Slashdot Log In
The Hidden Engineering Gender Gap
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jan 16, 2007 07:24 PM
from the tech-needs-women dept.
from the tech-needs-women dept.
ifindkarma writes "Joyce Park, CTO of invitation site Renkoo.com, has written a two-part essay exploring why there is no pipeline of self-taught female engineers entering the tech industry via Open Source or other individual efforts. In The Hidden Engineering Gap, she asks why there are so many self-taught male software engineers in startups, but no similar pool of women. In A Modest Proposal, she discusses a potential short-term fix to the problem: a one-year, co-op, certificate-granting program for women set up and sponsored by Silicon Valley companies." dgilik notes that his unscientific survey suggested that 93% of Linux users are male.
Related Stories
[+]
Slashback: Net Neutrality, Bugged Coins, and Pawns 102 comments
Slashback tonight brings some clarifications and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including: anti-Net-neutrality article modified; no bugged Canadian coins; a tech program for women in Silicon Valley; Pirate Bay and Sealand; and Microsoft evangelist apologizes for "pawns" comment. Read on for details.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
let's condescend to women (Score:5, Insightful)
I think complaining there aren't emough women in tech is disingenuous and a little condescending towards women. There has been a wide open door for women for years, self-taught, or otherwise. To claim otherwise ignores so many other attempts and programs.
The reason there aren't more women in tech, self starters or otherwise is because they don't want to be and aren't interested! No program, encouragement, coersion or other methods will change that.
Consider a telcom I worked for... In the mid-80s a memo was circulated admonishing IT for the "underutilized" women. An IT policy was thus implemented picking women from myriad other jobs (call centers, anywhere!). These women were given free training, often at universities and were given 6 weeks and more to be trained. Most of these women were looking at more than a doubling in salary, all they had to do was "participate"...
Even with that policy, we could not even approach fifty percent of women in the IT work force.
(As an aside, an unexpected (to management) side effect of this monumental effort was a flood of women (those that signed up), only a small fraction of whom had any interest at all in tech, and only a fraction of those hitting stride in any reasonable time join It without even close to the skills necessary to contribute. We burned a lot of money to skew a population and saw productivity tank.)
It is no reflection of women's abilities. I know it's really cliche, but some of the very best IT people I worked with were women. But, as in the male population, many women were incompetent as were men. The difference isn't in ability, it's in the proportion choosing a field... For some reason men choose computers, women don't.
Ultimately, if you build it (the program), they will come, but not in droves. Like it or not, there seems to be a difference in wiring between the sexes. And, as in any large population, there will always be exceptions. IT welcomes (at least in my experience) women as much as men.
In the meantime, these old harangues only condescend to women who have chose not to enter IT as a career choice. They do have the options today... they're still not choosing it. Nudging them with these initiatives somehow implies their non-IT choices weren't valid, or good.
This hand-wringing is as silly as wondering why more police officers don't enter the tech fields (and some do as a recent /.
article pointed out -- a state trooper wrote a traffic ticket
application). They didn't/don't because they like being police
officers better.
Re:let's condescend to women (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no crisis, there is no emergency, there is no problem. I wish people would stop trying to force a non-issue onto the rest of us.
Parent
Don't paint engineering pink! (Score:5, Insightful)
How is it that nobody bitches when there are so few female trash collectors?
Parent
Re:Don't paint engineering pink! (Score:5, Insightful)
I also didn't think about the money when I ripped apart my toys, to see how come they worked the way they do. I was curious, and that's what excited my brain. I still take apart my toys, but they are just a lot bigger, and cost a lot more(and I wish I was better at putting them back together)
I went into computer, because I actually loved working with them. I will admit, that when it came time to make a choice as to what to take in university, the hope of being gainfully employed help it win over taking music, but it would have been in the running without that.
If I had been interested in money, I would have just gone into business. Funnily enough, a lot of the girls I knew in school were taking business...
Parent
Re:Don't paint engineering pink! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Don't paint engineering pink! (Score:5, Interesting)
There are many reasons why most women don't have any interest in computers - one, of course, is role models. Some people only act as their parents and friends do - and if they don't use or *value* computing neither does the next generation. A second problem is that I know many many women (yeah and men too) who have no interest in how things work - they often learn new things by rote rather than by thinking WHAT/WHY they are doing something rather than HOW. Thirdly (and kind of related to my first point) is that often people who choose a different field of interest get so much support and see such a complete package to their chosen area that they have no room in their life for computing or scientific thought because their world does not allow these things in, and therefore does not need them.
Parent
Re:Don't paint engineering pink! (Score:5, Insightful)
While there may be some truth to women leaving the workforce being a primary factor in lower wages, your attack on stay-at-home moms is poorly placed. Have you ever actually watched someone do this? Consider their day:
Wake up self, wake up kids, gets kids fed, get oldest ready for school and out the door, change the baby's diaper, gets the 2nd oldest ready for pre-school, drive him to school, drive back, get the baby ready for morning nap, put baby down for morning nap, take care of dishes from breakfast, take a shower, get a load of laundry going, take inventory of food/plan shopping, sweep floor, move laundry to dryer, get another load going, get baby up, give baby snack, off to store for dinner fixings, come back and put food away, pick up oldest from kindergarten, pick up middle child from preschool, back home, fix lunch, feed kids, send kids to play, clean up lunch table, play with kids, get youngest two ready for nap, put youngest two down for nap, give the oldest some quiet craft/activity to do, move laundry to dryer, fold clothes that were in dryer, put clothes away, start dishwasher, wipe down counters and sinks **now you get a brief break until the youngest get up from nap**, get kids up from nap, feed everyone snack, begin prepping for dinner, keep kids entertained, keep baby in clean diaper, kiss boo-boos, bandage scrapes, defuse fights, start cooking dinner...
fuck working all your life when someone else can do it for you.
I've watched my wife do it. It is exhausting work and worst of all it is tedious. The routine offers no intellectual stimulation. Staying at home is HARD WORK and it's selfless. Don't demean it.
Parent
Re:let's condescend to women (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes.
If you are hiring someone to do a job, you should select the candidate who is best for the job. If you do anything else, you don't have the best man (or woman) for the job.
A core American value is not to discriminate based on race, or gender. You suggest doing exactly that, and you are exactly unamerican for doing so.
Parent
Re:let's condescend to women (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think anyone is arguing that women should be excluded or treated unequally. I think the point is that there's a fine line between trying to provide equal opportunities and trying to shoehorn people into jobs, education, etc. where they just aren't good fits. Anyone who has ever witnessed a badly implemented affirmative action program knows what I'm talking about. Real progress in terms of equality (racial, gender, etc.) takes generations; it doesn't happen overnight, and anyone who says they can make it happen overnight is probably just trying to win a lucrative government contract.
Programs to encourage women in IT are certainly welcome, but beyond a certain point, you will see diminishing returns. I think we're already at that point (if not past it), considering that probably 10% of the folks in CS programs at both my undergrad and grad school were women. That's not a small number of people, and it certainly isn't a small enough number to suggest widespread discrimination in any meaningful sense.
The reality is that engineering fields like CS/CE tend to be self-selecting, and people---male or female---who are naturally adept at these sorts of thought processes tend to gravitate towards those fields, while those who aren't tend to gravitate away from them. Thus, trying to go significantly beyond guaranteeing equal opportunities for women is not likely to result in any meaningful gains, and the people you are likely to get as a result will tend to be those who will not do as well in the field as their self-selected (male or female) counterparts. It's pretty basic sociology, really.
Parent
Re:let's condescend to women (Score:5, Insightful)
I see this study as another of these wrong-headed assertions that because there aren't equal numbers, something must be wrong.
Parent
Re:let's condescend to women (Score:5, Insightful)
I can tell you about my experience in that regard, if you're interested. It's a long story, and it ends with me going for a Master's in Transportation Planning, and hauling my IT experience over to a line of work where people appreciate it, rather than looking at me like "isn't that cute, she thinks she knows what's wrong with the network!"
The field is still quite hostile to women. Society in general is very hostile toward women with technology experience and knowledge; look at the first post in this article (when reading on +2 anyway), implying that the women who are in tech jobs all have beards! Maybe that's because it's really tough to get or keep a tech job, or be taken seriously in one, if you don't look like a guy?
Parent
Re:let's condescend to women (Score:5, Interesting)
The difference in my experience is that women tend to be more "credential" oriented than men. That's why more women are going to college and getting advanced degrees than men these days. It's also why in heavily administrative, bureaucratic areas, women hold their own with men and are even taking over...
But real IT - administration, design, and programming - frequently means working without directly relevant credentials or road map, and without any peer support when it comes to learning. For whatever reason, men are more willing to do this.
Frankly, if it weren't for biology - men can't bear children - women would be earning more than men by now, except at the very highest levels.
Parent
Re:let's condescend to women (Score:4, Insightful)
Construction workers
Flight attendents
It's amazing how well all the massively unbalanced professions fit the legos vs. dolls model so well (these are all generalizations, and the generalizations create the percentage results. I totally respect that individual people make individual choices and there's nothing at all wrong with that.)
Before I had children I thought that boys and girls had basically the same odds for any skill set and that the difference when they grow up was largely based on how parents expose boys vs. girls to different things and create different expectations.
I have two children now, a boy and a girl, and I know how wrong I was. It's not just the differnece between my own children (which is, itself, blatantly dolls vs. legos just like the stereotype) - it's also what I've observed is virtually every other set of children I've been around in playgroups, malls, playgrounds, museums, etc. Most girls have a set of interests and behavior that is very different from most boys.
I've bought my daughter legos, I've tried to work with her to build them, I've tried to keep her interest - it can't be done - she thinks they're mildly fascinating since her brother has them but will not sit still to play with them, she frankly wants to put her doll in the stroller and push her around the house. I've even found her Dora Legos (on ebay, they don't make them anymore, can you guess why?) - she likes the dora character pieces, wants to carry them around, doesn't actually want to build anything.
My son (at 5!) has built a ~3100 piece star destroyer and is embarking on building a ~3500 piece death star (among many many other lego sets he's built) - I couldn't pry his interest from this if I tried.
Software programming is all about building things piece by piece from a limited set of basic shapes. System administration and building up IT infrastructure is also about putting pieces together to build something better and more interesting. Now, IT as a general profession has a wider array of jobs and skill requirements, and as such you do find more women in "people-centric" IT positions (marketing, IT HR, usability, call centers for non-techncial areas - those that haven't been outsourced anyway). In my area of work there is clearly a larger imbalance the more "technical" the job requirements are.
Parent
Hidden? (Score:5, Funny)
Better question: (Score:5, Insightful)
Do computers designed by women run quicker?
Does software written by women take up less memory?
Do processors designed by women emit less heat?
Certainly we shouldn't do something that inhibits a particular gender's ability to participate in the profession of their choice. But an engineer is an engineer - why should we care what their gender is?
Maybe there are not so many self-taught female engineers because women mature socially earlier and thus don't spend as much time talking to their monitors. Maybe women tend to be emotional thinkers and engineering doesn't jive well with emotional thinking. Maybe there's just a shortage of women who are nerds.
And maybe there's nothing wrong with that.
Re:Better question: (Score:5, Insightful)
The potential doubling of your talent pool.
Parent
Re:Better question: (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Better question: (Score:5, Insightful)
Computers designed by women may be more attractive to women; that will let you tap a market currently underserved and increase your customer count. That directly translates into more cash, so it matters.
Parent
Re:Better question: (Score:4, Insightful)
This would be a good example of emotional thinking. I see that you read "Women being underrepresented in engineering is not a problem", and you responded with "Writing off 51% of the population is not acceptable!"
Unfortunately, this does not make any logical sense. Your response appears to be based on a rather poor assumption - what if developing great products, and finding innovations that make things better, also involve professions OTHER than Engineering?
Clearly this is the case. Let's take the converse of your statement. What if EVERYONE was an engineer? How well do you think the world would function then? Not very well, I'd imagine.
Engineers should be people who choose to be engineers. If women choose to be something other than an engineer, it's quite possible that maybe, just MAYBE, they're BETTER AT SOMETHING OTHER THAN ENGINEERING?
Maybe to develop great products, to find the innovations that make things better, you shouldn't write off the 99% of the population that arn't engineers.
The fact of the matter is, there are many professions, and all of them are important. We should allocate people to the professions they are best suited for, regardless of gender. And again, if women WANT to do something OTHER than be an engineer, what is wrong with that? Just because YOU wanted to be an engineer doesn't mean every other woman should want to.
Parent
it's all configure's fault (Score:5, Funny)
checking for a BSD-compatible install...
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for gawk... gawk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking whether to enable maintainer-specific portions of Makefiles... no
checking for g++... g++
cheking for penis... ERROR: Penis not found.
It's just one industry (Score:5, Insightful)
And a side note - regardless of gender, if you don't want to do IT you won't do a good job. You have to have a certain passion for the work. No amount of financial incentive can change this..
An intentional allusion? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modest_Proposal [wikipedia.org]
She answers the big question. (Score:5, Interesting)
Women often seem to gain self-confidence by pursuing institutional affiliations, credentials, and clear career goals -- rather than simply pushing forward as "lone wolves" driven by individual curiosity.
Firstly, I think this statement discredits the true innovators of this world(past & present) who are driven by a passion to solve problems(sometimes at significant personal and social cost). These people are not just fulfilling some curiosty.
Secondly, and this is the crux of the whole article, females, by "pursuing institutional affiliations, credentials, and clear career goals" are giving themselves the access to a future raising a family.
By exposing themselve to this environment enhances the chances of finding a more desirable mate.
Why does this matter? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, if we really want to think about gender gaps in professions, why are there not more male nurses? I had to spend a decent amount of time in ICU when my father was hospitalized because of his heartattack. He is very overweight and it was no small challenge for the staff there to help move him when it was required. I think there was one male nurse there who helped but he wasn't always on duty. Would it not make sense to make this position more appealing to men since it would be a boon to both patients and staff alike? Just something to think about.
Brendan
Re:Why does this matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
You might as well ask... (Score:4, Insightful)
Men and women are different. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. And those who think that men and women need to be exactly equal in every area of life need to get over it, and stop trying: There's a few hundred thousand years of evolution working against you, and you're going to lose.
steve
Why do women need preferential treatment? (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was an CS undergrad in college I remember hearing constantly about how 'women have it tougher in cs' and so forth. In my view exactly the opposite is true. I never once saw a female getting a worse grade because of her gender. I did however see one of the schools deans go ask professors for explanations when a female was doing poorly in a class. The result of that was that professors were under pressure to make sure that female students got through which resulted in unfair grading.
If women want to become engineers they should be allowed to and have the same opportunities as men, but preferential treatment just makes the ones that are legit look bad.
Men and women are not the same (Score:4, Insightful)
The paucity of women in engineering is not solely an artifact of lack of opportunity, nor of cultural conditioning, though both of those things obviously have an impact. In a typical Silicon Valley tech company, you'll find far more Chinese and Indian women than white women in engineering, even though the white population is much larger than the Chinese or Indian populations in the area. So clearly culture matters, and to that extent there's a problem we can and should address. But you'll find even more Chinese and Indian men than women in those same companies -- it's not clear that culture alone can explain the gap.
So by all means, provide good opportunities for girls and young women who would be interested in engineering (or physics, or...) but for the lack of exposure. We all benefit from that. But please don't try to force the issue beyond the levels they'll naturally settle at when everyone has the appropriate opportunities -- even if those levels are still male-dominated.
Such a program exists for both women and men (Score:5, Informative)
I direct just such a post-baccalaureate program at Mills College [mills.edu] in Oakland, California, not far from Silicon Valley. It is coed, although the majority of students are women. Many successful graduates have gone on to industry jobs and CS PhD programs. The application deadline is February 1, if any Slashdotters want to apply.
There was a recent article about the program [sfbg.com] in the San Francisco Bay Guaridan. For more information, see http://ics.mills.edu [mills.edu] and/or contact me.
a tricky problem (Score:4, Interesting)
There are lots of little reasons (time demands, male oriented, no role models...), but the big root reason is that these are just not good jobs. All those little reasons were there in law and medicine, and were overcome. Rather than ask why no women want these jobs, ask why any person WOULD want these jobs. Most reasons women have for staying away from these areas should probably keep men away as well.
Even if you don't buy that women should be more or less equally represented in most jobs, it can be very educational learning exactly why they're staying away.
Is the price worth it? (Score:4, Insightful)
We've done an admirable job as a society in removing coercive legal barriers against genders. Most of the remaining gender based barriers do not come from the state, but from nature and culture instead.
We can do nothing in regards to nature based barriers, lest we end up a pathetic dystopia. The unavoidable fact is that men and women are differnt. But what about cultural barriers? Indeed, many radical feminists act strangely similar to radical cultural conservatives. Therein lies the danger. Trying to mold culture through laws is a perilous activity. We can attempt to modify culture through voluntary persuasion, but once we get the government involved, we are headed down the path to tyranny.
If there are laws that act as barriers to women, they must be repealed. But we cannot go around punishing parents who encourage their daughters to be nurses instead of doctors. We must change that part of culture through the slow process of voluntary persuasion.
For those of you who would like to believe women.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been in IT for 27+ years, first as a COBOL programmer on a Honeywell DPS/8, then as an SCO Unix developer, and now as a Windoze developer/lead. I'm female. EVERY STEP OF THE WAY I have been discouraged, disparaged, talked down to, brushed aside. Granted, it's been less in the past 10 years than it was earlier, but it's STILL there. It's run the gamut, from my parents (who leaned on my heavily to become a secretary or bank teller), to fellow (male) students who pointedly excluded me from study groups, to clients--sight-unseen. One potential client, when told by my boss that I would be on site the next day to troubleshoot their problem, told him in a crestfallen manner "...can't you come out instead? She's just a woman..." They'd never even heard of me before - this was not related to my performance, but simply to my sex. This was NOT an isolated incident.
YES, I love to tinker. I work on my motorcycle (CBR600RR, thank you very much) in my spare time.
YES, I love to code, AND I'm self taught (from the time I was 12, using Basic on a CP/M system).
NO, I wouldn't be doing this if I had listened to ANYONE who sought to "help" me by steering me toward a more "suitable" career. I know MANY women who gave up and left pursuing a computer-related career because of the discouragement. I'm too thick-headed, I guess.
YES, it still is like this for women. I recently went back to university to pursue an advanced degree - last semester, I took an undergraduate course; the first week, one of the other women in the class was lamenting the fact that so many male students were always telling her she shouldn't be in CSE because she was a girl, and it was a "man's field." Excuse me!? This is 2006... in the United States??
I had hoped, when I was young, that by the time I was in my mid-40s the playing field would be a bit more level. Judging from the comments here, there's still a loooong way to go.
Is this really an issue? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet, many of the girls chose to do a humanities subject at university. Why is that? Could it be that they are more interested in those subjects than mechanical engineering or have they been socially programmed to shy away from the hard sciences? The flip side is that there is a disproportionately high group of females now studying Law and Medicine. In fact, apparently in some Western countries (like Australia, my home), more women than men study these disciplines and there could be a time when they outnumber men in the profession itself. Once again is this a problem and that we should be encouraging more guys to take up law or med? I don't think so...
One thing that was interesting to observe in my time as a HS and then undergrad student was that there were far more Asian girls doing engineering than westerners. In fact of the female population in my eng/sci courses, 95% of them were Malaysian/Sinagporean/Indonesian Chinese (I studied in Australia). Even now, I work in an engineering company and most of the female engineers are of Chinese or Indian origin (we have about 20% female engineer population). The exception are the Scandinavian countries, where there there appears to be a higher proportion of female engineers than in other Western countries. The female engineers I've worked with are no more or less competent than the guys, so once again it's not a matter of aptitude.
I think like any job or vocation, to be any good at it, you have to want to do it and do the hard work associated with it. This applies equally to pursuing a qualification or teaching yourself. If you don't have the passion for it, then you aren't going to have the single minded and borderline anti-social drive to be the best at it you can possibly be. Guys seem to do this more in the technical disciplines, particularly in the after work or school hours. Maybe girls and woman don't have the same passion for it and that their interests lie elsewhere? Should we be coercising girls into be interested in stuff like this? Hell no, in my opinion. If they are interested, they'll gravitate towards it just like some boys do.
At the end of the day, this all starts from early childhood. In modern times, how many rational parents are going to stop girls from playing with trucks or LEGO etc if that's what they like? I'm a parent of a girl and boy (both the same age) and it doesn't worry me in the slightest. If my daughter grows up and becomes an engineer or physicist I'll be just as happy as if she pursues a career in law. She's a smart kid and will most probably be good at either.
Self-taught is one of the keys here (Score:5, Insightful)
Schoolboy's bias suit [boston.com]
Where The Boys Aren't [weeklystandard.com]
Why boys can't be boys [guardian.co.uk]
The Trouble With Boys [msn.com]
and especially
How the Schools Shortchange Boys [city-journal.org]
It's not a big factor in this particular case, but one reason some guys are self-taught is because they've learned education isn't for them -- rather it's against them.
Geek culture from a female perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
So what if baby girls like to play with dolls and baby boys play with trucks. That says nada about future aptitude for CS or EE. I am the mother of a girl, and she loves playing trains and trucks and thinks dolls are a lot of fun to throw down the stairs while yelling "uhoh, my baby!". Basically, even if the brains are wired differently, I don't think it's enough of a difference to make technical work a non-starter for all females. There are some advantaged being socialized female brings to technical work; such as the ability to enjoy taking showers on a daily basis. As a sysadmin, I have noticed that users are often relieved when I work on their issues, instead of the BOFH type who is smug and condescending in his treatment of users.
I am a self taught sysadmin, I worked for 6 years before going back to school to get my CS degree. I think the main reason why we lack distaff autodidacts is that they simply do not have the confidence with machines in our culture that males do. I remember learning pascal (yes, i'm ancient) and my dad telling me "Pascal?! What is that crap, if you were a boy you'd be writing compilers in assembly" when I was 14. If that's not one of those hidden sexist cultural things which undercut one's self confidence, I'm not sure what is. I have been a linux user since 1997, and have attended several LUGs only to be hit on, disregarded, or publicly sexually harassed when giving presentations (on vi of all subjects!). It doesn't really make me want to have a lot do with LUGs.
Another issue I have observed is that males are protective of their in-groups in a professional and scholastic setting. These in-groups tend to make up the talent pool which upon which future start-ups are formed. In school we had several group projects, and none of the males in the top 2/3s of the class wanted me on their team, despite the fact that I usually placed in the top 5 on coding assignments(in class sizes of 60). It was like the third grade all over again. So there is a lot of self-segregation taking place. In fact, I'm not even sure why I'm writing this as these threads usually turn into a misogynistic circle jerk among the dominant male in-group of slashdot (and yes, I've seen many of these types of threads over the years around here).
FWIW, I totally disagree with changing classes to be more "girl" friendly as TFA suggests, that's bogus. Algorithms and computational models were my favorite classes, despite being "dry" or "boring". Math departments didn't paint math pink to get up to 30% female (3x higher than CS/EE by most counts). It's a cultural issue which must be addressed. And you can start by taking down the pr0n in the computer labs(yes, there was pr0n printed out and posted in my undergraduate computer labs, boys will be boys, right?!)
OTOH, I've found my career in IT to be satisfying and worth the trouble. It has the flexibility and high pay that a new mom needs, ironically enough. Try finding that in "women's work".
Re:facial hair (Score:5, Insightful)
First Post confirms that a big part of the problem is that women are judged by their appearance rather than engineering skills.
Parent
Re:facial hair (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:facial hair (Score:4, Funny)
"It's true you don't see many Engineering women. And in fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance, that they are often mistaken for engineering men!
And this in turn has given rise to the belief that there are no engineering women, and that engineers just spring out of holes in the ground!"
(Blatant Two Towers Gimli reference)
Parent
Re:facial hair (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe if we could get computers to recognise and respond to boobs, some kind of "boob input device" or something, more women would be interested in working with them? After all, if men can be controlled with boobs, but computers could be controlled with boobs, keyboard AND mouse, then computers could be controlled much better than men - who lack the keyboard and mouse interface - then the computers are going to be much more fun!
I'm a genius!
Parent
Re:facial hair (Score:5, Interesting)
First, have you read his speech? Here it is. [harvard.edu] Your characterization of it is at best overy simplistic and possibly just wrong.
Is it not even worth considering the possiblity that there is a difference? I have heard a lot of people talk, and a lot of theory, conjecture. and speculation as to why there is such a gender gap in science and engineering, but no answers. Over the past 50 years, the gender gap has dramatically decreased in many fields requiring intelligent, technical people, but much of science and engineering has resisted diversification. It seems that speculating on the range of validity of the initial assumption should not get you fired by a community that prides itself on allowing people to hold radical or controversial viewpoints.
I personally think it is unlikely there is a siginificant difference in inherent aptitude, largely based on anecdotal observation that the gap is smaller in many european countries. Furthermore, I think that at least in the case of science researche (only because this is what I am familiar with) even if there is a gender disparity in the number of exceptionally qualified people, it is worth putting some serious effort into getting more women into those jobs. First, this provides a role model for other women who aspire to those jobs, but perhaps more importantly, if there is a real difference that means it is likely women will be able to provide new ideas and directions that men might be less likely to come up with. Said another popular way, monocultures are dangerous, if not necessarily bad.
Parent
Re:facial hair (Score:5, Informative)
A variety of reasons have been kicked around. Some off the top of my head:
Obviously, a big problem is that the debate is so charged that dispassionate, impartial discoveries and testings of hypotheses are very difficult. Even good unbiased studies will be regarded with suspicion.
In the US, Computer Science is possibly the most lopsided discipline of all. But in Israel, CS is about 50/50. I heard speculation that it was because CS is a relatively new discipline, so there aren't a bunch of crusty old prejudiced men putting up barriers like in all the other disciplines.
Parent
Re:facial hair (Score:5, Insightful)
They pick jobs that can't easily be outsourced to India
I definitely see more ladies going in Law, Medicine, Accounting/Finance than Engineering or IT.
These jobs pay pretty well.
With all this, why bother encouraging uninterested women to go into IT?
There's no great scarcity, so it's a waste of resources. Better for them to do something else.
Why not encourage more men to do Nursing? Stronger = easier to carry/move patients around etc.
Parent
Re:facial hair (Score:5, Insightful)
God forbid scientists try to actually answer a question if the answer might be politically incorrect. Everyone knows that if your data suggest something that's not PC, massage the data, or at least don't have the nerve to publish, right? Everyone rants about how the Religious Right wants to make certain scientific subjects off-limits, but the Left is just as bad. In fact, Sweden has already banned research into gender differences in mental characteristics [salon.com].
And his answer("Women aren't as good at men at math and science,") was offensive and incorrect, and rightly struck a blow to his reputation among the faculty.
It pisses me off to no end that everyone thinks Summers said women weren't as smart on average as men. He explicitly did not say this. What he did say is that there is evidence the standard deviation (not the mean!) for intelligence for men appears to be higher than the standard deviation for women. He proceeded to discuss the implications of this (more male morons, but also more male geniuses).
Go find a transcript of what Summers actually said (the whole damn thing, not a soundbyte), read it, and stop slandering the poor man.
Parent
Re:facial hair (Score:5, Insightful)
To shout down a legitimate question on the grounds not that it is provably false, but that it is merely distasteful, is thus not merely reprehensible in the full sense of the word, but contrary to the interests of both sides of the debate. The star chamber that fired Summers has therefore likely done far more harm by this action than he did by raising his question.
Parent
Re:facial hair (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:facial hair (Score:5, Informative)
Query: Why are they different with regard to engineering?
Problem: Axiom is insane. No rational conclusion can be drawn from insane first premises.
Conclusion: As long as political correctness pervades our universities, any science they produce in these areas is warped.
Parent
Re:facial hair (Score:5, Insightful)
I am all for women attempting to improve in the scientific, mathematic and engineering fields, but I would be lying if I said they had the same potential as their male counter parts. But this is really no different than saying males do not have the same capacity for child birth, because, guess what, regardless of what science comes up with, females will still be better suited for this task. And yes the brain and the uterus are complete comparable as they are both cellular structure formed by information provided by DNA.
If men and women had the same potential there would be know reason for men to carry a Y chromosome. This in itself is an interesting topic since the Y chromosome is both benefit and detriment to Males. because Males contain only a single chromosome of each type they are incapable of regenerative replacement when a sequence is damaged, while women have a back up copy which can be used to repair each other. I'm sure it's ok for me to point out the male weakness, which in this case is very rarely disputed, but you are probably already offended by my support that male and females have different mental capacity, even though it makes logical since regardless of the evidence (which in this case happens to support the idea of gender difference) Maybe what this women is asking is "Given the evidence that there are less women undertaking the work necessary to be successful in engineering fields, is there a genetic or gender specific reason for this."
I don't know about anyone else, but the day Men an Women are identical (as compared to equal) is the day I give up on humanity completely.
Parent
Re:Cultural or Biological? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like to take 200 newborns, and divide them into two groups of 100, 50 of each gender in each group.
One group is only allowed to play with dolls and easybake ovens, the other group is only allowed to play with legos.
As a society, we TEND to encourage our female children to play at SOCIAL situations ("Let's have Tea!") and we TEND to encourage our male children to play at building things. This happens when we are really young, when our brains apparently have a much easier time at learning to do things (like languages).
Maybe the problem is that if you don't give a one-to-three year old a chance to play with things like legos and teach their brains to think in three dimensions when the brain is young that they never will be very good at it. And maybe we just happen to provide that education to boys more often than we do to girls.
Parent
Re:Cultural or Biological? (Score:5, Interesting)
Usual disclaimers on generalizations apply.
Luckily, my three year old also likes to help me work on the car.
Parent
Re:Cultural or Biological? (Score:5, Informative)
Most of the time, with no prompting, the girls will cuddle and mother the trucks that you give them, and the boys will throw the dolls.
There are inherent differences between girls and boys. And why wouldn't this be true? Every other species on the planet seems to recognize this fact.
Think of it this way. If the differences between male and female humans were arbitrarily decided by society, then how is it that every separate human culture on earth arrived at a similar result?
The experiment you describe happened thousands of years ago before there were baby dolls, footballs, and ovens. You can see the results of it by looking around you.
Parent