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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday September 07 2017, @09:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the doesn't-stem-student's-interest dept.

Research into the obvious, but someone has finally done it: Three women researchers have studied the behavior of undergraduates in STEM fields, and concluded that there basically is no problem. From the abstract:

"The results show that high school academic preparation, faculty gender composition, and major returns have little effect on major switching behaviors, and that women and men are equally likely to change their major in response to poor grades in major-related courses. Moreover, women in male-dominated majors do not exhibit different patterns of switching behaviors relative to their male colleagues."

Furthermore current recruitment efforts to attract more women tend to be counterproductive. In an interview, the primary author says:

"Society keeps telling us that STEM fields are masculine fields, that we need to increase the participation of women in STEM fields, but that kind of sends a signal that it's not a field for women, and it kind of works against keeping women in these fields."

One of our female students told me that the women are interviewed endlessly, for one project or another: "tell us about your experience", "are you doing ok", "have you experienced sexism", and on, and on. That alone is enough to make them question their career choice.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 07 2017, @10:43PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 07 2017, @10:43PM (#564795)

    Sure but is there equal lack of opportunity in STEM jobs? Of course there is not. Those of us who got high grades in our major and graduated with honors and studied instead of partying are totally fucked.

    There are no jobs out there for anyone who is truly passionate about STEM. I went to an interview for a data networking job where the interviewer literally told me, "well it looks like you padded your resume with a lot of keywords" to which I was flabbergasted as I explained that I have hands-on experience with every networking protocol I listed on my resume since I have implemented them in code. I did not get the job.

    I guess I should have majored in beer pong instead of CS.

    STEM jobs are for social people. Nerds go to hell.

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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 07 2017, @11:02PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 07 2017, @11:02PM (#564805)

    There are no jobs out there for anyone who is truly passionate about STEM. I went to an interview for a data networking job where the interviewer literally told me, "well it looks like you padded your resume with a lot of keywords" to which I was flabbergasted as I explained that I have hands-on experience with every networking protocol I listed on my resume since I have implemented them in code. I did not get the job.

    Have you considered a boob-job? Seems you had your padding in the wrong place!

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 07 2017, @11:13PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 07 2017, @11:13PM (#564817)

      Imagine a shemale Richard Stallman with breast implants and a penis pump. Fucking hot!

      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 07 2017, @11:21PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 07 2017, @11:21PM (#564821)

        with jews you lose

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 07 2017, @11:07PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 07 2017, @11:07PM (#564813)

    Silly nerd can code a network stack but your mistake was not blogging about yourself to emotionally manipulate everyone into liking you. You should pretend to be homeless like that liar Michael David Crawford. Then everyone will want to hire you.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Friday September 08 2017, @12:15AM (1 child)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday September 08 2017, @12:15AM (#564845)

    STEM jobs are for social people. Nerds go to hell.

    Where did you interview for this job? Was it in the Valley?

    From what I've seen, there's a lot of diversity. The STEM jobs I see, and am usually involved in, are usually filled by more introverted people, but also usually older people. (This might be because I do C/C++/embedded work, not web dev.) Also, older/stodgier east-coast companies, and defense contractors too, are more like this. Stuff that's more west-coast and newer technologies is filled with younger people who fit the "brogrammer" stereotype much more, and even at the older places and defense places, it's changing as younger people take over.

    Overall, as a whole, I think the younger generation does a lot of things better than the older generations (less religiosity, less homophobia, less racism, etc.), but the ones who go into STEM jobs now aren't representative of all of them, and really have a lot of bad qualities. I do think the people going into STEM now are more like frat members than the people I went to college with. I think it really comes down to the fact that STEM, and computer jobs in general, are a victim of their own success. Back in the 70s-80s, that stuff was for "nerds", and introverts went into them to make a good living while doing something they really enjoyed and were really good at. They did such a good job that now everyone has basically a supercomputer in their pocket and uses these technologies for everything from shopping to socializing, and there's a lot of money in the industry so that's attracted a lot of people who in previous decades would have gone into marketing, sales, business/management, etc., and they're pushing out the nerds.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @01:32AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @01:32AM (#564872)

      STEM jobs are for social people. Nerds go to hell.

      Where did you interview for this job? Was it in the Valley?

      Not sure about him, but I feel the same and I'm working in New England. It's just general corporate culture IMO -- not a single damn thing gets done without twenty people in a room debating back and forth. Not one line of code gets written except by committee. I've seen literally one line of bash -- a single rsync command -- take four or five people to write. So if you do your best work alone...you never actually get to do your best work. Hell, "alone" doesn't even exist anymore with open plan office environments. And everything is so compartmentalized that even if you come up with some way to improve the overall process and hopefully make everyone's life easier, you have to get so many other departments on board that someone won't want to or won't understand how to do the work and it won't ever go anywhere.

      I do think the people going into STEM now are more like frat members than the people I went to college with. I think it really comes down to the fact that STEM, and computer jobs in general, are a victim of their own success.

      Christ, you might have a point there...I've been here thinking that was just because we were getting all the H1Bs who think America is just what they've seen from Hollywood. Most of the people I work with care more about playing football (soccer) than doing anything with tech...