And I'm sure many men simply did not consider the possibility of a career in female dominated professions, like nursing or elementary education. I think there's certainly something to the idea that we internalize stereotypes and that can restrict our options, but I'm skeptical that it generally explains large differences in career preference today.
For example, women were once stereotyped as not being doctors or lawyers, but that didn't seem to stop them from joining those fields en masse. If internalized stereotyping didn't matter enough to stop them then, for those fields, why does it matter now for engineering?
Representation is important - MLK convinced Nichelle Nichols to stay on Star Trek because she was, at the time, the only black educated woman in a leadership position on television.
Now, yes, but what about in the 60's and 70's?
The examples are legion.
The same cannot be said for the legion "quirky female hacker" characters that exist in many TV shows.
The fields you mention made serious efforts to counter sexism. STEM hasn't, yet.
1. https://www.payscale.com/compensation-today/2019/03/tie-bonu...
Mine, too, and I'm over 45.
Furthermore, do you care to identify what in this discussion makes it so clear why women would not go into STEM?
More than that, what "cultural changes" did they enact? From what I've read of the history, culture only shifted after women achieved rough gender parity. Cultural shifts follow demographic shifts, not vice versa.
And even now, gender disparities exist that can't be explained by sexist theories. For instance, why is surgery dominated by men and pediatrics dominated by women?
Sexist theories have a lot of holes like these gender disparities within fields and the gender equality paradox that's the subject of this article. And yet, there's a theory that explains all of the data we see:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018...
This theory relegates sexism to a minor role, perhaps affecting single digit differences in gender disparities, not the double digits we actually see.
Law is essentially the definition of the "Old Boys Club" and as for Medicine... I used to work in the medical field for a while. Go ask any (female) surgical nurse about the supposed efforts to counter sexism in the OR.
I don't believe your claim is true.
The major difference (in my opinion) is that the Old Boys Club owns it. They know they’re not welcoming to women and for the most part they don’t care. But Silicon Valley, for whatever reason, absolutely insists that they’re welcoming and that it’s all in our heads. The Old Boys Club was frustrating but Tech is infuriating.
Did you consider other reasons than sexism for the environment that you perceive as unwelcoming? E.g., I guess the ratio of introverts vs. extroverts is pretty different between Wall Street law firms and software developers.
Hm. I guess it was all in my head.
The extent to which discrimination makes tech more welcoming is debatable. It does have the immediate effect of increasing the number of women in tech roles, but it does so at the expense of putting them in an environment where they know that their male co-workers were held to a different standard and vice versa.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: your comment history shows a lot of political and ideological flamewar comments, and we've already had to warn you about not taking HN threads into gender war. If you keep this up we're going to have to ban you, so please don't.
You say this as if the fields themselves decided, but it could just as easily be that women pushed in harder.
> Fifty years ago people would no doubt have told you that women just weren't interested in becoming lawyers or doctors.
Again, what was the difference? You've suggested a relative difference in sexism at the time, but I've seen no data suggesting this. It just looks like a guess on your part.
> You don't, either.
Why would you even say this? The comment you responded to didn't have me asserting a reason why. It's like you're attacking a strawman.
I claimed that this is the case today. You are the only one of us making any assertions whatsoever about levels of sexism in the 1960s and 1970s, which are irrelevant to choices women make now.
Do you have any references on what those efforts were?
I've never attended personally, but we also host an event yearly called "Girls Who Code."
Adobe has also partnered with a local dev bootcamp to hire intern graduates-- I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty confident that there's an emphasis on female graduates.
Historically, the professions you're alluding to have been closed to women by men. So for example, the reason that women couldn't serve in the military until relatively recently is not that women used their power and influence within society to get a pass on military service. Rather, it's that men didn't want to let women serve.
Equality of opportunity to die serving a country is all very well, but until men figure out how to operate wombs without women there are practical differences when deciding who is risks probable death. The situation has probably changed now that growing populations no longer looks like an easy win but the calculus goes a bit beyond 'men just didn't like the idea'. Men didn't like the idea because it is an objectively bad idea in an era where population really mattered. The women probably agreed with that one on the whole.
This is an argument that's rarely if ever been used against allowing women to serve in the military. I think it's the argument that you'd like people to make rather than an argument that people have actually historically made.
More broadly, if you see women primarily as baby machines, then military service should be the least of your worries when it comes to fertility.
And we can't really say for certain that what everybody thought was controlling what happened. What everybody thinks and what actually happens in, eg, banking and finance are completely different. The people in control are not the people talking on the street.
> More broadly, if you see women primarily as baby machines, then military service should be the least of your worries when it comes to fertility.
Call me old fashioned but I'm ruling out the idea that men are the primary baby making engine of humanity.
On your actual point; the fact that there are other things to think about doesn't stop people thinking about this specific thing. The US lost 400,000 servicemen in WWII without really even seeing a foreign invasion; those sort of numbers absolutely should involve someone asking the question 'who can we most and least afford to lose?'. The militaries of the world are not warm and happy-go-lucky organisations. They ask quite unpleasant questions all the time.
I think you are just advancing your own arguments against allowing women to serve in the military here, not actually giving any evidence that these arguments were widely used in opposition to women's military service. That's a tangent.
Incidentally, in the broader context of this thread, this is exactly the kind of fringe content that just might give women the impression that the tech community has a sexism problem.
>Call me old fashioned but I'm ruling out the idea that men are the primary baby making engine of humanity.
I think you misread. I said "if you see women primarily as baby machines", not "if you see women as the primary baby machines".
1 - Logging workers
2 - Fishers and fishing workers
3 - Aircraft pilots and flight engineers
4 - Roofers
5 - Refuse and recyclable material collectors
6 - Structural iron and steel workers
7 - Truck drivers
8 - Farmers, ranchers and agricultural managers
But yeah, many of those jobs have a skewed gender distribution in significant part due to sexist stereotypes.
I ignored the "for men" qualifier as it seems obvious that these are the most dangerous jobs period.
The problem in STEM isn’t that the gender balance isn’t exactly 50/50. It’s that substantial numbers of women are discouraged from STEM careers by sexism.
But actually, the question is quite easy to answer for me. I am more interested in sexism per se than in the gender distribution. When women in the industry infrequently report that they are experiencing sexism, then I’ll consider that we’re well on the way to solving the problem. The current gender imbalance is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
This is the fox guarding the henhouse. There is no incentive for women to ever stop crying "sexism!" if this is the criterion in use.
There is a good discussion to be had over why conscription has mostly been male only. Is it powerful men wanting to get rid of young expendable men in some form of evolutionary benefit to themselves? It it because of historical benefit of muscle differences? Did women use their power and influence within society to get a pass on conscription?
Men did not choose to be forced into the military. People do not generally chose to be forced to the front line and die. It is also worth mentioning that in the US, black males were proportionally drafted in higher rates than white males during the Vietnam war. Most people would agree that white men used their power and influence to get a pass on military service.
Maybe the first question to discuss is if being drafted is a benefit or disadvantage in term of power and influence.
As you point out, the people in charge were all men. It was up to them to make the rules about who could or couldn't volunteer and who would or wouldn't be conscripted.
>Most people would agree that white men used their power and influence to get a pass on military service.
This perfectly illustrates my point. That is exactly not how women got a pass on military service. Thus, it misses the point to complain that men disproportionately do certain dangerous jobs. Women have been kept out of those jobs by men, and by sexist attitudes more broadly, not by some kind of inverse sexism that favors women over men.
Most worlds armies are conscription, and even the US army had conscription during the American Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. It culturally defines the military.
> This perfectly illustrates my point.
No it does not. Men as a group did not keep women out of conscription so men alone could get the privilege of being conscripted. It not a privilege. A better claim is that society pick which ever demographic is most expendable and force them to pick up arms during major conflicts. Young men, especially men of color, is consistently seen as expendable. It is racism, sexism, ageism, and a bunch more isms, and part of it favor women over young men.
During world war 2 almost all nations involved used prison population for conscription purposes. It is the most obvious place to find a lot of expendable people.
Voluntary military service still carries with it that culture and non-expendable people tend to not be near the front line.
Yes, but so what? The gender requirement on front-line service has never been limited to conscription.
>It not a privilege.
This is a well-worn argument. When women wanted to vote and join the workplace, they also got told that these things were terrible burdens that they ought to be glad not to have to bear.
Clearly, there are women who do want to join the military, just as there have always been men who want to join the military.
In a modern context, in the US and Europe, the question is not about whether women should be forced to serve in the military against their will, but whether they should have the same right to volunteer for service as men, and the same range of opportunities subsequently.
Until recently, the men in charge thought that they should not.
Not men as a group. Rich old men thought that poor young men, disproportionately African Americans, should be forced into the military.
In modern context we still have remnant views that military is a punishment. Popular culture often use the trope that troublesome boys who don't behave get sent to military school so the boy can redeem themselves in the eyes of society. The concept of military service as a punishment directed at young men is still well alive. One never see the idea of sending misbehaving girls to military school.
In Europe most nation still have conscription. The question has been whether women should be forced to serve in the military against their will. To pick a few examples, both Sweden and Norway think they should, and thus we have conscription there for both genders. As the advertisements says, everyone has equal responsibility to server their nation. The word "responsibility" is used here to make the conscription sound nicer but it no less forced.
Of course it was men as a group. You only have to go back a few decades to get to a time when the majority of men, across social classes, found the idea of women serving in the military ridiculous.
I still don't see how the rest of your comment is relevant to this discussion. Again, the gender requirement was not specific to conscription.
>One never see the idea of sending misbehaving girls to military school.
Because girls couldn't join the military!
Young poor men has always been at the bottom of the social ladder.
As you must be aware, I didn't suggest that this is the case.
I simply said that men chose to exclude women from military service.
The people who got excluded from military conscription were women, rich men and men with influence.
What you're saying is correct, it's just completely irrelevant.
Poor men, having no influence or power gets conscripted against their will. Women, being in the middle, are exempted from conscription but can't volunteer. Rich men, being at the top of influence and power, was exempted from conscription and also had the choice to volunteer (usually for officer or other high ranking positions).
No one denies that the small percent that makes up rich men have more influence and power with more freedom to choose during conscription. Men as a group however is both the poor and the rich. If we only look at the top then we ignore an already marginalized and vulnerable part of the population. Those at the bottom.
This is just a wrong analysis. Women didn't get our of conscription as a result of their power and influence. They were exempted from military service because almost all men, across all classes, were opposed to women serving in the military.
And you are wrong that almost all men, across all classes, were opposed to women serving in the military. Armies that are created by rich men at the top looks very different to those created by lower classes, such as resistance movements in Europe during world war 2.
Absolutely had no clue what to go into and they didn't help much. Perhaps they were at a greater disadvantage because the internet revolution was about to hit.
Girls don't know that there's such a thing as programming or Computer Science degrees?
How many girls and women fall into each category?
Now that "tech" is so important and lucrative I'm sure this is changing to some extent, but this is a recent trend that's probably 5 years old at most. Tech wasn't viewed the same as it was now in 2012-2014 and felt like a much more risky and inaccessible field. Now it looks a lot more like any other high paying corporate job.
The Dot Net bubble in the 90s was arguably the biggest news story of the decade. Everyone knew there was tons of money to be had in tech, and stories of people landing jobs at startups after learning a little bit of HTML.
I don't hear this anymore from the grown-up-on-iPad generation.
I'm pretty sure most of the boys said that too.
We look to outcome equality to gain some kind of insight into this.