If women freely choose to pursue other areas of interest - no matter the area's importance or the women's interests - we've reached the point where the only acceptable cause to claim is "sexism".
It's disappointing because it takes away agency and becomes a form of control.
Why do you find it disappointing that women choose certain careers while men choose others when they have fully free choice on the matter?
We know that by nature, men and women MUST have different interests on average, otherwise they wouldn't be interested in each other and our species would die :).
Can't we just accept that we make different choices sometimes and try as best as we can to make things progress to the best of our capabilities, regardless of how much each gender contributes to each human endeavour?
> we've reached the point where the only acceptable cause to
> claim is "sexism".
I disagree. The differences could be societal, cultural or biological. For example, I don't think it's contested that at least some women pick some career choices due to the want to have/raise children. People could argue indefinitely as to exactly how much influence each factor plays, but to call 'sexism' simply because there are gender differences seems incorrect.
I understood the comment you replied to as sexism being the only cause acceptable to society at large. If you suggest different reasons, you'd get in trouble if you worked at Google for example.
> sexism being the only cause acceptable to society at large
That's how I understood it.
> If you suggest different reasons, you'd get in trouble if
> you worked at Google for example.
Unfortunately, it seems so. And this is the same most places I've experienced. In academia for example, you couldn't even pose the question in most places - there would be protests, your tenure would be under review, your funding would be cut - to name a few possibilities. If academics are nothing, they are overly cautious.
You have to ask yourself for example why the term "intellectual dark web" was coined [1]. They don't refer to them as 'wrong' or 'conspiracy theorists', they just pose different questions, and for that alone they were ostracized.
I refuse to live in a world where even posing the question is not possible. If Google won't dare hire me, I'll build my own theme park with blackjack and hookers [2].
Girls typically abandon STEM at the high school / undergraduate level. I do not pretend to know all of the factors that go into that, but one such reason I have heard is that the gender bias in STEM tends to strongly favor boys at this level and perhaps a bigger component to that is not the teachers' bias, but the bias of peers and society that students at the high school level will be increasingly aware of.
I don't see any specific age when women abandon STEM as individual contributors; it seems to be constant throughout all life stages at a moderately higher rate than men. Until high school, however, there is no choice, and female grades are generally higher in everything, so they stick with it until they have to make a prioritization choice.
I see it naively like this: life is a long process of eliminating options that don't meet your interests or best chances at success. Women in general have more options in life than men, career being only one aspect of that, which means that over time, any one of those options is going to be chosen less and less.
Sociology distinguishes itself from economics in the assumption that people's choices are the result of stupidity or victimization. I just looked up the top math student in my 5th grade class. She's a 5th grade public school teacher after attending an Ivy for Geography. I have not the slightest clue why one would ever study Geography in college, nor would I find it financially prudent in my situation to be a public elementary schoolteacher, but I also know this person to be quite smart and fully-capable of making her own choices. I talk to female H1B engineers that came here for a better life, which was not STEM work, so they often quit as soon as they get a green card. I see women retiring earlier to start new careers. Female attrition is a constant feature of the entire STEM pipeline.
If I try to be honest with myself, I will admit that I was not at all intellectually interested in my engineering degree. Computers were always about creation and expression and social possibilities to me, not the pedantism and rigor that I practiced for financial reasons. I think we all just saw it as a test to see whether we could make it, or how well we could do, a game. It might as well have been pinball, and it never ends. 30-year SWE veterans still play leetcode. I am constantly being told that the opportunity to unleash my creativity and wonder upon the world is just around the corner. I should have dispensed with all that and started out as an artist.
All the STEM greats quit this game early. That says something. If Gates, Zuck, Musk, Jobs, etc. had never taken DiffEq, would they have been any less capable or motivated? I doubt it. The women that abandon STEM may have more in common with them than we admit. They're probably doing something better with their lives.
I think what's actually happening is that we're eliminating all non-STEM pipelines for building a career. The truly adventurous can go start their own businesses, but STEM has become the default pipeline for everyone because it's the only thing that pays well. Everything else, even being a lawyer or doctor, is much more of a "calling" than a career play. Other necessary professions like teaching or nursing are considered lower tier, when the really shouldn't be.
Because everyone is pushed into STEM, I believe that the bar for engineering has been lowered. I'm a SWE and over the last few years, I've realized that more and more of my coworkers don't have any idea how computers work. Most can't use a shell, don't understand unix, never wrote a line of C, are unclear what a pointer is, that sort of thing. It's no longer a requirement to understand computers and computer culture to be employed as a developer.
I think a lot of older SWEs probably recall stereotypes of women and minorities not being able to do computers because most of them didn't grow up with the culture. In the 80s and 90s, it was much less common for those demographics to have a computer in the home and to have internet access. We tried to fix that by promoting diversity, especially in the STEM pipeline. In reality, that diversity just killed the culture by sinking it to the lowest common denominator, which looks a lot like leetcode.
> I should have dispensed with all that and started out as an artist.
Then you'd be poor, which is why you didn't dispense with all of that.
Men have worse grades than women, so women get all the more desired non-STEM jobs. Men don't dominate STEM fields, it's actually that women dominate NON-STEM fields and men are only left With STEM jobs
If you "abandon STEM" in high school or undergrad, you're likely seeing people who are just completing prerequisites for the courses they actually want to take.
I find it interesting and perhaps telling that this comment is being down voted. I am wondering what an individual could take offense to. As far as I can tell I made two assertions:
1. Girls who are interested in STEM tend to abandon it at the high school / undergraduate level [factual]
2. That one factor in that may be a gender bias favoring males during this period in a students education. [well supported by academic research, though I presented the information casually and without citation]
If we can believe the research that there is a gender bias against males at the middle school level surely the opposite may also be true at the high school / college level where there are more male teachers.
> If we can believe the research that there is a gender bias against males at the middle school level surely the opposite may also be true at the high school / college level where there are more male teachers.
The sex/gender of the teacher didn't play a role at the middle school level though. I find it hard to keep up the narrative of "society doesn't want girls to go into STEM" when there's a lot of affirmative action, selective media representation, lots of programs etc. "But it's only to offset the invisible bias" I'm sure some might argue, but I think they overlook the possibility that there is nothing keeping them down and they just make different choices.
I didn't downvote your previous comment, but it did sound like you were a bit reaching for straws to turn an observation into the desired outcome by filling in the middle.
And I think it is valid to not agree with that narrative or to think my argument weak (as I admitted, my observation was casual and lacked citation).
However, gender bias and lack of representation are, from anecdotal observation, the most cited reason in academic journals for the lack of women in STEM. Take that for what you will.
And by all means make a counter argument, edify me, cite sources, but burying a comment for even the nascent mention of a connection between gender bias and the lack of women in STEM seems to demonstrate a lack of willingness of some on HN to even engage with the idea, which, funnily enough, could give credence to the existence of gender bias against women in STEM.
I'm not sure. My niece was on an all-women STEM floor of her college dormitory. After 2 semesters, she was the only woman still in STEM. The rest had all convinced each other to do something easier. Not the success story you might imagine.
Anecdotes aren't data for sure, but they can be helpful to build a mental model or explain a hypothesis. The argument would be much less clear if JoeAltmaier had simply said "I'm not sure" with no elaboration.
There are a number of misconceptions with that common belief. First, it's a US experience only, there are many countries where females are in similar numbers of other students in engineering courses. Second, it depends widely on course: it is not uncommon to have a male majority in computer science and mechanical eng., and a female majority in chemical eng., physics, math, aerospace eng., medicine, pharmacy, etc
See the "gender-equality paradox": "Paradoxically, the sex differences in the magnitude of relative academic strengths and pursuit of STEM degrees rose with increases in national gender equality."
There is one, actually: Algeria... also, Oman and Morocco are not far behind!
This is according to this[1] report from Plan International Norway (whose author's "focus is on gender, technology and social justice"), which has the objective of finding ways to actually increase the participation of girls in STEM in Scandinavian countries, where their participation, paradoxically, is just about the average of the world at around 30% female, against 19% in the USA.
From the paper itself:
"More recently, Stoet and Geary’s (2018) paper on the «gender equality paradox» demonstrated that, perhaps surprisingly, the more «gender equal» a country is, the larger the gender gap in STEM education and careers."
Despite that statistic, the Scientific American[2] claims that this is NOT due to women choosing differently than mean, but because "Early in school, teachers’ unconscious biases subtly push girls away from STEM".
I don't know how they came up with this conclusion (they link to a paper[3] correlating student's mothers biases with the student's later choices - which is NOT what they had just claimed and seems to only weakly give the argument any substance), but that goes directly against the new research we're discussing, which seems to point to the exact opposite conclusion.
That belief is only held by people who are deeply programmed to expect equal outcomes across any arbitrary demographic partition - i.e. they expect that career interest and fitness is completely independent of cultural background, sex, etc. For people who weren’t successfully beaten over the head with a standard US progressive education, this is obviously a priori very unlikely.
People beaten over the head with a progressive education is concerning. The leaders of today are the bigots of tomorrow. The future requires us to think for ourselves
> If so it’d turn around a long held belief that STEM education is biased towards men. At least in grade school.
No, you can't infer this conclusion from that paper.
Yes, the paper claims that there exists some bias towards girls (from teachers' grading). And the sentence you quote claims that without that specific bias, the gender gap would be in favor of boys ("12.5% larger"). However, we do not know if this figure is free of bias (IMO, fair to say probably not). Therefore, there might be other biases in STEM in favor of boys that could explain the gender gap in their favor.
It's unlikely. You're suggesting there's an even bigger bias but one which we've been unable to quantify scientifically to even a limited extent (compared to this study, which provides clear evidence)
I've read this paper in the past. Like many papers, it has some powerful results, but I think it overclaims on correlation vs causation.
What is true is teachers overrate girl's performance earlier in school compared to boys, then girls catch up and overtake, often approaching their teacher's predictions. This might well be a case of matching expectations. Another, to me reasonable, explanation for the results is that teacher's grading includes potential, based on their experience. It's hard to know, and would be very hard to ethically test.
This area deserves more research, and less sgouty arguments, but there isn't a clear cut answer.
> Another, to me reasonable, explanation for the results is that teacher's grading includes potential, based on their experience. It's hard to know, and would be very hard to ethically test.
Before discussing this, I'd like to make sure I don't strawman the point you're trying to make: the only way I can interpret this, as of now, is that you think it's "reasonable" to believe that girls inherently have more potential than boys. And, even disregarding that, that it would be reasonable to grade based on "potential" than on actual performance.
I ask to make sure because there's no way I got that right. Mind you, some groups of people say stuff like that in earnest so I'm not sure if this is an instance of that or, I hope, I misinterpreted.
My personal belief (which does not yet have enough evidence) is that boys have a greater variation, and indeed in general society encourages girls -- but this particular paper overclaims (while providing interesting evidence).
It could be one gender does have greater mental potential -- certainly one has greater physical potential, but the gap is much smaller and certainly not yet decided.
So I guess my interpretation wasn't that far off then. You actually were suggesting that girls had more potential.
Well, since you also make clear that you believe such a thing only because you choose to and without evidence, I guess there's really no point in discussing it. All I can say is that I disagree, entirely, and this article (and many others with similar findings) are more than enough reason why.
I don't see how you could read that from my reply. I don't think girls we can know if girls have more potential "independently of the world around them".
It is true girls currently, on average, do significantly better at exams at many levels, in particular to get into University (at least, in the UK). Why is open to debate.
Tests are not run for fun - they are ultimately there to measure the potential for achievement in workplaces/academic research, and to prioritize scarce university spots (and eventually jobs) based on this imputed expected potential.
I remember reading a study that asserted the best predictor of success is if your teacher believes you're capable. Teachers were told a group of students we're 'gifted' and those students ended up improving more than their peers. Unfortunately, all students were randomly assigned to either the gifted, or non-gifted groups.
Actually being brilliant is much less important than if someone believes in you.
Affects similar to the "relative age effect"[0] are really important. Kids that just so happen to get ahead early (whether by a slight age advantage, or any other) often end up being put into some sort of "gifted" track where they have access to better teachers/resources, which compounds until they are well ahead of the others. Even without any sort of gifted program, the self-confidence that gets built around being "the smart kid" is a powerful motivator. The fight for self-confidence in school classrooms is zero-sum.
What surprises me is that, from what I've read, the IQ literature doesn't seem to take this basic compounding affect into account. So it seems like some skepticism should be held for the idea that IQ is ~50% genetics and ~50% environment. It could be 5% genetics that compounds into 50%. That would seem to be in line with the observation that the measured heritability of intelligence increases with age.
> What surprises me is that, from what I've read, the IQ literature doesn't seem to take this basic compounding affect into account.
According to most of the IQ literature, a person's IQ does not significantly change over time, which means that any compounding effect you might find in academic or professional performance is completely unrelated to the person's IQ actually increasing because of that.
> According to most of the IQ literature, a person's IQ does not significantly change over time
If you're saying that a person's environment (e.g. education) doesn't causally affect abstract reasoning skills (as measured by IQ), then that is not correct according to the currently available evidence.
"We looked at 42 datasets using several different research designs and found that, overall, adding an extra year of schooling in this way improved people's IQ scores by between 1 and 5 points."
First of all, the additional year of schooling has not been shown to compound, i.e. it works for 1 or 2 years, doesn't mean it works for several years (if it doesn't, then as I had claimed, the gains are NOT very significant).
Second, the highest change (5 points per year) was for the cases where "Students who made an age cutoff to begin schooling were compared with students who had not.", which seems to me to imply the difference was of only one year (students who did not make the cutoff had to wait another year to get in), while the other cases, which are what we normally think of when considering years of schooling (i.e. students who were going to get the same number of years of schooling VS the drop-outs) the increase was only 1-2 points over a few years maximum... again, not really very significant (I would consider at least 10 points to be something significant in terms of changing possible outcomes for the person).
Scores on any test can be improved with practice and training. The SATs are a notable example, but similar test preparation techniques will work for any other aptitude test and IQ tests are aptitude tests.
I'd go so far as to say that the rising prevalence of test preparation is critically reducing the signal these tests provide. When one cohort routinely prepares for the aptitude test and another one doesn't, the latter is going to appear disadvantaged, but what's being measured is no longer what the test was designed to measure.
Top tier American universities have long been aware of this effect, which is why they negatively weight certain groups' test scores to balance out the bonus they are getting from test preparation. It's gotten so bad that the UC system is abandoning standardized testing altogether.
That doesn't jive with my experience. When I was growing up in Ontario, there was a program at my high school that put students going through the gifted program (from elementary) together with students who tested as excelling at math & science in grade 8 into the same program. I never felt like the "gifted" students as a cohort excelled in any significant way (overall grades, aptitude for any specific topic, etc). Now the data sample here is obviously small & anectodal, but to my knowledge this is supported by scientific studies on the topic of gifted programs.
> best predictor of success is if your teacher believes you're capable.
It's important to look at the mechanism here. I'd guess it's mediated by pushing those students harder. Which is a double-edged sword; there is a reason we don't just push everyone harder.
> What is true is teachers overrate girl's performance earlier in school compared to boys, then girls catch up and overtake, often approaching their teacher's predictions. This might well be a case of matching expectations. Another, to me reasonable, explanation for the results is that teacher's grading includes potential, based on their experience. It's hard to know, and would be very hard to ethically test.
Girls overtake boys in terms of grades assigned by teachers, but they don't in terms of scores on standardized tests. You can make the argument that the grades are just another method of overrating girls' performance.
Teachers definitely can be biased. My anecdote for this was our teacher instantiated a "hierarchy" of readers in several "colors". This was in 3rd grade. I was one of the poorer kids in class and she placed me in the lowest tier which of course made 3rd grade me pissed off. I knew I was one of the best readers and spellers (if not the best) in the class at the time and I was furious to the point of almost crying when I found out which "color" I was. The only thing I could figure at the time was that I was one of poorest brown kids in the class and she just didn't like me. I promptly worked my way through all the "exercises" until I beat most of the rest of the class to the "end" time-wise, other than the ones who started out in the highest "colors" to begin with. She even accused me of cheating at one point and watched me as I completed one and got a perfect score on it like I had most of the others. Teachers are human just like the rest of us and can show bias for lots of reason based on race, gender, etc.
Maybe we need more male teachers for kindergarten and the younger grades. Perhaps some sort of affirmative action or preferential hiring for male teachers for k through 6th grades?
There are various initiatives to attract more male teachers, but research suggests that the low status and pay of teaching deter men from entering education.
Raising the respect and salary of teachers would be a good starting point. Preferential hiring to balance the gender ratio of role models in a school may be helpful as well.
> I find that the gender bias does not differ by teachers’ gender in literature, and only marginally in math. In this subject, female teachers are less biased in favor of girls than male teachers
So adding more male teachers might marginally increase the discrimination rather than decrease it.
That's interesting thanks for sharing. I guess that begs the question: even if there are some documented negative effects, does it outweigh the benefit of young boys experiencing positive role models in the classroom? Measuring the benefit of role models is really hard to quantify, but role models definitely influence people.
Elementary and middle schools in the United States would welcome more male applicants. The issue is there are not many males that major in education at the undergraduate college level and so there are not many male applicants to choose from.
This is a societal / financial issue.
Societal because boys see education as a woman's job, which is reinforced through their educational experience of having mostly female teachers.
Financial because as much as Americans like to think that they live in a progressive society, males are typically expected to be the primary income earner. Education simply does not pay well; particularly when you consider the education and credentials required. Education in the United States has added increased prerequisites to become a teacher in a public school. In all likelihood, your child's teacher either already has or is working on their master's in education to maintain their teaching credentials. If they have aspirations of being an administrator they are likely working on a doctorate. This to earn a maximum annual salary of less than $100,000 and only after decades of working for a school district.
Another reason is that American society today often assumes there is something wrong or creepy with men who choose to spend their time with children. I don't think this is a valid assumption, but it is a common one, at least in my experience as a father.
> The issue is there are not many males that major in education at the undergraduate college level and so there are not many male applicants to choose from.
This is like the mythical pool of untapped female engineering talent VPs of Diversity and Inclusion imply exists.
I’ve heard from a friend whose a special ed teacher that there effectively is a strong desire for male teachers in these grades. But there’s also so much need in this space that there’s a desire for any credentialed teacher.
It’s not really like software engineering where people have to know algorithms and do whiteboard exercises. It’s about credentials and desire.
I think some feminists do push for this in the name of gender equality, and caretaking not only being a female responsibility.
At the same time, the idea that mainly women should solve the problem of "young boys need positive male role models" seems ironic. I'm sure many women do care because they want their sons to thrive, but men want their sons to thrive too, right?
British teaching unions shot it down - said it was misogynistic to hire men as it implied women weren’t doing a good enough job. This logic of course doesn’t apply to tech.
I thought in nursing the gender gap is closing because it's one of the few careers that actually pays off these days. At regional colleges the nursing major is usually the one with the highest salary, you can check that on the Department of Education's website. High school leavers seem to be directed towards it, especially first-generation students.
Reading this makes me sad and bitter. You have groups of activists such as feminists that claim to be for equality of all (scope creep), but yet they are silent on important subjects such as this. Don't be convinced that feminism simply doesn't care about men's rights, they sometimes actively work against them [1]. To suggest that men may experience oppression weakens their perceived oppression, therefore it's in their interest to fight against it.
It's no surprise that men are outnumbered in higher education too. There is always talk of increasing the number of women in STEM fields, but never any talk of increasing the number of men in the arts, English or the -ologys.
Don't get me wrong, I am very happy to see equal opportunity. I am glad to see the riddance of "toxic" environments that discourage people from fulfilling their objectives based on arbitrary characteristics. But I also look at the future young men of today with genuine concern.
Also, to modern feminism equality doesn't mean treating everyone the same but rather to give advantages to what they consider "historically oppressed minorities".
I think the idea is simply to give resources to those based on what they need rather than to give to everyone equally. It costs more to educate a kid from a poor/disadvantaged background.
It doesn't really make sense to "treat everyone the same", since different people have different needs. Not everyone needs a wheelchair, but some people do, for example.
That's a strange thing to pull out of my mouth, given what I said. If you're trying to say that gender shouldn't be a factor in determining a person's needs, then you're obviously wrong. Cis men don't need access to feminine hygiene products, for example.
You'd obviously want to take into account as many factors as possible when trying to work out a person's needs relative to someone else's. Socioeconomic background is a good start, but obviously doesn't capture all of the relevant variables. A trans person can come from a middle-class background, but be at a higher risk of bullying than the other middle-class children at a high school, for example.
That sounds reasonable but you don't see mainstream feminism even acknowledge men being disadvantaged against women in certain contexts (family courts, homelessness, etc) and if they do they just blame men for it and continue to advocate for women and minorities only.
> There is always talk of increasing the number of women in STEM fields, but never any talk of increasing the number of men in the arts
On this particular point, I think it's because STEM-like fields are quite economically useful compared to the arts. On average, it would probably "hurt" men (in financial/power terms) to encourage more of them to go into the arts.
I don't argue against STEM fields typically yielding higher paid careers. But there is more to consider than finances: For example I think mental health is a major issue (suicide, prison, depression, etc). I don't see encouraging men into other fields where they learn to express themselves as a detractor. Putting more men into the arts for example doesn't mean less men in STEM fields.
A lot of the male prison population usually have mental illness, sexual assault histories, were raised by a single parent (often the mother) or more generally a broken home. It's not ideal, but if we encouraged more male teachers into the early education system, perhaps young boys would have a good male role model to look up to.
Reading this, it is easy to get into the weeds: how to keep teachers from being biased; culture wars on which way that bias should swing, etc.
Viewing it from the the frame of regenerative education though, this particular problem is lessened. In this frame, children are not taught from a curriculum that the adults choose. There are no standards, or grading. Instead each child chooses something meaningful to make a contribution. Children are given a framework in which they can understand whatever it is they set out to do. They learn how to problem solve, critically think, and reflect, as they go about trying to make meaningful, real-world contributions that have real consequences. Teachers are there as resources. The feedback doesn't come from teachers, but rather, when they are trying to accomplish something that has real world consequences. You're not graded by an external source against a standard, but instead, you evaluate whether the outcome was really what you set out to be. It folds within it "grit" and "growth mindset", but not for its own sake.
In such a setup, it is no longer about gender bias (conscious or unconscious), or even equal opportunities.
Furthermore, achievement is reframed from effort rewarded in external praise and material gains from society and inverted to what you meaningfully add to the community and society. What develops is intrinsic motivation and purposeful action. There isn't an exhortation to "apply yourself", or the "when you grow up and have to pay your rent and etc". The childhood dreams, aspirations, and imagination is redirected towards something meaningful, instead of being crushed by the grind of adult living. Your ambitions are not about getting your just rewards for working hard, or winning the lottery, or exploiting opportunities.
I think this is a great education model for happy kids in a stable environment, but I'm worried it would compound inequality if applied universally. Many kids don't have much in the way of family or friends encouraging them towards learning. If we take away the structure of a curriculum and the grading expectations of success, will it still be possible for them to succeed?
It appears to cost money to access the actual paper and the abstract does indicate the means by which this bias is applied. Without that important detail this only points to speculation and assumptions.
Just feed the DOI to Science Hub and be done with it. I have official access to a number of journals but use Sci-Hub even for those as the process of getting access is so much easier than running the Wiley gauntlet.
Does this not mean we have a gender bias towards females in STEM at the education level?
If so it’d turn around a long held belief that STEM education is biased towards men. At least in grade school.