That’s the result of decades of work, which started with affirmative efforts by law schools to achieve gender parity at the beginning of the pipeline. (Those efforts proved self sustaining. Once women didn’t have to swim upstream to choose law school—facing years of being in a small minority at the outset of their careers—efforts to recruit them specifically became unnecessary.) There is a ways to go yet before we hit parity, but I feel like in STEM folks are still litigating the issue of whether numeric parity should even be the goal. That question was settled in the legal field a long time ago.
I think most tech companies would go into a full-blown panic if you imposed a quota of non-asians (who are something like 5% of the U.S. population) for technical positions.
But did they have this back in the 60's and 70's when representation started going up? What caused it back then, that didn't apply to engineering?
Be specific, because this could mean different things. Were the genders balanced because the applicant pool itself had become balanced, or because law schools started enforcing balance in admission, or a mix of both?
> In the 1970s and 1980s there was a series of lawsuits as a result of which law firms began to hire gender balanced classes of entry level lawyers
And what were the graduate pools like at the time, re: gender balance? Do you have sources that talk about these points, because it sounds interesting.
Part of the issue for tech companies is that there are fewer women with CS degrees, something they don't directly control, and have only modest at best influence over. And then at the university level, they've had issues getting more women to sign up, though I understand some schools have had more success than others.
What I said was that recent progress is the result of work that started decades ago. Harvard law graduated its first women in 1953. But back then top women law graduates were still getting offers to be secretaries. (Justice Ginsberg’s story was not at all atypical for her cohort.) That, along with the prospect of joining a 90%+ male class in and of itself dissuaded women from pursing law. Law schools fixed that by making 50-50 classes an express goal, and then achieving that goal. Then law firms made 50-50 classes of incoming associates an express goal, and achieved that goal. Gender parity was achieved not simply by accepting women to law schools, but by actively seeking to admit gender balanced classes. But once that happened, the new ratio became self-perpetuating. When being a woman lawyer no longer meant being part of a tiny minority in law school, a firm, etc., women self-selected into it when previously they had opted out.
I strongly suspect the same factors are in play in STEM: women who would be good programmers self-select out of the field because they don’t want to be the 1-2 women in a class of 20 men, or the 1-2 women programmers on a team of 20 men.
Wait, what? Is this an argument that men are inherently unsuited to be Supreme Court Justices?
My guess is this means having 9 women on the Supreme Court is to make up for all the years there were 9 men on the Supreme Court.
I find this dangerous logic. Seeking to alternate oppression of one group versus another doesn't seem like a good long term solution, in my opinion.
By the way, thanks for your analysis about the progression of gender equality in the legal profession. That's something I didn't know about.
> Wait, what? Is this an argument that men are inherently unsuited to be Supreme Court Justices?
It just means that if gender is not considered, we should see an all women's court once every 2^9 = 512 time.
If the number never goes above the mean, gender must still be a factor.
I took that to mean "just as it was unremarkable in the very recent past for the SC to be 100% male, it should be unremarkable if in the future it became 100% female (on merit)".
I do remember in my first CS class: about 70% of the men, and all but one or two women dropped the week after pointers were introduced.
There's this hypothesis that men statistically tend to pick jobs involving working with and treating patients as things, and women tend to pick jobs involving people and socializing. Medicine as a field is full of high-status jobs of both kind, so - under this hypothesis - gender parity of the overarching field is entirely unsurprising. And, as predicted, individual specializations tend to show strong gender skew.
Law is also a very large field, so I suspect the profession probably shows a similar dynamic.
Viewed through this lens, our industry is less like "medicine", and more like "radiology". And I suspect - but didn't check - that if you expand the definition of "software" to include supporting fields like design, UX and testing, the overall gender ratio will be much closer to 1:1.
Could also look at careers like "developer evangelist" and "solutions engineer", both of which are technical but much more people-oriented than being a regular software engineer.
The evangelists also have to deal with not just the environment at Microsoft, but also the partners we were helping architect solutions for. On more than one occasion I know women had problems delivering solutions to a partner because that partner had blatantly sexist stakeholders who would constantly try to question or circumvent them in ways that didn't happen for men. One of the college hires I was mentoring was the point person on a project, yet every single question was sent my way and I had to keep redirecting them to the woman who was perfectly capable of answering the question and was actually in charge of the account.
So yes, there were a lot more face to face interactions, but the women still didn't stick around for these roles. Some had much better experiences actually writing code on the product teams. Some moved into project management or research.
Data to support this hypothesis here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge...
ObGyns are 85% female, Pediatrics 75%, while radiology is 72% male and anesthesiology 63%.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
Even straight white men hate medicine and can't leave because of debt... so it's not a great comparison.
Googling around seems that it's contentious, and that a lot of people consider nurses, physicians etc to be STEM careers under the 'science' heading. But this doesn't seem all that core to me. (And you have to draw the line somewhere - are psychiatrists STEM? How about psychologists?)
Many people who go on to go to medical school will major in a STEM subject in undergrad (like biology or something)
This is a US-centric view - most people do in fact study medicine right out of school. It is interesting though that the definition of what constitutes a field vary quite greaty around the globe.
The M is not for Medicine
Actually, I am unsure how country specific this is and where to put medicine with respect to hard sciences, soft sciences, social sciences etc.
It is kind of hilarious how different this works in a lot of countries. For example in German, the translation of science is 'Wissenschaft'. It would literally translate to "the thing you do to make knowledge". Humanities are called 'Geistes'wissenschaft and Law is called 'Rechts'wissenschaft'. Math is generally considered to be part of the humanities, and CS is usually either part of the math-department or very closely settled to the engineering department.
There's many more differences between the german and anglo academic culture, let alone all the other ones out there.
Hm, not always. In my experience it was a B.Sc., M. Sc. and Dr. rer. nat. and in the math-nat department, but it can also be associated with philosophy and of course there is no scientific method in math.
For medicine you also have the (again country specific?) question whether a medical doctorate is comparable to a hard science one, e.g. for the purpose of grants in medical research.
Just because there are other skills needed besides science based ones doesn't mean it isn't a science field.
People differ in whether they think medicine and the other applied sciences fall under the 'science' umbrella or not. Try searching around and you'll see a lot of mixed opinions on the subject.
How can anyone get a qualifying score on the MCAT without significant exposure to science?
Disclaimer: I'm definitely coming at this from a U.S. point of view which someone mentioned in another comment effectively (not always but definitely in the overwhelming majority of cases) requires STEM undergrad degrees to get into medicine.
So people tend to disagree about where to put medicine. But overall, most major public institutions in the US don't include medicine in STEM:
* US Department of Labor (Bureau of Labor Statistics) -- No. (https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2007/spring/art04.pdf)
* US Department of Commerce (Economics and Statistics Administration) -- No. (https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED522129.pdf)
* NSF -- No. "The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering."
Medicine-aligned subjects do a lot to improve the gender ratio, if one wants to improve the gender equality figures...
Why is it that two professions that you'd naively expect to be just as sexist, if not far more sexist than STEM (Higher status, more of an "old boys club", established hierarchy that has positions like nurses for women, etc) have achieved gender parity, while STEM hasn't?