Insofar as your observations are correct, they're a simple tautology: obviously CS has become a "boy thing" which girls avoid; one needn't look further than enrollment statistics to confirm that.
The question is rather, "Why is female enrollment in computer science dropping, while things like, say, organic chemistry graduate more women than men?"
Your argument implies two fatally flawed notions: That gender roles are static. Obviously they're not. 50 years ago women didn't become doctors, because that was man stuff. The other is that girls avoid the hard boy stuff because it's not very girly. But it's specifically in engineering, physics and CS that there's such a huge gap. It's for the most part not there in biology, chemistry and mathematics.
>"Why is female enrollment in computer science dropping, while things like, say, organic chemistry graduate more women than men?"
Because it's not an appealing career choice, even for those with an aptitude? Why is this such a bad thing? Computer science enrollment are dropping for everyone, precisely because it's not as glamorous a career choice as it was in its hey-day. Perhaps women are more selective in their career choices? The point is, I don't think this is evidence for anything.
We need to restrain ourselves from trying to make the career more appealing specifically to one gender, to fix a gender imbalance we perceive to be a problem.
I covered much more than a mere tautology. Friendly warning: Ignore my reasons and live to regret it strongly in most contact with females. Politically correct? Heck no. Crucial? Sadly, yes.
Organic chemistry is often a prerequisite for a career in biology or medicine. Women do fine in some parts of medicine, especially OB/GYN, pediatrics, family practice, and dermatology. There is also a wide range of 'biology and medical technology' careers where organic chemistry is from important up to a prerequisite; likely we should also include pharmacy. And some women might want to try for a career in research biochemistry.
Also chemistry in college can be a good path to a career as a science teacher in high school.
Similarly for mathematics: At a teacher training college, it is common for the girls to major in math on the way to being a high school math teacher. But don't look for girls in math departments in the better research universities or in the math oriented careers (say, DoD work or as a Wall Street 'quant').
Women are attracted to biomedical careers due to the role of human to human contact; generally women seek careers with such contact.
Although I omitted it, one of the strongest emotions of women, and one of their most common directions in hoping to get security from praise and approval from others, e.g., their community, is to have a career that "helps people", and biomedical careers seem to qualify.
Computer science as a college major has had ups and downs due to (1) the NASDAQ tech stock bubble of 1999 and its bursting in 2000, (2) the stories of software jobs going to India, (3) the role of the NSF in writing into academic research grants that graduate students must be supported and, then, the common practice of getting such graduate students from India and Taiwan and, thus, convincing many US citizens, especially girls, that they will not 'fit in' in computer science, and (4) a bubble and its shrinking for 'feminism'.
One of the problems with a woman being a computer science major is that so far it has not been a common K-12 certified teaching subject.
With 'feminism', some enormously talented and determined girls as high school seniors believed "Women don't have to just be cared for. Women and do things, too.", made terrific grades in college and let that reinforce their belief, charged into 'male' careers, and paid a very high price in lack of children, busted marriages, and sometimes even their lives, literally. "It's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature.".
That "A woman's place is in the home" and otherwise as either a nurse or school teacher has moderated. So, right, the patterns are not actually 'static'. But that women can do as well as men in any field where their 'rational' abilities seem to permit is a big, HUGE mistake as I tried to make clear: Rationality is NOT enough and, instead, an appropriate emotional 'environment' is crucial.
Also we have to consider: At each generation, there will be (A) some women who do well as mommies and (B) others who are weak, sick, or dead limbs on the tree. It promises to remain that technical fields will be much better for (B) than (A).
I omitted a huge point: At present the Western European gene pool is likely in the most rapid change in the last 40,000 years because genes of women who are not just DETERMINED to be mommies are being pruned out. So, in another few generations, we will be left with women who are determined to be MOMMIES.
There is another point hidden in the fog: As in E. Fromm, Western Civilization got the norm from the French Revolution that any difference was a threat of tyranny. So, in particular the norm was that men and women should be as 'equal' in all respects as possible. Combine that norm with some simplistic, naive 'rational' model that anyone can readily do anything their rationality permits, and can arrive at the long running story, back to 'the women's movement' and farther, that any difference in careers of men and women is evidence of something ugly or unfair. Then, in particular, as in this thread, we look for what is 'wrong' that so few women major in computer science. Uh, sorry, but that the fraction is small need not be evidence of anything wrong.
Fromm's summary remark was, "Men and women deserve equal respect as person but are not the same.".
> one of the strongest emotions of women, and one of their most common directions in hoping to get security from praise and approval from others, e.g., their community, is to have a career that "helps people", and biomedical careers seem to qualify.
I can't tolerate such a torrent of nonsense more. Your last couple of posts are utter bollocks, plain and simple. After all, "helping people" is probably one of the main incentive for plumbers -- though almost all of them males -- to crawl under other people's toilets, though this doesn't fit much with your silly black and white, childish world view.
You seem to imply that it's impossible for a women to be a "mommy" and an astronaut, a computer geek, or I suppose a boxer. For your information, my sister is altogether pretty, a good mommy, an aeronautic engineer, and has a couple of black belts in various martial arts she could use to kick your silly ass.
Life is complex, and people don't fit into nice little boxes for your (very) little brain convenience and comfort. It's way past time for you to actually leave your computer and meet living people instead.
It seems that you are offended by some of his ideas. If this is the case, you will not give any of them the consideration they deserve. Perhaps this is his fault but it is not easy to write about touchy subjects in a way that will be non-offensive. As it happens, his ideas are well in line with expert opinions on the topic of moral development from infancy to adulthood and deserve to be considered in a more candid manner.
The statement you made about what he was implying demonstrated what I mean. You're offended by what he wrote, so you are trying to find things to object to. He never said it was impossible for a woman to be a good mommy and an astronaut. He said that women would tend towards being good mommies.
I appreciate the point you are trying to make however @HilbertSpace did say that it's impossible for a woman to be successful at both motherhood and a career:
With feminism, some girls believed "Women can and do things, too", charged into male careers, and paid a very high price in lack of children, busted marriages, and sometimes even their lives. It's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature.
Further, what on earth are you talking about when you say that his post is in line with expert opinions on the subject?
A few random quotes...
It's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature. To get girls to major in computer science, you are dealing with forces you cannot possibly understand.
Having women pursuing computer careers will stick like water on a duck's back -- not a chance.
There can be a reason for a girl in college to take some courses in computer science: Look for a husband!
I am all for a balanced discussion but seriously, is this not a little nutty?
As I said and Hilbert said in other places, this is about trends and tendencies. Not specific cases. As this discussion is about why women don't pursue careers in computer science as often as men, it is appropriate to speak in generalities.
The quotes you're picking sound bad, but they're not.
"There can be a reason for a girl in college to take some courses in computer science: Look for a husband!"
He's not saying the only reason any girl should ever take computer science classes is to find a husband. He's saying that a girl following typical gender roles will actually use that reason as opposed to the other good reasons for doing so.
"Further, what on earth are you talking about when you say that his post is in line with expert opinions on the subject?"
Look into the subject of moral development. There are conflicting views on the subject, but at least one of the views (promoted by Carol Gilligan) is very similar to what Hilbert has been saying.
Absolutely not. He pretends that women tend towards being good mommies because of some ridiculously over-simplistic "natural impulse" or similar crap. This approach is altogether stupid, complacent and wrong.
1° generally human behaviour can't be described as simply as bacteria behaviour in a petri dish.
2° there is a general trend recently in using some pseudo-scientific discourse as a comfortable vehicle to shocking ideas, basically pretending there is some science behind the differences between men/women, blacks/whites, etc. This is UTTER BULLSHIT. There is NOT the slightest fucking speckle of science backing this.
3° there is a more profound philosophical error that is trying to justify a scandalous state of matters because "nature makes it this way". Let me tell you one thing, nature sucks. Living in the "good ol' natural way" is being eaten alive by wolves and dying young, and painfully with that. Nature is a very bad excuse; everything that civilisation is about is precisely doing things in unnatural ways because you know, nature is nice as long as you aren't really part of it.
2: Your ignorance of the science does not invalidate its existence. As an example of research that has been done, look up some of the works of Carol Gilligan. There are many others, but it's not my field.
3. And here you are promoting ignorance. Yes, nature is bad, but if you want to change it, you must understand it. If you have no understanding of why women are less likely to go to computer science, have fun solving the problem.
1. indeed. And he repeatedly babbles with authority.
2. I've seen some science on these subjects. Unfortunately it always was heavily politically connoted, and the data was terrible ( no, it's not statistically valid to draw a linear regression from a vague random looking cloud of points).
3. I'm not promoting ignorance; I'm getting sick of right-wing morons, be it the anti-science style of the social darwinist style.
You are missing it, failing to 'get it', running off in unnecessary directions, and flailing away at irrelevancies.
It's simple, dirt simple: Here the shortest clear explanation: "The hand the rocks the cradle rules the world.".
If you don't like that one, take all the woman in the US at, say, 18. Put each woman into either (A) REALLY wants to have children and be a good mommy and is concentrating on finding a suitable husband and (B) women with less overt interest in being a mommy.
Then, track (A) and (B) over a few generations and see what happens. Is there any doubt in your mind? The women in (A) will have the strong limbs on the tree, and the women in (B) will have weak, sick, or dead limbs on the tree. Then over time, the fraction of women in (A) will increase, and the fraction of women in (B) will decrease. In particular, genes that put women into (A) will increase.
Just what is it about this 'thought experiment' you find difficult to understand?
Here is what should be your first question:
Q. If this thought experiment is correct, then why do we have any women in (B) now?
A. I should leave the answer as an exercise. Here's one piece of historical evidence: Supposedly in year 1800 could take all the women in the US of Western European descent, track their descendants, and by year 1850 discover that their population (of say, just the women) had increased by a factor of four. We're talking 50 years with nearly all the women pregnant nearly all the time.
So, (A) or (B) didn't matter: Due to very strong social, economic, and practical pressures, the women got married, and then the babies 'just came'.
Since then, more and more, (A) and (B) mattered a LOT. So, now women in (B) have the option of concentrating less on motherhood and do and, thus, are pulling their genes out of the gene pool. In a few more generations, what stands to be left is women in (A).
The effect of (B) is already strong and easy to see: In the more industrialized countries, women of Western European descent are having way less than 2.1 children per woman and, thus, are dying out. So, as women in (B) die out, the population can continue to shrink. When about all that is left is women in (A), then the population will stand to increase again. Come back in 100 years and find a LOT of REALLY eager women in (A)!
Your next question should be:
Q. But women in (B) should have reproductive advantage because of their better ability to contribute to the economic strength of the home.
A. Good point, but so far it's not working. I suspect that somehow it won't work well enough before the women in (B) die out.
The demographic transition has been observed in many different races and cultures, as parents deliberately have fewer children as their confidence increases in the survival of those children (and the parents' own subsistence in old age). If wanting more babies were a heritable biological drive, we wouldn't see whole societies ignoring it immediately after it became economically rational to do so. Instead evolution took the easy way out and created drives for sex and for nurturing babies, because those are immediate experiences an animal can respond to. We've given contraception a bunch of cultural baggage, but there is no drive against using it any more than there is a drive against overeating processed sugar, because neither existed in the environment that shaped us.
You mention several good points, but, net, you miss it. The most serious place you get off the track is with your "If wanting more babies were a heritable biological drive, we wouldn't see whole societies ignoring it immediately after it became economically rational to do so."
No: There is "a heritable biological drive". But as I explained elsewhere on this thread, e.g., for the US population increase from 1800 to 1850, that "drive" long didn't play much role. Now with contraception, etc., that "drive" is crucial. Or, the lack of that drive, with contraception, etc., is now the reason for the fall in the birth rate.
It's dirt simple: Now with contraception, more career opportunities for women, etc., women without that "drive" will be pulling their genes out of the gene pool. So, come back in a few generations and find what? Sure: Find what's left, find nearly all women who DO have just that "drive".
You seem to doubt that the "drive" can exist and be from genes: Don't doubt! It's in the gene pool now: A significant fraction of women see the face of a baby and know right away, front and center, that they want BABIES. Then they go looking for a suitable husband. In particular they don't go looking for K&R on C.
Look, it's even simpler: It's really easy for girls from 2 on to really love their dolls and like to play 'mommy'. Don't doubt that most of this is just in the genes.
I've been trying to stay out of this. I'm a woman, and a former homemaker/homeschooling mom. I originally wanted three kids but stopped at two, largely for health reasons but also for other reasons. I have an older sister who had serious fertility problems. She went through fertility treatments on and off over 8 years with two different husbands, which is considered to be a rather tough case (often just changing partners resolves the problem). In contrast, I seemed to get pregnant at the drop of a hat. I've done a lot of reading on women's issues and thinking on topics like this because the truth is I never planned on being a full-time parent for so long. I wanted to be home while my kids were little and then go pursue a career. But I had undiagnosed health issues, special needs kids and a military spouse, so I had a lot of obstacles to pursuing a career.
I have noticed patterns like: A career military wife has two kids, they both start school, she is still in no position to pursue a real career and is basically bored and lonely. So she has a third child to fill that empty void, because it is the only real viable option that satisfies her needs to be occupied and feel useful/valued and also fits into her current life -- which she can't conveniently dismantle or walk away from. If there weren't enormous obstacles to her pursuing a real career at that point, she might have done that instead.
I don't think the divergence of two types or groups of women has anything to do with "some women really want kids and some don't". I think it has a lot more to do with "some situations, once you get into them, are incredibly difficult to get out of". This cuts both ways: Not only is it very challenging to try to establish and pursue a career (as opposed to just getting a job) once you've had kids, it is also very hard to try to fit in kids once you've established a real career. Women who strongly want both and get adequate support for doing that tend to end up in "pink collar" jobs, thus in most cases really aren't on the same footing with the typical male career. I don't think this involves any male conspiracy to oppress women or any female ambitions to be supermoms. I think it is rooted in the simple fact that a serious career and a child are both similarly demanding obligations which you cannot simply and easily walk away from, limit the demands made on you and so forth -- so they compete for your time, energy and other resources in a way that makes it difficult to do both. For some people it is harder than others. If we can find a cultural means to resolve or ameliorate this fundamental conflict, then you will see fewer women choosing one or the other.
I found this story and perspective very interesting but everyone discussing this subject with Hilbert is severely mistaken if they think they'll dissuade him from his unpopular beliefs with anecdote and musings.
Sadly, your story is not one that is going to be heard often in HN (wrong demographic entirely), but it still falls under the scope of anecdote.
I think what you're pushing is a more deterministically oriented perspective in terms of where women find themselves in their lives.
I don't think that's necessarily going to be much more popular than Hilbert's biologically deterministic tendencies -> choice flip.
You'll need to take a different approach in advancing this argument, although the lack of misandry is certainly appreciated.
A gentle note: countries that have state funded childcare and that otherwise compensate for the burden of child-rearing have even higher part-time and pink collar employment rates for women than countries that do less to provide for women and children.
Your point, I'm afraid, doesn't have fact on its side.
everyone discussing this subject with Hilbert is severely mistaken if they think they'll dissuade him
That's a big part of why I was trying to stay out of it. Call it a moment of weakness that I bothered to reply at all.
A gentle note: countries that have state funded childcare and that otherwise compensate for the burden of child-rearing have even higher part-time and pink collar employment rates for women than countries that do less to provide for women and children.
I am 45. In my twenties, I read quite a lot of books on women's issues and some comparisons between the US and some European countries (many of the titles are lost to the mists of time) and the general understanding I developed was that countries that provided better support for maternity leave and childrearing (and had lower divorce rates) had made more progress than America in closing the wage gap. Those statistics are out of date by at least two decades, but I think the general concept has probably not staled in the least.
I don't think I am pushing anything deterministic. I am saying it is tough to change gears once you go far enough down a certain path. But it can be done and understanding what is going on can help in that regard. (EDIT: Also, understanding that this is an issue can potentially help reshape society so that it isn't so much of a "one or the other" kind of choice.) I got divorced and now work full time. After having been a homemaker in a very "traditional" (throw back to the 50's) marriage, I did some gender roll reversal with my sons: When push came to shove financially, I encouraged them to learn to cook and take over more of the housework so I could work more overtime instead of encouraging them to get jobs.
I did this for a number of reasons, but one of them was I did not wish to remain the household "domestic slave" and it was clear to me that if we all had jobs, the majority of the housework would continue to fall to me -- not because they are male and I am female, but because I am the one who already knew how to do it. They are well aware of my views that a lot of stereotypical gender roll stuff is rooted in situational factors, not in our genes or physiology, and they were well aware of my various motives. It was better overall for the family than other options available to us and they went along happily. Since my "theories" are yielding real world results for me and my family, I feel confident they aren't simply hot air or delusions (though I also have no fantasies that I know 'everything' either).
Anyway, long day and continuing to comment on a topic I should probably stay out of most of the time. It would be far better for me to turn my thoughts into a blog so I can explain my views, at my leisure and and at length, instead of "arguing" it in a male dominated forum.
>I developed was that countries that provided better support for maternity leave and childrearing (and had lower divorce rates) had made more progress than America in closing the wage gap.
Short answer: no. Slightly longer answer: Definitely not categorically and it depended on the endemic culture.
No, it enabled them to have a better quality of life and less work than compared to the US. It also enabled them to have a more secure means of raising a family without having to work full-time.
Being a homemaker in the US is a rather fantastic risk to take, especially if you're a stay-at-home Dad as the courts won't favor a wealth transfer as much.
I consider the improvement of security for those that want to raise a family without requiring massive individual wealth transfers like the US to be valuable benefits. That said, I find it amusing that some think people somehow have some kind of universal goal to play the career game. Not everybody cares.
It wasn't until recently that most feminist writers stopped being so fixated on career development. (Seemingly, anyway. I'm no historian of gender politics.)
> I did not wish to remain the household "domestic slave"
More power to you, glad you made the kids learn how to better care for themselves. My parents did that with me partially out of necessity and partially out of laziness but it did wonders for my independence.
Saved my ass later in life.
I'm sure your kids are better for it.
Can't say the domestic slave wording is exactly necessary or appealing. Would you describe a stay-at-home Dad as a domestic slave? That's extremely offensive.
>It would be far better for me to turn my thoughts into a blog so I can explain my views, at my leisure and and at length, instead of "arguing" it in a male dominated forum.
I agree with the first part, but I'm going to have to tut tut you for making excuses. I called you out on a common fallacy.
You're going to need to suck it up if you want to debate such violently contentious issues on the internet, and I guarantee you having a 100% female presence would do nothing to make it less...whatever it is you're complaining about.
I'm not even arguing with you, I'm just refuting a fallacy and pointing out a wrinkle.
These are some of the more educated, open-minded, and liberal (I'm using this in the broader sense) people you're ever going to find on the internet. If you find this community unpleasant you're in for a hell of a shock if you start really plumbing the Internet for the depths of mediocrity.
Re: getting my sons to do more housework: One of my explicit goals was to make sure they can care for themselves. My oldest son has the same medical condition I have. We have gotten off all the drugs and stuff and gotten well by eating better, keeping the house stringently clean, etc. He literally could die if he moved out (or I died) and he didn't know how to care for himself.
Re: "domestic slave" -- seems to me like good shorthand. You knew pretty clearly what I meant -- someone really unfairly bogged down with uncompensated labor -- without a lot of elaborating, offended or not.
Re: Female audience. That's a laugh. Women seem to find me far more intimidating and offensive than men do.
Re: Arguing: That has two meanings, one of which is to debate it and the other is to fight about it. I don't mind a debate though my experience is that most folks on the internet don't really do that. They pretty quickly deteriorate into fighting.
Nor am I making excuses. I have pushed the envelope on topics like this many, many times in male dominated forums. I have a fairly good idea of how hard it is do this kind of thing and that one of the big issues is the framing and underlying assumptions of what other people say. It very, very frequently becomes "If you don't agree it's black, then you must be one of those psychos that think it's white. And that is so amazingly obviously wrong that you must be a retard." There is no room for discussing shades of grey, much less a more technicolor version of reality. If I don't agree 100% with their assertion it's black, they peg me as one of those "100% white" folks. I get routinely slammed as being someone who strongly holds the "opposite" view for attempting to say "I don't see it that way". It really matters very little what the topic is -- politics, gender issues, homeschooling, you name it. If I say I homeschooled my kids, I must be one of those folks who wants to dismantle public school. If I say I don't think the anti-vax crowd is completely crazy, someone inevitably asks me what made me choose to not vaccinate my kids at all (which is a fallacious assumption and real example from this very forum). And on and on. So a public forum is a quite difficult place to try to articulate a view that is substantially different from the "standard positions" everyone is familiar with. All attempts to side step the repeated efforts of other people to peg me as this, that, or the other makes it incredibly difficult or downright impossible to convey how I really see it. Thus a blog would be a better option, and not out of cowardice.
As it happens, "as it happens" is a way to lead into an assertion that tends to provoke casual acceptance. It's not all that different from "wouldn't you agree that", a mock-question that's often accompanied by a nodding motion; the combination frequently illicits a nod even from someone that disagrees.
Of course many of the commenters are offended by some of the ideas expressed here; that doesn't make the ideas more correct. It's not a question of finding things to disagree with, because inherently the commenters' shortcoming isn't that they are hoping to reveal a logical flaw in the argument, but that they were tricked into debating a troll in the first place.
Wouldn't you agree that people with outmoded or poorly researched ideals can do a lot more damage if they are clever enough to embed their ideas in layers of empirical-sounding academia-speak?
I'd take it a step further, but I don't want to be "that guy" who invokes Godwin's law. :)
By "help people" they do NOT mean anything like what a plumber does! What they mean is more like social work helping the needy. Why? It is important to know, and some of what I wrote provides some hints, but I'll leave the rest for you as an exercise! Actually, it's an important exercise; you need to know why they want to "help people" in the sense of social work.
Your example of your mommy is impressive, but in this discussion we are talking about only generalities, not particlar cases. In particular cases, nearly anything is possible. But the generalities remain: Men and women are different. If you want a more detailed way to say this, then pick a measure and get the distribution on this measure of men and then of women. The distributions will likely overlap so that some men are better than some women and some women are better than some men. Fine. But the big point is that the two distributions can be, commonly are, so different. The big, classic example is the SAT scores: The girls do better on Verbal, and the boys on Math. I hope you remember that in grade school the girls did MUCH better on verbal than the boys. Uh, the girls like English literature and fiction much more than the boys do; if you don't like this 'generalization', then think in terms of distributions. Amazon 'gets it' on this point and aims their Kindle reader at women who want to read fiction.
What I wrote I very much wish I had read as a teenager. Elsewhere on HN I posted some solutions to some Oxford CS questions; tough to argue with those solutions. But for explaining women here, it's impossible to give solid proofs. So, it's easy to argue with what I wrote if you just wish to do so, and there can be many reasons to wish to do so. In particular, there is no way to get all solid answers to the questions of this thread using only solid science. But if we still want answers now, then we have to make do with the best we can get now. What I wrote took me decades, stacks of books, etc. to understand. Actually a lot of what I wrote is directly from the two references I gave. If you investigate, then you will find that they are both relatively good references. The costs of my efforts were high beyond belief. In the end, what I wrote is good insight into women. Without science here, in the end have to use judgment. Yours likely will not fully agree with mine. But you would be foolish just to discard what I wrote and not think about it seriously. Your mother is just one person and, thus, cannot be a counterexample; until you get past such a simple point, you have not started to think seriously here.
> By "help people" they do NOT mean anything like what a plumber does! What they mean is more like social work helping the needy.
You have an extremely arrogant stance on plumbers, you know. BTW your quick-n-dirty generalisation doesn't work : it seems quite obvious that psychiatrists and psychoanalysts are doing an extremely social work, helping the suffering and the needy, though they're almost all male. You start from the conclusion.
> The big, classic example is the SAT scores: The girls do better on Verbal, and the boys on Math.
Sorry, that may be true in some particular place and time, but last time I checked girls did better on BOTH in many countries. Hint : this hasn't much to do with genetics.
> Uh, the girls like English literature and fiction much more than the boys do; if you don't like this 'generalization', then think in terms of distributions.
Ghaaaaa, this is moronic. Once again you're pretending that vague social trends are rooted into genetics.
> Amazon 'gets it' on this point and aims their Kindle reader at women who want to read fiction.
Funnily, my impression is that the Kindle mostly appeals to geeks; or at least they're the one talking about it.
Too bad, at times you made some interesting posts but this thread is saddening.
You STILL fail to 'get it' on "helping people". I gave the example of social work for the needy. More generally the 'reason' is to hope to get security from praise from the community for the 'good' work done. The work is commonly close to non-profit, charity, or volunteer work. It's all heavily about getting support from a group instead of being self-reliant. Yes, it can be a form of dependency (if I discuss dependency emotions in women, some posters in this thread will form a lynch mob at my house).
In particular, the motivations for "helping people" are heavily emotional. The motivation is very common and strong in women of Western European, Christian descent. If you look, you can see this situation: It's VERY strong. If you don't see it, then your ability to understand women will be seriously limited.
You can try to explain the situation as nature or nurture, but I come down on the side of nature and really regard the nurture role as a result of the nature effect in earlier generations.
Your point about the mental health profession is off: The psychiatrists are heavily men because the field requires a lot of training after an MD.
However, psychological counseling requires much less training and is heavily women.
Also women are heavy users of both because their emotions strongly conflict with much of our society outside of a traditional home. One of the main causes of the emotional problems is anxiety, and that is four times more common in women than men with a guess that somehow such anxiety, which essentially incapacitates women for essentially anything except getting pregnant, has had reproductive advantage. For a reference with the factor of four and the guess about reproductive advantage, see:
David V. Sheehan, M.D., 'The Anxiety Disease', ISBN 0-553-25568-1.
You are angry at what I wrote, and a guess is that you see unfairness. So, you are doing what E. Fromm explained from the French Revolution: You are seeing any difference as evidence of something unfair, and that brings anger.
You should think carefully about Fromm's resolution: "Men and women deserve equal respect as persons but are not the same.". There's another such remark, "In our society, women are treated as privileged characters." They are: At the Titanic, they got the lion's share of spaces on the lifeboats. Our society regards women and especially girls as needing and deserving special protection.
If a girl gets kidnapped, then the whole US media run headlines for weeks. If a boy gets kidnapped, then the media ignores the story, and eventually the kidnappers write the parents a 'ransom note': "Send $5000 or we will return your boy."
So, just why do women want careers that have "human to human contact"? Because from at least 18 months on, human females are MUCH more talented at 'social interactions' and much more highly motivated for social interactions and for getting praise, acceptance, and approval from other people and groups. Broadly their strong 'instinct' is that their security depends on their getting approval from many other people, especially in their community.
So, they seek and excel at careers that have "human to human" contact. Then, careers (outside of K-12 teaching) in math, physical science, engineering, technology, and computing are seen as 'cold and harsh' in the sense of human emotions and missing an important role for human to human contact. Also these fields have essentially no contact with the goal of "helping people" as I have explained this goal. So, that's why women will likely be uncomfortable in such careers. Can they actually do the work, that is, do they have the 'rational' ability? Commonly, yes. So, what blocks them is the 'emotional environment' (context, content, however you want to put it) and not 'ability' in a narrow sense. So, again, for the women, rational ability is just NOT enough, and it is just crucial also to consider their emotions. For men, the assumption is that they control, throttle, or suppress their emotions: So, they can be in a foxhole in a jungle, knee deep in water, snakes all around, explosions going off nearby, and bullets going by less than one foot above their head, and still supposed to stay 'rational' and fully effective. They are not supposed to be "a nervous Nellie who breaks ranks and runs" (LBJ).
Might it be possible to teach middle school girls C, Java, Visual Basic, or some such? Sure. Will they do well? Sure. Why? Because the girls are highly motivated to appear to be 'good' in front of others. But all along they will suspect that they will not have a career in such work. They will hear this strongly from older women they trust. Then in college for their major for their career direction (outside of K-12 teaching), they will not like computer science. And THAT'S the clear, short, solid answer to the question of this thread.
Hmm, it saddens me to see people actually expressing opinions like this in a way that appears authoritative. I don't claim to be expert in many things; but observing people is definitely a skill I have pride in and, empirically, you are wrong.
Well, not so much wrong as massively over simplifying a complex psychology. It seems to boil down to "girls are mad", which is not necessarily something I would disagree with at 2pm on a Sunday when we just have to see another dress shop... but when talking I do think it is just a mistake.
I see a lot of this; I think it is often born out of the fact that some of the more high profile CS women tend to be kooky or off the wall which introduces an accidental observation bias.
one of the strongest emotions of women.. ..is to have a career that "helps people", and biomedical careers seem to qualify
Nah, this is just a stereotype. It is born out of the stereotype that the female oriented jobs all tend to be inclined in that way; female oriented jobs are historically non-academic, practical and not usually physically taxing. This is due to historical prejudice against female ability.
There is no evidence of a greater "sharing caring" mentality in the female psych compared to men.
With 'feminism', some enormously talented and determined girls as high school seniors believed "Women don't have to just be cared for. Women and do things, too.", made terrific grades in college and let that reinforce their belief, charged into 'male' careers, and paid a very high price in lack of children, busted marriages, and sometimes even their lives, literally. "It's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature."
That's just what they dramatize on TV. Top tip; don't learn psychology/sociology from TV, they thrive on mild prejudices :)
The problem with such a theory is that you are looking at a portion of women entering traditionally male arenas; and you are actually looking at the failures. As with most things, you never really see the successes.
At present the Western European gene pool is likely in the most rapid change in the last 40,000 years because genes of women who are not just DETERMINED to be mommies are being pruned out. So, in another few generations, we will be left with women who are determined to be MOMMIES.
Studies please, that is an extraordinary claim. It puts breeding/nuturing ability against ability to have a "non-female" career, to the best of my knowledge that has never been studied. And I feel that identifying such a broad but simplistic link would be extremely hard...
Uh, sorry, but that the fraction is small need not be evidence of anything wrong.
Finally something rational! :) But there is a caveat; which is that it is not automatically evidence of a problem, but it may be the indicator to a problem (i.e. something that is restricting those women that do want to enter CS).
Generally, from a little after birth and for nearly all their lives, human females are MUCH more emotional than human males.
Studies show generally that this is untrue. Women tend to be more openly emotional and have lower thresholds for both being hurt and "getting over it". Whereas men have a higher threshold, and are emotional more in private, but when it hurts it damn well hurts for a long time. Simple statements like the one you make are classic observation bias.
One of a human female's strongest emotions is to get security from membership in, and praise, acceptance, and approval from, groups, especially groups of females about their own age.
True for people of any age, gender, race etc.
That is, they are 'herd animals'.
Snap.
I am not saying that your observations do not have a basis in fact; but they are polarised so far towards observation bias and general prejudices as to be incorrect.
Waffle about "Mother Nature", without even being able to define what that means, is just that; waffle. What you are really referring to is a complex mix of personal psychology, group psychology, social prejudices and social pressure. All of these things can and have changed; suggesting that it is biologically (or otherwise) impossible for women to be pre-disposed to CS is... misinformed :)
and with great excitement tries to explain it to a girl his age at, say, lunch
I work with kids of this age; particularly teaching them computer science stuff (and other engineerign topics). It'd be hilarious to see them talk about any (extra-curricular) subject with people not within that sphere of interest. This is not limited to computer science, people know not to bore others with their pet interest from a fairly early age. There is no special case for CS :)
and the girl regards the boy, and soon, all boys less then 2-6 years older than she, as at least 'socially' immature and, really, just immature
Hmm, not particularly true. This is the classic "older man" and protector bias, I believe it is disproved but don't actually have the studies to hand.
From my observation middle school girls on average "go" for boys in the same year or the year below. Those that aim higher in middle school are usually socially frowned at ("she's a slut" etc.), that is just my observation, but I bet it holds out generally.
Nonsense about Mother Nature, emotions and herd psychology just shows a miscomprehension of the subject. Make chauvinist? ;)
> Hmm, it saddens me to see people actually expressing opinions like this in a way that appears authoritative.
I was happy to read his opinion, it changes from the usual PC stuff, and the annoying uppercasing can be explained by the boldness of the claim: that Women are actually different than Men, in such a way that one of the result is they are less inclined to mess for hours, days, years with lines of computer language just to prove one theory of theirs.
As a side note, I am very annoyed when I read PC code like the boss "she", or alterning "he" and "she" in tech docs in fields where obviously the concerned people are 80% guys. In 50 years our readers will think we had problems with the reality and language: we seem to have forgotten that the language basically describes reality, it doesn't make it happen, except for those who believe in magic (hope not too many here are in this case).
Why is it wrong that occasionally manuals use a "she" to describe somebody? Is "she" an inherently wrong default position to take as opposed to "he"? Even if 4 out of 5 times it's a guy, why not suggest that perhaps it'll be a girl sometimes?
I personally use "they", because I'm a badass linguistic prescriptivist who's fine with using a neutral plural to indicate singular. But I don't see a problem with stopping the male singular from being the default. Language describes reality, but it also defines it; languages that assume maleness as a default suggest to its users that maleness is the superior form to take. I don't think it's a particularly devastating result of language, but I also don't think it's particularly annoying for women to ask that they not be diminished by the language. If it doesn't mean anything, why not just alternate it and not raise a fuss?
(I draw the line at stuff like "womyn", though, because that's when for me it becomes noticeably silly.)
I know it has been. But I don't agree that just because that's the tradition means we should go on with it. I see nothing wrong with using "she" as the default sometimes, and quite a few reasons why sticking to "he" might not be the best thing.
The only point I can think of, and which I tend to agree with, is that when you do it you make a big fuss about the gender of the person and that distracts from the actual content that you are writing about. So opponents of using "she" as the default sometimes may be simply annoyed that the author is, instead of just using the already established convention, breaking convention in a noticeable way that might distract from the real content of the document.
Language is nothing but but a traditional set of noises we make. You can decide to start calling coffee "fngelriu," but it's disingenuous then to act surprised when people think you're being deliberately obtuse.
>Nah, this is just a stereotype. It is born out of the stereotype that the female oriented jobs all tend to be inclined in that way; female oriented jobs are historically non-academic, practical and not usually physically taxing. This is due to historical prejudice against female ability.
Or arguably a historical prejudice against female expendability. Males are expendable - http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm (this comes up here quite frequently, you've probably seen it already).
Quoting that link:
"A second thing that makes men useful to culture is what I call male expendability. This goes back to what I said at the outset, that cultures tend to use men for the high-risk, high-payoff undertakings, where a significant portion of those will suffer bad outcomes ranging from having their time wasted, all the way to being killed."
Maybe I should have made my explanations even longer! You are failing to 'get it':
The stuff about "Mother Nature" is just an abbreviation for fundamental effects that are easy to see and seem fundamental but seem to have strong causes difficult to explain.
"I work with kids of this age; particularly teaching them computer science stuff (and other engineerign topics)."
We're not talking about really the same thing. What I am talking about is more fundamental in this discussion. Here I am drawing directly from Tannen, and she's right:
Okay, in my scenario, in middle school at lunch a boy, all excited about some technical topic he just learned, say, the TCP part of TCP/IP, tries to explain the topic to a girl. Likely he will not get a good reception for, say, four reasons:
(1) She's a girl, knows that she's a young women, and is reluctant to interact with males her age or older without a good reason. She has been warned by older women that such interactions have a tough tine being just casual because the male can easily start pursuing more. So, she is selective. Maybe if the boy is 1-2 years younger she will feel less threat and be more ready to be just friends.
(2) He's all fired up about the technical topic. Sorry, but boys have strong desires to master any technical topics around them that appear important. In part there is a lot of innate curiosity. Why? Exercise. Sorry: It's rare for girls to do that. For how an automobile differential works, there is something wrong when a boy is not wildly curious or when a girl cares at all unless, say, being able to give a description will get the her something else she wants, say, an A, and thus praise and approval from others, on a test in middle school general science.
(3) Females make connections with others, and more generally get acceptance in groups, by gossip where they express their feelings. Boys are taught to keep their feelings suppressed as in "How you feel about it is just irrelevant.". So, what the boy is trying to give the girl is not really girl gossip and, thus, is not liked by the girl.
(4) Males make connections by sharing information, especially, neat, cool, technical information. So, that is what the boy is trying to do. The girl doesn't give a weak little hollow hoot about technical information (for it's own sake).
Here (1) was your observation; for (2) I'll let you justify that yourself; (3) and (4) are directly from Tannen.
Lesson for girls who want to be more like boys in computer science:
You have heard about virtual memory. Now, any boy with any hope at all of liking Hacker News, will be eager beyond belief, and thrilled enough to jump out of his skin, for any even small bit of information about why virtual memory and how it works. When they get into page-segment tables, look-aside associative memory translation buffers, least recently used techniques, how I/O makes the virtual to real translations, and the shockingly low average execution time overhead, etc., then they will grow two feet taller instantly and have a "Eureka!" experience.
Similarly for closure in programming languages, binary search, the Gleason bound, the TCP part of TCP/IP, multi-protocol label switching (MPLS, used in the core and backbone of the Internet), and much more. They'd rather understand such stuff than eat, sleep, play sports, watch a movie, or sit in class. They really, really, really want to learn this stuff, all of it they can, whenever they can. The first time they get to see a tower case with the sides off will be one of the most exciting moments in their life.
Girls: If you want to do computing, go for it. It's clean, indoor work with no heavy lifting. Don't need gloves, masks, or special clothes. A computer for less than $1000, a good Internet connection, and a lot of time alone with the computer are a lot of what you need from the beginning into quite high competency.
To get to the "pay window" (JLM at AVC.com), right now you go to the head of the line, well ahead of all the boys with similar qualifications:
(1) The hottest thing in computing now is social media, and there in conceptualizing the opportunities the girls should be knocking the socks off the boys. Uh, much of Facebook, with over 500 million users and worth over $50 billion, is about gossip where boys can at best try to use a telescope from Mars to look at Venus. Larry Page just said that 99% of social search has yet to be done; so, what's in this 99% that would be good to do now?
(2) Learn how to bring up a corresponding Web site. The site will need some graphic design where girls are much better than the boys (25% of whom are partially red-green color blind and likely still draw both trees and people as stick figures). The site will need a good user interface and user experience (UI/UX), and here girls should totally knock the socks off the boys. The site will need some text, and, again, girls are much better at not just typing and spelling but at writing for emotional effect -- knock the socks off the boys. Still more important, girls are much better than the boys at writing and correctly estimating the reactions of others. E.g., I'm a man, here am just writing ideas, and clearly don't have even a clue about how others will react! Maybe I don't even care, but girls both care and know, and that's a big advantage.
(3) Once the site goes live, you will need to get some publicity: "I don't know if you know who runs that business, but I assure you it's not the Boy Scouts." (Dangerfield in Back to School). Neither is it the mafia, but it is women.
(4) Older men with big bucks tend very much to want to help women. No joke. Not just into bed or to be a Daddy Warbucks or Svengali. So, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, and Mark Suster have all been loud and clear on their blogs about how happy they are to fund women. May find much the same at KPCB and Sequoia. You are at the head of the line; the door is being held open for you. HP was thrilled to have Carly Fiorina and Patricia Dunn. Yahoo was thrilled to get Carol Bartz.
Sorry, but boys have strong desires to master any technical topics around them that appear important.
You kinda lost me at this point I am afraid; this is just entirely inaccurate. Certainly there is a prevelance in the male population for technical topics, but it is only a generality, most are averagely interested.
The young boy your describe would likely find little interest in most of the other boys, not just the girls :)
Females make connections with others, and more generally get acceptance in groups, by gossip where they express their feelings. Boys are taught to keep their feelings suppressed as in "How you feel about it is just irrelevant.". So, what the boy is trying to give the girl is not really girl gossip and, thus, is not liked by the girl.
Males make connections by sharing information, especially, neat, cool, technical information
Horribly simplistic analysis. Males mostly communicate via gossip too; which is the "neat, cool" part (you probably just don't see it as gossip, but it really is). The "technical information" is undeserving of it's equal share in that sentence - how often do you share technical information with your wider group of male friends. I chat about girls, life, politics, moans and whinges etc. no one would be interested in what I was programming earlier :)
She's a girl, knows that she's a young women, and is reluctant to interact with males her age or older without a good reason
Girls and boys do spend a lot of time apart at that age. But in groups they spend a lot of time together.
a girl cares at all unless, say, being able to give a description will get the her something else she wants, say, an A, and thus praise and approval from others, on a test in middle school general science.
This is just hilarious ;)
Conclusion: You will get boys such as you describe; but they will be in the vast vast minority, and their excitement is as boring to most of the boys as the girls. The reaction to them is not as simple as you make out, and says absolutely zero about the future careers, interests and motivations of females.
I feel you are over simplifying - and that is the main problem with your analysis.
A simple resolution for the question of this thread is easy:
For now, girls tend to pursue what girls do and know that computer science (CS) is for boys and not part of what girls do. So, girls try to avoid CS in college. When they try CS in college, mostly they don't like it.
Why don't they like it? Girls are (1) much more emotional than boys, (2) much more social, (3) eager to get praise, acceptance, and approval from others from work that "helps people" in the sense I explained (essentially volunteer work to help suffering people), e.g., one of the daughters of Bush 43 went to Ethiopia, and (4) better at, and more strongly seek, human to human contact.
So, on these criteria, girls see that CS is so detailed and technical it seems (1) emotionally cold, (2) not very social, (3) not good for work that "helps people", and (4) not good for human to human contact. So, many girls who try CS soon conclude that they don't like it.
For the future, girls who do not want to concentrate on being mommies, unlike for nearly all of history, will be able to so not concentrate and, thus, on average will be removing their genes from the gene pool. What will be left will be genes of women especially determined to be good as mommies and even less interested in CS.
You missed it with my:
"He's all fired up about the technical topic. Sorry, but boys have strong desires to master any technical topics around them that appear important. In part there is a lot of innate curiosity."
Then for my
"I'll let you justify that yourself"
you didn't!
The "technical topics" here are not yet nearly all that would be popular on Hacker News. Instead the topics are whatever are "around them" (the boys as they grow up). So, depending on what they see in their family, adults' careers, neighborhood, community, etc., the topics might be about cars, cattle raising, household electricity, operation of a commercial pizza oven, cardiology, roasting pastrami, trading foreign currencies, computing, etc.
Why? The usual explanation is that the boys know that they are small versions of men, that men take competency in their careers very seriously, that they, the boys, do not have such competency, feel vulnerable and out of control from the lack of competency, and, thus, as part of growing up into such competency are eager to soak up everything that is relevant they can. That's the standard explanation. Although you didn't 'get it' the first time I explained it, didn't work it out for yourself, I believe you can understand this point.
For whatever reasons, you are straining to disagree with what I wrote.
I remember a girl in the fifth grade: Her handwriting was good, and mine, as is common for boys at that age, was poor. So, she looked at my paper and said that she couldn't read it. So, I copied the paper again in block letters, and again she said she couldn't read it. I copied it again in larger, extremely clear block letters, and she gave the same answer. Of course, she was lying and having fun manipulating. You are doing much the same. Enjoy the games of fifth grade girls.
Of course, she was lying and having fun manipulating. You are doing much the same. Enjoy the games of fifth grade girls.
That's... a terrible piece of rhetoric... :(
I don't see how I can explain that what you are saying appears to be founded in stereotype and a lack of understanding. So, I guess the argument is over, except to say:
Don't overthink things, and don't oversimplify. Your point #3, for example, is based on so little fact and on so much on prejudice.
I actually think what you could have done is observed the somewhat socially inept computer geek stereotype; and extrapolated the direct opposite as "how girls are". There is a lot of commonality between male and female phsyc - and many differences.
At a young age both those extremes are amplified.
the topics might be about cars, cattle raising, household electricity, operation of a commercial pizza oven, cardiology, roasting pastrami, trading foreign currencies, computing, etc.
I encourage you to work with teenage boys and try to engage with them on topics like these. Nowadays it is not at all common to find a kid who has such interests; computer games, girls, sports and food (i.e. "gossip") are much more common.
will be able to so not concentrate and, thus, on average will be removing their genes from the gene pool
Essentially you are saying that... girls who do technical careers won't be as able (or be suited) to procreate and so future women will be genetically pre-disposed to motherhood?
Do you have any idea how genetics works, for a start? I'd love to read your work on isolating the genes related to good motherhood and proficiency in technical topics and your research into how they interrelate within the population... ;)
Why? The usual explanation is that the boys know that they are small versions of men, that men take competency in their careers very seriously, that they, the boys, do not have such competency, feel vulnerable and out of control from the lack of competency, and, thus, as part of growing up into such competency are eager to soak up everything that is relevant they can. That's the standard explanation. Although you didn't 'get it' the first time I explained it, didn't work it out for yourself, I believe you can understand this point.
Standard explanation? Really? Find me a kid that, at age 15, is concerned about his competency in relation to a future career. Now, I could agree they would be concerned about competency in areas their social peers are strong; say football.
In fact; I will make it easier. Find me some peer reviewed material that identifies this as a standard explanation
For whatever reasons, you are straining to disagree with what I wrote.
It's really not hard :) although we seem to have gotten off track from the main topic, which I thought was your theory of little girls being pre-disposed to sharing & caring and not interested in technical topics because of genetics.
You REALLY don't get it and strain to misconstrue and misunderstand.
"That's... a terrible piece of rhetoric... :("
Huh?
You wrote:
"I don't see how I can explain that what you are saying appears to be founded in stereotype and a lack of understanding."
No: The crucial point is that I have and am presenting a lot of "understanding". Neglecting what I'm saying will bring large risks in dealing with human females, especially in the US now.
"Stereotype" argues neither for nor against anything; broadly some stereotypes are accurate and some are not. I argued everything based on simple facts, observations, and references and never mentioned anything about stereotypes; e.g., I never claimed that something was true because many people believe it is true.
"Your point #3, for example, is based on so little fact and on so much on prejudice."
By "#3" apparently you mean my
"{Girls are] (3) eager to get praise, acceptance, and approval from others from work that "helps people" in the sense I explained (essentially volunteer work to help suffering people), e.g., one of the daughters of Bush 43 went to Ethiopia,"
I will omit the many, overwhelmingly strong examples from my own life.
"Well, I would have kids and stay at home and take care of them. As they grew up, I would love to work more with the catholic church, because that means a lot to me."
So, what is Jim Simons doing? Uh, he's a bright guy, quite a good mathematician, e.g., as in the Chern-Simons result in differential geometry and useful in theoretical physics, and the most successful hedge fund manager in all of history and commonly paid himself $2 billion a year. Can get his story in his autobiographical lecture he recently gave at MIT at
The guy who introduced him is I. Singer of Atiyah-Singer index result, one of the best results of 20th century math; Singer was an informal Ph.D. advisor for Simons!
So there in the audience was his pretty wife, maybe half his age, and running their charitable foundation.
Melinda Gates? Is there any doubt in your mind that she is the one getting Bill to devote his time to charity? They have three kids; with the family wealth, they face some special challenges; they could use a lot of attention from both parents; all this emphasis on charity is too much time away from attention on their kids. So, at least Melinda is so interested in "helping people" that she is essentially neglecting her own children. Why? She wants praise, acceptance, and approval from the public even if she neglects her children and even her husband and has him neglect his business (Microsoft needs him to return to the CEO slot). She's determined to save the world super big time. This ain't a small thing.
Laura Bush? Sure: Devoting her time to charity. And, as I mentioned, one of her daughters is in Ethiopia doing the same. Instead, Laura should be devoting her time to her husband, to getting the daughter in Ethiopia a good husband, and being a good grandmother for the children of her married daughter. So, again, save the world super big time and neglect own husband and children. This ain't a small thing.
That women want to pursue volunteer work, i.e., charity work, that "helps people" is a rock solid part of a large fraction of women, especially Christian women of Western European descent in the US, especially if they have the financial means, and too often even if they do not.
Here we can use Hollywood: Part of what they have to do is present believable images. Well, in the girl's movie Samantha: An American Girl Holiday the mother devotes her time to charity and is in a woman's club also crucial for her work in charity. Seeing this, the grandmother asks if she can help.
The husband? He's clueless and uninvolved in charity. He is, however, very interested in the adoption in the story while his wife mostly is not. So, she's more interested in saving the world than being a parent (and the adopted daughters very much need some good mothering), and he is more interested in being a parent than she is. Again, it ain't a small thing.
Even the series of Legally Blond of chick-flicks has her give up her law job, shoot her law career in the knees, leave the town of her new boyfriend, and rush off to a staff job in Congress to help society by saving puppies used for testing cosmetics. She is so focused on helping society that she has her boyfriend, for the second time, bust his law career to join her in DC. So his role is to follow her from city to city as she runs around helping society, largely ignoring him, and being wildly irresponsible financially. Seen that, too often.
The leadership of the American Red Cross -- women who want to "help people".
It's as plain as the difference between boys with short hair and girls with long hair. If you can't see this, then you are obtuse about society and women.
Again, this urge to "help people" is commonly stronger than paid career, and even marriage, parenting, and financial responsibility. It ain't small, and you fail to see any of it.
For this point about women, there is no "prejudice" at all: Any man who fails to get it on this point is just oblivious and at high risk of making big mistakes about women.
You wrote:
"I actually think what you could have done is observed the somewhat socially inept computer geek stereotype; and extrapolated the direct opposite as 'how girls are'."
You are attacking the messenger, not the message. And, the short answer is, you are wildly wrong. That's not even close to what happened.
I wrote:
" ... the topics might be about cars, cattle raising, household electricity, operation of a commercial pizza oven, cardiology, roasting pastrami, trading foreign currencies, computing, etc."
and you responded:
"I encourage you to work with teenage boys and try to engage with them on topics like these. Nowadays it is not at all common to find a kid who has such interests; computer games, girls, sports and food (i.e. 'gossip') are much more common."
Here you are showing that you are getting a D- in basic reading comprehension. You totally misunderstood the statement. Totally.
Again, and I won't take the time to count the times, I repeated that boys get interested in the technical topics that are "around them" and appear to be important and wrote:
"Sorry, but boys have strong desires to master any technical topics around them that appear important."
So, then, sure, my:
" ... the topics might be about cars, cattle raising, household electricity, operation of a commercial pizza oven, cardiology, roasting pastrami, trading foreign currencies, computing, etc."
is rock solidly correct.
So, your:
"I encourage you to work with teenage boys and try to engage with them on topics like these."
What? You didn't read what I wrote. You are confused.
Again, if you will read, of course, nearly no teenage boys will be interested in
"roasting pastrami"
because that topic is not "around them". But if their father runs a deli, then that topic will be "around them" and will be fully obviously important to the family finances, and, thus, the boy will likely be very interested in it. E.g., if the boy is working in his father's deli to get money for his first car so he can take out his girlfriend, then he can be very interested in
"roasting pastrami".
His sister? If his mother works in the deli, maybe his sister will be interested in the part of the deli the mother works in. If the mother doesn't work in the deli, then the sister likely won't care at all about
"roasting pastrami".
So, the boy is interested in career competency as illustrated by his father, and his sister isn't.
My point is general: Again, again, again, again, again, the boys will be very interested in WHATEVER technical topics that are around them and appear to be important from their family, community, etc.
Got it now? Need it explained seven more times?
Your D- in reading comprehension makes this exchange hopeless.
Again, and I won't take the time to count the times, I repeated that boys get interested in the technical topics that are "around them" and appear to be important and wrote:
I read it.
You are totally wrong. (how many times do I have to say that ;))
Hence my suggestion for you to try and observe this apparent phenomena. Bottom line is; you will struggle to.
I grew up with my Dad in the RAF; but have absolutely zero interest in planes. I could cite similar examples ad-infinitum. I honestly challenge you to find teenage boys that have an absorbing interest in the technical aspects of their dad's job - sure, you will fine some, but a minority.
It's as plain as the difference between boys with short hair and girls with long hair. If you can't see this, then you are obtuse about society and women.
Is this also down to genetics (random irony; I have longer hair than most of the girls I know :))? Or do you think it might be to do with social/historical situation?
Even the series of Legally Blond of chick-flicks...
Seriously? You are using a film to demonstrate your point? Seeing as that film series is a classic example of female stereotype it probably says much that you see a general point in it.
Neglecting what I'm saying will bring large risks in dealing with human females, especially in the US now.
I think I am doing ok :) but thanks for the concern.
Basically; your claims about women being genetically pre-disposed against technical topics (and towards "caring/sharing" careers) is, despite the bluster on other tangential topics and terrible examples, complete crap and not something you could begin to support with reasonable evidence.
To return to the original point: the barriers to women in technology are almost all social and psychological, not genetic.
And all the guff about women being like this and that seems representative of reading some pop psychology without going any further (I recommend reading something good on social interaction, one that looks at the similarities in gender groups)
Hilbert, I'm sure that you mean well and I mean this with no disrespect to you at all, but you're making statements that're unpleasant and bordering on outright offensive.
Statements like:
> Women are attracted to biomedical careers due to the role of human to human contact; generally women seek careers with such contact.
ignore the fact that our emotional patterns are not tied directly to our genders. Social/antisocial patterns are not strictly female/male patterns. I know plenty of wonderful women who are antisocial and dislike direct contact with lots of people; I know plenty of guys who are sympathetic and warm and caring. It does not do you well to make such generalized statements about complex subjects.
Paragraphs like:
> With 'feminism', some enormously talented and determined girls as high school seniors believed "Women don't have to just be cared for. Women and do things, too.", made terrific grades in college and let that reinforce their belief, charged into 'male' careers, and paid a very high price in lack of children, busted marriages, and sometimes even their lives, literally. "It's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature.".
are bordering on downvote-worthy. Are you really suggesting that women can't handle male careers? Really? Are we living in the seventies still? Because last time I checked we had a handful of women CEOs proving they could run Fortune 500 companies. I'm pretty sure some of those CEOs are happily married and have families. Sure, the male-to-female ratio is heavily imbalanced, but that's because women are fighting against centuries of irrational bias against their gender. Irrational bias that statements like yours don't help whatsoever.
For what it's worth, my mother has been a corporate executive at AT&T since before I was born, and she managed to be an excellent mother to me and my brother. So if you're going to say things like:
> that women can do as well as men in any field where their 'rational' abilities seem to permit is a big, HUGE mistake
then you are insulting not just an entire gender in general, but my mother in specific, and I'll ask that you meet me at dawn with your pistol loaded.
Finally:
> So, in another few generations, we will be left with women who are determined to be MOMMIES.
This is really, really, really stupid. Your argument only holds water if you think that "wanting to be a mommy" is a genetic trait, that women are born either wanting kids or not wanting them. While there is a biological impulse towards maternity, the fact is that career aspirations are social traits, inherited more from society than from genetics. Just because a girl is born to a woman who wanted to be a mother — and let's pause for a minute to note how absurd it is that you'd say that; literally every girl is born to a woman who wanted to be a mother — doesn't mean that she won't decide she wants to get a job before eventually settling down, or maybe that she doesn't want to settle down at all. In fact, this is more likely the more permitting society becomes of women in the workplace, because working will seem less and less unfeminine the more it's shown that women can hold their own.
There are more women working now than were working a hundred years ago. Did women somehow evolve? Of course not. Society evolved. And society is continuing in the direction of affording women equality. Your attempts to study women like they're simply a byproduct of their genetics ignores what's actually happened in the last century.
>ignore the fact that our emotional patterns are not tied directly to our genders. Social/antisocial patterns are not strictly female/male patterns. I know plenty of wonderful women who are antisocial and dislike direct contact with lots of people;
Why is it so hard to accept that biological sex can and does have a strong affect on emotional patterns? Testosterone and estrogen are the driving hormones behind our sex differences. It's a fact that testosterone affects aggression. So why is this so hard to accept?
Of course there are going to be outliers, but anecdotes do not disprove the general trend.
>are bordering on downvote-worthy. Are you really suggesting that women can't handle male careers? Really? Are we living in the seventies still?
Again, you're countering his assertion with an anecdote. It's wonderful that your mother was able to balance both, but that doesn't counter the apparent correlation with women's increasing career aspirations and the breakdown of traditional families. This isn't being sexist, it's being honest.
>This is really, really, really stupid. Your argument only holds water if you think that "wanting to be a mommy" is a genetic trait, that women are born either wanting kids or not wanting them.
You're missing the spectrum in between. You're right that career aspirations are social traits, but ambition in general is likely strongly rooted in genetics. So the question is does one outweigh the other in a particular individual. While his conclusion is a major leap, it's not without a semblance of reason.
This is the problem with discussions like these. Any non-PC point of view gets immediately shot down and accusations of sexism fly. If we truly want to get at the root cause of the imbalance, we must be able to ask the tough questions that might have uncomfortable answers.
> It's wonderful that your mother was able to balance both, but that doesn't counter the apparent correlation with women's increasing career aspirations and the breakdown of traditional families. This isn't being sexist, it's being honest.
I don't think you're being sexist. I do think that your line of thought is completely wrong. The breakdown of traditional families is correlated with the breakdown of traditional gender roles, but this is not not NOT because working makes it hard for a woman to raise children. Rather, it's because women, given the choice to defy their traditional roles, have also decided frequently that they don't like the traditional family model and have chosen other lifestyles.
Carly Fiorina, for all I loathe her politically, was a powerful woman in the businessplace for two decades. And she's been married to the same man since 1985, and raised two stepdaughters. Meg Whitman too has been married for a long time and raised two children. The point is not that the traditional family model hasn't suffered. It's that the root of its suffering isn't that women are finding it hard to be emotionally available because all of a sudden they have jobs.
> This is the problem with discussions like these. Any non-PC point of view gets immediately shot down and accusations of sexism fly. If we truly want to get at the root cause of the imbalance, we must be able to ask the tough questions that might have uncomfortable answers.
I agree with you that there are uncomfortable answers! But I think that the uncomfortable answer is uncomfortable in the exact opposite of the direction you're going.
I don't think that the biggest problem in this discussion is that women are somehow genetically incapable of keeping up, because I know many women who can keep up and even surpass men at this. I think the biggest, most uncomfortable problem here is that vast swatches of our society are so wretchedly sexist that men have a hard time seeing just how difficult it is for women. We assume that we are in fact living in a post-sexism world, and that everybody is equal, when in fact we have decades and decades to go before women are truly seen as equals in society. And I'm not somehow exempt from this, by the way; it's been a process of literally years of talking to women and slowly realizing just how shitty they've got it.
Jean Hsu here is just one of hundreds of women whose stories have forced me to accept that while we might have a more equal society than history has ever seen before, that does not mean we are as equal as we ought to be. The status quo is still unfortunately sexist, and while one day perhaps we will get to the point where we can honestly assess the differences between men and woman, the conclusion we draw will not be that women simply can't do these things that we claim they can't do. The fact that we're arguing that right now is proof that we still have grossly distorted views of what an entire sex is capable of.
It's not that I'm calling you specifically sexist, hackinthebochs. And I apologize if I ever made it seem like that. But the society we both live in is profoundly sexist, in ways we don't even recognize, and so a lot of the arguments to be made about how it's okay that women have experiences like this are rooted in logic that's as sexist as it is commonly accepted. Does that make sense?
>Carly Fiorina, for all I loathe her politically, was a powerful woman in the businessplace for two decades. And she's been married to the same man since 1985, and raised two stepdaughters. Meg Whitman too has been married for a long time and raised two children. The point is not that the traditional family model hasn't suffered. It's that the root of its suffering isn't that women are finding it hard to be emotionally available because all of a sudden they have jobs.
Your anecdotes don't lead in the direction of your conclusion that "women are [not] finding it hard to be emotionally available". Carly Fiorina I'm sure found it hard to be "emotionally available" when her step-kids needed comforting and she was in a board meeting. See http://web.archive.org/web/20071101051517/http://www.careerj... for example which strongly suggests that her husband Frank's retirement enabled her.
I'm of the opinion you can't have it both ways. Either kids or work in almost every situation one will get marginalised.
>the conclusion we draw will not be that women simply can't do these things that we claim they can't do
Can women scratch their own balls? I'll answer for you - no they don't have any (in general), despite how equal you want things to be that isn't going to change. Men and women are different.
>The fact that we're arguing that right now is proof that we still have grossly distorted views of what an entire sex is capable of.
You're talking about capability but I think you're looking at the wrong thing. The reason there are less off one sex in traditional roles of the other sex is little to do with assumptions about capability IMO. IMO it's about desire of individuals to do those roles as much as anything.
> [...] our emotional patterns are not tied directly to our genders.
Of course they are. Gender has a direct effect on one's emotional patterns. (Direct effect does not mean only effect, by the way.) Depending on whether you have XX or XY chromosomes (or some other combination), you will grow up with different organs in your body and different hormones in your blood. Such things define your gender, and they directly effect the emotions you experience.
As an example, men are prone to wanting to engage in pistol duels at dawn over minor quibbles.
> ignore the fact that our emotional patterns are not tied
> directly to our genders
It's a fact? Source?
> I know plenty of <…>
> It does not do you well to make such generalized
> statements about complex subjects.
Indeed. You knowing someone is not exactly a science.
> Your argument only holds water if you think that "wanting to be a mommy" is a genetic
>trait,
Oh, it is not? That's interesting.
> that women are born either wanting kids or not wanting them. While there is a
> biological impulse towards maternity, the fact is that career aspirations are social
> traits, inherited more from society than from genetics
And I wonder, why nobody is fighting horrible inequality in numbers of women giving birth compared to those of males.
The question is rather, "Why is female enrollment in computer science dropping, while things like, say, organic chemistry graduate more women than men?"
Your argument implies two fatally flawed notions: That gender roles are static. Obviously they're not. 50 years ago women didn't become doctors, because that was man stuff. The other is that girls avoid the hard boy stuff because it's not very girly. But it's specifically in engineering, physics and CS that there's such a huge gap. It's for the most part not there in biology, chemistry and mathematics.