emphasis mine: "The researchers are not suggesting that sexism and cultural pressures on women don't play a role, and they don't yet know why women choose the way they do."
From my experience not a large percentage of the guys who sign up for engineering programs actually WANT to become engineers. It sounds like a socially acceptable major, and sure maybe they like mechanical things, but a huge number of the guys washed out from mechanical engineering, (we started with 140, we are down to 80, of the 80 there are 15 girls, we started with 17 girls, the rest of the wash outs were guys). I think few girls go into engineering as a default major, so if they are there they really want to be there. In the end, the only ones who can get through it are those who really want to be there, so why encourage people who aren't committed?
> Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women - highly qualified for the work - stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else.
Am I the only one not startled by this? My reasoning was as follows... I can think of a ton of jobs that are traditionally dominated by females (elementary school teacher, housekeepers, talk-show hosts) that I happen to not want to do. It has nothing to do with me being male or some perceived descrimination against me by the females in the field. I just don't have any interest in being those things.
I would assume the same thing holds true for a female and some professions that just happen to be historically dominated by males. I mean, some of the disparity probably is because of gender-based slight, but it seems rational to expect that some jobs just aren't interesting enough to attract people in droves of equal and politically correct gender ratios.
> The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. In countries with less economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, she writes, the number of women in physics is as high as 30 to 35 percent, versus 5 percent in Canada, Japan, and Germany.
My guess is this is because they have the option to choose careers, rather than being forced to accept whatever pays well and is safe.
> Benbow and Lubinski, at Vanderbilt, found that high-achieving women often pick their careers based on the idea that they'll eventually take time off, and thus avoid fields in which that absence will exact a larger penalty. In humanities or philosophy, for instance, taking a year or two off won't affect one's skill set very much. But in quickly evolving technical fields, a similar sabbatical can be a huge career setback.
I have seen this in talking with my girlfriend about her career goals. She is a chemical engineer, and often fears that taking time off to raise kids will doom her career.
Two reasons: FUD and the fact that women are more rational (as someone said "more sensible"). Purely statistically speaking, you are more likely to do work that's both interesting and well paid if you go into medicine versus software engineering.
Medicine takes much longer and steeper learning curve, but once you climb that an average job requiring an MD is more interesting than an average job requiring a BS in CS and pays better (while if you fail to get an MD, an average job requiring a BS/MS in Bio-Chemistry is at least as interesting and still decently paying).
The FUD part is pretty self explanatory: introversion doesn't mean lack of social skills (the latter are learned and eventually most geeks do end up learning them one way or another) and given the amount of team work involved in any real engineering projects there are plenty opportunities for extroverts to re-charge.
The way to encourage women to go into these fields is to provide dual degree programs (no opportunity cost for seeking a CS degree and applying to engineering jobs as an undergraduate) and combating the FUD.
Let me give another perspective. I'm from one of the developing (an optimistic term) countries mentioned.
While I was still in my home country, I worked in an IT consulting firm. My boss' boss was female, her boss (a VP) was female. A lot of the other bosses were female. More than half my teammates were female. 30% female / 70% male seems awfully low, it was more like 45%-55% female.
The company would occassionally send people to the US. Over time, over a hundred of us have moved here to the US. So you have a sample of men and women who are good at math and picked IT while they were in a country with few economic opportunities, and took them to a nation with financial stability - the two environments the article mentioned.
What's happened so far? In time, some of the women changed careers. Some went to medicine, going back to school in order to switch. Some went to completely non-science fields, like real estate. None of the men have switched careers.
I know some men still dabble in computers in their spare time - open source projects, linux, etc. None of the women do.
Small open source projects are a far better measure of this phenomenon. It's completely unaffected by salary, no one gets paid, completely free of bias, you have to do everything yourself. And yet the disparity is enormous.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadAssuming there is no discrimination or other judgement going on in the workplace causing them to choose a different career, and women simply choose not to enter IT/engineering fields, what's the problem with that?
A particular woman may want babies because women around her said "babies rock, all women want babies." Was it wrong for her mother to discuss the rewards of motherhood?
A particular man may like computers because his father told him how cool it is to bend machines to your will. Was that wrong?
If neither of those acts is wrong, then what is wrong with "society" telling people stuff?
Was that wrong in any moral or normative sense?
I'll grant that the underlying positive belief is incorrect, but what makes giving out well intentioned (if bad) advice wrong?
How does female engineering differ from male engineering? Why wouldn't male engineering allow us to maintain an economic advantage over India and China? And why does relative economic prosperity matter? As long as we're all getting better, shouldn't we be happy?
Note though that a couple of my friends work for scientists and claim gender discrimination is pretty bad. The picture they described of a scientific research company is nothing like what I've seen in the IT industry for the past 8 years or so.
I think the reason people are uncomfortable with the gender imbalance in IT is because of earlier studies showing that women tended to get paid less in jobs where they are doing the same work as men. Now whenever we hear of a gender inequality, we assume -- perhaps incorrectly, in this case -- that the inequality is due to a hidden, unfair bias.
So there is nothing wrong with women preferring non-IT jobs, per se. But I think we are right to feel cautious about conclusions in this area: Someone could take this general result and erroneously apply it to specific women, thereby assuming that female IT employees are less interested in their jobs than men and thus less deserving of raises or promotions... which creates a new source of gender bias.
For the same reason not many men become maternity nurses or kindergarten teachers?
Frankly, you couldn't have kept me away from IT if you'd tried. Despite low wages (when I started, at least), poor conditions, working on short-term contracts, being required to educate myself, putting up with being treated like some kind of idiot savant, etc, etc -- still, I wanted it very, very badly.
Now, for people who don't feel that way, we're supposed to engage in this collective hand-wringing exercise: "Oh dear! Not enough wimmin in IT!" If they don't want it, I would seriously question the morality of (so to speak) tricking them into joining the profession on the basis of a collection of half-truths. Either you want to play with the shiny toys or you don't. And if you don't, good luck, because 90% of the time it's not exactly what you'd call fun anyway.
Incidentally, I've been around a bit and I have never, ever witnessed any indication of prejudice against women in IT. Where I've worked with female engineers, they've always been welcomed and treated with respect. Maybe we should just accept what any parent can tell you: there are gender differences, and we need to accept those rather than pretend we're all the same.
/rant. calming down now ;) talk amongst yourselves...
I have two children (1 boy, 1 girl) and they have very different interests, so I'm approaching this from a parent's viewpoint as well. As for encouraging them into the profession, I always say "do something you like and ignore computers, because it will grind you down in a relentless, soul-destroying fashion." I'm being a bit cynical and if they showed a genuine interest I'd encourage it, but I'll be damned if I say it's the most rewarding, happy profession out there. Cos it ain't.
Yup, I agree with that. My daughter discovered Xena a few years ago, then Buffy, so she doesn't fit the submissive, stupid mold at all :-) Good role models, AFAIC. There's no TV and I've always taught them to be suspicious of advertising, so that helps. But, let's face it, we all fit some kind of cultural expectations even when we don't want to.
I just don't buy that (U.S.) women are receiving and accepting a message that they are "submissive." There is still some overhang from the previous male dominated culture, but it is being rapidly eroded and may have already disappeared for the generation now attending college and/or entering the work force.
I am curious to see data indicating a trend in the opposite direction.
"Young women in New York and several of the nation’s other largest cities who work full time have forged ahead of men in wages, according to an analysis of recent census data."
Mainstream media can be pretty disturbing. I have a bunch of friends my age (19), and I'm quite possibly the only one that puts makeup on sparingly only at special events like a concert I'm performing at - like, covering up a small blemish and putting on a teeny bit of eyeshadow to be a bit more photogenic. Apparently you're not beautiful until your face is buried under a ton of makeup. :(
To the second half...I haven't even graduated college and I've dealt with more than I've wanted to. Sure, with some profs and at some of the places I've worked at it was awesome - people were friendly and treated me as an equal. But I've gotten my fair share of discrimination.
In fact, why do I end up writing so much about this. Lemme just copy and paste what I wrote on a similar reddit topic: I was interested in computers and programming in particular since elementary school, and since then I've been harassed about it by the most unexpected people. My parents gave up the fight but not after more than a decade, and I get irked by the various types of people I end up talking to when my job/major comes up. "You're kidding, right? You're a woman, do you know what to do?" is not that uncommon to hear, despite the decent resume with good references or a word-of-mouth recommendation from some happy client who wouldn't shut up telling them about how much they liked me and my work.
Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there. Or maybe you just..don't notice it?
Well, you could argue that about the discrimination I've faced in my work. Or maybe I was just working with assholes, I don't know. Or maybe it's a cultural thing, comparing the US or India to the UK (where I live). I honestly don't know, but I can say that I have not once been aware of discrimination, at least in the immediate workplace. I can't speak about rates of pay or promotion prospects, or whatever, but that's my experience.
We should graduate the best engineers and scientists.
But if you have a bigger pool to draw from, the 10% that's not crap will amount to more engineers. And the 0.01% that's really spectacular will be more spectacular. That's the way a bell-curve works - if you raise the area under the curve, the tips spread out as well.
There're a lot of smart people in finance whose talents are being wasted making sure that the market reflects all information within microseconds instead of within minutes. If the economic incentives were such that they started companies or did basic research instead, I bet you'd see quite a few more breakthroughs.
I don't know what the right answer is (or if there is one); what feels right is to raise the standards of admission.
Your second point assumes that the relative percentage of "not crap" remains constant as enrollment increases, which is highly dubious.
And there's a lot of smart people being wasted at Google and Microsoft, too.
Hmm, all the men I know that excel in math and science have excellent verbal abilities. I'd be curious to see their research on this.
There. I ruined your statistic. :P
I also know some guys who are the complete opposite, and it's sort of amusing because of how much I had to deal with as a kid for being what I am just because I was a different gender and I didn't meet society's stereotypical views on it.
How could you talk about gender roles and differences without generalizing? Or really talk about any demographic larger than a handful of people? Just because it's a generalization, doesn't mean it's not a useful piece of information.
There are women in IT who are interested in people and relationships and they are still engineers. There are women who hate people and are engineers. There are men....you get the idea.
Is it not meaningful to say that men are taller than women?
Don't be constrained to the fashions of your times. Less than a century ago, would you could have said "boys are generally interested in making money, while girls are generally interested in cooking"?
On the surface, the differences are there, but it's not due to anything innate. The East-versus-West comparison in the article should make that obvious. (The article claims it's because we're more "free".) It's cultural. Duh. I don't see anything wrong with that, either; it doesn't mean there should be a 50:50 gender split in every field. But looking for the explanation in biology is a dead end that enough researchers have run into already.
More precisely, the variation within a gender group is much larger than the variation between genders.
You're measuring the wrong thing. If you look at the top percentage of performers in these fields then the differences become striking.
"The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. In countries with less economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, she writes, the number of women in physics is as high as 30 to 35 percent, versus 5 percent in Canada, Japan, and Germany."
Japan is listed as one of the countries where women don't don't pursue IT carriers. The common trait is economic, not social.
I think that we should deal with people on an individual basis and not a group basis. It does not matter why people choose the careers that they do, what matters is that they are happy where they are. If you find that a bunch of women are unhappy because they didn't choose or were denied a career in IT, then you have a cause. If you find a bunch of women who are unhappy because a bunch of other women didn't choose careers in IT, then you have a bunch of busybodies that don't have my sympathy.
Basically, the example countries look cherry-picked, where those researchers lined up the percentages of women in physics by country, then generalized about the high and low ends of the scale, rather than starting with a proper hypothesis and testing it.
Still, my own personal experience corroborates the theory. Examining just folks that I know, women seem to be more attuned to social pressures than do men. If this were even partly true of whole species, then it would more than explain the gap.
Still, as you said elsewhere, differences within the sexes are by all measures more significant than differences between the sexes. With this being the case, we could have a great deal of difficulty isolating specific differences and yet still have them exist subtly.
Lost the source but not making this up.
I, too, have never felt or seen bias against women in IT, once we're all adults.
I hope you enjoyed that while it lasted.
But if the article says "girls just do what they like", I feel my argument is relevant, because it could explain why they can do what they like.
This explains why you've, "never felt or seen bias against women in IT." You can't hear it even while you're saying it.
Of course not every women is the same, but I have heard many woman who were frustrated with their job say "maybe I'll just get pregnant". Among other things. Sure it is a bias. I am not ashamed to believe that men and women ARE different. I also did not say that every woman would be indifferent to financial prospects of her career, just that many would be.
Also I did not say "isn't it equally true", I was merely trying to make the point that bias is sometimes correct. Of course it doesn't prove my suggestion that women worry less about their career path. If I had a proof, I would not be writing here, I would publish a scientific paper.
The way I was quoted, I interpreted as if I have some negative attitude towards women, which is not true.
As for women in IT, to be honest I haven't even met one for years now. Do they even exist?
Meh, getting shades of "someone is wrong on the internet"[xkcd]. I don't think this thread is going anywhere productive. It's probably down to cultural differences, saying that most women don't want to think about their future careers because they are women in a culture which values financial independence sounds a lot like bias against women, and certainly doesn't jibe with my experiences.
Well that's fair enough, if that is your opinion. Nothing to argue about, just different viewpoints. The 3boobs women are not IT workers, though (not that I know, anyway).
You are being overly sensitive.
Even if I were considering that preposterous option at any time, it sucks to say this but it is really hard to live off of one person's income today.
Obviously there also girls picking maths and so on, so your one example doesn't really prove anything (statistics). Sorry for your plight with the hormones. Hint: if you don't sleep with men, you could actually stop taking the contraceptives.
Also, what is preposterous about having kids and staying at home to take care of them?
The income issue is easily solved by trying to marry a man with more income, or making him work more.
If I ever have a daughter I'll send her to an all-girls school. Boys are going to find her either way, and I'd prefer her "wanting" to do X or Y to be based on her skills and brains, not peer pressure.
Another point to ponder on: would I accept a CS professorship at MIT? Hell, yeah! Would I accept one at Wellesley? I don't think so - I'll possibly end up being called a pussy.
Neither women nor men have anything close to perfect information about what their careers might be like down years of a prospective path. Many career decisions are influenced by the crudest of stereotypes. If the stars of the computing world (who barely receive much press anyway) seem to be mostly introverted men, and if those already into computers seem lacking in either social grace or extraversion, then who's to blame them for choosing careers which would appear to help them be more socially engaged.
So women flock to fields like nursing, and teaching. Who told them that both operate in an often stiflingly apathetic bureaucracy? Of computers and engineering, they've in many cases never had the joy of being able to make something work on their own. For all they know, cooking is more creative. They have no idea how exciting the startup world is, how gratifying to work on something new, how empowering it feels to have the wind of social benefit at your back, how freeing it is to be able to choose your work to be most important, as opposed to being most externally justifiable.
Extraverted women and men have shied away from computers and related fields for a long time. But perhaps it's not so much a function of the nature of our field. Perhaps we just have bad press.
Are you questioning which career is in fact more socially engaged? Can you name a field which is less socially engaged than CS/Math?
It seems to me that it is a function of the nature of our field, which demands long stretches of unbroken attention, that draws people who desire large amounts of social activity away.
This is a slightly weaker statement than the one made above, but I still don't agree with it. Surely there is variance, but the median programmer is far far less social than the median (for example) doctor.
Yes, there are Tim Brays on our side who are quite socially oriented and radiologists and virologists who never see actual patients on their side, but every real programming job requires you to be alone and focused on a computer for long stretches of time. Is this incorrect somehow? What programming positions don't require this?
(My fiancee is a resident, and I assure you that she does not spend long stretches of time on singularly focused tasks like programmers do - you will have to have a spectacularly convincing argument to convince me otherwise)
But there's a solution. Forget the 'typical' programming job. Even if the typical tech career would suck, it's still possible that of all possible careers, there a tech career that's the best for you. I think this is largely true in the startup world. And I think that if the press on startups focused less on founder youth, geekiness, and round-the-clock machismo, and more on the social benefit produced, the freedom gained, and the excitement experienced, we'd start to see very different people founding companies and working in computers. One might even suggest that's already starting to happen.
Many fields can have long periods spent alone, honing one's abilities. Lawyers can. Writers can. Musicians can. Housewifes can. It may be a defining hallmark of technical careers, but I think it's far overrepresented in both the media, and our own heads.
Math people are probably as introverted as people from Electrical Engineering, but they don't proudly carry their social incompetence as a label.
Biologists who, say, monitor and log the behavior of animal life also wait for hours in pure concentration, so they won't miss anything when (or if) something happens. Usually introverted people sign up for that kind of thing, but not really socially awkward ones.
It's also a kind of stereotype to say that programming is about creation and empowerment; the existence of this forum (and most of what pg writes) seems to me a reaction to the utterly dismal, uncreative state of most programming jobs. So it's not really fair to say that people flock to other fields based on misinformation. Most computer-related jobs really do suck.
Not without good cause. Startups aside, the vast majority of programmers and engineers spend their careers implementing other people's ideas. Outliers that start their own companies are very rare. In law and medicine, it seems that running a startup (your own pratice) is the expected progression of a successful career. They are groomed to expect it. The typical tech/science track seems to be tailored to produce....drones. Judge them by their fruits.
Closer to your example: my dentist is in his mid-20s, and already owns a half share in two established practices. How many programmers own a half share in their own business at 25?
I swear if none of my startups work out I will count my engineering degrees a complete waste of time. I found only 2 or three classes moderately interesting, and from a moneymaking standpoint, the brainpower required to make it through the curriculum versus the salary is a joke. I studied EE and use next to none of it.
I could have learned to code on my own, and even studied electronics in my own time like I did as a kid, and still ended up in cubicle land, or earned a professional degree to fall back on (medicine, law) probably having a better time in the process. Sometimes you have to separate business and pleasure.
I must be the only one then. We also haven't taken any funding and are profitable.
How about the whole thing at 19?
(This has come very close to driving me entirely out of the field; the only thing that has kept me in it for so long is the paychecks.)
It's not always their fault. A lot of these engineers have ADD.
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
This article is about science careers. Just switch a few things in his career path and it is the same argument for engineering careers.
Having an average engineering job isn't lame, your (and Greenspun's) line of thinking IS lame. In fact, it's pretty disgusting. That also explains why there aren't many women in the field: generalizing, they're simply more bottom-line oriented, as numerous studies have proven: they don't spend 6 years to get a Master's and build robots in a garage in their spare time for free, instead they'll "wipe ass" overtime in a nearest hospital with an associate degree, because overtime pays double rate.
Am I the only one not startled by this? My reasoning was as follows... I can think of a ton of jobs that are traditionally dominated by females (elementary school teacher, housekeepers, talk-show hosts) that I happen to not want to do. It has nothing to do with me being male or some perceived descrimination against me by the females in the field. I just don't have any interest in being those things.
I would assume the same thing holds true for a female and some professions that just happen to be historically dominated by males. I mean, some of the disparity probably is because of gender-based slight, but it seems rational to expect that some jobs just aren't interesting enough to attract people in droves of equal and politically correct gender ratios.
> The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. In countries with less economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, she writes, the number of women in physics is as high as 30 to 35 percent, versus 5 percent in Canada, Japan, and Germany.
My guess is this is because they have the option to choose careers, rather than being forced to accept whatever pays well and is safe.
> Benbow and Lubinski, at Vanderbilt, found that high-achieving women often pick their careers based on the idea that they'll eventually take time off, and thus avoid fields in which that absence will exact a larger penalty. In humanities or philosophy, for instance, taking a year or two off won't affect one's skill set very much. But in quickly evolving technical fields, a similar sabbatical can be a huge career setback.
I have seen this in talking with my girlfriend about her career goals. She is a chemical engineer, and often fears that taking time off to raise kids will doom her career.
Medicine takes much longer and steeper learning curve, but once you climb that an average job requiring an MD is more interesting than an average job requiring a BS in CS and pays better (while if you fail to get an MD, an average job requiring a BS/MS in Bio-Chemistry is at least as interesting and still decently paying).
The FUD part is pretty self explanatory: introversion doesn't mean lack of social skills (the latter are learned and eventually most geeks do end up learning them one way or another) and given the amount of team work involved in any real engineering projects there are plenty opportunities for extroverts to re-charge.
The way to encourage women to go into these fields is to provide dual degree programs (no opportunity cost for seeking a CS degree and applying to engineering jobs as an undergraduate) and combating the FUD.
While I was still in my home country, I worked in an IT consulting firm. My boss' boss was female, her boss (a VP) was female. A lot of the other bosses were female. More than half my teammates were female. 30% female / 70% male seems awfully low, it was more like 45%-55% female.
The company would occassionally send people to the US. Over time, over a hundred of us have moved here to the US. So you have a sample of men and women who are good at math and picked IT while they were in a country with few economic opportunities, and took them to a nation with financial stability - the two environments the article mentioned.
What's happened so far? In time, some of the women changed careers. Some went to medicine, going back to school in order to switch. Some went to completely non-science fields, like real estate. None of the men have switched careers.
I know some men still dabble in computers in their spare time - open source projects, linux, etc. None of the women do.
From what I've observed, the article is spot on.