Today it’s seen as rather reductive to think of women as baby factories, but given the current fertility trend and its demographic and economic consequences, I wouldn’t trust people 500 years from now to be understanding or forgiving of us today. At least no more understanding or forgiving than we are of people who lived 500 years ago.
Just in yesterday's news I read a telling stat: +40% of men think that women had gone too far in pursuing equal rights... in my country, a fairly progressive one.
What's there to understand or forgive? This is unacceptable. Patriarchy is dominant culture in most parts of the world, and it utterly sucks, period.
If they live in a progressive society and says that existence of men who doesn't see that they live in a horrible patriarchy is proof that they live in a horrible patriarchy then yeah, it is not unreasonable to think they wont be happy without a matriarchy because that is where such thinking ends up.
If they have good examples of patriarchy and horrible things against women they should have posted that instead of saying that men thinking women have it good is evidence of patriarchy.
Did they define what they meant with going to far? During metoo in Sweden, the dominant discussion was about media ethics and how far things should be legal with trial by media. There was also discussion about banning men from concerts and have women exclusive departments on trains.
There has also been discussion about giving women free credit points for university programs with high ratio of men (but was later cancelled because they did not want to give men the same credits in programs with high ratio of women). Affirmative action in education has been a fairly hot political topic for the last couple decades.
An other discussion is about quota systems for boards or management, and if those system is effective strategy for equality. Within EU it has also become a question if such laws should be on EU level or on a national level. Similar discussion also exist with parental leave and if those should be shared or dedicated, and if it should be EU law or national.
Which region of the world are we talking about with "+40% of men think that women had gone too far in pursuing equal rights", and what is the context/demographic/method of polling used?
Understanding is good. You don't need to agree with someone but to understand someone is always good.
To see the world through anothers eyes might be the only way how those who view progress as too far can be reached and talked with. How can someone willfully ignorant change their mind?
Understanding isn't something that only ones enemies have to do. Understanding can be a prerequisite of forgiveness and necessary for peace.
Many do not want to understand or forgive for many factors. Understanding these factors is good.
(In a political context, personally I find politicians are able to understand others views most. They understand and can approach those with differing viewpoints)
I did interpret "understanding" as "being supportive to" and not as "comprehend incentives / PoV".
In that case, fair enough, but I don't think there is a ton left to comprehend, as in, I am not seeing many new arguments as why men career opportunities must come at the cost of women's, etc.
(An btw, not advocating / defending matriarchy either, but egalitarism.)
> +40% of men think that women had gone too far in pursuing equal rights... in my country, a fairly progressive one.
Why is it strange that men in a progressive society thinks that they are a bit too progressive? The more privileges given to women the closer we are to women having gotten too many and now men are disadvantaged, so I don't think it is unreasonable for a large amount of men thinking it has gone too far regardless were you are on the spectrum.
Is it a privilege to have gender-specific programmes and scholarships at universities?
Particularly if that gender is now the majority at universities...
And it's not only at university level. Boys are doing worse than ever before at all levels of education, yet the focus is still on helping girls succeed. And I don't believe that it's due to discrimination, I think boys are just more vulnerable to modern distractions (including girls) and schools are doing a very poor job compensating for that.
No, I mean privileges, don't argue with a strawman.
> The same rights that men already have?
Women hasn't lacked a single right men had in my country for my entire life, but women has many legal rights/privileges that men hasn't had in my life. That is why I said privileges and not rights. Maybe they need those privileges to make up for cultural privileges men has, but you can see why some men think that maybe they gained too many.
OTOH I am not going to ask what "privileges" women have in your country, but I hope you don't count abortion, longer maternity leave, reduced VAT in feminine hygiene products and such, as women's privilege.
Gender salary gap is a privilege of hours worked and work experience. People who work full time get the privilege of getting more paid that those working half time. The linked ourworldindata page also says this, as the gender salary gap is about inequality and not necessary discrimination. The ourworldindata page does also not use the word privilege.
A major cause of inequality is that mothers spend less time in the work force during and after pregnancy, and that there are a higher ratio of mothers than fathers. Fathers also do not take out their given parental leave, with many reporting that they are not allowed to because of cultural discrimination (including from their partners).
And how would that work in a society that is heavily leaning to monogami? Or repsecting the womens voice in that? Or squaring that with the manoshperes whining about declining male fertility?
And no, a man cannot realostically have hundreds of babies. Unless, of course, you don't give women a voice in the process. And even then, only a small minority of men would actually be up to follow through with something that amounts to rape.
Genghis Khan is estimated to have had over a thousand children, it is an extreme example but it certainly is possible. About 8% of men in previously Mongol areas carry his Y chromosome.
> Or repsecting the womens voice in that?
Believe it or not, but some women actually wants to have babies with men even if they wont get a relationship from it. Why do you believe women can only want a monogamous close relationship? I know of a happy woman who had 2 kids with a guy she never had a relationship with, the kids are happy etc.
> In 2003, evolutionary geneticist Chris Tyler-Smith discovered that eight percent of men across 16 different Asian ethnic populations shared the same Y-chromosome pattern.
This pattern was traced back to a shared origin from about 1,000 years ago and to create so many descendants it is thought that this origin, or person, would have had to have a huge number of sons.
Genghis Khan is known in contemporary literature for fathering hundreds of children in this area, so historians and geneticists presume the common origin of the chromosome is the first Mongolian emperor himself.
You seriously, unironically, link to the TV and Showbiz section of the SUN? And there I was, thinking Twitter would be the worst source I see on HN... At least it is not a TikTok short.
> The case for Genghis Khan’s genetic legacy is strong, if circumstantial. A 2003 paper2 led by Chris Tyler-Smith, an evolutionary geneticist now at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, discovered that 8% of men in 16 populations spanning Asia (and 0.5% of men worldwide) shared nearly identical Y-chromosome sequences. The variation that did exist in their DNA suggested that the lineage began around 1,000 years ago in Mongolia.
Anything more recent backong up the, I quote, "strong, if circumstantial" claim?
The claim sure is sensational and hood for headlines. If true, it would be quite a thing in the field of genetics. So I assume there was more than one study done, right? Also on the method used, because it coupd be used for so many other use cases!
Good to know so, that we all can be Genghis Khan if we want. Finally an alternative to Batman! And we would even save, I assume, western civilisation by producing a lot of good strong children with the, what, Harem (we would need a better, western term for that, right?) we get provided by, well, whom exactly?
> And we would even save, I assume, western civilisation by producing a lot of good strong children with the, what, Harem (we would need a better, western term for that, right?) we get provided by, well, whom exactly?
What are you even talking about here? Can you stop talking to a strawman that only exists in your head? All people is saying that men can have way more children than women can have, you argued against that, I provided evidence that it is actually true and has happened. Why are you starting to talk about unrelated things then?
A man produces more semen than he knows what to do with, but has a limited capacity to provide a nurturing environment for a proverbial “barefoot and pregnant” wife and subsequent children.
Going on a satyriasis-addled insemination spree will do nothing to help the demographic crisis, if anything it will make it much worse.
It will all depend on how much women will have a hand at researching history and presenting it to the general public. History will probably still be about narratives and perceptions.
It’s not at all obvious to me that women 500 years from now will have the same values as women today, any more than the men. So while female inclusion in history writing obviously has an effect, I don’t think we can infer anything about what that effect will be.
Not quite - the question is posed with a historical context that has since changed. It is certainly the case that history lacks female authors, but that’s not so true today. Writing is one discipline where women have substantially levelled the playing field.
Other fields do still suffer a deficit of female participation, and the reasons for that are highly debated of course.
Notably for this site, there are vanishingly few female engineers compared to the male population.
My pop explanation is that engineers are produced in a pipeline that starts with games (particularly video games) which are stigmatized in the typical socialization that young girls are subject to.
Spot on. “Computers are for boys” is exactly the socialization I’m talking about.
“So when Ordóñez got to Johns Hopkins University in the '80s, she figured she would study computer science or electrical engineering. Then she took her first intro class — and found that most of her male classmates were way ahead of her because they'd grown up playing with computers.”
A programmer is not so different to a tennis player: training begins before age 10. Anyone entering a compsci university course at age 18 without substantial experience of computing has a mountain to climb.
As a further anecdotal observation, I believe elite programming (but not mainstream programming) to be an autistic spectrum trait. Males are diagnosed with ASDs in a 4:1 ratio over females.
Women did a great deal of coding after that as well, they didn't disappear it just added a lot of boys who wanted to program their own games.
If you look at the absolute numbers graph that is obvious, women continued the same path it already had, men had a massive spike with the growth of home gaming. And that is still true today, extremely few girls dream of making their own games even though many of them play games and many games are marketed to women.
It does not seem like men and women are exactly the same tabula rasa to be shaped by society and socialisation. We are shaped to a great degree of course, but I believe in innate differences (on average), and I believe that the first step towards achieving true equality and peace will be understanding those innate differences, appreciating them, and realising that not only they have nothing to do with our intrinsic values, but make us complimentary in a beautiful way.
Absolutely - you don’t even need to venture far into the murky territory of psychological tendencies to observe that the male and female experience is massively shaped by obvious biological differences. These differences are what give rise to the sociological phenomenon of gender stereotypes. Some of these stereotypes have a strong connection to the underlying biology (“women are good at caring for babies”), others might have a small kernel of truth but are mostly obsolete hindrances (“women aren’t good at programming”).
I prefer lifting up explanations for gender segregation in society that provide a bit more explanation of the whole spectrum rather than one work category that happen to sit at very average numbers. The equality paradox in particular is a large hint of a much stronger phenomenon than the pipeline problem.
Group identity is my personal favorite. People self filter on every possible aspect in life, and work choice has gender segregation on a very large number of layers. The teacher profession has gender segregation at the initial start of the pipeline, during the training phase, during the first professional years, during the specialization phase, during the senior phase, and so on. They segregate on which schools they pick, country vs city, and so on.
Sweden has public available statistics on work profession, and it is gathered as part of tax collection so it has very high accuracy. Guess which profession has highest gender segregation, and how high it is. There are no engineer jobs that sits at the 99%, or the 99.8% that is ratio of the single most gender segregated profession.
After 30 years of being highly positive towards more women in CS, and only seeing a handful of actual good examples, I can't get around the observation that women by large can't be bothered with tasks where they have to go deep and invest a lot of time learning new stuff. I just recently had the example in my friend circles. She used to work in a different field, and decided to switch to working with computers as a new job. The original argument was something like "I know how to use MS Word, so I am going to be a computer expert." Then there were 3 intenships, which all ended the same way. And once she was asked to learn Python to do a little coding, she dropped the ball completely and is now trying to become a singer. No joke. And she is not alone. I would love to have different experiences, but anecdotally, females are not willing to invest as much time as males when it comes to tech jobs.
Wow, are you seriously generalizing out of your anecdotes? This is incredibly harmful, and reason why women don't feel welcome in CS.
So I guess I can tell you a couple of my anecdotes, to make up for that one, uh?
One: I am an expat in a country with a pretty difficult language. Within my circle of expat friends (all couples), only the women had taken the time, investment and effort to go deep and learn the local language. In ALL cases she knows the language better than her male partner.
Two: At last job I met a woman who moved from accounting to CS in her late 30's. It was her second CS job, and in 3 years she "overtook" me in the company technical ranks, very deservedly so.
I could make a very long list, but I'll leave it here. So please stop being a judging jerk.
Your experiences being positive while mine not so much automatically invalidates mine and makes your more valid? I believe not. I am happy that you have more positive experiences then mine, no worries. However, it is in the human nature that we can only extrapolate from personal experiences. You can believe in things which havent beeen confirmed by your experience, but that is mostly wishful thinking.
Women likes language and things related to social experiences more than men, so you seeing women learning languages faster and better makes sense. You see girls outperforming boys in language classes throughout schools all over the world. But the other side of that coin, boys outperforming girls in technical classes is also a thing.
It is 100% true according to all the data we have. Girls are relatively better at language, boys are relatively better at math everywhere.
Look at Figure 2 on page 7, shows every country has a massive gap where girls do much better on reading and boys do much better on maths relatively. The only effect you see is that more progressive countries the girls perform better and better on both, and the less progressive girls do worse and worse until boys are about as good as them at reading but massively better at math, but everywhere you see the same trend of girls preferring reading and boys preferring math.
And all the studies done to understand those numbers show the difference in outcome is driven by tze social environment and esucation systems, and not the sexe.
You, of course, will ignore that I am sure. I hate it when the menoshpere invades HN, my last save place on the internet. If that continues, I'll just have to leave I guess.
> And all the studies done to understand those numbers show the difference in outcome is driven by tze social environment and esucation systems, and not the sexe.
No this is wrong, the studies done has shown that you can make girls do better and boys do worse by priming them. No study done has shown that you can eliminate this gap, just move it towards boys or girls being advantaged.
> You, of course, will ignore that I am sure
No, I read those studies. The stereotype threat paper just show that you can boost girls performance at the cost of boys performance and thus get equal performance at math, not that you can get relative equal performance at math and language. No such paper has shown that you can eliminate the language-math gap between girls and boys, and all data shows that the language-math divide for boys and girls stays the same.
So, all the progressive help to get girls better at math just made girls equal to boys at math, but now girls has an enormous advantage at language because they boosted girls score overall, they didn't make things equal.
Your own link shows that the "math gap" was eliminated in Finland and Sweden, both countries with very equitable education standards, Finland in particular is often cited for having the best education system in the world.
The very study you linked makes the point that male V. female performance in education appears to be linked to differences in how the sexes are treated, not to innate differences between them
There are other studies, but that is the study that you linked.
> Your own link shows that the "math gap" was eliminated in Finland and Sweden, both countries with very equitable education standards, Finland in particular is often cited for having the best education system in the world.
At the cost of creating a massive language gap. The math-language divide is still there, they just boosted girls score overall they didn't close the gap where girls do relatively better in language and boys math.
So what the poster above saw was that math-language gap in action, women dominated the men in language in their experience, just like the data says we should expect.
> The part about making boys worse is something you made up.
Look at the data yourself, you clearly didn't read the paper, this is the data from the original stereotype threat paper, look at how much worse boys does.
Thank you! Just wait until you hear that I also have a day job, a family and other hobbies!
Let's rephrase it for the extremely pedandinc and semantic HN crowd: "All the reporting on those studies, and the executive summaries of the studies I read" Better to parse?
Sometimes it feels like talking to a comoutet or a ginie on HN. Not the slightest ability to understand the meaning of what was said, even when the wording gets corrected, ignoring the whole point and moving the discusssion to input parameter semantics. And thinking this appriach is super smart and edgy.
Frustrating really, and a lazy, disengenious way of argueing a point.
Well, current results do not support your posotion. Totally out of chance, local news just reported that MINT-support programs are apparently not improving things. That is pretty much the contrary of what you are trying to claim, backed up by a news article released today
But I am sure you will find ways to subsume all HN posters into a perceived partiarchy that is only trying to make your life harder. Go on, I no longer care.
Probably generational, in my experience women have written control systems for the Concorde, full geophysical aquisition and control systems, developed robotic control libraries in the 1980s for bleeding edge technology, built systems for recognising sign language in real time, backends for medical imaging, abstract algebraic engines that have broken proposed quantuum computer proof encryption candidates, and more.
I guess our anecdata varies by the people we surround ourselves with.
Well, reading between the lines it seems like you are working as a coder, given what people you know. Me is just an admin. So that alone explains the difference between our perceived stories.
Perhaps it is sexist attitudes like yours that discourage women from staying in tech. Being targeted by misogyny day in day out isn't exactly a positive work environment.
I am disabled. I am being targeted by random people who treat me like a subhuman on a daily basis. I am being subjected to patronisation on a regular basis. And I am still here, and doing my job. People like you naming me misogynistic is rather low on my list of insults. Dont lecture me about complications when dealing with peers. I know more about that then you will (luckily) ever experience yourself. So keep your accusations, I am not interested. IOW, I have no sympathy for whining. Life is hard, people need to own up, period.
So the answer is historical socio-economic factors generally preventing women from (1) dedicating themselves to a craft, and (2) from being recognized and remembered even when they do.
Where "generally" means pretty much "always" until a few years ago, and still a lot today.
And not only in literature, of course. Lise Meitner, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Rosalind Franklin are some very famous examples, but there are many, many others.
