How do you define which countries have “more gender equality?” It seems like begging the question.
My family immigrated from Bangladesh to America. In most ways, obviously, America is a lot more equal. But my mom and her sisters have STEM degrees, and that wasn’t all that unusual for a wealthy Bangladeshi family at the time. Bangladeshis perceive STEM as important, and encourage both girls and boys to pursue it (even if they don’t expect girls to stay in the work force after they get married).
Raising a daughter in the US, my perception is that girls in America are taught about “princesses and fairies.” We impress upon boys the need to get practical education so they can support families but are more indulgent with girls. Last summer, I signed my then four-year old up for summer camp classes. There literally was classes for “princesses and fairies.” Of course I signed her up for “little engineers.” My daughter was quite upset to be the only girl in the class. That’s not innate. It’s somehing we’re choosing to do to our kids.
In developing countries where women (and men frankly) study STEM in higher numbers it's likely that those women come from elite families (considering the vast majority of population in these countries do not have a chance to pursue higher ed). As a result we're looking at a an elite microcosm that is, by virtue of its own access to education and enthusiasm for remaining (recognizing fierce competition) in the elite tier of an otherwise incredibly gendered society.
My 10 year daughter loves legos but complained the other day it seems only boys play legos. I would argue that legos and building things for fun is STEM, and it's curious why girls aren't encouraged to play with legos as much as boys in the U.S. This is despite things like lego friends that are targeting younger girls. Once they hit around 10-11, then all the legos seem to be engineering oriented (robotics etc..), which she loves but can't understand why other girls don't get it.
Note: Am Indian and can totally see the same problem you noted.
My theory is that many not-that-rich countries didn't have opportunity to go through a period where some jobs are thought as strictly male/female (think 50s in the US). Coming from such a country, and being a woman, I never heard from my parents, or another adult for that matter, that engineering wouldn't be suitable for a girl. This wasn't just because there is money in engineering. It was the same for less lucrative professions in STEM. The concept of woman needing to pick a suitable profession was just not there. Education was important for both genders. I am very thankful for that and it bothers me when people say women from my part of the world enter STEM just because of money. It's just not true for majority of STEM women that I met.
> Bangladeshis perceive STEM as important, and encourage both girls and boys to pursue it (even if they don’t expect girls to stay in the work force after they get married).
That could be a critical factor. The other factor that I've heard posited is that career opportunities for women are limited in less liberal countries, so they take what they can get. This would be why Iran has gender parity in computer science, for instance.
I'll probably face wrath, and hell's fury for this, but maybe, men and women are different. Has forcing STEM upon the female population, driven any more of them towards the discipline? Taking the sampling size of every woman I've ever went on a date with in my 37 years, none of them were interested in anything related. The vast majority were teachers, psychologists, and nurses. Occupations based around nurturing others. One, was a designer/artist. None of the women in my huge family, sister, mother, none of them care about technology fields. My father, and male cousins on the other hand, are in various fields of tech and engineering.
This is on the front page of Hacker News because people here believe it bolsters arguments about the underlying fairness of our field, in which women make up something like 20% of the workforce.
The article does not accomplish that. Despite an overall trend in STEM throughout the western world for greater male participation than female, computer science is uniquely low; it is rivaled only by physics and MechE for gender disparity.
Throughout the rest of STEM, including hard fields like chemistry and mathematics, we see significantly improved participation among women. There are a bunch of STEM fields that have near parity, and a few (molecular biology, for instance) in which there are slightly more women. These are PhD numbers, not premed stats.
Besides better gender parity, something all these fields have in common at the graduate level is that they are significantly more demanding than commercial computer science. We kid ourselves that our day-to-day work is so rarefied that we need the top of the intelligence curve, so much so that the supposed variance in intelligence between men and women might explain our staffing. That's ridiculous. We do a bog-standard symbol manipulation job, and, even at the elite level, we tend to do it slap-dash and ad-hoc.
Whatever is keeping women to 20% of our field is artificial, and a travesty.
It's also on the front page, I believe, because it's a cite followed from an article posted earlier this week making some of the same arguments. That post had a huge discussion, making this a needless duplicate. We don't need to keep re-litigating this on the front page of the site. I flagged it.
> The underrepresentation of girls and women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is a continual concern for social scientists and policymakers. Using an international database on adolescent achievement in science, mathematics, and reading (N = 472,242), we showed that girls performed similarly to or better than boys in science in two of every three countries, and in nearly all countries, more girls appeared capable of college-level STEM study than had enrolled. Paradoxically, the sex differences in the magnitude of relative academic strengths and pursuit of STEM degrees rose with increases in national gender equality. The gap between boys’ science achievement and girls’ reading achievement relative to their mean academic performance was near universal. These sex differences in academic strengths and attitudes toward science correlated with the STEM graduation gap. A mediation analysis suggested that life-quality pressures in less gender-equal countries promote girls’ and women’s engagement with STEM subjects.
Their definition of "gender equality" is this:
> The World Economic Forum publishes The Global Gender Gap Report annually. We used the 2015 data (World Economic Forum, 2015). For each nation, the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) assesses the degree to which girls and women fall behind boys and men on 14 key indicators (e.g., earnings, tertiary enrollment ratio, life expectancy, seats in parliament) on a 0.0 to 1.0 scale, with 1.0 representing complete parity (or men falling behind). For the countries participating in the 2015 PISA, GGGI scores ranged from 0.593 for the United Arab Emirates to 0.881 for Iceland.
(One of the things I'd be curious about is whether that's just a proxy for Western cultural norms; the more commonly cited reasons for a gender gap in STEM fields in the US are things like harassment and misogyny, and it's certainly possible that those are correlated more strongly with Western culture than with cross-cultural structural inequality.)
I wonder if it's possible that men and women, on average, have differing criteria for choosing careers, and artificially forcing the distributions towards the middle might do more harm than good.
As expected, this is the top comment on an article practically built for this argument.
It may very well be that men and women have different criteria, but that is completely irrelevant, and I find this line of argumentation very frustrating as it completely ignores the actual complaints at hand.
Women in STEM complain that they have less job prospects and feel uncomfortable in their positions. Many women feel they are disrespected, unrightfully criticized, and scrutinized to a degree unlike their male counterparts. As a whole, they have recognized that this is not the fault of individuals in their workplaces. It's "natural" to be more critical of the few women in your workplace because as a human, that's how your brain is built to work. Correcting that requires conscious effort on your part, and most are unwilling to correct themselves.
Instead, as a group women have decided that the best way to make themselves more welcome in STEM - is to have more women in STEM. This will slowly correct the negatives by causing more individuals to come into contact with women and have to learn how to behave properly. But these same systemic issues prevent many women who would otherwise enter STEM from doing so. No one is claiming that a perfect 50/50 ratio is all we need and then "we're done, pack it up folks". Simply that making efforts to get women into tech is actually a good idea.
Women are interested. Women want to do the work. Many that do are forced out for one reason or another, and this makes many not want to do it any longer.
Claiming that men and women just have different criteria, and thus the problem should be ignored entirely completely misses the point.
> I wonder if it's possible that men and women, on average, have differing criteria for choosing careers
Not only is this true, it has been fairly exhaustively researched.
> Cross-cultural consistency of sex differences for four traits: extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and male-versus-female-typical occupational preferences. Men and women differed on all four traits. 200,000 participants from 53 nations.
> Only sex predicted means for all four traits, and sex predicted trait means much more strongly than did gender equality or the interaction between sex and gender equality. These results suggest that biological factors may contribute to sex differences in personality and that culture plays a negligible to small role in moderating sex differences in personality.
This shows that girls are more inclined to have different interests than boys. There is clearly not equal distribution
in interests between genders. There is nothing wrong with that. We shudn't enforce equal distribution by some quotas. Instead we should allow everbody to have an equal chanche to achive their full potential.
I think it's certainly possible that different career preferences is true and that the current distribution in practice is still skewed. That is, perhaps the "right" distribution is something like 60/40 men/women, in which case both 50/50 men/women and 90/10 men/women would be skewed and pushing people out of careers they'd be happy with.
Men and women do have different criteria today. But how can you tell when they're cultural criteria, or when they're intrinsic and inherent gender differences? Are you assuming that the current differences in career choices aren't already artificially forced away from the middle by cultural biases and even perceived or real sexism?
Sure, it is always "possible" to do harm by taking action, but is it likely? There is widely acknowledged bias that is not believed to be a natural intrinsic gender difference by many scientists who study this, so is it better to do nothing, or to try and address the issue?
To me, this question seems a little like asking whether I should avoid erasing some files when my computer fills up, because I might delete something important. Yes, you could accidentally delete something you wanted to keep, but on the other hand, if you want to continue using it, you have no choice.
I agree about not forcing the distribution. I think positive action either solves no issue (no sexism in the industry and the current distribution is simply the "natural" one); or doesn't solve the deeper issue (sexism in the industry). However, until there's no scientific consensus about whether or not there's sexism in the workplace, the current state is not satisfying and we should continue until we clear out that concern, and if there is sexism, fix it.
My personal guess would be that there's indeed sexism, particularly in the programming industry. This overall "not my problem" attitude from men about anything regarding this subject is a clear hint of it.
I can't help but think that the article/paper are overstating a statistical effect here by attempting to reduce a multicausal phenomenon to a monocausal one.
If you look just at rich western countries, most of them occupy a fairly narrow strip on the graph. There are outliers, but they can go either way; Finland has a very low STEM graduation rate for women, Denmark a very high one (Figure 3b in the paper). Austria and Germany have fairly different outcomes, despite being culturally more similar than other countries that differ less.
This is sort of obscured by throwing in many countries that honestly have very different cultures, very different academic systems, and different constraints for people of different genders that seem to be difficult to reduce to just a single number.
For a simple example, there are countries where nursing is primarily taught at colleges and others where nursing is primarily taught through vocational programs. Given the gender disparity in nursing, that would affect the gender breakdown for STEM graduation rates (depending on whether you count nursing as part of the "M" in STEM or not, one way or the other).
I'm honestly surprised that for most affluent western countries the numbers are not more spread out. If I had to guess – and we really have too few data points for that – I'd say we're simply looking at a normal distribution here, especially as (with the exception of the UK) the larger countries tend to be closer to the midpoint of the 20%-30% range and it's smaller countries that are at the fringes of the range.
Has anyone ever looked at it from the network effect angle? I’m a software dev because I didn’t like being a CPA and my friend was a tech guy who got me into it.
My wife went into the medical field because her sister turned her onto this speciality that was easy to get into and paid quite well.
I tried to teach my smart wife to program and failed miserably because that’s not how our relationship works.
Most people in even your industry are not die hard passionate live and breathe the code lifestyle types. They show up, work, and go back to their lives.
We all know that ‘in general’ in the USA at least but I’m sure in other countries as well the genders tend to self segregate their peer networks. My close friends are men. Her close friends are women.
However you feel about Jordan Peterson, he brings up this fact all the time, esp w/ regards to Scandinavia, would define this phenomenon as the difference between equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome, and that the genders, when provided the option, tend towards different preferences (e.g. bricklayers vs nurses), and that environment factors can skew these natural preferences in either direction.
raises the question of _why_ women in these egalitarian societies are currently are selecting against STEM. Because for example there are plenty of female accountants, which is not normally thought of as a "people" business. So perhaps the environmental factors could change the preferences.
Whether the overall result is preferable for society, I have no idea.
How about doctors vs nurses? I think this is a much more relevant comparison. In the united states (sorry) male doctors outnumber female by about 2:1 [1], while female nurses outnumber male nurses by more than 10:1 [2]. Comparing these two professions it's a lot easier to make the argument that women are implicitly encouraged to set their expectations lower than men, who actually may feel emasculated as a nurse.
STEM jobs are seen as more difficult to train for and to achieve than non-STEM jobs, similar to the job of a doctor compared to the job of a nurse. If you're confused as to why women choose 'difficult' jobs less often, I hope this line of thinking is convincing...
I realize this is an anecdote, but one of my long-term clients is a tax/accounting office run and staffed almost entirely by women. When I started working there, I fully expected to find it tedious and drab. It turns out that it is surprisingly fun- they get clients that run all kinds of small businesses, we meet, talk about things, see what we can do to help them... Knowing the tax code & GAAP is important, but they turn out to be only the means to a far more social end. Really changed my mind in a positive way.
"If governments want to increase women’s participation in STEM, a more effective strategy might be to target the girls who are clearly being lost from the STEM pathway – those for whom science and maths are their best subjects and who enjoy it but still don’t choose it"
I don't understand why we should try to make somebody choose a subject they didn't choose to do.
> I don't understand why we should try to make somebody choose a subject they didn't choose to do.
If they didn't choose to do a subject because, for example, they had their high school teacher(s) tell them that he "does not expect female students to do as well as male students" (I have seen that happen few years back when I was still in high school), then it surely is an undertaking worth considering.
I think the logic here is a nontrivial portion of the women who "fall out of the pipeline" do it for reasons other than lack of enthusiasm for the subject. If indeed there are girls who want to pursue math/cs but run into extrinsic obstacles that put them off, we should try to identify what those obstacles are.
Imagine a subject only sociopaths are willing to take. I see good reasons why the society might want to change the framework so that even non-sociopaths take that subject.
Now, neither men nor women are sociopaths, but they are different. They have different behaviour towards risks, on average, among other things. That gives reasons for the society to work on having both genders in every subject.
The next sentence is: "If we can understand their motivations, then interventions can be designed to help them change their minds." I imagine there is a non-coercive way to try to understand the reasons, and use that to inform counseling of students.
Often the reason motivating people to make statements like this is that they assume a systemic reason as to why a given group are not choosing a particular choice. An illustrative example would be asking why fewer men participate in cheer squad. The answer is derivative of the context - maybe football recruits more vigorously and has masculine traits which appeal more to young men. The follow-up question, if we were looking to have more boys in cheer, would be to ask what can we do to appeal more to those traits or appeal to things which no other activity satisfies.
The quote proposes looking at the context within which girls who show aptitude choose not to pursue STEM and see if there is anything the government, who wants more women in STEM, can do to facilitate this. It isn’t about removing the choice, it is about making a particular choice more appealing by better understanding the fundamental drivers behind particular choices.
My sister when to STEM instead on another field, because of campaigns. She hates herself for doing that, even now at 38 years old. It’s entirely probable that encouraging women to do things they stubbornly wouldn’t choose otherwise is making a generation of depressive mothers.
First of all, what we choose for our career is depending on many external factors, it can be people putting you off your interest but also someone helping you to learn more about it.
An important fact you're missing here, girls are lost from the STEM pathway in their early teenage years. https://it-online.co.za/2017/03/07/teenage-girls-fall-out-of...
Teachers not thinking they could do STEM, parents who have other ideas for their kids (I include boys, if my mom had her way I wouldn't be a programmer) and friends who think STEM is just for stupid nerds.
well making Engineering and Science careers as well rewarded and give them the same social status as say the Law, Medicine are might help.
Those young women with triple A's beloved of headline writers come exam time are making a rational decision not to go into a field where they are badly paid.
Whenever thinking of gender equality, I like to go back to Beauvoir. plato.stanford.edu's page [1] is fantastic, here's an extract:
"Before The Second Sex, the sexed/gendered body was not an object of phenomenological investigation. Beauvoir changed that. Her argument for sexual equality takes two directions. First, it exposes the ways that masculine ideology exploits the sexual difference to create systems of inequality. Second, it identifies the ways that arguments for equality erase the sexual difference in order to establish the masculine subject as the absolute human type. Here Plato is her target. Plato, beginning with the premise that sex is an accidental quality, concludes that women and men are equally qualified to become members of the guardian class. The price of women’s admission to this privileged class, however, is that they must train and live like men. Thus the discriminatory sexual difference remains in play. Only men or those who emulate them may rule. Beauvoir’s argument for equality does not fall into this trap. She insists that women and men treat each other as equals and that such treatment requires that their sexual differences be validated. Equality is not a synonym for sameness." (emphasis mine)
I find this paragraph particularly well written, but watch out, I've had an american writer read it and he understood the opposite of what is written. I had to make him read it again ^^
I don't know if it applies to this particular statistics. My personal interpretation of Beauvoir is that yes, this stat does make sense. In a gender equal society, you shouldn't find equal ratios everywhere because du-hu, we're actually not the same. But we should be equal.
That being said, I don't like talking about these things because I generalize to much, and the question is way too complex for me to approach. I like reading other people's take on it though. Anyway, I just wanted to share Beauvoir's thoughts and my rough interpretation of it in this context.
Countries with more gender equality are richer.
Countries with less gender equality are poorer.
In poorer countries, you are more inclined to choose careers based on paycheck, less on personal preference.
In richer countries you are more inclined to choose careers based on your personal preferences and less on for the paycheck.
It's pretty easy.
EDIT: A good counter example to this correlation could be Japan. Low gender equality but also low female participation in STEM fields.
I wonder how much of this is related to parental leave policy versus generic social safety net. Countries with a strong safety net also have generous maternity leave but are behind on paternity. I imagine that at a large scale this does make many companies slightly less likely to hire women, and families much more likely to have the mother take time away from her job. The ultimate effect, albeit in a warm and fuzzy way, could be to deemphasize women’s careers by normalizing the idea that it’s best if you stay home with the kids.
I don't suppose that this could have a larger effect than the gender inequality in many countries lacking a social safety net, but it could be a contributing factor.
The idea that women, given the choice, generally would rather prioritize motherhood seems totally plausible. If that's the case, it could indicate that we need to think about diversity differently.
But I'm uncomfortable with a side effect that some of these policies could have - subtly pressuring women to focus on motherhood. The solution is complicated though if the mere existence of a good maternity leave policy encourages sexism. Hopefully general parental leave can help address this.
> Girls, even with their ability in science equalled or excelled that of boys, were often likely to be better overall in reading comprehensions, which relates to higher ability in non-STEM subjects.
Why is reading comprehension non-STEM?
I've read that success in STEM graduate degrees is highly predicted by language scores on the GRE, and not well predicted by the math part of the test at all.
> Girls also tended to register a lower interest in science subjects. These differences were near-universal across all the countries and regions studied.
So girls are less interested in these subjects, but in more unequal countries (read poorer) they do it for career prospects, while in more equal countries (read richer) they do what they want (not STEM subjects).
One thing I have noticed is that male engineers are intrinsically motivated but female engineers, even highly capable ones, are extrinsically motivated.
So you find very few female engineers in open source projects, under 3% by some estimates, although the percentage of female professional software engineers is much higher. Clearly this is not due to discrimination —- github doesn’t ask you your gender. So there must be some other explanation. When someone is intrinsically motivated (i.e., not motivated by salary alone) they are likely to be a better employee.
Here are three possible explanations for the observed behavior that don't require a belief in inherent biological differences:
1. Since countries with lower gender equality also tend to be poorer, STEM could be seen as a rare opportunity to escape poverty, and this motivation could outweighs any kind of societal bias agains female participation.
2. A quick glance at the graph of results in [0], shows that there's also a strong cultural division. Countries with more gender equality are mostly in Nordic Europe and Western Europe, while countries will less are mostly in the Middle East, Eastern Europe. It's possible for regions to develop cultural norms that reduce gender equality without also developing cultural norms that reduce female participation in STEM.
3. As a corollary to 1, and pulled directly from the article: "STEM careers are generally secure and well-paid but the risks of not following such a path can vary. In more affluent counties, where any choice of career feels relatively safe, women may feel able to make choices based on non-economic factors."
To be clear, I don't have strong evidence that any of these are necessarily true, but I think the existing of possible alternatives should at least force a reconsideration of the immediate conclusion that this correlation proves anything about biological difference.
I think it's troubling that as of writing this, none of the top comments do anything to suggest alternative explanations, and are quick to use this to confirm the existing narrative [1]. Again, I don't think I've done anything to disprove these claims, but it's indicative of a larger intellectual problem on HN if we would rather have discussions that confirm our beliefs than discussions that challenge and sharpen then.
Even if we do conclusively find that women on average prefer non STEM careers, I think for the good of our society, we should still make an effort to entice more women into STEM who otherwise would not. Not for dime immediate social justice reason, but because the advancement and progress of our own society needs more STEM grads, if we don't produce our own, we'll have to import them, which we should not have to, if we could develop policies of encouragement.
[+] [-] rayiner|8 years ago|reply
My family immigrated from Bangladesh to America. In most ways, obviously, America is a lot more equal. But my mom and her sisters have STEM degrees, and that wasn’t all that unusual for a wealthy Bangladeshi family at the time. Bangladeshis perceive STEM as important, and encourage both girls and boys to pursue it (even if they don’t expect girls to stay in the work force after they get married).
Raising a daughter in the US, my perception is that girls in America are taught about “princesses and fairies.” We impress upon boys the need to get practical education so they can support families but are more indulgent with girls. Last summer, I signed my then four-year old up for summer camp classes. There literally was classes for “princesses and fairies.” Of course I signed her up for “little engineers.” My daughter was quite upset to be the only girl in the class. That’s not innate. It’s somehing we’re choosing to do to our kids.
[+] [-] redwood|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imartin2k|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shortsightedsid|8 years ago|reply
Note: Am Indian and can totally see the same problem you noted.
[+] [-] acid_dog|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naasking|8 years ago|reply
That could be a critical factor. The other factor that I've heard posited is that career opportunities for women are limited in less liberal countries, so they take what they can get. This would be why Iran has gender parity in computer science, for instance.
[+] [-] kyleschiller|8 years ago|reply
Having said that, if you just want to know how it was literally defined here, I found this comment helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16408092
[+] [-] overcast|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|8 years ago|reply
The article does not accomplish that. Despite an overall trend in STEM throughout the western world for greater male participation than female, computer science is uniquely low; it is rivaled only by physics and MechE for gender disparity.
Throughout the rest of STEM, including hard fields like chemistry and mathematics, we see significantly improved participation among women. There are a bunch of STEM fields that have near parity, and a few (molecular biology, for instance) in which there are slightly more women. These are PhD numbers, not premed stats.
Besides better gender parity, something all these fields have in common at the graduate level is that they are significantly more demanding than commercial computer science. We kid ourselves that our day-to-day work is so rarefied that we need the top of the intelligence curve, so much so that the supposed variance in intelligence between men and women might explain our staffing. That's ridiculous. We do a bog-standard symbol manipulation job, and, even at the elite level, we tend to do it slap-dash and ad-hoc.
Whatever is keeping women to 20% of our field is artificial, and a travesty.
It's also on the front page, I believe, because it's a cite followed from an article posted earlier this week making some of the same arguments. That post had a huge discussion, making this a needless duplicate. We don't need to keep re-litigating this on the front page of the site. I flagged it.
[+] [-] geofft|8 years ago|reply
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617741719
> The underrepresentation of girls and women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is a continual concern for social scientists and policymakers. Using an international database on adolescent achievement in science, mathematics, and reading (N = 472,242), we showed that girls performed similarly to or better than boys in science in two of every three countries, and in nearly all countries, more girls appeared capable of college-level STEM study than had enrolled. Paradoxically, the sex differences in the magnitude of relative academic strengths and pursuit of STEM degrees rose with increases in national gender equality. The gap between boys’ science achievement and girls’ reading achievement relative to their mean academic performance was near universal. These sex differences in academic strengths and attitudes toward science correlated with the STEM graduation gap. A mediation analysis suggested that life-quality pressures in less gender-equal countries promote girls’ and women’s engagement with STEM subjects.
Their definition of "gender equality" is this:
> The World Economic Forum publishes The Global Gender Gap Report annually. We used the 2015 data (World Economic Forum, 2015). For each nation, the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) assesses the degree to which girls and women fall behind boys and men on 14 key indicators (e.g., earnings, tertiary enrollment ratio, life expectancy, seats in parliament) on a 0.0 to 1.0 scale, with 1.0 representing complete parity (or men falling behind). For the countries participating in the 2015 PISA, GGGI scores ranged from 0.593 for the United Arab Emirates to 0.881 for Iceland.
(One of the things I'd be curious about is whether that's just a proxy for Western cultural norms; the more commonly cited reasons for a gender gap in STEM fields in the US are things like harassment and misogyny, and it's certainly possible that those are correlated more strongly with Western culture than with cross-cultural structural inequality.)
[+] [-] nicolashahn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aspaceman|8 years ago|reply
It may very well be that men and women have different criteria, but that is completely irrelevant, and I find this line of argumentation very frustrating as it completely ignores the actual complaints at hand.
Women in STEM complain that they have less job prospects and feel uncomfortable in their positions. Many women feel they are disrespected, unrightfully criticized, and scrutinized to a degree unlike their male counterparts. As a whole, they have recognized that this is not the fault of individuals in their workplaces. It's "natural" to be more critical of the few women in your workplace because as a human, that's how your brain is built to work. Correcting that requires conscious effort on your part, and most are unwilling to correct themselves.
Instead, as a group women have decided that the best way to make themselves more welcome in STEM - is to have more women in STEM. This will slowly correct the negatives by causing more individuals to come into contact with women and have to learn how to behave properly. But these same systemic issues prevent many women who would otherwise enter STEM from doing so. No one is claiming that a perfect 50/50 ratio is all we need and then "we're done, pack it up folks". Simply that making efforts to get women into tech is actually a good idea.
Women are interested. Women want to do the work. Many that do are forced out for one reason or another, and this makes many not want to do it any longer.
Claiming that men and women just have different criteria, and thus the problem should be ignored entirely completely misses the point.
[+] [-] ghostcluster|8 years ago|reply
Not only is this true, it has been fairly exhaustively researched.
> Cross-cultural consistency of sex differences for four traits: extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and male-versus-female-typical occupational preferences. Men and women differed on all four traits. 200,000 participants from 53 nations.
> Only sex predicted means for all four traits, and sex predicted trait means much more strongly than did gender equality or the interaction between sex and gender equality. These results suggest that biological factors may contribute to sex differences in personality and that culture plays a negligible to small role in moderating sex differences in personality.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-008-9380-7
[+] [-] mdimec4|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geofft|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dahart|8 years ago|reply
Sure, it is always "possible" to do harm by taking action, but is it likely? There is widely acknowledged bias that is not believed to be a natural intrinsic gender difference by many scientists who study this, so is it better to do nothing, or to try and address the issue?
To me, this question seems a little like asking whether I should avoid erasing some files when my computer fills up, because I might delete something important. Yes, you could accidentally delete something you wanted to keep, but on the other hand, if you want to continue using it, you have no choice.
[+] [-] NewEntryHN|8 years ago|reply
My personal guess would be that there's indeed sexism, particularly in the programming industry. This overall "not my problem" attitude from men about anything regarding this subject is a clear hint of it.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] rbehrends|8 years ago|reply
If you look just at rich western countries, most of them occupy a fairly narrow strip on the graph. There are outliers, but they can go either way; Finland has a very low STEM graduation rate for women, Denmark a very high one (Figure 3b in the paper). Austria and Germany have fairly different outcomes, despite being culturally more similar than other countries that differ less.
This is sort of obscured by throwing in many countries that honestly have very different cultures, very different academic systems, and different constraints for people of different genders that seem to be difficult to reduce to just a single number.
For a simple example, there are countries where nursing is primarily taught at colleges and others where nursing is primarily taught through vocational programs. Given the gender disparity in nursing, that would affect the gender breakdown for STEM graduation rates (depending on whether you count nursing as part of the "M" in STEM or not, one way or the other).
I'm honestly surprised that for most affluent western countries the numbers are not more spread out. If I had to guess – and we really have too few data points for that – I'd say we're simply looking at a normal distribution here, especially as (with the exception of the UK) the larger countries tend to be closer to the midpoint of the 20%-30% range and it's smaller countries that are at the fringes of the range.
[+] [-] purple-again|8 years ago|reply
My wife went into the medical field because her sister turned her onto this speciality that was easy to get into and paid quite well.
I tried to teach my smart wife to program and failed miserably because that’s not how our relationship works.
Most people in even your industry are not die hard passionate live and breathe the code lifestyle types. They show up, work, and go back to their lives.
We all know that ‘in general’ in the USA at least but I’m sure in other countries as well the genders tend to self segregate their peer networks. My close friends are men. Her close friends are women.
[+] [-] platz|8 years ago|reply
raises the question of _why_ women in these egalitarian societies are currently are selecting against STEM. Because for example there are plenty of female accountants, which is not normally thought of as a "people" business. So perhaps the environmental factors could change the preferences.
Whether the overall result is preferable for society, I have no idea.
[+] [-] kenning|8 years ago|reply
How about doctors vs nurses? I think this is a much more relevant comparison. In the united states (sorry) male doctors outnumber female by about 2:1 [1], while female nurses outnumber male nurses by more than 10:1 [2]. Comparing these two professions it's a lot easier to make the argument that women are implicitly encouraged to set their expectations lower than men, who actually may feel emasculated as a nurse.
STEM jobs are seen as more difficult to train for and to achieve than non-STEM jobs, similar to the job of a doctor compared to the job of a nurse. If you're confused as to why women choose 'difficult' jobs less often, I hope this line of thinking is convincing...
[1] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/physicians-by-gend... [2] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/total-number-of-pr...
[+] [-] Baeocystin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js8|8 years ago|reply
I don't understand why we should try to make somebody choose a subject they didn't choose to do.
[+] [-] sannee|8 years ago|reply
If they didn't choose to do a subject because, for example, they had their high school teacher(s) tell them that he "does not expect female students to do as well as male students" (I have seen that happen few years back when I was still in high school), then it surely is an undertaking worth considering.
[+] [-] majos|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madez|8 years ago|reply
Now, neither men nor women are sociopaths, but they are different. They have different behaviour towards risks, on average, among other things. That gives reasons for the society to work on having both genders in every subject.
[+] [-] psyc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alextheparrot|8 years ago|reply
The quote proposes looking at the context within which girls who show aptitude choose not to pursue STEM and see if there is anything the government, who wants more women in STEM, can do to facilitate this. It isn’t about removing the choice, it is about making a particular choice more appealing by better understanding the fundamental drivers behind particular choices.
[+] [-] tajen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheArcane|8 years ago|reply
These facetors aren't limited to geographical boundaries and hence could affect the populace of countries with both low and high HDI equally.
[+] [-] TomK32|8 years ago|reply
First of all, what we choose for our career is depending on many external factors, it can be people putting you off your interest but also someone helping you to learn more about it.
An important fact you're missing here, girls are lost from the STEM pathway in their early teenage years. https://it-online.co.za/2017/03/07/teenage-girls-fall-out-of... Teachers not thinking they could do STEM, parents who have other ideas for their kids (I include boys, if my mom had her way I wouldn't be a programmer) and friends who think STEM is just for stupid nerds.
[+] [-] walshemj|8 years ago|reply
Those young women with triple A's beloved of headline writers come exam time are making a rational decision not to go into a field where they are badly paid.
[+] [-] globuous|8 years ago|reply
"Before The Second Sex, the sexed/gendered body was not an object of phenomenological investigation. Beauvoir changed that. Her argument for sexual equality takes two directions. First, it exposes the ways that masculine ideology exploits the sexual difference to create systems of inequality. Second, it identifies the ways that arguments for equality erase the sexual difference in order to establish the masculine subject as the absolute human type. Here Plato is her target. Plato, beginning with the premise that sex is an accidental quality, concludes that women and men are equally qualified to become members of the guardian class. The price of women’s admission to this privileged class, however, is that they must train and live like men. Thus the discriminatory sexual difference remains in play. Only men or those who emulate them may rule. Beauvoir’s argument for equality does not fall into this trap. She insists that women and men treat each other as equals and that such treatment requires that their sexual differences be validated. Equality is not a synonym for sameness." (emphasis mine)
I find this paragraph particularly well written, but watch out, I've had an american writer read it and he understood the opposite of what is written. I had to make him read it again ^^
I don't know if it applies to this particular statistics. My personal interpretation of Beauvoir is that yes, this stat does make sense. In a gender equal society, you shouldn't find equal ratios everywhere because du-hu, we're actually not the same. But we should be equal.
That being said, I don't like talking about these things because I generalize to much, and the question is way too complex for me to approach. I like reading other people's take on it though. Anyway, I just wanted to share Beauvoir's thoughts and my rough interpretation of it in this context.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/
[+] [-] curiousgal|8 years ago|reply
The findings only present a paradox if you believe that gender equality requires equal representation in all fields.
[+] [-] rtz12|8 years ago|reply
It's pretty easy.
EDIT: A good counter example to this correlation could be Japan. Low gender equality but also low female participation in STEM fields.
Why? Because Japan is a rich country.
[+] [-] stevenwoo|8 years ago|reply
Some analysis (source of link): https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
[+] [-] seaknoll|8 years ago|reply
I don't suppose that this could have a larger effect than the gender inequality in many countries lacking a social safety net, but it could be a contributing factor.
The idea that women, given the choice, generally would rather prioritize motherhood seems totally plausible. If that's the case, it could indicate that we need to think about diversity differently.
But I'm uncomfortable with a side effect that some of these policies could have - subtly pressuring women to focus on motherhood. The solution is complicated though if the mere existence of a good maternity leave policy encourages sexism. Hopefully general parental leave can help address this.
[+] [-] dahart|8 years ago|reply
Why is reading comprehension non-STEM?
I've read that success in STEM graduate degrees is highly predicted by language scores on the GRE, and not well predicted by the math part of the test at all.
[+] [-] Mikeb85|8 years ago|reply
So girls are less interested in these subjects, but in more unequal countries (read poorer) they do it for career prospects, while in more equal countries (read richer) they do what they want (not STEM subjects).
[+] [-] greentuna|8 years ago|reply
So you find very few female engineers in open source projects, under 3% by some estimates, although the percentage of female professional software engineers is much higher. Clearly this is not due to discrimination —- github doesn’t ask you your gender. So there must be some other explanation. When someone is intrinsically motivated (i.e., not motivated by salary alone) they are likely to be a better employee.
[+] [-] datashovel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyleschiller|8 years ago|reply
1. Since countries with lower gender equality also tend to be poorer, STEM could be seen as a rare opportunity to escape poverty, and this motivation could outweighs any kind of societal bias agains female participation.
2. A quick glance at the graph of results in [0], shows that there's also a strong cultural division. Countries with more gender equality are mostly in Nordic Europe and Western Europe, while countries will less are mostly in the Middle East, Eastern Europe. It's possible for regions to develop cultural norms that reduce gender equality without also developing cultural norms that reduce female participation in STEM.
3. As a corollary to 1, and pulled directly from the article: "STEM careers are generally secure and well-paid but the risks of not following such a path can vary. In more affluent counties, where any choice of career feels relatively safe, women may feel able to make choices based on non-economic factors."
To be clear, I don't have strong evidence that any of these are necessarily true, but I think the existing of possible alternatives should at least force a reconsideration of the immediate conclusion that this correlation proves anything about biological difference.
I think it's troubling that as of writing this, none of the top comments do anything to suggest alternative explanations, and are quick to use this to confirm the existing narrative [1]. Again, I don't think I've done anything to disprove these claims, but it's indicative of a larger intellectual problem on HN if we would rather have discussions that confirm our beliefs than discussions that challenge and sharpen then.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... [1] https://imgur.com/a/1Diel
[+] [-] mc32|8 years ago|reply