
Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies - andrenth
http://quillette.com/2018/02/15/sex-stem-stubborn-facts-stubborn-ideologies/
======
scarmig
This reminds me of something I was thinking about earlier today.

It's well known that men generally are stagnating economically, while women
are catching up. In many metro areas, single women out earn single men.

And so I came across this paper[0], which had some interesting research about
that. And what struck me was this: there's an explicit assumption that men
have worse socio-emotional skills than women, and that can be used to explain
the gap.

By itself, I don't take any issue with it. It's true. But if you turned it
around and explained the CS gap starting from the assumption that men are
disproportionately represented among the upper levels of spatial and
mathematical abstraction skills, there'd be an uproar. Petitions would be
signed, scalps would be taken. I say that as someone who thinks much of those
differences can be explained by childhood socialization.

And you're not even allowed to talk about it. I'm hesitant to post this
comment, for fear someone might hunt me down and dox me to my employer. (Even
now, I ponder if I should be making a throwaway account.)

In real life, I had been willing to have conversations about this because I
find it an interesting and nuanced topic. But now both sides have taken to
treating anyone who doesn't take a stance of complete agreement with their
respective ideologies as the Enemy.

It's creating a class of people who know just to shut up and withdraw from any
discussion about the topic, because there's clearly no good that can come from
it, either socially or professionally. Even academics. And I genuinely don't
get why anyone would want that.

[0] [http://www.nber.org/papers/w24274](http://www.nber.org/papers/w24274)

~~~
psyc
Lest we forget, it isn't only charismatically-challenged unfortunates like
Damore who get thrown under a tank for daring to speak 'out of turn' wrt the
social justice narrative. Just two hours ago, I happened to re-read the
various vicious hit pieces written about Paul Graham several years ago, after
he had the gall to speak his mind about representation. These are the times.
Everywhere I look online, it's men vs. women, black vs. white. To paraphrase
Yudkowsky, "Arguments are soldiers, this is war, and it's life or death."

This account began as a throwaway. I used to comment with my real name, in the
days before the war broke out. In the days when pg used to comment here
regularly. The days when, if someone disagreed with you, they'd tell you so,
or why you're wrong, or maybe that you're a dumb-dumb. Now, if you don't
follow approved talking points in your social media communiqués, you're in
real danger of being pilloried, and - as these things go - you're more likely
to be attacked by fellow members of the party. I've identified as left-leaning
my entire life, but I've never for a moment feared this sort of personal
sabotage from a right-leaning person. This is a pursuit of ideological purity
at any cost.

~~~
rayiner
Damore’s screed was also rife with fallacies and unsupported generalizations,
let’s not forget that. It drives me nuts that his lack of “charisma” (rather
than his lack of logical reasoning skills or writing ability) is what people
are saying got him fired. If he’d written a manifesto that sloppy on a
technical topic people would’ve ripped him to shreds.

~~~
psyc
So it's normal and ok if _being wrong_ got him fired? No matter, as that isn't
what got him fired. He was fired because it's good optics in this climate. And
I'm asserting the climate isn't good.

~~~
awinder
Yes, because he was wrong about something that he had no business or expertise
or business position to even be discussing, and because he did it in a very
loud way.

Damore got what he wanted, he wanted to be a martyr, probably because that was
all he was ever going to be good for. He’s the truest of snowflakes, stop
giving idiots this platform and maybe they’ll go away.

~~~
traverseda
To me that reads like a lot like credentialism. "Unless you've been formally
vetted by the institutions we like you can't participate". It's like a
bizzarro-world anti-intellectualism, where you can't read a scientific paper
unless you have the right degree in that particular sub-field.

~~~
awinder
If the alternative to credentialism is idiots like Damore rabble-rousing other
total idiots, sign me up for credentialism.

~~~
traverseda
I mean the well credentialed seem to be doing more than their fair share of
rabble rousing. Also like half or more of social psychology research can't be
replicated, so clearly that particular credential is not highly correlated
with being correct...

~~~
awinder
Yep, that’s right. The well informed lead society, not the idiots. If you
wanna go back to the dark ages make your point, but mine is that a biology
major working for a technology company making commentary on psychology is a
slam dunk case of someone who should just shut up. Certainly not someone who
should be egged on.

BTW: the original comment was based on his job. Google didn’t hire him to make
comments like that, they hired him to code. That’s all I meant, don’t shit
where you eat, if you’re hired to code do that job and focus on that. I don’t
know what this generations problem is with not being able to keep it together
in a professional workplace, but the problem is this generation, not the
rules.

~~~
dang
Your comments in this thread have been breaking several of the site
guidelines, especially the ones against flamewars and name-calling in
arguments. Users here need to follow the rules, regardless of which views they
favor. Please (re-)read
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
and follow those rules if you want to keep commenting here.

Your account also looks like it's tending to use HN primarily for ideology and
politics. We don't allow that, because it's destructive of the intellectual
curiosity that HN is supposed to be for. I've posted about this a lot, if
anyone wants to understand how we apply that rule:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20primarily&sort=byDat...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20primarily&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0).

------
tptacek
Once again: compared to other STEM fields, women participate less in CS than
any other field except physics. By double digits percentage more in
mathematics PhDs. Statistics is almost 50/50\. Several rigorous earth sciences
fields --- chem and biochem, for instance --- have 50% _or greater_ female
participation.

One thing all these fields have in common is that they are more intellectually
rigorous and harder to succeed in than the computer software industry.

Clearly, they have something else in common. We just need to figure out what
it is.

This essay, which invokes the "Google Memo", is subtly attacking a straw man.
Even those almost the entire rest of STEM is better than CS, it's true that
it's not balanced; it remains deeply imperfect. Physics and mechanical
engineering, clustered with CS, remain the province of men. There's a expanse
of STEM fields with female participation between 25-40% that you'd want to
explain or correct. Is it stereotype threat? Implicit bias? Who knows?
Probably not?

But that has nothing to do with why Google has so few women engineers. The
work that a commercial software engineer does --- even at the lofty heights in
which the profession is practiced in such a cathedral of software design as
the Alphabet Corporation --- is simply not that hard; most of it is just
wiring form fields to databases in new and exciting ways.

Whatever is holding women's participation in our field at or below _twenty
percent_ is artificial, and a travesty.

~~~
simonsarris
> One thing all these fields have in common is that they are more
> intellectually rigorous and harder to succeed in than the computer software
> industry.

Can we rank these fields by day to day... sociability? Or how solitary they
are?

Say, by the number of coworkers you talk to on a given day for a given number
of hours. Or the amount of time you spend not at all speaking, and staring at
a screen?

Can we approximate these somehow?

~~~

Can we rank these fields by prestige _in the eyes of the median person?_ E.g.
If you are a biologist, does a guy on the street think its more interesting
and glamorous than being a programmer? Or less? Why?

From the people I've talked to about why they _didn 't_ go into computer
science/programming, a lot of them see programmers as essentially overpaid
janitors or hi-tech sewer workers. They make Facebook/civilization/the
internet run, but just how isn't important, and it probably isn't fun. The
people I talked to have _no idea_ what the pay scale is for programmers
(actually many programmers I've talked have no idea what the pay scale is for
programmers either). So they don't consider a cost-benefit very clearly when
rejecting CS/Programming.

~~~
JabavuAdams
I think there's something to the communication angle...

Part of why I like computers is that I can spend my day not talking to these
fucking apes that infest this planet -- present company excluded, of course. I
say this as someone who's not a social moron, who's recognized as an excellent
teacher, and who's actually interested in team-dynamics and debugging
miscommunication.

If I'd wanted to be a social worker -- I would have become a social worker.
Who let all these social workers into the computer lab?

Anecdata -- dated a kick-ass Data Scientist, and a Molecular Biology Prof
recently (separately). Their professional interests were a large part of their
attraction to me. As I got to know them, the data scientist confessed that she
didn't really like the math and wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't so
lucrative. The Prof. was much less interested in biochemistry than in how
people relate to science in the context of health care.

So dissapoint.

~~~
antisthenes
> As I got to know them, the data scientist confessed that she didn't really
> like the math and wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't so lucrative.

Your expectations are pretty high if realizing this led you to be
disappointed. Not expectations of your SO in particular, but in general about
people.

I think this is inherent to most people - they generally don't enjoy the job
they do, but they do it still to pay the bills and secure for yourself some
form of retirement and safety net in your later years.

~~~
JabavuAdams
I should clarify. I know what you mean. This isn't a value judgement on them.
More that it would be awesome to have a life partner who could teach me
biochemistry, or machine learning, or physics that I don't know already.

EDIT> But also, I generally don't do any job whose subject matter I don't
enjoy. I'm different in this way, from most people. The concept of doing
something that I don't like is very foreign to me, with all the positives and
also negatives that entails.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
I'm a PhD student at a UK university. From what I've seen in my department
(Engineering) there are about 3 women for every 5 men, both in staff and
students, a not unreasonable ratio. However, I struggle to remember more than
a couple of women who are British or from an English-speaking country. The
majority come from India, China, the rest of Europe, the Middle East etc.

I've also seen this in the six years I worked in the UK as a developer, before
starting my PhD. Of the women developers I worked with, (in this case, not so
many) the majority were Indian or Eastern or Southern European. The same goes
for the students in my data science Masters (also in a UK university).

Other women I've discussed this with, have similar experiences. In particular
Greek women (like myself) don't remember any perception of a strong bias in
numbers against women in STEM subjects. I have a fair few Greek women friends
who have bachelors or master's degrees in computer science.

All this is of course anecdotal but it makes me think there is some sort of
bias that is not explained by "interest in things" vs "interest in people", or
any such difference between the sexes, because it is particular to specific
cultures, rather than to the sexes around the globe.

In any case "gendered interest" sounds like a convenient oversimplification
that seeks to confirm cultural bias as natural and spontaneous, rather than an
attempt to understand it. Instead of answering any questions it passes the
buck; it leaves someone else to wonder _why_ girls and boys are interested in
different things (e.g. fire trucks vs barbie dolls). The same goes for
academic performance in school: that is also an observation that requires an
explanation- not an explanation in and of itself.

~~~
MistahKoala
Casual lay observer here (i.e., don't treat this as coming from a position of
being deeply informed). The phenomenon you describe sounds similar to the
'Nordic gender paradox' (or variations of the term). It's been a while since I
last touched on it and I can't easily find a source worth pointing to - at
least, one that hasn't been presented through a political lens - and academic
names on the subject don't come to mind just now.

Essentially, despite various attempts to get to 'equal' gender outcomes in the
most 'equitable' societies in the world, participation in jobs and industries
associated with men and women remains stubbornly unmoved towards 50:50 (or
whatever proportion is considered desirable). The suggestion is that it's
precisely the relatively equitable and liberal norms of those societies that
have provided the conditions for women to make use of their agency and choose
roles according to their preferences. Whereas women in societies less
predisposed towards liberal norms may be motivated by other considerations,
such as the need to maximise their earning potential, familial expectations of
success or a stronger sense of needing to prove one's potential and
achievement (including perceptions of gender in their own societies). In the
instance of the anecdote about your Greek colleagues, I wondered if the
financial crisis was a catalyst for greater participation, along with the
current trend of Greeks' tendency towards staying in HE for longer?

I've probably made mistakes or mischaracterised aspects of this idea, but
that's broadly how I understand it. It doesn't answer the why of
'systems/things' vs 'people' (which has more accessible academic discourse
than this does), although I think it offers a different perspective on biases
that may be in play.

~~~
Cthulhu_
What you mention is also referred to in the article itself, and it does make
sense - true emancipation and gender equality is IMO more about equal
opportunity, and the freedom to choose. The push towards getting more women in
STEM and specifically CS feels like it tries to take that freedom away in a
sense; you SHOULD pick CS, here's all the money we're investing in getting
women to work for us.

~~~
MistahKoala
> What you mention is also referred to in the article itself

Admittedly, I'm yet to read it (Pocketed it for later).

I assume I agree with your sentiment about what equality means and what its
relationships with freedom and liberty are - it's just not something that can
easily be said in the open without running the risk of having to defend it or
attracting pariah status. I don't really want to say much more on the matter
here beyond that (it's mostly a draining experience).

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
>> Admittedly, I'm yet to read it (Pocketed it for later).

Tut tut. You should always read the article before commenting, the manual
before turning it on and the contract before signing it.

But, you know- no pressure :P

~~~
MistahKoala
What can I say, I'm a man! I attempt to build the Lego without the
instructions, drive the car without the map, and play the board game without
the rule book :D

~~~
sundarurfriend
> play the board game without the rule book

Nooooo! It's not a good board gaming session unless you spend 90 minutes
poring over the rulebook and 19 minutes in gaming, well known fact. How can
you do that if you don't have the rulebook with you!

------
jenthoven
I’m a CS graduate and female founder. I disagree with many parts of this
essay, but I actually agree with this part: “The sex difference in interest in
people extends to a more general interest in living things, which would
explain why women who are interested in science are much more likely to pursue
a career in biology or veterinary medicine than computer science“

I believe that, at age 18, women have more sophisticated social lives and care
more than boys do about relationships with people. But I think the perception
that CS is less beneficial towards people or that technologist don’t work with
people as often as other professionals is false. My job as a PM at Google was
incredibly social, and I felt had a huge impact on “living things”, much more
so than my female friend’s role as a psychology researcher or operations
associate at an insurance company. There’s a belief in society that all CS
grads do is sit in caves alone and make video games, whereas the truth is that
they have beautiful offices, close-knit teams, a lifestyle with time for
friends, a lot of influence, and a huge impact on real people’s lives through
the software they create.

Now, a related problem is that CS actually is less social for woman than in it
is for men. I had very few friends in my advanced classes, whereas the dudes
took those classes together in packs. I benefited a huge amount from women in
CS community at my university because I felt like I knew more people in my
classes, could sit, chat, and work with them. IMO, all of the dollars going
towards women in STEM that this author criticized are and should continue to
target these two problems: that CS is perceived as less to do with “living
things” and that it actually is less social for girls because there isn’t a
strong community.

~~~
corpMaverick
> I believe that, at age 18, women have more sophisticated social lives

I think you are on to something. This is really the critical age when the
decision happens. Everything else is the just the result of this.

My own theory, is that CS (programming) is perceived as having low social
status. Women are socially smarter, so they are aware of that. Men are
clueless, so they are more likely to choose programming and later they move
into other CS fields.

~~~
icefox
> My own theory, is that CS (programming) is perceived as having low social
> status.

A colleague told me when out at a bar he refrains from telling women that he
is a programmer because they suddenly become way more interested because they
know how much $$$ programming jobs bring in. That does not sound like low
social status signalling to me, but the opposite at least for males.

~~~
teddyh
Having a high income gives a high status _to men_ , but not to women. Women
are not at all judged by their income like men are. Therefore, the fact that
programmers make money attracts men to being programmers, but does not attract
women.

------
alexandercrohde
To get a little meta:

I think discussions like these make progress, but very slow progress. I think
the root of the issue for many people is more than factual at this point, it's
become emotional for both sides. And I think progress will come when both
sides can get a handle on their frustrations and then articulate their
feelings gracefully.

At the end of the day, I think only a very small percentage of people
commenting here care too much about what a new study finds. I don't think it
will move many viewpoints.

So I think I'll propose a template for resolving this conflict (a longshot, I
know).

Pursuit of agreement:

A) Do I want to understand the feelings of the people I'm talking to? If not,
don't expect progress.

B) Do I want to understand my personal feelings? Do I recognize why this topic
is emotional to me, why I'm spending my Thursday morning arguing this?

C) Do I see how tangential the connection is between my feelings and the
article at hand?

D) Do I care about reaching a point of agreement, or is my motivation more
around rewarding myself/punishing others?

E) Am I willing to describe my feelings/worries/motivations without using
emotionally charged-words?

~~~
fwdpropaganda
Why is it accepted that feelings should be relevant here? I'm not trying to be
provocative, I'm genuinely open to listen to your response to that.

To paraphrase Data O'Briain, "zombies are at an all-time low but the fear of
zombies could be incredibly high, doesn't mean we should have government
policies to deal with the fear of zombies":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zopCDSK69gs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zopCDSK69gs)

If we're getting meta, I think that the first thing that should be discussed
is: What are we optimizing for, and how do we measure it?

~~~
ESRogs
Feelings get in the way of changing minds. Ignoring your own or your
opponents' feelings doesn't make them go away.

Take a look at the article. How is someone who is concerned about sex
differences in representation going to feel when they read, "Many academics in
the modern world seem obsessed with the sex difference..."?

The article shoots itself in the foot in the first sentence. It's not going to
change minds because it doesn't consider feelings.

Writing in a way that gets the facts right, and uses good arguments, and is
worded in a way that doesn't turn off your opponents is hard. But it can be
done. I think slatestarcodex.com often does it (though not always).

~~~
fwdpropaganda
> Feelings get in the way of changing minds.

So going even more meta, that's the first thing that should be addressed. I
realise that eliminating feelings completely is a lost battle, but I thing at
minimum how socially acceptable it is to make decisions based on feelings
would be beneficial.

------
Noos
What's really annoying about this is that women are not underrepresented in
STEM careers! The article mentions if anything, they are overrepresented in
the life sciences, and are only underrepresented in math at the doctoral
level. The issue is that we are suddenly defining STEM as computer science and
engineering only, and that those are apparently the only worthwhile aspects of
STEM. The sexism thing and message thing is odd when you realize women in
general can make up to two thirds of science teachers.

I think the problem with computer science in general is that it's one of the
few careers you need to like at an early age and do a lot of self-directed
study before you even enter college, or you are at a disadvantage compared to
others. This affects both men and women, and keep in mind most men aren't
interested in those fields either.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
I don't think it's just Engineering and Maths that have a problem. There's
this joke where someone says "A man and his son are in a car crash and they're
taken to hospital. The doctor sees the child and goes 'Oh no! It's my son!'".
Then they ask you "who is the doctor"?

The point is that you are supposed to struggle with the answer because you
can't imagine the doctor to be the boy's mother. That there exists an
assumption that people will find this difficult to answer suggests that there
is some sort of expected cultural bias about doctors being male or female.

An anecodte, of course- literally.

~~~
bloak
That works much better with "surgeon" instead of "doctor". Lots of doctors are
female, but not so many surgeons, at least here in the UK.

~~~
Cthulhu_
I dunno, it threw me off for a bit - "doctor" still has a very male
connotation with me. Mind you I've not seen one in forever.

~~~
err4nt
In english 'Doctor' is a word that at one time exclusively did refer only to
males. A word used for females was 'Doctress'

[http://doctordoctress.org](http://doctordoctress.org)

~~~
bloak
That could be relevant. Also the word "actor", with the same ending, is
sometimes (by some newspapers, for example) reserved for men.

Sometimes a similar trick anecdote is told about a "German". There's a
suspicion that the ending "man" in "German" primes the listener to imagine a
man.

------
pron
> Many academics in the modern world seem obsessed with the sex difference in
> engagement with science, technology, mathematics, and engineering (STEM)
> fields. Or rather they are obsessed with the fact that there are more men
> than women in some of these fields. ... Proponents of these theories and
> their activist followers believe that some significant proportion of the sex
> differences in STEM fields – but curiously only those in which men outnumber
> women ...

Completely leaving aside the rest of content, the only obsessed people here
are those who are obsessed with not understanding what the issue is about
perceiving it to be an obsession. We are not obsessed with the number of women
in STEM for its own sake (it's an important but a secondary concern) but
obsessed with the inequality of power. As women happen to be underrepresented
precisely in those areas that confer power -- including some STEM fields --
_that_ is what we care about. If women were underrepresented in software
engineering but commensurately overrepresented in, say, politics, banking or
high management, this would have been a matter of less concern. As women
happen to be underrepresented in _all_ of these, we're attacking each of these
individually.

Of course, those of us who are in STEM also feel that women
underrepresentation (aside from the much more important issue of power
equality) is a huge loss of talent for our field.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
But what if the under-representation is due to women not being as interested
in the field?

~~~
pron
First, _why_ are they less interested? Second, like I said, the problem is an
_overall_ unfair distribution of power. I find it very hard to believe that
women are so uninterested in _all_ professions that confer power to the point
that they're willing to give up power (and therefore freedom) to not practice
them.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
I've worked in the finance industry and the tech industry, both industries
where women are underrepresented. These industries would love to employ more
women. When I worked in finance the recruiters spent a ton of effort trying to
get women to apply, but they couldn't get anywhere close to 50/50 in terms of
number of applicants. Maybe women (on average, not outliers obviously) value
other things more than power? At least in finance it's incredibly demanding to
be at the top. The work is consuming and if you aren't willing to put in the
time someone else will and will take your job. It isn't really compatible with
a traditional family life.

~~~
pron
But the whole point of almost every kind activism is to change what has so far
been called the traditional way of life -- from the struggle of the plebeians
and patricians in ancient Rome, through the French Revolution and abolition to
women's suffrage and desegregation (and even, you could say, that of
vegetarians) -- because the traditional way of life distributes power
unequally (that's an objective fact) and unfairly (that's a subjective
opinion). It's fine to say that you think that the current distribution of
power should remain (because you think that this unequal distribution is fair
for some other reasons or because equality of power among large groups of
people is not one of your values) -- that's what conservatism is about -- but
it's not fine to deny it or claim that those who want to change the current
distribution of power are "obsessed". The tactic of claiming that the
marginalized don't even really want their share of power is also an old and
ultimately unsuccessful one. The argument that we want more women but they
aren't there is also weak, just as saying "we want rich and educated black
land-owners to run local farming associations but there aren't any" during the
reconstruction would have been. Social change occurs _as a result_ of
activism; it's a slow process and one that always meets plenty of opposition.

The real argument is this: do you think that women _should_ (meaning that it
is our priority as a society to make that happen, and that means changing
things) have equal power or not?

~~~
jeffreyrogers
> The real argument is this: do you think that women should (meaning that it
> is our priority as a society to make that happen, and that means changing
> things) have equal power or not?

I'm not sure what equal power means, nor what changes would help bring that
about.

By the way, I don't think people who want to change the current distribution
of power are "obsessed", but it's hard for me to know what a fair distribution
of power looks like. It's also likely that due to unfair distribution of
personality traits among the population that a fair distribution of power is
unlikely in practice unless enforced on society.

I also think women and men have different values and priorities in life, in
part due to women's fertility declining sooner than men's. It's hard to have a
high-status job and it's extremely hard to care for young children while doing
a high-status job.

~~~
pron
> I'm not sure what equal power means, nor what changes would help bring that
> about.

I think equal power means just that (see [1] for definitions of power), and as
to what actions would bring that about, that's a matter of debate among
progressives. But the main question is whether you _want_ to bring it about
with all the social change that entails; conservatives generally don't (they
find the status quo satisfactory, and some even want to roll the clock back).
My main issue is not with conservatives who admit their conservativeness, but
with those who've convinced themselves that their conservative and (sometimes
extremely so) values aren't conservative but neutral. If you don't think
social action of any kind should be taken to change the current power
distribution in society (and let alone if you want to roll back changes
already made), then you're advocating for conservative policy. Wanting to do
nothing is conservative by definition, and it means that your values are such
that you find the status quo preferable over a change in the distribution of
power.

> It's also likely that due to unfair distribution of personality traits among
> the population that a fair distribution of power is unlikely in practice
> unless enforced on society.

No, because we're talking about statistical distribution, not an equality
among all individuals.

> I also think women and men have different values and priorities in life, in
> part due to women's fertility declining sooner than men's. It's hard to have
> a high-status job and it's extremely hard to care for young children while
> doing a high-status job.

That is a largely irrelevant question (or a secondary one [2]). The question
is whether you want to change society so that women and men have equal power
(statistically).

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_\(social_and_political\))

[2]: That's because we can ask why that's so. No biological basis for that has
been proven and even if biological factors play a significant roles, we
constantly use technology to overcome biological limitations to achieve
desirable goals. For example, biology is certainly a 100% complete explanation
for humans' inability to fly, but because we've deemed flight desirable, we
overcame that limitation with technology. I always find it amusing how people
who normally see technology as a solution to many problems and are reluctant
to admit defeat use the slightest hint for small biological effects as a
satisfactory explanation that some change cannot or should not be achieved.

------
novia
Hi everyone. I'm a woman with a math degree who just completed a computer
programming certificate. I've wanted to study math my whole life, and I wasn't
exposed to programming as a field of study until college.

I just wanted to state that, for the record, having these sorts of discussions
on hacker news is extremely distressing to me. I've worked hard to get the
accreditations that I have, and I usually enjoy the things I read on this
website. But just imagine for a moment how all this appears to an aspiring
programmer when she wakes up in the morning and checks her favorite technical
content aggregator.

Like, yeah, none of you are saying that ALL women are less capable than ALL
men, but what I'm reading here is the subtext. When I pursue a career in this
field, how will my coworkers perceive me? Will I be treated with respect? Or
will I be seated next to someone who is convinced that there is a gender war
going on, and thereby offended by my very presence?

~~~
rvo
There is the flip side too. I wouldn't want to be known as the diversity hire.
I want to be judged on my work and my skills. Not on what chromosomes I carry
or what my melenin level is.

The more we keep framing things in the context of hiring to meet gender based
quotas, the more people will see us as diversity hires. I would hate that more
than knowing someone doesn't like me because of my gender because that persons
mind I can maybe change via my skills and work.

~~~
door2
Maybe that’s the problem of sexist and racist white men who can’t believe that
a woman or PoC could possibly be here based on merit and always treat them
with suspicion. It’s not the fault of people trying to fix the problem.

~~~
zxxon
If someone literally gets hired over some white dude by "virtue" of their
gender and/or race, then they _aren 't_ there by merit. That's exactly what
some ideologically (or PR) driven HR departments do. The suspicion is entirely
warranted.

The thing is, such practices also damage the self-image of the hire in
question. Am I being hired for my abilities, or for being a number in some
statistic?

~~~
Caveman_Coder
That is exactly what happened with my wife when she was a developer. She only
likes coding and solving technical problems, the problem was her entire team
was women and promoted this "yay sisterhood" groupthink, even to the point of
openly talking about how they hired my wife so they could keep the team devoid
of any males...she hated it so much and ended up going to a more technically-
inclined and less sexist team before leaving the tech industry for good. She
always said the "women-in-tech" groups did more harm than good and thinks its
just one big "women/POC-in-tech industry" that unfortunately won't be going
away anytime soon since there is now so much money involved.

~~~
rvo
Yea, I saw the women in machine learning group at NIPS and was really
wondering if this is a good thing or not.

Now they are considering Black in Machine Learning too (or something like
that).

This all just seems sexist and racist. Mathematics and statistics shouldn't be
conditioned on race and gender! What's next, there are too many Jews who win
the Nobel prize?? Doesn't this type of thinking remind people of the horrible
past?

------
drakonka
> The real issues concern the magnitude of these effects on women’s STEM
> participation and the foregone opportunities of not focusing on other
> factors that might have an even stronger impact on their participation.

I am not sure that I agree with the entire article, but this part stood out to
me. I never know how to express this in a way that sounds appropriate, but I
feel that some of us might be better off if we focused more of our energy on
actually developing in our chosen field and less on dwelling on how sexist
everyone says the field is.

I understand that the above comes with a lot of caveats. "What if the sexism
is the thing _preventing_ me from developing?", etc. And I do think there are
legitimate problems, and that they need to be addressed. But sometimes it
seems like the flood of media and popular opinion constantly shoved at us
about how bad we have it only makes us more tuned to focus on things that may
not even matter (and may not _all_ come from a place of gender bias, but are
now prone to being categorized that way). This then results in us wasting our
time being affected by/thinking about/dwelling on those things rather than a)
actually growing in our chosen field and b) focusing on more _serious_ gender
issues that may be a little bit more concrete than "This guy was rude to me,
obviously it's because I'm woman and not because he's an asshole to
everybody."

At the same time I'm not sure if the above is the right viewpoint to have. Is
it better to potentially be blind to actual "microaggressions" or other
"smaller" issues that might build up and keep trudging along in a state of
ignorance, or is it better to not see those things and keep working in a field
you enjoy?

I don't speak about this much because to be honest I don't have the energy,
and prefer to spend my time on making things. This may be bad: one day I too
may have a "MeToo"-esque story of working in tech, and maybe I will suddenly
realize I've been blind this whole time.

~~~
badosu
> _I am not sure that I agree with the entire article, but this part stood out
> to me. I never know how to express this in a way that sounds appropriate,
> but I feel that some of us might be better off if we focused more of our
> energy on actually developing in our chosen field and less on dwelling on
> how sexist everyone says the field is._

For some agendas, exarcebating an issue and exposing a divide between groups
of people is more desirable than solving the issue itself (which is counter-
productive to the agenda )

------
ac2018-02-14
Whenever this comes up, I like to mention this video [0]. The video speaks for
itself, but generally it advances the position that human behavior and
preferences are a distribution, and the distributions for _women_ are in some
cases different from the distributions for _men_ (in the sense that summary
statistics like mean and variance differ), but there is always significant
overlap. The position that men and women are indistinguishable behaviorally
and in their preferences is not taken seriously.

A notable point advanced in the video is that there is a difference in the
summary statistics (not the entire distributions) which indicate men
prioritize _status_ and _family_ different from women (with men more likely to
prioritize _status_ at the expense of _family_ , the opposite of women).
Another notable difference (again in the summary statistics, not the entire
distribution) is that men prefer careers that are _thing_ -centered over
_people_ -centered.

I wish statistics were better understood by the general population.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw)

------
natch
it’s fine and valid to research whether people encounter improper bias in
their careers, which is clearly often the case. But their discussion is
incomplete without at least recognition of another possible partial cause of
gender disparity in tech, the fact that many sexist anti-STEM cues are given
to children at a much earlier stage, way before careers are even on the
horizon. These cues are delivered by parents, teachers, parents of friends,
other adults, and other children. Cues can be as subtle as a wide-eyed look
while reacting to the news that Sally wants to be a programmer, where Joey
gets no such wide eyes for the same news. Any study that overlooks that cause,
in order to focus only on the causes highlighted in recent dramatic episodes,
is an example of the phenomenon mentioned in the title of the book their
chapter appears in: Groupthink.

~~~
bitL
Many girls decide at around age 12 that a better life strategy is for them to
get a husband that will do all the heavy lifting. This obviously worked for
thousands of years and is likely a result of evolution and specialization. I
always admire when I meet an independent woman that rejected this conditioning
but it's very rare :( Maybe there should be a better approach to early-teenage
girls to help them to make a different choice that would not render them
uncompetitive in STEM fields later? 10,000 hours to achieve mastery or
childhood dedication seem to be increasingly more relevant in STEM, similarly
to piano/violin virtuosos.

~~~
mantas
Independent non-family women lead to less children. Thus society as a whole
has motive to lead girls towards this specialization.

~~~
bitL
This could be the culprit - those women, that became independent removed
themselves and their traits from genetic pool due to not having children or
having fewer of them. That might also explain persistence of religions that
emphasize sexual relationships for reproduction only and banning abortions, as
it leads to higher probability of carrying on with one's genotype. So what we
are observing could be some stochastic optimum in some game theory of natural
conditions. A question is if our civilization that could seemingly solve
cutthroat problems of the past leading to brutal competition like food
scarcity will have completely different, stable stochastic optima. I guess we
will see (or generations after us).

~~~
mantas
Indeed. I wonder wether civilisations after reaching certain step sort of goes
into self-destruction mode.

Maybe deep down humans feel that they're at evolutionary dead end and decide
to off themselves as a society? I could easily see why today's western society
(and possibly others as well) may be far from optimal. Yet I'd prefer to try
to fix it.

What is funniest, people advocating for "progress" etc frequently are those
who have no children. Although old good "you're not grown up till you got
kids" outlook is looked down nowadays, I can see why it'd make sense. If you
don't have kids - you don't have skin in the long game. Nor experience what
it's like to play in that mode. I wonder how the world would change if we'd
only allow people with kids to vote and/or participate in politics.

------
jakecopp
I'm sure it starts from before university and careers.

I was lucky enough to take a Mechatronics class (software + electronics) in
high school a couple of years ago (Australia, year 11). One (very talented)
female chose to take the class along with probably 15 males, though physics &
maths seemed about a 50/50 split.

That's an even worse percentage than the engineering faculty at my university,
which at 23% has the highest ratio of women in engineering faculties
nationally.

------
SiempreViernes
> Let’s start with the magnitude of stereotype threat on girls’ and women’s
> mathematics achievement. [...] It should be noted, though, that the largest
> study to date included nearly 1000 children (9-14 years old) and found no
> effects. This latter study is of particular interest, because it included
> adolescents, whereas most other stereotype threat studies were carried out
> with university students.

Well, what was actually tested was if showing girls and boys a video declaring
that girls are bad at math would make them perform worse at a math test right
after[0]:

> Students in the two groups were brought to separate classrooms and watched
> the video that either activated stereotype threat or nullified the
> stereotype and then completed the mathematics test. The testing session took
> approximately 40 min.

> The video shown to the stereotype threat group depicted a scientist telling
> students that recent research “shows that math intelligence levels among
> students do not change as students get older. Students are born with a
> certain amount of natural math ability which does not change.” Students were
> then shown brain imagery and were given a detailed explanation regarding how
> some students are born with better mathematics skills (as indicated by more
> brain activity). In this condition, the students were also told that
> “females have lower levels of this kind of brain activity than males. This
> makes sense because girls often get lower scores on standardized tests
> compared to boys.” These students were also told that the “test that you
> will take today is a very good measure of your natural math ability.”

[0]: An examination of stereotype threat effects on girls’ mathematics
performance. Developmental Psychology Vol. 49, Iss. 10, (Oct 2013): 1886-1897.

~~~
yorwba
The abstract (
[https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1050056](https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1050056) ) says:

 _Stereotype threat has been proposed as 1 potential explanation for the
gender difference in standardized mathematics test performance among high-
performing students. At present, it is not entirely clear how susceptibility
to stereotype threat develops, as empirical evidence for stereotype threat
effects across the school years is inconsistent. In a series of 3 studies,
with a total sample of 931 students, we investigated stereotype threat effects
during childhood and adolescence. Three activation methods were used, ranging
from implicit to explicit._ Across studies, we found no evidence that the
mathematics performance of school-age girls was impacted by stereotype threat.
_In 2 of the studies, there were gender differences on the mathematics
assessment regardless of whether stereotype threat was activated. Potential
reasons for these findings are discussed, including the possibility that
stereotype threat effects only occur in very specific circumstances or that
they are in fact occurring all the time. We also address the possibility that
the literature regarding stereotype threat in children is subject to
publication bias._

Did you read a different paper, or do you disagree with the author's own
abstract?

------
jancsika
> Many academics in the modern world seem obsessed with the sex difference in
> engagement with science, technology, mathematics, and engineering (STEM)
> fields. Or rather they are obsessed with the fact that there are more men
> than women in some of these fields. There is particular concern about the
> lack of women in prestigious STEM fields, such as Ph.D.-level faculty
> positions, but surprisingly there is no concern about the under-
> representation of women in lower-level technical jobs, such as car mechanics
> or plumbing.

Obsessed as in "doing science on socially relevant topics?"

> These differences are socially important because these tend to be
> prestigious occupations, and practically important because the different
> numbers of men and women in these fields contribute, in part, to the sex
> difference in earnings.1

So... "doing science on relevant topics."

Why misrepresent that as an "obsession?"

~~~
alexandercrohde
I think you're making a fair point, that there's a value judgment going on
there.

But I also think it's a fair question why gender differences are such a huge
focus right now, as compared to say class problems (MOST Americans don't have
$500 in savings [1]), or environmental problems (Men's sperm counts have gone
down by half in the last 30 years [2]).

Obviously these aren't mutually exclusive, but there is a case to be made that
the amount of energy/money going into this problem isn't proportional to its
severity.

1\. [http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/12/pf/americans-lack-of-
savings...](http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/12/pf/americans-lack-of-
savings/index.html) 2\. [https://www.npr.org/2017/07/31/539517210/sperm-
counts-plumme...](https://www.npr.org/2017/07/31/539517210/sperm-counts-
plummet-in-western-men-study-finds)

------
cosmic_ape
People talk about research involving indicators such as "ability" and social
factors. But have anyone _asked_ the boys and girls before college, or before
starting a graduate degree why and how they make their choices? It seems to me
that doing it on scale, like 1000 participants, in a given fixed country,
would clear the picture.

In a way, they are voting with their choices, and all we need is a focus
group.

~~~
anon12345690
From the article:

"It should be noted, though, that the largest study to date included nearly
1000 children (9-14 years old) and found no effects.9 This latter study is of
particular interest, because it included adolescents, whereas most other
stereotype threat studies were carried out with university students. If
stereotype threat discourages girls from pursuing math-intensive STEM
coursework and careers, its effect should be evident in high-school. The fact
that a large and well-designed study could not find any effect, in our
opinion, suggests either the effect does not exist or it is unmeasurably
small."

~~~
cosmic_ape
Yes, but I'm not interested in works where researchers are trying to validate
a hypothesis like "stereotype threat discourages girls from pursuing math-
intensive STEM coursework and careers". I'm asking about what these
adolescents are actually saying. Raw answers, perhaps in two paragraphs, to a
simple question of how they think they would choose.

edit: and then of course, such dataset should be anonymized and made public,
so anyone could see what we are talking about.

------
strangeloops85
I find the notion that this topic is NOT being discussed and being suppressed
somewhat hilarious. Find me a single women in STEM who has not read or heard
_extensively_ about the idea that men are biologically predisposed to be
better than women at 'abstract reasoning' etc. Historically, the notion that
women might be just as capable at men at technical disciplines is what's NEW!
I personally know of at least a dozen gifted young women scientists at the
very best institutions in the world quitting the field because of advisors and
others explicitly belittling them based on their gender. While these are
anecdotes, they're representative for the question of who becomes faculty in
STEM since that's my world: These were people who were identified from a young
age as being likely to be future faculty in the sciences, performed off-the-
charts well on every metric you can think of, publishing papers in journals in
undergrad, and you know what? They heard this discussion ad nauseam, and in
combination with the random sexism thrown their way, decided to bail (as
frankly I would have in their shoes).

A related read that I found quite illuminating:
[http://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-
content/uploads/2017/05...](http://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-
content/uploads/2017/05/Kitrosser.pdf)

(I run in fairly left-leaning liberal circles and you know what I hear about?
NOT actually being PC (whatever that is -- define it, I dare you) but people
complaining about something being PC. This has been going on since the year
2000 so much that I'm pretty sure jokes about something being PC are PC, while
actually being PC is not PC..)

------
andrepd
I wish this article spent more time on substance and facts and less time on
expounding their very obvious ideology.

------
dlwdlw
I'd say that in general, due to cultural expectations, men are better at
anything that requires a domination mindset. Winning in zero-sum games.

The non-domination mindset focuses on non zero-sum win win results. This
requires creating something out of nothing. An example is relationships. There
is nothing directly measurable or improveable, but meaning is can still be
derived purely through reorganization of actors and the interfaces between
actors.

The degenerate win-win situation is when both actors win due to the loss if a
third party. A wealthy country can have win-win between all sorts of actors as
long as the negative consequences can be outsourced.

This implies that all existing win-win methodologies are probably corrupt in
some way because there are very few people who expand their bubble of humanity
recognition to all humans. Whether it's a different country or a different
ideology, the tendency to dehumanize is trigger-happy.

I'd say that society creates two mindsets. One geared to winning. The other to
living. Culture specializes these two mindsets into 2 groups. The male/female
divide being one that matches fairly well due to physical difference.

This isn't the case now since mentally there is no large difference. At least
in potential.

To focus nowadays though is too much on having the "living" mindset learn how
to win. Instead it should focus on the winning mindset learning how to live.

------
trextrex
On one hand, the author takes a lot of effort (with a lot of references) to
explain that stereotype threat, implicit bias, etc. may only be a small
contributor to the unequal representation of women in STEM.

But, on the other hand, his counterargument for the existence of other
potential factors seems to me to be quite weak and lacking the same rigor. The
existence of "basic sex differences" is not discussed in detail, with only a
couple of references. And a lot of his counterargument seems to be based on a
few example countries with high gender equality rankings and low STEM
participation.

Is there any validation that these gender equality rankings are a useful
indicator of gender equality? What about factors that surface only after
school/college in these countries? What about network effects in various
fields?

Not that I'm saying such factors do exist. But the author makes a somewhat
strong (IMO) argument against stereotype threat, implicit bias etc. and a very
weak argument for the existence of other factors.

------
rphlx
> publication bias – the tendency for positive but not negative results to be
> published

Many years ago Feynman expressed concern and regret about the harm that causes
to experimental _physics_. One can imagine it being a far bigger issue in some
of the social sciences, where there is nothing nearly as consistently
apolitical as Nature to gradually separate reality from comforting delusion.

------
imartin2k
It’s important to investigate this topic from various perspectives, and the
text contains a couple of important points (which of course are not new to
anyone who’s been following this debate).

However, right at the beginning, this is really a bad argument: “There is
particular concern about the lack of women in prestigious STEM fields, such as
Ph.D.-level faculty positions, but surprisingly there is no concern about the
under-representation of women in lower-level technical jobs, such as car
mechanics or plumbing.”

This can hardly be surprising to the authors. People in lower-level technical
jobs don’t have as much power over society at large as those in high-level
positions. Thus gender imbalances there don’t have the same supposed impact
and perpetuating effect on structural imbalances as those in high-level fields
(an example: the recent study about facial recognition being less accurate on
female faces). Thus they are not considered as harmful in the grand scheme of
things.

Edit: In other words: no matter where one stands in the debate about the
reasons for gender imbalance in STEM, it is totally reasonable not to be too
concerned about imbalances among plumbers or car mechanics, because this
imbalance does have less consequences. It doesn’t matter for any other aspect
in life whether a woman or man fixes the car, but it matters who creates the
algorithms that control everyone’s lives.

~~~
JorgeGT
> Thus gender imbalances [in lower-level technical jobs] don’t have the same
> supposed impact and perpetuating effect on structural imbalances as those in
> high-level fields .

Others have commented in this thread how gender-biased attitudes towards
engineering fields are present even in young children. There's an obvious
connection between this and the fact that when you're a child most of the
adults you met in your everyday life practicing technical jobs (plumbers,
cable technicians, car mechanics) are male. On the other hand, children see
how their pre- and middle- school teachers are mostly female. Thus, children
learn by observation that technical job => male.

Yes, neither car mechanics nor pre-school teachers have prestigious, 6-figure
salary, PhD level positions, and yet they have a big impact in the perception
of gender bias in adult labor when children are growing up and unconsciously
cementing their views of the world.

I believe that a big step to close the gender gap in engineering would be
young girls watching the super cool woman in the car shop expertly fixing
daddy's car.

~~~
mantas
Or cool dude teaching them at school. More men at education -> more positions
in tech for women. As well as more women looking for these positions.

Can't wait for the next campaign to make men 50:50 in kindergardens and
schools!

~~~
kirillkh
It's when you talk about young men in kinder gardens that you realize how
ridiculous this whole discussion truly is. There will never be 50:50 young men
to young women in kinder gardens. Not even 20:80. That much is obvious.

Most young men do not like to be with children. Most young women do not like
working in car repair. While none of these claims are sufficiently
substantiated in research, if the first can be true, then surely the second
one can be, as well?

~~~
mantas
IMO the only reason is that IT looks relatively clean and easy job for nice
money.

Although after working in the field for over a decade, I don't really think
that's true. While it's clean physically, mentally it's totally different
story. Personally I'm on the line if I want to keep doing what I love or if I
switch to something more sane.

------
peterwwillis
Why does this article keep conflating gender and sex? As supposed academics,
they know there's multiple of both, and they don't always coincide - right?

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Humans have male or female genitalia (outside of some rare cases) and gender
corresponds to what sex organs you have, no? So there are two of each, right?

~~~
peterwwillis
No, not really.

Gender corresponds to the societal and cultural difference between the sexes,
as opposed to the biological, and is socially constructed [4]. Gender is part
of what changes how we act and think, both as normal psychological and
behavioral processes, and in more inherent ways as determined by some studies
[3]. It commonly is assigned based on sex, but in many cases, some people
innately feel that their gender is different than the one assigned to them.

In biological terms, sex may be determined by a number of factors present at
birth, including the number and type of sex chromosomes, the type of gonads
(ovaries or testicles), the sex hormones, the internal reproductive anatomy
(such as the uterus in females), and the external genitalia. People whose
characteristics are not either all typically male or all typically female at
birth are intersex. [1]

There are many different conditions in which a person's sex organs may not
match up with levels of hormones in their body, primary or secondary sex
characteristics[2], or someone's internalized gender identity. It's important
to note that these are not deformities, but simply conditions that different
people are born with. Doctors around the world have for centuries actually
been surgically intervening and modifying the sex organs of babies to fit the
surgeon's or parents' expectations, which is now considered a human rights
violation and widely condemned by the international community [5].

So some people are born with one set of chromosomes, and/or one set of
genitalia that may not be typical, yet exhibit some or all of the other
characteristics and thoughts of someone with a different set. Their gender may
not correspond to their sex, or sex organs.

Hence, it is better to refer to _gender differences_ than _sex differences_
when talking about the roles of people in society. Unless we're specifically
talking about making babies, and even then it's not totally simple.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virilization)
[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_differentiation_in_huma...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_differentiation_in_humans#Psychological_and_behavioral_differentiation)
[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction)
[5]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_assignment#Controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_assignment#Controversy)

------
edna314
I don't get it. Why is equality of outcome not a desirable goal, especially in
science and technology? These authors only try to disprove theories which
potentially explain the inequality and then conclude that there is no
injustice. This is logically flawed in my opinion. In order to justify the
inequality they would need to come up with a plausible theory why the
inequality is inevitable and then support it with sound facts. Otherwise
social pressure from "feminists" is well justified.

~~~
biofox
I am completely committed to removing biases and discrimination that stand in
the way of competent people, but I find the idea of equality of outcome _for
its own sake_ to be deeply troubling. It moves the discussion away from
systemic biases, and to an artificial metric that has little relation.

A simple example of why equality of outcome might be undesirable is this:
people don't like doing jobs they find unfulfilling.

Even though I admire the nursing profession, I have absolutely no desire to
become a nurse. If nursing were the highest paid profession, it still wouldn't
interest me -- because I get my kicks out of playing with ideas and building
things.

In my case, it has nothing to do with ability, or IQ, or emotional
intelligence.

Should nursing training and culture be manipulated to be more appealing to
people like me? I would only want that if it were beneficial for the nursing
profession itself.

It doesn't matter that people with my temperamental make-up are under-
represented, because there are plenty of other people who are drawn to
nursing.

Where there are systemic problems that hinder women / minorities who want to
excel in tech, focus on those, instead of an artificial number.

~~~
edna314
> idea of equality of outcome for its own sake

It's not for its one sake. It's for peace in the society.

> Should nursing training and culture be manipulated to be more appealing to
> people like me? I would only want that if it were beneficial for the nursing
> profession itself.

Have you tried it? I think it's not really reasonable to assume that humans
are made to do exactly one thing. It's more of a necessary convention to have
a functioning society.

> Where there are systemic problems that hinder women / minorities who want to
> excel in tech, focus on those, instead of an artificial number.

The number is not artificial its reality. One systemic problem is nudging
which is tried to be fixed implementing quotas. The quotas are not meant to
fix the number but the nudging effect.

~~~
biofox
I worded my comment poorly. You're right... the number in not artificial. And
I agree with your point on humans being capable of many things.

I want to live in a society where people can make a living doing things they
enjoy and are good at. My concern is that quotas for outcomes (rather than
things that more directly measure discrimination) might end up achieving the
opposite: on one hand encouraging people into positions that are not a good
fit for them, through external incentives, while at the same time removing
opportunities from others who would prefer them.

Shouldn't measures of workplace satisfaction matter a hell of a lot more than
the number of women on the board?

~~~
edna314
I never argued that quotas are great solution. But, I think once you realize
that a solution to a problem is bad you should look for a different solution
instead of declaring that there is no problem, which seems to be the easy way
out.

------
cousin_it
This is a "culture war" topic, let's prepare for the shitshow in the comments.

I'd like to offer some advice to make things go a bit more smoothly. There's a
widespread view that all beliefs are political, you can't be apolitical, and
anyone arguing for a belief opposing yours must be an enemy. To me, that view
is pretty much a type error. Beliefs are value-neutral. Only _arguments_ for
or against beliefs can be political or not.

More specifically, some arguments are _rational_ (based on evidence) while
other arguments are _political_ (based on who benefits and who loses). You can
be a very civil person, but still reach for political arguments when defending
your beliefs, and thus cause net harm. Or you can be a rude person, but drawn
to arguing based on evidence, and thus cause net benefit. It's up to you.

Now go forth and make a flamewar :-)

~~~
jabot
As a counter-point: People can hold beliefs because they have certain
consequences. Simple example: "all people are created equal". This is a belief
that is (probably) frequently held because it has assumed beneficial
consequences for society.

So if people choose to believe in something because that has certain
consequences - then a belief can be political.

EDIT: To expand on this a little... It seems to me that you divorce a belief
itself from its consequences. As there are a lot of beliefs that have
immediate and direct political and social consequences, i think that this
separation is questionable.

If you have a belief, you probably will act on that belief. Having a belief
and _not_ acting on it _at all_ seems rather useless and abstract to me. I'm
not saying that this doesn't happen, but in general, if some person has a
belief, he (or she) will act on that belief.

So, to be blunt: for some beliefs, having them is a political act.

~~~
cousin_it
Yes, beliefs are chosen for consequences. And the optimal way to choose a
belief based on consequences is to choose the truth.

For example, my decision whether to take an umbrella today must be based on my
honest best guess whether it'll rain today (and the relative utilities of
various outcomes). If I shift my best guess one inch away from what's
warranted by evidence, to obey social pressure or something, then acting-as-if
the new belief was true will predictably lead to lower expected utility for
me. That holds always, no matter how controversial the belief.

When social pressure is weak, it mostly makes people lie about their beliefs,
while still acting-as-if their best guess was true. When social pressure gets
strong, people start acting-as-if false things were true, and get lower
utility. No amount of pressure can change the fact that actions based on
accurate beliefs lead to higher expected utility. That's why I'm not a fan of
social pressure on beliefs. For both individuals and societies, the best
consequences are achieved by believing what is true.

~~~
jabot
You are right with your juxtaposition of belief and truth.

Two minor points:

1) What is truth? How do you know whether something is true? By perceiving it?
Is your perception not influenced by belief?

I'm not saying that we cannot know truth, ever. But we have to keep in mind we
might be wrong, too...

2) Believing in something might _make_ it become true. Or, to put it
differently: Belief may lead to actions which change reality - essentially a
self-fulfilling prophecy.

~~~
cousin_it
Yeah, agreed on both points.

------
tome
Does HN have the equivalent of shadow banning for stories? This story is on
the second page but has many more votes than front page stories that were
posted at the same time.

~~~
detaro
Flagging affects ranking (quite strongly), which is what I would assume in
this case, as do other things like vote-to-comment ratio.

~~~
Slansitartop
The mods can also manually down-weight and up-weight stories, independent of
any user flagging. Some guy did an analysis some months back:

[https://drewdevault.com/2017/09/13/Analyzing-
HN.html](https://drewdevault.com/2017/09/13/Analyzing-HN.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15507821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15507821)

------
skywhopper
This is a very poor article, masquerading as a scientific paper, but published
in a political publication. The authors pick a few jargon-heavy effects, claim
there's no evidence for those effects, and dismiss the entire argument, and
fall back on the lazy "boys like things, girls like people" explanation, and
is laced throughout with accusations of politically based dishonesty in
opposing views. In other words, it's no scientific paper, but a political
polemic.

Whether or not these few specific effects they claim to have debunked are real
or not, to explain the gaps, you have to go far beyond a few narrow
sociological effects. There's a self-reinforcing culture of same-hiring-same
that glorifies algorithmic intuition as the end-all be-all of software
development. There are cultural and fashion trends in the social media
landscape that reinforce what's appropriate to be interested in based on your
self-identity. The authors claim that gendered interest in CS and the like has
remained "stubbornly low" because "women prefer working with people", ignoring
huge evidence that even as CS has become far more human-centered and
collaborative since the 80s, the numbers of women declaring it as a major have
plummeted.

~~~
bloak
It explicitly calls itself an "essay".

------
pwinnski
I read "obsessed" and "surprisingly" (for something which surprises me exactly
zero) and "intimidating" and I keep reading, even though literally the first
sentence has revealed a pretty strong bias. Then I read that "there should be
gender equity" is "an extreme agenda," and I finally roll my eyes.

I did keep reading, and I find that I do agree somewhat with their conclusion,
but I wonder if they're aware of how ridiculous their framing is.

Of the many points I found objectionable, I'll focus on only one, the most
egregious silliness:

It is neither "surprising" nor "curious" that "there is no concern about the
under-representation of women in lower-level technical jobs, such as car
mechanics or plumbing." Two paragraphs later they go on to spell out why it
should be completely unsurprising: "the different numbers of men and women in
these fields contribute, in part, to the sex difference in earnings."

If there's a problem with both A and B, and B generally pays 10x what A pays,
I'm going to focus on the problem with B.

Duh.

------
xt00
I think people will always be scared of losing their job or their way of life
changing.. so coming up with reasons why somebody who is different from you is
somehow not as good at what you do, is a comforting path to go down for many
people. It will be a battle between people that don't want things to change
and the people who want to see things change. I do think that when anybody
says "hey ya know you should just be happy about more women or minorities or
whatever being helped to get into your field, or "you can't complain you've
had a bunch of advantages to get where you are.." I do think that causes a
bunch of push-back from people who do have a reasonable basis to say that
whatever advantage they may have had may also have been tiny or in their case
non-existent or whatever. So I do hope the narrative does eventually shift
toward something more constructive like saying lets support women and
minorities getting into the STEM area, but should also help to remove from the
discourse statements that undermine the hard work that the men did to get into
these challenging fields. If somebody makes a statement like "and you look at
this math department and they are all men.. clearly something is going on.."
that is implying that those men don't deserve to be there, which obviously
creates a very negative situation for everybody involved both the men and the
women seeking to be in those fields that historically have large percentages
of men.

~~~
kirillkh
Not sure what all of this has to do with the linked article, which discusses
purely the scientific merit of claims of bias in STEM.

------
jankotek
From my experience location dependence is the greatest obstacle for women to
join high earning STEM jobs. With paygap women find it more difficult to live
in expensive cities. Also remote work allows more life balance for care givers
(who are mostly women).

It should be seen as sexism, if company does not offer remote jobs.

~~~
OscarCunningham
Your first two sentences seem like a circular argument. Women can't get the
high paying jobs because they don't live in the right places, they can't live
in the right places because they can't get the high paying jobs.

~~~
jankotek
Not really. If woman gets high paying job, she makes less money for the same
work.

Also women have more expenses than men (ping tax, daycare...). Big cities are
unaffordable even at the same salary.

~~~
gambiting
>>Also women have more expenses than men (ping tax, daycare...).

What's ping tax?

How is daycare more expensive for women? Surely, a man raising a child on
their own will pay exactly the same amount of money for daycare? In a _normal_
case, where partners raise children together, they surely pay for daycare from
a shared budget, not just from the woman's salary(that would be just bizarre).

>> If woman gets high paying job, she makes less money for the same work.

The counter argument to this is that if this was true, companies would only
hire women, since apparently they do _the same work_ for less money!

~~~
psyc
"Pink tax": the idea that goods marketed to women are priced higher than
equivalents marketed to men.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=pink+tax](https://www.google.com/search?q=pink+tax)

~~~
gambiting
Same thing works the other way around but I don't know if it has a name. I
frequently see things like yoghurt/juice or shampoo/antiperspirant/shaving
accessories to be priced higher if they are branded "for men". You can
literally buy the same thing in pink colour and it's cheaper.

The only case where I agree is that stupidly, UK government applies extra tax
to sanitary items for women, while cosmetics for men do not have such tax.
That is stupid, but that's a literal tax chosen by the government.

~~~
mantas
Mind to give a link for that UK extra tax? I wonder how it's worded :)

~~~
gambiting
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampon_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampon_tax)

It's just normal VAT, the issue is that many "necessary" products don't have
VAT on them, but tampons or pads do, even though they are a biological
necessity.

~~~
xeeeeeeeeeeenu
Toilet paper is often taxed too, but of course it doesn't fit the narrative.

~~~
gambiting
You can use a bidet instead and never buy any toilet paper. If you are a woman
you need to buy some sanitary products at least once a month.

~~~
mantas
It's more like men bodies have more robust design, thus they get away with
less items.

It's like women-day-off when they're on their period. On one hand, it'd be
nice and makes sense. On the other hand, that sex-based discrimination.

Meanwhile over there we got flat VAT for everything. No tampon tax issues! :)
Paying extra 21% for basic food sucks though.

