[marquis]

I'm not maled so I google 'male advocacy' and picked what came up first. Want some equivalent sources on women? I can pick a few hundred off the top of my head. As a feminist I completely support such groups for men also in careers where women are over-representing.

[jack-r-abbit]

I don't want to speak for the paulwithap, but it seems we're talking about the disproportionate amount of effort to get men into in careers where women are over-representing compared to the other way around. And also the disproportionate amount of criticism we give to members in that field when they don't. I'm all for anyone doing what ever job they feel like doing as long as they have the skills to do it. I don't even care if they only do it for the money as long as they do it well and don't mess it up for the rest of us.

[marquis]

My uncle lost his job recently as a factory worker and is retraining at the age of 50 to be an nurse aide. He wishes he'd trained as nurse but 30 years ago it was near impossible. Not every man wants to be a brain surgeon.

And teachers? That has to be the MOST important group where we should absolutely have equal representation.

[jack-r-abbit]

> And teachers? That has to be the MOST important group where we should absolutely have equal representation.

I would mostly agree with that. A lot of people probably would. But we don't see a huge number of "guys who teach" or "black guys teach" type programs popping up all over. We don't see article after article full of disdain for the "girls club" that is teaching. It is not just a gender thing. We don't see many "girls who drive trucks" programs either. I think it is some what of a phenomenon having such a large push to specifically get women into coding specifically. It just seems quite disproportionate. I'd like to see more push from other "one gender dominated" fields. [EDIT] Maybe there is and I just don't see it since I'm not in one of those other fields.

Sounds like your uncle is finally realizing a desire he's had for many years. Best of luck to him.

[eropple]

> we don't see a huge number of "guys who teach" or "black guys teach" type programs popping up all over

You don't see a huge number of "girls code" programs, either, you just think you do because some of them have press and you're pretty deep in the culture of software development. Not a bad thing, mind you! But we have to keep in mind observational bias.

[Consultant32452]

I would never consider being a teacher because of the assumption of men being pedophiles. Well, that and pay.

[marquis]

I think those are precisely the 2 reasons we have so few male teachers entering the workforce these days. It's an awful awful thing. Being a teacher used to be a prestigious career.

[jack-r-abbit]

There has been several teacher-student sexual assault cases in the area in the last few years... I think all but one was "female teacher and male student(s)". I believe that a far greater number of people view that as "more acceptable" than "male teacher and female student". It is a very sad double standard.

And we pay our teachers like crap. Which confuses me even more about the teachers that clearly don't care for teaching by the way they half-ass the job. Clearly they are not in it for the money.

[Consultant32452]

Money is relative. Education is one of the easiest 4 year degrees to get. The low pay for teachers is a myth compared to other jobs with similar qualifications. At least, the hourly rate isn't that bad. You get lots of holidays and summers off so your yearly wage looks bleh. It's still way less than what I make as an engineer, but I dare say most teachers could not get an engineering degree.

[auctiontheory]

And teachers? That has to be the MOST important group where we should absolutely have equal representation.

As a "traditionally female" occupation, K-12 teaching is woefully underpaid relative to, say, police or firemen. In the SF Bay Area, teaching is just not a middle-class profession at all.

[marquis]

Could I take your comment to mean that men are not teachers because of the low pay-scale? It's a valid point and certainly one we would all like addressed.

[auctiontheory]

It is certainly one reason that keeps men (and many highly-qualified women) from being teachers.

Someone made the point long before I did that while we are grateful that women have so many more professional possibilities, it does mean a loss of many of the best women for the traditionally-female professions of nursing, "librarian-ing" and above all teaching. Just as engineering and science and medicine lose STEM minds to Wall Street and app-design shops.

Where I live, cops make $150K. Teachers make a lot less.

[marquis]

>a loss of many of the best women for the traditionally-female professions

I'd really disagree with that. It means the best women are heads of those departments, not that they are lost from the profession.

[cobrausn]

How do you actually determine what is 'over-represented' and not just the result of individual agency en masse?

[saraid216]

Individual agency en masse should be a random distribution, which results in a proportionate representation within reasonable error margins. Not having this suggests that there's another factor besides individual agency factoring into decisions. It could be something acceptable, like men can't biologically give birth (yet), or it could be something unacceptable, like blacks being targeted by police solely on suspicion of race.

This is one of the ways in which you recognize that something weird is going on with American politics. While it's a good thing to have lawyers in Congress, it's kinda weird that they're overwhelmingly lawyers.

[cobrausn]

I do not agree with the first statement - it supposes that men and women will, given an option and without external pressures, always choose the same thing in equal amounts. I don't think that is a settled question. But it is worth looking into, as are any external pressures that may be keeping women out of 'Tech'. Does a representative field such as you suggest exist? Genuine question. I'm thinking retail/service?

In regards to Congress, it kind of makes sense to me they would be overwhelmingly from a law background - after all, the ones who know law best and are interested in law are most likely to want to have the ability to change it.

[saraid216]

> I do not agree with the first statement - it supposes that men and women will, given an option and without external pressures, always choose the same thing in equal amounts.

That's not quite what I'm supposing.

I'm supposing that the choices of individual people without external pressures will always choose things unpredictably. In other words, correlation between individual choice and any particular demographic facet of a person should be pure chance.

This is how random number generators work. You want to provide as even a distribution as possible. That doesn't change the fact that, given a certain seed, the generator will always return the same "random" result.

The analogy comes back around like this: if you can reliably predict that a random number generator will return a number divisible by 3 if the input is odd, there's something weird going on even if some results are not divisible by 3. Chances are, if you look at the RNG's algorithm, you'll find something that creates that bias.

Do you care? Is that an issue? Is that a vulnerability? That's an entirely different question. As software engineers, we'd call it a business or design decision. In the wider world, we call it morality or ethics.

Edit to add: One of the consequences of this perspective is that it factors in any demographic variety, not just "men and women". If someone has a chromosomal set of XXY, then it still makes sense to consider their representation. That it's vanishingly small, such that they rarely register a blip on populations smaller than "the entire world", is part of the same analysis.

[pbhjpbhj]

>Individual agency en masse should be a random distribution //

Would you like a) a beer, b) a hot chocolate ...

Hmm, I'm sure it'll be a random distribution with equal weighting of men and women.

Is it really that weird that lawyers predominant in a legislative field? It seems like it would be the least weird tendency - like if street cleaners, dental hygenists or pop-stars were predominant that would be weird.

[saraid216]

> Is it really that weird that lawyers predominant in a legislative field? It seems like it would be the least weird tendency - like if street cleaners, dental hygenists or pop-stars were predominant that would be weird.

Nah. Usually I'm actually arguing on the other side of this one. But it seemed like a good example for illustrating how biases can be systemic to ethics-illiterate techies, since a remarkably large number of HNers are allergic to having respect for lawyers.

[nousernamesleft]

>Individual agency en masse should be a random distribution

What are you basing that assumption on? You are 100% certain that there is no possible way that men and women could have different preferences, priorities or interests?

[saraid216]

A basic understanding of math, mostly.

[nousernamesleft]

Shit, I guess I must have been sick the day we covered "men and women are statistically identical in all choices they make". Was that in calculus?

[saraid216]

Why would they be statistically identical? I'm pretty sure I gave a specific example of how this wasn't true. Did you miss English class in addition to math class?