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.'"

Comments

Women make up more than half

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

(I don't need to tell you that women make up about half.)

Actually girls graduate at a higher rate than boys both in college and in high school. So they make up more than half the graduates.

In other news

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Gender and culture start early in life, and continue through life. More on this when we talk about how women dominate professions which require high empathy and social skills.

Re:In other news

[wisnoskij]

Empathy is slightly off, in fact the positions you are talking about often like lower empathy. You are talking about a good ability to read emotions/people, like a sociopath.

Sales,HR, etc and the like. Interacting with people, but most of the time not looking out for their best interests.

In my opinion, of what little real evidence there is, it points to men being the empathetic gender.

1. We know that the number one creator of empathy in children is time with their father.
2. Women and girls are simply not known to be caring. See high-school girls (what is the first thing that pops into your mind: caring or mean and spiteful).
3. See every female animal with a cub ever, who are known as the most cold blooded killers out there.

Re:In other news

[just_a_monkey]

1. We know that the number one creator of empathy in children is time with their father.

How do we know that?

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

1. We know that the number one creator of empathy in children is time with their father.

How do we know that?

Since you asked, here's a citation backing up the GP's assertion: A Qualitative Analysis of the Parental Influence on Psychoemotional Empathy Generation in Juvenile Female Homo Sapiens Sapiens

Re:In other news

[Fwipp]

"Ladies are sociopaths"
Modded +3.

Oh, slashdot.

Re:In other news

[Velex]

Too bad it's not untrue.

An eye-opening experience for me was a co-worker I had a while back. She was kind, hard-working, and fair. She wasn't afraid to let me know when I was wrong about something and she didn't fly off the handle when I told her she was wrong about something. Then again, I don't recall many times other than when she was new that I had to let her know her perception of how something worked wasn't accurate.

Unfortunately, she get pulled down by the drama and decided to find another job.

It must be difficult working as a woman. Every other woman sees you as a target, somebody to claw down. The heartbreaking thing is watching this happen to somebody, watching things that are wrong and things that aren't even wrong or are sheer lunacy get thrown around just to smear somebody. Sometimes when it gets really bad I'll see things like official documentation get surreptitiously screwed with. One thing one has to be careful about in a workplace that's dominated by womyn-born-womyn is when one woman asks you to make one change to some software and then another woman asks you to make a very similar but different change.

Hoo boy, I've learned attempting to reconcile the two individuals requesting different things from me is a complete mistake when they're both womyn-born-womyn. I have a feeling that's what got the co-worker I liked working with in over her head. The most frustrating thing is that attempting to bring this to the attention of both individuals invariably is seen as picking sides. Sure, guys do this from time to time (just like having a vagina does not make one above sexism, having a penis does not make one above pettiness), but with a womyn-born-womyn you can count on it. It's not honest, but I've found the best way is to work through each nuance of the request, implement the parts of each that seem most correct, and then just tell both requesters it's all set. I don't know if they ever go back to check if I did what they asked, but the important point to a lot of womyn-born-womyn is that you were asked to do something so you did it without involving them in the details.

It's not important to be objectively correct to womyn-born-womyn. They have other priorities, values, and ways of knowing. There's a lot of what that article calls "Subjective Knowledge: The inner voice" going on. Unfortunately that "way of knowing" simply doesn't lend to success when you're writing a computer program. For many womyn-born-womyn, it's just simply unimportant to move to another "way of knowing," and why should they? What benefit would using "Procedural Knowledge: Separate and connected knowing" or "Constructed Knowledge: Integrating the voices" that incorporate both personal subjective knowledge and external objective knowledge have to a Mother?

That I think is a big problem. I cannot have children, and being trans I also have no family or any other way to influence a child with a reproductive system on the inside to have other aspirations than getting rich in sales or medicine or being Mother. Instead, it seems they continue to be influenced by Mothers and the increasingly womyn-born-womyn dominated elementary school.

The only solution I can think of is that we have to stop giving entitlement benefits to womyn-born-womyn solely on the basis that they got themselves pregnant. Require them to have a career or some other way to support a family before they choose Mother. Unfortunately, I think a lot of womyn-born-womyn would continue to limit themselves to being a Mother, but at least maybe they'd just be a lower-case mother and there might be a father involved instead of wage garnishment.

I look at you cisgendered people, and a lot of times I'm at a loss for many of the ways objectivity goes out the window when it comes to gender. Do I want women "back in the kitchen?" No, but I struggle to see any other outcome as long as all we do is blame anyone and everyone assigned the male ge

oh no!

[ganjadude]

Kids who are not interested in XXX dont do XXX when they get out of high school! Also, water is wet

This is the AP Comp Sci exam

[smittyoneeach]

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.

Re:This is the AP Comp Sci exam

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:This is the AP Comp Sci exam

[ebno-10db]

Statistics. That unforgiving bitch no one asked to be invited that tries to manipulate all of our lives.

Statistics don't manipulate people - people manipulate people.

Seriously. I wish more people understood more about statistics, in particular their elementary application, because that would avoid much of what you're talking about. If nothing else beat into their heads two basic points. First, correlation does not demonstrate correlation. Most people here have heard that a thousand times, but it's not widely appreciated in the general population. Second, statistical behavior is not deterministic. That's the ultimate "duh, no kidding", but it's usually unappreciated. If person A belongs to group G, P(success|G) < P(success|!G), it doesn't determine whether person A will succeed.

"Lies, damn lies, and statistics" only applies to people who don't understand statistics and their application.

Re:This is the AP Comp Sci exam

[jafiwam]

People don't know what "correlation" and "causation" mean in the first place.

Let alone used together.

Re:This is the AP Comp Sci exam

[NicBenjamin]

From your word choices I will make the entirely stereotypical and somewhat racist assumption that you're a Brit.

Would you be cool with it if the only 18-year-old kids in Scotland who evinced an interest in one of the most lucrative career fields were the children/grandchildren of peers? Would you just be like "I guess the commoners like working for McDonald's?" Or "I guess Irish Catholics don't enjoy tech work." Because that's pretty much exactly what's happening here. The people who ran the country (and, in fact, who created the country specifically for their own benefit) were white men. We've fixed most of the worst problems, now we really pride ourselves on America's ability take anybody (that "Give us your poor" poem on the Statue of Liberty was always jingoistic BS, but that doesn't mean we don't think it should be true) whose willing to work and make them wealthy.

Tech is the career field that is most likely to take you from loser to Millionaire before your 30th birthday. And only the old nobility is taking advantage of it. Therefore everyone else wants to know why. Your explanation ("Black people and women just don't like tech work") works at a logical level, but it's identical to the reasoning white men used to explain why black people and women weren't dominating the economy in 1910; which means that it's not terribly convincing.

What I suspect is going on is a couple things:

1) The white upper-middle class is a lot bigger on college education then anybody else (except possibly Asians, but none of the states mentioned have a large Asian population). This means they send their kids to schools which have lots of AP course options, and force their little darlings to take multiple of these courses. A HS AP course not only raises your GPA, thus increasing your odds of Harvard, if you pass the test it also counts as a 3-4 credit college class. I suspect that if the AP did a survey on class status of test-takers the white working class (which is bigger then the black population in most states) would take the test even less.

Note that the way we do education in America guarantees that non-whites (and poorer whites) will have significantly less access to AP tests. You either have to pay $20k per kid per year in private education, or live in a school district with a bunch of rich people paying taxes to get your kid into a school that offers lots of AP classes. Since school districts tend only to have a handful of neighborhoods, this means to use public schools with AP tests you have to be wealthy enough to live in a very good neighborhood. It also means that in the event a cheap neighborhood ends up in a good district, it stops being cheap.

2) HS kids are obsessed with identity. The ultimate insult to any HS-age boy is to imply he's either female or gay. Girls will try boy things at that age, but not as often as they would a few years later. It's very rare for a non-white HS student to consider a white teacher a role model, but early 20-somethings will happily take a white college professor as a role model. Which means that when one racial/class group monopolizes a career field it's much less likely for HS-age kids of other groups to think they could actually do that shit. A couple years after High School the technically inclined black kids will stop thinking of programming as something that makes white guys (like Zuckerberg) rich, and start thinking of it is something they could do, but generally by the time you're 20 you're already a) in the midst of a career or b) halfway through college in a non-CompSci program.

Note that this is not just a race/gender problem. The kids of the working class white guys aren't likely to go for computer programming when they're 17 because Zuckerberg/Gates/etc. all seem a lot like NPR-listening upper-middle-class geeks and they're proud hicks. But nobody measures this shit because in the US nobody really thinks the white working class is distinct from the white upper class.

--------------------

I don't really know if there's a way

Re:This is the AP Comp Sci exam

[dkleinsc]

After all, it's clear that they don't have interest in certain fields

It's also pretty clear, based on the experiences of women who have an interest in technology, that they experience hostility, sexism, and nastiness, many enough for them to quit. If it were just a couple, then I'd think it was maybe a fluke, but when every woman I've talked to in tech about it has said they experienced it, and all but 2 of my female college classmates dropped out of the CS program, I'd say it's safe to say there's a sexism problem in the culture of tech that should be addressed.

Try this, if you are a guy in tech who doesn't get it: When you encounter a reasonably good-looking (by your standards) woman with a similar professional background, is your thought process about her professional work (e.g. language or OS choices, server configurations, algorithm ideas), or is your thought process about how you might be able to get her into bed? If it's about her work, congratulations, you aren't part of the problem. If it's about the hope of bedding her, then you need to pay attention and make sure you're thinking with your brain rather than your dick. If you don't know for sure, err on the side of professionalism and focusing on work, and let her make the conversation personal if she wants to. If you can't stick to those rules, you are part of the problem.

Re:This is the AP Comp Sci exam

[ultranova]

Oops, "correlation does not demonstrate correlation" should obviously be "correlation does not demonstrate causation".

Correlation does not demonstrate causality. However, it strongly correlates with it.

Re:This is the AP Comp Sci exam

[Anonymous Coward]

Tech is the career field that is most likely to take you from loser to Millionaire before your 30th birthday.

If by "loser", you mean "a wealthy white upper-middle-class upbringing, where mommy and daddy paid for everything", then sure.

Re:This is the AP Comp Sci exam

[mopower70]

It's also pretty clear, based on the experiences of women who have an interest in technology, that they experience hostility, sexism, and nastiness, many enough for them to quit. If it were just a couple, then I'd think it was maybe a fluke, but when every woman I've talked to in tech about it has said they experienced it, and all but 2 of my female college classmates dropped out of the CS program, I'd say it's safe to say there's a sexism problem in the culture of tech that should be addressed.

My experience has been that women in technology who say they "experience hostility, sexism, and nastiness" are experiencing the exact same environment that the men they work with experience. Men who work in the primarily female field of nursing experience cattiness, back-stabbing, and undermining cliquishness. Are women in nursing inherently sexist? No, of course not. Men are just not used to the dynamic of a primarily female workplace, and the same holds true for women.

Try this, if you are a guy in tech who doesn't get it: When you encounter a reasonably good-looking (by your standards) woman with a similar professional background, is your thought process about her professional work (e.g. language or OS choices, server configurations, algorithm ideas), or is your thought process about how you might be able to get her into bed? If it's about her work, congratulations, you aren't part of the problem. If it's about the hope of bedding her, then you need to pay attention and make sure you're thinking with your brain rather than your dick. If you don't know for sure, err on the side of professionalism and focusing on work, and let her make the conversation personal if she wants to. If you can't stick to those rules, you are part of the problem.

So, the woman who finds a male nursing co-worker attractive is the problem with the under-representation of men in the nursing field? Men interact with men differently than they interact with women. Women interact with women differently than with men. "Professionalism" that attempts to pretend that's not true is doomed to failure. There are plenty of fields that are balanced in gender representation. There is absolutely nothing inherent in IT professionals that they create a more "sexist" environment than there is in nursing or teaching professionals. Attempting to blame the behavior of those already in the field is disingenuous, uninformed, and insulting.

Re:This is the AP Comp Sci exam

[femtobyte]

That's a nice snappy soundbite --- but, perhaps a bit easier said than done. What list of revolutionary scientific discoveries can you credit to your own name from following such sage advice?

Yes, there are lots of things admirable about, and lots to learn from, the experience of folks like Einstein. However, a useful role model is not necessarily the same as high-level pithy quips extracted from a mythologized lifetime of work. Real-life role models (in teachers, parents, friends, etc.), versus aspirational heroes, might be a bit more mundane --- but can make a far greater difference in a person's life. No matter how many inspirational Einstein posters you plaster on the walls, don't expect youth (of any gender or race) to become infused with scientific greatness.

Re:This is the AP Comp Sci exam

[UnderCoverPenguin]

My experience has been that women in technology who say they "experience hostility, sexism, and nastiness" are experiencing the exact same environment that the men they work with experience.

Sounds like you work in a generally unpleasant place.

I have rarely experienced hostility or nastiness, let alone sexism. I have witnessed most of my female coworkers be subjected to such on a semi regular basis. Most often, some variation of a male finding excuses for devaluing a female's contribution in spite of clear evidence of equal or superior quality and quantity of contribution. Sometimes there was actual hostility/nastiness directed at women that was never directed at other men.

As for school-age treatment of females vs males, from pre-school all the way up, the school discouraged my female classmates from science and engineering, and for those girls set on science and/or engineering, the school cast them as future teachers (or nurses for those interested in medical science), discouraging them from pursuing careers in industry. My girlfriend, who is an engineer, experienced this bias in school, so did our daughter, who is now an engineering student at a highly rated university.

My colleagues in other companies report similar experiences and observations.

Re:This is the AP Comp Sci exam

[AK Marc]

And studies like this one prove you false. Women don't avoid IT because they've been in the field and find it troublesome (the people, not the work). The "trouble" starts much earlier. They don't go into IT, and stop considering it, long before they are aware of what the working environment will be. That points to something other than "sexism in the workplace" as a much larger factor.

Your irrelevant rant only masks the problem, and is counter-productive to real progress. That makes you part of the problem, not the solution.

Re:This is the AP Comp Sci exam

[Redmancometh]

"Note that this is not just a race/gender problem. The kids of the working class white guys aren't likely to go for computer programming when they're 17 because Zuckerberg/Gates/etc. all seem a lot like NPR-listening upper-middle-class geeks and they're proud hicks. But nobody measures this shit because in the US nobody really thinks the white working class is distinct from the white upper class."

As someone who comes from decidedly redneck stock (Texan), and who grew up in Texas schools let me say this:
A) No one..I mean absolutely no group is more wow'd by tech.
B) In my experience no group is as likely to ask "how in the hell did you do that" and actually listen to the answer.
C) I've lived in suburbian SoCal (my contender for polar opposite) and they don't care how *any* system works. They "just want it to work" like apple fans.

Just generalizing here obviously.

Also I don't think it's the "working class" as you would put it that have an issue it's the "lower class." I'm sure it's defined elsewhere, but I would say people living $2-3k/yr below the poverty line. Those are the people who don't have computers in their house, or at least not until it's 100% necessary. Those kids (unless they are real savants) aren't going to just randomly pick up general computing. If they don't pick that up specialized education probably won't follow...except as "just a job" in the smarter kids.

Re:This is the AP Comp Sci exam

[Marxist Hacker 42]

So, the evolution of heterosexuality is to blame? That could be a pretty big thing to try to engineer around. How about single-gender software teams?

here we go again...

[Anonymous Coward]

Its 2014, not 1992.. Why must we try so hard to get women to work in tech? I don't believe that there are any negative influences early on dissuading women from working tech. Maybe they just don't want to. Just putting that out there. I'd love to see more women in tech, but don't brainwash someone into it.

Re:here we go again...

[Anonymous Coward]

I got asked by the teacher why did I want to go for computer science instead of humanities. I told that I like computer science better. His answer: "you know, some guys going for computer science are very good. It would be easier for you in humanities." It was NOT after failed test or anything like that. It was in the beginning of school year and he knew nothing about me.

How many boys got asked stupid questions like that? Girls can pick up that they are not supposed to be interested in these things soon enough. We are supposed to be clueless and kids are good in picking up such clues.

Re:here we go again...

[TheRaven64]

Because we want to get the best people. If you look worldwide, the gender balance (to pick the one imbalance your post mentions) is a lot closer to 50:50 in some countries, in others it's even more skewed. This implies that there's nothing intrinsic about women that makes them genetically less likely to want to do engineering or scientific things, there's some other cultural or social pressure stopping most of them. If we're only recruiting from 10% of the female population that, absent these pressures, would have gone into these subjects, then we can hope that it's the best 10%, but that's not very likely.

Re:here we go again...

[The Mighty Buzzard]

I think there is a high likelihood that the differing brain structure and soup of hormones/other chemicals their brains swim in may play a significant role, yes. Throwing out from consideration a known variable before the experiment because you don't want it to be true is extremely poor science.

Re:here we go again...

[elrous0]

I wonder if there are articles on fashion industry sites lamenting the lack of heterosexual males in the fashion industry.

Re:here we go again...

[mark-t]

got asked by the teacher why did I want to go for computer science instead of humanities. I told that I like computer science better. His answer: "you know, some guys going for computer science are very good. It would be easier for you in humanities." It was NOT after failed test or anything like that. It was in the beginning of school year and he knew nothing about me.

And if a daughter of mine came home from school with a story like that, I'd have been all over it, asking why teachers are discouraging somebody from taking a class about something that the student indicated a preference for. What difference should it make how good other may be compared to how hard the course might be for somebody else? Some of the people in humanities could also be very good too... should they also be discouraged from taking that class as well simply on that premise? Sure, it's definitely possible that it might not interest you as much as you had hoped in the beginning, but you'd learn that over the year as you took the class. What kind of basis would a teacher use for deciding that a student was liable to change their mind about how much interest they had in a subject when they plainly said that they liked it?

I'd be expecting an apology from that teacher to be delivered to my daughter the following day, or else I'd be wanting to see that teacher fired.

Wow.... just wow. How *DARE* that teacher suggest that you wouldn't be any good or have any significant interest in computer science just because you happen to have ovaries.

Re:here we go again...

[serviscope_minor]

Why don't you go and read some articles and find out?

And yes there (a) are heterosexual men in the fashion industry and (b) there is a social pressure which reduces the number. This is not a good thing.

But this is a tech website not a fashion one, so we tend to discuss issues relevant ot the tech world.

Re:here we go again...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:here we go again...

[Bengie]

Females show an adverse reaction to "tech" as early as 1 day old. Are you saying newborns have had time to be influenced? Show a newborn female a doll, and they are interested because it has a face. Show them toy car and they couldn't care less. Show a newborn boy a doll, and it's less interested, show it a car and it wants to grab and hold it.

Actually, this is linked with testosterone levels during development. Females that had a mother with higher testosterone levels exhibited similar rates of wanting the car over the doll, and visa versa for boys. Guess which gender on average has higher testosterone levels?

Other surveys, that have gone over many many years and over the top 40 countries, have found that interest levels in tech for women is nearly identical in every country, unaffected by culture. The rate of women actually in tech drastically varies, but many of those women don't enjoy it, they're only in it because they were pushed into it.

Isn't this the polar opposite of our current issue? We argue that maybe more women would be in tech if we encouraged them. It turns out to be the opposite. They don't want to be in it, but if they are, it's because they were forced into it. The optimal percentage of women in tech should be about the same as the percentage that are interested in it.

Re:here we go again...

[xigxag]

From 1965 to now, the percentage of women in US medical school, which is a likewise high-training high-commitment-level field as CS, jumped from 10% to about 50%. What changed? Societal attitudes. Not brain chemistry.

Re:here we go again...

[xigxag]

That remark doesn't even begin to make sense as a rebuttal. If we were arguing about this in 1965, "from 1965 to now" would only be 1965's data, and not two generations worth of data proving that women have the capacity to succeed in a mentally demanding profession.

The point is that women have made tremendous strides in the past 50 years a field where it was previously thought they had an innate deficit. Their innate deficit was shown to be a canard, a just-so story to justify keeping them out of professional fields. In the US, the gender ratio in medical fields has made great changes, but not so in tech. Yet in some other countries, both genders are well-represented in tech. How does your "brain structure" argument account for that kind national-level disparity?

Re:here we go again...

[lgw]

No one is going to take seriously anything you write using the word "womyn". At first I just assumed you were trolling, but you seem to be in earnest - no troll would blend ridiculous notions from the left with ridiculous notions from the right into the same post, that's just poor trollmanship.

Re:here we go again...

[russotto]

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?

If you were American, you'd probably have an idea what the issue is in Utah immediately. (and this time it really is societal pressure)

What I tell kids.

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget the computer science - go for the biology and other hard sciences.

I have yet to hear of a hospital that offshored their medical staff or lobbied for H1-Bs.

I have never heard of any medical establishment saying, "There are no qualified Americans."

Funny. I guess all the smart Americans are going into medical.

Oh yeah, and in medical I have never heard any one say that "if you're over 30, you just don't get it."

Actually it starts at conception

[Karmashock]

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.

Re:Actually it starts at conception

[cyber-vandal]

A lot of the young men that dropped out of college didn't risk everything since the college they dropped out of was Harvard.

Re:Actually it starts at conception

[Velex]

Yes. I am.

what I found interesting...

[buddyglass]

If you drill down to some of her Excel spreadsheets you'll find that the overall number of female CS exam takers was 18.5%. One might explain that by arguing that women just don't like math/science/etc. But you'll also find that 48% of Calculus AB exam takers were women. Possible explanation: you need calculus if you're planning to do pre-Med as an undergraduate and lots of women wants to be doctors. Apparently very few women want to be software devs and/or engineers. But it's not because they're unwilling to take a math class, as we can see from the rate of females taking the Calculus exam.

Re:what I found interesting...

[quetwo]

Let alone many schools won't accept AP credit if that is what your major is in. Why take an AP test if CS is your passion but it does absolutely no good? Unlike most other AP exams (language, math, etc) those credits are useful for people who are not in those majors.

Re:what I found interesting...

[NicBenjamin]

That's probably part of it. But there's a much simpler explanation.

If you want to be valedictorian/Harvard material/etc. you have to take a lot of AP classes, and you have to take three or four years of math. You don't have to take any computer classes. There are only a couple AP courses that are pure mathematics -- Calc AB and Calc BC and Statistics -- and Calc AB is probably the only one offered at most schools.

OTOH if you need a full load of AP classes senior year CompSci is probably optional.

is created

[markdavis]

>"But exam data shows the gap is created much earlier"

"is created" implies that some one or some group is guiding/causing/forcing it to be so. A better wording would be "appears" or "unfolds" or "starts" something.

Wording is important.

So what?

[FuzzNugget]

This just in: different genders and ethnic groups are naturally attracted to different things.

Next we'll be hearing about how there are an inordinately high number of females in the hairstyling and beautician industry or how basketball has too many black men.

Oh, wait, no we won't, because discriminating against white males is the racism du jour.

It starts at conception

[jackspenn]

Why are we fixated on trying to artificially diversify professions?

The PC BS has to stop at some point. There are some professions and things that men prefer more than women and others that women prefer more than men.

I will give you one example of this insanity:

In the mid-nighties a friend of my parents came over all upset. She was a manager for a publisher and all except one of her editors were female. She explained that men did not have a strong desire to edit textbooks. The only male she could find that was both good and interested cost her over double the rate of any other female editor. The reason was that she had to hire him away from another employer so that she could meet a diversity requirement from some of the states who purchased her textbooks.

Well, this male editor ended up getting an even higher offer from a different publisher. As she sat at my parents table saying "Men just do not enjoy or wish to be editors as much as women do. How am I ever going to find enough men who are both good and interested in doing this job?"

It was at this point that my dad who worked in IT at the time walked in and heard this statement. He said "I have the same diversity issue at work, they would like to have more women in IT, but most women don't want to be in IT."

At this point my mom suggested the simple solution, she explained how my dad was paying good women more money than men to work in IT when he could find them and sometimes not as good women when he had nothing else. So my parents friend ended up hiring three not so good male editors and just had whatever they edited initially sent back through to other editors.

Was that fair? Was it right? No, it was what the government wanted.

People walk around saying "Diversity is our goal" or "Diversity unites us". Yeah, that last one goes up at a state office building each April, I go to their lobby just to laugh at their mini-ministry of truth.

The truth is so much simpler. Hire people who are interested in learning/growing in the areas related to their work. Don't worry about how the numbers turn out. The only reason companies worry about diversity is because of some BS forms some bureaucrats asks them to fill out. Don't let your world be shaped by this nonsense. If asked be honest, explain you do not discriminate, you only hire the best qualified.

(I agree, I do need an editor)

Enough already

[erroneus]

Men have personalities. Women have personalities. They quite often very different. They lead people into different directions in life.

Why aren't we asking why there aren't more "jocks" in science and why there aren't more "nerds" in sports? It's the SAME CAUSES.

And every time the topic comes up, it invariably results in recommendations of making an environment more comfortable for the other party. And this push ALWAYS goes one direction without fail. So here it is.

WHITE MEN: You must change everything about yourself. You are to blame for everyone else not being like you. Women don't want to work with you in your job and it's always YOUR FAULT. Black people never feel welcome or equal in your work place either and guess whose fault that is? That's right. It's your fault.

Has no one ever wondered or asked why we're only pushing to have more diversity in a white man's environment? Why it's considered wrong for there to even be a white man's environment? Why is there no push for diversity in churches? Why is there a Korean Christian church around the corner? Why aren't there more Christians and Jews in mosques? There is a long, long list of things women do which men have no interest and yet no one is pushing for more diversity in those areas.

Diversity is code for anti-white-male. Show me I'm wrong by pointing to an instance calling for diversity that isn't targetting while males?

Re:Enough already

[serviscope_minor]

There is a long, long list of things women do which men have no interest and yet no one is pushing for more diversity in those areas.

You're really claiming there are "things" that women do that "men are just not interested in". You have no idea. Guess what: news at 11! there are social pressures on men as well as women (the modern lack of male primary school teachers is an excellent example of a bad social pressure).

Until you admit that men and women are more diverse than you believe you will be entirely blind to social pressures which stop people being what they want to be.

So, I call bullshit on your "long, long list of things" that "men have no interest in".

There is certinly more variation within either gender than the average difference between genders in essentially every measurable way: there's 3.5 billion people in each and those tails go out quite a few standard deviations with that many people.

But yet you've found a long, long list of things which 3.5 billion of the worlds population like ad no one in the other 3.5 billion likes. Oh and even better, it's completely innate!

Boys and girls are different

[craigminah]

Why do we all need to score the same or have the same fill rates in the various skilled jobs? Can't we all just agree that boys and girls are different and will excel at different things? Why does everything always have to be equal? So long as girls have opportunity to take science, math, etc. with no stigma then we've done our part.

What test?

[clickety6]

exam data shows...

18 percent of the students who took the exam ...

some states where not a single member of one of these groups took the test last year ...

etc., etc. if you're wondering what the hell test is being talked about, you'll need to check the actual article to find it's the Advanced Placement computer science exam.

Re:What test?

[tompaulco]

exam data shows...

18 percent of the students who took the exam ...

some states where not a single member of one of these groups took the test last year ...

etc., etc. if you're wondering what the hell test is being talked about, you'll need to check the actual article to find it's the Advanced Placement computer science exam.

Yes, I read the article, too, and thus I think the whole thing can be thrown out. It is not appropriate to try to gather statistics about general enrollment in a discipline by the number of people who attempt to go for advanced placement in that discipline. Particularly if you are going by numbers where one of the largest states to participate had 50 whole people take the test. Many states had no one take the test, probably because they have their own standards for determining advanced placement, as probably do most school districts. It's not like there is a federal standard for determining whether a child can be in the AP computer science class.
Talk about jumping to conclusions. Only John "Correlation is Causation" Tesh manages to abuse statistics more.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:People are different...

[Anonymous Coward]

oh jeez, Mexican-Americans don't have a greater "interest" or "capacity" in being fruit pickers or short-order cooks, any more than Chinese people of 50 years ago were subsistence farmers because they were limited by some innate "interest" or "capacity." Groups find themselves disproportionately in certain kind of jobs based on circumstances.

The people who want to maintain the status quo and downplay societal unfairness are the ones with the political agenda.

-smafti

There are a lot of things people don't know

[Taco Cowboy]

People don't know what "correlation" and "causation" mean in the first place.

From the TFA:

... which helps explain the dearth of young women and minorities

What is the definition of "Minorities" ?

What is the percentage of the Asians (particularly the yellow-skinned East Asians and the Asians from the Indian Subcontinent) vis-a-vis the percentage of the Latinos-Americans / African-Americans, of the entire population of the United States of America ?

I am willing to bet my bottom dollar that the Asian-Americans will be the fewest of the three groups.

Would that entitle them with the term of " MINORITIES " ?

Apparently TFA doesn't think so.

Look at the enrollment of the Asians (men and women) in the tech courses and you will see how ridiculous TFA is.

In some EE classes, there are MORE female Asian students than male African-Americans attending.

Care to explain to me why Slashdot carries such crappy "news" in the first place ??