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In a landmark study involving over a million students, it appears that the reason boys dominate girls in STEM fields is not that they are better than girls at it (the reverse seems to be true) but, perversely, that gender differences are lower in non-STEM fields.
About the STEM grades, which are often abused as an explanation:
A classroom with more variable grades indicates a bigger gap between high and low performing students, and greater male variability could result in boys outnumbering girls at the top and bottom of the class.
“Greater male variability is an old idea that people have used to claim that there will always be more male geniuses – and fools – in society,” O’Dea says.
The team found that on average, girls’ grades were higher than boys’, and girls’ grades were less variable than boys’.
But girls' and boys' variability were much closer in non-STEM fields.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @04:09PM (9 children)
Historically women were dominant in STEM. I'm not joking.
Going back to the late 19th and early 20th century, you have women like Emmy Noether and Marie Curie, who made incredible contributions but they were the exception not the rule.
In fact most women in STEM during those days were in large pools of workers doing their work in a collaborative environment.
For example, the bulk of astronomers and even chemists were female. Yes they were working under the auspices of a male "chief", and in many cases they were lamented as being part of someone's harem.
But the fact is, women outnumbered men by a large number.
Sadly these women are now nameless and faceless, their contributions all but forgotten.
But the fact is, there were always a lot of women in STEM, and we've forgotten them because when they were recognized, they were recognized as a group and not as individuals, largely due to the nature of the work.
Let's focus on the subfield with the largest gender disparity right now, computing.
Originally a computer wasn't a device. It was a job and it was a job filled primarily by women.
Go back to WW2, the vast majority of code breakers were women as was the job of calculating ballistics and trajectories.
It was so commonplace for so long, that in languages such as Spanish which assign gender to neigh everything, the term "computer programmer" (Programa de computadoras), has very strong feminine connotations,
Note that "dora" is Spanish for "female who does a thing".
During this time frame, there were perhaps 1 man for every 20 women. STEM was hard to get into and as a man you needed to have PhD level credentials.
As a woman, you barely needed to be an undergrad. Part of this may have been the war which was placing a huge selective pressure on the field. There were very few men in general who weren't running around trying to kill men on the other side of the conflict, thus the available pool of workers was mostly women.
Yet the 1950s was post war.
It was also at the dawn of the era of electro-mechanical computers women still outnumbered men by as much as 10:1.
It wasn't until the solid state revolution of the 1970s that the infill rate (the rate of new women entering vs older women retiring), started to slip.
What changed? The nature of the work is what changed.
Before the age of powerful electronic solid state computers, doing these tasks was almost always a collaborative effort.
Once the interface became easier to operate for a single person and the devices that handle computation became far more capable, the need for collaborative skills dropped off precipitously.
This is not at all about gender discrimination, not in terms of numbers, although there probably was a glass ceiling and maybe there still is.
But the truth is this drop off in sheer numbers is about job satisfaction.
Men in general are not about collaboration as equals.
Men don't get an equal sense of satisfaction from working in a group towards a consensus solution that they do from having a feeling of "place", whether that place is the top of the ladder or the bottom of the ladder or "cog in machine".
Men feel overwhelmed and incomplete in a group setting where there is no hierarchy. They will quickly establish a leadership structure before they do anything else. Someone has to lead and someone has to follow.
Men in general prefer a structured hierarchical approach to problem solving.
Women in general do gain a greater sense of satisfaction from collaboration as equals.
Women feel restricted and isolated when they are part of a structured hierarchical approach to problem solving and they are more consensus seeking. Women are less likely to form hierarchies, with the notable exception of the "Queen B" who may emerge, yet the threshold for women accepting a "Queen B", is much higher than is needed for men to accept a "Big Chief".
Finally but perhaps almost as importantly, women have options that are not in general open to men.
So why settle for a job where you aren't satisfied?
What has changed in computing and in STEM in general is that the opportunities to collaborate are now all but gone.
It's not that there has been some vast conspiracy to keep women out, nor have men suddenly become more sexist.
The numbers of women entering the field dropped off because the benefits of collaboration dropped off as have the opportunities to do so.
Collaboration just isn't a huge part of the day in and day out work of your average computer programmer, or lab assistant.
I posit that what is really going on in STEM, is that the nature of our work has changed.
This change began in the 1960s, but only really accelerated in the 1970s and finally peaked in the early 2000s.
Now days, a group of people who are seen standing around and talking for half the day are penalized for not warming a seat.
Open floor plans help ease this somewhat, but everyone male and female needs a little quiet place where they can go to let their fingers accomplish whatever task their mind has set them to.
Yet doing this is now viewed as "not being a team player".
This didn't used to be the case. Men and women were treated differently and they were apportioned workspaces that helped, not hindered their workflow.
These workspaces were based on a perhaps sexist recognition of typical mental archetypes, which my experience has shown to apply mostly based on gender.
There will always be outlier personalities which perform better in a context outside of the norm for their gender.
They are by definition exceptional though, not the norm.
Perhaps the best solution to bringing women into STEM is to give every candidate a choice. Like we had at the game company in Denver.
You can choose to work in isolation or work as part of the group.
As long as your core metrics i.e. goals, are met within 1 standard deviation of your group, then there is nothing for anyone to be concerned about.
I believe offering each employee a choice of their work environment will allow each employee whether male or female to perform optimally, and the ability to choose will draw better candidates all around.
This is probably true for all STEM fields. We've gone from "work how you want to work" to "work how we tell you to work", and this has had the effect of shunning women more than men because women typically do have more choices about where and when they work. As a result women are less drawn to fields where they are forced into a hierarchy and told "this how to do your job".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @04:43PM (7 children)
As someone who speaks Spanish, I will say that your statement:
"""
Originally a computer wasn't a device. It was a job and it was a job filled primarily by women.
Go back to WW2, the vast majority of code breakers were women as was the job of calculating ballistics and trajectories.
It was so commonplace for so long, that in languages such as Spanish which assign gender to neigh everything, the term "computer programmer" (Programa de computadoras), has very strong feminine connotations,
Note that "dora" is Spanish for "female who does a thing
"""
is complete gibberish.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @04:58PM (6 children)
What is the Spanish word for computer?
Are you saying the suffix "dora" does not imply female?
Or are you saying there was a typo somewhere that you were unable to parse?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @05:40PM (5 children)
Spanish grammar lesson time...
According to the DRAE, the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy which is the authoritative dictionary in Spain and highly influential elsewhere, the Spanish word for computer is "ordenador".
This translates to: something that orders (organizes or sorts) things.
Note that the word is MASCULINE.
Outside of Spain, nobody says "ordenador." They use a word adapted from English. In most of Latin America, they say "computadora" which is feminine. However, I have also heard with as much frequency the word "computador" (same word, without the final a) which is masculine.
So what does this all mean? Absolutely nothing.
You've got to get out of your head the idea that grammatical gender corresponds to some direct concept of male or female for a thing. Most of the time, it does not at all and we might just as well think of the genders, instead of being masculine or feminine, as being Gender A and Gender B. The only exception to this is when the noun refers to a person and there are 2 different forms of the word: one form for the sex of eachnperson.
Example:
doctor = male doctor
doctora = female doctor
When there is only a single form of the word, there is really no correspondence with the sex of the person.
Example: victima (English: victim)
Victima is always FEMININE, even if the victim happens to be Arnold Schwarzenegger.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @06:07PM
Some more examples...
Three different Spanish words for breast, as in boob:
seno (MASCULINE)
mama (FEMININE)
teta (FEMININE, vulgar "tit")
Different words for penis:
pene (MASCULINE)
verga (FEMININE, very vulgar)
pinga (FEMININE, vulgar)
See the pattern? There isn't one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @06:16PM (3 children)
Apologies, I don't know about received pronunciation from Spain.
I do know that Latin America speaks a completely different version of Spanish.
I assume though it's like RP English, only people over there speak it and it's a minimal spoken dialect just as RP is minimally spoken dialect of English because American English is the dominant form in terms of sheer number of speakers.
I sure as hell wouldn't know what you're talking about if you asked me to open the bonnet or boot on my car. Most native practical English speakers would be clueless too.
I lived in Mexico for a decade and Latin America as a whole for nearly 2. So I can hold my own when I speak with someone from Latin America, never really tried with someone from Spain though.
In my 2 decades in LATAM, never once did I hear the term "ordenador", I'd challenge you to google that term vs computadora and see how many links pop up.
Yet it is undeniable that in languages and cultures where objects and jobs have gender it is typically because of historical gender roles in the vast majority of cases, even if it isn't the case now.
Case in point, "cocina". The "A" at the end makes this a female thing, and let's admit it, the kitchen is historically a female space across almost all cultures. The job of Cocinera or Cocinero obviously has it's own gender specific words, yet honero and batidora.
Honero is obviously historically male, it is associated with fire. Batidora is a device that mixes and in the home it was always women's work, so when it became a machine, it received a female title.
Tejedora, is an excellent example as well. The act of weaving was done by women for so long, that when machines took over they maintained the historical title of the women who performed the task.
Compare this to "forjador", a device for forging steel. This was typically a male dominated profession and thus the device for doing it maintained the historical title of the men who performed the task.
My point was and is that the act of computing as a basis for your job, i.e. doing math for a living, especially math in bulk, was historically a job primarily staffed by women and as a result when devices were created to automate this they maintained the same title as the person they replaced including the implied gender of the worker that used to do this job. English is less likely to add these gender terms to objects or jobs and as a result it causes us to forget the times when there were gender roles and what was expected of each gender during those times. Instead we've been sold a false narrative that women were excluded from these professions and it was not ever the case. There were occasionally specific jobs for which women were prohibited, but the field of work has always had women and in many cases there were vastly more women than men. As we have developed automation, we have automated tasks that used to require the collaboration of many people, this has had the effect of automating away jobs that were historically filled by women.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @07:09PM
You completely dismiss my post because the facts therein destroy your pet linguistic theory?
Um, OK. Continue being proudly ignorant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @12:22AM (1 child)
I smell cognitive dissonance. Ignore the whole point fixate on one point of something slightly wrong. This is their brain saying 'ignore everything'. Give it a couple of days and come back.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 12 2018, @03:36AM
I was not interested in discussing anything about the person's post except for the common but erroneous notion that grammatical gender in a language generally corresponds to some concept of the thing described as being "male" or "female." It rarely does.
If you want to go on about the unrelated topic of women's standing in society, have at it among yourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @12:15AM
STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
Your history is about coders that translate algorithms into machine code. Nowadays we call those "compilers".
Meanwhile, actual STEM has always been dominated by men. Even though women used to be an integral part of the Technology quadrant, there were still plenty of men designing the machines and algorithms. You tell me when women have ever commonly been a part of the other three.