http://www.cpreview.org/blog/2021/6/why-are-we-failing-our-s...

Are they harder to teach? Possibly, even probably.

Does that mean we should just resign ourselves to mediocrity in teaching them based off of sexist stereotyping? Hard no.

I suspect that getting more men involved with elementary school teaching would help ease this issue because you'd provide more role models for young boys in elementary school. At the school I went to, there was only one male teacher for all of pre-kindergarten through 6th grade. That absence of male role models can't be a good thing.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/clr

That's interesting, I always kind of assumed it was for bored housewives, because in my direct experience most of my women teachers were married to doctors & lawyers, and it seemed like they were able to pursue a career in teaching because it didn't matter that the job paid next to nothing because they had a husband with significantly more income.

Wow, so this is exactly what people are talking about when they say check your privilege. Do you expect children to seek out a father figure in their community and have the presences of mind to consider their options and pick a good one? I grew up in a pretty privileged community and know multiple guys who had no significant father figure, or (probably worse)a very unhealthy one. As Ive gotten older I’ve come to appreciate how unless your parents are both complete rockstar geniuses, it really helps to have a variety of both father and mother figures in your life to give you better context for how to mature and succeed in life.

> but we did not have this problem.

Yeah, I guess when the patriarchal aristocracy was virtually the only group getting advanced degrees we didn't have this problem. lol. Nevermind that society was extremely geared toward getting and staying married and was very judgemental about women who chose not to have kids and out of wedlock children in times gone by. There’s a reason we celebrate people like Marie Curie and Grace Hopper, they stood against social expectations and showed the male-dominated world what women were capable of.

>it really helps to have a variety of both father and mother figures in your life to give you better context for how to mature and succeed in life.

Isn't that exactly what the GP is saying, and relates to the question they are asking? We have more options than just school for male role models, so why would a lack of male role models in just school be the problem?

>I grew up in a pretty privileged community and know multiple guys who had no significant father figure, or (probably worse)a very unhealthy one.

And here is the real crux of it all. The argument that it doesn't matter where the role model is coming from, as long as the children have one. Yet one can argue in recent years, the family unit has been breaking down. Not just in the form of broken homes and divorces causing fathers to lose touch with their kids, but also expecting society and education to raise kids despite the severe lack in father figures (read: boy-positive male teachers).

>Showed the male-dominated world what women were capable of.

As an aside, where men were dominating the top, they were also dominating the bottom. And they still are dominating both the top and the bottom. The whole "patriarchy" thing isn't as rose-colored for men as people like to believe it is, and such statements contribute to the current narrative which leaves the boys described in the article on the wayside.

I do not think child participates in "patriarchal aristocracy", I only say that me and many other people I know have found other role model than biological father even without having male teacher. I do not know why there is pertinence on children out of wedlock, we mostly still see it as bad but I think you have already some anger on this subject and it has no relation here. Are you making statements that government school must provide male role model so women can have children without marriage and those children have role model? In loco parentis is not the intended normal course for all children to such an extent.

And this is exactly why I said you are acting privileged, most of my friends have no religion and I dont even know anyone who was in the scouts. Going to a friend's house wasnt easy, male teachers absolutely helped, in a big way. I'm glad that worked for those guys, but that's hardly universal. Not everyone has a community to support them.

>I think we must limit degree to which government employee acts as role model for child.

Care to elaborate as to why you think that? I have the diametrically opposite opinion. Looking at this data, society is currently failing boys, I think that providing more role models is a step in the right direction. If the government doesnt do it for those less fortunate boys, who will?

>I do not know why there is pertinence on children out of wedlock, we mostly still see it as bad but I think you have already some anger on this subject and it has no relation here.

What? I have anger on this subject? nah. Please don't make assumptions about how others feel, its pretty rude and destructive. We're talking about societal trends of boys having less father figures, that absolutely has relavence here. I also find your presumption of seeing single mothers as bad as pretty... archaic. Live and let live.

> I do not think child participates in "patriarchal aristocracy

I'm sorry, I guess I was clear enough, my point was directed at:

>>>For a long time teacher was only a job for young unwed women, but we did not have this problem with boys

When being a teacher was only a job for young unmarried women and we weren't having this problem with boys, elite academics absolutely was the realm of the patriarchal aristocracy. To be very clear, I'm positing that we didnt have this problem because academics used to be sexist and classist. Times change, society changes and government needs to adapt.

And yet not long ago: "In fact, more women as a whole now graduate from college than men ... This is a great accomplishment—not just for one sport or one college or even just for women but for America. And this is what Title IX is all about." President Barack Obama.

It goes back to kindergarten. We have known for over a decade that this occurs. And yet we get these fake baffled faces. Education is currently actively hostile towards boys and young men. Just imagine how fraught trying to date would be if you were a young man in a university now and had heterosexual leanings.

And yet that wage gap "factoid" continues to be chanted at every turn.

> Just imagine how fraught trying to date would be if you were a young man in a university now and had heterosexual leanings.

What? THAT's why the educational system is actively hostile towards boys and young men? Because non-consensual sex is less acceptable than it was 20 years ago?

I know young men in college, and things are fine. People drink a little less, talk a little more, are more careful about sex. Everyone still dates, and has sex, and has a good time.

And I've seen what happens to rape victims, and it is awful. No one should have to experience that. If the tradeoff is people communicating more and drinking less in exchange for fewer campus rapes, I'm all for it.

If you didn't "believe," actual fistfights occurred. The accuser would later change her story, and managed to fabricate other things as time went on, including frankly supernatural events.

A pointing finger is all that is required these days. And perhaps you should do a bit more reading on some current travesties of justice that have occurred on campuses as of late.

Everyone knows it's overkill, but nobody wants to be the exception that proves the rule.

Not sure what you mean:

- What does the difficulty of dating have to do with the education system?

- My understanding is that the abundance of dating apps should have made dating significantly easier nowadays than in the past. Is that not the case?

- Why is sexuality relevant for this point? The article is primarily focused on gender

If anything my single friends biggest complaint is that apps are the defacto way of dating, even before the pandemic. Your options were basically apps, mutual introduction, or bars. Even bars I would say were slowing down, at least amongst my age group, because everyone was so busy with work, or just general life stuff.

Also you are dating yourself with that last sentence.

> Also you are dating yourself with that last sentence.

Nice pun but no, I am typical college age. I dont see how it's "dating myself" to not want to marry somebody in 7-10 years who hooks up a lot now.

Out of curiosity what would you define as "a lot"?

Here's a little unsolicited advice from one older man to a younger one, take it or leave it: As you age, you will find older women more attractive, and younger women less attractive. I dunno why that is; maybe this is because older women no longer resemble your mother (because she's aged as well), and younger women start to resemble your own children (who you shouldn't be attracted to). But I've found it to be true. If you have a relationship with the same woman over a long period of time (long meaning decades), you'll find yourself attracted to her at any age, and increasingly over the years. You'll see, even as her looks fade (and they will, just as yours will) you will still find her more attractive than when she was ostensibly "in her prime".

Most people have ~5-8 sexual partners, so that’s not that likely.

As far as what I think is a lot, if I’m seeing someone who slept around a lot, if they did it because they enjoy sex and were having healthy sexual relationships, I really don’t care about the number. If anything, the women who have more experience are more open and confident.

I guess the last time I thought “man maybe that’s getting to be a high number”, a friend of mine crossed the 50-partner mark. Sooo, I suppose that’s the general zone of “a lot”. But I don’t ascribe any moral or character issues to that number.

Maybe! Though if the 25-year-old women don't want to get married, and the 30-year-old women are just starting to think about it, the primary options for guys will be the 35-year-olds.

Here's the long Eurostat link (use the Sex dropdown to look at the different sexes):

https://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?query=BOOKM...

Though the relatively large jump between 2018 and 2019 seems odd, I assume there's some additional factor(s) I'm unaware of affecting the totals.

It is always the same story and nothing seems to change.

An example from Daniel Kahneman's Noise (I'm paraphrasing) - When university faculty was told of their bias in marking from hunger/mood/normal daily human sways, why didn't the first person marking it write the grade on the back so the second couldn't see it until the end: They responded that they used to do it that way, but it caused arguments.

There are lots of book about this. E.g.: https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Boys-Surprising-Problems-Educ...

Motivation...just is. It is also highly changeable.

The same student might enter a course with a highly intrinsic motivation for a topic, slide towards a more extrinsic motivation as a test or exam approaches, and then migrates back to intrinsic if a well thought out project is given.

Course and pedagogy design are highly influential on the types of motivation as are social and emotional factors. Self-regulation of emotion is definitely an area of development and (maturity) but there is no right, the potential for multiple different forms of motivation exists in everyone.

I'm talking about empirical research about motivation rather than platitudes though. It would be wonderful if all of my students were motivated to learn the subject matter I teach, believe me. However, it is more useful to understand their motivation and engage with it. That can include identifying ways to link what would motivate them to learn a subject matter (personal interests) to the class material.

Favor shouldn't really enter the equation when linking motivation and education.

c.f.: https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/theory/

It has absolutely nothing to do with doctoral degrees. Why even bring it up?

0.00000001% can be significant so long as the sample size be large enough.

It simply means it's unlikely that the numbers are caused by a statistical fluke and expected to show up again in a reproductive attempt.

Of course significant numbers are very often not reproduced, both due to that the publishing industry selects upon creating this result and because the mathematical principles that compute significance are simply abused, both willfully, and due to lack of understanding of the assumptions behind it.

Because honestly; I feel this secondary meaning is a buzzword transferred from the first meaning which actually has meaning, but in the secondary case it's simply used to use an expensive word without understanding it.

Edit: Another example is significant digits. Significant digits is a much older concept than significance in statistics, and maps much better to the original meaning of significance. Basically significant things are things you can't ignore when you do your analysis.

As for what it means: "important and deserving of attention; of consequence" (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/significant)

Where did this come from? When did the discussion apparently become about this?

Edit: For the sake of clarity, my comment was tongue-in-cheek as it's the justification I repeatedly see whenever gender imbalance/inequality is mentioned on HN. I think it's patently ridiculous to say that one gender is for some reason more interested in learning than another.

Ideally we would have a Germany-like system that better guides training for these populations and professions to help create a more robust working class.

If the books are about robots and the manual task is taking care of kids you'd draw the opposite conclusion.

Building mechanized and static systems with a specialized subset of tools has been found to be more of interest by men across cultures. Who knows if this is due to natural selection.

The main reason universities see more women than men is that universities focuses more on subjects women likes than men likes. If universities removed most social science courses you'd see mostly men in higher education.

The reason you see people complain about these things here is that they reverse the complaints about men dominating engineering. It wouldn't be right if people only complained about men dominating engineering, so to even that out people also complain when women dominate other subjects.

You see the same just-so storytelling when it's observed that women achieve more chemistry doctorates than they do physics doctorates. "But women are interested in medical careers". A chemistry PhD is not part of the ordinary path towards getting a medical degree. Or with math: "women are interested in being teachers, so they get math degrees". Not PhD's, they don't.

Your theory that women are held back by bias would require that every developed country coordinated their biases so they map the same by field. That doesn't make sense, there is no way I'll believe that is true unless some really extreme evidence is provided. How else would you explain that the gender ratio for these subjects in Russia is very close to the same as in USA? It isn't like they share culture etc. There are so many fields, why would biology have the most women, then chemistry, then civil, then mechanical etc? It is too much of a coincidence.

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

1. Tech in the US is super lucrative and you can't cherry-pick it--women's salaries increase by 77% if they switch to tech here. This is true across the board: in the bottom 13 of your linked Index (sorted by % Difference of Women in Workforce and Women in Tech) women get a 29% salary increase, whereas in the top 13 the increase is 51%. This probably indicates a more parsimonious explanation: despite being more hostile to women, tech in these countries is more lucrative.

2. More broadly though, it doesn't pass a simple smoke test. Just in the top 13, how are Iceland, Ireland, and Canada right next to Romania, Turkey, and Mexico? There's a sincere lack of correlation.

This chart represents this. It extracts the "T" from the rest of STEM.

All fields were dominated by men 80 years ago and were extremely hostile to women. Since some fields attracted women and others didn't, if that was just random chance then you'd expect different cultures to see women take interest in different fields, but that didn't happen. Instead this evolved similarly all over the world.

So to me your explanation looks extremely weak. You can believe in that, but you wont convince me on this, there is just too much data in my favor. Of course the future could prove me wrong and I am open to that, but I'd argue that the data we have today strongly supports my stance.

Note, I am not saying that we should discourage women who want to enter these fields. That serves absolutely no purpose.

They certainly shared patriarchy which has been around a lot longer than the cold war. You haven't provided much in the way of numbers being 'the same' but the comparison would also be skewed by these countries' significantly different gender ratios, on top of many other factors.

You don’t think evolution plays a role in behavior?

Seen as another example of Sexism in Higher Education

Interesting how things change

So it's fascinating that there are issues faced by this population that aren't moving despite everything being aligned to just make them go away and that you have to fight for them like they were minority issues. And what's crazy is that for these issues the population you need to convince that these issues are important are white men!

Specifically for gender representation in nursing and teaching there's three main barriers to have to be broken down to get people to care about them.

1. That the factors that are keeping men out of teaching and nursing are internal -- lack of motivation or ability, rather than external factors like discrimination or access to education.

2. That nursing and teaching are "low status" careers so it doesn't matter if there's a gender gap because nobody is really clamoring to be one.

3. That nursing and teaching are "women's work," which is especially funny since teaching used to be male dominated.

Any evidence for this? To me it seems like people care much more about homeless women even though most homeless are men, they care more about womens suicides even though men kill themselves more, they care more about when women get murdered even though men get murdered more etc.

People care more about white people than black people, yes. People care more about cis than trans, yes. But I have seen no evidence at all that people care more about men than women.

The people who talk about female suicides are the ones who argue that women should go back to traditional home. They are hardly feminists and suicides are not much topic related to women.

Are you just making that up? Have you seen any homeless shelters exclusively serving men? There are plenty for women. Or do you just assume that when people say "homeless" they mean a man since most homeless women have already gotten help and therefore isn't homeless? I haven't seen a single article arguing that we should prioritize male homelessness, but plenty that we should prioritize female homelessness.

https://www.womenshelters.org/cit/ca-san_francisco

This is such a lie, From mental Health, to Domestic Abuse, to Substance abuse, there is almost zero funding, or support for programs targeting men; race not withstanding.

Try opening a Domestic Violence Shelter for men and see what happens, as a man try going to a domestic violence shelter for aid and see what happens

It is "Suck it up and be a man" that is societal response and has been for decades. This is why male suicide is through the roof.

>>Specifically for gender representation in nursing and teaching there's three main barriers

While some of those are true, there is also a societal narrative that men are abusers, that men can not be trusted with children. Be a single dad and take your child to the park and see the looks from others there, in some cases maybe even has the cops called on you...

This extends to teaching and nursing as well. This is related to number 3, but you paint it has a gender norms issue, and while that is some of it, that issue is far more complex then you are leading on.

Carmack was recently highlighted for saying it’s easier to educate a doer than motivate the educated.

Frankly that almost feels like a nice of way of saying less educated have questionable negotiating skills.

I can be busy collecting fractions of cents or lazy and earn more in an office doing data entry, not unstopping toilets.

History has shown us a whole lot of those “get er done” programmers and projects just made fragile messes we had to babysit later.

If we’re busy “doing” we aren’t negotiating social progress. The goal isn’t perfect mind control, just to persuade folks to move along.

This is a re-balance, and honestly employers need to be look at their positions that traditional they want a degree for, middle management, some IT roles, and other "information worker" roles to take a hard look if those positions really do need a degree. I suspect no...

The societal pressure placed on men to earn enough to be a provider or at least earn more than their partners causes men to assign a higher weight to ROI when evaluating pursuing higher education.

Anecdata: I have no degree, my company will pay for me to get anything up to the PhD level - I have little interest in this because I don't see it increasing my earning potential vs investing the same amount of time in progressing my career or looking for a new job.

EDIT: I have a second conjecture too now that I think of it - increased levels of education and career progression for women puts a sort of "floor" on whether getting an education is worth it all for some men since even after investing the effort they're at or below the income levels of their potential partners. I don't know enough about the effect income disparity has on partner selection to put much stock in this but maybe it's a thing?

It's biological to some degree. Female sexual selection prefers status, so any sort of signaling of status in society will encourage competition and put pressure to select for the ability to signal said traits. Sure it's 'society' that makes status == money, but I think any society that uses money will defer to that.

Meanwhile essentially all education metrics are worse for boys than for girls, all the way through university and the gap keeps getting worse. At some point the US is going to have to start having a national discussion about it, or the consequences will get a lot more dire (and it's already quite bad).

And it weirds me out that everything people truly value: community, love, relationships, romance, heritage, adventure, friends, family... none of these factor in. Just money and power; which are ultimately just more responsibilities if you aren't selfish.

In Bulgaria education is free and there are very competitive and selective free high schools that teach languages. When I was there, one high school had a gender quota. The boys admitted needed more than a letter grade less (out of 5) to get into the high school. Another high school had no gender quota and it was 90% girls. Because of the high % of girls in the second school, boys had a very strong additional incentive to be admitted there throughout the years.

Everytime an issue is brought up.. people just completely ridicule the person bringing up the issue.

There is a way around that, which is smuggling menminist issues in cultural devices that result in menminism but don't advocate for it. One example would be the precepts of organized religion which often given certain privileges to men, but on the basis of an authority less pitiful than "the guy from Ms. Doubtfire seems really sad, we should help him." That attitude gets people mocked on Twitter.

If I had to predict where menminism will go in the next 100 years, I would expect someone to invent a way to motivate it on anti-pitiful non-victimized grounds. Then it will start gaining traction in modern culture.

The peace movement, the origins of labor organization... almost every popular movement in US history has been conducted from the perspective of class solidarity, endurance under difficult conditions, and an intent to fight to change something that forces outside the movement didn't want changed.

How they're going to make that work for menminism is beyond me, but we're living in the time before the talking points seem obvious. When someone figures out what they are, then everyone will start repeating them until we all have them memorized. That's the way things go.

Their goal was to keep going long enough to make other people care, not despite but because of the forces deployed against them. Not by enduring oppression long enough that their oppressors got tired of fire hosing them; but long enough to awaken the conscience of people far away.

That does take a lot of strength and endurance, I'm not suggesting otherwise, but one can be strong and still be greatly outmatched and in a position of relative weakness.

However it is very insightful to notice that females are only 25% in engineering, and 76% in public administration. Those are the worst imbalances, but there are others almost as bad. There is a lot of work to do in getting real balance.

Of course, all the work will go to fixing the "females are only 25% in engineering," and whatever effort is spent fixing "females are...76% in public administration" will round down to zero.

> There are over 276,986 plumbers currently employed in the United States.

> 5.1% of all plumbers are women, while only 91.1% are men.

Women already have 5x as many engineers as they do plumbers. Maybe we should start concentrating on other sectors critical to modern society. I've never heard anyone complaining about this massive, massive disparity. I can only conclude that we care about women being in some professions, but not others, so it's not really about general parity. It's selectively targeted parity. There are many industries with numbers like this, not just plumbing.

https://www.zippia.com/plumber-jobs/demographics/

That we or others are not targeting the plumbing industry doesn't mean no one cares about that issue. Academics are very loud, and major media loves to amplify what we are saying and doing. I don't think plumbers and the plumbing industry enjoy the same status in American society.

But it's probably an issue that plumbers and the plumbing industry should champion first rather than outsiders. With 5% female representation, there might not be a critical mass of women in that industry to start a movement for change, it will probably be up to male plumbers to see any effort get off the ground, so I am curious what their general feeling is. My female colleagues are the most motivated to solve this issue, as they are invested personally to see that future generations of women have an easier time in our industry. They host conferences and write papers about the issues most important to women in our field, and they derive solidarity and purpose from this comradery that motivates them. That kind of dynamic probably is harder to recreate in industries with 5% female participation.

We can all name famous engineers, not sure I could name a single famous public administrator...

I can think of several female politicians with a doctorate in subjects like public administration.

That's assuming a fixed pie. If you push more women into the PhD level (or discourage men), then you could perhaps fix the engineering disparity while keeping the others. An overall disparity that favors women will probably not be perceived as much of a problem.

> And it’s no particular surprise that people find engineering more interesting to talk about.

Why? Engineering is in fact often incredibly boring to most people, and I would be very surprised if people spend more time talking about it than public policy.

Sure. But the broader professional job market is approximately zero-sum: most people above the working class have exactly one job, so addressing a gender disparity in one segment should functionally address disparities in other segments, no?

> Why? Engineering is in fact often incredibly boring to most people, and I would be very surprised if people spend more time talking about it than public policy.

Sorry, this was unclear: I meant that the public talks more about getting people into engineering fields than into public administration, since the former is seen as a reliable path to the middle class. Engineering itself is boring; the public policy around the engineering workforce is of exceptional interest to a lot of people.

Right now I have no idea. I don't think there is a genetic reason for females to not become engineers, but I haven't studied it so I have to remain neutral on the question.

Whether this is cultural or biological is questionable, but given the natural duties of the common sexes (male/female)... it's definitely not unfeasible that the critic with options (and children) would multi-task, while the performer would be more focused on a single task.

What instead should be the case, IMHO, is two fold:

- at each milestone level (school, college, hiring, promotions etc...) , we should aim to be within a certain small percentage of the previous milestone. E.g if a class in college starts with 20% Indian women, then it should ideally graduate with ~20% Indian women. The next milestones after that (hiring, promotion) should ideally be reflective of that to some degree.

- we should analyze the percentage of people entering fields of education, and see how that represents similar demographic locally, and at the state and federal levels. Using that data we should see why certain demographics are skewed towards and against those fields. Using that we should see if there's any systemic issues keeping them away, and try and balance society accordingly.

So you want to make college classes easier for certain groups so that they don't drop out?

I personally believe that everyone should have an equal opportunity... But an equal outcome inherently involves being unfair and disadvantaging a certain group for the advantage for another.

We should be aiming for close to equal results, and trying to understand why we aren't getting those.

I never said how one should achieve equal results on both the input and output. I just said that's the more realistic goal. I even say that it's not going to be exact.

The point is to analyze, and come up with well formed opinions based on data. If a certain demographic is dropping out at a higher rate, maybe it's worth understanding why?

Are they simply not as good? Do they have societal pressures from their homes? Do they face harassment from other majority demographics? Do they have other factors like lack of health support?

There's many factors that play into it. We need the data to understand the discrepancy, and then to start understanding why that discrepancy exists.

The point is "what adversities are preventing this demographic (not individual) from getting the success that other demographics have in this program"

Support should absolutely be given uniformly to all students, but how can you recognize what new forms of support need to exist till you start analyzing things?

You're also focusing on the lowering of the bar of passing to make people pass.

It's not about lowering standards. I'm not sure why people go there, other than the implicit belief that the people who couldn't meet the bar were all somehow less than

It's instead about providing equal footing to be able to reach for that bar. Some people still won't make it. But at least their footing isn't being actively eroded from under them.

Think about family support as just one example. Some people are held back because they need to look after children (their own or others). Providing subsidized daycare helps them out without lowering the standard for anyone.

What about mental health? Someone's just moved away from their family and support group. They're in a class with local people. Their temporary depression is holding them back and it snowballs. Providing student counseling, or creating communities would help them and in turn help others. Again, not lowering the standard.

Now let's talk about discrimination. What if you have a professor with an implicit bias? They are giving certain demographics a harder time. Seeing that they have a much lower rate of passing among those demographics, versus similar programs in other schools, might help identify the program. Again, it hasn't lowered the standard. It's just given everyone equal footing.

What's wrong in letting the society balance itself?

Would women have the right to vote if someone didn't say "hey this demographic here is not being represented". Would Black people in America be free?

Society needs to self reflect and introspect before it can balance. Numbers are a means to achieving that introspection.

If the imbalance is the result of different innate preferences (and there’s a great deal of evidence it is) then working against nature is a waste of time and money!

How about letting people live their lives the way they want to instead of trying to artificially change the society?

You can also see that the gender disparities in academia mirror the gender disparities in their related industries. e.g. more men get PhDs in tech and work in tech, but more women get PhDs in education and work in education. So is it academia that is the biased institution, or is it the related industry? Or are they creating those conditions by biasing who they teach? You can't really say given the statistics here, and you certainly can't use these statistics to support the claim that academia is biased against men! There's nothing here to draw a conclusion that strong.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-nations-fare-...

She also taught me everything I know about home remodeling. Together, she and I basically gutted her home and remodeled it, including dealing with sagging outer walls, poor plumbing installation, electrical wiring, cabinetry, hanging doors/windows.

Yet, she never managed to get a job in the field. In the 90s, people just didn't hire women to do these kinds of things.

So are these departments particularly hostile to women, or are women less interested in pursuing these subjects? If so -- in either case, actually -- why might that be?

On the other side my wife always say, that if she would have job like I have she would shoot herself. It looks like the most boring thing on earth. And you always have all these issues and bugs to fix. Nothing ever works as expected…

She also never really wants to tinker with stuff. When something is broken, she just wants it fixed.

Also from what I’ve read, the most ‘equal’ countries in the world are nowhere near 50/50 distribution.

So while we should fight all discrimination and try to give access to education to everyone. I think we should also respect, that people have different interests and don’t pressure them to pursue career they don’t really want. Just so we have 50/50 distribution that ideal world should have.

Can we use the same reasoning to explain why more women earn degrees than men? Men are not interested in education? If I were a woman, I'd tell you about how my husband thinks reading books is the most boring thing ever and just want to watch sports on tv. :)

We shouldn't pressure them to pursue higher education. If men are happy being uneducated working menial jobs, we should let them while highly educated women serve leading roles in society.

I really want to hear the people in the comments making claims that women just aren't interested in tech and that boys are being failed by the education system answer this.

This is not my experience. I know several women that dropped out of the tech industry because of discrimination.

No matter how much I tried to get my daughter into "boy stuff", she would just want the pink pretty things, even from a very young age.

Growing up she spent most of her time with her male cousins, so it's not like she wasn't exposed to lots of boy's toys.

Not that I mind get being into girly things... In fact it is pretty awesome :)

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12512-women-may-be-ha...

I was just speaking from a parent who also thought it was cultural that girls preferred pink sparkly things, but then experienced parenthood and it's clear as day they do.

I'm sure there are lots of girls who don't care for pink...but so what if the majority do?

This has always been the case. Just as men are less likely to be nurses/grade school teachers, they don't play to each sex's strengths. And that's ok

It can often be a surprising exercise to look at the history of fields that are supposed to play to "natural" gender strengths and examine how they've evolved over time.

> As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was "just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it's ready when you need it... Women are 'naturals' at computer programming." James Adams, the director of education for the Association for Computing Machinery, agreed: "I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there's as much opportunity for a woman."

Swap out some of the specifics, and the general tone of argument hasn't changed much since back then. It's just that we've now decided to substitute in other "obvious" conclusions about who is suited for which jobs.

I have no doubt that Grace Hopper turned out to be a great programmer and made many great contributions to the field, but it turns out she was in the army, and she was ordered to go work on a computing effort, it wasn't her choice:

"In 1944, Lt. Grace Hopper was ordered to report to Harvard University to work on the Mark I, the behemoth digital computer that had been conceived by Harvard's Howard"

The idea that there may be some natural differences in preferences (things that interest you the most) between men and women is controversial for some reason, but this idea shouldn't be seen as sexist.

If it turns out that men really are more drawn to engineering (on average, this is obviously not true for everyone) because of some underlying biological development factors, shouldn't we try to understand why? Being more drawn to engineering doesn't mean you're automatically better at it. It just means you're probably more likely to go into the field and more likely to spend long hours studying it.

Right now the politically correct thing to do is to just reject that hypothesis and insist that all of these differences have to be nurture. I mean, why spend precious capital studying these things when we've already decided what is the correct answer, right?

To be clear, Dr. Grace Hopper is not the only woman who worked on computers. This was a general field post-WW2 that women were encouraged to go into because they were seen as natural fits, even as men started to come home from the war. It was only after computing started to become more "respectable" that it started to shift into a more male-dominated industry.

There may well be natural differences between sexes in preferences (either biological or social), but if your arguments about how those differences are "obvious" aren't actually predictive, and if historically those exact same arguments have been used almost verbatim to explain trends that skewed in the exact opposite direction -- then at that point I think you're talking about a pseudoscience.

You want to research sex difference? Well, part of examining a hypothesis is looking at whether it actually holds true and is useful as a predictive tool. If you balk at the idea of questioning whether the trends you're trying to explain are actually universal or whether they're cultural, then that you're not really doing science.

I'm happy for all the women who choose to go into STEM, who enjoy doing that work, and who succeed. I still think that it's problematic to explain away the huge gender imbalances in STEM fields based on the idea that it's all because of oppression or social norms.

Consider the medical field. Those used to be very much male-dominated, but nowadays, there are more women graduating out of med school than men, and AFAIK, under a certain age, most young doctors are female. Women are also going into law at a higher rate than they are in CS. Law has a reputation for being macho and toxic as hell, but that's not stopping women from entering the field. Why do we blame the gender imbalance in CS purely on oppression, discrimination or social norms?

As far as there being more women in STEM during WWII than there are now, and that disproving the idea that there could be natural differences in preferences (again, on average, this is not absolute), and that somehow disproving the idea of sex differences in preferences... Many young men were sent to war during WWII and women were given extra incentives to enter the field. It wasn't exactly a situation where people were just choosing things based on their own free will. After WWII, you had a situation where a few million young men had died, and the women who were now working in those fields kept doing so.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-01624-7

> Consider the medical field. Those used to be very much male-dominated, but nowadays, there are more women graduating out of med school than men, and AFAIK, under a certain age, most young doctors are female. Women are also going into law at a higher rate than they are in CS.

To look at multiple fields that used the exact same statistics and arguments to justify their gender gaps, and that have since been proven wrong, and to argue that CS/STEM is the one field where that's never going to happen -- is just a wild leap in logic to me.

There is, of course, some decent research on infant preferences. How that relates to abstract code is an exercise left to the reader. But it should give you some pause that after the doctors pointed at infant preferences and said, "that's why there aren't women doctors", and after the lawyers pointed at infant preferences and said, "that's why women don't want to be in high-stress environments", and after both of those fields were proven wrong, you're now using practically the same arguments verbatim and claiming that this time the link is real and not just projection.

----

Secondly though, I want to talk about the overall context of the conversation we're having. The idea that sex differences contribute (both socially and biologically) to different experiences and development is not what this debate is about. The criticism of of biological explanations for gender gaps is not a denial of biology, it is an assertion that biology on its own is not sufficient to explain current gaps.

So I want to push back on the inevitable claim that always comes up in these threads that this is a fight over whether biology is real or whether sex can possibly have an impact on preferences. If that's what the claim was, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation; biological differences between sexes is a completely uncontroversial idea even in the majority of feminist circles. Equality activists are not against looking at biology as part of their research into gender gaps.

What proponents of biological want in practice is not acknowledgement that biological differences exist, but a denial that other social differences exist. Look over this thread; what are the actual arguments that are being made?

> Just as men are less likely to be nurses/grade school teachers, they don't play to each sex's strengths. And that's ok

> Politics are preventing us, as a species, from properly understanding ourselves.

> There is everything about nursing that is gender specific. Men are interested in things, women are interested in people

> Unfortunately HR departments just look at the employment statistics and decide that the numbers need to be 50/50, for some reason

The overwhelming sentiment I see every time I get into one of these conversations isn't "biological differences exist", it's "gender gaps are fine because biology exists, and we shouldn't look into the social aspects because biology is a good enough explanation."

Maybe you're not in that camp. If not, then I apologize, I don't mean to just lump you in with other commenters. But I think it's short-sighted to look at fields that by your own admittance have seen large demographic shifts because of social changes, and to argue that the people suggesting that Computer Science might have similar problems are being unreasonable or denying that sex exists.

If anything the situation is the opposite; we know, very observably, that culture shapes interest during early development. If we can have a conversation about equity while acknowledging that sex exists and has physical effects on people, we also should be able to acknowledge that culture exists without people immediately bristling and complaining about "politics".

> and it isn't just a big calculator

I'm not sure you've thought this argument through.

Are you suggesting that women are naturally better-suited to mathematics and theoretical engineering then men are? You think that the male shift in CS was because the field became less theoretical, and men realized that the field wasn't only offering analytic/abstract challenges?

I'd love if in these types of debates we could all standardize on what the inherent biological differences are that we're talking about, but it always seems to me like proponents have a hard time doing that. The theories fluidly evolve, flip around, and transform to meet every example and statistic, their only constant being the belief that cultural solutions to how fields are presented, taught, and managed should be off the table. Hence the pseudoscience concerns I have above.

----

The point I brought up in my original comment was that all of these arguments:

- that women don't like analytic/abstract thinking

- that women don't like practical/applied thinking jobs

- that women prefer fuzzy-creative tasks instead of hard-creative tasks

- that women care about people more than concepts

- that women prefer social jobs and men prefer isolated work

- that women naturally avoid careers with high amounts of conflict like upper management positions

they're all brought up by their proponents as if they're obvious conclusions, despite the fact that they're often mutually exclusive claims, and despite the fact that even when they do contradict each other they still all use the exact same evidence and justifications as "proof" for their obvious-ness. Most of these theories aren't the result of real scientific research, they're rationalizations for current outcomes that start from a position that the outcomes necessarily must have a biological explanation.

It's hard for me to have a lot of respect for that. And these people want to claim that the people who are actually testing social theories about gender gaps are the unscientific ones. Their definition of the "scientific" way to approach gender is to just assume everything is biological and to never question the status quo.

> Are you suggesting that women are naturally better-suited to mathematics and theoretical engineering then men are?

I have thought it through, but thanks for your concern. Mathematics is close to gender parity, engineering is not. When computer science shifted from being closer to math to being closer to engineering you saw the population attending shift to match engineering rather than math ratios. It is that simple, and it matches observed data perfectly with how CS curve went upwards matching the curve for math but in the late 80's it took a quick nose dive and followed the curve for engineering ever since.

I am not sure why you bring up suitability to study a field though, nowhere did I say that men are better at anything than women and vice versa. People study what they find interesting, not necessarily what they are good at.

But you are right, we know that women are more willing to study the purer more theoretical classes over the engineering versions. I don't see how that would contradict anything.

Where are you getting this data from? Mathematics has a pretty noticeable gender gap, it's not at all close to parity.

Besides, if your theory is correct, we shouldn't see parity. We should see women dominate the field, the same way that they dominated early computing. Even in a world with an actual 50/50 split in mathematics (which again, is not the current world), your theory still doesn't explain why women were over-represented in early computing, even after WW2 when men had returned home.

----

Let's make some other predictions based on your theory while we're at it.

If what you're saying is correct and women are primed to find theoretical fields more interesting than men do, we might expect to see a higher proportion of women in research positions for hospitals than in practical positions like nursing, and similarly we might expect to see a higher proportion of men in practical medical fields like nursing and direct care.

Do we see that? No.

If your theory is correct and women are inherently more interested in theoretical fields, we should expect to see a gender inbalance in teaching fields based on education levels and practicality of subject. So for example, we should expect to see more men teaching lower-level mathematics and intro programming where their work has a direct impact on people's day-to-day life, and more women teaching higher-level mathematics and abstract programming courses in higher education settings.

Do we see that? No.

You've globbed onto an explanation based on one statistic because it might explain that statistic. You haven't formed a widely applicable explanation that can be used across the board to explain the different statistics that we see throughout multiple fields, or that can be used to predict what statistics we will see in the future.

That is a lie, they were never over-represented in computer science. It is based on a small uptick in the 80's, math made an uptick at the same time and is now close to parity while computer science didn't follow the math curve.

There where a lot of women working on the first computers since at the time most computers were women and they had to hand off their work, but the field computer science was always male.

> Where are you getting this data from? Mathematics has a pretty noticeable gender gap, it's not at all close to parity.

Are you arguing without even knowing about the data?

You can see curves here, math is 40%, computer science made an uptick in the 80's for women at the same time women started to go into physical sciences and maths and engineering. Then Computer science made the anomalous dive down to engineering levels. When people say that women disappeared from computer science they are talking about that short uptick in the 80's, that is all it is based on:

https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/ba.png

> You can see curves here, math is 40%

A 40/60 split in mathematics does not support your claim that women prefer abstract thinking more than men do, and also incidentally is a pretty noticeable gender gap to most people, hence the large amount of discussion you can find online about gender gaps in mathematics fields and mathematics testing.

I never claimed that women prefer abstract thinking more than men do. I claimed that women prefer abstract thinking more than they prefer working with machines relative men. It would be massive if women in engineering or computer science were anything close to 40/60.

> Come on. Your graph starts in 1971 and you're using that to argue about differences in the 1960s.

You have provided no data supporting your claim. I wont dig up more data just because you can't look for it yourself. You are obviously ignorant about this topic and don't want to educate yourself.

I think it's fair to say that you can believe that the difference is biological without it being sexist. But it is also true that many people who hold this belief are sexist (in fact most misogynists probably do believe this), so people being hesitant to give a platform to people taking this angle is understandable.

That's completely false. There's lots of published research on this subject. The existence of said evidence is routinely being denied, but there have been numerous studies. One of the most famous studies established that female infants tend to be more interested in looking at human faces than boy infants, and boys generally more interested in looking at things.

This is generally referred to as a "things vs people" preference. With women generally being more people oriented, and men being more "thing" oriented. Again, there is no relationship to performance here. Nobody is claiming that either of these is better than the other. It's just a very consistent finding across many many studies, and the fact that this is still controversial boggles the mind. Politics are preventing us, as a species, from properly understanding ourselves.

This is a meta-analysis of infant sex vs toy preference: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-01624-7

If you think this preference for things vs people is due to culture, consider that this kind of toy preference exists in monkeys as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm9xXyw2f7g

It’s a well established fact that, even in children as young as a few weeks old, males and females have different preferences.

I don't think programming was a field that used to be about people skills and slowly morphed into something analytic and technical today, programming today seems to me to be much more user-friendly and social.

There is everything about nursing that is gender specific.

Men are interested in things, women are interested in people

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/

Why is it different when a woman is taking vitals and walking through a diagnostic checklist than when a man is doing it? Is there something special about being a women that makes the better at drawing blood or placing IVs?

They don't, physicians are close to gender parity. What you see is that Physicians used to skew male a long time ago, but that isn't the case any more in younger generations.

And Physicians isn't about people, Physicians is about seeing people as things you can fix, so it tickles both the "people" and the "thing" aspects at the same time, which would explain why gender ratio is about equal.

If you remove the "things" aspect from physicians you are left with nurse, which skews extremely female.

"Countries with greater gender equality see a smaller proportion of women taking degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), a new study has found.

Dubbed the “gender equality paradox”, the research found that countries such as Albania and Algeria have a greater percentage of women amongst their STEM graduates than countries lauded for their high levels of gender equality, such as Finland, Norway and Sweden.

The researchers, from Leeds Beckett University and the University of Missouri, believe this might be because countries with less gender equality often have little welfare support, making the choice of a relatively high-paid STEM career more attractive."

Basically finding that specialities with less patient contact have a higher proportion of male doctors.

Though I suspect there probably is more going on with nursing than differences in interest in people.

With advanced degrees becoming more and more common, it's also more and more likely the nurse seeing you has the same number of years of schooling as the doctor.

I don't think anyone looks down on nurses in the UK if they have spent anytime in hospital.

The tech world is notoriously unwelcoming to women, tons of unconscious biases push women away from STEM, societal pressure/general atmosphere tends to encourage women to focus on things other than their career, etc. In light of all that it is hard to say whether women don't want to get into STEM because of some natural disinclination, or simply because all of these other things make STEM less desirable for them.

There are fully theoretical CS degrees out there, but that isn't the norm. Look at Stanford for example, one of the top rated schools in the world on this subject, and you can graduate with less theory courses than a typical engineer has to take.

So you'd expect CS to have a gender balance similar to most engineer degrees, which is what we see.

https://cs.stanford.edu/degrees/undergrad/Requirements.shtml

Edit: Just want to note that I am not correcting you on this, just noting the difference between the subjects.

I feel like students complain a lot about how tough theoretical CS can be. When I was in school, a lot of former CS staple courses were moved into the graduate program and replaced with lighter, more practical courses in undergrad (i.e., compiler theory replace with a comparative programming languages course that touched on JVM bytecode). They event went so far as to split BSCS and BACS by reducing the math requirements even further for the BA degree.

In order to bridge that gap you'd need to tie programming to something women love as much as men loves working on machines that has moving parts.

Edit: And I've seen CS degree variants with heavy UX focus that tends to get 50/50 gender balance. It is really easy to shift gender balance in degrees this way, just shift it more to humans and you get more women, more to moving things and you get more men.

However, in order to get a PhD you must face much harder challenges. Whoever left engineering because of that comment is not fit for a PhD.

HN, by and large, also happily insists that men are naturally better than women at logical thinking. You'll see it all over this thread.

It's not hard to challenge this belief once one starts looking outside the US. We had female poster here, a couple of months ago, who said that in Gaza the computer science courses were 60-70% female. It's hard to reconcile that with hand-wavey statements about 'brain chemicals' so it's easy to ignore.

The disparity with places like the middle east is an example of the gender equality paradox [1]. The more patriarchal and oppressive a place is, the greater women's interest are in high paying fields as it provides a path to security and independence. In more egalitarian societies, women are more free to pursue fields in accordance with their own iterests.

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

Easy example - any girl who started reading the HN message boards at a young age would probably give up on a future career in engineering. Why try when a bunch of educated men don't think you can succeed?

The article is interesting but not definitive. Even granting ( which I wouldn't ) that girls have a greater aptitude for reading instead of science and math, being a good _engineer_ is also about being a good reader. If boys are naturally better at math, that doesn't at all mean they are better professionals. If they can't read the instructions for using Vivado to design firmware, than they are in the wrong profession.

I've also rarely encountered commenters on hacker news saying women cannot succeed in engineering, and it's downvote heavily in the rare instances it does appear. You claim it's present in this thread, in your previous comment, yet don't link to any instances of this alleged disparagement. It strikes me as the kind of statement that stems from assumptions rather than concrete observations.

I haven't seen a single person on HN say that women can't succeed in this field.

Not as a rule exactly: these days, anyone reasonable savvy person can learn CS well enough to be employed in tech and any math-savvy person can certainly end up in CS research. But it is, I think, _super_ hard to start learning programming in college and actually end up good at _low_-level computing like Kernel/Systems level stuff, which really requires like total immersion in the space, similar to learning a language by living in the country. In my program this meant that the really technical classes were filled with the students who came in already very computer-literate and into programming, and they tended to be 90+% male.

(There are exceptions. I'd characterize Charles Severance's MOOC from UMich as a true beginner class. But, by contrast, I think I'd find MIT's intro class in the CS department (6.001) impossibly difficult if I was having to basically learn to actually learn simple programming on the side.)

[1] https://www2.seas.gwu.edu/~kaufman1/FortranColoringBook/Colo...

[1]https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-the-declinin...

If CS was mandatory from grades 1-12 then things might be a lot less skewed in those first year introductory CS courses. Of course you're still going to run into the issue of kids who take up programming as a hobby at a young age and arrive at university with a large lead in skills. On the other hand I've seen math students who have done the same thing.

I actually did well in math throughout high school but it wasn't a particularly strong skill of mine in university. And I could have no more majored in math (or physics) than I could have flapped my arms and flown.

My secondary point still stands. Just as there are kids out there who grew up programming in their bedrooms who come into first year CS and crush it, there are kids out there studying extra math and writing math contests etc who will come into first year with a big advantage.

Man and women having different interests had innate, biological roots. It has been observed in children only a few weeks old.

I am not saying this explains the whole imbalance, but for sure it can explain part of it.

Summarization from the parent page (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...): "In 2018, women accounted for 54 % of all tertiary students in the EU-27; however, 52 % of the students following doctoral studies were men. "

A "liberal arts" "doctorate" means EXACTLY NOTHING.

The entire society is going to pay a heavy price for pretending unequal things are equal.

Your GenderFaggot Studies degree does NOT equal my Doctorates/Masters in Engineering, Computer Science and Medicine.

I refuse to pretend that they are.

You should too.