Slashdot Mirror
Will Elementary School Teachers Take the Rap For Tech's Diversity Problem?
theodp (442580) writes "Citing a new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (free to Federal employees), the NY Times reports on how elementary school teachers' pro-boy biases can discourage girls from math and science. "The pipeline for women to enter math and science occupations narrows at many points between kindergarten and a career choice," writes Claire Cain Miller, "but elementary school seems to be a critical juncture. Reversing bias among teachers could increase the number of women who enter fields like computer science and engineering, which are some of the fastest growing and highest paying. 'It goes a long way to showing it's not the students or the home, but the classroom teacher's behavior that explains part of the differences over time between boys and girls,' said Victor Lavy, an economist at University of Warwick in England and a co-author of the paper." Although the study took place in Israel, Lavy said that similar research had been conducted in several European countries and that he expected the results were applicable in the United States."
There are problems at all ages. It starts even before school. Don't try to blame one group. Don't blame anyone, just give them the solutions.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It is the parents faults, it is the white mans fault, it is the patriarchies fault, it is the society's fault, it is the schools fault, it is the medias fault, it is the teachers faults.
Perhaps most women are just not interested in science and technology?
Maybe it just does not appeal to them?
I have never encountered a teacher at the elementary grade level (1 - 6 in Canada anyway, between 1970 and 1976) who was bias in favour of either male of female students in their classrooms. The modern education system from kindergarten to doctoral studies is biased against boys and the feminists still refuse to acknowledge reality. The percentage of high school graduates pursuing an undergraduate degree is at a historically high level yet the majority of undergraduates are women. Quite a reversal from the 1970s and prior.
If women don't want to work in tech fields, that's their business. Why this is even an issue is beyond me. How is it considered a good idea to encourage more people to work in fields they're not interested in? Why is tech singled out as the one and only important field?
Okay.
How the fuck does that happen?
2+2=4 whether you are a boy or a girl.
How is a teacher grading that differently based on the kids' names?
You might even get people to believe there is a problem. Well at least people that don't work in the field. The rest will be trying to find ways to kill the goose that has been laying golden eggs.
How is a study on middle and high school students in Israel relevant to elementary students in the US?
Although the study took place in Israel, Mr. Lavy said that similar research had been conducted in several European countries and that he expected the results were applicable in the United States.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
1. Let's treat and pay teachers like the profession that they are.
2. Let's change science curriculum and the way it's taught. The way it's taught, it bores even the most ardent lovers. Engage the students more. Teach a concept, do an experiment, discuss. Keep'em moving and attuned.
3. Stop this attitude that science is hard. It's hard because we make it so. Yes, some people do not have the talents necessary to be a professional or major in it but we're talking about grade school here. A lot of science geeks do not have the talent to be professional baseball players but we still teach it in grade school.
4. Parents. Parents need to be engaged with their kids - and it's a tall order in our society since it's pretty much required that both parents have to work 50+ hours a week or their jobs are gone overseas.
5. Parents again: limit TV and video games. I limit mine to no more than an hour a day - after they get their homework done.
6. Do not give them a smart phone. You want an electronic leash? Give them a flip phone. Because kids will always have their noses in those damn things instead of paying attention.
7. Stop blaming lack of diversity. How about actually start offering opportunities instead.
8. EOR
Being a millenial, I can attest to the fact that growing up interested in technology and science automagically branded you a nerd. You were picked on relentlessly, harassed and ostricized socially, and generally spent a lot of time avoiding direct contact with interpersonal engagements that did not pass a battery of personal safety tests. Chess club or magic the gathering at school was considered your Turing test for a friend. Billy Graham and the moral majority however were convinced you were the devil incarnate for playing the game, which was verboten in many schools despite its keen ability to teach logic and strategy.
Fast forward through the sanguine post columbine era of education by doctrinal purity and it just got worse for nerds. after 1999 nerds faced a pretty large degree of scrutiny and fear. I for one wore a lot of black, kept to myself, made excellent grades, and played a lot of doom/heretic. My prize to claim for having spoken a bit too loudly with friends about a quake match and my affinity for the shotgun with quad damage was an entire week of suspension due to a 'zero tolerance' policy. I failed calculus, spanish, and was left scrambling to figure out how i was going to graduate based on this seemingly arbitrary application of "justice." my parents were angry at me, and i in turn was angry at them for having never taken my side in the ordeal but i digress. If you believe that the tech diversity problem is due to inherent gender affinity and poor marketing to minorities, you're sadly mistaken. People avoid STEM because they dont like being beaten down like subhumans.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Let me summarize this entire thread so we can get back to stuff that matters:
"Men and women are different, deal with it" (rotates between -1 flamebait and +5 interesting)
"That hasn't been proven" (+3 insightful)
"Gamergate is evil" (+3 troll)
"Gamergate is good" (rotates between -1 flamebait and +5 interesting)
"Here's a comprehensive discussion of the merits of this article" (no moderation)
"The patriarchy is real" (+2) "No it isn't"(+4)
Here's my own input:
Slashdot will you PLEASE stop running the sjw story of the day. You're not fooling anyone and it will never come out the way you want until you start actively censoring comments. And pushing clickbait isn't giving you any points either.
Everyone who holds a gender-based opinion on this: PLEASE take half the time you would otherwise argue about this and review the latest studies, but take into account who funded them and the difference in funding dollars for two conflicting points of view.
Everyone else: I hope you see the obvious agenda-pushing that has been happening these last few months and inoculate yourself against it with knowledge.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
There's only one problem here, and it's called the "social sciences".
These are pseudo-academic programs that have been put in place in many institutions of higher learning. While this gives them the aura of legitimacy, the fact remains that their methodologies are not worthy of being called "science", and their standards are quite poor when it comes to performing research.
By lacking the solid foundation that real fields of science like physics, biology and chemistry have, the "social sciences" degrade into debates about the merits of different -isms ("feminism", "communism", "racism", "genderism", and so on), and once that's been discussed to death, they just start making up problems ("diversity in the tech industry") to "investigate".
For some participants it's just an easy way to get money. For others, it's a way to fight back against other inadequacies in their life, like a lack of ability. And for others it's just a power trip.
Regardless, anything coming out of the "social sciences" should be taken with a really big grain of salt. Or better yet, it should just be ignored. It's likely a big load of bullshit to begin with.
As a boy, I were discouraged by teachers to go to university. For them, I was unable to reach the requested level. I can't stand people saying what I am able to do or not. Finished the first university year head of the class...
In my experience, boys are receiving an harsher treatment by school teachers than girls. Maybe time to say, girls (man up /o\): help yourself like boys.
What I've seen in my children's schools is a girl bias. I continually hear talk putting down boys.
I worry that my boys aren't getting a fair chance.
Obviously because these jobs pay well. No one cares about diversity in construction work because it's dangerous and the pay isn't very good, especially in proportion to the harm one must put himself everyday.
I'm generally for eliminating biases that cause people to feel certain life paths are inaccessible to them. Problem is that the media has singled out a few that are of special interest to them. If, for example, a man wanted to become an elementary school teacher, he'd likely be met with suspicion at every turn that he's a pedophile. But no one cares about this; in fact, the only concern is fields that are male or white dominated. In the the few that are female or minority dominated, "diversity" is not a concern. As we all know, "diversity" is a code word for "social re-engineering." That's fine but let's call it that. No one gives a flip about a diverse classroom or work environment for the sake of learning or productivity. They just want people who aren't white and male to be rich.
What's really interesting to me is that the feminist sites (like our buddies Jezebel) don't focus much on tech. They jump up and down when they find an article about bias, of course, but they seem to care very little about the lack of women in programming aside from that.
If women don't want to work in tech fields, that's their business. Why this is even an issue is beyond me. How is it considered a good idea to encourage more people to work in fields they're not interested in? Why is tech singled out as the one and only important field?
Because there's more money in it.
Law is another field where "diversity" primarily means women instead of minorities.
They are female, after all. Only males can be blamed, as per repeated stories on slashdot.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Weirdly enough, women were quite well represented in technology before the 80s. Clearly there was an interest - so what's changed?
Women in other countries are somewhat more well represented in technology and more likely to go into STEM fields - so what are those other countries doing differently?
There are a number of things that make a strong case for the reasons women aren't well represented in tech being related to artificial issues rather than natural tendencies.
Tech isn't singled out as the one and only important field, by the way. I'm not sure where you get that idea from, but if you look at most any field with a lopsided gender ratio you'll see concern about the gender imbalance and efforts to remedy it. Nursing programs will aggressively pursue male candidates, same for elementary teaching, for example.
In any case, my guess as to why tech is singled out is not that tech is singled out, but that you're probably primarily reading tech sites where this gets discussed, so it just seems that way.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
When I was in Middle School in the mid 80s, everyone knew that computers were going to be a major part of the future. At that time, personal computers did not yet have an OS To Rule Them All, and the amount of things one could actually accomplish with a home computer was relatively limited. Pretty much any home computer of that era booted straight into BASIC, and most people perceived computers primarily as things in which people wrote software for to tell it what to do.
At that time schools were trying to make use of computers in the curriculum (beyond Apple IIs playing Oregon Trail and entering LOGO instructions to move the Turtle), and what most schools went with was BASIC programming. Our school had recently "upgraded" from TI-99/4A to Color TRS-80 (which was upsetting to me, because I owned a TI and could program for it very well). So my entire grade of 7th graders spent an entire semester programming in BASIC. Every boy, every girl - all of us. We always worked in teams of two (mostly boys paired up and girls paired up, as is typical at that age). Further, this was commonplace in most schools of the era.
So here is what we *should* have seen. Since we had boys and girls all being equally submersed in the writing of software for hundreds of thousands of children, if boys and girls equally relate to, identify with, and enjoy programming, then we should have seen a surge of that generation of girls also becoming computer scientists. But we did not. When I was in college less than a decade later, my fellow majors in CS consisted of only two females (and I'm friends with both of them on FB still). One does not do anything related to computers at all. The other is still involved in technology, but is more interested in and active in designing artistic elements at the company where she is CTO.
I think we're seeing the overall, general difference between male and female here. I think it's obvious that different talents and thus careers seem to carry with them trends in certain kinds of personalities. Generally, do musicians, artists, executives, managers and computer science people each seem to have personality tendencies that go along with their career? Those tendencies aren't "learned" by being in the career - those individuals had those traits before they entered their profession. So it is my belief that, generally, the typical female does not relate to software development. Perhaps it is because male and female brains are indeed physiologically different in various ways, and it is more enjoyable and / or natural for a male brain to think in a single-track mode required to deeply delve into one specific thought process for a long time while developing software. Or maybe it's for other reasons along that line.
Regardless, my point is simple. Why is anyone trying to point fingers at our educational system instead of just admitting men and women are different, and women just simply may not like software development?
Better known as 318230.
Girls consistently outperform boys in school. In all subjects.
The education system doesn't work as well for boys.
DIVERSITY IS STRENGTH FOR CAPITAL BUT WEAKNESS FOR LABOR.... if you are white and work for a living, diversity is your enemy. Now ask me why. Or if you are really smart and independent-minded, tell me why diversity is strength for the owners and management and weakness for the white majority.
A quick look at the demographics of teachers shows that around eighty-four percent of teachers are women. So, do women have lower expectations of female students? Are they unconsciously selecting for non-technical professions, because teacher themselves are not working in a technical profession? Are female teachers to blame for discouraging girls, because they were not able to succeed in a technical track in high school and college? Obviously, TFA is another attempt to stir up the "gender wars," but I'm not sure the narrative that's being pushed really fits the current PC template.
But wait, girls excel at math and science according to test scores in elementary schools, so it must be the teacher's fault that by high school and college they drop from it. Of course it couldn't have anything to do with a culture that hypersexualizes young women. Look at the upcoming 50 Shades movie. Obviously, a young woman can't be complete and productive unless she is first an object of desire.
If you want more women in science and math, you need to change the culture that tells them that their primary role is of being an object. That's not the school system, but the media. As long as the media emphasizes cleavage over brains, the problem will continue to exist. But go ahead and blame the schools, we'll pour lots of money into fixing the problem, but since it is the wrong problem, nothing will change.
One of the common complaints of modern feminism is that while women have made great strides in the workplace, they're only something like 17% of CEOs. Yes, but they're probably 1% of trash collectors and coal miners, too. Men are at the top of the economy, but they're also at the bottom. The cry for more female CEOs is basically saying "we want only the good jobs!"
Also, uh, you want to join the ranks of greedy sociopaths? "It's mostly men screwing over workers and destroying the environment! We want to be oppressors and oligarchs, too!"
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
is designed to lay the groundwork for another area of gynocentric bias against males. The idea that men and women are different in any way is, of course, against the current day narrative of sameness in all things.
E Proelio Veritas.
Let's define the basis for this being a problem:
Are we suggesting that in all workplaces, any skew in gender-balance is a "problem"?
There are multiple problems with this position, not the least of which is "free will". Go to any college campus in America or Europe and you will see social sciences and language studies heavily populated by female students. Is this a problem? Should universities limit the amount of women allowed to study Italian? Why or why not?
Hard sciences, mathematics, engineering and computer science on campus are mostly male.
The feminist argument is that this skew in gender balance is the result of prior socialization. But this claim of nurture over nature is not only unproven, it is utterly untestable. Needless to say defining "problems" based on untestable criteria does not pass anyone's logic test. And to pretend that men and women 'would' have the same interests if it weren't for society is to not only discount the empirical evidence of every culture throughout history, but the very real biological and chemical differences between male and female brains.
To suggest that men and women 'would' have the same interests and motivations were it not for socialization despite the empirical evidence to the contrary and the clearly documented biological differences is a desperately unlikely scenario which would need rigorous proof if it were to be accepted. But the cult of feminism -- much like fundamentalist religion -- would rather pretend that it is their platform that is valid despite oceans of evidence that it isn't. Those who 'disbelieve' are infidels and must be silenced.
But let's get back to the original question: Why is it a problem that technology is primarily male?
If it is indeed to be our cultural premise that all careers should reflect a 50/50 gender balance, then what of the 'less sexy' fields which are primarily male? What of the world's most dangerous professions? Logging? Fishing boat crews? Electric powerline installers? Military combat? Mining? Underwater welding? These are no longer strength-related fields. And as we all know, male workplace deaths outweigh female workplace deaths at a rate of 9:1. Where is the feminist outrage against this "problem" of unfair male access to tragic death? (Never mind the fact that it is dangerous work that pays the best, and is a direct contributor to salary imbalances).
But no, "technology" has been singled out. Why? Because it's sexy. It's in the news. And the payouts can be spectacular.
So clearly this isn't about gender equality. It's a power grab.
If women don't want to work in tech fields, that's their business.
In my engineering career I have seen it go from no women whatsoever to women coming in and getting prompt promotion to management level - because the directors are terrified of being accused of anti-women bias. And yes, there are women directors, the sort that are also part-time directors of a dozen other companies, mostly finance and legal ones.
But these women engineers have totally different outlook from the men. The men (I am talking about the graduate engineers) have (or have had) hobbies like tinkering with cars, building boats, building electronic circuits, and amateur radio. We lend each other stuff like compression testers, welding outfits and oscilliscopes. The women "engineers" however do none of this; they look on with contempt and claim they are "too busy with families" (as if men are not), but it seems they did not take an interest even before they had a family.
In fact they do not seem much interested in engineering at all. They have helped to turn the work activity to things like financial planning, work programming, managment training, and (worst of all ) "'Elf and Safety". The whole nature of the work has changed from real engineering projects to perfecting paperwork trails. It is no wonder that the Western world is losing or has lost its technological lead and has turned to navel gazing instead.
It is that programming a computer requires advanced mathematical study. It doesn't. So long as you get through say 1 semester of Algebra 1 and know different base numbering systems like 8, 16 etc. you can program a computer.
Conditionals are one thing they'd have to learn and so too branching etc. But those are simple concepts that even a kid can pick up.
We had to cut down some trees at a nature center I volunteer for. After a tree service dropped them, it was up to the patrons to come out and split all the wood for the fireplaces in the conference centers. 3,000 emails went out asking for volunteers to help, 60% of the membership is female.
Out of the 3 dozen people that showed up, would anyone care to guess how many were women?
I'll tell you - ZERO.
Emails went out to everyone regardless of sex. Some things aren't discrimination, most just boil down to natural differences. Neither good nor bad, just are.
I have a skill level of 15. My skill is represented by this string:
000000101111100010001101101011001
You have a skill level of 16. It is represented by this string:
111100001110010100100111001001001
Our team's skill is represented by this string:
(bitwise AND of the two above)
111100101111110110101111101011001
As you can see, we have a combined skill level of 23.
This is a very basic answer to how having a diverse team can help.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Being a millenial, I can attest to the fact that growing up interested in technology and science automagically branded you a nerd.
As someone a little older I can attest to the fact that getting branded as a nerd has very little to do with your specific interests and a whole lot to do with how you interact socially with others. I coach kids from 1st grade through 12th and have for over 20 years. What gets them ostracized pretty much never has anything to do with specific interests. People get ostracized for behaving oddly in combination with having nothing to offer others. Nobody gives a shit about the fact that you are interested in technology. What they DO give a shit about is what you can do for them. Can you help them socially? Are you someone who is kind to them when they need it? Can you help them with their homework? Are you fun to be around? These are things that matter in school.
You were picked on relentlessly, harassed and ostricized socially, and generally spent a lot of time avoiding direct contact with interpersonal engagements that did not pass a battery of personal safety tests. Chess club or magic the gathering at school was considered your Turing test for a friend.
I was on our school chess club and played tons of games both computer and otherwise. I spent lots of my free time in the school computer labs and most of my close friends were rather on the nerdy side. I wore thick glasses, was something of an introvert and was painfully shy around girls. I have a name normally associated with the opposite gender and wasn't the most socially graceful kid ever to put it mildly. HOWEVER, I also was the captain of the cross country and wrestling teams. I also made some effort to be friendly and be interested in what others were doing. Sure I got picked on plenty but I also didn't make myself an easy target. I had something to offer others that was unique to me.
EVERYONE gets picked on. I got beaten up on the playground because of my name and the fact that I was a shy, emotional kid by some thugs a little older than me. You know what? I got over it. Anything that makes you stand out is likely to cause you to get picked on. The only thing you can do about it is to adjust your reaction. You can go sulk in a corner but if you are hoping for pity you will be disappointed. Nobody except maybe your parents gives a shit about you except for what you can do for them. Have something to offer. You will not get a job because you are a nice guy who works hard. You need to have something more than that to offer. Things are no different when you are a child. This is a rather good and frank article about what I'm talking about. Have something to offer the world and you'll find it a much more manageable place to be.
Billy Graham and the moral majority however were convinced you were the devil incarnate for playing the game, which was verboten in many schools despite its keen ability to teach logic and strategy.
I've never seen a school that forbid playing chess and teachers generally only give a shit about other games like MtG when they interfere with classes. Maybe you lived in a place where they were irrational about such things (sadly there are some) but that is certainly not the norm and I've lived in a lot of places around the US. Certainly enough to know that that is not the norm.
I for one wore a lot of black, kept to myself, made excellent grades, and played a lot of doom/heretic.
So you dressed oddly, didn't speak to anyone, didn't have anything to offer anyone else and you wonder why people might have thought you strange and wanted little to do with you? Sounds like you were a real self absorbed buzz-kill.
My prize to claim for having spoken a bit too loudly with friends about a quake match and my affinity fo
> everything you do pre-calculus is pretty trivial
Which is really sad for those who don't believe in made-up infinitesimals...
I've already given the answer to the problem. We have to force them into tech jobs. Determine the proper gender match, have a lottery, and the losers .....eeerrrrrm winners go into STEM .
The really big problem with the idea that the teachers and schools are part of the grand conspiracy is that if you take a look around schools these days, there are precious few males in the picture. Teacher gender balance is rather askew in favor of women.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The problem is where girls who would want to work in tech are discouraged because of bias everywhere. Commercials are also bias. On the other hand a country like Sweden which has tried very hard to eliminate all bias has seen an even greater difference in the professions people choose. It seems that when they have the economical freedom to choose, they pick their preference. And that men and women have opposite preferences in a number of fields.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
I think everyone's getting really tired of seeing these articles. It's starting to seem more like a troll attempt than anything valid that needs to be discussed.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
That's a bitwise OR. Bitwise AND would result in a lower or equal combined skill level.
Yep, popular feminist sites contain the same amount of celeb tat, tabloid drivel and other nonsense as any low-brow women's magazine. The tech diversity moan is only popular now because tech jobs can pay fuckloads of money - they really couldn't care about the 90%+ of geeks who work their asses off for average pay. Is the same reason why Jez and co. go on about female CEOs or the disparity between male & female movie star pay but not so much about how to bring up kids on a supermarket wage or women who clean hotel rooms for a living.
Feminism has been co-opted and turned into an 'aspirational' movement to inspire rich white girls and occasionally their rich black/Asian sisters.
still remember the 1st 1/2 of 1st day of required sociology class was basically this - insecurity much?
also, I remember at my wife's MBA graduation the program had a brief synopsis of PhD recipient's thesis (plural?) & the "social science" ones were hilarious! it's amazing how many unnecessary multi-syllable words one can use to say: "I spent three years quantitatively proving that being a single mom in prison sucks for both mother & child" (yes, someone actually got a doctorate for that & that person is likely taking out their anger on undergrads somewhere as I type this)
Change doesn't happen overnight, since in general established companies don't hire women fresh out of college as CEOs. The average age of a CEO is in the 50s. The policies of the 1980s and 1990s are producing today's CEOs.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
this is only an issue b/c tech pays well & ipo(s)/startup buyout are putting insane amounts of $ into the pockets of a group of people who are disproportionately male (& white, "gender conforming", etc - basically everything that's "wrong").
THAT is what this is about! sjw's don't care that women aren't slaving away banging out code, they care that they aren't getting "their cut" of the $!
Talk about a field with a diversity problem: In the US, 87% of the teachers are female. In my own country of Switzerland, it's 82%. What a scandal!
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
.
"If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Unlike the majority of people here, I actually have experience being female. We moved around a lot when I was a kid so I attended several different school systems in 6 states in the 70's and 80's. I was a nerdy kid, very interested in science. I have never been a math genious but always did quite well in the subject, and enjoyed it, when I had a good teacher. I can't remember one time where any teacher, male or female, discouraged me from science or math. In fact, I remember quite the opposite. My mother, though, she was another story. When I was in 3rd/4th grade I decided that I wanted to be an astronomer. Apparently she had taken astronomy class at a community college, and it turned out to be all math. She failed the class and her takeaway from that was that she is bad at math, and therefore all girls are bad at math, so that meant I couldn't be an astronomer, because it's all math. And of course I believed her. Why wouldn't I? Nevermind that I placed very highly on all standardized tests, including math. In junior high they took me out of regular classes, put me in the gifted & talented program, and I took all the advanced math classes all though high school. I took a CS class in high school, had a Commodore 64 and wrote programs in BASIC. I tested out of my math requirement for my bachelors degree and then after grad school took a couple of calculus and astronomy classes just for fun. All that time believing that I was bad at math. It's very hard to overcome that type of bias, no matter who puts it in your head, even in the face of evidence telling you otherwise. Kids really absorb that stuff. I think it wasn't until I was in my 30's that I realized I was never actually bad at math. I'm now a computer programmer. Can you imagine if my mother had been a teacher? Thank goodness I was the only girl she had influence over.
The article is talking about primary school children, not women. 50 years ago women (generally speaking) weren't interested in management, politics, science, high level medicine, or a host of other traditionally male occupations. So now, if women generally aren't interested in IT (largely due to the hostile environment that any male dominated sphere inevitably creates), should we maintain that prejudice for future generations?
When I started in professional computing in the early '80s, there were probably 30-40% women in areas where I worked. It isn't some kind of innate preference - that tired excuse that gets trotted out to justify any conservative position.
I also note that there were more women in STEM in those days. I do find the idea that women do not have any preferences as tired as the "men are pigs" excuse.
My own thoughts are that during the late 70's women were first entering professions in various fields, and eventually figured out what fields they found interesting or applicable. And STEM wasn't one of them. I was involved in trying to recruit women into STEM. Now there was an uphill battle. Polling indicated that most young women were interested in becoming lawyers, MBA or nursing/animal vet. And our hiring and promotion efforts were really weighted toward getting and keeping females. It was hard to tell if it was successful or not.
Do you care to speculate on the amount of sexism in business or law? Hard to get the idea that STEM is so sexist when compared to the business world, where nice young lady "escorts" are so often part of the package for visiting business people. So really, we need to disabuse ourselves of the idea that STEM is the hotbed, the locus, the ground zero of misogyny, if you will.
One female engineer I worked with had a surprising take on the situation. This was a woman who knew from childhood that she wanted to become an engineer. She was involved in several local college programs during high school that I was involved with. Went to university, Had a Masters. What is more, she was not a stereotypical "geek" she was a fitness buff, and could have modelled if she felt like it. She has a very engaging personality But she knew she wanted to be an engineer.
The biggest impediment to her career?
Other women. They tried to discourage her, even ostracized her. The old "Who'd she lay to get that job" trope does not come from men.
My wife who was in business rather than STEM, has noted the same thing. She only had one problem with a male, but the hateful sniping from females was horrifying.
It's now like a long corridor of slight but persistent bias - highly evident in the bitter, stupid comments in this discussion - that weeds out women from the field.
One of the interesting elements in the idea that slight but persistent bias keeps women away, is that it presupposes weakness on the part of women. I do not think women are weak. Of course STEM people are going to receive bias. Both male and female. It's just how the world is right now. The stereotype of the "AV guy", "geeks" "nerds" "eggheads" "bookworks" "wonks" are rather non-sexual in nature wouldn't you think? But those are all name we're called. All of us, not just the girls. And the most positive name I was ever called as "professor". I didn't care - I knew what I wanted to be.
Bias? Oh yes. But as we dig through this morass, I ended up coming to the conclusion that if we are to ever get some manner of gender equity in STEM, we are going to have to both change the prejudice against STEM in general, and we are going to have to fix the approach women take to people in it. The latter is the most critical part.
We can point fingers and blame men all day long, but that is like looking under a streetlamp for your keys instead of the unlit place you lost them - because the light is better, you'll not find them.
Now the next question is - is the susceptibility to social effects an inherent part of being female? I don't know. I do know that the successful females I've worked with were not. They knew what they wanted to be, and they went for it. But to a woman, they said that other females were an impediment.
Completely unpopular conclusion, I admit. In modern times, we've been inculcated to the idea that problems, especially gender issues, are men's fault. But in a world where most problems are
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Honestly, where did this idea come from that there is a conspiracy to keep women out of the tech field? I work in a school with both high school and primary students (as the IT manager, not a teacher) that offers advanced computer classes (compared to other schools in the area). And not once have a I heard a teacher say no girls or this is geared for guys etc... (yes I know anecdotal evidence bla bla)....Hell even when I was in high school people did not ever say this profession is men only/women only...or even hint maybe you should not go into this field because you are a man/woman. In fact everybody is always told (falsely IMHO) you can do annnnnnything you want with your life (nice fairytale).
Why is this not a major issue in other male dominated fields? Like car mechanics? Or trucking? Taxi? Miners? People who cut trees for a living?
You want to know why? Because companies like Google, Apple and other tech giants are probably looking for another way to bring down salaries of IT workers by trying to recruit from another pool of workers.That is what, IMHO, it comes down to. Outsourcing and H1B visas (or wtv they are called, not from the US) are not very popular policy and are getting harder and harder to increase/justify.....So they are looking at the next best thing: get more women involved! In a perfect scenario it should hypothetically double the number of IT workers and nothing can be done to stop it (if you did how dare you you sexist), unlike the other methods.
It's all about the benjamins my friends, nothing more nothing less. If Apple really gave a shit about society & fairness, it wouldn't be using slave labor to manufacture the goods that lead to the hugest income reported EVER by a company. Hypocrites.....
Weirdly enough, women were quite well represented in technology before the 80s. Clearly there was an interest - so what's changed?
What changed was the definition of what a technology job is. Before the 80's, technology jobs included things like typists, calculators, vacuum tube changers, telephone operators, etc. These were relatively low skill repetitive jobs that were well suited to women in the workplace which didn't require higher education, physical ability, or advanced trade skills.
They are amuck these researchers. There is validity to the bias. The unfortunate problem for them is that they can't actually fix the problem without making the problem worse.
The problem is being fixed already. It will take at least a generation of teachers to fix. This generation cannot fix it. It may not get fixed next generation either. The tensors in the equation are too tight. Massage them and they blow back in your face.
God: "I don't leave footprints!"
You're saying that diversity is good for owners and weakness for labor because... a diverse workforce is easy to divide against itself, or did you have something else in mind?
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
My female colleagues and managers are WITHOUT EXCEPTION great software engineers. I wonder why your workspace is so bad?
It's hard to blame it on "the women" because then you'd have to explain why places like my workspace doesn't suffer. So it must be something else. Any ideas?
The great irony of this is that every post like yours perpetuates the Brogrammer narrative that the media is trying so hard to push. Everry stupid shrill SJW out there is actually sawing off the branch they're sitting on.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No, women are usually less well represented in tech in other countries (but I'm sure you can find the occasional exception if you look hard enough).
women and men were EQUAL in the 80s. say 5% of each gender was in tech.
that changes so maybe 20% of men went into tech. women stayed the same at about 5%
that is the imbalance. not a lack of women. a dirth of men.
This is off topic, but I would not be surprised to learn that male elementary school teachers are rare because that career to too dangerous. One nutty parent plays the pedophile card and your life and career are ruined.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Wow, talk about a sweeping generalization. I know lots of female engineers who have engineering related hobbies, but naturally they do tend to put those to one side somewhat once they start having families. There are only so many hours in the day, and kids take up a lot of them. The fact that some guys don't really pull their weight isn't really something to be proud of.
Anyway, that is mostly irrelevant to the argument. I know lots of engineers who do something completely different in their own time. They want to get away from work, have a change of pace. It doesn't mean they are bad engineers, they just have different tastes to the ones who spend every waking minute thinking about code or electronic circuits or mechanical designs.
Do you think the best doctors go home and practice surgery for fun or something? Lend each other scalpels and MRI scanners?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If girls/women don't like STEM, fine let them do something else. An RN can earn well over $100K/year. Why no screaming hissy-fit over a lack of male nurses?
I bet a lot of great tech start-ups lacked diversity. Not just gender diversity, but age, income, education, and race, as well. All young white guys who come from well-off families, and dropped out of big name colleges. I wonder if those start-ups would have worked as well if they were burdened with diversity regulations.
Girls are worried that protective welding equipment makes them look fat? One size dimwit.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
WTF?
Nobody with any real experience can honestly say 'My * colleges and managers are WITHOUT EXCEPTION great software engineers.' unless they are COMPLETELY clueless about what a great software engineer is.
I suppose if you replace * with 'great software engineer' it might be technically true. Trivial case.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You are describing diverse in skills, which has obvious benefits. The OP is talking about diversity in gender and race, who's benefit is unrelated to the job at hand.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Diversity is not the problem. The problem is they're encouraging people to program despite ability, or perhaps we should say inability and disinclination.
I don't want a surgeon because she's black and female to operate on me. I want a surgeon to operate on me because she is skilled and experienced, because she has a high success rate, because she's the right surgeon for the job.
Picking programmers to fill diversity quotas is a nonsensical way of doing business. Pick the programmers who are excellent.
Political correctness needs to die.
Well, I actually remember the era you're talking about -- at least the very tail end of it. When my wife went to graduate school at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Vax operators and technical support staff were mostly women, and were called -- I kid you not -- "Data Dollies".
That should give you a clue as to the relative status of women in tech back in the day. They generally did less well-paid, less prestigious work like keypunching although many a clever keypunch girl became a COBOL or FORTRAN programmer by osmosis. The assumption was that women weren't making a career of technology, they were just working until they could find a husband.
Women in tech (as a whole, individual exceptions noted) were viewed as a stopgap to a shortage of male labor. It started in WW2. One of my friend's moms graduated from Wellesley in WW2 with a degree in math and went to work as an operator on the Harvard Mark 1, and later MIT's whirlwind. When she got married she was expected to retire and did.
It should seem inconceivable now, but when I started work it was still widely believed by men old enough to be middle to senior managers that women couldn't be good at math and technology -- the exceptions before their eyes notwithstanding. And it was still widely assumed that a woman would and should prefer to marry a man with a good career rather than have a career herself.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"Every post like mine"? What's wrong with my post? I've worked in dozens of places, and most of them have had highly toxic macho cultures, men talking about women like they are pieces of meat and belittling their abilities, even when women are present. If the truth reinforces an accurate portrayal, that's not irony.
It goes a long way to showing it's not the students or the home, but the classroom teacher's behavior that explains part of the differences over time between boys and girls
1. There are statistical differences of interest between the genders, some subjects more than others, this leads to different proportions of gender in various subjects.
2. Given a strong enough natural bias of proportion (not individual ability), over time stereotypes will emerge that magnify those biases.
3. Inevitably, teachers (being human and all), will subconsciously be affected by these stereotypes.
It's important that in a subject where women are a small minority that people in teaching positions make a concerted effort to be unbiased and try to remove stereotypes from their judgement. However "reversing the bias" will do as much harm as good, it's almost as misguided as trying to create a perfectly equally diverse workforce in a region where the diversity of the population is not equal. While determining the natural bias in cases like this may be near impossible, people in positions of influence can at least try to be unbiased to reduce the impact of stereotypes on minorities.
I'm in the middle of a 6-week long term subbing position for a first through third grade combination class. I've introduced code.org to all of the students, but it's only the girls that have been really interested. I have 2 or 3 girls that choose to do activities on code.org EVERY day.
I brought my daughter both dolls and trucks. Tried to bring her up in gender neutral way. She did well in math, 5 in AP Calc. 760 in SAT math. But 790 in English and she would not code no matter what carrot I dangled in front of her. Suddenly in the middle of linguistics major (real natural language linguistics not the comp-sci linguistics) she is girding up to learn the wisdom of Donald Knuth. Attending LaTeX workshops etc. (LaTeX bending counts as a form of code bending in my book, she is a big Avatar fan too.)
[*] I am sure there American educated undergrads with great coding skills, but they all end up Google, Amazon, Microsoft or tiny start ups in California. They don't seem to be applying to companies like ours in the middle of rust belt.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
started a STEM program to fill the second half of the day for half-day kindergartners, in four affluent suburbs. "Great!" thought I - this is a chance to get these kiddos before school had a chance to socialize them into well-known STEM gender roles. They haven't been to school yet (plus or minus the odd day care setting - but still nothing like being in school 6hours per day for 180 days for X number of years. Clearly this is as close to tabula rasa I'm going to get for schooling. Surprise, surprise surprise. 90% boys enrolled. Ads, flyers all gender neutral or balanced images. Every year I'd survey the parents, the most common response about female sibs was that no, I'm putting "her" into (dance / swimming / skating / etc.), she's not really into that science-y stuff. Uh huh. The kid just came up with that? Sorry folks, waiting to middle school to fix this is shoveling against the tide. We learned the value of "early" and the value of prior knowledge as an entry point way back with LEGO TC Logo.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
As long as we also discuss (and repair) the gender diversity "problem" in ... ...then I'm perfectly willing to discuss how we can get more women into cushy, well-paid tech occupations at the same time (as long as we spend equal efforts at both).
- executions
- felony convictions and imprisonment
- punishment for all crimes from misdemeanors to felonies
- deaths in the workplace
- low wage menial physical labor jobs
We're trying to fight sexism generally, aren't we?
-Styopa
A study by researchers from the University of Georgia and Columbia University, which evaluated 5,800 elementary school children, came to the opposite conclusion as these Israeli researchers. Researchers analyzed data from 5,800 elementary school students and found that boys performed better on standardized exams in math, reading and science than their course grades reflected.
From the above-referenced study:
The gender differences in grades emerge early in all subject areas and favor girls in every subject. Because boys out perform girls on math and science test scores, it is surprising that girls out perform boys on teacher grades in math and science by nearly 0.15 standard deviations. Even more surprising is that the girl boy gap in reading grades is over 300 percent larger than the white black reading gap and the girl boy gaps in math and science teacher grades are about 40 percent larger than the corresponding white black grade gaps.
and
the inconsistency between test scores and grades is largely accounted for by non-cognitive skills. White boys who perform as well as white girls on these subject-area tests and exhibit the same attitude towards learning as white girls in the classroom are graded similarly.
So, in short, if a boy acts and has a similar learning style as girls, he will get the same grades as girls. Women dominate the teaching profession - 84% of teachers are women. In Kindergarten it's even worse - 98% of teachers are women. Therefore, women apparently value students whose learning style is similar to their own.
In another study, boys were awarded lower grades by women teachers than by external examiners. Whereas male teachers gave girls the same marks as external examiners.
On the political side, in 1972 there were 17% fewer women graduates of college programs than men and this was considered something of a crisis and Title IX was passed to ensure equal opportunities for education regardless of gender. Today, 25% few men than women graduate from college and President Obama calls this a "great accomplishment."
...our education system for the systematic under representation of male elementary and middle school teachers? Is the the fault of college level education courses? Do they have a systematic bias towards women?
Why is this marked insightful? Economics, Anthropology, and Psychology all have testable methodologies.
Says Victor Lavy, economist at the University of Warwick in England.
So, according to Victor the Britain-based economist studying Israeli education culture, not only does gender bias in the Israeli education system somehow represent the experience of European students (all of them. All of Europe. Every county there, every culture, every background), but he also assumes it accurately represents the American educational system?
Does anyone expect this academic british economist to have something relevant to say about the current American Education System?
Why is he even a voice in the room? And he's 'solved the case?'
Also from the article, I love the story about teachers giving their male students higher scores and their female students, but only when they new their names. Did *MATH* all of a sudden become vague? In elementary school, math questions generally have a right answer, and anything but that answer is unarguably wrong. Where is the room for gender bias on elementary school math exams? Oh - maybe math is different in Israel? There's no 'estimation of ability' on a math test! There's just ability!
This study and this study are highly specious and I hope everyone here asks the obvious questions rather than letting this bit of garbage sit in their minds as unquestioned fact.
Other than a general "yes, children who are encouraged at something tend to like it more" this article seems irresponsibly fluffy.
Just my 2c.
Weirdly enough, women were quite well represented in technology before the 80s. Clearly there was an interest - so what's changed?
My guess is that tech in the 80's was mostly composed of newly created fields where more conservative established males did not want to risk. Therefore it was open to women and they went there. Once they acted as the pioneers, the more conservative good ol'boys settled in and took over.
There is a dire shortage of men in elementary schools. So don't blame "male teacher bias" for this phenomenon.Rather, blame the lack of parental involvement in education, and perhaps further blame the fact that most parents are so time-and-energy-strapped that they don't have time to properly engage their kids in ways that model the possibilities for girls. Just look at the Barbie Doll market; that says it all!
My female colleagues and managers are WITHOUT EXCEPTION great software engineers. I wonder why your workspace is so bad? ... Any ideas?
Perhaps because the engineering I work in is not software engineeering. It is heavy engineering, building and running power stations.
I think that there isn't a single reason for why males are more likely to join tech fields, and why they are more likely to be interested in it (And the fact that so many more Asians are represented per capita). And both biology and society likely plays some hand in why females (while more inclinded toward social careers, where they can easily outnumber men) are seemingly "driven out" or simply find technology less interesting on a technical level, when compared to males.
One big problem with the conversation, and the social sciences that spawn it, are the inherent politics involved. When a smattering of different variables are being painted over with only a few (if that many) different variables, it leads to people assuming that it must be the fault of one group of people, the us VS them mentality, one ideology fighting everyone who doesn't agree.
The issues are misunderstood, and blame gets shifted unevenly, sometimes on purpose. A lot of people have plenty to gain from making a solution and forcing it to fit a problem, even when the problem isn't even serious enough to warrant the solution. "Toxic masculinity"/"patiarchy", or "Women just aren't good at [skill]". Pick your poison, they both only serve to benefit one group by harming others.
Having a measured and balanced response or view on issues is not always very popular, as it doesn't generate clickbait articles like this. And it also doesn't allow someone to unfairly incentivise a course of action that doesn't value or even take into account all the facts. And I agree with other posters who postulate that this is such a hot-button topic simply because there is so much comfortable money to be made in Tech compared to, say, firefighting, police or construction work.
Trying to make it easier for women to learn/enjoy studying STEM fields is all well and good. I would love to see more driven, nerdy chicks walking around who know their stuff. But making it all about how a male-driven society is to blame is a bad way to go about it.
Seriously, AC here deserves upvotes. Sadly I have none. But parent deftly illustrates why the difficulty of getting valid scientific results in the social sciences in no way proves that it's categorically impossible; I suppose though some people would rather write things off as impossible when they can't get quick, easy results, which says far more about the people being so dismissive than the nature of such intellectual endeavours.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Nothing you said is true.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That's not really true at all. Many sociologists, economists, etc throughout history have made explicit predictions that could be then evaluated in the face of further evidence. That sometimes people continued to argue after things appear to have been disproven, or when what the evidence actually implied was disputed, hardly makes the social sciences categorically different than "real science". Otherwise, we'd have had to conclude that physics was a fake science after people kept piling on explanations for how the luminferous aether existed. Every time something would seem to falsify it, nope, that just showed some other aspects of the properties of the aether that our celestial bodies move through . . .
It reminds me of one of the only really good jokes The Big Bang Theory ever had. Someone asked one of the main characters "So what's new in . . . uhh . . . physics?" and he replied "nothing really for the past few decades, unless you count String Theory, and they're just like 'ooooh, our theories have internal consistency!'". That some people create a theory, cling to it, and adapt it just barely to accommodate new evidence is sadly a facet of science as it's long been practiced. It's bad science, sure, but "real science" fields have examples of it littering their history.
Meanwhile, examples of hypotheses proven or disproven abound in sociology, for instance Durkheim's claims that it was not the mere tenant of prohibiting suicide that made people statistically less likely to kill themselves if they were devoutly religious, and this hypothesis was proven by comparing the rates of suicide between otherwise demographically similar people and playing with two variables when examining the data: integration within a religious community and the specific religion at play. He showed through the data that the tenants of the religion don't make a statistical difference, but how integrated a person is in the religious community does make a difference. In other words, it wasn't the beliefs of the religion that prevented people from committing suicide, it was their ties to a community. And if you want to try and prove that wrong, all you need to do is find significant evidence of equivalent religious communities whose difference is merely in whether or not they prohibit suicide as part of their doctrine. Sure, that's far more complex and full of hard-to-isolate variables than colliding two particles together tends to be, and skews more to field work than replication in a laboratory---but even our proof of General Relativity relies on observing light in the universe well away from Earth itself.
Are there people who take advantage of the complexity and breadth of potential variables and influences in social science data and hypotheses and push out junk academic works? Oh, definitely. And I'd even agree that it's probably worse in many of the social sciences than many of the hard sciences. But taking such a general trend and pretending it's an absolute and categorical result is, ironically, precisely the kind of junk science you're accusing the social sciences of. I mean, surely you appreciate the irony of claiming
while you've offered no data to back up your hypothesis..
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
That's funny, since there is less gender diversity in elementary education than there is in tech.
Right, annoying that Slashdot has no way of editing posts. Fortunately there are few situations where non-knowledge sabotages knowledge (as it would if it were AND).
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
The OP asked about diversity, not just any specific kind of diversity. But either way, you rarely know beforehand just what sort of diversity will be useful, and just knowing that people are different might affect your decisions.
Suppose you have three new employees, and are sending two of them to work in a team. You have tested them, and you estimate they all have skill level 16 individually (estimating exactly the bit string, exactly which areas are their strong and weak points, your testing isn't good enough to do). Now two of the employees are men, and one is a woman.
In that case, why should you pick the woman and one of the men? Because men and women are slightly different - meaning that you have reason to think they may have slightly different strengths and weaknesses. There might be ever so slightly fewer "collisions" in the bit string in a man/woman pairing compared to a man/man pairing.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Women in other countries are somewhat more well represented in technology and more likely to go into STEM fields - so what are those other countries doing differently?
Those women have less freedom. When they have the freedom, both cultural and economic, to choose their own futures, they may stop choosing STEM fields.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Yes, I guess that's why it's important to have the source :P
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
Maybe this problem is more prevalent in the UK. I don't think it's my fault, I prefer to think that I notice it more than most men might do.
I think diversity is great. But ethnic diversity does not equal skill diversity no matter how much you say it does.
Please note that I have no said anything about race or gender. Those do not matter to me, only skills do.
But maybe caring about having the most skilled employees makes me sexist? Maybe you are the sexist one for saying that women cannot have some skill men have, and men cannot have some skill that women have.
That different genders tend towards different jobs is inconsequential here. If I have a particular job that needs to be done, maybe that means I will end up with an all female or all male team. But it is because those are the people that applied for the job. More often than not, its a bunch of one gender and a few of the other. But not because I was going out of my way to have a diverse team.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Considering that the environment in IT is actually more hostile to men than to women, the question is kind of moot.
I've not encountered that, but anyway the specific problem in IT is purely a numbers game. Even assuming mysogyny and mysandry are equally pervasive, if 50% of people are hostile to men and 50% are hostile to women, then in a department of mostly men, each man will feel threatened about half of the time but women will feel threatened all of the time, because there are fewer targets and so each one becomes the target of mysogyny far more often. The same can be said for any minority. When one group dominates, the minority suffer even if bias is evenly distributed.