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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.'"
(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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
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.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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.
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.
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)
Respect the Constitution
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.
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?
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.
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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.
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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.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
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?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.