The male advantage in mathematical and spatial orientation has been replicated in many different countries. So that pretty m uch rules out the cultural explanation.
Except that many different countries have a similar cultural attitude towards females.
And again, taking a correlation between gender and math scores and extrapolating a genetic predisposition of a gender to fail in an entire class of industries is a stretch to say the least.
But then you have to go back to the original question: what is it about maleness and femaleness that makes it possible that in so many societies around the world, the same patterns exist? You can't have culture without brains to create it. And the brains of males and females in different cultures seem to be producing similar patterns.
Women have babies. Doing that has a profound impact.
Think of that fact as a marketing funnel. Some number of women will make a prioritization decisions. Some will choose to focus 100% on child rearing. Others will focus on career. Other will balance both.
Of the women who focus on career, some are in work environments that are family-friendly and will thrive. Some strive. Others are in environments where not being able to do hackathons or do conference calls at 9PM will close doors to career advancement.
Unless you're a well-researched person who can cite real research, genetic arguments are just anecdotes or vague facts interpreted through a journalists' lens. We should focus research in this area on the anti-patterns -- house husbands. What happens to men in their careers when they take a few years away from the workforce? My guess is a story similar to what we see with women.
If I understand correctly, the idea here is that IQ is measurable (even if the measurement is noisy) and real (has predictive power, doesn't change). This is accomplished by studies that look to test individuals at different points in life. Secondly, IQ is mostly genetic. This is evidenced mostly by twin studies. Thirdly, math tests are okay IQ tests.
Note that I'm not saying that things are one way or another, or that the reason there are so few women in tech is genetic. Just explaining how the ideas go together. It COULD be that way.
But IQ is not that important when we're talking about being successful, making money, or building a good tech tool. Otherwise people with genius IQs would be the only ones ruling our society...but that's definitely not the case.
Some IQ advantage tends to help in these situations, but more isn't always better.
In other words, you're likely to do better if you're a little better than average (e.g. 1 SD or 115).
On the other hand, if you're one of those bizarro 180 IQ outliers who can't connect socially and emotionally (to say nothing of intellectually) with average people, you aren't likely to be able to be successful in a way that incorporates and leverages the contributions of other people.
Perhaps I should've said biologically, as the article did. The point is that when you say one class of people (females) isn't represented in an industry because "they just aren't born that way," what differentiates it from any other class of people (such as African Americans).
One consequence is that many people don't understand just how hateful the WWW is for some other people.
Sure, anyone can be the victim of really unpleasant attacks from others on the Internet, and it's been going on for years. But try creating different online characters. Give one a male name, give the other a female name. And make that the only difference. Now see the different ways people interact with you.
Having more diverse workforce can help you understand the problems of not having good blocking tools or reporting tools or privacy controls.
But then again, Google has a ton of women working for them and they've fucked up real names and G+ integration. So maybe I'm wrong.
I don't entirely buy this. Everyone can improve themselves by mingling with their peers and listening to the pros, so if women were so easily dissuaded by negativity on the internet, you'd expect them to do worse at everything, which is clearly not true. I think a missing nuance is that everyone is mean on the internet, but people are much more likely to take meanness in stride when it comes from members of their own gender.
The visual arts are very close to having gender parity (47.4% female in the US, according to [1]). A quick look around a site like Deviantart reinforces this. If you've spent any time around such communities, you'll know that young female artists are just as mean and obsessed with petty drama as young male computer geeks are with trying to look smarter than everyone else. Yet, the amount of professional female artists that emerge from those conditions is roughly equal to the amount of males that do.
This suggests that "guys being jerks to girls" is only a symptom of a different problem; for cultural, historical, or perhaps, as the article suggests but doesn't really back up, biological reasons, girls just aren't as interested in computers as guys are. If we had gender parity in tech, little Susan would probably be calling Anna a bitch for copying her code, and they'd both get by somehow.
As an aside, I've noticed that artists are much better about giving and receiving criticism than supposedly objective and "meritocratic" programmers are.
Just positing that these things _might_ be true and should be investigated was a key factor in Larry Summers getting drummed out of his position as President of Harvard.
The world at large isn't ready to hear these statistics, and overall that is probably a good thing. We shouldn't accept these disparities as driven by natural forces until we've tried everything we can imagine to try to bring the differences in line.
Over the course of history, far more bad has been wrought by assuming differences were innate than assuming they were the result of bias. Given that, we should assume and act as though differences are due to bias long after the differences are well proven to be natural. It is a case where being wrong in one direction is not very costly, but being wrong in the other direction (and thus institutionalizing bias) is disastrous.
Looking bad over History, many groups have been denied the right to vote, denied basic human rights, and killed, because it was decided they were different, and therefore this treatment was reasonable.
I am unaware of any reasonable comparisons of where trying to ignore natural differences has caused anything resembling the same level of suffering. I would be interested in some examples you could provide.
Nope, just the biggest one (Holocaust), the second biggest being Holodomor, an Stalin's attack to Ukranian Nationalism. Genocides in Nigeria and similar ones are ethnic ones for political power, without justification over biological differences.
No, I would argue the holocaust and more are confusing cultural disagreements with racial stereotyping which have more to do with (surprise!) culture than race. I think it's much more believable that a large group of people grew angry with a culture of racial inclusion in financial matters leading toward the ease of hatred of a racial stereotype than the actual genes involved. Race is the identifier, not the cause.
If it wasn't race, it would family names or family colors/flags, gender, buck-teeth or what-have-you, as shown throughout history. Bickering and bigotry aren't reason for arbitrarily changing things.
>The world at large isn't ready to hear these statistics
Not the "world at large". Just (provincial) middle/upper class America.
>We shouldn't accept these disparities as driven by natural forces until we've tried everything we can imagine to try to bring the differences in line.
Shouldn't we in fact try to understand what's going on, instead of trying to change it because of a priori notion that there shouldn't be disparities (which, if disparities exist due to natural forces will be unatural and unjust).
Disparity (e.g less women in Tech) is NOT a problem in itself.
Obstacles to access is a problem (e.g a woman not being let to work Tech -- eg not being hired because she is a woman).
Also, why is IT somewhat different? I don't see much push for more female fishermen or male nurses, to name two random professions with similar disparities.
Nursing is a well-paid profession that offers flexibility and good benefits.
Fishing can also be a very well paid profession (look at Deadliest Catch for example) but the challenges, hardships, and stress are extreme for those challenging fishing crew jobs.
> Disparity (e.g less women in Tech) is NOT a problem in itself.
Sure it is. Lack of diversity means lack of understanding about other uses. It also means that biases can go unchecked, and can develop into accepted wisdom.
> Also, why is IT somewhat different?
Because the (false) reasons given for other occupations don't apply at all for tech. "Men are stronger, that's why you don't get women in construction"; "women are nurturing, that's why they make good nurses".
> I don't see much push for more female fishermen or male nurses, to name two random professions with similar disparities.
Have you looked? I'm not sure about fishermen, but there are many programmes to increase the number of men in nursing, or women in construction.
> Sure it is. Lack of diversity means lack of understanding about other uses. It also means that biases can go unchecked, and can develop into accepted wisdom.
I wonder if that would explain why all the faculty treated me like garbage in K-12.
>Sure it is. Lack of diversity means lack of understanding about other uses. It also means that biases can go unchecked, and can develop into accepted wisdom.
But if "lack of diversity" in the ratio of men/women working on IT is an issue _for the reasons you mention_, it means that you accept that men and women have different interests/thinking (uses/biases), and can bring different perspectives.
In which case you should also entertain the idea that women might just not like IT style jobs and the kind of problem solving people do in programming. That's a different bias/perspective too, after all.
>Have you looked? I'm not sure about fishermen, but there are many programmes to increase the number of men in nursing, or women in construction.
> A successful initiative set up to support women working in the construction sector, has been granted £420,750 further funding to continue.
> The government-funded Women and Work: Sector Pathways Initiative is led by Construction Skills and aims to help get women into construction work and supports women already working in the sector to get further training.
> The Women in Civil Construction Initiative will directly address the skills required for entry to the civil infrastructure sector of the industry. The Civil Contractors Federation (CCF), in collaboration with their funding partners Construction Skills Queensland, is delivering a flexible based program designed to deliver the entry level skills required to participants who wish to pursue a career in the Civil infrastructure sector. The WIC program is already underway within Queensland.
IT's white-collar whereas the jobs you're talking about aren't. Apparently there's never been a huge amount of feminist interest in getting women into male-dominated blue-collar jobs or in working-class women in general; it's an old and fairly well documented issue.
It's money more than status. In the early 1990s, programming was still white collar but paid about the same as accounting, and nobody cared how few women were doing it.
Except it doesn't seem like people are saying "lets get this measurement right so we know what needs to be done". Instead it sounds a lot more like a self-righteous group determining what isn't and isn't the correct way to do things so that we can begin getting noise free measurements.
But all of that self righteousness is driving in the direction of lets try to fix the disparity through social change. I'm saying that even if we believe they're going to be wrong, we should try what they propose (in a structured and measurable way).
So you want me to agree that it's a problem that the male to female ratio isn't equal before you've proven that the inequality is brought about by a bad reason as opposed to a natural and just reason? That greatly reduces my frustration as to why I'm not on board with any of this.
edit: "lets try to fix the disparity through social change" ...as soon as you do the due diligence and convince me it's broken first. Evidence of disparity in no way tells me there is a problem in need of being fixed. It's a lazy way to try and get people behind a misguided white-knighting movement.
While it is a good point, I don't think that's directly analogous: I was talking about population statistics and biases that lead to different outcomes in different groups.
Two similar but not identical dichotomies:
* A population difference is due to innate differences vs a difference is due to systemic biases
* An individual difference is due to innate makeup vs a difference is due to individual choices
The question: Why is the % of people with X characteristic in Y profession lower than the average. Applying my proposed standard above to that question, assume differences are due to biases until sumarily proven, we still aren't encouraging or abiding discrimination when X characteristic is sexual orientation.
> The world at large isn't ready to hear these statistics, and overall that is probably a good thing.
I agree. Research and data might make people feel bad, and not making people feel bad is obviously way more important than increasing knowledge.
> We shouldn't accept these disparities as driven by natural forces until we've tried everything we can imagine to try to bring the differences in line.
I agree. Personally I think we should withhold all math education to males until they are 21. We can discontinue this policy when there is a 50/50 gender split among all STEM workers, educators, and investors.
> we should assume and act as though differences are due to bias long after the differences are well proven to be natural
Yep. 1+1=3. Doesn't matter if you can prove that 1+1=2.
> It is a case where being wrong in one direction is not very costly, but being wrong in the other direction (and thus institutionalizing bias) is disastrous.
You're responding almost entirely to things I didn't say.
> Research and data might make people feel bad, and not making people feel bad is obviously way more important than increasing knowledge.
Not what I said at all, I said the standard for proof should be extremely high. High standards for proof != don't do research (though I admit I should have said so more clearly as I used the example of Summers without condemning what happened to him. He shouldn't have been drummed out for asking the questions.)
> We can discontinue this policy when there is a 50/50 gender split among all STEM workers, educators, and investors.
I assumed that the word "reasonable" was implied in what I was saying. But you're right, some people might propose absurd attempts to bring things in line.
> 1+1=3. Doesn't matter if you can prove that 1+1=2.
First of all, I was commenting on the standard by which we should accept 1+1=3, and which of the two (1+1=3 or 1+1=2) should be our acting hypothesis until we know.
Secondly, I said we should act as if differences are due to bias _until long after_. I was arguing for the default standard, and when it would be acceptable to change the standard. I never said never.
> Yep, unimaginable catastrophes.
Are you actually ignorant of the human history of genocide, dismissal of female person-hood, and racially driven slavery?
It's really simple. The more gender equality there is in a country, the more women and men revert to stereotypical occupation choices. That is, there are more female engineers in India or Eastern Europe than in Scandinavia.
The countries where the percentage of women pursuing STEM is the highest, are the countries where STEM careers are disproportionately lucrative.
These findings have been confirmed by multiple studies with enormous sample sizes (e.g. Richard Lippa's n=200,000 survey of 53 countries).
Feminists will spend the next couple of years staunchly denying these findings, while the number of women in STEM has flatlined, and the percentage of students that are female only rises because men are systematically discriminated against.
Edit: I'm asking because @dnautics gave us an anecdote that doesn't add anything useful. Knowing why would be much more interesting, although still an anecdote.
I discovered that this is not the case. In general, Board meetings don't work like hollywood says they do. Usually my board meetings are pretty uncontentious.
Maybe it's like the conference speakers. Now that everyone's getting flack if their conference doesn't have female speakers, but there's only a handful of successful female leaders in heavy rotation in the media, they can't go to everything so they inevitably turn stuff down.
Maybe the construct of a "management board" isn't appealing to the mentality of women (huge generalization admittedly). Imagine a history of humanity dominated by females as much as our human history was dominated by males to this point. Would the female dominated society create something like a management board? Would they create something different?
Hardly a definitive proof that it's all just biology.
I'd scale it back, and draw the conclusions more conservatively. Along the lines of 'employment statistics don't necessarily imply discrimination'. Just because twitter's board is mostly male, doesn't necessarily mean that being male was a requirement. No one would argue that truck drivers are mostly men due to hiring policies.
Do you have any statistics/reasoning that support this argument?
I'd say it's simply because it's a crappy, low-paying, exhausting job with too many working hours, which not many people want. Men usually get such jobs.
The real question is, though, why don't the women get/take such jobs. I think the answer is a mixture of the following: (1) they are worse at such jobs than men (physically weaker and menstruating, which I assume might matter for a job like truck-driving), (2) (I assume) women get more government help, because they are more often (single) mothers and (3) women can play on other qualities (more social, better caregivers, more attractive, less dangerous) that allows them to get other jobs (nanny, waitress, secretary, ...).
And this power imbalance between workers and employers is terrible. Yeah, all pretty standard socialist stuff I’m a huge fanboy of. It’s of course not only gender roles that play a role here.
You reasons are pretty bullshitty, so I don’t think I ever want to talk to you again. Bye!
Teaching is a low-paying job with too many working hours. Women work at places like Target, Wal Mart, and McDonalds which are not exactly known for how intellectually stimulating and high-paying they are. This is a weak argument. People who are uneducated and/or have life circumstances that force them into low paying crappy jobs are the people who end up with those...women, men, white people, black people, asian people...people in general.
Actually, that argument is pretty universal. Even MRAs are sort of making that argument, only they claim the reason is some sort of weird feminist conspiracy, something that really makes no sense at all.
I would consider the culture of working oneself to death generally harmful and strictly policed gender roles can play a very dangerous and enforcing role there.
You can "actually" all you want, but it doesn't change reality. The vast majority of people are neither feminists nor MRAs. Even if the absurdity of you trying to equate two different positions were overlooked, the total of both of those groups is still a minority, not anywhere even remotely close to universal.
On a side note, you aren't helping the image of feminism by bringing up MRAs out of nowhere just to deliberately present the worlds laziest strawman on their behalf, so you can dismiss it.
In our society gender roles are strictly enforced and policed. It has gotten better during the last few decades (though there have also been some regressions) but it’s still pretty bad.
Or more simply that women simply don't find the idea of sitting alone in a cab for hours on end, possibly not showering for days at a time, constantly sleeping in strange places (maybe in the truck) to be an attractive career proposition.
This is pretty lazy thinking. It's hard to even call it a rationalization when it makes no sense:
"Males around the world on average tend to be better at doing [math] than females; likely due to the need to fashion weapons and objects for warfare, hunting, and competing throughout evolutionary history."
There's one really, incredibly glaring flaw in this argument right near the start. He argues that it takes men to come up with sites like Twitter and Facebook because most venture-capital-backed startups are created by men. Except, of course, venture capitalists openly admit they choose startups to back not just on their merits, but "pattern matching" the founders to what they expect a startup founder to look like - and everyone expects startup founders to be male. Even if women were just as good at founding successful startups, we'd expect them to be less common than male founders simply because VCs go with what they're used to.
He is essentially arguing that women are inherently worse at founding tech companies because they're under-represented in an area where people discriminate against them based on the belief they're inherently worse at founding tech companies.
This sounds like it was written for a 12th grade research assignment and makes several incorrect inferences without a basis of fact, i.e. the male hunting equating to math reasoning.
I tend to think of it as the same reason minorities are not prevalent in these places either, probably because society held them as "lower class" until recently and they are just now making gains which are long overdue.
All in all, women are catching up fast to men in mathematics as well. They account for the fastest growing percentage of graduate degrees in the sciences and I, personally, work in a high-tech field dominated still by male developers, but also women managers who supervise them and do a fantastic job at it.
It's not biological, it's history. Until recently those spatial learning and building toys for children were all male-focused, but that is changing.
I firmly believe that women will easily overtake men in technology in the future because attitudes have changed for the better.
Interesting theory as well. The final statement seem to be not backed up by the arguments presented.
I would love to see this theory getting more researched. So given that the original article used just numbers and assume that the time derivative of these are flat, you're suggesting that the time derivative is not, and I feel like there must be stats backing this in a more.. cited manner.
Please go research it then. Anyone can find citations to prove any point they want. The original article suffers from a narrow-minded adolescent hypothesis and the citations don't prove much of anything being as old as many of them are. That was my point.
One other reason(apart from gender stereo typing) is the women who could go into traditionally male stem fields look at the poor pay and status and rationally decide that whist probably still facing a glass ceiling and sexism at lest they get paid better as Dr, Lawyer or Banker.
These studies just show that there is a difference. It doesn't say it's mainly caused by innate biological differences between the sexes. These differences could for all we know be the effect of the different social conditioning that we all get from birth. In reality it's probably somewhere in-between - both social conditioning and innate biological differences play a role but if I was to guess I'd say that the social conditioning is the largest factor of the two. But neither has been shown in these studies.
>It turns out that being in technology demands a very masculine set of mental qualities.
I stopped reading right there. Should I change from a dress to some pants? Cut my hair short? Watch football? Didn't we have this argument about doctors and lawyers 80 years ago?
whilst this may be accurate i advocate the safer approach, but equally valid argument that women don't want to enter technology.
this is easily backed by data which shows that the level womens rights in a country has a strong inverse correlation to the number of women in STEM fields. this way, even before we consider the merits of the sexes we have a simple explanation which avoids the classic battle of the sexes arguments... and actually i'm sure women know this themselves - after all they are the ones who regularly decide that they would prefer to enter a non STEM field.
having few women in STEM fields is ironically an indicator of having a free and liberal society with strong rights for women.
The problem with his argument is not the statistics, which are sound, but the fact that he begs the question and also ignores some obvious implications of the very data he presents.
First, let's talk about mathematical ability. It's widely known that men outnumber women in the upper percentiles of mathematical ability. However, that's an explanation for why there are so few female Fields Medalists (in fact, there are none), not why there are so few female engineers.
Among people who score a perfect 800 on the Math SAT (top 1% starts at 770), men outnumber women only 2:1. Even if mathematical ability is totally determinative, and being a programmer required top 0.3-0.5% of mathematical ability, we would expect to see ratios of maybe 65/35 in the programming world, not 90/10 or 95/5. Due to the shapes of the bell curves in question, the disparity between men and women gets quite large when you get into the 0.1% or 0.01% of mathematical ability. But, by and large, Silicon Valley isn't made up of those people. They're more run of the mill smart people (Stanford's SAT Math inter-quartiles are 93rd-99th percentile).
With regards to the points about competitiveness versus cooperation and risk-taking and caring about people, they all beg the question. Why is competitiveness a good thing for the business of writing software? Don't you think cooperation would be better for such a deeply team-oriented discipline? Why isn't caring about people a positive strength, when much of Silicon Valley 2.0 is fluffy social stuff? Finally, while more risk-aversion might explain why there are fewer female founders, it doesn't seem to be the case that females are less represented in startups than in technology companies in general. What's risky about going to work at Microsoft or Google?
The refrain of "these statistics are things nobody is willing to talk about!" is a cop-out. Most people will not pillory you for pointing out that women are more risk-averse or do things differently. Indeed, it's something women themselves often talk about. My wife was recently at a social gathering for women attorneys. She recounted a discussion of how women tend to disclose when they haven't done something before, while men tend to say "sure I can do that." It's not 1990 and people are quite willing to discuss how men and women approach work differently. But the statistics only support conclusions as strong as the scope of the evidence. And in this article, the author wanders far beyond what the statistics support into blatant conjecture and rationalization.
It could be the butterfly effect. It starts with children. Better at math -> more interested in math -> better at math -> ... by they time young adults start seeking jobs, a small initial bias has turned into a large gap.
Personally, I don't think that's the whole story (according to my observations, it's also upbringing, girls socialize more than boys, who are more likely to keep to themselves, and differences in topics of interest, which I have no idea what they come from).
First, it's probably not the case that interest and practice can have any impact on your underlying mathematical aptitude. Second, regardless, the 2:1 ratio for perfect scores on the SAT Math manifests at 16-18, so when people are already mostly developed.
> First, it's probably not the case that interest and practice can have any impact on your underlying mathematical aptitude.
What?! How did you arrive to that conclusion? This is a really bad myth. Math abilities for the most part have very little to do with genes, and almost all to do with hard word, motivation, and practice. See http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/the-myt... for more.
The shape of the curves are such that men have a very small advantage on the Math SAT at the median, which gets larger up the scale. So using the disparity between the sexes at the median makes the author's argument even worse.
Even being 2:1 why would you expect those results being reflected anywhere else? Why would an employer hire from one of the two pools of people where one haves 50% less chance of being good enough for the position?
If an employer just hired people with perfect SAT math scores, you'd expect a 2:1 distribution. If an employer just hired men, because they were twice as likely to have a high SAT math score, then the employer would be retarded because for both genders there is over a 99% chance that any given person will not have a high SAT math score.
Even if mathematical ability is totally determinative, and being a programmer required top 0.3-0.5% of mathematical ability, we would expect to see ratios of maybe 65/35 in the programming world, not 90/10 or 95/5.
That's true. But he described multiple factors that bias men towards programming. Even if individual factors (like mathematical ability) only cause 65/35 differences in isolation, combining a few of them together results in pretty extreme distributions.
The difference in mathematical ability is about the starkest difference between the aptitudes of men and women. You expect a 65/35 difference if mathematical aptitude is the only thing that matters, and if a top 0.5% level of mathematical aptitude is required for programming. If mathematical aptitude is say only 40% of what makes a good programmer, and the factors in the other 60% skew less than mathematical aptitude, then you'd expect a more even ratio than 65/35. Thus, consideration of other factors dilutes the analysis.
Let's say being a programmer requires X, Y, and Z. X is 65/35 male/female, Y is 60/40, Z is 55/45.
The odds of finding a woman with X, Y, and Z is 0.35 * .4 * 0.45, about 5%.
The odds of finding a man with X, Y, and Z is 0.65 * .6 * 0.55, about 20%.
All else equal, you'd find that about 80% of programmers are male.
Obviously my example is contrived, but if you think I'm wildly wrong, please respond with something math-based, even if it's equally contrived. Then we'll at least know what the other is really getting at.
Your math obviously doesn't make any sense, since say a 65/35 representation of men versus women among people who score a perfect Math SAT doesn't mean there is a 65% probability of finding a man with that characteristic and a 35% probability of finding a woman with that characteristic.
I was thinking more like this: consider giving everyone a goodness score. At first, let's say the goodness score is entirely based on mathematical ability, which skews strongly in favor of men. Then, let's make the goodness score based 50% on mathematical ability, and 50% based on an independent criterion that skews in favor of men, but less strongly. There should be more women who achieve a certain goodness score under the second set of criteria than the first. That's what I mean when I say that considering additional criteria is dilutive.
Besides that, all your metrics skew in favor of men. But out of the various metrics that go into being a good programmer, I think mathematical ability is the only one that skews in favor of men. Studies show that female students get higher grades, because they are more attentive over longer periods, have more patience and impulse control. Also, in terms of programming teams, I think being social and communicative is far more of an asset than being competitive.
>>Why is competitiveness a good thing for the business of writing software? Don't you think cooperation would be better for such a deeply team-oriented discipline?
Mostly because compensation, benefits, raises, promotions and incentives are in most cases at individual levels. So people chase goals what you want them to chase.
Also note what's good for the team is often not good for the individual. I know this from personal experience, if you have a mix of high and low performers in a team and the rewards for them are going to be the same regardless of performance- The next thing that happens is the low performers make no attempt to increase their performance and high performers are always supposed to make up for it.
This creates immense frustration for people who are performing well. They see no reason why they must be doing heroics to take the same amount of money as the guy who isn't putting even a fraction of their effort. So the whole team collaboration stuff collapses.
I wonder why nobody has brought up the fact when most women are starting to climb the corporate ladder, or just come into their career, they start having babies, starting their families and are less interested in ruling the corporate world as they are being with their families and raising their kids.
I wondered why the author didn't bring that up either. Just talking about how women are nurturing / expected to be nurturing isn't the whole story. These expectations translate into the idea that women have to be the primary caretakers of their kids, but men do not unless they really want to and decide to go against the grain. And lots of women feel guilty if they are a "bad mother"!
Most of your research is from 20 years ago. Cultural norms play a huge part in this and norms have been changing (compare what you'd read about the roles of women in the 1950's vs today).
My mother built one business after another even though my grandfather was forcing her to be a math teacher. She started 4+ businesses and each one carried the name of a guy in my family (even my brother, as soon as he turned 18) because businesses weren't supposed to be led by women.
I am female. At 8 I was hit on as the only girl hanging out in a robotics lab. At 13 I was mocked for writing code. At 15 I was asked to quit school to work at a tech firm, but instead I kept working on my own freelance business in parallel. At 18 I ranked second among peers in my country. I moved to the US, kept working, and continue to grow my skills and tech startup in the valley today. There are many more like me. Wait 10 more years and see what happens to the statistics and attitudes. In the mean time, my job is to keep proving those that bet against me and other female hacker-founders wrong through the product of my work.
While I agree that a lot of it is cultural based, I do agree that there is some biological basis also. As a woman also, I can see myself in the points the author makes. While I had good grades (was in high school math club) I avoided risks in school and in career (went for 'easy' degree of history first). Only recently did I go back and get a degree in programming, requiring me having to learn differently than before. I tell my boss I don't a managerial position because I don't want the responsibility (no matter how much he throws it at me). I've also had everyone around me supporting me to do what I want be it STEM or not. In many ways I see the cultural changes are allowing women to use their biological strengths better (running a business isn't too different from running a household of a large family). EDIT:typo.
Culturally, do you see the same demands placed on you as are placed on a male peer/brother of yours? I bet when you start seeing those you will start seeing similar behavior (because I have seen it).
"If you look at the profiles of Twitter’s board members, you'll notice that all of them either have educational backgrounds in Computer Science and/or have spent decades in the Silicon Valley tech trenches, clearly developing a deep understanding of technology."
I looked at all of the board members, and only 1 out of 7 has a CS background. 4 out of 7 have B.As/MBAs from elite schools, and immediately stepped into executive positions. I guess that's called "the trenches" these days. Their background literally screams "Old Boy's network." Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey have no education information mentioned and I don't think they did much coding on their way up.
So whatever the merits of this article, I don't see how the argument that the cause of this is in any way that not enough women go into STEM fields is a valid one.
There might be very slight natural differences in variance of ability, which would explain why more men come out at the top and bottom. I don't think there's value into coming in to that argument on either side. At any rate, the evidence seems to indicate that the gender disparity (at the relevant IQ level) is at most 2:1.
Going 100 steps further and justifying the good-ole-boy network that has taken over VC and Silicon Valley is another matter entirely.
What truth there is in this article amounts to a (significantly outdated) survey of the state of women in society. All it presents is correlations. It's a mathematical fact that you can know nothing of causal effects between correlated results based solely on such statistics.
In other words, what this article is saying is:
1. Women are demonstrably less represented in STEM fields.
2. Women do demonstrably less well in certain metrics we associate with STEM fields.
3. This is because women are biologically less interested/able/adept at STEM.
Every bit of evidence in the article supports 1 and 2 (at least as of 20 years ago). The only support 3 gets is repeated statements that 2 is the natural, inevitable order of things.
This is a pretty shallow article - especially irritating because it's referenced with a bunch of things that have no relevance. I love in particular:
There are a lot of stupid guys out there. And when you mix stupidity and risky behavior, you often get death. In the United States, men make up about 92% of workplace deaths
Exercise for the reader to think about why that might be the case…
And another:
A study of attrition of women in engineering and science programs found that frequently cited barriers were isolation, lack of self-confidence, and lack of interest in the subject matter (Brainard & Carlin, 1998). That’s hardly the stuff of societal discrimination.
That is exactly the stuff of societal (and social) discrimination. Not because people are saying "You're a woman, and you'll be rubbish at this," but because the extant lack of gender balance in these fields perpetuates itself; if women don't want to be scientists and engineers, it becomes harder for those women who do. There's a tipping point.
From a statistical point of view, there are ultimately psychological differences between men and women. That fact has as near as possible no relevance to this discussion - obviously so, because it's patently obvious that men are not - what, ten times better at running tech businesses? Twenty times better? And we can conclude from this that there is an obvious bias in terms of the people who end up running them.
Mika points out that there has been decades of work put into encouraging girls into STEM. That's true, kind of, but this is something which does take decades to achieve. Kids' career preferences can often start at a very early age, and the only way to improve the proportion of women in tech is by making the field open and accessible to young girls, and to promote that option to them.
Hamfisted "women are just different and we shouldn't worry about it" articles are probably not helping.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadJust because there's evidence for a correlation between gender and math scores doesn't mean there's a genetic reason for the disparity.
Think of that fact as a marketing funnel. Some number of women will make a prioritization decisions. Some will choose to focus 100% on child rearing. Others will focus on career. Other will balance both.
Of the women who focus on career, some are in work environments that are family-friendly and will thrive. Some strive. Others are in environments where not being able to do hackathons or do conference calls at 9PM will close doors to career advancement.
Unless you're a well-researched person who can cite real research, genetic arguments are just anecdotes or vague facts interpreted through a journalists' lens. We should focus research in this area on the anti-patterns -- house husbands. What happens to men in their careers when they take a few years away from the workforce? My guess is a story similar to what we see with women.
Note that I'm not saying that things are one way or another, or that the reason there are so few women in tech is genetic. Just explaining how the ideas go together. It COULD be that way.
In other words, you're likely to do better if you're a little better than average (e.g. 1 SD or 115).
On the other hand, if you're one of those bizarro 180 IQ outliers who can't connect socially and emotionally (to say nothing of intellectually) with average people, you aren't likely to be able to be successful in a way that incorporates and leverages the contributions of other people.
In fact, we know there are genetic differences, we just don't know that they affect intelligence.
Sure, anyone can be the victim of really unpleasant attacks from others on the Internet, and it's been going on for years. But try creating different online characters. Give one a male name, give the other a female name. And make that the only difference. Now see the different ways people interact with you.
Having more diverse workforce can help you understand the problems of not having good blocking tools or reporting tools or privacy controls.
But then again, Google has a ton of women working for them and they've fucked up real names and G+ integration. So maybe I'm wrong.
The visual arts are very close to having gender parity (47.4% female in the US, according to [1]). A quick look around a site like Deviantart reinforces this. If you've spent any time around such communities, you'll know that young female artists are just as mean and obsessed with petty drama as young male computer geeks are with trying to look smarter than everyone else. Yet, the amount of professional female artists that emerge from those conditions is roughly equal to the amount of males that do.
This suggests that "guys being jerks to girls" is only a symptom of a different problem; for cultural, historical, or perhaps, as the article suggests but doesn't really back up, biological reasons, girls just aren't as interested in computers as guys are. If we had gender parity in tech, little Susan would probably be calling Anna a bitch for copying her code, and they'd both get by somehow.
As an aside, I've noticed that artists are much better about giving and receiving criticism than supposedly objective and "meritocratic" programmers are.
[1] http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/96.pdf
The world at large isn't ready to hear these statistics, and overall that is probably a good thing. We shouldn't accept these disparities as driven by natural forces until we've tried everything we can imagine to try to bring the differences in line.
Over the course of history, far more bad has been wrought by assuming differences were innate than assuming they were the result of bias. Given that, we should assume and act as though differences are due to bias long after the differences are well proven to be natural. It is a case where being wrong in one direction is not very costly, but being wrong in the other direction (and thus institutionalizing bias) is disastrous.
Tldr: we should err on the side of caution.
I see more people causing harm trying to ignore natural differences, so I must ask, what have you observed that causes you to believe that?
"Don't just stand there, do something."
I am unaware of any reasonable comparisons of where trying to ignore natural differences has caused anything resembling the same level of suffering. I would be interested in some examples you could provide.
If it wasn't race, it would family names or family colors/flags, gender, buck-teeth or what-have-you, as shown throughout history. Bickering and bigotry aren't reason for arbitrarily changing things.
Not the "world at large". Just (provincial) middle/upper class America.
>We shouldn't accept these disparities as driven by natural forces until we've tried everything we can imagine to try to bring the differences in line.
Shouldn't we in fact try to understand what's going on, instead of trying to change it because of a priori notion that there shouldn't be disparities (which, if disparities exist due to natural forces will be unatural and unjust).
Disparity (e.g less women in Tech) is NOT a problem in itself.
Obstacles to access is a problem (e.g a woman not being let to work Tech -- eg not being hired because she is a woman).
Also, why is IT somewhat different? I don't see much push for more female fishermen or male nurses, to name two random professions with similar disparities.
Fishing can also be a very well paid profession (look at Deadliest Catch for example) but the challenges, hardships, and stress are extreme for those challenging fishing crew jobs.
But it's not nurses and fishermen who are drastically pushing up the cost of housing in SF. It's the tech industry.
Sure it is. Lack of diversity means lack of understanding about other uses. It also means that biases can go unchecked, and can develop into accepted wisdom.
> Also, why is IT somewhat different?
Because the (false) reasons given for other occupations don't apply at all for tech. "Men are stronger, that's why you don't get women in construction"; "women are nurturing, that's why they make good nurses".
> I don't see much push for more female fishermen or male nurses, to name two random professions with similar disparities.
Have you looked? I'm not sure about fishermen, but there are many programmes to increase the number of men in nursing, or women in construction.
I wonder if that would explain why all the faculty treated me like garbage in K-12.
But if "lack of diversity" in the ratio of men/women working on IT is an issue _for the reasons you mention_, it means that you accept that men and women have different interests/thinking (uses/biases), and can bring different perspectives.
In which case you should also entertain the idea that women might just not like IT style jobs and the kind of problem solving people do in programming. That's a different bias/perspective too, after all.
>Have you looked? I'm not sure about fishermen, but there are many programmes to increase the number of men in nursing, or women in construction.
Citation needed.
They're not hard to find. Australia, UK, US examples for females into construction:
http://www.heatingandventilating.net/news/news.asp?id=6255&t...
> A successful initiative set up to support women working in the construction sector, has been granted £420,750 further funding to continue.
> The government-funded Women and Work: Sector Pathways Initiative is led by Construction Skills and aims to help get women into construction work and supports women already working in the sector to get further training.
http://civilconstructioncareers.com/women-in-construction.ph...
> The Women in Civil Construction Initiative will directly address the skills required for entry to the civil infrastructure sector of the industry. The Civil Contractors Federation (CCF), in collaboration with their funding partners Construction Skills Queensland, is delivering a flexible based program designed to deliver the entry level skills required to participants who wish to pursue a career in the Civil infrastructure sector. The WIC program is already underway within Queensland.
http://www.construction.co.uk/construction_news.asp?newsid=7...
http://manhattan.ny1.com/content/news/136592/new-program-to-...
Men into nursing: http://aamn.org/
Men into early years educations: http://www.worldforumfoundation.org/working-groups/men/
Can I get on the life-raft yet?
http://blogs.computerworld.com/sites/computerworld.com/files...
The standard for proving the hypothesis of inequality should be extremely high.
All people created equal until summarily proven otherwise, and even then still treated as equal in every way that matters.
edit: "lets try to fix the disparity through social change" ...as soon as you do the due diligence and convince me it's broken first. Evidence of disparity in no way tells me there is a problem in need of being fixed. It's a lazy way to try and get people behind a misguided white-knighting movement.
An obvious counterexample would be sexual orientation: believing that being gay is a choice is used by many as an argument to justify discrimination.
Two similar but not identical dichotomies: * A population difference is due to innate differences vs a difference is due to systemic biases * An individual difference is due to innate makeup vs a difference is due to individual choices
The question: Why is the % of people with X characteristic in Y profession lower than the average. Applying my proposed standard above to that question, assume differences are due to biases until sumarily proven, we still aren't encouraging or abiding discrimination when X characteristic is sexual orientation.
I agree. Research and data might make people feel bad, and not making people feel bad is obviously way more important than increasing knowledge.
> We shouldn't accept these disparities as driven by natural forces until we've tried everything we can imagine to try to bring the differences in line.
I agree. Personally I think we should withhold all math education to males until they are 21. We can discontinue this policy when there is a 50/50 gender split among all STEM workers, educators, and investors.
> we should assume and act as though differences are due to bias long after the differences are well proven to be natural
Yep. 1+1=3. Doesn't matter if you can prove that 1+1=2.
> It is a case where being wrong in one direction is not very costly, but being wrong in the other direction (and thus institutionalizing bias) is disastrous.
Yep, unimaginable catastrophes.
> Research and data might make people feel bad, and not making people feel bad is obviously way more important than increasing knowledge.
Not what I said at all, I said the standard for proof should be extremely high. High standards for proof != don't do research (though I admit I should have said so more clearly as I used the example of Summers without condemning what happened to him. He shouldn't have been drummed out for asking the questions.)
> We can discontinue this policy when there is a 50/50 gender split among all STEM workers, educators, and investors.
I assumed that the word "reasonable" was implied in what I was saying. But you're right, some people might propose absurd attempts to bring things in line.
> 1+1=3. Doesn't matter if you can prove that 1+1=2.
First of all, I was commenting on the standard by which we should accept 1+1=3, and which of the two (1+1=3 or 1+1=2) should be our acting hypothesis until we know.
Secondly, I said we should act as if differences are due to bias _until long after_. I was arguing for the default standard, and when it would be acceptable to change the standard. I never said never.
> Yep, unimaginable catastrophes.
Are you actually ignorant of the human history of genocide, dismissal of female person-hood, and racially driven slavery?
The countries where the percentage of women pursuing STEM is the highest, are the countries where STEM careers are disproportionately lucrative.
These findings have been confirmed by multiple studies with enormous sample sizes (e.g. Richard Lippa's n=200,000 survey of 53 countries).
Feminists will spend the next couple of years staunchly denying these findings, while the number of women in STEM has flatlined, and the percentage of students that are female only rises because men are systematically discriminated against.
Edit: I'm asking because @dnautics gave us an anecdote that doesn't add anything useful. Knowing why would be much more interesting, although still an anecdote.
So, what's the point you're trying to make - that women are offered opportunities but turn them down, and therefore there is no problem?
And why aren't people getting up and arms over that?
I'd scale it back, and draw the conclusions more conservatively. Along the lines of 'employment statistics don't necessarily imply discrimination'. Just because twitter's board is mostly male, doesn't necessarily mean that being male was a requirement. No one would argue that truck drivers are mostly men due to hiring policies.
I'd say it's simply because it's a crappy, low-paying, exhausting job with too many working hours, which not many people want. Men usually get such jobs.
What’s your alternative explanation?
The real question is, though, why don't the women get/take such jobs. I think the answer is a mixture of the following: (1) they are worse at such jobs than men (physically weaker and menstruating, which I assume might matter for a job like truck-driving), (2) (I assume) women get more government help, because they are more often (single) mothers and (3) women can play on other qualities (more social, better caregivers, more attractive, less dangerous) that allows them to get other jobs (nanny, waitress, secretary, ...).
You reasons are pretty bullshitty, so I don’t think I ever want to talk to you again. Bye!
I would consider the culture of working oneself to death generally harmful and strictly policed gender roles can play a very dangerous and enforcing role there.
On a side note, you aren't helping the image of feminism by bringing up MRAs out of nowhere just to deliberately present the worlds laziest strawman on their behalf, so you can dismiss it.
In our society gender roles are strictly enforced and policed. It has gotten better during the last few decades (though there have also been some regressions) but it’s still pretty bad.
"Males around the world on average tend to be better at doing [math] than females; likely due to the need to fashion weapons and objects for warfare, hunting, and competing throughout evolutionary history."
He is essentially arguing that women are inherently worse at founding tech companies because they're under-represented in an area where people discriminate against them based on the belief they're inherently worse at founding tech companies.
http://thumbs.newschoolers.com/index.php?src=http://media.ne...
I tend to think of it as the same reason minorities are not prevalent in these places either, probably because society held them as "lower class" until recently and they are just now making gains which are long overdue.
All in all, women are catching up fast to men in mathematics as well. They account for the fastest growing percentage of graduate degrees in the sciences and I, personally, work in a high-tech field dominated still by male developers, but also women managers who supervise them and do a fantastic job at it.
It's not biological, it's history. Until recently those spatial learning and building toys for children were all male-focused, but that is changing.
I firmly believe that women will easily overtake men in technology in the future because attitudes have changed for the better.
sure...
I firmly believe that women will easily overtake men in technology
Huh?
Do you have any reason for this belief?
Also, if you really believe that is true, wouldn't it be proper to start promoting technology amongst boys?
Except that they are. Do Chinese and Indian people cease to be minorities when discussing tech?
I would love to see this theory getting more researched. So given that the original article used just numbers and assume that the time derivative of these are flat, you're suggesting that the time derivative is not, and I feel like there must be stats backing this in a more.. cited manner.
non aryan gingers are the true minority!
I stopped reading right there. Should I change from a dress to some pants? Cut my hair short? Watch football? Didn't we have this argument about doctors and lawyers 80 years ago?
this is easily backed by data which shows that the level womens rights in a country has a strong inverse correlation to the number of women in STEM fields. this way, even before we consider the merits of the sexes we have a simple explanation which avoids the classic battle of the sexes arguments... and actually i'm sure women know this themselves - after all they are the ones who regularly decide that they would prefer to enter a non STEM field.
having few women in STEM fields is ironically an indicator of having a free and liberal society with strong rights for women.
First, let's talk about mathematical ability. It's widely known that men outnumber women in the upper percentiles of mathematical ability. However, that's an explanation for why there are so few female Fields Medalists (in fact, there are none), not why there are so few female engineers.
Among people who score a perfect 800 on the Math SAT (top 1% starts at 770), men outnumber women only 2:1. Even if mathematical ability is totally determinative, and being a programmer required top 0.3-0.5% of mathematical ability, we would expect to see ratios of maybe 65/35 in the programming world, not 90/10 or 95/5. Due to the shapes of the bell curves in question, the disparity between men and women gets quite large when you get into the 0.1% or 0.01% of mathematical ability. But, by and large, Silicon Valley isn't made up of those people. They're more run of the mill smart people (Stanford's SAT Math inter-quartiles are 93rd-99th percentile).
With regards to the points about competitiveness versus cooperation and risk-taking and caring about people, they all beg the question. Why is competitiveness a good thing for the business of writing software? Don't you think cooperation would be better for such a deeply team-oriented discipline? Why isn't caring about people a positive strength, when much of Silicon Valley 2.0 is fluffy social stuff? Finally, while more risk-aversion might explain why there are fewer female founders, it doesn't seem to be the case that females are less represented in startups than in technology companies in general. What's risky about going to work at Microsoft or Google?
The refrain of "these statistics are things nobody is willing to talk about!" is a cop-out. Most people will not pillory you for pointing out that women are more risk-averse or do things differently. Indeed, it's something women themselves often talk about. My wife was recently at a social gathering for women attorneys. She recounted a discussion of how women tend to disclose when they haven't done something before, while men tend to say "sure I can do that." It's not 1990 and people are quite willing to discuss how men and women approach work differently. But the statistics only support conclusions as strong as the scope of the evidence. And in this article, the author wanders far beyond what the statistics support into blatant conjecture and rationalization.
Personally, I don't think that's the whole story (according to my observations, it's also upbringing, girls socialize more than boys, who are more likely to keep to themselves, and differences in topics of interest, which I have no idea what they come from).
What?! How did you arrive to that conclusion? This is a really bad myth. Math abilities for the most part have very little to do with genes, and almost all to do with hard word, motivation, and practice. See http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/the-myt... for more.
So you are selecting outliers to justify the "proper" average outnumbering? That doesn't add up.
[0]http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/09/2012-sat-test-results-a-hug...
That's true. But he described multiple factors that bias men towards programming. Even if individual factors (like mathematical ability) only cause 65/35 differences in isolation, combining a few of them together results in pretty extreme distributions.
The odds of finding a woman with X, Y, and Z is 0.35 * .4 * 0.45, about 5%.
The odds of finding a man with X, Y, and Z is 0.65 * .6 * 0.55, about 20%.
All else equal, you'd find that about 80% of programmers are male.
Obviously my example is contrived, but if you think I'm wildly wrong, please respond with something math-based, even if it's equally contrived. Then we'll at least know what the other is really getting at.
I was thinking more like this: consider giving everyone a goodness score. At first, let's say the goodness score is entirely based on mathematical ability, which skews strongly in favor of men. Then, let's make the goodness score based 50% on mathematical ability, and 50% based on an independent criterion that skews in favor of men, but less strongly. There should be more women who achieve a certain goodness score under the second set of criteria than the first. That's what I mean when I say that considering additional criteria is dilutive.
Besides that, all your metrics skew in favor of men. But out of the various metrics that go into being a good programmer, I think mathematical ability is the only one that skews in favor of men. Studies show that female students get higher grades, because they are more attentive over longer periods, have more patience and impulse control. Also, in terms of programming teams, I think being social and communicative is far more of an asset than being competitive.
Mostly because compensation, benefits, raises, promotions and incentives are in most cases at individual levels. So people chase goals what you want them to chase.
Also note what's good for the team is often not good for the individual. I know this from personal experience, if you have a mix of high and low performers in a team and the rewards for them are going to be the same regardless of performance- The next thing that happens is the low performers make no attempt to increase their performance and high performers are always supposed to make up for it.
This creates immense frustration for people who are performing well. They see no reason why they must be doing heroics to take the same amount of money as the guy who isn't putting even a fraction of their effort. So the whole team collaboration stuff collapses.
And who can blame them really?
My mother built one business after another even though my grandfather was forcing her to be a math teacher. She started 4+ businesses and each one carried the name of a guy in my family (even my brother, as soon as he turned 18) because businesses weren't supposed to be led by women.
I am female. At 8 I was hit on as the only girl hanging out in a robotics lab. At 13 I was mocked for writing code. At 15 I was asked to quit school to work at a tech firm, but instead I kept working on my own freelance business in parallel. At 18 I ranked second among peers in my country. I moved to the US, kept working, and continue to grow my skills and tech startup in the valley today. There are many more like me. Wait 10 more years and see what happens to the statistics and attitudes. In the mean time, my job is to keep proving those that bet against me and other female hacker-founders wrong through the product of my work.
I looked at all of the board members, and only 1 out of 7 has a CS background. 4 out of 7 have B.As/MBAs from elite schools, and immediately stepped into executive positions. I guess that's called "the trenches" these days. Their background literally screams "Old Boy's network." Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey have no education information mentioned and I don't think they did much coding on their way up.
So whatever the merits of this article, I don't see how the argument that the cause of this is in any way that not enough women go into STEM fields is a valid one.
There might be very slight natural differences in variance of ability, which would explain why more men come out at the top and bottom. I don't think there's value into coming in to that argument on either side. At any rate, the evidence seems to indicate that the gender disparity (at the relevant IQ level) is at most 2:1.
Going 100 steps further and justifying the good-ole-boy network that has taken over VC and Silicon Valley is another matter entirely.
In other words, what this article is saying is:
1. Women are demonstrably less represented in STEM fields.
2. Women do demonstrably less well in certain metrics we associate with STEM fields.
3. This is because women are biologically less interested/able/adept at STEM.
Every bit of evidence in the article supports 1 and 2 (at least as of 20 years ago). The only support 3 gets is repeated statements that 2 is the natural, inevitable order of things.
There is no reason to believe a word of it.
There are a lot of stupid guys out there. And when you mix stupidity and risky behavior, you often get death. In the United States, men make up about 92% of workplace deaths
Exercise for the reader to think about why that might be the case…
And another:
A study of attrition of women in engineering and science programs found that frequently cited barriers were isolation, lack of self-confidence, and lack of interest in the subject matter (Brainard & Carlin, 1998). That’s hardly the stuff of societal discrimination.
That is exactly the stuff of societal (and social) discrimination. Not because people are saying "You're a woman, and you'll be rubbish at this," but because the extant lack of gender balance in these fields perpetuates itself; if women don't want to be scientists and engineers, it becomes harder for those women who do. There's a tipping point.
From a statistical point of view, there are ultimately psychological differences between men and women. That fact has as near as possible no relevance to this discussion - obviously so, because it's patently obvious that men are not - what, ten times better at running tech businesses? Twenty times better? And we can conclude from this that there is an obvious bias in terms of the people who end up running them.
Mika points out that there has been decades of work put into encouraging girls into STEM. That's true, kind of, but this is something which does take decades to achieve. Kids' career preferences can often start at a very early age, and the only way to improve the proportion of women in tech is by making the field open and accessible to young girls, and to promote that option to them.
Hamfisted "women are just different and we shouldn't worry about it" articles are probably not helping.