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, @01:37AM (15 children)
Of course. Let's just go from one extreme to the other extreme.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @01:51AM (3 children)
What's the matter, can't stand the heat in the kitchen?
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Monday December 10 2018, @07:32AM
Even if you can stand the heat in the kitchen, it's not a guarantee that kitchen is your place [youtu.be].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @07:55AM
He is not a strong nord woman, dammit!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @03:18PM
I could use some heat in the kitchen. It's been really cold recently!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Monday December 10 2018, @02:26AM (8 children)
A good engineer will be interested in the data, and in how well it was assembled.
The rest will just whine about it.
--
Reality is that thing which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
(Score: 3, Informative) by krishnoid on Monday December 10 2018, @02:40AM
You just need a few small tweaks [smbc-comics.com] to target your audience properly.
(Score: 2, Redundant) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday December 10 2018, @03:28AM (5 children)
A good engineer will get hired because of their qualifications not what's between their legs.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @08:16AM
This shift in practice is why the debates on this topic are so heated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @09:26AM (1 child)
but but we MUST have gender equality!
How else can we get at least 50% of positions occupied by females?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @12:50PM
Yes, all those females who'll be achieving gender parity with males as sewage workers, garbage collectors and street sweepers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @11:04AM
Now that's good news for the polycells!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Monday December 10 2018, @01:08PM
Did I say anything about hiring because of what's between their legs?
Why no, I didn't. Nor did I imply it. Rather the reverse.
I will now leave you to continue to play with your straw (wo)man.
--
Knock softly, but firmly. I like soft, firm knockers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @10:21AM
Yes, and that is the issue. The data, the way the data is collected, and even the standards themselves (grades, test scores) are junk.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday December 10 2018, @03:31AM (1 child)
They're not going from one extreme to the other. They're attempting the old bait and switch with your attention. That girls have higher scores in STEM "on average" and with less variability says nothing to disprove that men still largely hold the extremes of the curve. It in fact reinforces it if you pay attention to what was actually said.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @02:43PM
Yeah and the boys that do well in STEM in high school go to STEM fields for university and work. Whereas the boys that don't, don't.
Similarly it doesn't matter whether or not there's a big difference between the average white/black/man/woman in how fast they run 100 meters. The 100 meter race and records remain dominated by black guys.
And few care about the 8th fastest person in the 100m race even if he's actually faster than billions of people. Just like few care about the 8th person who independently rediscovered the theory of relativity...
In many fields the average doesn't matter as much as the outliers.
(Score: 2, Troll) by idiot_king on Monday December 10 2018, @01:57AM (17 children)
I've heard Petersonites (friends included) state that "girls are interested in people, and boys are interested in objects" which is supposed to explain the gender gap in STEM and so on. I'm glad that real science is debunking this trash over and over. It's beyond ridiculous that we can't debunk more of this stupid backwards hooey in this day and age. Bravo to the researchers dismantling this myth piece by piece.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @02:07AM (4 children)
So, it is a fly-blown cult now, eh? Petersons are only interested in money. And if that involves insighting a bunch of incels, he has no problem with that. So pass the all-beef dinner, if you don't mind.
(Score: 1, Informative) by idiot_king on Monday December 10 2018, @02:27AM (1 child)
It's not just them, but in my experience they're the ones most explicit about it. Regular ol' classic sexism is implicit about it.
"Oh you're a woman? Let me take care of that." With that being some task which said woman is completely qualified for.
I'm starting to call these Petersonites, Dawkinites et al "neo-bigots" because they're bigots except actually honest about their bigotry and emboldened by their conception of "free speech" and "the marketplace of ideas" and whatever other garbage they tout as being superior.
(Score: 2) by EventH0rizon on Wednesday December 12 2018, @05:34AM
To be clear, are you really labeling Peterson and Dawkins as "bigots"?
Bigot:
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/bigot [dictionary.com]
"a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion."
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigot [merriam-webster.com]
"a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @08:01AM (1 child)
You name it, then you wonder if it has reached the status of naming, then you shame it. Then you call yourself liberal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @08:27PM
Fucking Nazis!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by exaeta on Monday December 10 2018, @02:45AM (3 children)
Actually there is quite a bit of well done research that supports this conclusion as being true. At the least, for very young children. Whether or not this applies to adults is quite a different question.
However, a study of academic grades fails to control for gender based grading bias, so this study is hardly a "landmark", rather it appears quite weak.
Here's some example discussion on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcDrE5YvqTs [youtube.com]
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @08:00AM (2 children)
There was a study that showed that women are 200% preferred over men during resume shortlisting, on same credentials, in STEM. Of course, that doesn't help a lot of men get laid by claiming alpha status of being a feminist, nor it helps bring moolah to gender
bigotsstudies.Also, let us nor forget, there are female incels - they are called feminist.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday December 10 2018, @12:47PM (1 child)
Involuntary feminists?
Ha! There, I laughed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday December 10 2018, @08:31PM
Infems? Makes sense. Wasn't the name of John Hammond's corporation in "Jurassic Park" InGen? And they were all female dinosaurs, because everyone knows that female (infems?) dinos are better at STEM, because females (Mother Nature) will find a way.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Weasley on Monday December 10 2018, @03:10AM
This study says that women choose to go into fields where they don't have to compete with high competing boys. That does not preclude the possibility that "girls are interested in people and boys are interested in objects".
(Score: 2, Interesting) by xvan on Monday December 10 2018, @03:24AM (4 children)
How does this debunk anything? It was worsens it.
That stem requires higher IQ than most other careers (except philosophy, if I remember right)
, and that there are more high IQ males than females is an elephant in the room that nobody wants to address. This is just a paper confirming the obvious.
The issue is that, even accounting for that, the IQ barrier for engeneers is not that high to explain the 20/80 , or even 15/85 gender distribution on mindless programming jobs.
So to answer, you have account preferences.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @08:12AM (3 children)
Women and men self-segregate in the lunch room.
Well, the same fucking thing is going to happen in the... uh... STEM room.
Given that most of the best STEM leaders will be male (according to this and other data), you're going to end up with STEM fields dominated by men and most women avoiding them.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @09:49AM (1 child)
Actually what happens in the STEM room is that the girls take a step back, lower themselves and generally do worse.
In grade 10, at a public school mind, two classes of the several in grade 10 were split into boys and girls. For science. No really. Literally for science based classes. That first day sucked. I stood with 20 or 24 or so other boys in the 10.5 class not realizing that there was a girls only class looking at the rest of the year in their boy/girl merged classes thinking "wtf". And they looked at us and thought "whats with the sausage fest? Did they put the homos all in one class?"
No. They wanted to trial boys only chemistry. Girls only chemistry. Physics. Biology.
At the end of year they announced the test scores. The other classes averaged around 85. Not bad. My boss only class averaged 91. Waaaaay.
The girls only class average 93.
Most of the high scores in the year came from the boys only and girls only science classes.
I remember being chased by 3 girls who wanted to "turn" me. Thanks, High school. I really needed that experience at 15 years old.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @06:10PM
Women cluster around average intelligence, as proved again by this study and others before it.
Well, no wonder they excel at boring, school, busy work. That's the domain of average folk.
The boys, on the other hand, while largely average, have 2 other not-insignificant groups: The dumbells and the geniuses.
Well, the dumbells are not good at boring, school, busy work, and the geniuses don't give a fuck about it. Now we understand why the boys have a lower average score.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday December 10 2018, @12:52PM
Prudent thing to do.
All that "sexual harassment" training seems to provoke the expected reaction - you aren't paid to be a human, you are paid to be a worke... errr... professional.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday December 10 2018, @03:32AM (1 child)
It's not being debunked. Their study reinforced it as I noted above [soylentnews.org].
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Monday December 10 2018, @08:14AM
[1] Since "STEM" is actually a collection of subjects, some that are dominated by one gender or the other and some more balanced, it's also disingenious of them to simply average them out without really getting into the finer details of their methodology as that could (and likely was) also be made to lead the reader's perception of the results. OP's point about what attracts a given student to a given field likely has some relevance to the results as it seems likely that students who opted for a field study of their own volition would have done so because they enjoy it/and or are good at it, both of which might lead to an expectation of higher grades compared to those who picked it through peer/parent pressue or because it is just what their social demographic is expected to do.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @02:40AM
For any that want to question the data or analysis, the researchers have made it available:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06292-0 [nature.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Monday December 10 2018, @02:40AM (1 child)
It's probably a good thing the people doing this study don't work for Google. They might be out of a job.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @11:16AM
Only if they posted it on Google's internal forums.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @03:12AM (3 children)
Let people choose what they want to study.
You are going to have sex differences in what they prefer.
Adjust your theory if theory repeatedly fails to match reality...
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @11:26AM (1 child)
At college in the 1980s, that was as far as I got.
(Score: 2, Funny) by c0lo on Monday December 10 2018, @12:54PM
#metoo
(large grin. A sorta nostalgic one)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Archon V2.0 on Monday December 10 2018, @06:57PM
> Adjust your theory if theory repeatedly fails to match reality...
As demonstrated by the support the Sokal 2.0 papers received, now it's about attempting to adjust reality if it fails to match your theory.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by crafoo on Monday December 10 2018, @04:21AM (8 children)
It's based on grades? I don't know. I can't be bothered to read it, but that seems just absolutely filled with pitfalls and unidentified biases.
Less variability in grades outside STEM ... yeah, I mean I think that's obvious. Language study, classics, and maybe things like archeology might have some real, objective knowledge to test. So much of the rest is pure indoctrination into woo bullshit. Do you believe the right things and do you know the cult's insider language? Great, here is your A.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @08:14AM (1 child)
Goddamnit. You can't just silence people who are expressing a perfectly rational, discussion-worthy point.
FIX THE MODERATION SYSTEM.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @09:41AM
-1 Troll mod!
FTFY! I just love the smell of social engineering in the morning! It smells like, semen.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday December 10 2018, @09:39AM (3 children)
> So much of the rest is pure indoctrination into woo bullshit
I think calling STEM "indoctrination and woo bullshit" won't get you very far. Mod -1 flamebait.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday December 10 2018, @09:48AM
I think our unpleasant craflo was referring to the non-rigorous extra-STEM stuff, like grammar and spelling, which seem to be sadly lacking here at SN. Oh, and History, and English. You know, the "woo-woo" stuff, outside of model trains.
(Score: 3, Informative) by zocalo on Monday December 10 2018, @10:04AM (1 child)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday December 10 2018, @10:25AM
The GGP is ambiguous. That's not how I read it, although it is probably what was intended.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @05:16PM (1 child)
yes, it's complete nonsense. girls are doing better in school than boys, period. at least in the US. everyone in this country even half way paying attention knows that.
boys are training for prison. girls are being groomed to be used by the slave/nanny state as Overseers. to use grades as the $whatever for study of this type is stupid and likely propaganda.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @10:38AM
The real question is why people worship grades and test scores when the standards are so obviously low to begin with. The fact that the standards themselves are abysmal means that meeting or exceeding them is just not impressive. Our school system is a disaster, so excelling within it is no accomplishment.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by looorg on Monday December 10 2018, @09:51AM (4 children)
"Landmark study", really? It's not exactly news that girls do better then boys in school if one looks at grades -- across more or less every single subject. That is quite literally old news. That is even acknowledged in the study.
The interesting part here is that they note that girls are conformist, so for them to be good at maths (or STEM) it requires other girls to be good at it to -- so they can or are allowed to (socially) conform. So for that to happen there has to be some outliers or trailblazers to lead the way first. Guess those are few and far between, that or girls just have to stop giving a shit about what other people think and do and do things for themselves that they want to do.
Sadly they keep coming back to the same old solution to the problem as always -- more preferential treatment for girls. Tilting the playing field even more then it already is in the favor of girls, it's already massively tilted in their favor. It's the standard solution to this, and all girl student problems. Then naturally they are left wondering why the boys are actually just doing worse and worse every passing year. I guess they just are not "applying themselves" enough ... I wonder why that is ...
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Monday December 10 2018, @05:32PM (3 children)
That is right and It is because girls mature faster than boys, and that has long been known as a factor in education circles. As an aside it is evident that many "boys" never grow up mentally at all (present company excepted LoL!) : obvious examples being Elon Musk and Fred Dibner (the UK guys will know who I mean), while the number of girls who never grow up mentally ... well I cannot think of any examples off hand. But the slower mentally maturing ones of either sex tend to overtake the faster ones intellectually in the long run.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @06:03PM
"while the number of girls who never grow up mentally ... well I cannot think of any examples off hand"
You don't date, do you?
(Score: 2) by Muad'Dave on Tuesday December 11 2018, @01:40PM (1 child)
> ... Fred Dibner (the UK guys will know who I mean) ...
Did you mean Fred Dibnah [wikipedia.org]? Even as an American I know who he was.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday December 11 2018, @06:49PM
Yes, Fred Dibnah : sorry for the slip.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @10:31AM (5 children)
Women actively avoid any interest or occupation that draws large numbers of unattractive, immature, socially awkward, powerless men into their orbit. They prefer their predators to be competent, ambitious, exciting and worth being afraid of (as opposed to just being a shoe-scraper nuisance) so they can collect some high-value gossip to enhance their standing in their peer group. (Not that there's anything wtong with that.)
Nobody ever wrote a serious romance novel about a hunky permanent bottom-rung individual-contributor IT guy fixing the heroine's PowerPoint presentation. ("Ohh, please fondle my breast just like you used my mouse, click on me baby":.... Seriously?)
If all but the top 10% most attractive, ambitious, mature guys disappeared from STEM and were guaranteed to stay out, the gender balnce would instantly reverse to majority-female.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @11:06AM (3 children)
Women avoid STEM because of guys like the one who wrote the above.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday December 10 2018, @11:31AM (2 children)
No, women avoid STEM way before they ever have any idea by whom its workforce is populated. Most of them just don't like it and you're going to run up against that fact no matter how badly you want equal gender representation. There's not a damned thing you can do about it except make the men as unhappy with it as a career choice as women are.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @06:38PM (1 child)
Ah yes, The Mighty Buzztard resonating with the incels. Down with women! Equality for anyone else is a persecution of white males everywhere!!!
If you dislike that characterization maybe don't be such a reeeeeeetard and say shit like "There's not a damned thing you can do about it except make the men as unhappy with it as a career choice as women are."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 11 2018, @04:09AM
Bzzzzt! I enjoy the company of women. I in fact believe they should be free to do whatever the fuck they're capable of and feel like doing. I do not believe they should be forced to conform to the current feminist ideology against their natural, cultural, and personal inclinations though. Short of using violence to do so, they're going to do what they like and tell you to go fuck yourself. If you want more women in STEM, try recruiting from gender studies.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday December 10 2018, @02:50PM
Way to reinforce negative nerd stereotypes! You can only be sexually attractive if you're a brain-dead sales guy, MBA or a violent thug, amirite? Naturally disciplines that require a lot of time doing mental and written work may have a greater number of individuals that became physically unfit or socially inexperienced but they're not all like that and I think the cultural stereotyping has had a much bigger effect on these preconceptions than the reality. After that it becomes self-perpetuating because people believe the stereotypes and ostracize the nerds.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 5, Informative) by pTamok on Monday December 10 2018, @12:38PM (4 children)
OK, so what the study confirms is that:
(i) Girls on average get better grades than boys.
(ii) Boys grades exhibit greater variability from the boys average than girls variability from the girls average.
(iii) The difference between the average grade results is smaller in STEM subjects than non-STEM, but still exists.
(iv) The range of variability is smaller in STEM subjects than non-STEM subjects, but still exists.
Graph (c) in Figure 3 of the paper shows that in STEM subjects, once you get into the top 10% of achievement, the sex ratio skews towards boys.
This means that if you have a purely meritocratic hiring policy which successfully hires only those in the top 10% of grades in STEM subjects, (all other things being equal) the sex ratio of the hired staff will be skewed towards males. The higher you set the grade achievement barrier, the greater the maleward skew. If you want a 50/50 sex ratio, you will need affirmative action, preferentially hiring females on some other criterion/criteria.
And, you will see the same effect in non-STEM subjects, but the crossover point to where the sex-ratio skews male is the top 2% of grades. So across all subjects, you can expect the sex distribution of the people at the absolute pinnacle of achievement to be highly skewed towards males. I would suggest that most recruitment strategies do not aim to get one of the '2%', but probably do aim to get one of the 10%. In that case, in non-STEM subjects, you would expect an unbiased grade-based meritocratic recruitment strategy to skew towards females.
Whether this should be changed is an ideological question. Whether it can be changed is an open question, as the effect appears stable across many studies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @04:03PM (3 children)
I think you mean Overall has top 2% skew towards men, not Non-STEM. I'm just looking at the graphs, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06292-0/figures/1 [nature.com] ,but my interpretation is that for non-STEM, the top grades are heavily skewed female. The overall numbers have the top 2% skewed male, but the non-STEM fields skewed female in the top 30-40% of grades. (A pretty massive difference)
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday December 10 2018, @04:11PM (2 children)
I'm looking at graph (c) on Figure 3 [nature.com], which is clearly labelled.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @05:57PM (1 child)
I think I may be misinterpreting what the graphs I was looking at are supposed to indicate. Although, reading the text more thoroughly isn't helping me a whole lot either. I must be one of those below average boys. The one you're looking at are more detailed at least and match what you were saying. Thanks for the clarification!
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday December 10 2018, @06:38PM
No problem.
I spend a reasonable amount of time reading this sort of stuff, and I don't always get it right.
If you want to get better at extracting the information from a scientific paper (and sometimes the papers are so bad there isn't any, it is all just smoke-and-mirrors misuse of statistics), then I would recommend starting with reading some of the website articles that pop up if you put 'how to read a scientific paper' (without the quotation marks) into your search engine of choice.
Unfortunately, understanding a lot of good scientific work will require that you have at least a familiarity with the statistical methods used. You can't really avoid it, because without it, incorrect conclusions are easily reached. This doesn't mean you need to have majored in statistics at university, but you should aim to know what the terms used mean.
There is often the problem that the people who produce the publicity material for universities and research institutions don't understand the papers, and put entirely incorrect spins on the. This irritates the researchers greatly, but there isn't a lot they can do about it. So be wary of taking publicity materials at face value.
The social sciences is one area where statistics are often misused, or even abused. Even well regarded highly-cited papers in the field can have fatal flaws. Just like other human endeavours, some people make mistakes through ignorance; others set out deliberately to mislead. Telling the difference between the two can be difficult.
Good luck with your further reading.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @01:46PM
It cannot be that non STEM subjects have totally Subjective grading....
Please GTFO with your feminist nonsense.
(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.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @04:46PM (1 child)
I'm not understanding the articles logic. Some of these statements don't match the data from the study but seem to me to be logically flawed on top of that. Pulling contextual differences out.
Conclusion: B subjects are not an equal playing field.
But they just stated the opposite, 'A' subjects were the most unequal playing field. WTF?
But a bad conclusion might be expected since things like:
"In STEM subjects girls and boys received surprisingly similar grades, in both average and variability."
The graph of the data indicates that this is true for average grades, but the variability wasn't similar at all. In fact, variability is the most dissimilar in the STEM fields according to their graph. Are they even looking at their own data?
"In other words, the researchers demonstrated that academic STEM achievements of boys and girls are very similar – in fact, the analysis suggests that the top 10% of a class contained equal numbers of girls and boys."
Again, look at their graph. This is true for the average achievement of boys an girls in STEM. It is very similar with girls doing slightly better on average. But the top 10% of the class containing equal numbers?, that doesn't look true at all, unless you have a very tiny class (and they are looking at 1.6 million students). It might be true for the overall numbers of all class types (that looks quite possible on the graphs). But it isn't true of STEM (at least according to their data).
In fact, go look at the graphs, really. I look at the graphs of the data and my conclusions are very different from the studies. Males, on average, need help. They do worse on average scholastically than females in every subject group. This means that the majority of boys need scholastic support just to try to get to up to the class average. This is especially true in the Non-STEM fields where the average male looks to be at least a standard deviation below the average female. Looking at this data and deciding that women are in trouble is a bazaar and troubling conclusion.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by qzm on Tuesday December 11 2018, @01:38AM
The whole study is broken due to selection bias, pretty much by definition..
These people are taking a big pile of existing data and trying to manipulate/interpret it to fit their agenda, not do actual research.
It is quite similar to how you will find that male nurses and teachers these days tend to get better results - because they need to be more motivated to
enter a field dominated by the other gender (in fact you will find a huge bias in both those cases). This does not mean men are better teachers and nurses,
it simply reflects a strong selection bias because you are not sampling randomly..
However they achieved what they want - the media, and decision makers will run with it, claiming this is a reason to push more and more funding towards women in STEM.
Equivalent 'bias' in other areas will be completely ignored of course (the last thing they would want is more women in construction laboring, or god forbid more male teachers)
Such is the world we live in.