The simulation of an academic job search used in this study is not very much like a real academic job search.
This study was well designed, but it is harder to do a faithful blind replication of the hiring process in academia vs the public or private sector because job searches are much rarer, and most of the applicants are known - at least by reputation - by most of the evaluation committee - their future coworkers.
The researchers made a strong effort to obscure the goal of the study, but if you are an academic participating in an artificial candidate search, you are likely to suspect that one of the variables being tested is either sex, race, or both. The experiment where evaluators rated a single candidate addresses this somewhat, but even in that case the participants are almost certain to have known that there was no job search in progress, and very likely to have realized that there was a socially desirable response possible to be given at no cost. By no cost, I mean that this person is not going to show up and take space and resources that could go to your preferred candidate/collaborator.
> Research on actual hiring shows female Ph.D.s are disproportionately less likely to apply for tenure-track positions, but if they do apply, they are more likely to be hired, sometimes by a 2:1 ratio.
I think the society and culture needs to work a bit harder to promote the idea of a girl as a professor, scientist, hacker, math wiz etc. Not just lip service but change the stories, the cartoons, movies, games etc. For too long in popular culture, starting early on girls are just princesses, then then later just a romantic interest side-kick. I noticed with my own daughter, she really wants identify with bad guys in the cartoons because even though they are naughty they have the coolest toys, rule the world and tell their minions what to do. But she finds it hard because the majority of the "cool" roles are taken by boys.
Yes by the time it comes to apply for tenure track positions, girls have already been told verbally and non-verbally many times -- "this is not for you, probably".
I remember in Eastern Europe in primary education, girls and women were more interested in math than boys. I was getting help with calculus homework from them. My high school CS teacher was a professional programmer before and she was an inspiration many girls and to boys alike, including me. She had a large book on Pascal and if we were good we could stay after school and do exercises from it. So I have seen it work in practice -- it is possible to have a culture and attitude where girls see math, science and CS as appealing disciplines.
On the other hand, I think it is worth to acknowledge that maybe there is also an element were women just don't want to do CS or math. Even if they had positive role models. I know we all think tech is super awesome, getting paid to do what we love, implement and develop cool algorithms, etc. But what if sitting in a cubicle inverting binary trees all day, mostly in isolation, doesn't appeal to others, and maybe those other are more likely to be women. Is that controversial to say? I imagine it might be soul crushing for some even if they were promised to get RSUs, options and a large salary.
>I think the society and culture needs to work a bit harder to promote the idea of a girl as a professor, scientist, hacker, math wiz etc
I keep being reminded of Phillip greenspun's quip:
"A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job?"
Like a lot of things he says, it is a cute just-so story, but obscures more than it reveals. Just a few things to try to slot in: differences in participation in "male" professions over short time periods, differences between cultures, differences between STEM and non-STEM higher ed with very similar same economic outcomes.
(Disclaimer: I just found the quote on Google. I don't know much about the author and his writing. And so I don't somehow endorse it or agree with it more just because I pasted the link).
> But what if sitting in a cubicle inverting binary trees all day, mostly in isolation, doesn't appeal to others, and maybe those other are more likely to be women.
It is hard to buy this as the cause when we've seen the percentage of women grow and shrink dramatically over time. Is this work lifestyle so different from software engineering in the 80s when representation in cs programs was far better?
> Is this work lifestyle so different from software engineering in the 80s when representation in cs programs was far better?
Good point. I don't have an answer there. I can think of a few things though:
* Maybe other professions changed and become more appealing so more women found it easier to become doctors or say lawyers. Maybe those women went into STEM before and now with more access to scholarships they could do something else?
* Culture changed. There was a great push in the 50s and 60s for STEM to overcome the Soviets, who were seen as winning the space race. So there were more programs to get children interested in science, and somehow it resulted in girls of that era being more attracted to it. By the 80s they grew up to get jobs so would be contributing to the statistics.
* The new tech companies that grew rapidly had more of a toxic male "brogrammer" culture unwelcome to women, and maybe paradoxically a more traditional places like NASA or IBM where people wore formal attire and pocket protectors also was a place were there was less harassment and more professionalism. As those new "startups" become large tech giants they had failed to pay attention to harassment and behavior of its "ninja rockstar programmers"
* Gaming culture. Maybe computer games started to become more popular. Those were geared more towards boys, as a result more boys got to spend time on computers, at first playing games, then trying to hack games and write their own.
But I imagine women were always underrepresented in STEM and computing and there is no one single factor. Was 80s a "golden age" of STEM for women? What was the percentage difference. How did it compare to representation in CS only vs STEM. I couldn't find good answers, maybe you'd have more luck.
At an academic institute I used to work at they hired a woman whose job was to improve equality for women. One of the specific tasks was finding out why there were fewer women in the institute. She gave a long presentation showing all kinds of statistics and bizarre graphics comparing job adverts to Playstation controllers (which only appeal to men, apparently). The talk concluded with a figure comparing number of women to number of men at each stage in the hiring process. From application, to interview, to hire. The numbers were equal all the way through, with a slight bias towards women, in fact.
Every woman who was at the institute also took advantage of options that were not available to me as a man. There are special grants for women. They can apply for the ones available for me as well.
So really the question for me is why there is such a divide between the science and what people believe. It's simple confirmation bias. If you tell people that they will be at a disadvantage due to a certain characteristic then they will blame every misfortune in their life on that characteristic.
Same goes for the wage gap. We know there is no gap. It's illegal and ridiculous to suggest it exists. But you will always be able to find at least one man who gets paid more than you. As a man I don't think it's becaues of his blue eyes. But women think it's because he's a man, because that's what they already believe.
> The median salary for women working full-time is about 80 percent of men’s.
I don't need to read any further because I've read it all before. Women tend do different jobs to men. Easier, safer, less responsibility and less stress. That's not a wage gap, it's just a different choice of career. Which makes the next statement downright offensive:
> That gap, put in other terms, means women are working for free 10 weeks a year.
But that doesn't take into account responsibility or actual job done at all. Organisations only have a limited number of job titles and at higher levels people are not as expendable. They do their own job.
The only thing that does seem to explain a gap---but a much smaller gap---is that men are more likely to negotiate their salaries.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's an abuse of this site, as stated in the site guidelines and illustrated by the tire fire below. Please don't create HN accounts to break the site rules with.
> We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle.
You seem to only take issue with one side of the "ideological battle", it's almost like you just banned the account because someone said something you didn't like.
If you would really believe what you say, you would not let "gender pay gap" and "women in tech" topics be posted at all.
The key word in your comment is 'seem'. It seems that way not because it's true—we've banned many accounts for abusing HN from the opposite ideological side—but because there's a cognitive bias in such perceptions. People with the opposite ideology have the opposite perception.
People here might be more willing to respond to your question if you didn't refer to a highly researched Washington Post article as a conspiracy theory.
> People here might be more willing to respond to your question if you didn't refer to a highly researched Washington Post article as a conspiracy theory.
People don't have to respond, trying to dodge the question with an appeal to authority proves my point just fine.
Your "highly researched" article doesn't deal with responsibility and seniority(mainly because there is no data for that) and makes funny claims such as "two very similar occupations, janitors (mostly men) and housekeepers (mostly women).", that's the equivalent of me saying "Worpdress development is similar to Enterprise Java Development" and for some reason one pays an order of magnitude more.
You don't understand what a conspiracy theory is. It's when a covert organization covers up a malicious act. You're just using inflated language to describe what's ultimately just a mistaken argument.
If my argument is "mistaken", why are you focusing on the language that I used instead of just disproving my argument?
I would also be interested that if the gender wage gap is real and it is as believers describe it, how would you explain it without going into conspiracy land.
Because your arguments are probably correct. I never claimed otherwise. I took issue with your language. You're contributing to the polarization by using unnecessary, inflammatory, and inaccurate language. That's the problem.
Claiming that across the US women get paid 20% less than men, for doing exactly the same work with exactly the same qualifications with everything aside from genitals being equal is not a conspiracy theory in your opinion? Claiming that society is sexist in that way is not a conspiracy theory?
Even if I grant you that I used harsh language, I take issue with your priorities, I would priorities truth over political correctness.
Are you saying that conspiracy theories are all true?
> I'm not sacrificing truth to point out your mistake.
You are wasting 100% of your effort on arguing semantics instead of engaging with my actual argument, sounds like a tradeoff to me. And no, it's not a mistake, don't know where you got that idea from.
Perhaps the lack of women in STEM is a first world phenomenon. In my third world undergraduate CS class, 10 years ago, there were 40 women and 20 men. I would say it even appeared to me that more women were in college than men.The few courses were I found less women than men were in Mechanical Engineering departments.
This is often repeated but the data is way more noisy than this comment implies.
For example this chart for Asian countries does have Iran on one side and Japan on the other, but it also have Korea way higher than Japan and Cambodia way lower.
In europe Norway has the fewest women in stem and Croatia the highest, but there are a lot of cases where the correlation isn't there. Hungary is very low and Luxembourg is very high. Ireland and Italy are high but Slovenia is low.
Heres some more studies I found interesting. I'm sorry if this list looks biased, its just what I could find. If anyone knows of (statistically sound) contradicting studies, please share!
"Women prefer less risk and less competition, appear to prioritize equality over efficiency and report a greater willingness to share wealth."
https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/gunwpe/0713.html
In Denmark for example, which by all accounts is a first world country, the majority of educated people are actually women[2], and there is absolutely nothing that prevents anyone from any social class or gender to take an education (it's free, heck even payed for), yet we still see women leaning more towards the humanities, social sciences and professions such as lawyer[0], than men. Men predominantly lean towards STEM, but even then it varies.
Take for example the first source[0], which only has a difference of 962 women to 1082 men accepted into the scientific faculty. At DTU[1] it varies more, although anything with Bio, Environment or Medicin in the name will be skewed more towards women.
I guess my point is: why do we insist there is some inherent bias against someone in society, if there is not a 50/50 split (which would in itself be weird)? If given completely free choice, perhaps some people are just disposed to being in interested in different things.
Disclaimer: I should probably say that the above of course only applies to Denmark, and I cannot talk on behalf of the situation in the US.
I think the idea of a (near) 50/50 split is that if there were absolutely no biases or differences then you would see approximately this distribution.
But we don't. We do know there are social biases, and thus these are being scrutinized much more. Certainly there can biological biases, but is is absurd to believe that is the only factor involved. My guess is that there is a whole complicated mess of problems and not an easy one (or even dozens) answer that accounts for these differences.
Why does it matter if the differences are biological, cultural, or both? If women have the option to go into STEM without risking social exclusion(which is arguably the case in most developed countries) yet they choose to do something else, shouldn't that be their choice? Wouldn't these unequal trends naturally result in an environment with equal opportunities among people with different overall desires?
> Why does it matter if the differences are biological, cultural, or both?
> If women have the option to go into STEM without risking SOCIAL (ie: culture) exclusion yet they choose to do something else, shouldn't that be their choice?
I'd say it matters if it is social exclusion. If a bias is caused by biology, then that's fine. But clearly there shouldn't be a cultural bias, because that prevents people from making that choice. I see the problem solved when there are no cultural or political barriers.
There is a big difference between social exclusion and cultural forces. In the 50's, it was nearly impossible for a woman to gain any power. Those who went against the gender norms of the time were ostracized and shunned. Nowadays, while there are cultural norms that guide how the majority of certain groups think, people who go against the norm are tolerated.
That is okay with me. I think it's fine that cultural norms guide women into certain fields and men into another, as long as everyone has the equal opportunity to choose to go against the cultural grain. Which they do.
There tend to be self-reinforcing trends in human behavior. Jobs that are highly gendered frequently stay that way, making it harder for the categorically-challenged to partake for purely social reasons.
So there are two easily identifiable reasons: One, we should want a society more free from constraints on individual self-realization than less[1]. And for those who lean less cuddly, two, it is economically inefficient to exclude market participants on factors unrelated to performance[2].
[1] Well, I think we should want to optimize that; if you disagree, we have a far more fundamental disconnect.
[2] Ironically, this is also an argument people use to claim that sexism and racism in the work place can't exist, in that annoying way some economists do.
> There tend to be self-reinforcing trends in human behavior.
But we also know how quickly human behaviour changes and adapts to new circumstances.
> Jobs that are highly gendered frequently stay that way, making it harder for the categorically-challenged to partake for purely social reasons.
I can think of many jobs where this is true (for either sex), but software engineering doesn't seem to fit in this category. In STEM about 30-40 % of students are female; less at trade schools (=lower educational attainment). About 25 % of the IT workforce is female.
> One, we should want a society more free from constraints on individual self-realization than less.
Absolutely.
> Ironically, this is also an argument people use to claim that sexism and racism in the work place can't exist, in that annoying way some economists do.
I think the classical Friedmann argument was that there is a cost to biasing against competent people. It doesn't really say anything about what people will actually do (like much of economic theory), since they might be (1) not aware of the cost [and indeed it would be difficult to quantify] (2) valuing their *isms above that that cost.
As far as classic economic theory goes, the argument seems to be correct, it's just a poor predictor for what humans will do.
> but software engineering doesn't seem to fit in this category
I was casting a significantly wider net, but you're correct wrt software-related fields. Moreover, women used to be far more prevalent in early-"IT"/operations than today, a shift that happened really quickly - a generation or two, depending on where you like to start counting. Shifts like this (they've happened elsewhere, too) is one massive argument against the "women just don't like math" silliness that always pops up.
> As far as classic economic theory goes, the argument seems to be correct, it's just a poor predictor for what humans will do.
Absolutely agree. That's the general thrust of my point overall.
> One, we should want a society more free from constraints on individual self-realization than less.
I don't think pushing women into a field that they overall don't want to do will help them earn self-realization. How would this work?
> it is economically inefficient to exclude market participants on factors unrelated to performance
The cynical side of me thinks that this is the real reason for the widespread push for diversity. A larger labor pool deleverages some of the highest paid employees in the world, thus increasing profits.
The danger there is in trying to explain a complicated social phenomenon with "it's free, so why wouldn't they do it?"
There's very little suggestion that the reason there aren't more women in tech is because they can't afford it. In reality, it's a thousand tiny factors from a thousand people, none/few of them actively trying to do harm. As an offhand, personal example, my sister isn't in tech because she was told CS "wouldn't be her thing" despite being just as good as any of the boys. Because of that, and similar discouragement, she ended up not going into tech whereas she otherwise _might_ have.
It's all statistical, lots of "maybes", "mights", and "coulds", but it adds up over the population. There may well be dispositions which align primarily along gender bounds, but there's not much indication this is one - but neither is it an organized conspiracy. It's just the sum total of thousands of tiny factors.
Then that would more be a aspect of social expectations, no? Perhaps I've read to much malice into the word "systemic bias", as if people were actively working against someone doing the particular thing there is bias against, where it is more a result of social expectations on what is "proper" for each gender.
Again, only speaking from my Danish perspective, but I've never met anyone thinking STEM of all things would not be fit for females, but you probably would get that reaction if you were to say, as a female, that you wanted to become a plumber or similar hands-on jobs.
---
Slightly going off-topic: Personally, I think the disparity we see, currently, in STEM et al, is for historical reasons, as younger boys used e.g. computers as an escape from socialising, and thereby grew interested in that particular field. I also think this is why it is sometimes met with a bit of a scuff from some in the tech community, because what was previously viewed as a something nerdy, uncool and with a lot of negative stereotypes attached to it, is all of the sudden the new cool thing, and people that suffered through bullying for being "nerdy" and generally not having the time of their life in younger school life, are now being touted as if they were privileged all along, which very much undermines the struggles they had during their upbringing.
This is mostly guesswork from intuition, since I personally did not have any trouble fitting in, yet even I got the "nerd" remark if I would tell people my interests, so I don't feel I was particularly encouraged or anything into this—in fact, most are probably here despite that.
>Perhaps I've read to much malice into the word "systemic bias"
Bingo. There's no active malice there, which is why it's such a difficult problem to solve. There's no one force to fight against and no "enemy", just a lot of well meaning people who average out to a crummy result.
Speaking of sisters, I'm a triplet with two sisters and I spent a lot of time on the computer as a teen mostly out of social destitution. But that's what got me into tech and programming.
My sisters never had time to play video games with me, although they periodically enjoyed them and even bought a couple games, because they were always meeting up with friends. People were always inviting them out.
I look at my tech-minded friends as a kid and there's a similar pattern of social deprivation. I wonder how much that plays a role in general.
I think a great many folks in software development would still have ended up with a software development job even if they were told that CS "wouldn't be their thing"
The problem is that the more you whittle down bigger arguments to "a thousand tiny factors", the less tangible and less useful arguments around gender inequality become. Your argument seems to be that girls are so suggestible that any discouragement easily bounces them back in line.
Frankly, there are far more reasons why a man would want to enter STEM than a woman. A man can put of devoting time to a family because he doesn't have the biological clock a woman has; STEM is a demanding set of fields that require a lot of thought and time, which becomes a challenge for an intelligent woman who also wants time to find a man she can not only relate to but is at least at the same class level as she is. Being in STEM also means being around a lot of unattractive, perhaps creepy men. STEM is competitive, and men and women compete in different ways, so a woman will likely always have to compete on the playing field of men.
If I was a woman, I probably wouldn't bother, not because someone told me I couldn't do it, but because it makes no sense from a perspective of happiness and reproduction. There's a slim chance the kind of man I would want would also be attracted to me as a person, and I might not even meet such a man if I'm spending most of my time in a lab or behind a computer.
As a man, there is a lot of incentive to go into STEM, probably more than ever. Actually, there's incentive to do just about anything so long as it provides a channel to move into the level of class one aspires to. Good luck attracting an intelligent woman who's going places if you're a cashier or a taxi driver. It's not to say that's impossible, but you put yourself at a huge disadvantage as a man when you don't work towards bigger things. Flip the sexes, and it's totally different; successful, intelligent men are far less likely to negatively judge a potential partner based on her career choice. Because of the tech revolution, working with technology can lead to greater levels of prestige than what used to be attainable. Men perceive prestige as a way of opening doors to the mating pool. For women, too much prestige can close doors because they appear more unattainable. (granted, both can experience levels of unattainableness, but it's all about perception at the end of the day)
I would love for society to expose more girls to science and technology, and encourage them to explore those ideas, but we also need to accept that men and women aren't the same and they are going to have different motivations and perceptions on aggregate. Believing that women can and should behave more like men is fundamentally sexist.
>Your argument seems to be that girls are so suggestible that any discouragement easily bounces them back in line.
They're _children_. Girls or boys, having an authority figure saying "you don't want to do this" will mean most won't do it. It isn't about that girls are any more suggestible than boys, it's that in this area girls get more discouragement than boys do.
Well, since as far as I know there's no real empirical evidence for this. I'll give my own anecdote as a man.
I wasn't encouraged at all, by anyone I knew, to get a career in programming. My parents tried to block certain websites I was frequenting, my friends showed no interest at all in what I was doing. I was lucky to find online communities who did help me and encourage me. But I found those on my own through my own curiosity and desire. I never knew where it would take me and my parents thought I was wasting my time.
It wasn't until I actually got a job that I got some validation by people I actually knew.
I think one of the problems this discussion has is people see "girls, on average, are discouraged more often than boys" and actually read "all girls have it worse than all boys and no boys had anything but a spiffing time". Now, I'm not saying you're doing this, and I'm definitely not saying your experiences aren't valuable, but I am saying that your experiences are fully compatible with girls recieving more discouragement, and that your experiences would be improved by the collective understanding which would help us rectify the problem.
I don't really think that people should need encouragement to do things they want to do. Some might, but if someone discouraging you slightly by saying "you wouldn't be interested in that" succeeds in discouraging you, I'd argue you didn't really want to do it.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not arguing that the active discouragement is a good thing. I think parents especially, should enable their children's constructive interests. If I had a son who liked baseball (a sport I hate) more than basketball (a sport I love), I might try to get him to do both, but ultimately would defer to him.
Those in my circle of friends who made something of themselves came from difficult backgrounds that didn't encourage them to do what they're doing now. Granted, this is anecdotal, but this is the perspective I'm coming from. I myself have always been averse to encouragement because I don't like doing things to please people or for reasons other than purely my own, but I'm probably a minority when it comes to that.
When it comes to women, I do think there's a widespread cultural problem of discouragement that tells them they are either not smart enough or won't be happy doing X. That is something we should definitely change, but if we instead encourage women into things they're not terribly interested in, we're not going to get the results we delude ourselves into believing are attainable. Removing barriers is preferable to tilting the playing field, which should be insulting to everyone.
I'm not saying you are wrong, but has there ever been research that suggests this is actually as widespread a problem as suggested? Otherwise, my main point still stands that there are other factors in play during adulthood, besides systematic bias, that would explain the lack of women in STEM and why the desire for gender parity is absurd.
There's other pieces here and there, but nothing conclusively stating "this is why there's a gender gap".
>Otherwise, my main point still stands that there are other factors in play during adulthood, besides systematic bias
There are definitely other factors in play - that's my point - and I don't think we can say it's inherent to the gender. Women being under-represented in STEM is actually a very western thing, most pronounced in the US and UK, and is significantly _less_ pronounced in many other countries. We don't know precisely why, but we do know the answer needs to be complicated and is unlikely to be "women are just naturally predisposed against science, but only in these countries."
Because of that, and similar discouragement, she ended up not going into tech whereas she otherwise _might_ have
I realise it's your sister, but do you know that for sure? Or is that more like a hope you have yourself, based on your own beliefs about women in tech?
It's quite possible that the person who told her CS "wouldn't be your thing" was giving genuine advice based on actually knowing her and her preferences, useful advice that stopped her making a mistake, and was not attempting to discourage her from CS specifically but rather, ensure she would study something she'd enjoy.
She _might_ have. She was into it at the time. She may well not have anyway, hence the might, but it's still additional discouragement the boys didn't get.
> If given completely free choice, perhaps some people are just disposed to being in interested in different things.
Because that would require people to acknowledge that the theory that everyone is a blank slate with equal capabilities and that any differences in outcome are as a result of some sort of systemic oppression might not be entirely correct.
China has similar, if not worse problems, as the USA. The lab I worked for in Beijing made lots of effort to attract female researchers, and it was still very lopsided.
From my graduate CS classes in the US, most women are from foreign countries. I notice the same in other US grad schools as well. From that, I am led to believe that women from developing nations (which kind of includes China) still choose STEM careers (most likely for practical purpose of making money).
There is a lot of selection bias in who comes to the USA to study and work. But also, in china, women don’t drop out of the field all together, but rather tend to move into less technical ones (e.g. PM), and are less likely to get the PhD needed to be a researcher. There are likewise cultural issues that make this hard (e.g. China’s leftover women problem). There has also been a lot less outreach compared to the west because communism was already supposed to have fixed these problems (this is changing of course), while the west has been perversely drawing away a lot of gender diversity at the high end with their current hiring practices.
Perhaps India does a bit better? When I visited Microsoft research Bangalore, it seemed a bit more diverse than Microsoft research Beijing.
1. We need more women in STEM because there is both an industry shortage and because it provides a potential avenue to a good career.
2. We should look for equal opportunity rather than equal outcome.
3. We see greater STEM participation in China, Russia, India, etc., despite barriers, so it's apparent there are other cultural factors influencing decisions and those need addressing in order to make STEM more appealing to women in the first place.
Including former cow-orkers I probably know a couple of hundred PhDs. Of those, a mere handful work in academia doing research. Even fewer are tenure-track. Of the remainder, how many do you think slogged through the programme in say physics or biology with the intent of becoming a software developer after?
I absolutely believe in equal opportunities but a false promise of a good job due to a shortage is not a fair way to promote it.
Very interesting. I presume this isn't a blind test though, so could there be a "ooo they're testing for sexism, better pick the women!" factor? Or did they account for that somehow?
Edit: Skimmed it and they did go to significant lengths to disguise their hypothesis. Details on page 2 of the PDF.
Without this being a double-blind experiment, than it is highly questionable. People over-compensate for bias if you tell them you're testing their bias. The fact that the abstract makes no mention of this is highly suspect.
If you had read the paper, you would have found that they tested and rejected the idea that reviewers were overcompensating due to guessing what was being tested. In Experiment 5, they sent single resumes to reviewers and asked them to rate on a 1-10 scale. Female candidates still scored significantly higher.
I am not too sure I would agree with this statement from the abstract: "These results suggest it is a propitious time for women launching careers in academic science.” It might be less worse to be a woman, but in the same way it is better to lose a leg below the knee than above the knee.
The study shows that the gender bias at the point of tenure approval is the opposite of what is claimed by some interest groups. That doesn't prove that gender bias isn't a factor in the number of women in STEM fields.
Some fields are majority male, and some fields are majority female. There are two possible causes: that women and men have, on average, different preferences, or that there is a bias problem earlier in the process than the point at which tenure is considered.
There is evidence that men and women do have different preferences and so we'd expect to see a gender imbalance in some fields. But we should still try to ensure that anyone with the ability and the inclination is able to enter the career path of their choice — that means schools, families, and the media not discouraging girls and boys from entering "non-typical" fields, something these studies don't address.
They do, however, show that the way many ideologically motivated individuals go about achieving their aim of gender balance is based on misconceptions about the world and is therefore likely to be counter-productive.
STEM positions have a long pipeline with appreciable attrition along the way. Any losses upstream propagate down stream so it's somewhat obvious that we'd have less women in physics national lab positions if we have less women studying physics in general.
People need to address the issue at each stage of the pipeline. I would argue that early stage imbalances are even more important than late stage imbalances (post-graduate) because upstream imbalances necessarily propagate downstream but not vice versa.
I don't think so. I think the everyday experience for female academics still lags behind that of male academics. If you're an undergrad in an unfamiliar hard class it can be tricky to approach a male fellow student without risking misinterpretation of romantic interest; if you're applying to grad school, letter writers are conditioned to talk about women in different ways ("diligent", not "brilliant", maybe); if you're a grad student choosing an advisor, you never really know if the (probably guy) you're choosing has predatory instincts underneath (most don't but enough do); if you're presenting work at a conference, navigating after-conference social activities while being awkwardly hit on gets old fast.
This comes from me talking to friends who are women in CS. It made me realize that as a dude in CS I have an interesting advantage of not being noticed when I walk into a room.
The field has made progress but there are still real frictions that make the everyday experience worse for women, even if the balance has shifted during the big decisions. So it may shake out as an advantage when applying for faculty positions or grad schools, but it's probably not an advantage the rest of the time. I don't think the former compensates very well for the latter.
Heh, I don't know about other STEM fields but I remember a lady attending a computer science freshman social event once. There were very few women there as the majority of women in CS are in HTI. After a while she said to my friend, "Why is everyone such a nerd."
I'm not sure she's blaming men as much as she's confirming the existence of the culture around tech that non-traditional students (women or blacks/Latinos) feel very alienated from. That doesn't mean she thinks anyone is "to blame".
I don't think we should downvote here. As much as none of us nerds like nerd-punching, we should admit that nerd culture is a distinct thing unto itself, which co-clusters with other demographic factors (especially being middle-class with time for hobbies when you're young), and frankly isn't very welcoming in the adult stages of acculturation.
If we expect people to "enter into" nerd culture to join "nerdy" professions, we're basically expecting people to learn a new language and move into a semi-foreign country just to enter a job field.
If we expect people to "enter into" nerd culture to join "nerdy" professions
You don’t think other professions have cultures?
Good luck with facial piercings and purple hair in Corporate Law, but in software no one would bat an eyelid. The culture you are complaining about is MORE tolerant than nearly all other professions!
"Nerd" isn't a culture anymore than "geekyness" is a culture. It's a pejorative, an insult intended to shame the person it's applied to by suggesting they are slightly disgusting, socially disagreeable, ugly, uninteresting etc.
When the woman turned up to a social event and said, "why are the men such nerds" and walked away, that wasn't the men's fault or problem actually (unless they wanted to date her). That's her problem: she's the one lobbing insults against an entire group despite not knowing the individuals in question. They do not need to do anything to welcome such a person into their "culture" because she wasn't talking about a culture to begin with.
The story given above, assuming the last "men were at fault" statement is related to the first part, is sadly reflective of all the worst stereotypes of young women. The woman in question decided what career to pursue because she didn't want to be seen as hanging out with uncool people during her studies. Guess what - nerds would be happy to hang out with "non nerds" too, if they came to their events and didn't act all judgey and superior. This is not something unique to women, it's rather, that men seem more willing to either embrace it or tolerate it.
Presumably she is now in a field with fewer "nerds", but quite possibly earning less money than if she'd stuck with CS. Too bad for her.
Have you ever considered things that men have to deal with and are not being able to put them in terms of 'being male in the X industry/community/field"?
This is not to minimize anything a woman has to go through, but let's, at least, not compare as if it's on equal terms. If we're able to talk about women issues at all, isn't that because women and men are different? Why compare it so easily and uni-dimensionally?
BTW, what about cases where a woman approaches a man about a technical matter, but with a _romantinc_ interest? Where's the real danger in that? We, as grown ups, should have the tools to dismiss politely romantic interests. It's the same case between men and men/women, as it is between women and women/men. It's part of life. The expression 'unwanted advances' is by far the craziest accusation one could make to a person. Man or woman.
> The CDC analyzed the murders of women in 18 states from 2003 to 2014, finding a total of 10,018 deaths.
> The overall age-adjusted homicide rate was 2.0 per 100,000 women.
18 states, tens of millions of people, and an inconceivably small number of homicides in reality. The overwhelming majority of women are not murdered by men, but live a long life and die of heart disease, cancer, or other old-age diseases.
Even when you only consider the age range in question - call it 18-64 - the leading causes of death are still unintentional injuries, cancer, heart disease, and suicide: https://www.cdc.gov/women/lcod/2014/all-females/index.htm There is a spike in homicides up to a staggering 7% of all deaths for the 15-24 age group, but that's only because young women almost never die, there's little real danger but an awful lot of fear surrounding this topic.
This crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed on HN. Neither is flamebait, which your comments elsewhere in the thread have crossed into by being handwavey and inflammatory.
Would you please stop doing these things? As the site guidelines say: "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
You've also posted a bunch of unsubstantive and even uncivil comments in the past, and we've warned you several times before. I don't think you're breaking the site rules on purpose, but we eventually ban accounts that repeatedly do this and don't change when we ask.
Imagine that you and your friend go to work for company X. You are put in a windowless room with an uncomfortable chair where every half hour a co-worker comes by to ask a brief technical question. Your friend gets a quiet, sunny office and is only interrupted by the meetings he organizes himself. However, management assures you that in light of your less amenable office situation, you will receive an extra 10 points out of 100 on your annual performance review, and your friend will not.
Would you conclude that you are truly "preferred"? Would you rather be in your friend's place? Would you stick around this company at all, even if the work appeals to you?
This is what I mean -- that having an advantage at one step in the process does not necessarily compensate for a negative experience at other steps in the process.
There are evidently few women in STEM and this data doesn't contradict that.
It's a consequence that hiring practices should favour women who are equally qualified on paper, because they have likely overcome more barriers in practice and, all other things being equal, are better hires.
> It's a consequence that hiring practices should favour women who are equally qualified on paper, because they have likely overcome more barriers in practice and, all other things being equal, are better hires.
I want to argue against this from a purely utilitarian standpoint, where we care about getting better hire, and don't care about any ethical implications. I think your logic is just bad math.
You're right, and women have more barriers to entry into STEM. And if some barriers are already removed (as this study suggest), I can assume that others still exist. Let's make the numbers simpler, and assume that these barriers make it 2 times harder for a given woman to get into some experience level (I don't know real numbers anyway, and they don't matter).
However, when we observe the effect of these barriers, we simply see that there are 2 times more men on that level than women. That's the whole effect. Statistically, if a woman had 2 times less chance of getting through, and there are already 2 times less women than men, then we already see the full effect of this barrier: there's no evidence that there should be some hidden variable to explain this barrier.
However, if we would know that women's barrier makes it 10 times as harder, and still, there are only 2 times as many men as women, then we would need some other data to explain this; namely, that these women are actually 5 times as good as the men.
But we don't know that. The whole knowledge about these barriers that we have comes from the outcome: we see that there are 2 times as many men as women, and that's how we assume (correctly, I think) that there is a barrier. But if we start from this outcome data, we can't through some magic come back to it and add a hidden variable - it's just a logic loop, and a strange one: we see data, make conclusions from observations, and from these conclusions change our observation of this very data to see it as incomplete, without help of any data points outside this original observation. How could such logic be correct?
The researchers made a strong effort to obscure the goal of the study, but if you are an academic participating in an artificial candidate search, you are likely to suspect that one of the variables being tested is either sex, race, or both. The experiment where evaluators rated a single candidate addresses this somewhat, but even in that case the participants are almost certain to have known that there was no job search in progress, and very likely to have realized that there was a socially desirable response possible to be given at no cost. By no cost, I mean that this person is not going to show up and take space and resources that could go to your preferred candidate/collaborator.