there is an incongruity that the theoretically more egalitarian the society, the less likely women are to enter STEM career path. I believe there is a much higher proportion of female engineers in India for example, than you might find a European country
> I believe there is a much higher proportion of female engineers in India for example
I worked in delivery centres in India and the Philippines and can verify your hypothesis. I asked women colleagues there about their career motivation which was: state-sponsored IT studies, good earning perspective, safe working environment. None quoted interesting topics/career satisfaction as a top reason.
I can't find the research piece, but there was also a factor of material benefit - basically, in poorer countries EVERYONE is motivated to gravitate to the highest compensation, whereas in richer countries, there is less of an incentive
The topic is called the STEM gender equality paradox. It was started by paper in 2018 [1] which only really reported on the correlation. I think there is still quite a bit of debate as to the reasons, why this is true.
However that number drops after graduation until it reaches a low 13.1 percent in management. The fact of the matter is that it isn't the lack of jobs or role models etc that's causing the issue, its the fact that females are worse at handling acute stress which is associated with STEM related jobs. Women require alot more emotional support that would simply be unavailable during a "facts only" argument or discussion. This is also partly why there are so little women in very early stage startups.
That being said, women are well suited for companies that have already gone past the initial growth stage, so instead of fighting against how different gender works, it may be better for everyone to focus on what they do best.
While I agree that there are certainly different interests and other various non-nefarious reasons for why we won’t get a 50/50 gender division in all possible fields, I’d suggest you rethink the idea that women can’t handle stress.
For one thing, nursing is usually almost exclusively women and I don’t think that can be called a stress free environment.
Is significantly more related to physical and emotional stress than the stress of white boarding the next release with your coworker that has tone problems, but is otherwise effective.
People who are female, smart, unhindered by their society and sufficiency wealthy to have agency can choose what they want to do. Why choose software development when medicine, finance and science are open? Yeah, some are introverted and are into programming but even for those, there’s way easier money owning the developers than being one. Far too many “fail” the last two criteria.
I don't think so, it's used a lot in the incel, and other, community in a degrading way. You don't say "I'll go to the swimming pool with my progeny" either
Words have meaning, if you use "men" in a sentence why use "female" in the next ?
There’s a mix of jargon and a mix of biology vs psychology (for lack of a better term to describe how the wetware works vs is constructed). Hence, standing on strict definitions without a full explanation of the jargon you use is problematical. Women vs female might be clear in your mind, but does it agree with my approach? Or our reader’s? The meaning was clear otherwise you would not have tried to change the terminology.
I believe some groups are offended and will call you a TERF if you use "women" because that refers more to the biology and less to the self-identified gender.
True, but there's nothing wrong with being a TERF (more accurately, MERF). Feminism is for women and girls only, i.e. female humans. Not men who claim to 'identify' as such.
Every time this kind of issue comes up on HN there's someone who comes along to mansplain why women are inherently less able to do tech jobs. It's not a good look for our profession and we really should be above this by now.
This is a thorny discussion, but it appears that IQ is unevenly distributed and the differences in variance are even stronger. And the end result seems to be that if you select for IQ > 150 people, then you expect to see 80% men 20% women purely due to biological causes. Whether or not we (the society) should accept that outcome is a completely different thing. But if you average over enough people, there are very real development differences between genders and some of them are related to brain energy supply and/or brain volume. And I believe the GP was right, stress response is also heavily biologically modulated. It kind of makes sense that the average 1.6m women would respond differently to a hungry tiger than a 1.9m bodybuilder... right?
HN has millions of users, so of course there's a wide spectrum of views. Any view that is sufficiently represented in society as a whole will appear here, regardless of how bad the argument is or feels. Moreover, HN users are all over the world, and geography (as a proxy for background and culture) has a huge influence on how people view these things. Surprisingly many of these disputes on HN come from people in one part of the world arguing with people in another part of the world without necessarily realizing it.
So while you're right that someone regularly "comes along to say $X", that's a function of population size and distribution. You can't generalize from that to the community as a whole, any more than to the human race as a whole. In the latter sense, sure, maybe "we" should really be above $badness by now, but saying that doesn't contribute to the hard work of persuasion, and neither does condemnation or name-calling or fulmination—however justified those reactions feel, they just contribute to cementing things as they are.
Edit: just for clarity:
I understand and sympathize with the frustration when you (I don't mean you personally) feel like a site is 'your' community on the internet and then you run into posts that aren't just wrong but are squarely outside the bounds of what decent people believe or say. It creates a feeling of a hostile environment that is even worse than if you had gone in expecting hostility. I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
The problem though is that those bounds are drawn very differently in different subgroups of society (and the world at large) and the population here is large and distributed enough to include all those subgroups. That means it's constantly and unavoidably pregnant with conflict. For most of us, any social conflicts we're implicitly part of are insulated and regulated by the subgroup(s) we belong to. In our world, for practical emotional purposes, approximately 'everyone' agrees. There may be an occasional holiday family dinner where the larger divisions break out, but (at least for a lot of us) that's about it. The population as a whole, however, can't regulate itself that way. A population as large as HN is in the 'hostile family dinner' situation all the time, only orders of magnitude more complex and worse, and spread all over the world.
I don't think the solution can be to exclude subgroups. It has to be to communicate across differences. One could call it 'supported communication across differences', where by 'supported' I mean having a scaffolding of principles that everyone is expected to follow (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, in HN's case.)
In practice, yes, that does mean going backward and having arguments that "we" should be beyond by now. But that's because there are many different versions of "we" here. If you take all the basis vectors of HN and consider the full opinion space they expand into, I'm not sure it's that much less complex or diverse than the entire world.
While I agree with the thrust of your post, I also think it's misleading to view HN as a proxy for all of society. HN is not a random sample of the world's population, and that skews discussion in all sorts of ways.
For example, HN quite clearly has more male commenters than female commenters. If we had an equal number of men and women, I suspect comments like the ones GP is referencing would be less frequent.
I wish GP hadn't made their point the way they made it (if at all), but I do believe they're reacting to something real.
> I don't think the solution can be to exclude subgroups.
I agree, but I do think a solution is to include more subgroups. I have no advice on how to do that. But, this is in fact why I'd like to see more women in technology.
> it's misleading to view HN as a proxy for all of society
I know I'm getting finicky here, but I am careful not to say that. What I say is that any view which is sufficiently represented in society as a whole is going to appear here as well. That doesn't mean it will appear in the same proportions.
> If we had an equal number of men and women, I suspect comments like the ones GP is referencing would be less frequent.
The point is that their frequency isn't the issue. The issue is their existence, and they will continue to exist here no matter how many more women or members of other underrepresented groups join HN (which I certainly hope they will!)
> ny view that is sufficiently represented in society as a whole will appear here, regardless of how bad the argument is or feels. Moreover, HN users are all over the world, and geography (as a proxy for background and culture) has a huge influence on how people view these things. Surprisingly many of these disputes on HN come from people in one part of the world arguing with people in another part of the world without necessarily realizing it.
100% fair. That doesn't annoy me, that's the internet in general. What annoys me is the general air of arrogance from the HN community about how things are so great here and it doesn't have the problems of (whatever site you don't like), especially when I routinely have more intelligent discussions in Discord servers nowadays.
From my perspective, there's more than one "general air". There's the air that you describe, and there's also an air of "I can't believe how bad/awful this place is" (presumably emanating from different users). Which feels the most "general" is really a function of the perceiver's preference: whichever you dislike more will feel the strongest. (You're referencing the same 'dislike' principle, actually, when you say "whatever site you don't like". I completely agree that that's how it works.)
These "airs" may not be as opposed as they appear. I think it has to do with how people identify. If you identify with HN (or whatever $object), you'll be more likely to say things about it that come across as triumphalist or arrogant. Someone who identifies against HN (or $object) will be more likely to say things about it that come across as supercilious or putdowns. Since that's just a mechanical consequence of identification, it's not that interesting—which explains why such comments (on both sides) tend to be generic and lack information—they're really not about $object, they're really about oneself. The interesting question is what drives the identification in the first place. That's not so easy to figure out from internet comments!
Re more intelligent discussions in Discord servers—I don't disbelieve you. The sad thing is that group size is one of the biggest variables affecting online discussion quality. Maybe the biggest. I say sad because it's sad to me—it means there's a cap on how good HN can ever get, and mostly all we can do is try to stave off decline. Or—to be superoptimistic—maybe it can slowly get a little better, if we spend a lot of energy.
What good about being "above this" by avoiding the issue at all. Understanding this fact and owning it means to increase women in tech, we need to factor in stress in the development cycle, we need to make sure that there are more or better avenues to enable social sharing of stress, and that may or may not even be incentivised at the corporate or tax level. This all comes with first accepting that women need help handling stress, so we can actually work on the problem and not hand waving it away by pretending that it isn't a problem.
btw. for the other readers: the 48% f/m in STEM is split as follows according to the linked study above: 74% (f/m) in health sciences; 27% in engineering; 32% in information technology; 60% in natural, physical and mathematical sciences.
I think the most relevant sentence comes on page 8: "In short, data tell us that the gender gap is not consistent across STEM disciplines. Women generally prefer STEM studies and careers which are people-oriented (e.g., medical science) over careers which are things-oriented (e.g., many branches of engineering) (Su & Rounds, 2015)."
Stress is probably not the most important factor; at least it's not in this study. I'd argue that women simply know that people are more important than money.
as mentioned, women gravitate towards careers that provides for or provide women with emotional support to help with stress. That cannot be said of engineering-related or "things-oriented" jobs, stress is not factored into the development cycle.
funnily enough, it might be due to the fact that more women participate in STEM for Singapore than other countries in the region that causes an overall lowered birth rate due to psychological stress.
> females are worse at handling acute stress which is associated with STEM related jobs
I don't believe that jobs like programming involve more "acute stress" than medicine or law, which many women have moved into. Not to mention nursing, as Swenrekcah pointed out. Or teaching for that matter.
Modern finance is literally indistinguishable from maths and tech.
Law isn't a guaranteed way to a high status career anymore, far from it.
Medicine sure. But the initial investment is multiple times that of a tech career, for fairly marginal gains in quality of life (when it isn't actually worse).
I'll drop the bomb and confidently say that soon this question will be rephrased to "why don't people like science or technology".
Because there isn't much science in either.
The tendency is to move towards assembly lines, where "workers" are expected to chase tickets and churn out features. A slippage in production will quickly be noticed on a story point chart and an eager manager will happily pass on negative reviews and replace the "resource" on a whim.
Naturally there are exceptions, but at least the software world is saturated with software to the point where it's become free. Many will be replaced by ai autocomplete functions because their jobs are repetitive and boring and those financing tech know it.
So if we want more people in tech we need find and develop new tech areas to generate value. Just like software, in their early stages these will be fun and people will take interest in them until they become the chryslers and fords of yesterday or the facebooks and googles of today. Boring and repetitive.
“On the other hand, we need girls in STEM in order to stay economically competitive.
...
There's the meat of why they are pushing this so hard, they want to drive down wages and seem to think there's an undertapped portion of the peasantry.
Because women are better with people and men are better with things. A few decades of liberalism can't erase millions of years of evolution no matter what wokers would have you believe.
56 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadthere is an incongruity that the theoretically more egalitarian the society, the less likely women are to enter STEM career path. I believe there is a much higher proportion of female engineers in India for example, than you might find a European country
I worked in delivery centres in India and the Philippines and can verify your hypothesis. I asked women colleagues there about their career motivation which was: state-sponsored IT studies, good earning perspective, safe working environment. None quoted interesting topics/career satisfaction as a top reason.
[1] https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0956797617741719
It's more like the more oppressive a country is, the more likely women will enter STEM.
The reasoning is that in harsher places, women will try to maximize benefits for themselves and family and enter STEM fields.
However that number drops after graduation until it reaches a low 13.1 percent in management. The fact of the matter is that it isn't the lack of jobs or role models etc that's causing the issue, its the fact that females are worse at handling acute stress which is associated with STEM related jobs. Women require alot more emotional support that would simply be unavailable during a "facts only" argument or discussion. This is also partly why there are so little women in very early stage startups.
That being said, women are well suited for companies that have already gone past the initial growth stage, so instead of fighting against how different gender works, it may be better for everyone to focus on what they do best.
For one thing, nursing is usually almost exclusively women and I don’t think that can be called a stress free environment.
Or, maybe, they just know better that enduring acute stress is a bad career choice.
Words have meaning, if you use "men" in a sentence why use "female" in the next ?
Do you have a source for this alleged fact?
stress women men study
Every time this kind of issue comes up on HN there's someone who comes along to mansplain why women are inherently less able to do tech jobs. It's not a good look for our profession and we really should be above this by now.
Your argument should be solid enough not to need cheap shots like that.
So while you're right that someone regularly "comes along to say $X", that's a function of population size and distribution. You can't generalize from that to the community as a whole, any more than to the human race as a whole. In the latter sense, sure, maybe "we" should really be above $badness by now, but saying that doesn't contribute to the hard work of persuasion, and neither does condemnation or name-calling or fulmination—however justified those reactions feel, they just contribute to cementing things as they are.
Edit: just for clarity:
I understand and sympathize with the frustration when you (I don't mean you personally) feel like a site is 'your' community on the internet and then you run into posts that aren't just wrong but are squarely outside the bounds of what decent people believe or say. It creates a feeling of a hostile environment that is even worse than if you had gone in expecting hostility. I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
The problem though is that those bounds are drawn very differently in different subgroups of society (and the world at large) and the population here is large and distributed enough to include all those subgroups. That means it's constantly and unavoidably pregnant with conflict. For most of us, any social conflicts we're implicitly part of are insulated and regulated by the subgroup(s) we belong to. In our world, for practical emotional purposes, approximately 'everyone' agrees. There may be an occasional holiday family dinner where the larger divisions break out, but (at least for a lot of us) that's about it. The population as a whole, however, can't regulate itself that way. A population as large as HN is in the 'hostile family dinner' situation all the time, only orders of magnitude more complex and worse, and spread all over the world.
I don't think the solution can be to exclude subgroups. It has to be to communicate across differences. One could call it 'supported communication across differences', where by 'supported' I mean having a scaffolding of principles that everyone is expected to follow (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, in HN's case.)
In practice, yes, that does mean going backward and having arguments that "we" should be beyond by now. But that's because there are many different versions of "we" here. If you take all the basis vectors of HN and consider the full opinion space they expand into, I'm not sure it's that much less complex or diverse than the entire world.
For example, HN quite clearly has more male commenters than female commenters. If we had an equal number of men and women, I suspect comments like the ones GP is referencing would be less frequent.
I wish GP hadn't made their point the way they made it (if at all), but I do believe they're reacting to something real.
> I don't think the solution can be to exclude subgroups.
I agree, but I do think a solution is to include more subgroups. I have no advice on how to do that. But, this is in fact why I'd like to see more women in technology.
I know I'm getting finicky here, but I am careful not to say that. What I say is that any view which is sufficiently represented in society as a whole is going to appear here as well. That doesn't mean it will appear in the same proportions.
> If we had an equal number of men and women, I suspect comments like the ones GP is referencing would be less frequent.
The point is that their frequency isn't the issue. The issue is their existence, and they will continue to exist here no matter how many more women or members of other underrepresented groups join HN (which I certainly hope they will!)
100% fair. That doesn't annoy me, that's the internet in general. What annoys me is the general air of arrogance from the HN community about how things are so great here and it doesn't have the problems of (whatever site you don't like), especially when I routinely have more intelligent discussions in Discord servers nowadays.
These "airs" may not be as opposed as they appear. I think it has to do with how people identify. If you identify with HN (or whatever $object), you'll be more likely to say things about it that come across as triumphalist or arrogant. Someone who identifies against HN (or $object) will be more likely to say things about it that come across as supercilious or putdowns. Since that's just a mechanical consequence of identification, it's not that interesting—which explains why such comments (on both sides) tend to be generic and lack information—they're really not about $object, they're really about oneself. The interesting question is what drives the identification in the first place. That's not so easy to figure out from internet comments!
Re more intelligent discussions in Discord servers—I don't disbelieve you. The sad thing is that group size is one of the biggest variables affecting online discussion quality. Maybe the biggest. I say sad because it's sad to me—it means there's a cap on how good HN can ever get, and mostly all we can do is try to stave off decline. Or—to be superoptimistic—maybe it can slowly get a little better, if we spend a lot of energy.
I think the most relevant sentence comes on page 8: "In short, data tell us that the gender gap is not consistent across STEM disciplines. Women generally prefer STEM studies and careers which are people-oriented (e.g., medical science) over careers which are things-oriented (e.g., many branches of engineering) (Su & Rounds, 2015)."
Stress is probably not the most important factor; at least it's not in this study. I'd argue that women simply know that people are more important than money.
I don't believe that jobs like programming involve more "acute stress" than medicine or law, which many women have moved into. Not to mention nursing, as Swenrekcah pointed out. Or teaching for that matter.
Finance, law, medicine, etc are higher status middle class roles and that's where the aspirational end up.
Law isn't a guaranteed way to a high status career anymore, far from it.
Medicine sure. But the initial investment is multiple times that of a tech career, for fairly marginal gains in quality of life (when it isn't actually worse).
Because there isn't much science in either.
The tendency is to move towards assembly lines, where "workers" are expected to chase tickets and churn out features. A slippage in production will quickly be noticed on a story point chart and an eager manager will happily pass on negative reviews and replace the "resource" on a whim.
Naturally there are exceptions, but at least the software world is saturated with software to the point where it's become free. Many will be replaced by ai autocomplete functions because their jobs are repetitive and boring and those financing tech know it.
So if we want more people in tech we need find and develop new tech areas to generate value. Just like software, in their early stages these will be fun and people will take interest in them until they become the chryslers and fords of yesterday or the facebooks and googles of today. Boring and repetitive.
...
There's the meat of why they are pushing this so hard, they want to drive down wages and seem to think there's an undertapped portion of the peasantry.