To tell it flat out, tech to me seems to be signalintocracy much more then meritocracy. We don't even talk about what merit is - like ever. We don\t know. If you broadcast the right set of signals and are confident, then you go up. If you are humble or fail at whatever signals are in fashion that time, you go down. I remember quite a few dudes (whether in school or work) who were total respected geniuses doing completely difficult things - until I had to do the same thing and it turned out to be easy. It would be also super awesome if the best argued for ideas would win instead of most confidently and aggressively pronounced ideas.
I also think that lack of women in tech has more to do with how strongly little kids learn to associate being boy with anything tech related. It has nothing to do with math abilities, at least here boys who go to engineering and rarely really good in math (compared to pool of people who go to college). However, it is a good job for a boy that wants a job and does not have any special interest or hobby. It is not seen as good job for girl that dont really are.
This seems slightly absurd. Tech is one of the few jobs which people move into after taking it up as a hobby, and for which doing it as a hobby is almost seen as a requirement. This is not generally what happens for doctors, nurses, lawyers, accountants, teachers or surveyors. Other jobs for which this applies are generally very poorly paid for the vast majority e.g. actor, footballer, musician, etc. Although many people do go into IT because they have no specific interests, moreso admin roles at big companies, which tend to be have a higher proportion of women than programming roles at startups.
To expand on the idea: in meritocracy, networking would matter much less then it matters in tech. Meritocracy would not see "culture fit" as so important as tech have it. Ability to work with others would matter, but there would be no beer test and crap like that. In meritocracy, your ability to socialize after work would matter less. Ability to organize own work would matter more then ability to sit there 80 hour a week being ineffective.
I also think meritocracy would lead to less fads nobody criticize until they are out of fashion at which point everyone criticizes.
So yeah, I stand by tech is not meritocratic and if it stopped being so self-confident about it, it could move closer to that ideal.
Of course I don't know you, but that might have more to do with your self esteem, or lack thereof, than anything else. Some people's reaction would be pleasure at their accomplishment.
There are a bunch of other professions where women are under/over-represented. CS is one of them. Others include:
Mechanical Engineering
Construction
Electrical Engineering
Physics
Aerospace Engi
Geography
Finance
I think it's going to be difficult to compose an argument for how computer science could be intrinsically better suited to men in a way that didn't also apply to other popular hard-science fields.
Neuro/molecular/chem ~= biology and is similar to each other for the most part.
women are underrepresented in almost all major engineering fields. It's not like the math there is harder than pure maths or that it's more challenging. Just different.
stats is its own beast. Accounting is very different from computers-related fields or biology for example. Statistics classes are also pretty much evenly balanced.
pure math is also very different from everything else. It might be in some cases similar to theoretical CS/applied math but to get to theoretical CS most people have to go through undergrad CS classes that paint a completely different picture of what that work is like.
One suspects that if there was some subfield of programming, like distributed systems, that had 45/65 female/male, there'd be an elaborate justification for how that programming discipline was so different from the rest of programming that any comparisons to it were invalid (and, in fact, I've noticed at academic crypto conferences that women are much more common than in the rest of CS, so maybe that's an example).
Again, this is what it means for an argument to be a special pleading: we're required to accept an obstacle course of criterion that ignores the simplest, most plausible comparisons.
On the contrary, if you look at lists of the representation gap between professions, computer programmers fit right into their surroundings. It requires special pleading to explain why programming is systematically discriminating against women, and not civil engineers, sound technicians, chemical engineers, industrial engineers, mechanical engineers, aerospace engineers, professionally active mathematicians, chemical engineers etc...
Computer science, physics, and engineering are the three male bastions of STEM. Nothing else in STEM compares. Moreover, the rest of STEM is significantly and increasingly dependent on computer science, so a very large number of practicing scientists in non-CS, non-engineering fields are spending much of their working time programming computers. Somehow, we've led ourselves to believe that plugging form fields into database columns is serious men's only business, but working with computational models of molecular biology isn't.
It would not challenge my intuitions to find that women in STEM are doing more significant CS work than the overwhelming majority of professional computer programmers.
I would tend to agree. I think that women are not interested in staring at a computer screen and making CRUD apps all day, they do something more interesting or rewarding that require technical skills. That is, the lower aptitude men stick it out, while the lower aptitude women quit and become nurses or whatever. It's just a theory, but plausible right? You seem stuck on a false choice between it there being some simple super-cause or else sexism. It's probably a bunch of things. I mean why else would the most gener-equal societies show the most segregation between professions?
1) Men & women have differently structured brains.
2) Different brains result in different behaviour.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6508777#6509275
Women in mining: http://internationalwim.org/
Women in construction:
http://www.nawic.org/nawic/default.asp
(some editing to tone it down a bit.)
By accept, you mean assume, and assuming is what Oxitendwe was warning against.
You haven't stated anything to rebut any of the points made by Oxitendwe.
Instead, you demonstrated your ignorance of basic argumentation skills and your proclivity for self-righteousness.
You would do well to drop the sanctimonious tone ("don't huff about", "don't pretend") during discussions.
If anybody here is huffing, it is you.
And the explanation would need to be simple, because it competes with another explanation, which is that computer technology is systemically biased against women, the way every other profession was before those professions took explicit steps to correct disparity.
To be fair, the gender gap is present in many engineering professions, computer science is in no way unique here.
The pleading here seems to me to get more and more special with each iteration of the argument.
> a math-intensive field with much better gender parity than computer technology
Stop saying this. It's not better, it's different.
> The pleading here seems to me to get more and more special with each iteration of the argument.
It's not special. Look at the tables, practically all engineering professions are 80ish% male. If you want to damn computer programming as discriminatory just because lots of women take Maths for their GCSEs, are 35% of chemists and 50% of biologists, you have to do the same for ALL engineers.
I don't agree that it is, necessarily. But you're working from the premise that it is inherently discriminatory.
> The pleading here seems to me to get more and more special with each iteration of the argument.
Really? Because you ignored what the parent comment said. I.e. special pleading!
* Chemistry
* Math
* Evolutionary biology
* Biochemistry
* Statistics
* Astronomy
All these fields have greater than 30% participation among women.
It's always possible to compose a special-pleading argument; that's why we have the term "special pleading". But to be convincing, that argument would have to come up with a compelling difference between computer science and all those other fields (it would also need to account for the fact that women are also far better represented in the rest of the professions).
The segregation seems to follow a pretty stereotypical pattern: men cluster is occupations concerned with abstract, impersonal systems or that revolve around physical labour and women cluster in professions that involve a relatively greater degree of social interaction. I am not making any claim as to why this is the case, merely that it is.
A good paper (IMHO) that does a thorough analysis of the data on vertical and horizontal segregation can be found here: http://sci-hub.cc/10.1177/0038038511435063
One finding I thought particularly interesting was that the countries with the highest levels of horizontal segregation are Finland, Denmark and Sweden. This seems counter-intuitive to me, though I cannot explain why...
1. I'm not sure it's surprising, let alone a rebuttal, to observe that there's significant gender disparity in most industrialized economies. In fact, it can be the case that the US leads the world in gender parity (in fact: I think this might be likely) and still simultaneously be the case that there are structural biases against women. Why would we expect to see wildly diverging outcomes in different countries? All these countries (note the exclusion of China!) employ essentially the same pipeline of children to the same set of Professions.
2. As has been repeatedly stated here and in the post we're responding to (which is premised on this observation): pretty much all the other high-status Professions have markedly better gender parity than technology. It may be the case that gender disparity in compensation is broadly the same in societies and that men and women generally cluster into similar compensation bands and occupations, but that could also primarily be a phenomenon of the (majority) of people who don't work in high-status Professions --- because in medicine, law, accounting, actuary, even sales, we have 40-55% female participation.
3. The notion that a study like this rebuts the argument I just made is a sort of flight to abstraction. We can look at women in science (where there is broadly equal representation between men and women in awarded degrees, and markedly better parity among postgraduates and practitioners) and see that CS (and EE) are outliers. I don't need to look at GINI coefficients and treat pay equity as a vector in R^2 to observe the problem, nor does it make sense for me to concede that the debate should shift into this mathematical abstraction. We have the actual facts here; no need for the models.
1. Unless I've misunderstood, the original assertion was that the gender gap is present in many engineering professions. I'm not clear on what facts you are relying on, but the data I've seen (and linked to) seems to bear this observation out. Such an observation is not at odds with your assertion that there are 'structural biases' against women.
And if I has to guess, to put it bluntly, I suspect China was not included as their official statistics on any remotely economic matter are highly suspect. Additionally, there are quite disparate outcomes among countries. On no measure of gender workforce equality is the US in the lead, at least according to the data in the linked study. The US is better than most on vertical inequality (i.e. wage gaps within the same occupational groups) but roughly average on horizontal inequality (i.e. occupational gender segregation). The US is closest to South Africa in these respects.
2. I don't have much to say here really. I guess part of this might come down to what one subjectively defines as a 'high status' profession. I don't really have an opinion here, so I defer to yours.
3. I don't recall saying that that study I linked to rebuts your point of view. I linked to the study because it's fairly comprehensive, informative, and seems to have a sound methodology. The data analysed is fairly credible too: large cross country social surveys and Census data. I'm not sure where R^2 comes into this, as the authors are not constructing a predictive model. Rather, they're simply calculating observational statistics.
And I'm not asking you to concede that the debate should shift into some kind of weird, abstract mathematical exercise. But if you refuse to even glance at some of the data put forward (or any data really), preferring some nebulous facts that you haven't actually presented, then I'm afraid you're likely to have a hard time convincing people who don't already agree with you.
One very simple, coherent way to arrive at Pike's position without sacrificing the notion of merit is to accept the idea that it's very unlikely that computer technology is unique among the professions in being suited to men, and thus the gender gap must itself be an indication that something other that merit is systematically advantaging men and disadvantaging women.
You're welcome to argue that point (or any other), but don't pretend that you've beaten it by default.