[quote=“marcus335, post:117, topic:2843”]
It’s about time someone stood up to the thought police. The people who talk a big game on diversity, then tell all us exactly how we are allowed to think on every issue. Disagreement gets you labeled as a whole host of negative terms. We can’t even have an honest discussion about issues in this country, because simply sharing data that’s negative about a group is racist, xenophobic, etc, etc, etc.
[/quote]Good to know another fellow blogger got the message. We need intellectual diversity, ideological diversity and thought diversity.
For those who don’t know what had happened in the 1980s,
Microcomputers became popular in the 1970s and 1980s with the advent of increasingly powerful microprocessors. Most popular applications are games and office productivity tools.
1982, TCP/IP was introduced. 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee came up with WWW. Late 1980s, commercial ISPs emerged. Rise of global internet. Rise of Unix, Unix server/ back-end, C and browser/ front-end technology.
Males known as nerds were attracted to this technology development, developed computer games for their entertainment, male nerds were obsessed and worked very long hours.
I think it’s about both plus religion and a host of political views.
Yes, women make up 50% of the population, but what percent of STEM graduates are they? We need to provide equal opportunity, but we should avoid trying to social engineer equal outcomes.
You don’t see anyone complaining about the lack of female janitors, oil field workers, skilled trades, etc. Skilled trades are some of the highest paying jobs you can get without a degree, but you don’t see women’s groups pushing for more female electricians, plumbers, etc. What about structural or civil engineers? Those are STEM careers that are male dominated, but do you see complaints about it? They only complain about the highest paying tech jobs being male dominated.
The PC police are content to let the jobs that are perceived to have lower prestige be dominated by men.
Instead of saying there are more male studying STEM and hence there are more males in the tech sector, the Googler claimed the difference is due to biological reason without citing some scientific study. May be he is aware of such study since he is a PhD in Biology but we’re not aware. So, he is jumping a step in his argument, it should be biological reasons >> more males studying STEM >> more males in tech sector if he has sources of the biological reasons, otherwise, just drop it. Omitted the connection make his statement crap.
I agree that he should have referenced a study on it. However, you can’t expect Google to hire 50/50 for STEM roles when women are such a small percent of STEM majors. I’d argue as long as their percent hiring matches the graduation rates, then there’s no bias. You could do the same looking at what percent of STEM graduates are in different minority groups.
I’ve seen data for this issue before. The 1,000 person org was mostly white men. The company was freaked about about it and hired a third party to research it. It turned out the mix of the org in terms of male/female and minority representation almost exactly matched the applicant pool. There was no hiring bias. The work just didn’t appeal much to women or certain minority groups. I don’t see how that could be called discriminatory.
“The problem with this “blank slate” interpretation of gender differences is that it doesn’t jibe with results of developmental studies. Newborn girls prefer to look at faces while newborn boys prefer to look at mechanical stimuli (such as mobiles). When it comes to toys, a consistent finding is that boys (and juvenile male monkeys) strongly prefer to play with mechanical toys over plush toys or dolls, while girls (and female juvenile monkeys) show equivalent interest in the two. (See this for summary of this research.) These sex-linked preferences emerge in human development long before any significant socialization can have taken place. And they exist in juvenile non-human primates that are not exposed to human gender-specific socialization efforts.”
Of course there is no discrimination. Remember not many people are capable of connecting the dots in their logical thinking. All they see is 50% of the population is female, so similar representation should exist in tech industry. Now we are not talking about 1 person, there are many many many people think this way, missing the connection in their own logic.
Biological evolution is optimized for human reproduction and survival. In the billions of years, early human and pre-human did not care about technology jobs.
The fascination with tech jobs is a recent phenomenon. Did millions of years of evolution not leave any mark on human? Is there any research on gender differences?
Individual diff is huge. As 2 groups, there could be also some differences. At least, men can not produce babies naturally
We should encourage everyone equally to apply for tech jobs. We should evaluate every worker’s work equally, no gender bias
The goal as a society is to increase the ratio of women working in tech. We have a shortage of tech workers and we are importing from abroad. It makes good economic sense to look at the whole stack and see how we can increase the ratio. Increasing women graduates is one of the goals. A worthwhile goal.
I actually referenced one a few posts up. There are a bunch to select from but people don’t like to talk about them. Then there’s the whole testosterone thing and how it impacts risk taking and decision making. We need to stop trying to say men and women are the same. What’s wrong with being different and having different strengths?
“Differences in male and female jealousy can also be observed. While female jealousy is more likely to be inspired by emotional infidelity, male jealousy is most likely to be brought on by sexual infidelity. A clear majority of approximately 62% to 86% of women reported that they would be more bothered by emotional infidelity and a clear majority of 47% to 60% of men reported that they would be more bothered by sexual infidelity.[19]”
Why not survey the college students on why less girls take CS? They know exactly why they do not want to major in CS. Let’s not jump to conclusion.
Also even white men do not major in CS that much. Some CS class is full of Asian men and Asian women
As a matter of fact, best students do not major in CS or engineering. Best kids go to Wall Street and second best go to medical school or law school. I would not encourage boys or girls major in CS. It’s an industry inferior to medical, law and finance.
Why do you assume it’s due to systematic bias against? This falls into the make everyone a victim category. That way they are powerless to change their situation. That’s a horrible message to tell people. We should be giving empowering messages.
Taking risk vs. being risk adverse has a ton of implications. It can be as simple as taking the job with a startup vs. an safer established firm. It can be negotiating harder for a better salary or a promotion. It can be taking a risky project that can lead to promotion. Not all risks will pan out, so the odds tend to favor those that take more of them. How many billionaires had business failures before they made it? You won’t keep trying if you’re risk adverse.
Because that’s the most obvious answer. Occam’s razor.
I don’t mean MIT and Stanford and Berkeley actively prefer men when they admit CS students. Most of the time women self select themselves out. You may say that’s all I care about. Case closed. But for me and “liberals” like me, we want to dig deeper to see if there are other reasons.
Maybe there are no female role models? Maybe the computer games are all shoot and kill and cater to boys only? Maybe the boys’ club culture of CS departments makes women feel unwelcome?
