Re:Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, ...
by geofft on Thursday May 04, 2017 @10:23AM
(#14265015)
> It's clear women on the whole are not drawn to STEM. It's not clear why but there does appear to be a biological component. It's certainly not primarily socially constructed.
I don't think I believe any of these three claims.
For these I don't think asking for supporting evidence would help - these aren't claims where you can easily point to a research paper, but these are interpretations of a large amount of data (some rigorous, some anecdotal).
But it's interesting that we have such different interpretations, worldviews if you will, of the data we've seen. I think women are drawn just fine to STEM as a whole (if by "drawn" you mean "innate interest"), I think they're somewhat structurally discouraged by socially-constructed barriers to STEM as whole and, importantly, quite a bit more discouraged to software engineering in particular. And I don't think there's anything biological about it (unless you count the fact that many people with wombs plan to bear children and nobody without wombs does, and long parental leave is a serious career hit, but I'd still argue that 90% of that is a socially-constructed barrier and not a biological one).
I don't think I believe any of these three claims.
For these I don't think asking for supporting evidence would help - these aren't claims where you can easily point to a research paper, but these are interpretations of a large amount of data (some rigorous, some anecdotal).
But it's interesting that we have such different interpretations, worldviews if you will, of the data we've seen. I think women are drawn just fine to STEM as a whole (if by "drawn" you mean "innate interest"), I think they're somewhat structurally discouraged by socially-constructed barriers to STEM as whole and, importantly, quite a bit more discouraged to software engineering in particular. And I don't think there's anything biological about it (unless you count the fact that many people with wombs plan to bear children and nobody without wombs does, and long parental leave is a serious career hit, but I'd still argue that 90% of that is a socially-constructed barrier and not a biological one).