I've been questioning the general assumption that male-dominated things are always desirable.

Maybe some things are stupid to do, and men tend to get tricked into them more often. Maybe moderately high pay is a trick to get people to do draining, unhealthy jobs, and men are more likely to succumb to the temptation.

It's not a good idea to become an underwater welder, but you do get paid a lot. It all goes into medical care, but you do get paid a lot.

I would agree that there is a certain, eh... stupidity, around risk-taking, lol. Or perhaps just a "not giving into loss aversion."

For whatever reason (and while it pains me to generalize), the high-risk, high-reward jobs are all almost all men. Any woman who feels a calling should of course go for it, and no one should stand in that person's way, but I wouldn't ever expect, say, a 50/50 perfect proportion of gender participants at some future date (as this article indicates, this is a dysfunctional expectation)

Back when bitcoin was only $10 a pop, a bunch of guys in our programming shop wanted to get involved. 100% of their wives nixed it. 100%. I was the only single guy, so I put in some money... Crazy at the time? Perhaps. Crazy now? Not with 20/20 hindsight...

Despite just-so explanations from evolutionary psychology, there is definitely an argument to be made that this is the byproduct of our culture, rather than something innate.

That a culture can survive the death of a much higher percentage of men than it can of women is not a "just-so" story.

It is a fact.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. Are there any studies showing men have a higher predisposition to taking risks? I cant quote one but I think there are.

There is an evolutionary reason for men to take more risks and have a desire to engage in hunting behaviours. We just have to be conscious of that and as per one of the top commenter's remarks not "fall" for something irrational or be driven by societal pressures.

white men, actually

"What on first inspection seemed like a sex difference was actually a difference between white males and everyone else."

http://nautil.us/issue/48/chaos/the-hidden-sexism-of-how-we-...

Men are 20 times more likely to die on the job than women.(at least in Canada)

http://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-mens...

Software isn't high-risk for women though. Diversity thirsty companies are desperate to hire technical women with even a shred of competency. It's just not a cool thing to do though, women don't want to be geeks. There is much more stigma against non-normie women than there is men. Nay for men, there is a heavy stigma against being normal and boring.

The article pointed out that men are typically more interested in working with things than women, and women are typically more interested in working with people than men, and that this is highly correlative and can explain many of the differences we see in STEM, because most STEM fields have a lot of "things" going on.

The article even generously suggests that many women are adept in BOTH math and verbal, but end up in more verbal jobs because men are typically NOT adept in both, so all the high-math low-verbal guys end up doing mathy jobs, and all the high-math high-verbal women do verbal/people jobs, because the mathy jobs are all the guys can do, while the women can do either (but take the non-mathy jobs due to market effects).

Software is kinda mathy, I guess.

"Software is kinda mathy, I guess."

Food for thought: Software has a bizarre curve if you look at it from a math/verbal skills perspective. For what could very well be the first 10-15 years of a software career, software is very math-y. Then, if you want to continue to grow, it takes a very verbal turn. If you want to continue to grow in software leadership and capabilities, you need to be able to express yourself, convince others, navigate politics, and figure out how to translate these issues into the code you structure and write. It isn't a sudden transition and some may transition earlier than 10 years, but it's an interesting way of looking at things.

(Note I'm not talking "management", but continuing up an engineering path.)

A lot of engineering looks like that. If software has any unique characteristics it is how far a single math-oriented programmer can get due to our unique abilities to pull down huge libraries with incredible functionality without having to work with anyone to do it.

Again, just food for thought with no particular argument in sight here.

Maybe, maybe not. But even if, it's pretty clear that it were men who declared those things to be desirable. So it sounds a bit hollow when they now tell women "Oh, you don't want to do that anyway. It's too dangerous!"

If men find it desirable then is it automatically desirable to women?

Men write, direct, and play the lead in most movies. They write the news, journal articles, books, speeches, and laws. Then, they're more likely to hold those speeches, break those laws, and peer-review those journal articles.

They hold more power deciding which job gets paid how much, which group of people gets a parade on July 4th (soldiers, not nurses), and which profession to glorify in the next credit card commercial.

So, yes: our impression of a job's prestige is formed by culture, and that culture certainly was–and largely still is–dominated by men. And yes, of course that culture has the same impact on mens' and women's views. They are people, you know?

Testosterone does wonders. Logarithmic increase in quality of life, if any, by time wasted, yet men do it all the time.

Verbal brilliance of women is also a purely biological thing. Their brain is wired for it.

These things influence and create inequalities.

There's no discrimination in modern western world capable enough and encompassing to create that kind of impact.

It might be that exactly discrimination (as is done in Iran) influences women to pursue STEM fields (and they do) but in the free world women go for their own desires.

Verbal brilliance of women is also a purely biological thing. Their brain is wired for it.

And yet there are plenty of successful male writers. I don't know the demographic breakdown, but they might even be in the majority?

A coherent article trying to establish evidence of a particular argument or claim would include all available studies and weigh them against their various differences in order to find a viable conclusion. It would, at the very least, attempt to search for alternate explanations and present them, and then make an attempt to debunk them.

The article's main problem is it's trying to attack a very specific problem, which is actually part of broader trends in human behavior and culture. It doesn't address that at all.

The author claims "gap != discrimination", which is true in basic definition and theory. But if you look at all the other studies that show things like hiring discrimination, discrimination getting into a good school, discrimination based on where/how one grows up, cultural discrimination, etc, gaps immediately form and cause a ripple effect.

That there are about as many black men as white women (or less) in a given tech field is one example of this. Pick any other discriminated-against minority and you see the same, except when hiring from overseas (economic benefit) or hiring someone with a preferred social stereotype.

If the author's argument is that women simply prefer not to go into this field due to some weird connection between math and speech, then you have to ask why the connection? Is it due to "biology", or social conditioning, or the wariness of sexual harassment in a male-dominated field, or the low pay, or a combination of these things? This article doesn't attempt to look at those, and its limited view of the subject leaves it running into the same correlation-is-causation conclusions it laments.

Pick any other discriminated-against minority and you see the same, except when hiring from overseas (economic benefit) or hiring someone with a preferred social stereotype.

So you really think that the huge over-representation of Indians and East Asians (relative to population) in STEM fields is just because people are hiring a preferred social stereotype? Could in perhaps be that they're actually more qualified?

That's my main problem with arguments that all numeric disparities are because on discrimination. I've never seen any convincing argument or study that Indians and East Asians suffer less discrimination than, say, Hispanics, but as they are no longer "under-represented minorities", they no longer "count" toward diversity goals.

More qualified women (and people with "ethnic names" and other discriminators) often get passed over for jobs or promotions by people who are less qualified, but have a preferred social stereotype. So the idea that qualification or merit is going to result in commensurate representation across the board doesn't work.

People who self-identify as Asian may be the best qualified for the position, but it doesn't hurt that it also reinforces their social stereotype. Asians are actually significantly over-represented in STEM, and make more money than any other group.

They aren't qualified because they're Asian.

Most importantly, you're the victim of selection bias: Only the most-qualified among about 4.4 billion people in Asia end up working IT in the US where you can observe them.

Why do they work mostly in STEM/IT? Because their home countries emphasise certain skills in school, because it's much easier to work in IT when you're from a foreign country than law, journalism, or business. And because these things often create feedback loops, because some people return and start teaching, or their stories become examples for others to follow.

Compare, for example, the success of Cubans in Baseball.

Why do they work mostly in STEM/IT? Because their home countries emphasise certain skills in school, because it's much easier to work in IT when you're from a foreign country than law, journalism, or business. And because these things often create feedback loops, because some people return and start teaching, or their stories become examples for others to follow.

I'm not disagreeing with you. You are saying that there are cultural reasons for why certain groups are over-represented in STEM fields, and that's my point: is quite possible that these cultural reasons are a much larger factor than bias and discrimination.

That there are about as many black men as white women (or less) in a given tech field is one example of this.

The problem with your line of thinking is you are looking at the outcome as if it was evidence. The unspoken assumption is that all humans are the same, or if not, then you're assuming that "skills" are distributed the same way across all populations.

There's no reason to think this, and there's lots of evidence to the contrary, but it doesn't get any attention because anyone who talks about quickly gets labeled as racist. Which might be true (that scientists and authors who talk about IQ differences across population could be racists), but doesn't make the facts less true.

This is a tire fire of a thread but I'll respond to your concern: the science of heritability, malleability, and measurement of intellect is nowhere near settled, not even close --- we barely understand the populations we've managed to measure. People who attempt to represent the scientific literature as having established a meaningful gap between "races" are misrepresenting the science, and doing so --- intentionally or not --- in the service of a strain of culture that has been persecuting and abusing people for centuries.

If you believe there's a "lot of evidence to the contrary", you should take it up with Turkheimer and Nisbett, both of whom have put more time into studying these issues than any combination of HN commenters have, combined.

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-...

Did you even listen to Sam Harris's podcast with Charles Murray?

I've seen this vox article before and I think it's a joke.

EDIT:

To clarify my GP comment, the point is that there are very good reasons to conclude that IQ is not distributed equally across different populations, and so if there are different percentages of developers from X or Y populations it should not be seen as evidence of discrimination because it could very well be the result of IQ distribution.

Also, it should not be necessary to point out since it should have no bearing on the discusion, but I am not white (at least not of European ancestry).

"This Vox article" is a piece Vox provided space for from 3 experts, at least two of whom are major figures in the academic field, prompted by that podcast. You won't have any luck dismissing it as a superficial Vox article. Any attempt to do so will inevitably end up saying more about you than about the piece --- which is the point I am trying to make to you.

Incidentally: Charles Murray is not a major figure in this field. Turkheimer and Nisbett are professors at major research universities both of whom have spent their careers studying these specific scientific questions. Murray is, for lack of a charitable description, a pundit. Obviously, he's well known for _The Bell Curve_, but we tend to forget that his co-author (now deceased) was the scientific authority behind that book.

Reevaluate.

You might as well have just said "How dare you disagree with my authority, you imbecile!"

But even the vox article does not dispute that IQ is not distributed equally across populations.

Race differences in average IQ score. People who identify as black or Hispanic in the US and elsewhere on average obtain lower IQ scores than people who identify as white or Asian. That is simply a fact, and stating it plainly offers no support in itself for a biological interpretation of the difference.

The phrasing is funny "identify as black", ok, but they cannot dispute the facts.

Now, given that IQ is distributed in different ways, why, just why, should we interpret this fact: "there are fewer black people in STEM" as evidence of discrimination?

In 1970 law and medical school graduates were about 10% female. Now it's about 50%. Did women change their interests? Are interests fixed? It doesn't matter. Just stop discriminating and give everyone the chance to develop their interests and capabilities.

Surely girls and women have, historically, been discriminated against in such fields. But discrimination in 1950 or 1970 does not constitute evidence of ongoing discrimination.

That quote is straight from the article. I think the author is arguing that everyone should be given a chance to develop their interests and abilities, rather than forcing anyone's interest to match a preconceived notion of the desired population outcome.

Considering that some fields, computer science in particular have fewer female participants than they did a few decades ago[0] its pretty clear something other than inherent differences in the sexes is at play.

0: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

I think the bigger question here is: we now have over 50% of people enrolling in medical fields being women. It stands to reason that this is because discrimination was taken away. Why didn't the same thing happen in math and engineering fields? Are we really supposed to believe that women entered the medical field in vast numbers because the medical field rapidly became much more welcoming of women? Do we really believe that women didn't enter engineering fields, as they have done in medical fields, because of widespread discrimination everywhere in North America?

Why didn't the same thing happen in math and engineering fields? Are we really supposed to believe that women entered the medical field in vast numbers because the medical field rapidly became much more welcoming of women?

No. You are supposed to believe that discrimination against women in medical fields was no higher than what existed in society unlike in fields like Finance and Tech where there always was and continue to be a disproportionately higher degree of bias

Particularly given the huge investment by the industry to incentive women to pursue careers in stem. I can't imagine a more welcoming environment, unless the Uber-esque fiascos really are commonplace and I've just had the good fortune to avoid these people.

By the time they are born, male and female brains are already different:

"A huge testosterone surge beginning in the eighth week will turn this unisex brain male by killing off some cells in the communication centers and growing more cells in the sex and aggression centers."

Since they are different at birth, we shouldn't be surprised that their interests are different, and accept that these differences contribute to varying populations of men and women in different professions.

Stamp out bias. Don't force a specific population distribution.

[0] http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Books/story?id=2274147&page=1

Did you read the article? It's most definitely not trying to force a specific population distribution.

It does not follow logically that just because men and women are biologically different that those differences are necessarily significant with regard to career distributions.

It does follow that we should not expect them to be the same.

Not necessarily (based solely on the axiom that men and women have different brain chemistry).

It is logically possible that the differences we observe in career distributions are more heavily influenced by other factors besides differences in brain chemistry.

Lets consider a sociology view. When it comes to inter-sex competition there is a sexual dimorphism where men competes and derive status over resources and women over social relations. This would causes behavior divergence for both boys and girls, especially during adolescence, where both sexes will do status-seeking behavior and favor career choices that best fulfill their goals.

That sexual dimorphism could in turn be caused by a different brain chemistry or by cultural values. From studies that look at different indigenous people, it seems universal that women select men based on a mans ability to gather resources, and men selects women based on their ability to raise and nurture a family. Inter-sex dominance hierarchy also follow those lines.

Should STEM be seen as desirable though?

It is one of those careers where you either make it before you are 25 or you are replaced.

STEM fields are extremely ageist where at 25 and onwards you have to look over your shoulder and watch out for the next 16 year old taking your job.

STEM for this reason is stressful and non sustainable.

Being in STEM and much older than 25 I feel that perhaps I made the wrong decision getting into STEM. Perhaps a people orientated career would have lasted me longer. I haven't been replaced yet, but can feel it coming...

The difference between STEM and non-STEM jobs is that as a worker, not a manager, you can't fake it for as long. Eventually people will notice that you're not keeping up with tech trends, learning, learning new things, or that your overall productivity is sub par (or in a lot of cases zero or even negative).

I see that as a plus for STEM jobs and more generally their sectors as it naturally rewards meritocracy and progress.

If you think you can't keep up with new grads, despite years more experience, I'm going to venture a guess that you don't find technology interesting enough to learn on its own.

Many years ago, I happened upon this analysis of why things are the way they are, and it rang true:

http://www.denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm

I def recommend Baumeister and Tice to HN.

Consider this clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BE476MvO_g&feature=youtu.be...

If this doesn't rock you down to your toes, you are not an engineer. At least not a born engineer.

I guess I'm not an engineer.

If this doesn't rock you down to your toes, you are not an motor enthusiast. At least not a born motor enthusiast.

While I think your conclusion is clearly wrong, I can't stop watching and listening to the machine starting up at 4:56. It also bursts into life with a violent explosion as one can see in the mans cloth, but the prior build-up with the short period of decreasing frequency exactly before the start fascinates me. I don't even like engines particularly :S

I loved watching startup of a Diesel engine that probably occupies more volume than my house, thanks.

But for sheer amazing operation at the very edge of what we know how to do, I like [1]. There's just something about running !% short of destruction as normal. That's engineering!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEQI4lpdJGI

Watching the nozzles quiver under the load gives me goose bumps!

Me too. When I see that, I wonder what how it would felt to be an SSME design engineer viewing that behavior. I sure wouldn't have expected my design to shake like a leaf in the wind.

I'm pretty sure I know what it'd feel like. An intense high.

(The levels of flexing and vibration would have been calculated in advance. But it's different seeing it.)

(When I was a kid I had a military ID, and would ride my bike out to the local AF base and park near the runway. Watching the F-104s taking off and hitting the afterburners halfway down the runway was the best show a kid could have.)

What are those nozzles on the launch-gear that are shooting out sparks? Is that what ignites the entire thing?

Those are sparks to burn off excess hydrogen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=capiUBVd7EU (7m 30s)

That was one of the most fascinating videos I've seen in a good long while. Thanks for posting.

I never understood why certain female dominated fields like Nursing are excluded from STEM. My mom was a nurse, my sister in law is a NP and my wife is studying to be an RN.

It sure looks a lot more like STEM than my "tech" job, which has more elements in common with what my aunt did as a secretary in the 70s than science.

I often refer to most computer programming as "digital carpentry." Of course, there are definitely jobs that require someone be more of an architect or a scientist, but the vast majority of jobs just need someone who can build common things that work and work well.

In that sense, most of the programming work I did in the first decade of my career had more in common with the blue collar tradecraft that my father did than it did with anything anyone would consider to be a STEM career.

Agreed. I always thought of it more as a trade, though now that I've been in the field for a few years, I'm realizing that technical prowess is secondary to political skill. A sub par programmer with excellent political skills will be seen by the organization as more valuable, whether or not he actually is. (This isn't sour grapes, I've been on both sides of the evaluation).

fields like Nursing are excluded from STEM

Health care is a very respectable field in and of itself

If you think it matters if nursing is 'part of STEM' you're falling for journo/blogger memes.

Very interesting article, and sort of depressing for me, specifically the conclusion of Wang et. al[0]. That if you're good at both math and communication, you choose a more social field over the mathematical one is almost a condemnation of the mathier fields.

Then again, being good at math in high school as Wang et. al measures doesn't really translate to math in college, which is much more problem solving oriented than math in high school. That's something to keep in mind here, so the whole idea that they end up being spread more broadly and thus aren't concentrated in STEM as the socially dumb men are is a more convincing explanation, it really doesn't have to do with differences in ability, it's merely other factors, mainly which major they try first.

How interesting.

[0] http://www.cds.web.unc.edu/files/2014/10/not_lack_of_ability...

It's more complicated than that, even with very simple models. Consider the toy model where there are two types of talent, "A" and "B" and that society benefits roughly equally, but sub-linearly, from productivity added to "A" talent jobs and "B" talent jobs. Consider the following talent distribution:

           A | B
    --------------
    Men   |1 | 2
    Women |2 | 2

As society tends towards the maximally efficient it will tend towards women in all A jobs and men in all B jobs, despite the fact that women are just as good at B jobs.

This obviously is a toy model, but it shows that even very simple assumptions can lead to very odd outcomes.

It would be great if you could (a) work through how that final distribution is more optimal and (b) explain why the number of men sums to 3 but the number of women sums to 4.

Sorry, the numbers are a measure of talent; so from that table, if a man were to work a year in an "A" field, he would generate 1 unit of production, but if he were to work a year in a "B" field he would produce 2 units of production. A woman would produce 2 units of production regardless of whether it is in an "A" or "B" field.

In many real-world cases you get diminishing returns for more production. Let's say it's a square-root return, so 16 units of production in "A" is twice as good as 4 units of production in "A" (if you do the math with other diminishing returns like logarithmic you see a similar outcome).

Consider a population of 8 men and 8 women. If they are equally distributed between jobs there are 12 units of production of "A" and 16 units of production of "B" for a total value of sqrt(12)+sqrt(16) ~=7.5 units of total value.

If instead all women work in "A" jobs and all men work in "B" jobs, then you will see 16 units of production in each, for a total value of 8 units.

The most pessimal would be the reverse of that and it would generate ~6.8 units of value.

A large weakness people have is the necessity of a sense of safety before taking risks. A risk here is defined as a testing of a personal idea. 3rd party ideas necessarily are already vetted to some degree by reality because transportation to you require going through reality.

Risks as defined then are a necessity for living a unique life. It isn't always the most desirable thing as the majority of people would rather follow a crowd, but it does often have the most disproportionate rewards for work input.

I don't know if it's biological or cultural, but girls/women often require a much higher sense of safety before being willing to do risky things. There is also a much higher "cost" from society from doing things that look foolish. This results in less of a desire to learn, especially as you approach the cutting edge where the failure rate rapidly rises and civilized structures start deteriorating. (the social structure that works best in this "wild" is the frat bro/alpha male structure)

Being born beautiful is actually a weakness due to an addiction to strength in this regard. A corresponding male strength is academic excellence. Both these strengths become weaknesses because of lack of experience dealing with setbacks and shocks as well as the accumulated dry tinder that was never periodically cleared via said setbacks. (old people are stubborn because they have too much tinder to risk in a fire/refactor) I use academics as the male example as it creates a drives to validate the prior excellence often forcing them along paths into finance or other areas with high monetary compensation. Selling soul for money, taking no risk by not being true to yourself.

Thus addiction to strength creates risk averseness and stagnates growth. Girls are often shielded from reality and also have an escape route of marriage. (men don't, an extreme example of an alternative for them for meaning is being a suicide bomber)

Almost all social structures in the world heavily cause girls to become addicted to social validation. (Note that individual validation can be "proved" by money while social validation cannot. Objective and subjective tokens of value) The stereotype of "ugly" girls in STEM is a result of being beautiful increasing the chance of this addiction. (The stereotype of smart/beautiful but crazy may have origins in life-changing experiences that shatters the status addiction but did collateral damage. )

Safety is a necessity for learning which necessarily involves mistakes. However the minimum safety level can be vastly lowered by encouraging a dismissive attitude towards social validation.

1. 70 percent more girls than boys had strong math and verbal skills;

2. Boys were more than twice as likely as girls to have strong math skills but not strong verbal skills.

No surprise on the 1st; I recognize that women can do/be anything they want in this world. But I wonder if the 2nd stat is explained mostly by the fact that MORE men are strong at math (not being a chauvinist pig; just running with stereotype)...or are the two genders equally represented among Math Elite and girls twice as likely to have strong verbal skills?

My gut feeling is that women prefer jobs where one must communicate more. Many tech professionals are required to spend their workdays lonely in front of the computer. This is a very unattractive concept to most women. This may be a biased view, yes, but that's just how they perceive it.