I think that the big difference in STEM is that nerdy boys exist in such a number that they can still get acceptance and support. It's not as normal as, say, being a football player, but male nerds aren't exactly rare.
In contrast, because there are much fewer female nerds, their awkwardness is even more exaggerated, and this feeds back on itself to heighten the pressure to conform. Boys find some support in numbers, and their interest in the subjects smooths over any discomfort. Girls don't have any of that support, so if they aren't absolute fanatics about the subjects, they're going to conform.
I favor an approach where we separate kids who've shown some aptitude for the sciences and concentrate them in schools full of their peers. We can't do anything for the anti-intellectual types, but we can at least stop their ruining perfectly good raw talent.
They tried that on us ("gifted schools"). The two things it got us were hours less sleep each day because of the longer commute, and worse college admissions because of GPA deflation. I would've rather stayed in the normal pipeline and gotten scholarships instead.
Unlike "hanging out with friends", a universal activity, extracurricular sports actually do conflict with early computer science exploration (they're a huge time sink, as any parent of a kid in a sport will attest).
Meanwhile, sports draws in more boys than girls.
Why are we so quick to accept the notion that after-school activities that girls participate in isolate them from STEM, but after-school activities dominated by boys don't?
As a nerdy teenager, I never had a problem with any girl in any clique or social group at my school. But I sure as shit had problems with the boys in sports.
There are kids (and parents) who get totally invested in a sport with often unrealistic expectations of college scholarships or professional careers, but there are a lot who are also remain very academically focused and balanced. I know that many of the kids on my oldest son's high school teams went on to college in STEM fields so it's not an either/or.
(Though it is true I did very little partying.)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, today I'm a software engineer.
I know this is purely anecdotal, but I think we forget that if you give kids access to everything, they will figure out their own playtime and communities.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2015/08/09/tar...
Target tries to make one step in the right direction (like making sure a chemistry set is not labeled as a BOYS chemistry set) and people respond with:
"You liberal POS idiots are ruining this Country. Just because you morons don't want to think there are boys and girls, doesn't mean the rest of us with a brain have to think in your warped ways."
"Complete stupidity. I want my girls and boys to identify with their gender."
"This is stupid! So you think my grandson's wants to sleep on a frozen bed set made for girls and my granddaughters wants to sleep on spiderman bed sets. I don't think so. You better leave well enough along before you lose your business."
"This is just stupid. Kids are being taught not be them selves such as a true boy or a true girl. Men now a days are not men, they are girly men. A lot of women are not women they are trying so hard to fit into a mans world. Leave kids to b kids please. Pinks and blues do not hurt any one!"
They are pushing back against the pressure to conform to this new dogma, not that they would deny any particular girl access to a "boy's things".
This is to be expected though. Removing gender associations is going to be seen as an attack on existing peoples' upbringings. Anything that falls into that category is going to be a painful fight.
When you give rights to one group, you have to remove them from another (important: even if the second group had rights that were not rightfully theirs).
Men previously and incorrectly had exclusive access to jobs (and votes, and so forth). By giving women fair chance to those rights, you have to subtract the unjust portion of men's rights. I don't know why some (most? unlikely) of us can accept the truth, that those rights were never only ours, but as for the rest they experience anger. Just another way that equality is a hard fight: we're fighting a documented psychological effect.
Where did you get that from? I was merely attempting a theory (not excusing) on why these people act they do toward equality.
Why is it unjust? Why do you have to bring your personal interests and preferences into the workplace? Why not make a neutral workplace where different kinds of people can integrate and feel comfortable?
There's a point at which can safely say that this kind of studiously groomed, exclusionary "cohesion" is doing more harm than good. I mean, there's obviously that point: if you refused to hire someone because they were a woman, you'd get sued; if you refused to hire someone because they didn't drink, you'd (rightfully) be ostracized in the community.
You might argue that workplaces shouldn't endorse one particular subculture over another: that's fine. But unless you take stern measures to ban fraternization, you're going to get coworkers forming friendships based on shared interests, and we're lying to ourselves if we think that interests of software people tend not to cluster around what we think of as "geek" culture.
Let me put it another way: do you want to spend all day hearing about my toddler? If not--well that's how I feel about everything you're interested in. So let's just all do our work and leave our personal lives at home.
Because that's not how human beings bond. We don't bond over a single facet of our lives; we bond as a community. The modern world, in which we live different places, believe different things and pursue different jobs, is poison for any sense of community.
So where do you draw the line? It's clearly not OK, even in the name of "cohesion", to encourage a culture that excludes people of different income levels or ethnicities.
In reality, the injustice is that a small group of very powerful men oppress all women and nearly all men.
Exactly how are Barbie dolls in conflict with chemistry sets?
Even boys who own chemistry sets play with them far less often than they do with action figures. Is there some connection between chemistry sets and action figures that advantage them over Barbie dolls?
Is it just Barbie dolls? I hope my 14 year old daughter's American Girl dolls haven't ruined her for STEM; that's her current planned field. The boy, 16, played with legos and video games. I'm guessing he's going to be history major, or a writer. Did we do something else right? Or are we doomed and just don't know it yet?
I don't think this difference is a problem we need to solve. Diversity is supposed to make our culture richer, right? If so, why are some people trying so hard to make us all the same?
Of course we shouldn't artificial barriers to non-gender-normative career choices --- but gender disparity in a particular field is not itself evidence that these barriers exist. We've already done quite a bit to draw women into technical professions. Whatever disparity remains is on them.
Programming is a solitary activity where you solve logic puzzles. Anyone can do it. Another activity that is very similar is playing chess - yet no one is up in arms that chess schools aren't including 50% girls in elite chess training.
If you took a group of girls and a group of boys and put them in a room where they played chess for a few hours, then asked them how much they enjoyed it... more boys would rate the activity higher. Is it because some stupid poster on the wall??? No it's not. On average, men and women are different and have different average preferences.
Programming is not an activity where you need social support groups to succeed. It's the one activity where being a hermit who takes initiative and learns everything themselves can be an advantage over being more social. A large portion of programmers are self-taught online, and just start tinkering with things because they enjoy the activity. You can't force that.
If you want to see it as a job, compare it to other businesses where you have to write things on a schedule, like writing a newspaper. There's more conversations with strangers involved in that one and it sounds a little friendlier.
Exactly: both boys and girls get strong negative feedback for being nerdy. Yet, somehow more boys are sufficiently interested that they find their interest more important than the negative feedback.
In these scenarios, boys find groups that are supportive. In their case the video game playing, computer oriented, math/physics/etc. "nerds" are one such social group.
The entire point of the article is that those same groups are not supportive for women and girls.
It has nothing to do with them being so strong and manly that they can stand up to the bullies and pursue computer science anyway! It's that they find a safe haven in those social groups where they are not bullied and are inclusive.
The way bullying works with boys and girls is very different. A boys greatest wish when bullied is to be left alone by the bullies. A girls greatest wish is to avoid being excluded. In general anyway.
As long as I have enough good friends, I don't really care what anyone else thinks of me. My wife on the other hand would be incredibly distressed to find out 80% of her colleagues etc disliked her.
That's the definition of desiring inclusion.
If all of those friends that accepted you were marketing majors and not computer scientists the odds you'd pursue computer science goes way down. Particularly if the computer scientists were the bullies.
The point of the article is the computer (and in her case physics/science) culture was hostile to women, not inclusive.
Previously when viewing a thread like this I would take a perspective of "It's not discrimination, they just don't want to do it". Now I want to think about it some more in the context of what I just said.
As a corollary however, is it really a good thing to push a gender towards a particular field? Anecdotally in the case of SE there seems to be a huge amount of anxiety, depression, and various social issues, that comes with the work load. I often wonder if my life would be better had I never taken to computers. Interesting food for thought, do any of us really know what's "best for us" on a societal level?
> a perspective of "It's not discrimination, they just
> don't want to do it".
Well, maybe that wasn't exactly wrong. Or rather, there are different motivations for entering the profession. For males "love of technology" is a much stronger motivating factor, whereas for females it is "job security", "ease of entry" and "flexible working hours" [1]. All other factors surveyed were not different.
When it comes to experience in the job, the only difference found was that women received greater support and mentoring from their superiors.[2].
This is from a study published in the Communications of the ACM as "Women and men in the IT profession"[3]. Although not as interesting an anecdote as the NY Times article, and not fitting the current narrative, the study does have actual data. It concludes that women and men in tech are more alike than different, that the primary difference coming in is "love of tech" vs "good benefits" and that the biggest difference when in the field is that women get slightly better support from their bosses.
Come on in, the water is fine!
[1] http://deliveryimages.acm.org/10.1145/1320000/1314229/figs/t...
[2] http://deliveryimages.acm.org/10.1145/1320000/1314229/figs/t...
[3] http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2008/2/5453-women-and-men-in-t...
I don't think the suggestion is being made to push genders toward a particular field. I believe the case being made is that the status quo is that genders are pushed towards certain careers due to cultural biases and antagonistic or hostile group behavior that goes unchecked by the larger communities in certain groups.
The question being asked is how we, as a society, can stop pushing genders into certain roles. In particular, regarding the field of computer science and engineering.
That said, as controversial as there is, I think there is a bit of a genetic component here. Not that girls are genetically less capable of being good engineers or even of being nerds, but rather, that men may be genetically more likely to have obsessive and solitary interests, including things that seem to be borderline on the autistic spectrum.
Men are 8x more likely to be diagnosed with high-functioning autism than women are.
If there is a genetic component to this [1], then the numbers of female nerds are probably always going to be lower than female nerds. But awareness and support of female nerds is certainly important.
[1] http://www.autism.org.uk/about-autism/introduction/gender-an... (See section about chromosomal differences)
Girls in secondary education, though, seem to be all-too-ready to screw over each other and throw "friends" under the bus if there is any perceived benefit socially (saw this happen with family and female friends).
It's downright ugly.
Where did you read that? I wrote sufficiently interested. And no, not because there's a "safe group", but because they lose themselves in the technology and f*ck the groups.
of course as this is the experience as reported from the author, it is at most anecdotal, but it's interesting and actually could be a good starting point for further inquiry.
The key is to make it a priority to move to an area where all the families promote a culture that views academic excellence as a good thing.
I know this isn't available to everyone due to financial limitations. But it's probably available to more than realize it.
That's not all that is required. By the time you get to where "real" academic excellence matters (college) you have already made a choice based on what you have been exposed to. I'm talking about exposing children to as many professions as possible with no pressure from their childhood peers to fit into the more archaic gender role.
However, that is a brilliant way to curb the really damaging bullying.
Plans that begin with that phrase are never sustainable. All sane people will want to move to the same places, rising prices substantially until people are forced to borrow huge amounts of money to buy houses in nice places, causing a housing bubble, causing a crash.
Although at some point, i discovered that superglue was much easier than sewing.
They do to me too! However the tech industry isn't the only industry with these problems, we just talk about them more. I bought up the nurse example because it's one I'm familiar with: I dated a nurse. By the time she graduated (around 2007 I think) her academic hospital had zero, as I recall - less than 2 to be safe, male nurses. I knew some civil engineers at college, out of their whole class: 2 women.
Every industry is experiencing it in both directions. It's more unfair to women as the higher-salary industries tend to be the male-dominated. However, if my son wanted to be a nurse I'd want him to be able to figure that out and then feel that it was completely normal.
This childhood self-discrimination is pervasive and needs to be fixed.
I'm baffled by how you can believe that individual choice can be a problem that needs to be fixed. Do you believe that people should be directed into non-traditional fields against their will? Or do you believe that they're not competent to make their own decisions?
Every comment I have written (including the root and the parent of your reply) explain how this is not what I am saying at all.
In the UK, there's possibly much more of a problem with low/status pay for engineers in general than for women engineers specifically.
Clever women with the right social background head for medicine, law, media, marketing, or even teaching - especially at department head level, and above. That's where the real money and status are. There's also not much of a gender gap to speak of, except perhaps at the very top.
If anything, the gap goes the other way now, because boys in state schools are being aggressively socialised by peer pressure and teacher disinterest away from academic achievement in ways that girls aren't.
Engineers often have poor social status anyway. The UK is run by public school types, and they tend think of engineers as a slightly better class of carpenter or plumber. Social polish and family/school connections are far more valuable than the ability to build stuff that works.
Unfortunately from that point on more male than female students go on to more fully grok programming. I believe this is because the hidden costs associated with pursuing the craft are unequal between the two genders. For either gender it can represent a 'ding' on their popularity scorecard so to speak, but the ding is felt far more profoundly for women. One can certainly debate why this is and of course it's possible to trace this phenomena historically back into the days of ancient greek culture and before.
My feeling on the matter personally though is that the cultural norms of highschoolers have simply not had time to adapt to the idea that "geek is sheik" because the sentiment has only existed (outside of hacker culture) for the last decade (and perhaps it's still only a thing in California). In addition to that there has never been a "female astronaut moment" for computer science, so to speak in terms of it breaking into the consciousness of the average teen. This may be a chicken/egg type problem.
I think this is shifting now, but my opinion is that the biases which effected how highschoolers were feeling 15 or 20 years ago about computer science are still skewing the hiring statistics today because there are far fewer women job applicants who have been doing this kind of programming work for 15 or 20+ years...
How many were programming BBS systems in ANSI C back before AOL was a thing, or how many were following along with the early web as the standards (things like CSS) were being flushed out and it's possibilities were being explored (intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_B31nF3sU0&t=2m10s)
According to the statistics there are a lot more men who have been engaged in "Internet engineering" in one form or another for most of their life and this kind of multidisciplinary computer-science background can skew a hiring decision in their favor assuming both candidates are equally well versed with the most current technologies. Young programmers find ways to make up for the often times narrower scope of their experience (lack of a lisp beard) by being really good at the things that they specialize in, and by tracking more closely the cutting edge. I feel there are more women who are joining this cohort every day, but there are still not as many and it's a shame.
Instead of accepting the responsibility of doing their part to foster an understanding in young women about subtle forms of bullying they instead prefer to embrace the victim role which is the view that little can be done to resolve the issue without somehow breaking free from their (imaginary) male oppressors.
But, given the context of this discussion, I am concerned that there is a decent possibility that he wrote something not outrageous, but simply contrary to the current received wisdom of young Bay Area Californians.
I agree that in this case it doesn't really add much to the conversation, although I am a bit more forgiving if the author is indeed not a native English speaker.
I'm going to keep showdead on. There have been a number of cases in which I've seen comments moderated to oblivion where, from the quotes in child comments, I think that they were probably worth reading.
(Amusingly, HN has not let me post this for several hours, since I'm 'posting too fast')
If you don't believe me, you're welcome to go look, but it's not an experience I'd recommend.
(edit: It occurs to me that the last sentence is unclear as to whether I'm referring to showdead or MVM; the answer is 'yes')
I think.
Dear Google: Please up your game to compensate for my stupidity -- love, mst
Dear wtbob: Doh, sorry. What rewqfdsa++ said.
Fixing this problem is really, really hard. Assuming I gave my daughters equal access to both barbies and chemistry kits, which would they choose? Kids want to fit in with their friends. Boy nerds get beaten up, girl nerds get ostracised. What does that lead to? The child choosing their gender stereotype (applies both ways) so that they can fit in. It's what the herd is doing and results in girls avoiding engineering and boys avoiding, say, nursing.
It's a systemic disease and is highly contagious. One possible solution is an elementary school where the entrance requirement is determined by the parents: girls get barbies AND chemistry kits. Boys get toy cars AND sewing kits. Their social group shouldn't be determined by gender, rather interest.