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[return to "Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies"]
1. tptace+Ti[view] [source] 2018-02-15 13:24:51
>>andren+(OP)
Once again: compared to other STEM fields, women participate less in CS than any other field except physics. By double digits percentage more in mathematics PhDs. Statistics is almost 50/50. Several rigorous earth sciences fields --- chem and biochem, for instance --- have 50% or greater female participation.

One thing all these fields have in common is that they are more intellectually rigorous and harder to succeed in than the computer software industry.

Clearly, they have something else in common. We just need to figure out what it is.

This essay, which invokes the "Google Memo", is subtly attacking a straw man. Even those almost the entire rest of STEM is better than CS, it's true that it's not balanced; it remains deeply imperfect. Physics and mechanical engineering, clustered with CS, remain the province of men. There's a expanse of STEM fields with female participation between 25-40% that you'd want to explain or correct. Is it stereotype threat? Implicit bias? Who knows? Probably not?

But that has nothing to do with why Google has so few women engineers. The work that a commercial software engineer does --- even at the lofty heights in which the profession is practiced in such a cathedral of software design as the Alphabet Corporation --- is simply not that hard; most of it is just wiring form fields to databases in new and exciting ways.

Whatever is holding women's participation in our field at or below twenty percent is artificial, and a travesty.

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2. aws_ls+To[view] [source] 2018-02-15 14:23:12
>>tptace+Ti
>most of it is just wiring form fields to databases in new and exciting ways

Not commenting on other points, but may be you are looking at it from an angle of an expert who has mastered it, so everything looks trivial. As, clearly its much more than that. It is like building extension for machines - the brains and the controls and also pure information management. That's why projects run into millions of lines of code. And the complexity is still growing, as we have new fields like ML emerging on top of it.

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3. Cthulh+ru[view] [source] 2018-02-15 15:00:02
>>aws_ls+To
I think one important thing that is easily overlooked is that while the technical part of wiring form fields to databases is something a lot of people do (and can trivialise), all of the processes behind it - what to put in, and where it fits in with the domain of the application and company, is probably the harder part. If that makes any sense.

Technical implementation details vs the big picture / domain.

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