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Tech's Gender and Race Gap Starts In High School
An anonymous reader writes "Diversifying the tech industry is a prominent topic these days, with much analysis being done on colleges and companies that employ software engineers. But exam data shows the gap is created much earlier — it's almost overwhelming even before kids get out of high school. From the article: 'Ericson's analysis of the data shows that in 2013, 18 percent of the students who took the exam were women. Eight percent were Hispanic, and four percent were African-American. In contrast, Latinos make up 22 percent of the school-age population in the U.S.; African-Americans make up 14 percent. (I don't need to tell you that women make up about half.) There are some states where not a single member of one of these groups took the test last year. No women in Mississippi or Montana took it. Seven states had no Hispanic students take the exam: Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, and North Dakota. And 10 states had no Black students take the exam: Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Utah. In some of these states, there simply aren't many students of any race or gender taking the test, which helps explain the dearth of young women and minorities. (Indeed, no women or minorities took the exam in Wyoming—but that's because no students at all took it.) But Idaho had nearly 50 students taking it, and Utah had more than 100.'"
This is a sticky issue but there are differences between men and women.
Anthropologists and neurologists have been proving this for some time.
Now I am not saying women are not capable of doing the work. Rather, they don't want to do it or don't find it interesting. And yes, there are exceptions but statistically most women simply don't want to do technical work. Its not what makes them happy.
What is more, why are we so hyper obessessed about the gender gap in these fields? What about the lack of female lumber jacks or female coal miners or female crab fishers?
I'm sorry, but why is it that they only care about jobs considered high status? And really, is tech even high status at this point? Oh sure, there are some extremely well paid positions in that industry but there are also a lot that pay nothing. Its a range.
And while we're at it, lets point out that the start ups were by and large set up by collections of interested young men that started out with NOTHING.
Nothing is stopping women from doing the same thing but generally speaking they don't do it. They're not the sort to drop out of college, start some crazy company with some friends, and risk everything to make a go of it in one thing or another. They just aren't wired that way. And to be honest, most men aren't wired that way either.
Statistically some men are... and while some women are... its a tiny percentage.
In any case, this gender gap argument is bullshit and needs to get filed as legacy women's lib bullcrap.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
My question, very much in general, and not to troll, is: at what point people just get to do what they fancy?
If you treat education like a cup of coffee, you might be more pleased with the results.
Because education isn't about personal gain anymore. It's a business. Period. And you've become nothing more than a number. Not even a student number, just a number buried in a statistical pile somewhere that states exactly what you should expect to achieve with your over-analyzed degree over the next 50 years, to include your chances of getting married, having children, or your expectant salary down to the dollar, adjusted for your zip code.
Statistics. That unforgiving bitch no one asked to be invited that tries to manipulate all of our lives. I kind of feel bad for women here to be honest. After all, it's clear that they don't have interest in certain fields, and yet we're berating them into it with pointless statististics. Fuck that. Do what you WANT in life. You only get one shot at it, and statistics are often dead fucking wrong due to personal choice and the chaos that ensues.
If it were hormones, shouldn't the effect be very consistent across nations and states?
Looking at stats for high-school courses in my country, Australia, only 7% of the people who did software design the HSC were women, whereas in the US it's 20%. Do American women have less female sex hormones than Australian women? How come 29% of participants were female in Tennessee but only 3% in Utah? Are women from Utah ten times more feminine than women from Tennessee?
According to the UK GCSE results, 40% of the 53,000 UK students who did ICT in 2012 were female, and they achieved a higher average grade than their male counterparts. If hormones were the deciding factor, British girls ought to be growing beards. (Source: www.jcq.org.uk/Download/examination-results/gcses/gcse)
Since the results are so inconsistent between what ought to be hormonally similar groups, I think we can safely dismiss hormones as the primary factor. The difference in culture between the various states and nations is much better at accounting for the massive variability in female enrollment in computing courses.