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.
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.
>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.
I tend to attribute this type of thing to what I call the "identity politics" wing of the left. In a Parliamentary system they probably would be in a different party than you.
"charismatically-challenged unfortunates like Damore"
Maybe I am on the autistic spectrum, or ots teh fact I studied science but i thought that Damore's memo was fairly well written. First time I went through it he made a couple of points where I though to myself "that sounds controversial", but then in every case he had backed it up with some study validating it to some extent.
It was certainly a lot better written than the majority of the media's reporting on it.
That's kind of the scary part. People are reading it, yet the media can't mention it without it calling it an "anti-diversity screed." If that memo is almost universally mischaracterized and smeared, then the arguments simply can't feasibly be made. The chilling effect is real.
I agree, his memo was a lot more reasonable than how it was depicted in the news (whether we agree with it or not). However I watched a couple of video interviews and concur on "charismatically challenged". For instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-9hh47dqeI
Quote:
Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt
became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal
democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned
from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but
now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.”
So if someone who is anti-semitic believes that Jesus died on the cross at the behest of his Jewish contemporaries, and I also believe the same thing because that's what history has taught me, does that make me anti-semitic?
Or is that one ok because it hasn't been debunked?
In which case, according to Wikipedia, the Frankfurt school "consisted of neo-Marxist dissidents uncomfortable with existing capitalist, fascist, or communist systems." Has that been debunked? If so, where?
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.
Screed? It was a simple memo, something that he meant for a few people and had shared internally for months before it became so widely misunderstood. He didn't say anything outright false, only that men and women are different and have different interests, so forcing 50/50 wont be a good outcome.
"Did I read this right? Susan Wojicicki said that women find “geeky male industries” (as opposed to “social industries”) “not very interesting” and Sundar cites research on gender differences."
He got political at the end though. Does this statement ("the Left tends to deny science
concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ and sex differences)") really ring true? What are "extremely sensitive PC-authoritarians" and how do they advance an argument? Why is one of the citations a Wordpress blog (https://becauseits2015.wordpress.com/) with an explicit anti-feminist bias? These may not be 100% false things to link to or say, but they are very contentious.
I see the memo personally as more young-and-naive and I'm not one who thinks naivety is something that should get you fired, per se (though, much of his whines at the end were directed directly at Google being explicitly anti-conservative; rightly or wrongly, employees who noisily complain in public about their employer do often get dismissed). But he certainly wade into some touchy waters armed more with opinionated commentary sources versus hard science. There is a century's worth of troubling eugenics-oriented history on that "IQ and biological differences" quote that should inform one that this is not a remark to toss off lightly, and merely semi-support that with a link to a conservative think-tank link (that itself IMHO was pretty naive).
Chop the last bunch of the manifesto and it would be more interesting, but as it stands, the memo was not just "men and women are different" and how that applies to STEM careers. In the end, it was also a whine about how Google is Capital-L
Left and "alienating conservatives" too.
Nothing outright false, but that was the major problem with it. Just because you aren't obviously wrong and you safecheck yourself with facts doesn't mean you are actually correct in your assessment.
He didn't say anything outright false, only that men and women are different and have different interests, so forcing 50/50 wont be a good outcome
I agree with OP that this difference in interests is probably socialized. Men and women are very obviously socialized differently, not to mention at many places (tech companies especially), the social atmosphere is one that favors men (boys) with keggers and nerf guns.
Damore's memo isn't very convincing from that perspective, because if the difference can be explain by 20 years of socialization, it can also be changed, and Damore's argument seemed to be based upon some inherent difference between the sexes and his solutions predicated on that assumption. Then again, not really sure exactly what he was arguing because it was meandering.
It's been argued to death at this point, but it genuinely surprises me that people find his poorly sourced memo (or whatever you want to call it) as the centerpiece for this topic. With that as the starting point, no wonder the discussion is garbage. The people who support viewpoints like Damore's should aim higher because it is not helping their case.
To give a more complete answer, here's a section from his memo:
De-emphasize empathy.
I’ve heard several calls for increased empathy on diversity issues. While I strongly support trying to understand how and why people think the way they do, relying on affective empathy—feeling another’s pain—causes us to focus on anecdotes, favor individuals similar to us, and harbor other irrational and dangerous biases. Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.
There are multiple claims there. He does refer to a blog post, but reading that, do you have any clue what that blog post may be about or how it applies to his argument?
Facts are used as evidence, which he what he did. There's nothing wrong with that. If you have a better explanation then let's hear it but all you said was that you believe it's "probably socialized" based on what exactly?
This article explains in great detail how that is not the case in any significance and there are even examples where men and women have been socialized oppositely and still end up choosing typical gender interests.
> argument seemed to be based upon some inherent difference between the sexes
Just because you provide sources doesn't mean your sources are relevant to your argument or good sources. Go look at his memo. It is paragraph after paragraph with his beliefs on the matter and then a link to some source which you are supposed to check out. He often doesn't bother explaining how those sources are relevant.
That's why it is bad. Just because you've got sources doesn't mean you are saying anything useful and I'd argue the discussion proves that. He's got sources, which is somehow supposed to mean he's correct. He's blessed his argument with associations with academia, but doesn't really make compelling arguments.
This article explains in great detail how that is not the case in any significance and there are even examples where men and women have been socialized oppositely and still end up choosing typical gender interests.
> some inherent difference between the sexes
Yes, men and women are different.
It doesn't do it at all convincingly. If sexes have been socialized differently for tens of thousands of years (and they have), and one of the sexes has been intentionally limited by the other for long durations of this time (they have), then how do you say what is biological and what is sociological? He never bothers with this.
It's not a scientific paper, it was an internal memo shared with a few colleagues. Also that's how evidence works, you make a narrative and support it with references. What else would you do?
No society has lasted tens of thousands of years and many were in complete isolation which already says something about how the same roles formed again and again. Also we see the same thing in animals.
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.
Maybe he was fired not just because he made the company look bad, but also because he insulted about 30% of his co-workers, and on top of that kept trying to get his memo read by as many people as possible within Google.
Banging on about a controversial subject that can cause upset and disruption in a work environment. Does that sound very professional, or something that a smart person would do? And do you really want that kind of person in your team?
I don't think he intended to insult anyone, but I also don't think it's unreasonable to believe that people could be insulted based on what he said. That's the gray area your binary distillation completely ignores. It's a little more nuanced than "he hurt my feelings!"
I'm not saying that the views are a problem because people are offended. I'm saying that since people are offended, it's reasonable to take a step back and ask if the views are offensive, and if the intent was to offend. "He didn't mean to offend" doesn't automatically mean that whatever he said was okay. In this particular case I think it was, but there's nothing wrong with stepping back and asking if the underlying views are okay.
Given that the media and all of Damore's other critics have to overtly lie about the contents of the memo in order to cast it as "offensive", I think it's abundantly clear that the memo itself is innocuous.
"Cultural marxism" and "marxism" are different things. One was a conspiracy theory with anti-semitic roots and one is a framework of academic inquiry. Guess which one damore mentions.
I've never seen anyone interpret any of that. Also has nothing to do with civil rights but was talking about men and women liking different things, so forcing them in equal ratios does more harm than good.
You should read the memo. Apparently lots of people just skimmed it, or read a summary. Your sibling comment quotes the exact footnote text where he references the popular anti-semitic conspiracy theory about "cultural marxism"
"The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported that William S. Lind in 2002 gave a speech to a Holocaust denial conference on the topic of Cultural Marxism. In this speech Lind noted that all the members of The Frankfurt School were "to a man, Jewish", but it is reported that Lind claims not to question whether the Holocaust occurred and suggests he was present in an official capacity for The Free Congress Foundation "to work with a wide variety of groups on an issue-by-issue basis""
He comes off as a reactionary, for sure. Before someone calls out you for strawmanning, he does go there:
Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.”
His entire memo is a distillation of reactionary talking points. That overall impression rather than any single argument is probably what pissed off a lot of his coworkers because these battles are much older than him.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
He did himself. Got ripped to shreds in a forum with folks that I'd expect to be somewhat sympathetic with his cause.
He then reworked the doc a bit to be less overtly offensive (the published version is one of these later ones), still got shot down in a friendly way by the sympathetic part of the Google population for bullshit reasoning. Eventually it got wider circulation - not sure by whom, but he certainly didn't object to that.
At some point, when managers and friendly inclined folks tell you to shut up at work, you do. If you decide to pursue the topic further, don't whine when people disassociate themselves from you - not for the content of your speech, but for your conduct and the disruption that comes with it.
I've heard this asserted several times, but nobody's said which of his sources they disagree with. Could you link to a source you disagree with and the basis for your disagreement?
That claim in Damore's memo shouldn't be controvertial. Here's what Deborah Soh (PhD in sexual neuroscience) had to say about it:
> Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at. http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
More from her about Damore's memo and scientific research in this space:
> Despite how it's been portrayed, the memo was fair and factually accurate. Scientific studies have confirmed sex differences in the brain that lead to differences in our interests and behaviour.
> As mentioned in the memo, gendered interests are predicted by exposure to prenatal testosterone – higher levels are associated with a preference for mechanically interesting things and occupations in adulthood. Lower levels are associated with a preference for people-oriented activities and occupations. This is why STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields tend to be dominated by men.
> We see evidence for this in girls with a genetic condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, who are exposed to unusually high levels of testosterone in the womb. When they are born, these girls prefer male-typical, wheeled toys, such as trucks, even if their parents offer more positive feedback when they play with female-typical toys, such as dolls. Similarly, men who are interested in female-typical activities were likely exposed to lower levels of testosterone.
> As well, new research from the field of genetics shows that testosterone alters the programming of neural stem cells, leading to sex differences in the brain even before it's finished developing in utero. This further suggests that our interests are influenced strongly by biology, as opposed to being learned or socially constructed.
EDIT: I wish I understood why I've been downvoted so that I could improve my comments in the future. Is the problem that it's too verbose? OK, I've tried to shorten it and replaced the links to three studies with a link to Deborah's article above.
You (and she) are focusing on the wrong part of the chain of reasoning. The issue is not whether there are gender differences in preferences, but why we have any reason to believe that programming is a “masculine” profession. The fact that men and women sometimes prefer different things due to biological factors does not mean that if you observe men and women preferring different things, that can be explained by biological factors. That’s the basic logical fallacy underlying Damore’s screed. (Pointing to articles validating the scientific assertions doesn’t help, because the challenge isn’t the scientific premise, but the inferences Damore is drawing from that.)
For example, for many years Law was 95% male. You could say that it was a masculine profession because it’s all about conflict while women prefer peacemaking. But today 50% of new large firm attorneys are women. Law isn’t any softer or gentler now—in fact it’s probably less civil. Same for teaching. We explain teaching being dominated by women on the basis that teaching is about nurturing. But in India, the vast majority of teachers are men.
You could easily say that programming is feminine. It’s not at all physical, all about cooperating and communicating with other people, it’s about managing expectations, etc.
Also, the truck analogy has been debunked. It’s explained by the fact that girls have a higher affinity for faces than boys. Which makes sense: infants don’t have any association between trucks and masculine professions like construction work. They can’t. Any gender difference observable at a very young age has to be unrelated to the associations adults have between trucks and masculinity.
> why we have any reason to believe that programming is a “masculine” profession
By exclusion: we have checked everything else we could think of and found no other logical explanation for the disparity of sexes in STEM. That doesn't mean women's preference is the true underlying reason, but then, we don't have a better explanation, or even any other explanation consistent with facts. Still, AFAIK, Damore never claimed it was THE reason, he just raised it as a possible and the likeliest explanation - given no other explanation seems to work.
> But in India, the vast majority of teachers are men.
I don't think India is a valid example here, because there is still a lot of inequality in that society. Let's talk about countries on the higher end of the equality spectrum, like Finland or Sweden.
Thank you for clarifying. Let’s not characterize programming as masculine or feminine (since that would begging the question and stereotyping). Let’s characterize it in terms of properties that have been scientifically studied.
I would characterize programming as very far on the “Things” side of the axis that is “People vs Things”.
See: Men and Things, Women and People:
A Meta-Analysis of Sex Differences in Interests
The fundamental task of programming – sitting in front of a computer, reasoning about the machine and the system, and writing code and debugging systems for hours on end — is about as “thing”-oriented as I can conceive of. One needs to do a great deal of this to get a CS degree.
Another dimension to consider is Systematizing versus Empathizing (citations omitted). Programming seems to be far on the systematizing side.
As a thought experiment, what jobs might be further on the side of “things“ and “systematizing” than programming?
(I don’t know of any studies that characterize the programming in these dimensions. I’m providing my intuition.)
I’m not super familiar with the practice of law, but I would guess that it’s actually fairly close to the middle of both of those spectrums. The law itself is systematic but practicing it involves working with people at every level (client, counterparty, judge, regulator). It’s possible to write and deliver code, or root-cause and fix a bug report, without interacting with another soul.
I would characterize law school as even more “thing” oriented than a STEM program (having done both). Law school is just pattern matching. You read cases to derive a set of abstract rules. Then on the test, you pattern match facts in a long hypothetical against the rules and write out how each element of each rule applies to the facts in the hypothetical. Whoever analyzes the most issues in 3 hours wins. Unlike STEM, there is no group work, there is no creativity, and although the fact patterns involve people, they are abstractions in the same way a person is just a database row. You’re actively penalized for thinking of people in terms of people, because professors set up hypotheticals to lead to results you might not want.
The practice of law at a business firm (where 50% of associates are women) occasionally involves people, but for the most part is thing oriented. I do less coordinating with team members and the client than when I was an engineer, because everything is on the record. You don’t have long meetings with the client to get their use cases, etc. When you do interact with people it’s systematized and highly artificial. Youre not trying to connect with the judge as a person. You’re breaking down an often highly abstract issue into constituent parts to help the judge understand it. And the things you’re dealing with are typically more abstract. The subject matter isn’t a website with pictures or human users. The subject matter is a lien, or a credit default swap, or a regulation embodying an economic theory. You talk about these abstractions as if they were things.
> The fundamental task of programming – sitting in front of a computer, reasoning about the machine and the system, and writing code and debugging systems for hours on end — is about as “thing”-oriented as I can conceive of. One needs to do a great deal of this to get a CS degree.
From the GP:
>You could easily say that programming is feminine. It’s not at all physical, all about cooperating and communicating with other people, it’s about managing expectations, etc.
Here's the real disconnect, and it's all about the environment that is cultivated wherever you happen to be. These are really two wildly different professions that happen to be lumped under one title. On the one hand you have the concrete, generative work where you are creating a thing out of the void. And on the other, you have the political infighting and jockeying to be allowed to do that generative work, and all of the overhead involved in such operations. These are wildly disconnected activities, and it should be no surprise that people gravitate towards one extreme or the other, with very few rare unicorns that can do both at a high level.
His logical reasoning skills seemed to be quite all right for Google when he passed their (challenging) hiring process. How the hell he managed to lose that while working there?
As for his writing ability, it may not be at the level of Mark Twain, but it seems quite eloquent to me...
However bad his reasoning was, the position he's criticizing ("disparity, thus oppression") is far less reasonable, and heads don't roll for it. In fact, it's the official view. Besides, one instance of bad reasoning does not merit termination. I really don't see how anyone can honestly bring himself to believe that Damore was fired for anything other than political heresy.
> Damore’s screed was also rife with fallacies and unsupported generalizations, let’s not forget that
Was it really rife with fallacies? Lee Jussim (professor of social psychology at Rutgers University) wrote:
> The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right.
Geoffrey Miller (evolutionary psychology professor at University of New Mexico) wrote:
> For what it’s worth, I think that almost all of the Google memo’s empirical claims are scientifically accurate.
Debra W Soh (PhD in sexual neuroscience):
> Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at.
It doesn't seem reasonable to characterize this memo as rife with fallacies or unsupported generalizations when multiple scientists are willing to go on the record saying the memo's science is generally correct. I have not seen similar in-depth rebuttals from other scientists claiming it's wrong. (If anyone knows of one I'd be glad to read it. I have seen brief quotes from scientists in articles written by reporters, but nothing with depth or analysis.)
EDIT: I wish I understood why I've been downvoted so that I could improve my comments in the future. Would anyone be willing to explain the downvote?
Fwiw: I think you're being down voted because the citations you mention have all become a part of the controversy rather than being external evidence. Each of the scientists you mentioned above have at times before this controversy shown a willingness to say things specifically to get limelight.
In culture war topics, the only real citations that can count are people above reproach, or people who are unknown but experts in their fields, which is a fine needle to thread. Also raw data, but few of us here would be qualified to understand the raw data.
I was mostly poking my head in to answer the question of why you're being down voted, IMO. I'm on the opposite side of your understanding of this research based on a cursory glance (nothing says 'unbiased' like including the phrase 'feminist campaigners' in the conclusion of a scientific publication).
This week's Weeds podcast has some interesting alternative theories based on the results from various Scandinavian countries where they legislated some gender equality stuff and it neither worked out as well as people on the left would like, nor as much of a disaster as people on the right predicted.
Reply to a reply, so I'm out, back to what I'm actually good at, building stuff for other humans to use.
You're not wrong, and yet ... as someone who would visibly be considered an african american, I have to watch what I say around my leftie friends. God forbid I should fail their intellectual purity tests. Fuck it!
I was at a club, and the first thing a brown woman said to me was "I had to get out of that room -- it was too white in there!". These bullies are just replacing one in-group with another. The root problem is tribalism and groupism, and only individuality, not a re-slicing of identities solves that.
Most men I know are pretty heavily in favour of equality. That might change if we treat equality as a war against men, instead of something we all work towards.
Adapting behavior is reasonable, but there's men also need to be able to have a voice, or you're going to get some major pushback. Hopefully we can keep this kind of war at a low simmer when trump is up for re-election.
More specifically, that means making sure that men do have a voice. I've seen a lot of silencing tactics deployed that are based on gender, or social class. It's all well and good to say "well that's how minorities always felt", but it doesn't actually make any part of this situation better.
The problem with silencing tactics currently in use that doesn't seem to be understood by those using them is that there is no such tactic that works in the voting booth. As long as we have secret ballots, the Shy Tory Effect is going continue to catch the censorship crowd off guard. I doubt this is going to be kept on simmer because we're already past that point. To continue the analogy, the pot will eventually boil over but eventually run out of water.
Strict equality of outcome means quotas, and that if the distribution of races, sexes, genders, sexual orientations, etc doesn't exactly match the entire population (or exceed it for certain disenfranchised groups) then something is horribly wrong and needs to be fixed. Very few people are in favor of that.
That being said, you can't have a strict equality of opportunity without acknowledging which people didn't have that opportunity. I think it's much easier to fix this problem if you focus on the person (e.g. Sandra couldn't afford college) rather than the group (Sandra's black and statistically less likely to have been able to afford college).
The problem is people use these bullshit heuristics that happen to suit their mental model of how they want their neighborhood/workplace/world to look ("We don't have a black woman in accounting, what's wrong with that hiring manager?" or "Everyone on the database team is Indian why can't they hire a white guy?") rather than just trying to be fair while still acknowledging systemic issues people have had because of the groups they may belong to.
Strict equality of opportunity is a pure lottery, which is just as absurd (if not more) as strict equality of outcome. Otherwise, it is claiming that certain factors (maybe, genetics or upbringing or geographic location or whatever else) should contribute to inequality of outcome, while others should not. The whole phrase, therefore, is a thought terminating phrase, allowing a speaker to ignore the nuance of which specific inequalities they belive are just vs not just, and why.
You can't control every factor. Arguing for "equality of opportunity" really just means taking a laissez-faire attitude as to who succeeds. It means not making explicit exclusionary rules as to who can participate, but also not undertaking a vain attempt to equalize every conceivable variable.
And one thing to remember is that (a) actual random distributions are lumpy, not evenly distributed and (b) there is pretty much no equality of outcome in whatever outcomes or input categories you choose. Anywhere. And very often the distributions in different places also look different (though there do seem to be some patterns).
Equality of opportunity a way of saying "fair treatment by some measures, unfair by others". You are picking which traits inequlaity should happen by and, huh, imagine that, they probably happen to be traits that overall benefit you.
"Equality of opportunity" is a phrase I no longer trust, because it obfuscates the true differences in moral ideology. Just be explicit about which factors you think should create unequal outcomes, and which ones shouldnt, and a real conversation can happen from there.
Equality of opportunity is meant as: Inequality should rise from personal choice and decisions, otherwise, why should anyone strive to be better than anyone else?
I suggest looking at the history of states that favor equality of opportunity (equality) against equality of outcome (equity).
I'll leave you with this Soviet joke: 'They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.'
I agree, but "equality of opportunity" tends to follow "equality", so I think the "equality of opportunity" folks are trying to advance the conversation, but other folks are trying to stop it at "equality" (presumably because elaborating on their idea of the word would expose it to lots of obvious scrutiny).
I agree with you, but from the opposite direction. On its surface the idea of equality of outcome seems terrible. It will never be achieved without oppressive totalitarian intervention. So any measure of equality or progress which is predicated on the goal of equality of outcome is a non-starter for me.
The only discussion I'm willing to have is one in which we discuss a particular area of treatment or opportunity.
It is very clear this is not equal opportunity but equal outcomes. Trying to make equal outcomes requires some serious mental gymnastics because numerous decisions collectively contribute to our direction, standing, and potential in life.
I can count at least three points in the guidelines[0] this comment violates.
> Be civil...Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. (could be multiple but is the same paragraph so assuming combined as 1 point)
> Assume good faith.
> Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle.
I wasn't however assuming bad faith, I was attempting to use humor to jolt someone out of uncritically adopting what I consider an asburd position (that there is any danger of a metaphorical "war on men", in any sense other than as a talking point).
> This “war” has been going on for centuries. The difference is that white men were totally dominating it until recent times, and a lot of them really don’t like that they may need to adapt behavior. African Americans had a right side of the street to walk on within the last 2 generations, for risk of being lynched. You better believe they’ve been parsing every word out of their mouths, not for fear of being labeled a mean word, but for fear of being killed, or having their families killed.
That's US-centric. Until a century ago the majority of humans did not have a lot of freedom. Living under some autocratic ruler. The skin color or gender was irrelevant: only who you were the child of. A Chinese noblewoman had a lot more freedom than a English farmer.
> A Chinese noblewoman had a lot more freedom than a English farmer.
You'll have to specify that better; for instance, is the farmer a landowner, or a serf? Both work in agriculture and can so rightly be termed a farmer.
Racism doesn't even translate well to other countries today: not every country has the situation that a significant part of the population has ancestors that were relocated by force and had to work as slaves in recent history, and are easily distinguishable by skin color ("race").
Different countries, different problems. Hence, different delineations in the various culture wars all over the world.
To some extent. By 1500 the Spanish were in the Americas, the European powers were forming colonies on the African coast, the Russians were dominating Siberia.
By 1900 European powers dominated almost everything, including China who were bulled into war by the British. If you were a subject of any of those colonial powers, you certainly were at a disadvantage to your foreign masters. This isn't even considering gender. Out of all of those empires, how many were led by women? There were exceptions here and there, but men dominated.
It's not US centric nor incorrect by any means to suggest that Caucasian males have had significant advantages in social relations for an extended period of time.
rate limited, but to reply:
Read Caucasian as white or European and don't get stuck on semantics. Germany only very recently favored this race (or another vague term, "Aryan") more than anyone else in history, so most people know what it means, the semantics are a digression and not an answer to what has happened historically.
Also, this isn't guilt tripping nor "hating" on my ancestors, it is pointing out obvious facts. Many of us are products of this domination and have connections to both sides.
"Caucasian" is a category that's or or less unknown in Germany, so "caucasian males" having advantages (or disadvantages) doesn't mean anything to us. That range of your categorization is much more nuanced around here. OTOH the US seems to have tons of categories that are simply called "Asian" here.
That's a big part in making that conversation US centric.
What's the point here? We should be content with anti-white discrimination now because anti-black racism used to be really, really bad? Is it justice to punish innocent people with pale skin because other, mostly dead pale skinned people unjustly punished dark skinned people? Or perhaps that there is some threshold of suffering that one's most recent ancestors endured before they're permitted to complain about discrimination? I'm not following.
I've seen this sentiment from former fans of left leaning fiction, and I have to ask: are you sure it's not the culture that's stayed the same and you who drifted right?
> Are you sure it's not the culture that's stayed the same and you who drifted right?
As a leftist, yes. I understand to be on the left means to strive for equality of power among people, economic and social. To be on the right means, at best, not to care about power inequalities between people.
I cringe every time when other people think that feminists and SJWs (I would prefer to call them by different terms but I don't know any) are leftist. They are only in a certain very narrow sense, which makes them often to be on the right, paradoxically. They often do not care about oppressed white males. But if you do not care about some oppressed group, then you don't stand for equality.
Feminism became to be included in the left, because in the past, all women were oppressed. It's no longer the case, and some feminists do not actually care about equality of other groups.
Some biologist put it nicely in a discussion: The left (as a broad political movement) might suffer from a predatory problem - being joined by someone who is oppressed, but doesn't actually want equality, only power. But that's the nature of the game.
And this conflict is nothing new, either. Noam Chomsky, a giant of the left, has been affected by it in the 70s, when he defended free speech of a Holocaust denier.
I'm not sure that actually answers my question (which was admittedly rhetorical), if this has been going on since the 70s, (and longer!), what's changed that it is such a problem to you now as part of the left, while say 10 years ago it didn't bother you?
If you look at the actual issues in US culture you’ll see if the left that has drifted further left. As an example you don’t have to go far back to see Nancy Pelosi advocating keeping immigrants out, Hillary taking a moderate stance on abortion or even Obama being to the right of Trump on some social issues like marriage equality.
I’m for all of those things but there is zero doubt society has moved left fast.
> I’m for all of those things but there is zero doubt society has moved left fast.
Definitely factions of society have, though I wouldn't say society as whole just yet. Those factions have thought-leaders who are unusually viscous and aggressive (e.g. heaping abuse on those who disagree with them, calling them "garbabe-people" etc.). I'd wait for things to settle down before making the final call.
> starting from the assumption that men are disproportionately represented among the upper levels of spatial and mathematical abstraction skills, there'd be an uproar
I’ve mentioned it repeatedly on HN and have never so much as gotten a rise out of anyone. (I should also point out that the SAT folks publish a detailed report on SAT gender differences each year and nobody blinks an eye.) The problem is that it doesn’t explain the disparity in STEM—it cuts against it.
Men outrepresent women about 2:1 among perfect SAT Math scores. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this represents a real difference in mathematical ability. Even if programming ability were 100% correlated with mathematical ability, you’d expect a much higher ratio than you see in practice. That is strong evidence that women are kept out of STEM for other reasons. Beyond that (1) the pool of programmers isn’t just people with perfect SAT scores—the representation gap rapidly disappears as you go from top 0.5% to top 5%; (2) professions leverage other competencies too. The same 2:1 difference shows up in the top percentile of the LSAT and MCAT, but those fields are more gender balanced because women applicants tend to have better college GPAs.
Anecdotally: I went to a competitive admissions STEM high school, where admissions is gender blind and based heavily on an SAT-like test. The ratio was about 60:40 boys, about what you’d expect from the required testing percentiles. CS was required for all students so it is gender balanced. But APCS was overwhelmingly boys, not because it was full of the best math minds, but I suspect because we’d play DOOM if we got our assignments done early.
> Men outrepresent women about 2:1 among perfect SAT Math scores. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this represents a real difference in mathematical ability. Even if programming ability were 100% correlated with mathematical ability, you’d expect a much higher ratio than you see in practice.
That doesn't follow for reasons explained in the article. Choice of whether to go into sciences over humanities isn't correlated with just science ability in school, it is correlated with relative ability between science and reading. The 2:1 ratio tells you precisely nothing about expected ratios of entrance into science programs until you compare it with the performance ratio on the English portion (assuming here, I don't know anything about SATs) of the SATs.
All this also assumes that SAT scores map well to interests and not aptness.
You might do well enough for a PhD in maths and in sociology and still decide try to become carpenter because you love working with wood more than sitting in an office, no matter if you're arguing math or social contexts.
For a woman that might be the hardest career of all these, too (2% of carpenters are women).
> That is strong evidence that women are kept out of STEM
I might be boiling down your comment down to that one line, but it such a common line that I feel the need to point out some data. Here in Sweden about 12.5% of the population, men and women, work in a profession where the gender segregation is not higher than 150% dominance for a single gender.
The other 87.5% of the population all work in a profession which is seen as extremely gender segregated. We could describe it as if the wast majority of the population is keeping people who don't gender identify similar to their own out of the work market for which they themselves work in. Evidence that men are kept out of 87.5% of the professions that women work in, evidence that women are kept out of 87.5% of the professions that men work in. In a nation which pride itself on equality, we could claim that there is evidence that the wast majority of everyone here is actively being sexist in their professional life.
When looking at numbers to explain whats going on in society, I feel that the discussion often lack perspective. A ratio of 60:40 is actually within that small minority of 12.5% that is recognized as gender equal, and yet many feel that it too is unacceptable high level of gender segregation.
The US is not Sweden. In the US, you die or your kids starve if you don’t have enough money. So when you see a statistic that women have the altitude to go into a high paying career disproportionately to their actual representation, it’s harder to dismiss that just by saying “oh they must prefer to do something else.”
Beyond that, I’m not inclined to believe that Sweden really is more gender equal. It seems based on little more than assumption.
Are things in the US are that bad? Maybe you should focus on how to help people with lower-paying jobs not starve, rather than pushing to make sure that the scarce "living-wage" jobs are going to women instead of men.
So, here's the thing: I think there are lots of good points in everything you wrote here, and yours is the only response to mine that I've upvoted. And I don't even disagree with most of it: I tend toward thinking that the gap is multicausal and that attribution is difficult. "Playing Doom" is exactly the type of thing I mean when I say I think socialization is a major factor in the gap. We could have an interesting back and forth to draw out if and where we disagree.
But my point is that's not the kind of discussion you could have on social media (or, god forbid, ill-advised internally published manifestos) and a not get significant blowback. If I see several friends sharing an article that describes a study effectively showing women are better than men at using Microsoft Word and using that as proof of deep sexism in tech, I'm posed with two choices: I can accurately point out that doesn't make sense as an argument and get people really mad at me for ruining a feel-good social moment, or I can do nothing and roll my eyes internally. Most reasonable people will do the latter, and I don't see how that's a good thing.
This is just a weird argument to me - the argument about ability. I don't think, in any western country - which for point of reference I'm taking as any country Israel or above on this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)... - that ability plays much of a part. I'd say it is mostly preference.
Lets say I have a preference for MMs over Skittles - a 2:1 preference. How often will I eat each? Probably in that ratio over a lifetime, because I'll eat snacks lots of times.
Now lets say I have a 60:40 preference for Driving a car as a career over being a shop assistant. What is the chance that the I will be a driver? Given I can only choose one, in a less than ideal world, it will be influenced by lots of things beyond my personal preference, opportunity most of all. But in an ideal world, the chance I am a driver starts to approach 100%, because why would I choose the 40% option, when I have a better one?
Free societies enable lots of choice, and tiny differences, 60:40 or even 55:45, will start to skew towards 100:0 over time. This is likely to play out right to the bottom, where people with fewer options are still likely to choose based on preference, hence garbage collectors and manual labourers vs shop assistants / PAs.
The consequence of tiny differences in preference and the small instances per person are likely to lead to some radical results.
There's a war on right now, and it's increasingly vicious. Competitive victimhood is how you spot it - a relishing of both a sense of being aggrieved, and rejoicing in public humiliation and punishment of the perceived oppressor.
I stay well away from it too. In fact I fear simply writing this comment.
On Twitter, I've taken to unfollowing people who repeatedly retweet threads that have turned into piling-on contests built on a shaky foundation - the uncritical joining of a mob to throw stones at the perceived oppressor is especially worrying when a closer examination shows nuances that don't justify mob justice even in an emotional sense.
Check out Nietzsche's concept of slave morality...the way I see it now is that the various slave moralities are battling it out to see which one will be the dominant one...from that perspective it becomes kind of interesting and entertaining so watch the "Oppression Olympics"...who will win the Gold? Will it be women, or perhaps Black women, or maybe LGBTQLMNOP Iranians...who will win? Stay tuned...sponsored by GirlDevelopIt
FWIW, I often read about these PC-related things in the US (and sometimes Canada). Much less so in Europe, although they start playing catch-up with their new hate speech laws.
As a German I can (mostly) speak my mind about men vs women, the only minefield there is IMO (remotely) Nazi-related stuff, e.g., try to criticize Israel foreign policy or mass immigration.
I have dual German - Canadian citizenship, and I've been surprised at how paternalistic German men can be in their expectations or comments around women's careers and child-rearing responsibilities.
If you're a technically-minded woman, who's more interested in her career than being a wet-nurse, you've got problems no matter where you're living.
Re social trends, it depends on the issue. LGBQ issues, sure. But on climate, safety, many environmental issues, gender gap and income inequality, Germany is out ahead.
I think 5 years is too long especially for tech, and there are things that are and will stay different. Otherwise Germany would be almost exactly like the US now, which it isn't.
I am not so optimistic; Big Data craze started in the US like 8 years ago, whereas in Germany it's in the past 2 years; Machine/Deep Learning is also only fringe, with most "Data Science" positions focused on classical (i.e. not really good) machine learning and Deep Learning is almost non-existent in the market. Only cars are years ahead of US. There is a significant latency in Germany in tech.
For that Germany doesn't really focus on innovation in technology. They tend to like to outsource development to eastern Europe. (That's depressed salaries) Any good developer in Germany is going to silicon valley instead.
No, that's not how it works. Germans outsource labor to eastern Europe, not development. They are hugely innovative, and responsible for lots of advancements in technology, in industrial automation, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, pharmaceutics and more. It's just they are not hugely innovative in JavaScript frameworks, which is what counts for "technology" on HN.
It’s funny. All I hear about in my social circles is people complaining how PC everything is now. It seems like it’s rather PC to complain about political correctness.
It's permissible to complain about PC, because that's too vague to implicate anybody for anything. Next time you hear that, ask them what specific politically correct opinion it is they'd like to express, and watch their face carefully, and you'll understand more.
More directly, you're insinuating that those who lament PC culture are racists. Are you sure that's the position you want to take? It seems incredibly naive and unnecessarily divisive to propose such a thing.
How did you find this out? When people complained about PC, did you ask them 'Are you really upset that you can't call people niggers and faggots any more?'
Yes, in fact. Whenever I've had these conversations with people, I always try to probe deeper to figure out why they are so angry about what should be common decency. And the answers are always the same. They think it's not about decency, and that their rights, and their way of life, are being attacked. In their minds that attack always comes from "liberals" or "niggers" or "faggots trying to rape our children in the bathroom" or some other hateful, bigoted nonsense. They think that their right to call these people out ("call a spade a spade" is an oft used phrase) is being eroded, and that means "PC culture" is preventing "dialog" and "telling it like it is" or "turning us into liberal pussies."
I cannot tell you how many times I've had this same unfortunate discussion. And every time it makes me sick to my stomach.
> Nazi-related stuff, e.g., try to criticize Israel foreign policy or mass immigration
Yeah, you don't really have free speech if you can't even criticize a domestic policy like immigration.
They convinced you that it is Nazi to oppose the government's stance. Soon you will be Nazi for preferring bacon in your sandwiches or having preferences in dating.
This episode of the Joe Rogan podcast w/ Jordan Peterson and Bret Weinstein touches on similar issues (among other things) and discusses why it's still important to have discussions like these:
I think it is well-known that men as a group have more degrees and education in STEM fields, have higher numbers in STEM careers, and perform better in the subjects according to testing measures. As you say, it is also well-known that we view women as better adjusted socially. And as you say, it can be taboo to make this point. I think when making this point, the important thing to realize or clarify is that it doesn't have to be this way! There is no reason to think that women will necessarily not take to mathematics or that men will necessarily be socially stunted. We can create better environments for children so that both issues can improve. I think part of the taboo about making your point stems from a fear of a biological-determinism argument about math ability. Which may not always be the case.
It reminds me of the master-slave morality that Nietzsche wrote about. Unable to compete by the current rules of the game (master morality), minorities/women have adopted a new set of rules by which they judge people (slave morality), and that is seen by the weird "Oppression Olympics" we see playing out right now by the "oppressed" groups on the left [1].
Unfortunately, even if you are one of the under-represented people, discourse that does not fit into the narrative is met with open hostility in this new world we live in. A great example of that is what this women experienced https://medium.com/@marlene.jaeckel/the-empress-has-no-cloth...
This isn't about gender, race, political affiliation, or whatever attribute you use to separate people into 'us' and 'them'.
This is about bullies and assholes. Bullies and assholes come in every race and creed. The thing about male/female chauvinists is that they're actually the same! A male chauvinist, born as a female, would still be a chauvinist. They have everything in common. They're the same asshole bully. They are the enemy.
We need to make a stand against assholes whether they identify with us or not, and stop letting the actions of assholes who identify with us cause us to sit by and tolerate further discrimination and bullying. My 'us' and 'them' is whether you discriminate against people.
Freedom from discrimination is a human right. You don't fix discrimination with discrimination - you only perpetuate it. I'm tired of the assholes running everything.
I think the idea that people are being silenced from discussing the issue honestly is totally disingenuous. I see far more posts from people on HN about not being able to discuss the issue than I do posts actually trying to discuss the issue. I don't think I've ever seen people shut down for expressing reasonable if contentious opinions, yet somehow everyone has this idea that there can't be a reasonable discussion about it. Yes the discussion may be heated, and some more extreme viewpoints should justifiably be considered beyond the pale, but that doesn't explain the level of paranoia I see around here.
The effect of this is to reframe the debate from the actual issue at hand, into a debate about how we discuss it. The way we discuss it does matter, but the level of attention that gets around here feels like bikeshedding.
You seem to be saying it's not a big problem on Hacker News. I would agree with that. Most people, including you and I, post pseudonymously here. Many people create throwaway accounts in order to post anything political. Furthermore, social justice people consider Hacker News to be the preeminent example of toxic-masculine tech.
I know for a fact that I, and several other people, remove ourselves from all in-life discussion of this topic because of fear of economic and social repercussions.
Is that not "silencing" (your word) because you think we are irrational and everyone can discuss reasonable points of view without reprisal? Or is it not silencing because we choose to remove ourselves from the conversation?
I wonder if the 'men have worse socio-emotional skills' idea can at least partially explain the male/female divide in CS? Right now we take men as the baseline, and say that women are underrepresented. But what if it is men that are over represented, because for whatever reason they are drawn to computers(more so than women) because of some lacking social skill?
Agreed. While we still legally have freedom of speech, the real-life ramifications for speaking your mind can be enormous these days. Try being an outspoken Trump supporter in the tech bubble and see what happens. That's why I exclusively engage in internet discourse using pseudonyms like this one. When I was growing up, it was common sense that you don't use your real name on the internet. Now people have surrendered common sense to the social media companies and happily (and ignorantly) identify themselves in their posts, comments, tweets, blogs, etc. Many of them have suffered drastic consequences for doing so.
>When I was growing up, it was common sense that you don't use your real name on the internet.
That may have been true in some circles and at some times, but in early (especially pre-Web) Internet days when it was primarily academic along with some early tech companies, true names were definitely the norm.
For BBSs and the like, it varied. For hacker sites and the like anonymity/pseudonymity was certainly common but for more mainstream discussion boards, lots of people used their real names. We even had IRL get togethers.
Unfortunately it applies to almost every topic now.
It seems like you can't have a nuanced opinion on anything, you're either pro or anti, right or left.
In the end the people with an actual opinion and interesting things to say don't talk, and the idiots throwing bullshit around scream louder and louder.
Implying that women are worse (upbringing related or not) at spatial and mathematical abstraction skills is taboo for the exact same reason that saying the same about black people is.
Making these claims simply adds hurdles for an already disadvantaged group. When claims like this get made it acts as subconscious, or even conscious, justification for the biases of some of the readers/listeners. I.e. simply making the claim adds to the problem.
I agree that this isn't fair, but worrying about that is selfish. It is perfectly acceptable to attempt to formulate solutions based on these beliefs, but vocalizing the the beliefs rather than the solutions in public is harmful.
Regardless, arguments that present this logic feel like a desperate attempt to shunt responsibility to someone else. Women used to be well represented in computer science. This is no longer true, and I suspect that the blame for that lies all over the spectrum.
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.
> 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.
Also, when kids make program choices, they do it by their 'perception' of the profession, not by actual professional reality.
To reflect on first op, first half of the article is straw man attack, second half is golden insight. The author must be really scared of cultural studies-like interpretation to fend off so many windmills before giving us some meat.
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.
> 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.
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.
>most of it is just wiring form fields to databases in new and exciting ways
Not commenting on other points, but may be you are looking at it from an angle of an expert who has mastered it, so everything looks trivial. As, clearly its much more than that. It is like building extension for machines - the brains and the controls and also pure information management. That's why projects run into millions of lines of code. And the complexity is still growing, as we have new fields like ML emerging on top of it.
I agree with tptacek here. Based on just my experience (contractor then corporate programmer for the last decade), probably 99% of programming work out there in the world is mechanical rote that just involves reading comprehension and the ability to mechanically execute steps in some order. Calling this type of work complex only means someone fucked up somewhere.
Certainly there are specializations that are pushing the edge of research, but we are talking about an industry here, not the few research-y jobs that still exist.
15 years in I have built systems from scratch and done menial janitor work. I don't think its fair to say that that it isn't complex, some shitty work can be really complex due to subtleties and it would take someone with a fair bit of experience to fix. If it was so easy there wouldn't be a shortage of tech workers and our wages would be way lower.
I always find it interesting that game programmers have to be so much more technically skilled (well, until the age of game engine middle-ware) than full-stack CRUD jockeys, and yet are compensated much worse.
Science is fucking hard, and biology is fucking complicated. Trying to make this transition now, and ermahgerd I thought I dealt with complex system. Not!
Agree 100%, although the same could be said of UI developers back before “middleware” (browsers, decent ui frameworks, etc). That shit was hard and required geometry and matrices. Occasionally your CSS guru today will touch on that stuff (that is the 1%), but with thousands of libraries or working implementations at their disposal. I think this will happen eventually in all specializations - you will eventually have your “ML devs” that invoke a library to recognize a hotdog in an image etc.
I think one important thing that is easily overlooked is that while the technical part of wiring form fields to databases is something a lot of people do (and can trivialise), all of the processes behind it - what to put in, and where it fits in with the domain of the application and company, is probably the harder part. If that makes any sense.
Technical implementation details vs the big picture / domain.
Seriously. I regret that I only have one upvote to give. Things that we here take for granted are nigh impossible, or look like magic to 90% of the population. Even among the subset of people that are employed as software engineers, it can be sobering to realize how many of them struggle and flail at "just wiring form fields to databases in new and exciting ways."
It’s not that this stuff isn’t challenging. It’s that it’s not particularly more challenging than abstract statistics or organic chemistry or tax accounting, fields where you see lots of women.
Yeah, I'm not sure why we have to take the approach of crapping on one or the other. I happen to think things like construction are probably pretty complicated too.
> But that has nothing to do with why Google has so few women engineers.
Uh. What?
As far as I can tell, it has _everything_ to do with that. These two things are so closely related i cannot fathom how you can make such a statement...
Also... You make the same point twice. To paraphrase you:
a) "academic CS is less intellectually rigorous and less hard to succeed in than chem/etc -- but there are less women in it"
b) "work as google is simply not that hard, just wiring form fields to databases -- but there are less women in it"
For both a) and b) you then point out that they are problematic and that we cannot explain them (and, for the record, I agree with you on both counts) - but they are still unrelated?
EDIT: To reiterate: I think you are right in that the gender imbalance is a problem and is hard to explain. It's just this disconnect that i don't get here...
This is an essay that knocks down two extrinsic causes for gender disparity in STEM and then suggests, using Finland as an example, that the cause of disparity is probably intrinsic.
It may be the case that some intrinsic difference between men an women keeps the field of chemical engineering at 40-60 women/men, or mathematics at 35-65.
But those fields are cognitively more demanding than commercial software development or, for that matter, undergraduate computer science. No cognitive ability or innate affinity explains the degree of disparity in computer science as practiced in industry. If it did, you'd see it in related STEM fields.
The term for an argument gerrymandered around the data to the degree "CS participation disparity is innate" is is special pleading.
Garbage disposal is not what people usually call a cognitively demanding field. The gender imbalance is still worse than CS.
What those two have in common are shitty working conditions. Yes, coding is done sitting in climate controlled offices. But it is mostly shit: shit doc, shit managers, shit clients, shit hours, shit tools. Only dumbfucks who don't mind shit conditions for more money would do it.
I'm sure if you checked the gender balance in government coding jobs and in gamedev you'd discover how it is more about working conditions than sexism.
We like to tell ourselves how awesome our jobs are: generally good salaries, decent office conditions, flexible work hours, no dress code, etc.
There's a big "but": SW dev requires a certain mentality to be able to stick at it for a long time, without becoming bored out of your mind or going crazy about all the inefficiencies, dysfunction and utter meaninglessness of it all.
In 4 words: maintenance programming and debugging.
Most clerical jobs don't have a lot of surprises hidden in the middle of some undocumented feature. And things are not improving with the multiplication of dependence on SaaS and build and deploy mechanism.
While I can agree with maintenance, I usually find debugging the most exciting part of software development. Problem solving is the essence of this job and I don't really understand what keeps people that hate it in this field.
One difference is that most other clerical jobs don't depend as much on long-term focus and flow, and so allow much more work socialization and frequent casual chatter. That difference matters heavily to those for whom such socialization is important. It neutralizes the pain of confined spaces and boredom for such socially inclined people.
I suspect arkh's point is something like the following (as made in an article I can't locate at the moment, from about 20 years ago):
1) There are multiple fields available for new entrants to the labor force to pick from.
2) Some of these have better working conditions than others.
3) Women tend to be a bit more mature than men at the age at which one picks a career and are more likely to consider working conditions when doing so.
This has nothing to do with whether people are caring that someone is screwing someone else or not per se. What it does mean is that improving working conditions in some fields would likely draw more women in, if the above theory is correct. I have no opinion on the theory itself.
Not anymore, a lot of it is automated now so if you can drive and operate some buttons (and a broom if need be) you should be able to get a job in that area.
> No cognitive ability or innate affinity explains the degree of disparity in computer science as practiced in industry. If it did, you'd see it in related STEM fields.
We do see it in related fields. Women comprise at least 50% of medicine, but they are not evenly distributed like men. Men are disproportionately surgeons, and women are disproportionately gynecologists and pediatricians. Similar distributions occur in actual STEM fields.
As I said in my other post, things-vs-people explains all of this data, but the sexism/oppression hypothesis does not. It's not a matter of cognitive ability, but it is a matter of affinity.
And I think you are right. CS is not that special imho, and the gender imbalance should be more similar to e.g. maths.
> The term for an argument gerrymandered around the data to the degree "CS participation disparity is innate" is is special pleading.
I'm curious, though... Do you have any kind of research that would back your point up? Anything that would refute this "special pleading"?
I mean... I think you are right, but then again I (and you?) are CS experts and not experts at chemical engineering. Could it be that we underestimate the difficulties in CS, and overestimate these in chemical engineering?
> those fields are cognitively more demanding than commercial software development or, for that matter, undergraduate computer science
... you arrive at
> No cognitive ability or innate affinity explains the degree of disparity in computer science as practiced in industry.
Even if software development is "cognitively less demanding" in every sense (though I'm not convinced there is just one universal kind of cognitive ability), it may still be that women do not possess the "innate affinity" for it - namely, they do not like working in it, preferring other fields instead. To my understanding, there is nothing to contradict this explanation, and it makes perfect sense.
> it may still be that women do not possess the "innate affinity" for it - namely, they do not like working in it, preferring other fields instead. To my understanding, there is nothing to contradict this explanation, and it makes perfect sense.
There's no evidence supporting the supposition that there is an innate ability gap. Social explanations are supported by the evidence and that's why people are trying to change the field to be more welcoming.
One of the key things to remember is that this isn't some fixed quantity – any argument for innate characteristics would have to explain why the rates started going down in the 1980s despite the field becoming increasingly popular and lucrative over the same decades and not seeing a similar trend in comparable fields such as math:
> There's no evidence supporting the supposition that there is an innate ability gap.
First, this is a straw man argument: I never argued for "innate ability gap". I argued for "innate affinity", which I understand as (quoting myself) "they do not like working in it".
Second, I never claimed there was evidence to support the correctness of "innate affinity" argument. I only claimed that it is a possibility, and OP should not have ignored it.
Third, there is no consistent evidence supporting "social explanations", and that's why people resist attempts to "change the field to be more welcoming" at the expense of hard-working, deserving white males.
> any argument for innate characteristics would have to explain why the rates started going down in the 1980s despite the field becoming increasingly popular
It seems you're searching the ground for the cause of the snow.
The gender imbalance is systemic, and not at all that hard to explain. In the early 90s, as home PCs were becoming ubiquitous, they were in part marketed in the same vein as any other masculine hobby -- auto repair, diy tinkering, etc. The "titans" of early tech companies were men -- not because women weren't interested or weren't smart enough -- but because socially, the gender stereotypes were such that women need not concern themselves (i.e. "Women need not apply").
Ultimately, the same systemic sexism that refused women the right to vote until they pushed hard enough, or refused women equal pay, is the same systemic sexism that keeps women away from CS.
Someone else commented that perhaps it takes a certain "grit" (paraphrased) to maintain interest in CS. I think they're so wrong they're right: It takes a certain "grit" to continue in such a "programmer-bro" culture, where there are few female role models.
> Clearly, they have something else in common. We just need to figure out what it is.
Have you also considered a possibility that there is no explanation, and the gap is simply due to internal variability in the underlying dynamical system?
Although personally I favor the "different interests" explanation, let me expand on this a bit. Humans love explanations, even of random events, that's how superstition comes about.
There was an interesting biological experiment done with ants. If you put two identical piles of food the same distance from an anthill, you would intuitively expect that ants will eat from each pile in 50/50 ratio. However, it's not what happens; in reality, the ratio fluctuates over time, at points being 20/80 and can reverse to 80/20.
Why? Because behavior of each ant depends on strength of pheromone path to food that is produced by other ants. In other words, ants, to some extent, copy behavior of other ants. And this copying is enough to produce a large difference in ratio even in cases that are objectively absolutely equal.
So is it hard to conceive that humans also copy behavior of other fellow humans (actually, the above example is from Paul Ormerod's book Butterfly Economics), and that women might prefer a job where already are other women? Or where isn't an overwhelming majority of different people (i.e. men)?
The influence on individual decision can be very subtle, but yet can, statistically, lead to large differences in outcome.
> Whatever is holding women's participation in our field at or below twenty percent is artificial, and a travesty.
Or just natural. I mean there's gender imbalance in most careers, as is also mentioned in that article; there's just less attention being paid to e.g. the gender difference in day cares (which is in part due to people's preferences in lines of work, but in that particular area a very clear case of gender discrimination and stereotyping)
At this point I can't tell what you're trying to pin me to, but just to be clear: no, I do not think there is an innate difference between men and women that is the cause of male mass incarceration. I believe there are profound cultural forces that create that result.
Maybe women just see CS for what it is - 'simly not that hard, wiring form fields to databases', and think, let others tap away at the keyboards, I'll be a surgeon or whatever.
So, if that were the case, would you say that it's fair to now force these would be neuro surgeons, doctors, lawyers, microbiologists, etc.. to 'wire fields to databases', because in 2018 some people believe that has a somewhat high status in (mostly american) society?
A female relative was considering a career change, but even though the salary and perks sounded nice, the work itself seemed meaningless to her.
Another friend did make the jump, mostly for the money and career opportunities and she's struggling and feeling a bit demotivated. The CS theory is quite hard, and it's not something she's especially interested in.
These anecdotes don't prove anything, but I've been thinking for a while if the mental toll of this profession is really worth it.
We say that the others didn't make it into the industry, but what if the others are clever enough to avoid having to spend all day in front of a computer working on very abstract things that aren't really understood by most of the people in their lives, including their managers and a significant number of their colleagues.
Having to spend their free time studying just to keep up with the latest fashion, doing overtime, going through the interview gauntlet every damn time, getting shafted by incompetent business leaders and managers.
Programmers are kind of the punching bag of the software industry.
> "Having to spend their free time studying just to keep up with the latest fashion, doing overtime, going through the interview gauntlet every damn time, getting shafted by incompetent business leaders and managers."
This is why my wife left the industry to be a full-time mom/homemaker. The problems she solves are more rewarding and the time/energy she spends on things are more worth it according to her. Why would she want to get out of bed every morning to churn out JS for some scummy corporation every day when she could be spending time with our kid, teaching them new things, hiking/backbacking/kayaking/fishing with them, etc.?
She's appreciative that I go to work everyday to pay the bills and sees her position as the more ideal one.
Exactly...my wife struggles with the judgement of her former co-workers/classmates who deride her decision to forgo a career coding for some megacorp...I don't really get why there is such hoopla over going to work and trading your precious time for some money...I get why it is necessary, but not why it is celebrated as a defining thing about a person...a company can easily find someone else who can build/maintain their simple CRUD app, your kid cannot as easily find replacement parents.
I'm one of those who made the jump from programming to medicine. I consulted during medical school, but programming is much more fun as a hobby than it ever was as a career, and I'm past the bad days where I had sleepless nights and long call. Residency still sucks but even that is getting relatively more humane.
I'd never go back to programming as a career unless medicine became completely untenable, and I doubt that's going to happen at the level I'm at now.
especially when CS folks are still considered nerds by default and nerds are still the butt of jokes.
It's not high status, there's just a window of opportunity where it's high paying compared to jobs with similar complexity (clerical office work). That, too, will end.
The difficulty here lies in actually doing a reasonable compare/contrast that looks at the entire system. You wouldn't compare the salary of a PhD principal software architect to a registered nurse at a pediatrics office. Just like you wouldn't compare the salary of a cardiac surgeon to a junior programmer.
There are many professional and specialist roles in the medical field that go beyond "nursing" but don't require going to med school for full MD training. You have occupational therapists, physical therapists, speech-language pathologists, physicians assistants, nurse practitioners, behavioral therapists, and probably many others I don't know about. Last I checked, all of the fields I mentioned are majority women. The salary ranges clear $100k though there's a generally higher education requirement for a given pay range. Although I think that is more an issue that tech has a uniquely low bar for formal education and a higher bar for informal education and experience.
In san-fran, sure. I'm in Canada (Nova Scotia) and they're pretty similar, with similar levels of respect. It depends a lot on country, but the gender ratio holds pretty steady.
They make 80k, I make at most 80k if I work at the highest-end webdev firms.
That's the whole point. Median salary nationally is massively skewed for computer science because salaries in tech centers, where those jobs are clustered, is extremely high. The same is not true for nursing, which is distributed fairly uniformly across the country.
For example, according to Glassdoor, a software dev in Chicago has an average salary of about 82k compared to about 120k for a nurse practitioner. Or if you want to compare earlier career, a junior developer is at about 67k vs. 68k for a registered nurse. You need to bound your statistics geographically to control for skewed labor markets when comparing salaries like this.
> For example, according to Glassdoor, a software dev in Chicago has an average salary of about 82k compared to about 120k for a nurse practitioner.
Becoming a Nurse Practitioner requires, at a minimum, a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, followed by licensure as an RN, followed by a Master's in a NP specialty, followed by certification as an NP. Practically, it requires more because most NP programs require practice as an RN in the specialty for at least 1-2 years prior to admission. Its a very small, elite subset of nursing.
Further, Glassdoor estimates are something like a real-time estimate of what the current values of a nonrepresentative measure would be; they really should be marked "for entertainment use only". Per BLS data, the median salary of the 1,930 NPs in the Chicago-Naperville-Arlington Heights Metropolitan Division is $101,930, about on par with the far more numerous software developers (Software Developers, Applications: 20,570 jobs, $99,430 median salary; Software Developers, Systems Software, 9,930 jobs $103,620.) [0] The Glassdoor numbers you give are way high for NPs and way low for devs.
Contrary to your suggestion of massive geographical distortion in median salary due to concentration of tech jobs in high-cost locations, this elite level of nursing is paid generally similar to software developers nationally, as well. (Nurse Practitioners, 150,230 jobs, $104,610 median salary; Software Developers, Applications, 794,000 jobs, $104,300 median salary; Software Developers, System Software, 409,820 jobs, $110,590 median salary.) [1] (Yes, these national numbers are a little different than those from the Occupational Outlook Handbook, also from BLS, that I posted upthread: the OOH is a high-level publication updated more recently, which also uses slightly different categorizations; so here I've used the national data that corresponds directly to the geographic specific data.)
You're still just cherry-picking. It's more sophisticated cherry-picking but what you are not doing is taking a balanced cross-section of people with a varying array of personality and cognitive traits and then tracing them through life/career decisions to see where they end up and why.
Software development is a great career. But it's just a career. It's not a prize. It's not some kind of gift handed out to a privileged elite. We need to stop treating it that way.
Thanks for the additional information. What about RNs vs. junior devs, which you completely ignored? As far as I know, that profession requires only a bachelor's degree.
I'm also trying to figure out what your point in the third paragraph is, exactly. If NPs are geographically distributed roughly equally and software developers are not, you would see exactly that median salary distribution. Again, that's the whole point - if you look only at national medians or averages, you're completely ignoring the effects of regional outliers. Take away SF, Seattle, NYC, and Austin, and then tell me what the median software dev salary looks like nationally. If you can't do that, look at non-tech cities and countries for an indicator of what unskewed salary comparisons look like between professions.
> What about RNs vs. junior devs, which you completely ignored?
I didn't ignore it, I addressed it implicitly with the reasons I rejected the validity of NP to software developer comparison; but to address it explicitly:
The median RN plaisibly makes in the same rough range as the median junior dev (“junior dev” being a seniority level within an occupational rather than a distinct tracked occupation in the BLS data, this is hard to tell with certainty, but plausible.)
OTOH, “junior dev” is the entry level of software development, beyond which people are expected to progress with a few years experience. RN is the full working level in nursing; the median across registered nurses includes a much wider experience band than that across junior devs, so they aren't really comparable: at the experience level of a median RN, a junior dev wouldn't be a junior dev any more.
> I'm also trying to figure out what your point in the third paragraph is, exactly.
You claimed that looking at Chicago rather than national numbers would shown that the latter suffer gross distortion in tech wages due to tech hubs like SF. In fact, the relation between the nursing sub-group you chose to focus on and software devs in Chicago is very similar to the national relationship (both are a little under the national level in Chicago, and software developers a few percentage points moreso than NPs, but not enough to make a significant difference in the relationship.)
> Again, that's the whole point - if you look only at national medians or averages, you're completely ignoring the effects of regional outliers
But I'm not looking at only the national numbers, I just compared them to the numbers for your chosen non-tech-hub locale and found that the gross distortion you claimed in the national numbers, compared to non-tech-hub locale, doesn't exist.
> If you can't do that, look at non-tech cities and countries for an indicator of what unskewed salary comparisons look like between professions.
But I just did that with you selecting both the non-tech-hub city and the non-tech profession, and the national vs. local comparison wasn't materially different. (I suspect that the reason is that locality has only modest effect on the median and a lot bigger effect on the total number of positions and the shape of the high tail; if we were looking at means rather than medians there'd probably be more distortion.)
Ok, I misread your original reply and did not see that you had reduced your selection set to look at the Chicago area BLS numbers rather than national. To your point on junior devs progressing through the ranks, registered nurse is also entry-level and the expectation is that RNs will progress to expert/mentor/manager nurse, a specialty, etc.
However, I have pretty big issues with BLS data in general, so it's pretty clear we're not going to come to an agreement here based on that data set. If you're going to treat BLS data as gospel and other sources as garbage then we can save time and stop here.
Becoming a nurse practitioner requires additional education and certification/licensing in addition to what's required for a registered nurse. It's not just a tenure/promotion thing like moving from junior developer to developer.
> Whatever is holding women's participation in our field at or below twenty percent is artificial, and a travesty.
Seriously? Why does it even matter if women don't want to work in CS? Why do we software "engineers" have the ego to think that we work in some great occupation and it's a "travesty" that women largely don't have any interest in working sitting in front of a computer all day.
We are glorified mechanics. Glorified by ourselves. We mostly build intellectually draining CRUD apps mostly and earn shit wages in super expensive cities like SF. Half of us are indentured servants via the H1b system. I think women are smart that they want absolutely nothing to do with this field.
We really need to get off of our high horses and stop believing we are "changing the world" via JavaScript.
Because software engineers consistently become involved in designing, clarifying, and solving the problems themselves, and companies consistently make mistakes that should be avoidable if that had more than zero women or minority staff working on the problem scope and definition.
See, for example, "HP doesn't care about black people," the ongoing trend of tech devices that are sized for men's bodies and hands and not women, social networks that fail to consider how a stalker could exploit their access policies, etc.
Ok, framing diversity hires as a way to sell product to other populations at least seems honest. It also explains why diversity hires are also underpaid. But a lot of the discussion around this seems to be about morality and "inclusion" based on people's chromosomes and melanin levels.
Similarly, I know that as an h1b hire, more often than not, I am just cheaper. No, the company is not hiring me because "I am the best in the world". I fear negotiating salary, fear leaving and am a little underpaid compared to the numbers I see on HN.
I hope women don't degrade themselves like we do to feed the massive profits of the big tech companies. I have faith that women are generally way more sensible then us guys and won't put up with this crap. Being a developer can be isolating, depressing and lonely.
Artificial? I would say cultural. I would surely like there to be more women in CS. There are literally no women at my office, and the only women I met for the last six months are from HR. I am single, and so is about 50% of my coworkers - this is not a particularly good position to be in on the 'relationship market'.
On the other hand, I can't blame women for not wanting my job. IT has a reputation for attracting white, male, introvert nerds - and like many prejudices, there is some truth in this even if this is only because of the self-fulfilling aspect of it (I certainly do conform to this stereotype to some extent). It has been shown that females are generally more attracted to fields evolving around social interaction - and IT has quite a bit of the opposite reputation.
If we compare the situation in CS with the situation in sports the situation does stop appearing to be problematic. We never get worked up about the lack of male cheerleaders, ballerino's (have you even heard that word before?), or that few women play football. I fail to see the point of getting worked up about this specific example of inequality of participation.
Really? Where do you work (as in what part of the country)? I'm in the Dallas area and have been for 20 years - everywhere I've ever worked has had lots of women (close to 50/50) in technical roles. They're almost all Indian, though (as are 90% of the people in any technical roles). Rare to see a female manager of any nationality, though.
The Netherlands. There work about 25 people at my office. I am currently working at a client, where there are again no women in the software engineering department (about 15 people).
> "I would surely like there to be more women in CS. There are literally no women at my office, and the only women I met for the last six months are from HR. I am single, and so is about 50% of my coworkers - this is not a particularly good position to be in on the 'relationship market'."
"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."
All other points aside, this is simply an untrue statement - the lofty heights of the average software engineer at Alphabet is not even fractionally close to the pinnacle of "intellectual difficulty" in our professional field.
Yeah, and after all those words about how even in advanced gender equality countries differences persist they offer the following qualitative reason for it:
> 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.
Right, so because as a woman she intrinsically like people more, my friend is now doing a postdoc about moths?
Not to mention that there's nothing touchy-feely about biochem, which is chem except you take orgo almost immediately. But the prefix "bio" in it allows them to dismiss it.
For the proposed mechanism to work there doesn't need to be anything actually "touchy-feely" about biochem, it's enough if the prefix "bio" makes it appear as such in the minds of men and women who consider going into it as opposed to some other field.
This is a misstatement of what the biochemistry coursework I am familiar with looks like.
Biochem, when offered as an undergrad program, is offered through the biology department and has a number of standard biology department requirements that would be elective at best for chemistry undergrads. Biochem majors also take orgo following gen chem, just like chemistry majors.
I don’t know what “touchy-feely” means in this context, but “chem except you take orgo almost immediately” does not match with my experience at all.
My son is in UIUC's biochem program. It's offered through the Chemistry department, has him in orgo next semester, and has a first year shared with chemical engineers.
At UIUC biochemistry is offered through Molecular and Cellular Biology. It's a good program but distinct from Chemistry. Next semester sounds like sophomore fall, which would be on schedule for chemistry majors as well as biochem majors at most programs I know of.
I have no idea what bringing up ChemE has to do with anything: undergrad ChemE has little to do with chemistry and a lot to do with continuum mechanics and steam tables. It's common for engineering students to do their natural sciences classwork (it isn't called "earth sciences", that is something else) together along with major students.
> Once again: compared to other STEM fields, women participate less in CS than any other field except physics.
Hm, are these US statistics? Cursory look at our electrical engineering (european post-communist country) study programme list of students reveals that out of ~50 students, there is exactly zero women (:(). There is decidedly more women in the CS programme (~14%)
It is a travesty that for so much talk, money and political focus that gender segregation get in our field, we are just so average on the work market. If we split up all the employed people in my nation, about 50% will be working at a profession below the twenty percent line the the other 50% will be above the twenty percent line in gender segregation.
If we only could figure out what is common below and above our field, we might get out of this place in astoundingly average in gender segregation and become exceptional. Whatever is holding men's and women's participation in each other fields may be something fixable.
Where are you getting your stats? The last time I saw someone assert this on HN I looked into it but didn't find that[0] - CS was about equal to MechE, EE, Aero Astro.
edit: nvm, I misread. You lump MechE (and I'd guess EE) with CS, and I think are pointing out they're in the 15-20% range as opposed to the other engineering disciplines mostly around 30%. I incorrectly thought you were saying the other fields were around 50%.
> 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.
This is very misleading. Female post docs in the maths are below 30%, and computer science post docs are at about 20%:
There is no really justification to think that the maths "are doing better" than other STEM fields. It's certainly not a double digit difference.
> Whatever is holding women's participation in our field at or below twenty percent is artificial, and a travesty.
That's pure conjecture. There is very little evidence that this is artificial, and a few good reasons to think it's not. For instance, female participation in STEM in more repressive countries like Iran is at 50%, because it's one of a small number of careers they can choose from.
Pretty much every country in which women have more opportunities to choose from a wider selection of careers shows the exact same gendered STEM trends. Do you really believe these prejudices holding back women from STEM are somehow universal in precisely the same ways across dozens of cultures? And furthermore, that the fields that were even more sexist and old-boys-club, like law and medicine, couldn't keep women out, but a bunch of nerds with keyboards are far too scary for women? That frankly stretches credulity.
A better theory that reasonably explains all of this data is the things-vs-people hypothesis:
You just gave me a sequence of data points that confirms my argument, claimed instead that it contradicts it, and then linked to a rambling SlateStarCodex post.
The claim was that what was holding women back from CS was an artificial construct. "Prejudice" is a loaded word for that, in my opinion... in that it often seems to imply malice in what I see sometimes in society as a tribal-oriented congregation on proper "roles", and stereotypes that get associated with professions and cling onto them.
The "people / things" role postulate is interesting, it may explain some of the differences. But I don't think it holds up in all cases (50% of chemist bachelor degrees are female (https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/membership/acs/welcom...) and chemistry really isn't a "people" oriented discipline IMHO).
In general culture, I do think some things get grouped into one sex or another based on pure marketing and image. The marketing style or image itself might play on certain characteristics of the sexes that are biological (for instance, men have more testosterone of course, so men will respond better to marketing and imagery that plays on testosterone oriented characteristics). But this might say nothing about the product itself.
For instance, I see nothing biological at all why in most Western societies, beer tends to be seen as a "masculine" drink and wine a "feminine" one. Rather, to me it seems to be pure marketing positioning at this time.
With CS, there may be some biological explanation which will produce a natural bias in the ratio. But there may also be a marketing / image / "role" component of CS that does depress the ratio as well. IMHO, the marketing / image part of this is always worth challenging.
And there is an ingrained stereotype with computer programmers: the popular image of someone into computers in Western media is, pretty much almost always, a socially awkward, non-athletic, nerdy male. (This stereotype honestly is actually honestly unfair to male programmers that aren't socially awkward or are athletic or aren't terribly nerdy.)
It would be interesting to examine the popular stereotypes and generalizations of programmers in other countries and see if sex ratios differ based on what the positioning is.
The article I linked also discusses similar trends in mathematics, ie. ~50% of math bachelors are also for women. Of course, what you can do with a bachelors in math is become a teacher, which is why the number of women doing grad and post doc math work falls to roughly similar levels as computer science.
There is no comparable horizontal skill transfer for a computer science degree into teaching, so there's less enticement from the beginning, and so less engagement. No doubt some women actually continue with math post docs because they actually find it more interesting than expected, and they change their minds about using the math degree for something else.
As for chem, besides teaching-oriented goals as with math, a lot of chem is closely related to life sciences, pharmacology and other disciplines which typically do show high enrollment among women.
The things-vs-people effect seems quite strong. I agree that it may not account for all of the differences, and this would need to be quantified to be sure, but it does seem to account for the many of them. Certainly much better than the oppression hypothesis, so why is the latter still the prevailing narrative?
> IMHO, the marketing / image part of this is always worth challenging.
Agreed. I think this should apply to all fields, like male nursing, pro dancing and flight attendants, whose stereotypes are typically highly feminized.
But we shouldn't then be up in arms if people still openly and naturally choose to segregate by gender, as seems to be the trend across all nations with high gender equality.
Unfortunately "oppression" is a big selling popular point these days for ranty-type people across all portions of the "political" spectrum these days. It is easier to think, I suppose, to get angry about Some Malicious Force conspiring against you, rather then examine the often multi-faceted cultural and/or biological constructs behind any sort of divide.
In some cases, there is some genuine concern behind the rant -- some of the stereotypes out there that some people hold are indeed downright oppressive. However, a lot of the times, accusations of malicious oppression are probably overblown, even if there truly is some stereotype out there that is facilitating the divide to some degree. Often the stereotype and prejudice might exist, but more because of social construct, not because of malice.
So angry rants about the situation are probably the least productive way to look into this problem. And yes, as you say, stereotype issues affects all professions. Once we resolve this problems (if we ever do), I agree there is no reason to be concerned about natural drift.
> Unfortunately "oppression" is a big selling popular point these days for ranty-type people across all portions of the "political" spectrum these days.
Right, it wouldn't bother me so much if the academics pushing the "oppression" narrative were a little more honest about how non-robust the evidence is. Instead, it's often just conveyed as fact, which just blows my mind. No wonder there's so much manufactured outrage on college campuses these days.
Like when the Damore memo came out, and academics on both sides lined up to agree and disagree with Damore's points, which often just devolved into attacking straw men. I was thoroughly unimpressed with the quality of the arguments I read and how uncharitable people were with the people disagreeing with them.
Edit: Like, there are literal studies [1] demonstrating how much better a theory things-vs-people are in explaining the STEM gender divide, but the narrative seems immune to facts and better theories.
> Whatever is holding women's participation in our field at or below twenty percent is artificial, and a travesty.
The overwhelming majority of kindergarten teachers are female (over 97%). Is this a travesty as well? Why can't various fields be dominated by one sex?
> is artificial
Our entire economy is artificial, so that goes without saying. I think you were insinuating that this is purposeful. It isn't.
> Is it stereotype threat? Implicit bias?
It isn't.
Women are simply more sensitive to work/life balance. For whatever reason, our industry seems to think it's normal to work 12 hours a day. Very few women want to spend 12 hours at a job. That's fine. Very few men want to spend time taking care of little kids. That's also fine.
> Women are simply more sensitive to work/life balance. For whatever reason, our industry seems to think it's normal to work 12 hours a day.
Most people in tech don't work 12 hours... it is not the norm. Maybe it's a Bay Area or early startup thing, but I never have.
Even if you were right, a lot of other office/"professional" jobs work just as much or longer than us. My friends (female and male) working here in NYC in other industries (finance, marketing, accounting, etc.) usually work 9-10 hours and don't take a lunch break (work while eating). Some careers like nursing are known for their crazy hours.
> Most people in tech don't work 12 hours... it is not the norm.
I've seen it almost everywhere, that's been my experience, but that's anecdotal. I do primarily work with startupy companies and large corps with aggressive environments.
> My friends (female and male) working here in NYC in other industries (finance, marketing, accounting, etc.) usually work 9-10 hours
These are industries dominated by men ...
> Some careers like nursing are known for their crazy hours.
It's not the consecutive hour count that's the issue, but the total hour count. Nurses do work long stretches of time, but they also get long stretches of time off.
My sibling comment attempts to make lemonade out of the problematic fact that there are in fact huge gender parity differences worldwide, with for instance massively improved gender parity in Asia. I'd say that fact pretty thoroughly acidulates the article's assertion about correlation with cultural gender norms.
Yes, and it's mentioned in the article. There seem to be a negative correlation between gender-equality and the proportion of female students in computer science.
I still fail to see how people's reluctance to make a public display in an academic lecture is somehow reflective of sexism in the field as a whole. How exactly does this tirade you speak of have any more influence than some random street preacher spouting about our sins and the end times?
It wouldn’t matter if you were accurate, it would still be rude and inappropriate, but note that tptacek is about the last person in the world I would describe as having had an underwhelming career working on boring projects (although I’m sure he’s done his share of those, too), so you got your facts wrong on top of everything.
That makes it worse: if he's had a fascinating career (and sees it that way), but says that 99% of CS work is "just writing form fields" as he puts it then he's looking down on everyone else. I hope we can have more respect for each other in this industry.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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
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!
The problem with that alternative explanation which is also offered by the
article above is that in the very big part of the world that lies outside of
Silicon Valley, the top salaries are accessible not through the technical
career paths, but though the managerial ones. So anyone who's just looking for
the highest paid job would not go for a technical career. [1]
What this tells us is the opposite of what the article concludes. If women in
more equal countries, with an absent "glass ceiling" that keeps them from
attaining the top-paying positions, choose non-technical careers, that is
because (they expect that) those careers pay better than technical careers.
This choice however, does not allow us to conclude a lack of interest in
technical subjects. It merely suggests an interest in a better paid job.
Note that we also can't conclude that women in less equal countries are more
interested in technical positions. However, this is not what I'm claiming. My
point is that it's not safe to infer "interest in X" fom "works in X".
P.S. I see below you say you didn't read the article. It basically says what you say in your comment.
_______________
[1] This comes from my personal experience, but I don't expect it to be
controversial. In many companies I've worked, men and women, even if they
started out as technical workers, jumped on to a managerial track as soon as
they got the chance. In one particular multinational financial company I
worked, this was so common that the company had very few technical employees
and had to outsource most of its technical work to contractors- which should
also not come as any news to anyone who's worked in the financial sector.
Do you not think this could be because immigrants are looking for economic prosperity and have fewer connections?
For example, a British woman that graduates from a British university with a history degree and wants to work in the UK probably met a couple people during the course of her degree (or at any other point) that can help her move forward with a career. Because let's face it, you're not going to get a high-paying job with high marks in your History BA and nothing else. As such, her prospects will be better in her field of study or in a reasonably related field (or any field where having contacts strongly helps and where she has made such contacts).
Meanwhile, an immigrant will be much, much less likely to have such local connections/contacts. Presumably then, immigrants will gravitate towards fields where getting into them / your pay grade is more closely based on competency and not "who you know". In other words, fields like STEM or (in your case) anything which requires a PhD.
Could that not be an explanation for your experience?
It's an explanation but not a very simple one. It requires the immigrant to have chosen a career while in their country that would offer them more prospects once they emigrated. But then, why immigate instead of choosing a career that would be profitable and respectable in their country in the first place?
I think a simpler explanation is that people choose a career in their countries for whatever reason (that I don't know and can't speculate about) then when demand for their skills rises, they may find that emigrating is a better choice than staying at home- for instance, because salaries are better abroad.
That would be a simpler explanation for why more women in IT professions are immigrants to the UK (and possibly the US, though I'm not sure): they got the skills, there's job offers, they go abroad and take the offers.
I would expect immigrants to more frequently choose careers that require fewer linguistic skills, such as engineering or music, rather than law or advertising, say.
Some of my engineer colleagues are very hard to understand on the phone because of their language. It's hard to imagine them getting anywhere as a lawyer, for example.
In the UK, a large number of doctors and medical staff are foreign, particularly Indian or EU citizens. For Indians I'm guessing English is not a problem because they learn it at school, especially the ones from the poshest backgrounds. EU citizens will have similar command of English. For those who have studied in British institutions, foreign language courses are mandatory if they can't prove a level of English that allows them to participate in the courses.
Some Indians speak English fluently, but in a way that most British people find incomprehensible. In contrast, and somewhat ironically, a German speaking bad English is often easier to understand than a random British person (as opposed to a British person from one's own social class and locality).
The level of English knowledge you need to study maths or engineering at a British university is obviously very much lower than the level required for studying law or working as a lawyer. Some otherwise intelligent people are bad at languages and will realistically never achieve knowledge of another language to a level sufficient to successfully work as a lawyer. In fact, I have been reliably informed that some Germans give up on physics as a career because they realise that they will never manage to learn English well enough to succeed in academia, which is a bit sad, really.
That may be true in the USA but I don't think we were talking about the USA specifically. In the EU we have lots of immigrants who didn't have or need a job-specific visa. Even in the USA, don't you have immigrants who were refugees or family members who are allowed to work?
>> Visas are overwhelmingly only granted to technical fields. So people who can immigrate to america are the ones in technical fields.
Even so, why are there more of those technical immigrants female than the locals? That the majority of visas granted are for technical fields doesn't tell us anything about the gender of those who obtain them. There's nothing stopping 100% of immigrant IT workers from, e.g. India from being male. Why are they not?
Also, I'm not sure the assumption that visas are only granted to technical workers is correct. My experience is from the UK and I don't know what happens in the US, but over here, immigrants do all sorts of jobs. For example, many doctors and nurses in the NHS (the National Health Service) are from India or the EU; the majority of agricultural workers are from the EU; plumbers, famously, are all Polish; catering workers are from the EU; etc etc.
> Even so, why are there more of those technical immigrants female than the locals?
You are comparing locals( general population) to immigrant females( self selected group). Ofcourse population selected for technical degrees has higher % of technical degrees.
> There's nothing stopping 100% of immigrant IT workers from, e.g. India from being male. Why are they not?
Because all people want better life male or female. Getting into tech(even if goes against their inherent choices) for Immigrant female population is worth the high reward vs local population where upside of getting into tech is might not be worth going against their inherent interests.
> the majority of agricultural workers are from the EU
You explained it yourself. What you are asking is equivalent to 'why aren't there more of UK natives among agricultural workers'.
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.
>> ...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.
That's not "the truth", that's your experience in the amusement park that has been created for the pampered developers of the current dotcom bubble at companies like Google. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Regardless of gender, I'd rather have the doubters weeded out by an unrealistic negative perception than have them lured in by an unrealistic positive one.
Fair, I apologize for generalizing. You're right that Google is an outlier in this way. But I still think that there's a perception that CS is more anti-social than it actually is, and a perception that other professions are more social than they actually are.
In my experience, programmers are generally less socially inept than people would think, while people in most other professions are less socially adept than they think they are.
The thing is, some programmers really are socially inept and CS work is one of their last refuges. That includes a bunch of socially inept women, too! Let's not disturb their natural habitat by bringing all these overly social people in, those will thrive in many other places as well.
Software development is an increasingly social job NOT because the people doing it are more social, but out of necessity. Anti-social cowboy programmers just can't produce the results the industry needs at this point it in time. Stories of success like Notch are increasingly rare.
From my experience as a programmer, while some level of communication is certainly important, most of my time and effort is spent concentrating alone at the task at hand. That's the central part of the job, communication only supports it. Communication is necessary to divide work across the team and exchange experience; it also provides some psychological relief and motivation. While all of these are important, I consider the concentrated mental effort a far more important and difficult part.
Right, but isn’t this true about many other fields that women do go into, like art, design, medicine, journalism, earth sciences, finance, research, etc? In these fields, the “meat” of the job is also analytical and done alone, but they’re still seen as more social than CS.
I used to be like that when I was younger and in earlier stages of my career. As time passed, the pride of achieving the status worn off, as did the novelty of problems I was solving. Many problems turned out to be reoccurring, so I moved on to harder and less mundane problems. I keep doing that to this day - moving away from mundane work to something new and/or more difficult.
At the same time, as I grew older, my social life improved, and I learned to understand humans, so that part became easier.
During my career, I’ve noticed many female programmers and even PhD-level researchers switching to PM roles. PM and UX have better representations than developer roles, though I don’t think that this should be counted as success towards the overall problem.
This actually goes to my point - PMing is more social than coding, and there are more female PMs and UX designers so those fields also feel more social for the women in them (easier to make friends, more feminine community).
Re:success - In my eyes, success is when women have better representation as engineers, makers, and technologists. A PM and UX designer could be a great engineer and technologist, although it's hard to keep your technical chops when you're not coding regularly. So I agree...
> 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.
> 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.
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.
What does this mean? Do women talk more? Yes. Is it substantive? Women are more willing to talk about their feelings but they also can be quite indirect compared to a man.
Socially smarter doesn't mean better social skills.
It simply means that they are more socially aware. If you allow the metaphor, I would say that they are more likely to "play the game" and "play it well" at that.
Social skills have very little relationship to "emotional intelligence", so I have no clue why you would bring up the point that women are more willing to talk about their feelings.
You are comparing extraversion and agreeableness. While both are statistically higher in women, you are comparing apples and oranges.
"Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance). This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs."
Maybe if women were more agreeable they wouldn't have been so offended.
Agreeableness trumps Neuroticism IMHO. Neuroticism is a knee-jerk reaction that you cannot control without a lot of self-control. To expect an individual ranking high in Neuroticism to control themselves is to be blind to other's points of view. In short, it means that you do not have enough sensibility to understand and predict the reaction of others before they happen.
Agreeableness allows you to predict those reaction and plan accordingly.
The parent above me said "Women are socially smarter, so they are aware of that. Men are clueless" and I didn't resort to calling them a misandrist. Let's stick to talking about the issue at hand.
It's not ok to use HN primarily for ideological battle, which your account appears to be doing. This site exists for intellectual curiosity, and we can't have that and war at the same time.
That doesn't mean politicized topics can't be discussed—obviously they are and should be, up to a point. But such discussions tend to consume everything else with their flames, so we have to be careful about not letting them take over HN completely.
The best way we've found so far to draw the line is the 'primarily' test. When an account uses HN primarily for intellectual curiosity, i.e. for encountering and discussing interesting things, it's not an abuse of the site to occasionally talk politics too. But if it's on HN primarily for political battle, then—regardless of the politics—we ask the user not to and ban the account if it doesn't change.
This turns out to work well because there's a gap between these two kinds of user. The first kind tends to remain civil and substantive even as topics get more divisive. The second kind tends not only to drop the gloves, but also to come armed with talking points and not be interested in conversation for its own sake. The one group fits the purpose of HN while the other does not. There are exceptions, of course. But the rule holds up well enough to be a fair standard for moderation.
Saying that you can't criticize a group because of its amount of power in a society is a completely arbitrary rule that is easily disregarded. You will never be able to shame people into following that nonsense.
You appear to still be using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's an abuse of this site because it destroys the intellectual curiosity that HN exists for. As I've explained to you before, we ban accounts that do this, regardless of which ideology they favor. This is in the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):
Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, so we ban accounts that do it.
I don't think you're abusing HN on purpose, but we've given you multiple warnings already. When people either can't or won't use the site as intended, we do end up banning them.
Thanks for saying this. I skimmed my past 6 months of comments and I don't share your view that I'm "using HN primarily for ideological battle". I don't believe I've previously discussed gender issues, either. If anything it looks like I've had a pro-Apple ideology, which hasn't been flagged.
I make a point to be respectful while commenting, but I don't keep an internal quota for the subjects I comment on. I don't want to add noise to a topic I can't contribute to just to drown out my other comments. The moderation is a bit stifling and doesn't feel ideologically neutral. I know moderation is nebulous so I wanted to offer some feedback, regardless of what happens.
Datapoint in agreement: My sister left a very successful career as an electrical engineer in her late 20s after a very successful school career, because ultimately it became clear to her how antisocial the career was for her, and how personally unsatisfying it was. She made the transition to become a counsellor and was much happier as a result.
And I can understand why -- I did the opposite -- dropped out of my philosophy BA to go join the .com rush, and now 20 years later am a SWE @ Google -- but having come from a humanities background originally, I continue to find this culture off-putting.
And I very much would prefer to be working with 'living things' (plants) at this point in my life. If I could only make a decent living that way.
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?
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
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?
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).
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.
Why? Who cares? Shouldn't we be optimizing towards everyone having at least the chance to do the thing they like for a living, or something along those lines?
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.
>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.
I do strongly suspect that has a lot to do with the fall-off in women working in CS. (It's probably not limited to that though it probably also leads to some self-perpetuating feedback loops.) It's almost unique among careers in that regard with the arts (playing music, etc.) or sports being the only other major exceptions.
You don't just decide in high school you'd like to do the violin thing and apply to Juilliard. But it's considered perfectly normal to decide you really liked high school chemistry, even if that's the extent of your exposure to it, and consider majoring in it once you hit college.
On the other hand, I've taken a couple of programming MOOCs based on intro programming courses at a couple of elite schools. The idea that I could have made it through them as a freshman never having touched a text editor/IDE is farcical. Yet [EDITED for clarity: when I took an intro programming course as a mechanical engineer in college way back when there was no expectation that I had ever touched a computer]. (I had done a little BASIC programming in high school but it was very rudimentary.)
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.
My kid sister is a critical care-trauma surgeon. One of her (least) favourite stories when she worked in the South was when she took care of a rather complex ICU case. At the end of it the patient said, "I just want you to know that you were great, but I never saw the doctor once."
My sister is rarely at a loss for words but I'm not sure _she_ even knew what to say to that.
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.
I don't know, I would immediately think that the doctor is the mother if this question somehow came up in a natural context. But if this question is posed as a quiz, it makes you think, am I not getting something here? Maybe that's why people struggle with the answer.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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).
[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.
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?
> "When I pursue a career in this field, how will my coworkers perceive me?"
In all honesty, recently I've seen underperforming women get promoted to positions they shouldn't have been promoted to because of political pressures, so there is going to be some sense of "is she competent or is she a diversity hire/promotion?" They also might think, does she really enjoy tech, is she a nerd like me, or is she just looking for a cushy office job in software that the "diversity/women-in-X" groups are so loudly promoting.
> They also might think, does she really enjoy tech, is she a nerd like me, or is she just looking for a cushy office job in software that the "diversity/women-in-X" groups are so loudly promoting.
Hell I think that about all my colleagues whatever their gender is. Seen plenty of males don't really want to code, but it pays too well to not.
Some will be openly dismissive, others will hide their disapproval, others won't care and some will enjoy working with you.
As an immigrant wondering how the natives perceive me, I've learned that one has to do their best and be assertive when it's necessary.
Ultimately it depends on luck. To split the world in ones tribe and "the other" is human nature, and not discussing things on HN won't make things better...
I'm unclear if you're asking the community not to have a discussion because you don't want to read it? There's a way to hide posts you don't want to read, I do it all the time with bitcoin articles.
Sexism* is rampant. It is not merely present in threads where the link is about gender studies. You cannot "block it out" like you would any other topic. It is not a "topic of discussion" but an issue lurking behind other topics.
*Sexism has can take many shapes others than direct attacks on women.
Edit: Interesting how this went from +5 to -5 in minutes. Very controversial topic, eh?
I guess this doesn't answer my question. What's the ask here? OP suggested this discussion was "incredibly distressing," I'm unclear if anybody is entertaining the notion that a debate among dozens cannot happen because one person wanders in who's distressed by it, or what?
Sorry, I was under the impression that this was a rhetorical question.
Of course she doesn't want the community to censor itself.
She is describing how such discussions are distressing to women (and not merely to herself, as you seem to state). She gives the example of an aspiring programmer stumbling on HN, noticing all the subtle sexism and giving up STEM. Which is precisely the issue that we should be debating.
In short, her point isn't "don't talk about it" but "don't be a bigot about it". Don't talk about it as if women weren't reading the threads. As if amongst boys.
A lot of those threads end up circle-jerking into a "men vs. women" debate while the actual debate should be "what is it in our communities that is driving women away?"
My point in that reply was that she shouldn't be the one blocking those threads, her point of view as a woman is vital in such a debate. It should be us that act more civilized instead.
> while the actual debate should be "what is it in our communities that is driving women away?
Why?
Women aren't, on the whole, passively "driven away". They actively choose other careers that interest them more.
Or why is it that men are "driven away" from veterinary science and early childhood education, while women choose not to go into computer science and mechanical engineering?
I find this the most distressing thing about these discussions: that women in the most progressive, egalitarian nations in space and time are suddenly regarded as passive vessels pushed around by outside forces, rather than as strong, active shapers of their own destinies.
Novia (the OP of this comments thread) already started a career in STEM and "wanted to study math [her] whole life".
With those two facts, she should be the perfect candidate. However, she is still feeling pushed away.
She actively chose STEM and is put in such situations that she has to (as you recommended yourself) block out entire topics simply to avoid reading distressful and distasteful comments.
It wouldn't be too bad if our community only acted like that online and in specific threads. But that isn't the case.
Male "elitism" and subtle sexism is present in the day to day life of female developers.
Imagine how tiring it would be if wherever you went, people singled you out because you were nerdy or geeky. You wouldn't want to keep working in that field at all.
But why is that? Isn't what is driving these concerns these never-ending "women in STEM" discussions that paint the field in a very negative light?
If I were entering a field an constantly hearing how horrible it is, I would also be concerned.
> distressful and distasteful comments.
Why are comments that talk about distributions of preferences being a probable cause distressing? What is "distasteful" about them?
Why is it distressing/distasteful to say 'hey, the field you have chosen to enter is actually not full of horrible people that will treat you badly because you are a woman'? In fact, it is somewhat friendlier (some studies say a lot friendlier) to women than it is to men? How is that horrible?
To me, the consistent bombardment of claims that the field is horrible would be a much larger deterrent.
> In fact, it is somewhat friendlier (some studies say a lot friendlier) to women than it is to men?
That's one of the problems. Nobody wants to be the special kid. The one you invite to all the meetings to be a token. The one who can't even be certain if their achievements are worthwhile or simply artificially inflated.
Being insincerely friendlier to women in a professional environment is, in fact, sexism. It is a form of gender prejudice and gender bias.
> I'm unclear if anybody is entertaining the notion that a debate among dozens cannot happen because one person wanders in who's distressed by it, or what?
The problem is not with having a debate; the problem is the sheer level of hostility present in this thread.
What if we replaced the word "hostility" with "frustration?" Hostility places blame, but I sense frustration all around by people who all think they're standing up for an important cause (and both sides are).
Also, to clarify, I don't think people in this thread are frustrated at/by women. There's no "hostility" there. You may be seeing frustration at a social-justice-movement that they think either A) goes too far or B) debates unfairly by making it "un-pc" to make certain points they consider important to the debate.
If you think having this debate itself is "hostile" to women, well then that's the exact type of behavior that gets interpreted as B above.
> What if we replaced the word "hostility" with "frustration?"
I specifically meant hostility, not frustration; no need to beat about the bush. Frustration expresses itself differently. It's not about standing up for a cause, it's an attempt at aggressively controlling the debate.
> If you think having this debate itself is "hostile" to women, well then that's the exact type of behavior that gets interpreted as B above.
I had already stated that the problem is not with having the debate, so I'm not sure why you are bringing that up again. The problem is with the form of the debate.
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.
Yes there are "diversity" hires, that is, people who are hired not based on their technical skill, but based on the desire of management to have more women/POC on the team. There are often financial incentives (bonuses) ties to improving diversity numbers, so there will of course be skepticism when a female junior dev gets promoted to senior dev, then manager in a two years. I've been on hiring committees where the team gave a candidate a low score on technical ability and said "we don't want this person" and because of some desired biological trait they posses, they were hired anyway.
That being said, I've seen it with males as well, but it has been more of the one guy on the team gets his MBA/college buddy hired kind of thing. In both cases, employees would be rightfully skeptical because of outside influences in the hiring/promotion process that are trying to purposefully achieve some end goal.
My wife, who formerly worked as a software dev, hated this aspect of the industry because there were so many women-in-tech groups that were trying to help (a.k.a. coddle) her achieve something she could easily achieve on her own by her own technical acumen. In similar vain, I've gotten jobs because of who I know more than what I know before (in my case it was because I'm a submarine vet and the hiring manager was also a former submariner), and yeah, it does undermine the sense of accomplishment that comes with doing something on your own.
Not the same, but as someone who is still as an adult growing out of being "the weird/socially inept/imposter syndrome kid":
Don't think about it. Of many valid reasons to work to change ones behavior, I don't think this is one of them. All that effort you were spending trying to change something that 1. may not be happening and 2. if it is, is "pretty damn typical human psychology" (It's as old as humanity to find ways to look down on others) and there's not really pragmatic ways to stop that short of a lobotomy. Spend that effort on excelling in what you do. Bust ass and the people who matter will respect you regardless, and it makes it easier to tune out the ones who don't.
Feel free to ignore this advice, I've long since decided to avoid commenting in threads like the overarching, but your original concerns and question made me want to try and contribute at least something marginal :)
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.
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?
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.
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?
White men get advantaged over nonwhite nonmen in pretty much all aspects of society. “Preferential” treatment towards people other than white men is really just a tiny little correction against the massive social and economic advantages white men experience. How many white men have you ever heard feeling bad because they were only hired for their white maleness (“Culture fit”)? And yet that is the dominant status quo hiring practice.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
I guess that means nothing these days.
It scares me when people start talking racially, especially like you. You call me a person of color (basically a new version of colored people). You see race first, content second.
This scares me because it wasn't too long ago that Jews were being thrown under the bus. And it scares me because now you might hate white people, but what if you start hating brown Indians like me (who have the highest family income in America), Asians, or Jews (you probably consider them to be white anyway).
This is just scary stuff man. I wonder how many of my liberals friends view race first.
I guess I’m the real racist for pointing out that racism exists?
Racism is the systematic disenfranchisement of a group of people based on their race. Correcting that disenfranchisement, empowering people who systematically don’t have power is literally the opposite of racism...
Pointing out that white people face massive advantages in the United States isn’t “hating white people”, it’s an obvious and undeniable fact. My ideal world is one where everyone is treated equally, and the road to that world isn’t just imagining everyone is treated equally and everyone enters the world with the same advantages, it is through acknowledging and correcting socioeconomic disparities.
I am just extremely wary of people who call me a person of color and who view things firstly through the lens of race. Of course there is racism in the west but correcting that shouldn't mean more racism.
Do you also believe Indians and Asians face a massive advantage in America? They are some of the most successful racial groups in America. Should their advantage be "corrected"? I guess it already happens via college acceptances...
How about Jews? Should we correct their advantage as well?
There is nothing wrong in addressing socioeconomic disparities. The lowest of our societies should be helped to a point of self sustanence and leadership. But it's just so offensive to call us all colored people, I mean people of color. Can I suggest not labeling people with higher melanin with that phrase? It reduces me down to a racial label and it makes me super uncomfortable. No kidding, it kinda reminds me of when I used to hear "Arab" or "terrorist" by right wing nut jobs as that label was also based on my race...
Here is a really good, really public example of how even the appearance of "diversity hires" can cause issues. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has ill will toward Yale, his alma mater because "I’d learned the hard way that a law degree from Yale meant one thing for white graduates and another for blacks, no matter how much anyone denied it." [0]
At least at my workplace I tend to assume that the women are on average a little more competent than the men because they have to really want to be here to have stuck around.
As far as I can tell, the linked article is saying exactly the opposite - that women can be and are perfectly capable as programmers, but that the gender imbalance is probably not driven by exclusionary tactics on the part of the men who make up the majority. It is noteworty that I've never even heard of a woman saying that she actually pursued programming as a profession and found herself excluded - just that the ones who do are surprised how few other women they see.
I think a lot of people here don't really think about the effects their words have on other people, no matter the topic.
I have been guilty of that too, both in online comments and in real life. "Guilty" is maybe even the wrong word, it can be very useful! I've asked Timothy Gowers once at a conference if he has ever written a program, and he said no! So you know more than he does when it comes to computer programming, just take that as a starting point and not the comments here :)
I'm not sure what this has to do with the article; it doesn't make any judgements on women's suitability for careers in STEM. Where it does talk about ability, it points out that women are, on average, better at science and maths than men. I think the article is making a similar point to that of Damore's memo; the difference in representation may be explained by a difference in preference. That's not a value judgement of capability.
> just imagine [..] appears to an aspiring programmer
Hmm...how do you think it should appear? You hint (strongly), but you don't really say.
> none of you are saying that ALL women are less capable than ALL men,
Yes. As in: not even a bit.
First, most of the talk is about preferences, not ability. Second, if anything it is about distributions that have large overlaps, with average ability being the same and with differences (in STEM), if anywhere, mostly in the width of the distribution (so males may have wider variance). Third, there is apparently one difference in ability, which then reflects itself in preference: women with high math scores tend to also have high verbal scores, whereas men with high math scores tend to only have high math scores, they are not good at the verbal bits. And statistically, people of either gender with high scores in both prefer going into non-STEM fields.
Fourth (going back to the second point): all of these are at most distributions. They say absolutely nothing about any individual. For example, I am a guy but despite the fact that I scored high in both math and verbal parts (and absolutely atrociously at the 3D mental rotation that supposedly explains a slight edge for guys in STEM), and was interested in (a) physics (b) english literature and linguistics (c) philosophy here I am as a programmer.
> but what I'm reading here is the subtext.
What is the subtext you're reading? Can you be specific?
What I see, text and subtext is an entire field defending itself from being smeared as sexist assholes with zero credible evidence of this being true and due almost entirely to choices other people make, choices that the people in this field have absolutely no influence over.
> [How will be perceived/respected etc.]
This will depend almost entirely on your individual circumstances, meaning most people will treat you with respect if you treat them with respect and behave respectably yourself. If you enter as a gender warrior, things might be different. Is this a 100% guarantee? Nope, nothing is. Assholes exist. In every industry.
If I told you the things that have happened to me in this industry, you probably wouldn't believe me, and if I claimed this happened to a woman, it would be seen as surefire proof of the systemic sexism in the industry. Except it happened to a guy, so whatever. And if shit happens to you, you probably want to assume it is because there are shitty people, not because of your gender.
A 2008 survey[1] by the ACM that actually interviewed both men and women didn't find significant differences in most parameters of job satisfaction, and in fact women reported slightly higher support by their superior than men did.
> 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.
> 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 )
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.
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.
While this theory makes sense, I find a rather large issue with it.
The basis for this argument is that both boys and girls are equally likely at birth to go into a given field. As they grow society gives cues to them that X is for boys and Y is for girls. These cues end up shaping preference and explain the large difference we see in the ratio of boys/girls in X. The issue I have with this theory is that it shouldn't apply only to STEM, it should work for all fields. Thus if instead of STEM we say Law or Finance or Medicine have cues then that should mess with the ratios there.
If you go back several decades the ratio of men/women in Engineering, Law, Finance, and Medicine were all equally low. As time moved on the ratios improved in Law, Finance, and Medicine but not in Engineering/STEM. If you want to claim cues as a major factor in the current STEM ratio you have to explain either
1) why unchanging cultural cues were not the reason for the improvement in Law/Finance/Medicine but still negatively affected STEM
or
2) why the cultural cues when away for the other fields and not STEM
I haven't been able to find an answer to either of those points and so I think that while some cultural cues exist, it isn't the main reason for the ratio differences and doesn't need to be address to fix the issue.
I think a major issue with CS in particular is that the numbers have actually gone down significantly in the past few decades:
> Before 1970, women took between 10% and 15% of computer science bachelor’s degrees. By the early 1980s, the number rose to 37%. However, the trend began to reverse in 1985. In 2013, 18% of bachelor’s degrees in computing were earned by women. Part of this decline is due to the fact that computer science became a male-identified field. But during the 1990s, hiring practices also began to favor men, according to the AAUW study, and “the creation of professional organizations, networks, and hierarchies” that supported the entry of men into the field helped pushed women out. In fact, as the study notes, once employed in the field, women are more likely to leave than men. They tend to suffer from isolation.
Believing that cultural cues are a major factor doesn't mean believing the natural ratio is 50/50.
The current ratio varies widely between STEM fields.
It would be helpful to understand how the culture came to accept women as lawyers and doctors, but why would that be necessary to identify cultural factors as a reason for the imbalance in CS?
> It would be helpful to understand how the culture came to accept women as lawyers and doctors, but why would that be necessary to identify cultural factors as a reason for the imbalance in CS?
It is necessary because the question "What cultural factors cause the imbalance in CS?" presupposes that cultural factors caused the imbalance. The whole point of bringing up that more gender equal countries have larger differences in ratios is to highlight a strong piece of evidence that this is not the case.
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.
Economically speaking, I suspect this is more to do with the superior position of women, as a class, in setting the standards of what an acceptable relationship looks like.
If husbands are willing to do heavy lifting, wives would be economically irrational to do their own heavy lifting. I'm pretty suspicious that the deal offered to a housewife comes with better quality of life outcomes than the deal offered to most engineers. I've always assumed it is linked to the relative excess of young men to the number of young women (something like 107:100 or close to [1]).
It makes sense to me that the group with most power in establishing a relationship would choose not to be an engineer if they could be, say, mind the house.
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).
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.
1. This just begs the question: why are men more ambitious and successful?
2. Clearly, this “decision” that women make when they’re 12 doesn’t effect them in many other fields, including life sciences, law, etc, because they are the majority in those fields.
I think that's a bit biased - some men seem to be more ambitious/successful; the environment is brutal to men to compete with each other, often for scraps. There also seems to be way more men at the bottom of the pyramid, homeless ones, losers of evolutionary selection. Maybe we should start talking about them as well?
As why many girls make that "decision" at around 12 - they might be smarter and see that they don't have to work that much anymore. Maybe in the past when things like cooking for 10 people family or washing clothes/cleaning were super difficult the partners had to form a team; these days most of this is semi-automated and allows different strategies.
Do you really believe that girls aren't making conscious choice to stay away from "weird smelly" engineers in STEM fields that are now popular wrt. $/status but were completely undesirable 20 years ago? Have you grown up completely isolated from young females and couldn't observe what were their choices? Yes, I have seen a lot of men dissing them "just females, can't be good" (I hated it in my idealistic youth), but then later you observe their choices and they aren't doing themselves any favors either, usually picking "safe choices" instead of risky ones needed for success.
My comment was in response to your initial point that "“Many girls decide at around age 12 ... to get a husband that will do all the heavy lifting". I don't think it's because they're "smarter" because in the long run it costs them opportunity, power, wealth, etc that people in the workforce acquire over time. There might be an element related to a partnership at home, but as Sandberg points out in Lean In, this should affect women's decisions in their 30s, not their decisions about their college major when they're 18.
I'm a female founder who majored in CS and left my PM job at Google to start a company, so I have "observed the choices" of many young females considering engineering. It's not enough to say that "women are just choosing the wrong thing" - we need to find the underlying cause of those choices if we want to shift the demographics.
- I can't take Sheryl seriously; she's not a prototype of a woman that risks a lot to achieve success and her dating advices IMO just poison the well to most regular women, as not many men contemplating serious relationship want to have anything with women following her advices
- from my personal experience of running multiple companies, I once offered significant equity in an e-commerce startup to a woman as one of two founders. Her reaction was that once the company nets $1M, I can give her 50% stake. This risk aversion is the norm. I have only one counter-example of a female CFO that was driven to succeed against all odds.
- young males are now seriously disadvantaged; they have to be like 50% better than females to even get to interview stage in most lucrative tech companies. This is obviously not sustainable nor fair and a backlash is mounting. Either they completely drop out of society, or become associated with extremist male-only movements. This is very troubling and a waste of potential.
>Microaggressions are subtle behaviors (e.g., facial expressions) or statements that are not explicitly hostile but are nevertheless interpreted by the receiver as conveying contempt, stereotypical attitudes, or other negative beliefs.
They only describe it in the context of the workplace and in degree-granting institutions, not in earlier schools or in the home where minds are in their formative stages. It’s microagression for sure, but they are overlooking the more powerful instances of it.
> 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.
Would you say that is a problem that can or should be fixed after the fact? For instance, if we assume that we know the major cause to be social conditioning at young ages should we then try to correct that after they leave education?
Your question is orthogonal to my point. You seem to be wanting to be get to a different point. All I’m saying is that these social cues are often overlooked in these discussions.
As far as fixing the problem, no we can’t correct all limiting stereotypes overnight or even for a very long time. But we should work on it. The least we can do is be supportive of those who try to succeed in spite of the stereotypes.
the article does address this topic. I think the implication is that these effects are lower in the Scandinavian countries, where children are given less bias as their societies are more equal. The article suggests that these effects are very low.
> 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
It doesn't look like you read the article. It clearly stated that in countries like Finland and Sweden, where such cues are less likely to be given, there is a larger inequality in STEM. Meanwhile, in Iran there are more women in STEM. Do you think that in Iran young girls are more or less likely to be subjected to "harmful gender stereotypes" than in Sweden or Finland?
> Cues can be as subtle as a wide-eyed look while reacting ...
This was precisely addressed in the article. It goes by the name of micro-aggression. Go back and read about it.
>This was precisely addressed in the article. It goes by the name of micro-aggression.
No. As I said above to another person who also made the same mistake:
They only describe it in the context of the workplace and in degree-granting institutions, not in earlier schools or in the home where minds are in their formative stages. It’s microagression for sure, but they are overlooking the more powerful instances of it.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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).
(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..)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
"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."
Seen from that perspective, I agree.
Still, in the eyes of those being referred to in the argument I criticized, fighting over high level positions likely promises higher returns - or at least appears to do that. Whether this then actually turns out to be true is a different story. Right now it doesn't even look like it, as pointed out in the article. Maybe indeed, starting at the bottom, with low level tech jobs, would be a better way to go. However, it would also take much longer. Some are impatient. Considering the accelerating progress in tech, I can understand that impatience.
> 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 inbalances there don’t have the same supposed impact and perpetuating effect on structural inbalances. Thus they are not considered as harmful in the grand scheme of things.
I'm not trying to misrepresent you but are you making the claim that if we had more female PHDs in STEM, that would lead to more female plumbers and car mechanics?
Or is it more, the changes needed to get women into stem would necessarily get women into other "less prestigious" fields?
surprisingly there is no concern about the under-
representation of women in lower-level technical
jobs, such as car mechanics or plumbing
And then reading this, two paragraphs below in the same article:
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.
When I read the article, this incongruity made me feel the surprise was feigned for rhetorical effect. And I was shocked - shocked! - to find crass rhetorical tricks in an article about gender bias in STEM :)
Neither. I only was critizing what I think is a flawed argument, nothing else. I didn’t make any mental connection to what you bring up. I understand why your impression is that I must have meant something more, as this usually is the case with comments about polarizing topics like this.
That aside (and not meant as criticism against you), it’s super frustrating how when it comes to this specific topic, it’s unbelievably hard to express a thought in a way which is not being misunderstood by others. We all seem to have a mental concept of the debate in mind and then just match everything we read to this existing concept, which leads to all kinds of misrepresentations.
I initially read the comment as you positing your chain of thought (instead of theirs) and i was trying to work out the underlying fact being such a chain of logic.
I guess what ill say is that having a mental concept of debate, i personally find useful in getting to the root of ideas.
Of course circling the wagons in your echo chamber by always taking on the debate in your favour isn't good, asking people to further explain thoughts and arguments you don't understand/don't agree with i think is good and people should do more of it.
I don't know if you're going to see this, but I feel the need to defend myself. Sorry about going on a tangent here, but I have no other way of doing this.
Here's what happened. Somebody posted a link to a PhD thesis in mathematics which was not at all written in the style in which math PhD these are written. Somebody else commented that this is great all math PhD these should be written like that. Then, I pointed out that the author of this thesis (a black woman), wrote a piece on a blog of the American Mathematical Society website saying that all the white male in the math departments in the USA are the problem, she wants them out and they should all resign.
Then various people started down-voting and attacking me. I replied to their attacks and defended myself. This amounted to "ideological war" according to some moderator. Also, since I did not use this account for making lots of comments, it appeared to the moderator that this account was created to primarily to start flamewars. The people who attacked me in a very nasty and personal way did not suffer any consequences since they had more comments hence their accounts looked more legitimate.
So yes, I feel like I've been the victim of an injustice.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Equality of Chance is more desirable than Equality of Outcome as it values the decisions of a neutral individual more than the later.
Of course, for Equality of Chance to be properly implemented you need to do away with as many barriers to it as possible but you should be willing to accept that no matter what you do, there won't be a perfect 50/50.
From all evidence we have, there is strong evidence that male and female humans grow up differently independent of their social surroundings, for example, we found that the brains of newborns can be easily distinguished into female and male as little as 1 month after birth, before any social factors have had much chance to get deep into development.
From that I find it easier to believe that there will be some statistical biases in one direction or another (like how will have, on average, a bit more height) outside of the purely physical domain.
I would rather see some evidence that despite all the physical, hormonal and developmental differences in male and female humans, there is absolutely no statistically significant difference in the brain and/or mind.
> Equality of Chance is more desirable than Equality of Outcome as it values the decisions of a neutral individual more than the later.
More desirable to whom? To the one with the worse outcome equality of outcome will always be more desirable than equality of chance. Plus, from a probabilistic point of view, wouldn't equal chances mean that for large numbers of trials (people) the outcome would also be equal?
> I would rather see some evidence that despite all the physical, hormonal and developmental differences in male and female humans, there is absolutely no statistically significant difference in the brain and/or mind.
You cannot even properly define what you mean by "brain and/or mind", which is why it's impossible to convince you that there actually is injustice if your opinion relies on that. But, for the moment suppose there is some convincing theory which explains naturally why less women are in STEM. Then why would we have to adjust our society to it, as it would benefit from less social tensions if there was equal outcome? Your point has to be much stronger to justify the inequality, as in everything would go downhill super fast if we had equal outcome. Otherwise there will always be social tensions and you have to learn to live with the "feminists".
> Plus, from a probabilistic point of view, wouldn't equal chances mean that for large numbers of trials (people) the outcome would also be equal?
Only if human properties are statistically independent.
If they are not, then a policy that depends on equality of outcome will screw someone over.
This has happened before, e.g. in medicinal research. Turns out, generalizing to the general population from a medicinal trial that consists only of men results in worse treatment for women.
It seems to me that you argue from a POV that basic human properties are statistically independent. Now... Why do you think that is so?
> If they are not, then a policy that depends on equality of outcome will screw someone over.
It means that someone would get less outcome than he or she would have gotten without the policy, true.
> This has happened before, e.g. in medicinal research. Turns out, generalizing to the general population from a medicinal trial that consists only of men results in worse treatment for women.
Wages or positions in companies are fundamentally different to medicine. We can decide how our companies look like. We can't decide how our body works.
> It seems to me that you argue from a POV that basic human properties are statistically independent. Now... Why do you think that is so?
I think you got me wrong here. I tried to argue from a POV of a reasonable being. I assumed that this is independent from any basic physical properties or even being "human". It's fine if you disagree with that, but I will have a hard time continuing the discussion. In hindsight this assumption although already implies that properties must be "statistically independent". Thanks for pointing that out I think I've learned something.
> Wages or positions in companies are fundamentally different to medicine. We can decide how our companies look like. We can't decide how our body works.
Well, for the most part, our power over our workplaces is also rather limited. True, you can leave, and go to a "different" company...
> It's fine if you disagree with that, but I will have a hard time continuing the discussion. In hindsight this assumption although already implies that properties must be "statistically independent". Thanks for pointing that out I think I've learned something.
I... think that statistical independence of human properties is a valid basic assumption.
However i think that it is worthwhile to question that assumption from time to time. Especially when, as mentioned in the article, more free societies like sweden or finland have more unequal outcomes than societies like iran (which iirc instituted a male quota for some STEM fields a few years ago).
> However i think that it is worthwhile to question that assumption from time to time. Especially when, as mentioned in the article, more free societies like sweden or finland have more unequal outcomes than societies like iran (which iirc instituted a male quota for some STEM fields a few years ago).
This only shows that the measures that are taken might be inappropriate to fulfill their purpose of establishing gender equality and is unrelated to the mentioned assumption.
> To the one with the worse outcome equality of outcome will always be more desirable than equality of chance.
That's not true. Yes, equality of outcome would give disadvantaged people more money to buy bread. The mistake is assuming that the price of bread would stay the same.
>Plus, from a probabilistic point of view, wouldn't equal chances mean that for large numbers of trials (people) the outcome would also be equal?
Yes. For most people those two options would be the same, which is why the difference between those two options matter.
Equality of Chance merely means that everyone gets a shot at becoming, for example, a Math PhD. You still have to put in as much elbow grease as everyone else and work just as hard as everyone else. If female and male humans are equivalent mentally then the end result should be a 50/50 distribution.
If there are mental differences then the distribution would be skewed but it would be fine since everyone has gotten the same chance as everyone else. It's the approach with the highest game-theoretic fairness; the chance of winning the game is directly related to the skill you bring to the table.
>You cannot even properly define what you mean by "brain and/or mind",
With brain I mean just that, I don't know why it lacks definition. I mean the raw organ of thought in the human skull. There are notable differences, as mentioned, found at early stages in the brain that are sufficient for a computer or human to identify the gender or sex of an individual with a higher-than-chance probability.
With mind I was refering to the mental capacity and properties of an individual, ie how good they are at math, their social skills, IQ score, pain tolerance, etc (these are just example categories, not necessarily categories in which a significant difference exists).
>which is why it's impossible to convince you that there actually is injustice if your opinion relies on that
It is certainly possible to convine me of the opposite, I have clearly formulated which evidence would be sufficient.
>Then why would we have to adjust our society to it, as it would benefit from less social tensions if there was equal outcome?
That question feels slightly loaded since it proposes that an equal outcome leads to less tension. Current movements concerned with an inequality of outcome do only so because it is unfairly inequal.
Not a lot of people complain when the outcome of the game is inequal but fair (for example, nobody minds that someone with low strength will be unable to participate in olympic weight lifting, there is an unequal chance of participation and outcome, but it's a fair process)
The resolution to the problem of "do we have to adjust society" is another question "is the reason we are suggesting to change due to a fair or unfair process?".
[footnote]: Fair and unfair are defined as the ability of a player to apply their skills and get an equal amount of reward to other players with the same skill level (or with neglible difference)
> With brain I mean just that, I don't know why it lacks definition. I mean the raw organ of thought in the human skull.
If I understood correctly in your original argument you tried to point out that you need this "brain/mind" to be good in STEM. I would argue that anything which has certain mental capabilities (which I'm not able to define) can be good at STEM whether or not it has a brain or even is human or not, would you agree to that? If so, to keep your argument valid you would have to define these properties which are necessary for being good at STEM. In the previous comment I was just doubting that you can do that, as these properties are not bound to a certain physical form under that assumption.
> That question feels slightly loaded since it proposes that an equal outcome leads to less tension.
I agree to that. So, it seems like both equal outcome and equal chances create social tension. Or are you claiming once this hypothetical convincing theory is out "feminists" will be gone?
> (for example, nobody minds that someone with low strength will be unable to participate in olympic weight lifting, there is an unequal chance of participation and outcome, but it's a fair process)
Yet people are concerned about doping. It's the athletes decision to risk his life for better outcome. Why does that make the competition unfair then?
> Not a lot of people complain when the outcome of the game is inequal but fair.
I would claim in real life situations it is almost impossible for me to objectively tell whether the game is rigged or I just performed very well/bad. But I can tell that the larger the differences in outcome averaged over many people, the more I'm suspicious.
>Or are you claiming once this hypothetical convincing theory is out "feminists" will be gone?
Hopefully not. Without opposition my hypotehtical theory would have no way of being refined further through discussion.
>I would argue that anything which has certain mental capabilities (which I'm not able to define) can be good at STEM whether or not it has a brain or even is human or not, would you agree to that?
I would agree to that in a limited capacity. These mental capabilities are more like capacities, the efficiency and speed of them is dependant on an individual. I propose that some of them may depend on which chromosome the human individual got at birth. In other physical forms this (potential) difference could be less pronounced or more pronounced.
>Yet people are concerned about doping. It's the athletes decision to risk his life for better outcome. Why does that make the competition unfair then?
Doping affects the added definition of fairness, other players who did not dope with the same skill level are outperformed; if two identically strong players were to participate, one doping, one not, then the doping one would have an unfair advantage that the not-doping player will have to compensate with a lot of hard work.
>But I can tell that the larger the differences in outcome averaged over many people, the more I'm suspicious.
That's usually a pretty terrible approach. Simply averaging the outcome is an easy way to trip over every statistical quirk there is.
The only way to be sure that the game is fair is to get a decent sample out of the population and perform a thorough statistical analysis that accounts for all variables possible. And I would suggest that the data crunching would be performed by people of differing political orientations, as much as possible, including hard right and hard left, to ensure that there is as little ideological bias as possible.
>Why is equality of outcome not a desirable goal, especially in science and technology?
I am going to try and describe this in a math/programming way.
Say we have two functions randM() and randF() the first returns a Male Person, the second returns a Female Person. Person has an Ability and a Preference. We also have a function stemJob(Person p) that takes a Person and returns a Job with an Income, Prestige, and Satisfaction.
Equality of outcome would mean that after 10^9 calls of each the this is true average(stemJob(randM()) == average(stemJob(randF()). This could be either because 1a) randM() and randF() produce on average the same person modulo Sex and stemJob() does not consider Sex or 1b) The difference between the average randM() and randF() is corrected for by stemJob() considering Sex.
The other option is equality of chance where stemJob(randM()) == stemJob(randF()) where randM() and randF() have the same Ability and Preference.
Notice that in equality of chance and in equality of outcome stemJob() may or may not be the same. If randM() and randF() produce on average the same person modulo Sex then stemJob() is the same for both equality of chance and equality of outcome. If that assumption does not hold then stemJob() must be different.
Thus, if I support equality of chance and believe avg(randM()) != avg(randF()) I would not support equality of outcome because that would require stemJob to consider Sex in a way that invalids equality of chance.
Hope this give you a different way to look at why some people are against equality of outcome in STEM.
I think it's a bit clearer now where the differences lie. For example the assumption avg(randM()) != avg(randF()), which should more precisely be avg(randM()) >> avg(randF()) to justify stemJob(randM()) >> stemJob(randF()).
There is another assumption here, that is that if you don't touch it, stemJob() is a fair function in the sense that stemJob(randM()) == stemJob(randF()) where randM() and randF() have the same Ability and Preference. I find that unlikely as, for example, there is evidence that people are more likely to hire candidates of the same sex.
What is interesting is that it boils down to the question whether or not you believe that avg(randM()) >> avg(randF()), or in words that in general men are much more capable then women in STEM and I asked for a theory supporting that claim in my original comment. If I understood correctly someone who supports equality of chance would agree that stemJob() must be unfair if it turns out that avg(randM()) ~ avg(randF()).
>in general men are much more capable then women in STEM and I asked for a theory supporting that claim in my original comment
Short, inexact, unnuanced version: The same thing that causes a 4M:1F ratio in autism diagnosis causes the similar gender skew in CS/Engineering.
First, I am going to narrow STEM to CS/Engineering which has a worse gender skew than the other parts of STEM. To massively over simplify assume we can plot all possible jobs/careers on two axis of ideas vs people. This is how much you get to work with ideas and how much you get to work with people. You could have low ideas high people (kindergarten teacher), low ideas low people (watching for forest fires), high ideas high people (college professor), high ideas low people (engineering). All the different jobs are spread around this plot. Lets simplify and assume a Person picks the job that best matches there Preference.ideas and Preference.people. Once they pick a job they get Income based on their Ability.
We now have a loose correlation in the population where Person.Preference affects count(XJob()) and Person.Ability affects avg(Job().Income) (and simplifications/assumptions abound).
Now, assuming 1) CS/Engineering is a job that requires high (90%) Person.Preference.ideas and a low (20%) Person.Preference.people. Also, lets assume that 2) std(randM().Preference.ideas) > std(randF().Preference.ideas) and std(randM().Preference.people) < std(randF().Preference.people) (std == standard deviation). These two things in combination could cause us to see more Males than Females in CS/Engineering because standard deviation has large effects at the tails of the population.
Now, is there an basis for assumptions 1 and 2? I am going to say that you agree with 1 as how CS/Engineering currently is. The 2nd is a little bit hard to prove, in fact I don't have hard proof. I have evidence that makes me think it is the case. If you request, I can try and find sources for my claims.
1) Baby boys like to play with trucks/balls, baby girls like to play with dolls.
Objection: That is cultural conditioning and not sexually determined.
Response: Baby monkeys have shown the same gendered preferences.
2) When looking at college application, males apply for CS/Engineering at rates much higher than females.
Objection: Culture preprograms this into people.
Response: If this was only cultural preprogramming, it should have went away as it when away in Law, Medicine, and Finance.
3) Autism affects males over females 4:1. One explanation of this is the Extreme Male Brain theory of autism [0]. From that portion of wiki "Baron-Cohen's research on relatives of people with Asperger syndrome and autism found that their fathers and grandfathers are twice as likely to be engineers as the general population." Also, "Another similar finding by Baron-Cohen in California has been referred to as the Silicon Valley phenomenon, where a large portion of the population works in technical fields, and he says autism prevalence rates are ten times higher than the average of the US population. These data suggest that genetics and the environment play a role in autism prevalence, and children with technically minded parents are therefore more likely to be diagnosed with autism."
My laymen's take on the above, the same thing that makes males more likely to have autism make them more likely to be engineers.
Objection: Haven't heard yet.
So in summary, since CS/Engineering is an outlier on the ideas/people axis and males are more likely to match that outlier we see more males in CS/Engineering.
> If it wouldn't on average it's reasonable to assume that there is a bias of some sort. You can decide if this bias desirable or not.
This doesn't answer my question. Is equality of outcome in the NBA a desirable goal or not?
If not, why is it one in science or tech fields?
> Because they don't seem to care.
I'm sure many do. Many women "don't seem to care" that they took nursing jobs while many men took software engineering jobs.
How many Hispanic men have to feel like they'd rather be famous millionaire basketball players before we get the NBA to start with racial quotas?
I don't mean to be pedantic. It just seems obvious that American black culture puts a heavier emphasis on basketball, and that results in more world-class basketball players. That in no way implies anything is wrong with basketball or the NBA, and therefore taking measures to bring about "equality of outcome" would be unfair and undesirable.
...and that's why policy attempting to create "equality of outcome" is not inherently desirable in science / tech (or anywhere else).
> This doesn't answer my question. Is equality of outcome in the NBA a desirable goal or not?
Sorry I didn't get that you were interested in my personal opinion on that topic. I just tried to tell you what I would find a reasonable approach to answer that question.
> I'm sure many do. Many women "don't seem to care" that they took nursing jobs while many men took software engineering jobs.
Yeah, seems like many of them are still ok with the situation. I'm just saying that it is likely that there will be a problem in the future and its better to fix it now than later. Plus, I think you would agree, that this problem is on a social level more relevant than your NBA example.
> Sorry I didn't get that you were interested in my personal opinion on that topic. I just tried to tell you what I would find a reasonable approach to answer that question.
What you're seeing as a "reasonable approach," though, may not be logically consistent.
You asked why equality of outcomes isn't a desirable goal in science and tech. I asked you if it's desirable goal for the NBA but you're not giving me a straight answer.
> Yeah, seems like many of them are still ok with the situation. I'm just saying that it is likely that there will be a problem in the future and its better to fix it now than later.
I'm not sure of this. There are many more female nurses than men and I don't see it as a problem now or even necessarily requiring "fixing."
> Plus, I think you would agree, that this problem is on a social level more relevant than your NBA example.
Of course--that's why I'm driving this wedge. It's more relevant on a social level but not for rational reasons. If you can acknowledge that differences in outcomes are inevitable among individuals and not inherently indicative of a problem (as in the NBA), you'd have to question whether or not differences in outcomes in science / tech are necessarily the result of sexism or even bad.
And that answers your question. If we can acknowledge the end result of individuals freely making their own decisions will not be equal outcomes, then pursuing equal outcomes is not necessarily a desirable goal.
I would disagree. "Difference of affinity" is in my opinion one of the main factors. The real question is where does this difference come from and my best answer to that question would be nudging. And this nudging is exactly addressed by quotas. They are not there to make the numbers look nice.
I guess it depends on how you go about it. If you needed 100 programmers, and there were exactly 100 programmers available, but 80 were men and 20 were women - but you insisted on equality of outcome, you'd hire 50 of the male programmers, all 20 of the female programmers, and be 30 programmers short, even though there were 30 perfectly capable programmers that would upset your gender ratio.
That would be indeed a problem in that special case, but I never argued that these quotas are a great idea in general. I just wanted to point out that the article dismisses gender equality as a bad idea with a equality of chance argument, which isn't explained, but the reader is expected to accept it as universally valid and always superior to equality of outcome. I was just questioning that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Social pressure itself is a fact. In your umbrella-example, you're restricting your definition of utility to the immediate benefit of dealing with rain weighted against the cost of having to carry the umbrella. But your choice can have a social effect, too. In particular, you need to take into account that other people will not always act on exactly what is warranted by evidence.
Just note that believing something because it has nice consequences is just logically wrong.
Formally:
1) A => B
2) I would really like B to be true, because it has some benefits.
3) Therefore A must be true.
If we are in search of truth and want to build a consistent model of the world then we just can't accept this kind of reasoning.
Also, even if A really turns out to be false, it doesn't mean that B can't be true and our world will forever be sad i.e. Even if it turns out that all people are not created equal, we can still live in just and enlightened society which treats everyone fairly.
And of course the implication between A => B may not even exist. Is it really true that if all people were created equal the society would benefit?
First, please do not get too hung up about "all people are created equal". It's just an example in this context.
> If we are in search of truth and want to build a consistent model of the world then we just can't accept this kind of reasoning.
Yes, you can. It's called generalizing. Remember, we're not doing math here, this is ethics.
Think about all the different situations where being treated equally to someone else is a good thing. Now you generalize that into "everyone is created equal", and that turns into a justification for all these situations.
If you want to criticise the generalization into A, there is a way:
Construct some C so that
1) A => C
2) C is not beneficial
Alternatively, you can attack the implication "A => B" or you can question whether or not B is beneficial.
> Think about all the different situations where being treated equally to someone else is a good thing. Now you generalize that into "everyone is created equal", and that turns into a justification for all these situations.
The valid generalization would be "everyone should be treated equally" not "everyone is created equal" which is a totally different thing.
EDIT: I think what you're doing here is criticising A by constructing A' and arguing that it is better (by having the same consequences while being less general). That is a good way of criticising the generalization as well.
>> If we are in search of truth and want to build a consistent model of the world then we just can't accept this kind of reasoning.
> Yes, you can. It's called generalizing. Remember, we're not doing math here, this is ethics.
To strive for a consistent set of beliefs grounded in reality is more akin to most branches of Philosophy than Mathematics as far as I am concerned, and seems particularly concerning to Ethics (e.g. you can achieve a set of beliefs of what you can consider 'good' or 'evil' ignoring all perception of reality but would the result be desirable?).
I would disagree with the generalization. Consider the following set of propositions:
1) The placebo effect predicts that believing I'll get over a bout of the flu quickly increases my chances of getting over the flu quickly
2) I believe in the placebo effect and would like to get over the flu quickly
3) Therefore, I choose to believe I will get over the flu quickly.
There is no reason besides practicality to believe proposition 3), but if propositions 1) and 2) are accepted, proposition 3) follows naturally. To my own way of thinking, some beliefs are self-justifying, but I'd be interested to hear how your worldview deals with this example.
Quite an interesting counterexample. The trick is in the self-reference where the fact that you believe the premise actually affects the conclusion which most of the time is not the case.
I might consider this an edge case and include it in my worldview as an exception ;)
When beliefs run counter to reality, the divergence between what is, and what is perceived ought to be, can increase to the point that the state's monopoly on violence is used to prop up a belief system.
If the gap is big enough, I think the result becomes indistinguishable from a theocracy, with analogues to blasphemy and ostracization for describing reality too closely, enforced by the state.
In a more general sense, consider the "laws of physics". People believe in them not because of their consequences, but because they explain reality (and quite well). So people believe in gravity because it has worked for them in the past, and because it has been verified.
Also... _not_ believing in gravity will not make much of a difference for your life (as long as you don't start jumping off cliffs of course).
EDIT: I forgot about religion. AFAIK, most people believe in religion because they have been taught/indoctrinated/raised to believe in it, and _not_ because they have (deeply) thought about the social consequences of their particular religion.
The laws of Physics don't explain reality, they model it to our best approximation.
>and because it has been verified. //
That may be true for you but is essentially an appeal to authority. Most scientists claim to be falsificationists and the current agreed Scientific Method is one of Popperian falsification.
Your comment on cliffs belies an ignorance of epistemology - people didn't used to have a gravitational theory, as far as we know no animals have one, that doesn't mean you then jump off cliffs. One's beliefs about reality don't fundamentally change reality.
That was not the point I was trying to make, sorry.
GP said:
>> People can hold beliefs because they have certain consequences.
> Nearly all beliefs are of this type. I believe the Earth orbits the Sun because it's helps me predict the seasons.
I think there are a lot of beliefs that are held not because they have beneficial consequences, but for other reasons.
Religion as a belief is held by most people because they have been brought up with it. (converts nonwithstanding)
Scientific theories are believed (i.e. held true, used for explanations of reality) because they predict stuff that actually happens and can not be falsified.
Both of these are not believed primarily because their belief has actual consequences IMHO.
It's the is-ought problem really. We can take a position on what is but very often pop off to talk about what ought to be. Further because people have differing levels of knowledge, understanding and acceptance of evidence of varying degrees of accuracy the rational positions on what is can be quite wide. Politics to me is not the opposite of rationality but where we take our is and extrapolate. As long as this extrapolation is reasonable to the evidence presented this is still rational since it's relative to the understanding of that individual. So I'm not sure that separating arguments into rational and political is that helpful except in dismissing others points of view.
For example there is plentiful evidence that women are less represented in certain STEM fields. But is that because they are ill-suited to them or the fields themselves are ill-suited to women. Do we accept this lack of representation as an inevitable consequence? It is this way and it ought to be so. Or do we broaden the possibilities and consider what these fields might be like and may accomplish otherwise if they were more female friendly.
I'd take a wild stab in the dark that prior political world view is probably a greater predictor than most for which of those options seems the more appealing.
some arguments are rational while other arguments are political
These attributes are mostly orthogonal though. Most evidence, even if conclusive, will show that certain approaches benefit one group more than some others. There is no such thing as purely evidence-based policy, because there is no agreement on what to optimize for.
I think this whole evidence-based fad completely misses the point. It insinuates that there is a perfect possible outcome that will benefit all equally, and that is simply not the case. And by focusing on the outcomes, it detracts from the real sticking point: let's talk about how to harmonize goals, instead of only results.
> Beliefs are value-neutral. Only arguments for or against beliefs can be political or not.
I wonder why you didn't go a step further to postulate "only actions can be political or not". Of course argument is action, but it could be claimed that only argument qua action is political.
Then again, a lot of beliefs have direct, strong and immediate consequences on your actions. So if your action is political, and you did that action because of your belief, is your belief still apolitical?
There are a number of different lines of enquiry one might take on this subject (and I'm sure they have been taken by those in research in philosophy or politics). For example, is being able to restrain oneself from acting on one's deeply held beliefs necessary to function in civilised society? Isn't it even possible to have mutally contradictory beliefs, thus making acting on them impossible under certain circumstances?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This can indeed be a problem but it is more of a class one. To find a job in some location it may be necessary to live there or have means to go there on a regular basis (for job interviews and so on). For somebody without means this can be difficult.
>>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!
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.
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.
I do not like the typical example of this which is razors. If pink razors are 50% more expensive then you can just buy the blue ones no? They are literally same except for the color.
They can, but there is marketing force that fights against this. How many women have only ever looked in the women's aisle for razors and not seen the price differences? These things can appear in aggregate even if individuals could behave a different way.
I'm not entirely sure that the same goods marketed at women as men are meaningfully more expensive for one group or the other. But it is undeniable that there are entire classes of products marketed and produced for female audiences and considered essential that males can disregard completely. One easy example is health and beauty products, and another fashion and accessories.
For example, my shower routine involves a bar of Ivory soap and basic shampoo. For my sister, my mother, my female friends and romantic interests, add conditioners, body washes, face scrubs, and all the associated paraphernalia, which easily triples the cost in dollars, not to mention time and hot water.
"The Majority of Children Live With Two Parents, Census Bureau Reports"
Maybe I should have said "usual" not "normal" - being a single mother is a normal thing. But so is being a single dad. Claiming that women are somehow worse off because they spend more on childcare is completely bizarre.
>>Google that...
Or you could just tell me - I googled it and there's absolutely nothing that relates to women, several pages of results on google are just taking about filing my taxes with HMRC when I search for ping tax.
>>Most primary care givers are women. Women are hurt by that more.
And? What's the argument here? You were saying that women are paid less for the same work(something which you completely ignored in my reply) and that they have more expenses than men(I would say a subset of people who are raising children on their own have more expenses than people who don't. They don't have more expenses because they are women, they have more expenses because of the choices they made).
I thing we can agree that raising kids in SF is very expensive, and that there are more single moms than single fathers.
> women are paid less for the same work
Gender pay gap is generally accepted fact.
> more expenses because they are women, they have more expenses because of the choices they made)
Not sure I understand. Family is not really a choice. And choice/not choice is irrelevant in argument. Goal is to get more women into STEM, one can not forbid people to have a children.
Is it? I'm pretty sure it was debunked time after time after time, with studies basically finding that women work fewer hours(by choice) and even when presented with an opportunity to advance to a higher, more stressful position, they decline more often than men do. Women tend not to take the well paying, but risky jobs that men take, skewing the proportions further. On the other hand, men account for nearly all workplace deaths in the civilized world - but it looks like they are rewarded for taking those risks.
It's definitely not fact. Men and women in the same exact position are paid the same with differences really coming down to negotiation for the salary rather than some scale based on gender.
I hate to be rude but I googled for a ping tax and maybe it's because I live in Australia, but all I can find is the ato answering questions about ping-pong tables and otherwise random economics subjects from china that use the word ping (eg: "Ping insurance", Gui Ping Wu).
Ah that does it. Yea i think the issue is that google knows im australian so it doesn't correct the mistake where the americans it's a big talking point.
And since we are more closely related to asian happenings, it decided to not correct it due to the misspelling being an asian name :P
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