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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. Cthulh+7u[view] [source] 2018-02-15 14:58:26
>>tptace+Ti
> Whatever is holding women's participation in our field at or below twenty percent is artificial, and a travesty.

Or just natural. I mean there's gender imbalance in most careers, as is also mentioned in that article; there's just less attention being paid to e.g. the gender difference in day cares (which is in part due to people's preferences in lines of work, but in that particular area a very clear case of gender discrimination and stereotyping)

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3. collyw+jz[view] [source] 2018-02-15 15:31:48
>>Cthulh+7u
yes, does the OP feel the same about the percentage of males females in jail?
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4. tptace+wK1[view] [source] 2018-02-16 01:56:29
>>collyw+jz
At this point I can't tell what you're trying to pin me to, but just to be clear: no, I do not think there is an innate difference between men and women that is the cause of male mass incarceration. I believe there are profound cultural forces that create that result.
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