Men tend to score higher than women in math on the SAT and the GRE; to a large degree, the gap between men and women in STEM can be explained by their GRE and SAT scores. If you would like to see the argument, I recommend you read this Slate Star Codex post, which goes into far more detail.
In the United States, all students are required to take a math assessment each year. As it happens, this assessment shows no difference between men and women in math ability, including in eleventh grade. The SAT is typically taken in eleventh grade.
This is somewhat strange. While there are theories that suggest that women are just as good at math when they’re young and lose their abilities as they get older, it is a bit much to expect that women would lose their skills in a matter of weeks.
No Child Left Behind assessments are taken by every student. However, only students who are interested in attending college take the SAT.
There are two factors here. First, within the No Child Left Behind data, men have a higher variance than women do, although the difference is not large. If you have two groups with the same mean but one has a higher variance, and you throw out all the low-performers, the high variance one will look like it performs better: you’re keeping all the very very high scores, but not the very low ones which balance it out. However, this is not sufficient to explain the gender gap:
For whites, the ratios of boys:girls scoring above the 95th percentile and 99th percentile are 1.45 and 2.06, respectively, and are similar to predictions from theoretical models. For Asian Americans, ratios are 1.09 and 0.91, respectively. Even at the 99th percentile, the gender ratio favoring males is small for whites and is reversed for Asian Americans. If a particular specialty required mathematical skills at the 99th percentile, and the gender ratio is 2.0, we would expect 67% men in the occupation and 33% women. Yet today, for example, Ph.D. programs in engineering average only about 15% women (14).
Furthermore, the greater male variability hypothesis applies to both quantitative and verbal IQ, and yet we see no such gap in SAT critical reading scores.
There is a six-point gap between the number of men who take the SAT and the number of women. Therefore, one ought to expect that men who take the SAT are probably smarter than women who take the SAT. But, again, this ought to affect both math and critical reading.
So: the Great Filter. There are various factors which affect whether someone wants to go to college: for instance, people who take the SAT have higher family incomes, are much more likely to be Asian, and (according to this SAT-to-IQ translator) have higher IQ scores. However, there may very well be gender-specific filtering.
Specifically: for some reason, there is a strong selective pressure for men who are good at math to want to go to college.
Imagine that the Czar of College Admissions said “we will solely admit men based on math SAT score, but we will admit women based on composite SAT score”. One would expect math classes to be male-dominated, even if the school at a whole wasn’t. While the Czar of College Admissions doesn’t seem to exist, there may be some other factor acting like the Czar.
Conversely, one might assume that the difference is that six-point gap: people who are marginal at math take the SAT and go to college if they’re female, but not if they’re male. However, it seems puzzling that that would create male-dominated fields, as opposed to balanced fields and female-dominated fields. Perhaps for some reason a slight male dominance in one field ends up driving women away?
There are a lot of unexplained factors in the Great Filter Theory. But I present the problem in the hopes that someone else will find the solution.
Thing of Things 
A data point: my employer once did an internal study on attracting young women to tech. What they did was bring the girls into a room, do a presentation on tech, and then give out a questionnaire which measured the level of interest in the field.
The difference between the control group and study group was this: for the control group, the room was decorated in (what we might call) a “male nerd” style, posters of video game stuff and circuit boards, things like that. For the study group, the room had some kind of concept design that coded less “male.”
(I know about this study from a discussion with my employer’s diversity group. I didn’t read it. Nor do I know the precise decorations.)
(I might have the “study group” and the “control group” backward. Anyway, there were two groups.)
The result was, there was a notable difference in the responses between the two groups. The women in the “male coded” rooms were less attracted to tech. The women in the “concept design” rooms were.
(No, I don’t have a link. So far as I know we kept the study internal. I know that sucks. Sorry.)
(That said, and for what it’s worth, our diversity group does hire real statisticians. We are results oriented. They really are trying to figure out how to attract more women, not create ‘media talking points’ for the gender war. Make of that what you will.)
In any case, these days we use a lot of concept design in our spaces. I often sit on panels with young women we are trying to attract — usually college age women, normal recruitment stuff — and, well, I think the design stuff helps. I know that when I first came in for a job interview, I found the space very welcoming. In fact, the “mood” of the space influenced my decision to accept the offer.
I mean, it was not the only reason. Plus I was already an established software engineer at this point, so the choice wasn’t “tech or not tech,” but still. Let’s just say the design of the space made me more excited about the job offer.
I have no idea how this might influence the SAT.
#####
Anyway, we’re all nerds here. We can talk honest-style.
I’ve noticed that a lot of us have a huge psychological investment in being smarter than the “mundanes.” And it’s tricky to talk about, but there is definitely a thing about the relationship that male nerds have with attractive, mainstream women. So yeah. My point is, we have ego investment. This is every Paul Graham essay. So if it turned out that those “muggles” could be trained up to become effective software engineers, well that would be a hard blow. Paul Graham would be wrong. Maybe we’re not so special after all.
Right now in tech, there is a zero-sum battle for the freaky aspie logic-obsessed people coming from the big tech colleges. So if a company can attract the “muggles,” and if the “muggles” prove effective, that’s a big win.
A big win!
Personally, I think there will always be a place for we weirdos at the core of tech. We just “get” software in ways they never can. I mean, we really do. We know this. But my employer has tens-of-thousands of software engineers of various levels, who all contribute. Most of those jobs can be done by smart, eager, and hard working folks, who are nevertheless not the sort to choose reading a math book over dancing [1].
My employer has around 20% women engineers. It’s probably in our best interest to do better.
[1] Note that with good time management, you can both do math and go dancing. In my case, Adderall helps.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Edit: The women in the “concept design” rooms were more attracted to tech.
Obviously!
LikeLike
Let me add: I’ve also done a number of panels with high school aged girls, things such as Girls who Code. They also seem to enjoy the space. You can just kinda tell they are responding to the “cool factor.”
LikeLike
on “muggles”: I can attest from my own experience that there’s been an increase in non-“nerdy” software engineers who are still smart and capable. I’m talking about people who have high IQs, but not the natural obsession with computers that most good programmers my age and older have. These are people that made a deliberate decision to go into software engineering as a career choice, not people who have been obsessed with programming since they were little kids. I think there’s a lot more of that type now, and a higher percentage of them are female than the “nerdy” engineers.
It’s possible some large fraction of the “STEM gap” comes from nerdy personality types going into STEM, whereas non-nerdy but high IQ people go into other things. If nerdy personalities tend to be male, then you’d see more men in STEM. And if more non-nerdy smart people now go into STEM, you’ll see more women as well.
on “coding”, I think people like Limor Fried do a lot of good by providing a positive example without being obnoxiously political about it. I expect this is entirely intentional.
LikeLiked by 2 people
We just have to make math pink.
LikeLike
Yeah that tends to lead to that type of fiasco: HuffPo on the UE video “Science, it’s a girl thing!”.
LikeLike
Oops the video linked in the HuffPo’s article has been deleted, please use this link instead. The people responsible had to confirm that it was not an attempt at irony.
LikeLike
Well right, but on the other hand, “concept design” does not mean the same thing as “pink,” so what you are saying is perhaps a bit unfair.
From a theoretical perspective, sexism can take multiple forms. One form is a prejudice against female sexed people, simply by virtue of their being female. However, that is not the only way sexism operates. Sexism can also manifest as a general disdain for feminine things. A third form is the notion that the two must be related, that all female people are essentially feminine, which can manifest as compulsory femininity.
Second wave feminism seemed to focus on the first and third form of sexism, at the cost of supporting the second form of sexism. I think the debate over “pinkwashing” lands in the middle of this.
In any case, this is a complex topic that requires a complex approach. Simplistic “gotcha” style comments are not helpful. No one is suggesting that software engineering needs merely a thin veneer of “pinkness” to make it cool for women. Nor do we mean to erase gender-non-conforming women from the conversation.
Plus, you know, a well-done concept design can be pretty nice for men also. Plenty of men have a decent aesthetic sense. In fact, over the course of history a fair number of visual artists have been men.
At my workplace, we frequently discuss who has the “cooler floor.” Even the men take part.
LikeLike
OK, but how do you actually draw that distinction?
Let’s make explicit what’s actually wrong with “making math pink”. Well, OK, there’s quite a bit wrong with it, but focusing purely on the sexist aspects since that’s what we’re discussing here. Basically it falls under sexism #3 — in that it is based in it (the thinking being that if we want to appeal to women we need to play up elements considered feminine and play down elements considered masculine), and that it reinforces it (because it’s done in an unsubtle manner and so anyone can see the intention and make the connection (“they believe this sexist-3 idea, which increases its credibility”)).
So how does the “concept design” case differ? On the first point it doesn’t seem to me that it does — but perhaps we should mark that irrelevant, since I don’t think the intention is that relevant (although it might affect the conclusions the people doing it draw for later!). On the second point… well, I guess it actually can differ there. Because unlike “making math pink” it doesn’t necessarily need to be so goddamn blunt, so people don’t notice that was the intent and the connection isn’t made.
…hm, I might have actually just answered my own question. Was that what you were thinking or did you have something different in mind?
LikeLike
It’s worth noting that “pink math” approaches are often designed by feminist women, which is to say, this is a conflict within feminism. I can give my opinion, but demanding an answer is like saying, “I’ll only support effective altruism if there are no disagreements within effective altruism.”
My answer is there is no one right answer. Some gender-non-conforming women might feel left out by a certain policy that, on the whole, is very good for gender-conforming women. However, their feelings are legitimate, and it might be the case that the project indeed sent a message that “girls like pink,” which not all do.
You answer this with nuance. You answer it with conversations and statements of respect. I don’t believe that all women like pink, nor necessarily concept design. I mean, some women like HP Lovecraft and differential Galois theory, and “design” is to them an insulting distraction.
But tech is big and growing increasingly multicultural. GNC women have a place, both within the workplace and as targets of recruitment efforts. But so do the women in the study above.
The point is, do not reduce outreach to women to “let’s just do pink, like maybe a Barbie Comic!” That’s not the answer, although some girls like Barbie.
In short, include a variety of perspectives when you design programs. Listen to the conversation that develops. Take seriously the complaints people have, but remember your broad goals. For example, you might ask a critic of “pinkwashing,” “Do you hate all efforts to reach out to women using feminine-coded messages, or do you object to feeling reduced to that.”
We can send more than one message. We can craft messages to include various views. We cannot please everyone.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Returning a bit late here, but I don’t think you’re answering the question I’m asking. I have three things to say here, though the first two are unrelated to that opening:
For example, you might ask a critic of “pinkwashing,” “Do you hate all efforts to reach out to women using feminine-coded messages, or do you object to feeling reduced to that.”
Well, I wouldn’t ask myself that, because I already know my answer. 😛 (It’s the former, if I haven’t already made that clear.) But more seriously, I’m confused as to how I’m supposed to come up with such a question, when nobody previously mentioned a feeling of reduction. Why would I postulate that if nobody mentioned it? If they’re speaking coherently I’ll take them at their word. Are we assuming that they’re not making sense and that therefore I have to ask them questions to try to reconstruct something sensible out of what they say?
Secondly, thanks for the description of “concept design” in the distant cousin comment wherever it was. Now that I have a clearer idea what it is (maybe I really should’ve asked before saying anything!) it seems unlikely that it belongs in the same bucket as pinkwashing at all.
But OK thirdly my main point. What I’m gathering from your post is that you claim that pinkwashing is a bad thing because many women don’t like it and it will drive them away; it isn’t effective outreaching. The thing is, this seems entirely unrelated to what I’m saying.
My complaint about pinkwashing has nothing to do with its effectiveness. (I mean, I remain unconvinced that “outreach to women”, or at least as I usually see it presented anyway (i.e. in a way that doesn’t care about causality), is a worthy goal in the first place. But that’s another matter.) My complaint is that it reinforces what you labeled type-3 sexism above; it does this by making use of it in its messaging and thus presenting it as valid. Hell, if it were effective I’d probably object to it more, because I would expect that the more effective it is the more effective it would also be at spreading that implicit message.
So basically it’s not clear that anything you’ve said responds to my question.
(That said, your description of concept design does quite a bit to draw the distinction here! It sounds like if someone wasn’t there prior to the implementation of concept design, they’d never know it had been any other way. I’m tempted to say my question has been answered, but unfortunately I think really just my example has been answered.)
LikeLike
Sorry, clarification: Where I wrote “Hell, if it were effective I’d probably object to it more“, I meant that if it were effective I’d object to it more on those grounds, not necessarily overall. I am not claiming I have no other objections or that any other objections I have bear this relationship to its effectiveness. I am simply not making those objections right now.
LikeLike
Well, ”pink washing” is not a new conversation to me, and like many concepts, a variety of things get that label by different groups for different reasons. Likewise, many women are participating in this conversation. You mention the notion of women feeling “reduced,” I’ve certain heard that said, so I don’t really understand your objection there. This is a big conversation with many parts.
Anyway, my point is, a superficial coating of “pink” can come across as insulting to some people, but why?
In other words, if there is nothing wrong with femininity, if femininity is not trite, not frivolous, then why would the act of presenting tech with butterflies and rainbows be objectionable?
Because it is different? Because it is deliberate? So what?
The question is: do women want to see tech that way? Do we want an overtly feminine office?
Cuz would that be bad for some reason? Is masculine inherently better? When I put a bow in my hair, do I lessen myself?
Here is the point: any representation you choose will be chosen for some reason, even if those reasons are unexamined. Furthermore, many things will get labeled “pink washing.” Each should be considered on its own merits.
Let me add, I think one can look at an instance of “pink washing” and find it objectionable. But I’ll argue that it is not such merely for being pink. There is this other thing, a kind of condescension that is hard to explain.
Consider this analogy: I’ve encountered many nerds who feel insulted by The Big Bang Theory, and I share this objection. The reason is not that we object to weird probably-autistic physics nerds. It is something else, something subtle that, in the view of me and other critics, “get’s it wrong.”
It is highly probable that a non-nerd won’t quite get this. At least, explaining it will be difficult, especially if they like the show. You can give a million details, but it is not any one detail. It is the weight of them, the little parts that add up to something condescending.
I don’t think anyone will produce a set of rules that determine when a thing is “pink washing” and when a thing is not. My advice is this: make sure you have a variety of women weighing in on such outreach decisions. Likewise, any choice you make will probably turn off some women, even if it attracts others. We have to ask ourselves, is this our only message? Are we talking to other women as well? Are there a fair number of women (and girls) who are receptive to the message? Do they like it, even if some other women do not? Can we tailor the message to meet these various goals in various ways? Are we engaging with the various concerns respectfully.
Honestly, I think this is the kind of problem that hyper-literal, hyper-logical nerd-types (us!) are really bad at. We want rules, which we can then rules-lawyer. That doesn’t work well for things like this.
LikeLike
What exactly do you mean by ‘Concept Design’? Having STFW’d, i still fail to grasp the connection.
LikeLike
@Lambert — Well, I guess it’s hard to explain. It’s like, professional internal design with “themes.” For example, my floor is based around an Alice in Wonderland theme. In fact, each floor of our campus is based on a subway stop on the Boston T system, and there is a town north of Boston called “Wonderland.”
(And I’m probably kind of giving away where I work. But whatever.)
The floor based on the “Aquarium” stop has a big fish aquarium and stuff like that. (I used to work on the “Airport” floor, which was kind of cool because I work on airline-oriented software. I’m not sure what teams are there now.)
Anyway, it’s about clever/cool/attractive design, instead of nerds-left-to-their-own-devices design, or banal-corporate-with-inspirational-posters design.
The point is, this is not the same as “pinkwashing,” but it does seem to make the spaces more inviting. So far as I can tell, most of my fellow nerds like it also. I can see no downside except the cost.
LikeLike
Ok. That sounds very awesome. Was there a male group in the study for comparison?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Post Script:
Do you have any links to more information about concept design, or is it so unique that to do so would compromise your privacy?
LikeLike
Good question. I don’t know.
I expect not. The purpose of this study was to discover ways to attract female candidates, whereas attracting male candidates is not a problem (we have over 80% male engineers).
Attracting top-tier candidates (male or female) is, of course, a priority. However, those software-obsessed mathy folks are already interested in tech, so at that point it is the normal war-for-talent that our recruiters live and breathe.
Well, I mean, I’m sure we also do studies about that. But this study seemed to have a specific purpose.
LikeLike
On “concept design,” not really. I actually thought it was a general term that people understood, until you asked and I Googled it and it seems obscure.
I’m probably just using the wrong term, and if a design professional happened onto this thread they would laugh at me and say, “no silly head, it’s ergo-noog-noog-design, based on the work of {some Bavarian guy}.”
Or whatever designers say. It’s a strange breed they are.
LikeLike
Lack of male test subjects precludes destinguishing between the hypotheses ‘concept design is more feminine’ and ‘concept design is more cool in general’. I expect both factors to be in play here.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yeah. That seems likely.
I mean, I wouldn’t mind Cthulhu posters on the wall or whatever. And like, you could do an entire floor with yuri and futa and I’d be fine with it — like, I would privately enjoy it even as I realize it is workplace inappropriate.
But anyway, my point is, there is a reason you hire me to write code and hire a designer to design.
LikeLike
I think the amount of contact this question has with contemporary politics makes it way too anti-inductive to be answered by the scientific method.
LikeLike
It’s an interesting theory. Any thoughts on how you might test it?
I admit, I suspect it’s probably not the right answer (which is not to say it’s not worth investigating). But it has a baseline assumption that male and female students do equally well on NCLB math tests because they are equally good at math, while male SAT takers do better than female SAT takers because they’re better at math. I think it’s far more likely that one of those assumptions is wrong than it is that the scores represent a real selection effect.
Not only do men and women have a different variance in their scores, they tend on average to be good at different kinds of math. The classic and very robust one is that men do better than women at spatial rotation tests, but there are other differences as well. Depending on the balance of questions of different types, you can kind of turn a gender bias on and off. There’s no a priori right answer, because there’s no good agreement about which skills are more important. I think the simplest explanation for the effect you describe here is that NCLB tests are written to be equally diagnostic for male and female students, and that’s not a consideration for the people who write the SAT.
I can’t find the link right now, but one woman involved in the early SAT design said women did better than men on the verbal portion but men did better on the math; the former was considered a test design flaw and fixed, but the latter was considered expected. I haven’t seen that corroborated by other people, though.
Finally, there might also be stereotype threat type effects depending on test design, but I don’t know if that’s large enough (or different enough between the tests) to explain it. I suspect not.
LikeLike
How strongly do individuals’ NCLB and SAT scores correlate? How much better can you predict an SAT score with NCLB + gender than with NCLB alone? (A likelihood-ratio test of some kind would be helpful, here. Also: data. Which I very much doubt exists. :()
LikeLike
Yeah, I think any such data would be hard to gather due to educational privacy rights (ETS can’t see standardized testing results for individual students, and vice versa). I had a quick look around and couldn’t find anything.
LikeLike
Actually, stereotype threat IS a big enough factor to completely and totally eliminate differences in spatial rotation test performance: http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-stereotypical-male
LikeLike
Wait, isn’t that obvious? Overall, there’s a much higher expectation for men to be breadwinners, or at least fully self-supporting members of the society, whereas for women the option of getting married early and becoming a housewife is less of a default choice than in 60s, but still somewhat socially acceptable. STEM degrees tend to pay much more than humanities, and unlike medicine or law degrees, they don’t require wealth or connections to bootstrap the returns on investment. Therefore, there is a far higher social pressure for boys to pursue such degrees than for girls.
LikeLiked by 4 people
A major driving life goal of mine is to raise kids (More specifically http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3106), so this was indeed a large part of my reasoning in choosing a major. In theory, I could have pursued being a stay-at-home dad, but I figured the set of women who would be interested in someone who was both socially awkward (inadvertently creepy?) and lacked the demonstrated capability to be the breadwinner was small.
LikeLike
I think a relevant difference that’s hard to capture with SATs and other standardized test is enthusiasm, rather than aptitude. When me and my sister were in the same Math classes, I feel like we had the same amount of aptitude and got very similar grades, but I felt like I was having fun doing math and she wasn’t. This would also make sense as an explanation for why changing the decorations of the room or whatever could have an effect: making the experience more fun for people with different enthusiasms would have a big effect, if enjoyment rather than aptitude is what predicts further interest.
If a subject is equally (or approximately equally) difficult for two groups, but more enjoyable to one of them, you can expect them to self-select into studying that subject at a greater rate.
LikeLiked by 3 people
That doesn’t match my experience. None of the high school (or middle school) math leagues I competed in were anywhere close to gender parity, nor were the advanced math classes. The AMC-10, which is taken in 9th and 10th grades (replacing the AHSME, for those old enough to remember that), shows 3:1 at the 90th percentile, 21:1 for perfect scores and a male mean about a standard deviation higher. For students who took the SAT in 8th grade, shows about 3:2 at 90th percentile, 2:1 at perfect and about half a standard deviation difference in means. (Note that both AMC-10 and SAT in 8th grade are weakly selected for top students, so you can’t make direct percentile comparisons.)
So NCLB is an outlier, not matching the results of experience, AMC or EMS, and the difference isn’t age. So what is the difference?
It could be that NCLB is basically interested in students who are near the middle, and everything else I cited is interested in the top. If female students are more inclined to satisfice math, or if male students are more varied, that could explain this. The NCLB data did consider 99th percentile, but if the test itself wasn’t designed to look at top ability this doesn’t mean much. I would expect that more than 10% of students max out the NCLB on substance, and the extent to which their scores differ from perfect reflects carefulness and luck — not mathematical ability. But I say that without having seen the tests, so don’t trust it too much.
Alternatively, it could be that the NCLB test authors really wanted that gender equality because otherwise they might get accused of gender bias and not purchased, so they kept messing with things until they got it. All the other tests are at least a little incentivized to find truth, but NCLB isn’t.
LikeLiked by 1 person
(Hi Daniel!) We have three levels of tests here: NCLB is aimed at determining whether students have a bare minimum of mathematical knowledge, SAT is aimed at the level of the median college applicant, math competitions are aimed at the best few students at each high school, so the top 1-10%. (The AMC exams perhaps a bit higher than that, since one of its purposes is to screen for the AIME and USAMO, which most high schools have no one who can handle.) I really don’t think they have much to do with each other.
We also have completely difference selection processes — everyone, the college bound (about 50% of the population), people who excel at and enjoy math competitions.
I think this last factor of enjoying competition selects for men as well. I am a professional mathematician, so my colleagues are generally people who are at 1 in 10^4-10^5 level mathematically. We are heavily male, but there are a significant number of women (and yes, I do think they are at the same level the men are.) I definitely notice that there are very few women in that pool who enjoy competition at the level that many of the men do.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It seems plausible the Mysterious Great Filter could also affect who takes the AMC-10 and the SAT in eighth grade.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’d expect that PhD programs in physics, engineering, etc. require much better than 99th percentile performance in math, so I’m still not sure that there’s a need for an additional filter from the evidence above. You wouldn’t have to move the cutoff threshold very far past 99th percentile to match the data point of 15% of engineering PhDs being women.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I think the great filter has to be something that influences people’s personal interests, though I don’t doubt that innate ability plays a large role as well. I’m okay at math myself (I scored 540 on the math section of the SAT), but I hate doing math with a burning passion, and I’ve known a lot more women who felt the same way than I have men. My social circles have always been roughly 50-50 male-female, too, so it’s not that I’m just around a lot more women.
I know a lot of people would assume socialization is the culprit here, but I’m not so sure given that I didn’t even know math and science were “male-coded” until I was in high school and some feminists told me about it. No one prior to that had ever in my life mentioned anything like “Girls can’t/shouldn’t do math/science.” My experience may be an outlier, but I also don’t recall any of my friends’ parents saying anything like that either, or any teachers.
Anyway, regardless of whether the cause is environmental, genetic, or something else, women and girls do seem to be less interested in STEM careers than men and boys.
I know there was a study that looked at women’s choices in either college majors or careers (can’t remember which) in countries with varying levels of gender equality and found that women in the more equal countries were less likely to choose “male” careers/majors than the women in less equal countries. I searched for this on Google and Google Scholar but couldn’t find it, so if anyone else knows where it is please feel free to post it!
If a) this study exists (I’m pretty sure it does) and
b) I am recalling it right
Then that seems to show that women as a group will only choose “male” careers/majors involving a lot of math when they live in poor countries (the less equal countries were mostly poorer than the more equal ones) and feel that they have to to get a job they can support themselves and their families on. Women in more equal, wealthier countries felt free to choose whatever kind of career/major interested them and did not worry as much about how much money they could make in it, so their choices are more likely to reveal women’s true preferences than the choices of the poorer women.
This of course does not mean women should be prevented from going into STEM if they want to or anything. I’m just not sure that they want to in the same proportions as men. And if most of the women who want to go into STEM are already doing so, it may not be a good use of money, time, or effort to try to convince uninterested women to change their preferences and go into a field they don’t like.
LikeLiked by 3 people
How about “A lot of women who have the mathematical and logical aptitude to go into STEM don’t choose to, just like a lot of men with the upper-body strength and medical knowledge to go into nursing don’t choose to.”?
Isn’t that our default hypothesis? Why are we assuming that women are being filtered from STEM rather than just choosing to do other things, when a cursory look at the gender ratio of jobs suggests that certain work ends up being sex-segregated, mostly by choice of applicants?
LikeLiked by 5 people
@robert — That seems entirely plausible. However, it still is not a “neutral” thing, which is to say, even if it is a preference, we can ask why people have these preferences and decide if we should change things.
For example, women in tech on average have shorter careers than men in tech. They work for some number of years, and then they leave the field earlier than a similar man would. Now, pregnancy and families is a par of this. But before you say, “Oh that’s just nature, nothing to be done,” when interviewed child care is not the most common reason that women choose to leave. In surveys, the most common reason was male sexism and otherwise hostile environments.
This is the “tech nerds are hella sexist” theory that is widely debated. Myself, I don’t care if tech is better or worse than finance. I want tech to be amazing. I work in tech. We should be the best.
In any case, studies such as the one I mention above do show an effect from how women perceive the tech work environment. For example, many are turned off by working with a bunch of socially-stunted nerd-bros.
Okay, but wait!
I SERIOUSLY DON’T FUCKING BELIEVE THAT ACTUALLY DESCRIBES THE MEN IN TECH.
At least, I don’t think it describes tech people at our best. It’s not all we can be.
I mean, it’s part reality, part stereotype, part reinforced behavior.
Plus the experience women have with weirdo-techy-nerdy men is often what those men are like in high school.
I remember what I was like in high school. OMG normal people didn’t want to be within a hundred yards of me. Yikes.
(And I was not the most dramatic weird-nerd in our school. We had this one twelve year old Filipino dude who was a senior in my high school. He was an odd duck.)
(I didn’t keep track of him, which I regret. I wonder what he ended up doing.)
Anyway, the point is, adults are not children, and tech culture is changing, even if those changes are happening with terrifying dramatic flair, all in the public eye. (Which is to say, the average NY Times reporter probably knows who Anita Sarkeesian is. They probably do not know who Donald Knuth is.)
(Myself, I admire both Sarkeesian and Knuth, for different reasons.)
This is work worth doing. Software is eating the world, and few careers have the global growth potential that software engineering does (along with related fields such as data science, etc.).
I’m all for more male nurses. However, saying “men don’t choose nursing” seems like a different phenomenon from “women don’t choose software engineering.” It worth asking why they make this choice. In the case of nursing, I think it is because men don’t want to appear feminine, because they fear that will diminish their perceived masculinity.
Are there other reasons? I’m open to hearing why men might avoid nursing. It is possible nursing is “unfair” to men. If this is the case, we should talk about that and fix it.
Nurses are amazing and we could use more of them.
On the other hand, the fear men have of appearing feminine seems very real and is probable costing us in many subtle ways.
Anyway, I strongly suspect you’ll find the reason men avoid nursing is very different from why women avoid software engineering.
Oh, and software engineers are also amazing and we could use more of them. If we’re driving people away from good careers for bad reasons, let us stop doing that.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Tech isn’t sexist. (Individuals may be, but as a whole – and I’m a contractor who has worked with many dozens of companies now – it REALLY isn’t an issue.) Tech is just horribly unpleasant.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-women-tech-20150222-story.html
“She had built a prototype for a travel website, she said, a feature to auto-suggest cities and airports based on the first three letters typed into the search field, fixing a long-standing problem.
Her male bosses told her she’d built it without permission. Then they said only architects within the company could pitch features — and all the architects were male. In the end, the project was handed to someone else, and she was assigned to less interesting tasks.”
That, right there, is normal, although it’s presented as unusual. There might be sexism going on there, but honestly, I doubt it – that’s the standard experience of most of us. But people are more likely to interpret hostile behaviors towards men as “normal”, and identical behaviors towards women as “sexist”. (There have been studies done on this I could dig up, but I’m lazy, so unless you insist I’d rather not.)
When people ask me what the tech industry is like, I point them to Office Space, which is an excellent documentary pretending to be a comedy. Granted, I work on a daily basis with the 99% of us who aren’t founding start-ups in Berkley, but rather working 9-5 jobs in the IT departments of companies who use their IT employees as a highly-paid technology janitorial/maintenance staff – except the maintenance guys don’t have to do unpaid weekends and nights when management moves deadlines up to meet artificial objectives, and get slightly more respect.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Wait! How do you know there is no sexism in tech? Like none at all, anywhere?
I mean, sexism is hard to prove beyond question. However, that is something of an isolated demand for rigor. The null hypothesis should not be “there is no sexism in tech.” It should be “tech has about the same amount of sexism as everything else.”
That might not be true. Tech could be this weird sexism-free place, but that seems wildly improbable.
Or do you think sexism is rare in our culture? That would be an outlandish claim.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Given that I said individuals may be sexist, you’re attributing a claim I did not make to me.
Our society perceives equal treatment as sexist against women, a sexism of itself remaining unaddressed, that women are unequal in mental constitution, and so require special protection that men do not require. Technology, as a field, has been resilient against providing this patronization – it hasn’t made itself “pink” – and thus is accused of sexism entirely on the grounds that it, on the whole, isn’t.
The suggestions outlined elsewhere hint at this sexism, the suggestions that technology make itself “pink” – technology, in its raw state, isn’t suitable for women. Circuit diagrams are “coded” male? Doesn’t anybody notice what’s horribly wrong with that assertion, left unchallenged, nevermind the argument about the pinkwashing itself? This is just another way of saying women aren’t suitable for technology. Throughout all of these discussions, there is an implicit demand that men make technology suitable for women – an invocation of chivalry, and implicit statement of women’s weakness.
Sexism is quite rampant in our culture, but remains almost entirely untreated and often even undiagnosed, as the doctors who should be addressing it are themselves infected, and spread it the more.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I mean, you are simply wrong. Studies show that when reading a written description of a business executive, test subjects will rate the person in the story more critically when the character in the story has a female name. Likewise, female names on identical resumes show differences in call-back rates. There are differences in how much men speak in meetings versus women. Likewise there are measurable differences in how willing men are to interrupt women versus men.
And on the latter point, women who attempt to “push back” against this behavior are seen as divisive and disruptive in ways that men are not. Women are “pushy.” Men are “assertive.”
There is a ton of social science on how this works in the professional world. I suspect tech differs in some ways, but not profoundly.
I mean, I could do a link-dump, but not unless you do one for all the studies you are talking about.
(I don’t respond to “isolated demands of rigor.”)
Circuit boards alone aren’t “coded male.” However, when a room is decorated in certain ways, it indeed codes “nest of nerdy guys,” which is in fact uninviting to many women. (#notallwomen)
However, these women are more than capable of doing the job. Likewise, they are entirely capable of working within a thriving company culture, if they find the culture inviting.
And why wouldn’t you want them there?
Short version: a tech company should be about creating excellent products, in an excellent culture, by amazing people. What matters most is the quality of the work, not the decorations on the wall. The decorations on the wall are important insofar as they serve other goals.
And note, being into “nerd stuff” might correlate with being “good at software.” In fact, I’m sure it does. However, they are not essentially related.
In other words, someone might say “Well, our product sucks and our tooling sucks and fucking source control just crashed again, but hey! at least every engineer has a nerf dart gun and a big poster showing an anime girl with tits!”
Which, I don’t have a problem with nerf darts, but please leave your tits-girl posters at home.
Anyhow, it’s funny how you hate your work environment but don’t want it to change.
Oh, and my office has a fuckton of nerd stuff. Like, every day at lunch a bunch of tables fill up with folks playing Magic and other games. Some of them are women.
I mostly like to sit alone and do math.
LikeLike
The idea that “an anime girl with tits” poster is an inherently “male” thing is not only sexist, it is also nauseatingly heteronormative. I know several women both online and off who very much like looking at pictures of anime girls with big tits. I also know several straight men who aren’t into that kind of thing.
I agree that this wouldn’t be appropriate for a lot of offices, as a lot of people, including plenty of straight men, would find it off-putting. Not to mention that it generally comes off as unprofessional. But it really grates on me whenever I see something like this framed as being “unwelcoming to women.” Especially when it comes from people who are usually very concerned about exclusionary language.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@ NN
But it is unwelcoming to women. It sexualizes and objectifies the female body, and is a hostile signal against women. Everyone likes looking at beautiful people, including the men who are “not into that kind of thing” as you say, and the women who object to objectification and sexualization. They just think the hostility of the sexism weighs more than the niceness of looking at something pretty.
LikeLike
@ NN
Posters of “anime girls with tits” in a professional environment are unwelcoming to women not because literally all women hate looking at breasts (Veronica, for instance, probably likes it quite a bit, and so do I).
The sort of people who decorate common workplace areas with sexy posters often also are the sort of people who disregard boundaries, including the default ones set by “professionalism”, because they consider their personal judgment so superior that they don’t need to care how others feel about it. Not all of them, of course, but there is a correlation — and that’s why people find it unwelcoming and off-putting.
LikeLike
Then why do all of the most popular women’s magazines put pictures of sexy women on the cover of every single issue? Or does this image not sexualize and objectify the female body? Or this? How about this?
Again, it is empirically wrong that images of anime women with big breasts in particular are a hostile signal to all women. Do they put off more women than they attract? I don’t know, because I don’t know if that’s ever been studied in depth before. But Cosmo et al. seem to be pretty significant data points against the idea that sexualized images of women are generally off-putting to women.
Or are you using the word “women” when you really mean “feminists”?
Even if we assume that has some truth behind it, why is acting upon stereotypes a good thing in this particular case?
Suppose that a gay man put up some posters of sexy men in his cubicle, and his straight male coworkers objected because “people who do this are also the sort of people who disregard boundaries.” Would you have any problem with them framing the issue in this way?
I want to emphasize again that I agree that this sort of thing is inappropriate in a lot of offices. In a workplace setting, “this makes me feel uncomfortable” is a perfectly sufficient reason to object to a coworker’s behavior. But I feel that a lot of the discourse on this issue propagates some pretty ugly ideas.
I’m always struck by how similar feminist rhetoric on the subject of “objectification” is to religious conservative rhetoric about “our sexualized society.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
Huh? Let me reiterate the portion of my comment you responded to:
“The sort of people who decorate common workplace areas with sexy posters often also are the sort of people who disregard boundaries”.
In my comments, “people” is not a synonym for “heterosexual men” — so I think I’ve already told you what I think about this framing.
But for an even better analogy, the context should be that gay men are the majority both the in industry and in each individual company, and some of them are known to consider straight men especially attractive but professionally inferior.
Right. You, I and many other people feel this way, and that’s why we don’t take porn to work. Let’s call us group A.
However, not all people feel this way. Some people believe that anyone who could be made uncomfortable by anything they personally enjoy shouldn’t be working in the industry at all. Let’s call them group B.
Since group B is more likely to bring sexy posters to work than group A, someone decorating a common work area with a sexy poster is Bayesian evidence that they belong to group B.
LikeLike
Did I get accused of being “heteronormative”? Heh. That’s adorable.
But anyway, the point is this: our broad culture sexualizes women in ways it does not sexualize men. Now, this is not absolute. There are spaces where the lines cross over. However, it is decidedly asymmetrical, enough to make a big different in how women experience sexualization versus how men do.
And yeah, LGBT people push against this in various interesting ways, but the broad culture is the broad culture. which is indeed heteronormative. That’s what we’re talking about here. Saying, “How dare you notice heteronormativity” seems unfair.
Most people are heterosexual. Furthermore, the sex drive is, for most people, pretty fundamental. It effects us a lot, and not just in obvious ways. Anytime you observe people interacting, their sexuality determines much of their behavior. Since most people are (mostly) straight, this ends up being about men and women.
By the way, I’m a lesbian.
But still, most of my coworkers are straight men.
Second wave feminism wanted to kind of erase gender. In the modern TERFy form, this leads to the crotchless gray pantsuit version of gender. I hope we can agree this is what few people want. However, neither do we want to return to the Mad Men style workplace. So what to do?
Men interrupt women more than women interrupt men. I mean, this is a demonstrable fact. But why?
I say that our mating behaviors never quite go away. It is easy to observe, when a boorish man barges into a conversation among women, in a way that he would not likely do with men. What is going on there? What motivated him?
But more, why did he think it was okay to do this? Because it is not. Had it been a group of men, we would have worked his way into the conversation more carefully.
I’ve seen this play out so many times.
Who decides how conversational dynamics work? Who decides what roles women play in the workplace?
Have you ever considered, the optimal strategy for a woman seeking a leadership position might be very different from the optimal strategy for a man. That’s kind of weird, right? But it seems to be true.
Most women are heterosexual. Furthermore, they largely seem to desire rather conventional gendered relationships.
They do this while at the same time trying to navigate the workspace among men they do not plan to date, and among whom they’d likely rather be treated more equally than they are.
A pretty young woman joins a software engineering team of mostly men, who then do not treat her as they treat a new man. In some ways they treat her better, in that they are very nice to her. But they don’t respect her in the same way. She cannot simply enter the pecking order they way a new man does. If she does, she will be very much disliked. It can get bad for her. She had to thread this needle carefully, in a way different from men.
Of course, many of her male coworkers actually want to fuck her, and that is coloring their interactions with her. Likewise, some know they have no chance, and they’re carrying baggage about that.
“She won’t fuck me anyway,” becomes the refrain of truly terrible men.
Men are expected to be strong, to compete. Women are expected to nurture. But what if she doesn’t want to nurture?
Of course, she can play her sex as a weapon, befriend certain men. This is a strategy what works for some women. However, it’s a pretty terrible strategy. In fact, it can be soul crushing.
It really isn’t an option for a woman like me. Even for the pretty girl, maybe she’s just not down with playing those kinds of games.
#####
All these things seem to live deep in our psychological nature. Which fine. She gets her sexual feelings. The men around her get theirs. Outside of the workplace they should all get to pursue their sex drives as they see fit, provided they respect consent. However, inside the workplace we strive toward professionalism.
So the titties-poster — look, I love those images, in private. Likewise, I’m not ashamed of my sexuality. My coworkers know I have a girlfriend. For some of them, I know their sexualities as well. This is okay. But I can choose how much I know, by sharing these details in private conversation, in thoughtful ways. But sexualized images, unabashed sexual comments, in-your-face presentation of detailed sexuality — these things are not okay. I have not chosen to relate to you in that way.
Many women don’t want a “sexed up” workplace, certainly not in industries that are not essentially sexual. Things such as fashion and modeling are playing by their own rules, as does the sex industry. We can discuss the ramifications of that, but I write software dealing with airline pricing. There is no reason my coworkers and i need to be up-front about our sexytimes.
I might not want to see your porn. You might not want to see mine. Keep it private.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The reason is fairly simple: Very, very few women want to go into tech.
Very, very few men want to go into tech, either, but where women are encouraged to do things that are self-fulfilling and make them happy, men are encouraged to go into fields that pay well, their happiness and self-fulfillment be damned. And the majority of us aren’t particularly happy in the field – the majority of us not working for IT companies, but for the IT division of companies, working in groups of dozens if not hundreds doing work that is best described as soul-destroying, with near-zero creative input, doing the tech equivalent of putting screws into pre-measured, pre-drilled boards.
Almost none of the women who complain about the dearth of women in IT, themselves go into IT. Why would they want to? And why do they expect other women to do what they themselves are unwilling to do?
LikeLiked by 3 people
This is probably a fair point. I tend to think of “women in tech” as women working for one of the “bigtech” companies, not women slaving away writing .NET code for a shitty little insurance company in some flat-and-dismal state. So yeah.
That said, “women aren’t dumb enough to do this to themselves” doesn’t seem like the right answer. For one thing, are there any surveys of women showing this? It seems like it would show up in polling.
“I don’t wanna work some thankless job in a server room” is an easy thought to state.
I mean, I don’t want to do that either, and I’m in tech. I dunno.
There are hierarchies in any field. Not everyone in finance lands a posh finance job. Most law graduates end up with shit sandwich. Most humanities majors serve coffee and never get their novel published. Tech is not different.
And in our upper tiers you get free lunch and concept design!
LikeLike
I don’t think “women aren’t dumb enough” is quite the right phrasing. Women aren’t -encouraged- to do this to themselves. Men are.
Out of the entire CS (and the business counterpart) class I was a part of, there were three of us who were there because we liked programmed. Everybody else was there because the field paid well, and literally suffered through it. (Engineering, with whom we shared some classes, was even more skewed, and populated entirely, as far as I ever saw, by athletes who paid for their classes with sports scholarships.)
Most of the people I work with don’t even play video games, which going into this field, had kind of been an implicit assumption of mine that everybody who was in this field did. I don’t bring up nerdy topics, because I don’t work with nerds. I work with fathers and husbands supporting their families doing jobs which – well, I worked as a custodian back in the day, and that job was more fulfilling.
I still tell stories from that job. The outside garbage can I didn’t know about for the first six weeks of working. Building a barricade ankle-deep in backed-up sewage to keep the offices from flooding. Relatable things! Stories I can tell at parties.
This job? Well, there was the time I spent a month hunting down a bug in our database connections, only to discover the database admins were killing all the database connections at 5:00 every day when they went home from work, so they’d have less cleanup to deal with in the morning. Or the time I spent two weeks trying to debug a REST call only to discover that the issue was a trailing slash in a namespace that looked identical to my HTTP URL desensitized eyes. Or my great victory, of poring through thousands of lines of code to find that a sensitive part of our code ported from older, single-threaded code, was still using an unsynchronized hashmap, causing very important business data to randomly go missing.
…uh, yeah. I can’t tell my friends what I do for a living. I argue with an alien god all day. My arguments barely make sense to me. “I spent three hours trying to figure out why a hashmap was allowing duplicate keys before I discovered that an equals function wasn’t overriding the object-level function because the function signature was different because it was using the specific object it needed to compare to instead of the general case.” What, any sane person might ask, am I even talking about?
And it didn’t begin when I started this job. College was just teaching us how to argue with the alien god, how to construct our arguments so it will listen. My High School programming class, the same.
Can you deal with one half of your waking life being utterly unrelatable to your friends and family?
With men – well, the field is mostly men, you can have male friends who you can talk to.
What is a woman’s option? There’s always going to be a schism in terms of relatable experience.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@Orphan — I don’t know. I think — like — you seem really sour on tech, and on your own job. I wonder 1) if this is a common attitude, and 2) if this is coloring your view on this topic.
On the latter point, I’ve noticed that men who are very unhappy with their own situation are often the least receptive when listening to women speak regarding our hardships. Which is to say, even if women on average have a harder time than men, some men will have a harder time than the average woman.
Does that make sense?
In any case, while sexism is real in this scenario, from the perspective of that man it is hard to see.
Anyhow, I love my tech job. I know a fair number of men who love theirs. Likewise, I know a fair number of women who have specific and visible complaints about how they are treated differently from the men.
#####
As an example, one time on a different forum, on a thread about this topic, I linked to this comic: https://medium.com/matter/the-ping-pong-theory-of-tech-world-sexism-c2053c10c06c
So anyway, this one dude on the forum — who I swear to Eris was some kinda redpill wanker — reads it and says, “Well, no one takes me seriously at work either.”
And so, I mean — how do I respond to that? Myself, I never took him seriously. On the forum, not many people took him seriously. He was, so far as I could tell, regarded as something of an annoying troll who mostly interrupted useful conversations to say unserious things.
Okay, so I’m not going to pretend I was neutral toward the guy. But still.
The point is, it wouldn’t really surprise me if, in real life, no one takes him seriously. He’s just that sort of guy.
Now look, I’m not saying you’re like that guy, at least I hope you’re not. But still, there is a pecking order in any office, not to mention across the industry, and your place in that pecking order tells you little about the special difficulties women will face finding their own place in that pecking order.
It works differently for women, and in a way that sucks.
#####
Better jobs exist. I wish you luck.
LikeLike
That’s pretty well constructed; any attempt at rejecting it would make me appear to be childish, and you insert multiple goads, the response to any one of which would allow you to dismiss me as a sexist troll. The construction deliberately compares me to a “redpill wanker” while leaving you free to claim never to have made that comparison, even as any reader is left with a clear impression that I’m just being “that guy”, who rejects women’s experiences. Then you left me a path to salvation – to NOT be that guy, and agree with everything you said.
However, I just stepped outside of the script. What now?
We could discuss the issue I hinted at earlier, if you wish, about the bootstrapping problem, whereby the lack of women’s interest in IT reinforces the lack of women’s interest in IT by dramatically restricting the potential social circles available, making any woman’s pursuit of IT as a career an inherently lonely pursuit.
Or you could continue to try to turn this into an argument that’s been repeated a million times on the Internet already.
I’m rather bored with the argument, I profess, and am not particularly inclined toward that option.
LikeLiked by 1 person
But wait! You are suggesting that you can infer the hidden subtext of what I am saying — in a fairly uncharitable manner — but it seems that you also believe that women cannot correctly infer that they are experiencing sexism, which you suggested above when you said that women perceive sexism in what is in fact equal treatment.
It’s curious that you can read subtext, but women cannot.
LikeLike
Most women cannot, much like most men cannot, and wouldn’t notice that you’re engaging in behavior which is fundamentally flirtatious in nature, using a deliberately clumsy move to provoke another response (which I’ll admit might itself be a feint into admitting that I noticed it is flirtatious, thus permitting you to accuse me of sexism on another level, but I broke the script again).
At any rate, I’m off to a party to get thoroughly trashed while dressed like a cartoon, so I must bid you a good evening!
LikeLiked by 1 person
@ Orphan
Do you think people who don’t work in IT can discuss their daily work issues with friends and family? My mother is an accountant, and all I understand is “quarter close is crunch time”. My ob/gyn friend once tried to entertain us with stories of foreign objects found in vaginas, but my partner felt it was disrespectful of the patients’ dignity.
And if I worked in IT, I could talk about it with my partner, my brother and half of my friends — oddly enough, “friends and family” of some women already work in IT themselves.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Orphan
I don’t think it’s a good metric. I’m doing my PhD in electrical and computer engineering, and I mostly don’t play video games. At the age of 13 I spent more time building a multi-floppy bootloader for Dune 2 than actually playing it, and at the age of 21 I felt like Orbiter was too hard (though I went back to it later, and figured stuff out), and wrote my own space sim to get the idea of how it all works better.
A lot of my classmates aren’t that much into gaming either, while they’re very passionate about their field and projects, talking about that all the time.
In LW circles I know of some avid gamers, but it doesn’t seem like the most common hobby either. During parties I’d often hear conversations about kernel development, macroeconomics, and general relativity, but gaming-related discussions are less frequent.
At the same time, I know several avid gamers who are completely unrelated to the tech industry, working as sales consultants or on other non-tech jobs.
So I don’t think the correlation is as strong as you perceive it to be.
LikeLike
@ Orphan
You seriously got the bit about arguing with an alien god wrong. What you are doing is not trying to appease a deity, it’s epic fantasy style magic.
In the words of Fred Brooks:
“”
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures….
Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. […] The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.
“”
Your job sounds a lot like mine, and mine is bloody fantastic.
LikeLike
I’m arriving way late to this party, but I just thought I’d jump in to share a very fuzzy data point. I was talking to a woman just yesterday evening who told me that she loved mathematics and especially mathematical physics when she was in college. But she said that, being a woman, to pursue an career directly in it would mean having to be an instructor rather than a researcher, which wouldn’t be so much her cup of tea. I asked why she felt that she couldn’t be a research professor because she’s a woman. I didn’t fully understand her reply, but it seemed to be along the lines of, “Well, you know, because women don’t do that!” I asked her if the problem was that she hadn’t liked the idea of sitting in classes that were composed almost entirely of men, and she affirmed that that was part of the problem. I’m not sure I understood her very well, as there was a slight language barrier and we were in a very noisy room. I should also mention that she is not American and was presumably studying in Europe.
I’m not entirely sure what this demonstrates, but it seems to involve that phenomenon of self-perpetuation of skewed gender ratios: some women definitely choose not to go into STEM because there are already disproportionately few women in STEM. That doesn’t account for what is causing unequal numbers in the first place, but it may well be significantly magnifying the effects. Slightly tangential to the topic at hand, but I thought I’d mention it since it’s on my mind.
LikeLike
Pingback: On The Gender Wage Gap | Thing of Things
I’m two years late to this party, but there’s an element of my experience that could, if it applies more broadly, act like precisely this filter. Specifically, one thing I have noticed is that there are gender-specific requirements that were sometimes placed on me which required me to have more non-mathematical skills than a boy might need to have in order to do mathematical things.
For example, when I was 9, a teacher remarked that she would seriously consider having me skip a grade were it not for my handwriting. I suspect that for a boy, this would have been less of a consideration, given that my writing was legible albeit not elegant.
For an even stronger example, when I was 11, it was decided that I shouldn’t be on the mathematics olympiad team because I “couldn’t work with others”. To be clear, it’s not that I was being mean to my team members or anything, it’s just that the competition was time-constrained and it was easier to work the problems out myself than explain them to my team members. I do wonder if a boy would have been subject to the same restriction.
So I wonder if girls who are good at maths, but not very good at “girl stuff” like handwriting, or verbal explanations, are more likely to get the impression that they are basically unacceptable academically, and are thus less likely to take the SAT.
LikeLike
You don’t have any evidence that a boy would be treated differently though. You really only have your prejudice about the prejudice of others.
As a counter anecdote, I was almost held back in kindergarten because of lacking artisan skills. By your theory this shouldn’t have mattered to them because I’m male and artisanal skills are seen as feminine.
LikeLike
Correct. It may be that the possibility raised by my purely anecdotal evidence has no real basis in fact.
LikeLike