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>very unlikely that computer technology is unique among the professions in being suited to men There are a bunch of other professions where women are under/ove

>very unlikely that computer technology is unique among the professions in being suited to men There are a bunch of other professions where women are under/over-represented. CS is one of them. Others include: Mechanical Engineering Construction Electrical Engineering Physics Aerospace Engi Geography Finance On the other hand, in Biology things are a lot more balanced. So maybe it is the field of interest as opposed to discrimination since the scientific culture in universities is about the same in Biology as it is in Physics.

tptacek 10y ago
Neuroscience, molecular biology, chem, stat, even pure math all have saner gender balance than computer science; some, like molecular biology, even have slightly more women than men. I think it's going to be difficult to compose an argument for how computer science could be intrinsically better suited to men in a way that didn't also apply to other popular hard-science fields.
- throwaway399 10y ago
  The nature of the work in all of these fields is different. My point is that women are not less qualified, but just less interested in a career of doing the kind of work software engineers do. It is very very different from applied math and statistics. Neuro/molecular/chem ~= biology and is similar to each other for the most part. women are underrepresented in almost all major engineering fields. It's not like the math there is harder than pure maths or that it's more challenging. Just different. stats is its own beast. Accounting is very different from computers-related fields or biology for example. Statistics classes are also pretty much evenly balanced. pure math is also very different from everything else. It might be in some cases similar to theoretical CS/applied math but to get to theoretical CS most people have to go through undergrad CS classes that paint a completely different picture of what that work is like.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    There was no set of comparable fields I could give where you wouldn't be able to provide some kind of distinction as if it was determinative, but at some point the argument gets so finicky that it becomes tautological. Science, but nothing biological, even if it requires organic chem and computational models. And not astronomy. Only physics, even though only a tiny minority of CS practitioners have physics training. Math, sure, but not abstract maths, or statistics, even though stat is the most important math for programming. One suspects that if there was some subfield of programming, like distributed systems, that had 45/65 female/male, there'd be an elaborate justification for how that programming discipline was so different from the rest of programming that any comparisons to it were invalid (and, in fact, I've noticed at academic crypto conferences that women are much more common than in the rest of CS, so maybe that's an example). Again, this is what it means for an argument to be a special pleading: we're required to accept an obstacle course of criterion that ignores the simplest, most plausible comparisons.
    - discombobulate 10y ago
      Do you believe the following statements are true? 1) Men & women have differently structured brains. 2) Different brains result in different behaviour.
    - camelite 10y ago
      > Again, this is what it means for an argument to be a special pleading: we're required to accept an obstacle course of criterion that ignores the simplest, most plausible comparisons. On the contrary, if you look at lists of the representation gap between professions, computer programmers fit right into their surroundings. It requires special pleading to explain why programming is systematically discriminating against women, and not civil engineers, sound technicians, chemical engineers, industrial engineers, mechanical engineers, aerospace engineers, professionally active mathematicians, chemical engineers etc...
      - tptacek 10y ago
        Something like 35% of mathematics PhDs produced annually are women, and that number is increasing --- it's up from 32% a few years ago. And math is one of the more male-dominated STEM fields. Computer science, physics, and engineering are the three male bastions of STEM. Nothing else in STEM compares. Moreover, the rest of STEM is significantly and increasingly dependent on computer science, so a very large number of practicing scientists in non-CS, non-engineering fields are spending much of their working time programming computers. Somehow, we've led ourselves to believe that plugging form fields into database columns is serious men's only business, but working with computational models of molecular biology isn't. It would not challenge my intuitions to find that women in STEM are doing more significant CS work than the overwhelming majority of professional computer programmers.
gaius 10y ago
Loggers, refuse collectors, meatpackers, miners etc etc are also disproportionately male.
- DanBC 10y ago
  You were told three years ago about the programmes that exist to correct the gender balance in each of those industries. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6508777#6509275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6508777#6509275 Women in mining: http://internationalwim.org/ http://internationalwim.org/ http://www.womeninmining.org/ http://www.womeninmining.org/ Women in construction: http://www.nawic.org/nawic/default.asp http://www.nawic.org/nawic/default.asp (some editing to tone it down a bit.)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - gaius 10y ago
    You were told three years ago And yet, the problem still exists, no? So my statement was merely one of fact. some editing to tone it down a bit Don't worry you got your changes in before I could take a screenshot to post on another site without context to stir up the outrage #hnwatch
    - tptacek 10y ago
      It's a bad idea to attack someone for taking extra effort to strip inflammatory stuff out of their comments. That's exactly what we want commenters to do.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]

tptacek 10y ago

Neuroscience, molecular biology, chem, stat, even pure math all have saner gender balance than computer science; some, like molecular biology, even have slightly more women than men. I think it's going to be difficult to compose an argument for how computer science could be intrinsically better suited to men in a way that didn't also apply to other popular hard-science fields.

throwaway399 10y ago
The nature of the work in all of these fields is different. My point is that women are not less qualified, but just less interested in a career of doing the kind of work software engineers do. It is very very different from applied math and statistics. Neuro/molecular/chem ~= biology and is similar to each other for the most part. women are underrepresented in almost all major engineering fields. It's not like the math there is harder than pure maths or that it's more challenging. Just different. stats is its own beast. Accounting is very different from computers-related fields or biology for example. Statistics classes are also pretty much evenly balanced. pure math is also very different from everything else. It might be in some cases similar to theoretical CS/applied math but to get to theoretical CS most people have to go through undergrad CS classes that paint a completely different picture of what that work is like.
- tptacek 10y ago
  There was no set of comparable fields I could give where you wouldn't be able to provide some kind of distinction as if it was determinative, but at some point the argument gets so finicky that it becomes tautological. Science, but nothing biological, even if it requires organic chem and computational models. And not astronomy. Only physics, even though only a tiny minority of CS practitioners have physics training. Math, sure, but not abstract maths, or statistics, even though stat is the most important math for programming. One suspects that if there was some subfield of programming, like distributed systems, that had 45/65 female/male, there'd be an elaborate justification for how that programming discipline was so different from the rest of programming that any comparisons to it were invalid (and, in fact, I've noticed at academic crypto conferences that women are much more common than in the rest of CS, so maybe that's an example). Again, this is what it means for an argument to be a special pleading: we're required to accept an obstacle course of criterion that ignores the simplest, most plausible comparisons.
  - discombobulate 10y ago
    Do you believe the following statements are true? 1) Men & women have differently structured brains. 2) Different brains result in different behaviour.
  - camelite 10y ago
    > Again, this is what it means for an argument to be a special pleading: we're required to accept an obstacle course of criterion that ignores the simplest, most plausible comparisons. On the contrary, if you look at lists of the representation gap between professions, computer programmers fit right into their surroundings. It requires special pleading to explain why programming is systematically discriminating against women, and not civil engineers, sound technicians, chemical engineers, industrial engineers, mechanical engineers, aerospace engineers, professionally active mathematicians, chemical engineers etc...
    - tptacek 10y ago
      Something like 35% of mathematics PhDs produced annually are women, and that number is increasing --- it's up from 32% a few years ago. And math is one of the more male-dominated STEM fields. Computer science, physics, and engineering are the three male bastions of STEM. Nothing else in STEM compares. Moreover, the rest of STEM is significantly and increasingly dependent on computer science, so a very large number of practicing scientists in non-CS, non-engineering fields are spending much of their working time programming computers. Somehow, we've led ourselves to believe that plugging form fields into database columns is serious men's only business, but working with computational models of molecular biology isn't. It would not challenge my intuitions to find that women in STEM are doing more significant CS work than the overwhelming majority of professional computer programmers.

gaius 10y ago

Loggers, refuse collectors, meatpackers, miners etc etc are also disproportionately male.

DanBC 10y ago
You were told three years ago about the programmes that exist to correct the gender balance in each of those industries. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6508777#6509275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6508777#6509275 Women in mining: http://internationalwim.org/ http://internationalwim.org/ http://www.womeninmining.org/ http://www.womeninmining.org/ Women in construction: http://www.nawic.org/nawic/default.asp http://www.nawic.org/nawic/default.asp (some editing to tone it down a bit.)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- gaius 10y ago
  You were told three years ago And yet, the problem still exists, no? So my statement was merely one of fact. some editing to tone it down a bit Don't worry you got your changes in before I could take a screenshot to post on another site without context to stir up the outrage #hnwatch
  - tptacek 10y ago
    It's a bad idea to attack someone for taking extra effort to strip inflammatory stuff out of their comments. That's exactly what we want commenters to do.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]