Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sp332 2484 days ago
Men are encouraged to go into CS just because they are men. https://www.bustle.com/p/girls-still-arent-encouraged-to-go-...
5 comments

Yet another silly feminist statistic, cleverly cropping context to make things look bad.

This is about advisories given to 16 to 18 year old boys and girls.

Does it seem possible that the advisors took the track record of the person they advise into account. Like for example their choices of subjects at school, their grades in Math, those sorts of things? And perhaps those aspects were more important in advising for or against STEM than the person's gender?

To me, that seems rather likely. But creative feminist statistics make it seem as if gender was the only determining factor, PROVING discrimination.

It's actually a pretty nice example of how typical feminist propaganda works.

Annoyingly, I can't find the study itself, even on the Internet Archive. I'm drawing on knowledge that I have about America and just used this to confirm that there's a similar bias in Europe. I can see how it would be less convincing if you don't have the same background info.
I don't know what background info you mean? You mean you already know that bias exists, from your experience in America, and that Europe study only confirms it?

How/what do you know about the situation in America? Tbh it seems more likely to me that US studies made the same "mistake". European feminists also like to copy methodology from US feminists.

However, if you have an article regarding the US, I will take a look.

Yeah, so encouraged by being ostracized from normal social activities and being called nerds.
A group with a self interest to have a certain outcome exist find that outcome to exist. It's a bit hard to say that this is a well made study with that conflict of interest involved. Don't get me wrong there are definitely problems abound and studies to support that position, I just don't think Bustle or Sky are the rigorous organizations to lead that charge. I was never encouraged to go into technology, my family wanted be to go into law. I went into tech well before there was any real indication in schools to do so because it made me feel less lonely. There's also the risk of trying to over correct and pushing people into careers that they aren't suited for, and that affects both genders as well. A more troubling correlation has been that women enter a traditionally make dominated field pay for everyone in that field goes down. Why we would suddenly value a field less because of gender is an interesting problem to understand. Another issue is that traditional gender roles for parenting may contribute to the problem. There's no way currently to address that problem without massive societal changes or law specific to address that. The issue is more complex than just a simple men are told to go one place women the other.
We don't value fields less because women enter it.

First of all, there is simple supply and demand. More candidates wanting to do a specific job means lower pay.

Secondly, you should ask WHY women suddenly want to enter some field. Very likely, circumstances have changed for that job. Maybe it now allows for flex time, or new machinery makes it safer, or whatever. I don't have a good example at hand. But I would look at that - very likely it is that thing that makes it cheaper (because it is more attractive), not the women entering it.

Another possibility could be a job starts paying less, so the men leave and the women come in (since they are less dependent on high income).

Edit: I just saw example of physicians on the net, which reminds me that women also tend to work fewer ours. Apparently physicians is one of those example where women have taken over and rates seem to have dropped. However, I know that female physicians work far fewer hours than male physicians (averages), which could presumably explain the drop. (example from Germany, don't know about physicians world wide).

I must have missed that invite. I went into CS because that's what I was good at.

I learned how to program at an early age, despite discouragement because I wanted to make video games.

I seem to remember being constantly bitched at by my parents for not spending enough time outside and getting made fun of for having no friends, guess I was born too early