A friendly reminder to those of you commenting here:
Like most tech-centric sites, there is an extreme bias of male-to-female members. Please keep that in mind when you weigh the things discussed by our female posters. It can be very easy to (even unintentionally) “pile on” with the other men without realizing it.
to the female posters here (and in tech in general): Thank you for swimming upstream! We’ll do our best to keep the wading pools clear of sharks.
Thanks, Ken!
I agree with that.
This does not follow. My point is that the difference isn’t individual (simply knowing that a person is a woman tells you nothing about her particular skills and abilities; there will always be highly competent and driven women in every field they are allowed to participate in) but it exists in the aggregate average (you will get only 3 competent male candidates for every 7 competent female candidates for each vacant position in veterinary care, because that’s how many men decided to pick this field in college, and there is nothing you can do about it, short of drastic pro-male gender-equality campaign, because that’s just all the amount of talent flowing in. So something like 70% of these positions are filled by women. Yes, there are also cultural effects of residual assholes in the sector, and the more men in the field, the greater concentration of pigs. So effects probably compound themselves.)
Ok, but why do you think these career choices reflect biology and not culture?
Women really seem to reliably statistically (not individually!) follow certain criteria in career choice: Affinity for work with people, helping others, particularly children and animals. Men, on the other hand tend to prefer working with things, alone.There is decent psychological research confirming these tendencies as fairly universal and the more free choice a country permits women in vocation, the more reliably will they tend to the fields associated with their preferences (i.e. Netherlands has a way higher gender difference in field participation than Congo).
Yeah, but why isn’t it just culture?
It is certainly partly culture, but there are some clear biological links. Women with elevated levels of male hormones have a career profile distribution similar to men, male children castrated at birth and raised as girls still exhibited male gender identification and stereotypical preferences. And then you have the really direct links of: “If I want to get pregnant before 30, I should pick a field with a career path and life/work balance compatible with that.” I could go to evolutionary psychology tropes, from the more defensible, like natural maternal instincts, to more speculative, but I don’t think it’s even necessary to invoke them.
"This theory gives everyone what they want. It explains the data about women in tech. It explains the time course around women in tech. It explains other jobs like veterinary medicine where women dominate. It
explains which medical subspecialties women will be dominant or underrepresented in. It doesn’t claim that women are “worse than men” or “biologically inferior” at anything. It doesn’t say that no woman will
ever be interested in things, or no man ever interested in people. It doesn’t say even that women in tech don’t face a lot of extra harassment (any domain with more men than women will see more potential
perpetrators concentrating their harassment concentrated on fewer potential victims, which will result in each woman being more harassed).It just says that sometimes, in a population-based way that doesn’t necessarily apply to any given woman or any given man, women and men will have some different interests. Which should be pretty obvious to anyone who’s spent more than a few minutes with men or women."
The problem is, @8080256256 never said #2. He clearly indicated he did not think any differences that exist were differences of ability, but in distribution of interests. He might very well still be wrong, and he knows that, too. But he is at least willing to consider that interest is a separate question from ability. Both are culturally shaped, yes, but they are also biologically shaped.
There is sexism in tech. There is sexism in lots of places. This is a bad thing, and of course we should fight to reduce it everywhere. It does not necessarily follow that sexism is the cause of every gender disparity. Saying it is is a really strong claim. You seem to believe, and you may well be right, that if there were no sexism women and men would be equally common in every field. Is that an accurate assessment of your position?
Because that statement doesn’t have to be true. There’s no moral, biological, or other fundamental law that says that. And if it isn’t, then we really do need a good way to answer the question “Is this gender disparity the result of sexism?” Because if it isn’t, then tying it to the fight against sexism is at best a sub-optimal strategy and possibly actively counterproductive.
And yes, there are a whole lot of assholes in the world who believe horrible offensive things, and shaming is an effective tool for removing them from a community. But everyone has beliefs that someone finds horribly offensive. The line between “We should divide the world into mutually shunning value-based communities” and “We should tolerate all horribly offensive views” is really, fundamentally hard.
I get that it’s exhausting and unfair to have to have the same fight again and again across so many fields/companies/decades. It’s not right. But it works, little by little, partly by winning people over and partly because the ones who don’t get won over lose out to companies that higher otherwise-overlooked talent. Shaming and shunning, though, only work as long as you’re more powerful than your opponents. But if you set the norm now that it’s okay, you have no call to do otherwise if someday the tables are turned. Or, for that matter, for saying it was wrong to do so in the past when the tables were turned. That’s a pill I refuse to swallow.
So well put.
This especially.
During the period of American slavery POC really seemed to like to work for free in the fields statistically speaking (not individually!). /S
Or maybe juuuust maybe rich white men forced that distribution unnaturally. Maybe there might just be a parallel with the careers that women have today. Maybe men let women have some careers without complaint while other careers they feel they need to write manifestos suggesting their company would be best off firing all the women because of some vague and unproven link between penis ownership and the ability to write code?
Btw, there are a lot of us here with decades of experience in various tech fields. The more you talk, the less of a clue you seem to have about this industry and the men and women in it.
Hi there. I’m a female. I have birthed a child, and I have been interested in computers since the 60s. Let me tell you some of my story, so you can see part of the other side.
NOPE. You are wrong here. In 1977, my school system received a mainframe computer donated by NASA (which was in the neighborhood.) Two new courses were added to the cirriculum: Keypunch, for the secretarial students, and Programming, for the college prep students. I was in the first Programming class. We wrote in BASIC, and our programs were handed off to the Keypunch students. The following class we’d be handed our output on green and white perforated paper. IIRC, there were slightly more guys than girls, but we were definitely all nerds, geeks, or weirdos.
I got my first home computer (Radio Shack Micro-10) in 1983. I used it to write programs to make learning math fun for my 3 year old, who did have fun entering a 2 on the keyboard when it said 1 + 1 = ? because it made fireworks go off.
I still wanted a career in computers then, but had a civil service job and was comfortable.
I still messed around with computers whenever possible, including learning dBase so I could write a program to count cases and print out recertification letters, because I hated doing it by hand with 3x5 cards. .
In 1990, I started an engineering degree, because my brother and cousins (all engineers) said that was the only way to get a good job in computers. I left school with 3 years later because I was offered a help desk job with a temp agency. I did “contract computing” for 15 years, and encountered a lot of hostility, because I was not only female, but “older” (in my 30s and 40s), and they’d never considered that someone who looked like a suburban mom in polo shirt and khakis could know more about computers than most of the 20-something bros.
When I started my employment in the computer field, I already had a kid in school. Remember, I had worked before, and because of this, had been familiar with child care. There is such a thing for women (and men!) who have children and also work jobs that keep them away from home outside school hours. It appears you and others who are waving the biology flag have overlooked that fact that many many parents across the world have not divided into the “man works, woman stays home” mold.
Now, fast forward to why I stopped fighting. I had taken a job in a state office. I found out, after I was hired, that they didn’t expect someone with outstanding credentials would apply - the job was supposed to go to a nephew of someone. So I started the job with hostility, because I shouldn’t be there! And I was a woman. And I knew more about fixing computers and networking than the two guys who were retrained a year or two ago to be PC techs. One guy had porn as a wallpaper; the other told racist and bigoted jokes, and spent most of the day hanging around the secretarial pool.
When I complained to the manager about how they had sabotaged a project I was working on “as a joke”, I was told that I should try harder to fit in and not “be like that.”
When I was denied a promotion because I didn’t have a degree, I quit and went back to school. While getting gen ed classes out of the way, I stumbled over Communications, fell in love with filmmaking, and got a degree in that instead.
Not all the IT departments were misogynistic hellholes, but most had some of it. You may not realize how condescending it sounds to have someone who demonstrably has less skill, training, and knowledge tell me that he is intrinsically better because, basically, he has a penis and I don’t. That kind of attitude, expressed openly, and inappropriate jokes of all kind, makes offices uncomfortable* to people who believe that the aforesaid skill, training, and knowledge should determine who gets a job, not skin color, gender, religion, or disability.
*if not downright hostile. There’s a place for everything; leave the inappropriateness for after-work LAN parties.
You know what, I take your point about the early coders.
That does sound exactly like a situation in which women had established themselves in a field, doing lot of the early pioneering work, getting no real credit and then getting opportunistically booted when there were lots of good jobs to be had. And that surely left some sort of a lasting legacy.
So I think I understand why you are pointing out sexism in tech, particularly.
When you consider how complex the brain is; how removed thought and consciousness is from the neurotransmitters flowing back and forth, and how difficult it is to even figure out where particular complicated thoughts are being processes (even with complex medical imaging), it seems like a real stretch to attribute behaviors, abilities, and interests to specific differences in gender chemistry (which is what it all boils down to – XX vs. XY chromosomes directing chemical traffic). There are SO many things going on, especially from the standpoint of environmental and cultural influences, that any correlations found must be taken as highly suspect. The minute a person is known to be a boy or girl (now in utero using ultrasound), the cultural influences begin. This is especially true when you try to use these correlations as an excuse for making decisions about how to treat people.
The only way to get a good correlation between gender biology and ability or interest is if the subjects were brought as totally non-gender specific environment, without either themselves or anyone else knowing what gender they are. Such experiments would be impossible.
When you consider how complex the weather system is, how many factors contribute to specific weather at any given place in any given time, from mundane solar energy input (fluctuating quasi-periodically over a chaotic 13-year cycle) and condensation levels, to ocean-atmosphere heat exchange, precise composition of gases and atmospheric particulate matter and even movement of extraterrestrial objects, pushing around enormous bodies of water in complex tidal cycles of interacting solar and lunar gravity, it seems like a real stretch to claim that in New York, Decembers will be on average cooler than Julies.
I don’t think that’s a very good analogy, as it can be described by physical law, using temperatures averaged over areas and time to take care of the chaotic nature of the weather. Human behavior is far more complicated, and averages taken are far more uncertain – they don’t just average over a chaotic process, but over human will. Differences in behavior aren’t just due to chaos. I just don’t trust that any of these correlations can properly tease out biology from cultural influences, even with averaging.
If that were true, I might’ve gotten a bit less bullying in high school because I wouldn’t have been setting the grade curve in every math and science class. My failure to have been born with outdoor plumbing has absolutely no bearing on my ability to engage in abstract thinking.
Amen sister.
It was so bad that, when I went back to college in my late 30s and got 100% on my first math test, i panicked and hid it in my bag so no one would see it. I’m a grown woman, no one is going to shove me into a locker anymore! But it was an ingrained reflex.
Can I say in general, how hurtful it is to have to say the same things over and over, and still be told that it’s not a real problem, that it’s “just the way things are” and fighting against these problems are not worth it. It’s as if we’re not real human beings to some of you and that our problems are real problems that we need to fix at a societal level. It’s threads like this when I get to see who I can really depend on here to be open minded and thoughtful about these difficult issues. And it’s really too bad.
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