
Breaking News:  Girls don't become engineers because they don't want to - aggieben
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/18/the_freedom_to_say_no/?page=full
======
DaniFong
There may be a rock unturned here.

Neither women nor men have anything close to perfect information about what
their careers might be like down years of a prospective path. Many career
decisions are influenced by the crudest of stereotypes. If the stars of the
computing world (who barely receive much press anyway) seem to be mostly
introverted men, and if those already into computers seem lacking in either
social grace or extraversion, then who's to blame them for choosing careers
which would appear to help them be more socially engaged.

So women flock to fields like nursing, and teaching. Who told them that both
operate in an often stiflingly apathetic bureaucracy? Of computers and
engineering, they've in many cases never had the joy of being able to make
something work on their own. For all they know, cooking is more creative. They
have no idea how exciting the startup world is, how gratifying to work on
something new, how empowering it feels to have the wind of social benefit at
your back, how freeing it is to be able to choose your work to be most
important, as opposed to being most externally justifiable.

Extraverted women _and_ men have shied away from computers and related fields
for a long time. But perhaps it's not so much a function of the nature of our
field. Perhaps we just have bad press.

~~~
timr
It's not just bad press; engineers (of any stripe) are often frighteningly
socially incompetent. In my experience, this is true far more often than for
lawyers or medical doctors.

It's also a kind of stereotype to say that programming is about creation and
empowerment; the existence of this forum (and most of what pg writes) seems to
me a reaction to the utterly dismal, uncreative state of most programming
jobs. So it's not really fair to say that people flock to other fields based
on misinformation. Most computer-related jobs really do suck.

~~~
DaniFong
Perhaps I was insufficiently specific. The problem isn't that the conception
of the median programming job is wrong. The problem is that technical people
of both genders are often completely unaware of the existence of better jobs.
Sometimes, when people talk of career prospects of becoming a programmer, they
say it with such disdain that they might as well be talking about becoming a
_drone_.

~~~
aswanson
_they say it with such disdain that they might as well be talking about
becoming a drone_

Not without good cause. Startups aside, the vast majority of programmers and
engineers spend their careers implementing other people's ideas. Outliers that
start their own companies are very rare. In law and medicine, it seems that
running a startup (your own pratice) is the expected progression of a
successful career. They are _groomed_ to expect it. The typical tech/science
track seems to be tailored to produce....drones. Judge them by their fruits.

~~~
timr
Well said. Even in academic science, the presumption is that you will one day
lead your own research group (however unlikely that may be)...and academia is
not known for progressive organizational thinking.

Closer to your example: my dentist is in his mid-20s, and already owns a half
share in two established practices. How many programmers own a half share in
their own business at 25?

~~~
aswanson
_How many programmers own a half share in their own business at 25?_ None.

I swear if none of my startups work out I will count my engineering degrees a
complete waste of time. I found only 2 or three classes moderately
interesting, and from a moneymaking standpoint, the brainpower required to
make it through the curriculum versus the salary is a joke. I studied EE and
use next to none of it.

I could have learned to code on my own, and even studied electronics in my own
time like I did as a kid, and still ended up in cubicle land, or earned a
professional degree to fall back on (medicine, law) probably having a better
time in the process. Sometimes you have to separate business and pleasure.

~~~
reynolds
_How many programmers own a half share in their own business at 25? None._

I must be the only one then. We also haven't taken any funding and are
profitable.

~~~
aswanson
I answered that question wrong. I should have stated "none that I know." But
at any rate, I can rattle off far more lawyers, doctors, dentists, and for
that matter CPA's that own businesses than programmers.

------
menloparkbum
Women are more sensible than men. Unless you start a successful startup, or
are in the top 1% of engineers, having a typical engineering job is pretty
lame. Statistically you will make more money with less effort by choosing a
medical or legal related field. Greenspun said it best here:

<http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science>

This article is about science careers. Just switch a few things in his career
path and it is the same argument for engineering careers.

~~~
tx
Typical engineering job is pretty lame? That's very American, if you ask me,
because you're measuring everything around youself in dollars. I've become an
engineer because I _create_ things: every day something starts spinning,
cranking, rotating and pumping because I build it, while 100% of lawyers
(without exceptions) are useless parasites eating off our own deficiencies.

Having an average engineering job isn't lame, your (and Greenspun's) line of
thinking _IS_ lame. In fact, it's pretty disgusting. That also explains why
there aren't many women in the field: generalizing, they're simply more
bottom-line oriented, as numerous studies have proven: they don't spend 6
years to get a Master's and build robots in a garage in their spare time for
free, instead they'll "wipe ass" overtime in a nearest hospital with an
associate degree, because overtime pays double rate.

------
etal
Consider the following analogy:

    
    
      psychology researchers : gender differences :: moths : flame
    

Rosalind Chait Barnett at the bottom of the article has it right.
Investigating gender differences is the first quest every psych grad student
embarks on, and 19 times out of 20, they're disappointed to find nothing
significant. (The other 1/20 is the false positive that comes with 95%
confidence testing.) It bothers me that this article pursues so many
hypotheses at once -- planning for career flexibility; language aptitude;
discrimination; women fulfilled through biology, men through machines. None of
them is a satisfactory answer because in a properly controlled gender-
differences experiment, having filtered out the noise, there's no signal left.

On the surface, the differences are there, but it's not due to anything
innate. The East-versus-West comparison in the article should make that
obvious. (The article claims it's because we're more "free".) It's cultural.
Duh. I don't see anything wrong with that, either; it doesn't mean there
should be a 50:50 gender split in every field. But looking for the explanation
in biology is a dead end that enough researchers have run into already.

~~~
astine
If I recall, the article didn't mention any East-West differences, it
mentioned GDP differences.

"The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which
offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice,
have the greatest gender split in careers. In countries with less economic
opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, she writes, the
number of women in physics is as high as 30 to 35 percent, versus 5 percent in
Canada, Japan, and Germany."

Japan is listed as one of the countries where women don't don't pursue IT
carriers. The common trait is economic, not social.

I think that we should deal with people on an individual basis and not a group
basis. It does not matter why people choose the careers that they do, what
matters is that they are happy where they are. If you find that a bunch of
women are unhappy because they didn't choose or were denied a career in IT,
then you have a cause. If you find a bunch of women who are unhappy because a
bunch of other women didn't choose careers in IT, then you have a bunch of
busybodies that don't have my sympathy.

~~~
etal
You're right, I missed Japan in the other group. I'm always suspicious of
industrialized-vs-developing groupings because the intersection of
industrialized and Western is so large. What do the numbers look like in Latin
America, for instance? And Russia seems to have a lot of respect for
scientists, in particular.

Basically, the example countries look cherry-picked, where those researchers
lined up the percentages of women in physics by country, then generalized
about the high and low ends of the scale, rather than starting with a proper
hypothesis and testing it.

~~~
astine
It's totally possible that the countries are cherry picked.

Still, my own personal experience corroborates the theory. Examining just
folks that I know, women seem to be more attuned to social pressures than do
men. If this were even partly true of whole species, then it would more than
explain the gap.

Still, as you said elsewhere, differences within the sexes are by all measures
more significant than differences between the sexes. With this being the case,
we could have a great deal of difficulty isolating specific differences and
yet still have them exist subtly.

~~~
timr
The countries weren't cherry-picked for _this_ analysis -- the article says
that they were data sets published in Science for different purposes.

------
sealedidentity
Well it boils down to the simplest of things: Boys generally are interested in
things while girls are interested in relationships and people. That explains
why there are more guys as engineers than girls. It's not a question of
smartness, more of interest and personality.

~~~
silencio
Stop generalizing. I hate people, I am antisocial until I need to be nice
(networking?), I'm with friends, or I'm drunk. Relationships I can stand
because I really like cuddling and sex.

I also know some guys who are the complete opposite, and it's sort of amusing
because of how much I had to deal with as a kid for being what I am just
because I was a different gender and I didn't meet society's stereotypical
views on it.

~~~
modoc
The whole point of statistical trends is that they ARE generalizations. Yes,
you can find individual cases which buck the trend, but across a large sample
group, these are the tendencies...

How could you talk about gender roles and differences without generalizing? Or
really talk about any demographic larger than a handful of people? Just
because it's a generalization, doesn't mean it's not a useful piece of
information.

~~~
silencio
My problem with discussing gender differences in engineering is that there
isn't enough research into it. It can be a useful piece of information in the
correct context, but I didn't believe the above was.

There are women in IT who are interested in people and relationships and they
are still engineers. There are women who hate people and are engineers. There
are men....you get the idea.

------
krschultz
From my experience not a large percentage of the guys who sign up for
engineering programs actually WANT to become engineers. It sounds like a
socially acceptable major, and sure maybe they like mechanical things, but a
huge number of the guys washed out from mechanical engineering, (we started
with 140, we are down to 80, of the 80 there are 15 girls, we started with 17
girls, the rest of the wash outs were guys). I think few girls go into
engineering as a default major, so if they are there they really want to be
there. In the end, the only ones who can get through it are those who really
want to be there, so why encourage people who aren't committed?

------
Tichy
Girls always have a plan B: get pregnant and stop working altogether. Just ask
some random female students whether income perspectives had any bearings on
their choice of profession. More often than not, the answer is no (they might
not even know what salary they can expect). It would make sense if men thought
about that some more (since families need money), so they might tend to pick
the more prospective subjects.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Attention, Projectileboy: upthread, you said

 _I, too, have never felt or seen bias against women in IT, once we're all
adults._

I hope you enjoyed that while it lasted.

~~~
Tichy
So I displayed bias against women in IT how exactly? Also, is bias always
wrong? Would it be biased to say "women tend to have boobs"?

~~~
llimllib
You presented an irrelevant argument which is based on imagined evidence;
therefore it's easy to assume that bias underlies the argument. Whether it
does or not, I won't judge.

~~~
Tichy
What makes you think it is irrelevant? It's true that I didn't conduct and
publish a study for this though.

But if the article says "girls just do what they like", I feel my argument is
relevant, because it could explain why they can do what they like.

------
apstuff
Enrollment by young Americans, both boys and girls, is dropping in all fields
of engineering. The nation doesn't need that many hedge fund managers does it?

~~~
aggieben
I'm not so sure a simple drop in enrollment is such a bad thing. I recently
taught a couple of graduate level courses in a nearby CS department, and I can
tell you that they should "un-enroll" about half of their graduate students,
and it would vastly improve the quality of the department almost overnight. (I
can only speak to the graduate program - I haven't been in much contact with
undergrads). The U.S. will never graduate as many "engineers" as China and
India, and we shouldn't try.

We should graduate the _best_ engineers and scientists.

~~~
nostrademons
Chances are, "un-enrolling" about half the graduate students would improve a
department no matter how big it is. Sturgeon's Law - "90% of everything is
crap".

But if you have a bigger pool to draw from, the 10% that's not crap will
amount to more engineers. And the 0.01% that's really spectacular will be
_more_ spectacular. That's the way a bell-curve works - if you raise the area
under the curve, the tips spread out as well.

There're a _lot_ of smart people in finance whose talents are being wasted
making sure that the market reflects all information within microseconds
instead of within minutes. If the economic incentives were such that they
started companies or did basic research instead, I bet you'd see quite a few
more breakthroughs.

~~~
cdr
Un-enrolling the /bottom/ 50% would probably improve a department, sure. But
how do you get that bottom 50% without enrolling all of those students in the
first place?

Your second point assumes that the relative percentage of "not crap" remains
constant as enrollment increases, which is highly dubious.

And there's a lot of smart people being wasted at Google and Microsoft, too.

------
scott_s
The most important sentence from the article, emphasis mine: "The researchers
are not suggesting that sexism and cultural pressures on women don't play a
role, and _they don't yet know why women choose the way they do."_

------
Xichekolas
> Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a
> perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the
> gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When
> it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of
> women - highly qualified for the work - stay out of those careers because
> they would simply rather do something else.

Am I the only one not startled by this? My reasoning was as follows... I can
think of a ton of jobs that are traditionally dominated by females (elementary
school teacher, housekeepers, talk-show hosts) that I happen to not want to
do. It has nothing to do with me being male or some perceived descrimination
against me by the females in the field. I just don't have any interest in
being those things.

I would assume the same thing holds true for a female and some professions
that _just happen_ to be historically dominated by males. I mean, some of the
disparity probably is because of gender-based slight, but it seems rational to
expect that some jobs just aren't interesting enough to attract people in
droves of equal and politically correct gender ratios.

> The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom,
> which offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job
> choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. In countries with less
> economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, she
> writes, the number of women in physics is as high as 30 to 35 percent,
> versus 5 percent in Canada, Japan, and Germany.

My guess is this is because they have the option to choose careers, rather
than being forced to accept whatever pays well and is safe.

> Benbow and Lubinski, at Vanderbilt, found that high-achieving women often
> pick their careers based on the idea that they'll eventually take time off,
> and thus avoid fields in which that absence will exact a larger penalty. In
> humanities or philosophy, for instance, taking a year or two off won't
> affect one's skill set very much. But in quickly evolving technical fields,
> a similar sabbatical can be a huge career setback.

I have seen this in talking with my girlfriend about her career goals. She is
a chemical engineer, and often fears that taking time off to raise kids will
doom her career.

------
mamama
These pointless "women in computer science" articles really make my trigger
finger itchy.

------
strlen
Two reasons: FUD and the fact that women are more rational (as someone said
"more sensible"). Purely statistically speaking, you are more likely to do
work that's both interesting and well paid if you go into medicine versus
software engineering.

Medicine takes much longer and steeper learning curve, but once you climb that
an average job requiring an MD is more interesting than an average job
requiring a BS in CS _and_ pays better (while if you fail to get an MD, an
average job requiring a BS/MS in Bio-Chemistry is _at least_ as interesting
and still decently paying).

The FUD part is pretty self explanatory: introversion doesn't mean lack of
social skills (the latter are learned and eventually most geeks do end up
learning them one way or another) and given the amount of team work involved
in any real engineering projects there are plenty opportunities for extroverts
to re-charge.

The way to encourage women to go into these fields is to provide dual degree
programs (no opportunity cost for seeking a CS degree and applying to
engineering jobs as an undergraduate) and combating the FUD.

------
undetected
Let me give another perspective. I'm from one of the developing (an optimistic
term) countries mentioned.

While I was still in my home country, I worked in an IT consulting firm. My
boss' boss was female, her boss (a VP) was female. A lot of the other bosses
were female. More than half my teammates were female. 30% female / 70% male
seems awfully low, it was more like 45%-55% female.

The company would occassionally send people to the US. Over time, over a
hundred of us have moved here to the US. So you have a sample of men and women
who are good at math and picked IT while they were in a country with few
economic opportunities, and took them to a nation with financial stability -
the two environments the article mentioned.

What's happened so far? In time, some of the women changed careers. Some went
to medicine, going back to school in order to switch. Some went to completely
non-science fields, like real estate. None of the men have switched careers.

I know some men still dabble in computers in their spare time - open source
projects, linux, etc. None of the women do.

From what I've observed, the article is spot on.

~~~
attack
Small open source projects are a far better measure of this phenomenon. It's
completely unaffected by salary, no one gets paid, completely free of bias,
you have to do everything yourself. And yet the disparity is enormous.

------
helveticaman
Breaking News: it's not necessarily or completely men's fault.

------
projectileboy
Seems a pretty childish analysis... The question is - why do girls "not want
to" by the time they reach age 18?

~~~
rufo
Devil's advocate: What's wrong with them not wanting to?

Assuming there is no discrimination or other judgement going on in the
workplace causing them to choose a different career, and women simply choose
not to enter IT/engineering fields, what's the problem with that?

~~~
projectileboy
There's absolutely nothing wrong with them not wanting to. What's wrong is a
society that for 18 years tells them "you don't want to do _this_ , you want
to do _that_ ".

~~~
yummyfajitas
"Society" is a concept we need to banish from these discussions. "Society"
exists at a higher level of abstraction than what we are discussing.

A particular woman may want babies because women around her said "babies rock,
all women want babies." Was it wrong for her mother to discuss the rewards of
motherhood?

A particular man may like computers because his father told him how cool it is
to bend machines to your will. Was that wrong?

If neither of those acts is wrong, then what is wrong with "society" telling
people stuff?

~~~
silencio
Those two are not wrong, but from personal experience, what's been happening
is too many people telling me that CS is a bad choice based on my gender and
not my interests or anything else. That is wrong.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I've been told by many people that I should play basketball not based on my
abilities (I have terrible eye-hand coordination) but based on my height.

Was that _wrong_ in any moral or normative sense?

I'll grant that the underlying positive belief is incorrect, but what makes
giving out well intentioned (if bad) advice wrong?

------
asnyder
"Women who are mathematically gifted are more likely than men to have strong
verbal abilities as well; men who excel in math, by contrast, don't do nearly
as well in verbal skills."

Hmm, all the men I know that excel in math and science have excellent verbal
abilities. I'd be curious to see their research on this.

~~~
spydez
I excel in math and science but do not have excellent verbal abilities.

There. I ruined your statistic. :P

------
jaaron
What a horribly mangled headline. Why not say, "Girl's don't want to become
engineers?"

------
tlrobinson
Ok, but _why_ don't girls want to become engineers?

------
aswanson
Smart choice, ladies. Should have listened to you.

------
giles_bowkett
Girls who go to all-girls schools do better in math.

If I ever have a daughter I'll send her to an all-girls school. Boys are going
to find her either way, and I'd prefer her "wanting" to do X or Y to be based
on her skills and brains, not peer pressure.

~~~
jimbokun
The point of the article is NOT that boys do better at math. The point is that
girls who DO excel at math choose non-technical (or less technical) careers.
Specifically, careers that involve more human interaction, or at least deal
with living things in some form (biological sciences).

~~~
giles_bowkett
Yes, I know that, and I'm insulted by your misinterpretation. My point still
stands. The article is tautological fluff. "If we explore the most obvious
implications of a known phenomenon, and pad it with numbers, people will know
we were awake, we'll still have jobs, and really foolish people will think
we've discovered something."

------
xlnt
"Don't read too much; no one will want to marry you."

Lost the source but not making this up.

~~~
mamama
I can confirm that you're not making it up.

