>We need to do all we can to encourage girls in match/science/CS. //
Why is sex so important to math/science/CS that you must, presumably, aim for a population that is directly representative of the proportions in the wider population.
Presumably you're also concerned that there is an under-representation of men in, oh I don't know, 'family and consumer science'? If not, why not?
The field of CS is currently where the field of law was in 1970. The overt discrimination of the 1950's and 1960's was gone, but indirect forces existed to keep the number of women in the legal field small. Law schools and law firms made determined efforts to increase the representation of women. Fast forward to today, half of all law schools graduates are women. Nearly half of all associates in large law firms are women. At some old-line NYC firms, 20-25% of partners are women. Law schools and law firms no longer make a concerted effort to recruit women, they just happen to end up with roughly evenly distributed classes.
It's easy to say that women are just "less interested" in CS/Math, but that's a cop-out. One might point out that a job in a large law firm is often boring and exceedingly detail-oriented (it's kind of like debugging code actually). One might point out that such jobs are also guarded by an entrance examination that depends very heavily on formal logic, something women aren't stereotypical good at. Yet, law firms around the country are full of women.
The problem is not so much that there are not enough women in CS. It's that 40% of the kids who get SAT Math scores of 700+, and 30% who get a perfect 800, are girls, yet top CS programs, which presumably screen heavily for math aptitude, might have only 5-10% girls. Given that CS is such a great way to a solid middle class income, and so many girls clearly have the aptitude for it, I find it very difficult to chalk up their self-selection out of CS to merely "interest."
> It's easy to say that women are just "less interested" in CS/Math, but that's a cop-out. One might point out that a job in a large law firm is often boring and exceedingly detail-oriented (it's kind of like debugging code actually). One might point out that such jobs are also guarded by an entrance examination that depends very heavily on formal logic, something women aren't stereotypical good at. Yet, law firms around the country are full of women.
> ...
> Given that CS is such a great way to a solid middle class income, and so many girls clearly have the aptitude for it, I find it very difficult to chalk up their self-selection out of CS to merely "interest."
Here's the thing. Law is a high-status field. STEM frankly hasn't been until very recently, which is why it's suddenly become an issue. When the tech bubble pops and the rest of the economy recovers, STEM careers will return to low-status and the feminist outrage will dissipate. No one seems to mind that, say, garbage handling or logging are male-dominated professions, though if there was an irrational exuberance for timber instead of software maybe there would be more outrage about women loggers.
Incidentally, women seem to be less underrepresented among CS folks in cultures where STEM professions are not historically low-status. It just seems that women aren't interested in breaking into male-dominated, low-status professions. Who can blame them? It's a lot of effort for very little reward. Women can already get into female-dominated, low-status professions more easily.
"women seem to be less underrepresented among CS folks in cultures where STEM professions are not historically low-status."
The correlation isn't so clear. STEM is even more unpopular among Japanese and Korean women than English-speaking nation women.
But thanks for pointing out that CS is hardly a desirable route to a good and comfortable life unless you love it for its own sake. It requires the same level of skills and ability necessary for a much more profitable and less difficult career in medicine, law, accountancy, dentistry, business administration, public administration, or the like.
>It's easy to say that women are just "less interested" in CS/Math, but that's a cop-out.
Or it could simply be true. You're right, there are certainly a lot of girls who are capable of learning math and computer programming. But that doesn't address the interest question.
You presume too much. What we, I anyway, want is for the CS "population" to reflect the population of people who are naturally good at and enjoy CS. This may not have the same gender ratio as the population at large, but I'm pretty sure we're not there now either. And that means some people are not doing what they they're best at, what they were meant to do, which is bad for both them and society.
Now as a tactical concern on the road there, there are definitely some men in the system who will not react well to there being more women. Trying to change them with reason will have limited effectiveness. I think what we need to do is put enough highly competent women in front of them that they either have to shut up or look like idiots, thus marginalizing them and their bad attitudes. This will make it easier to get to the natural, aptitude-based proportion of people in the field. This is, IMO, a good reason to encourage well-suited women to go into the field. I don't know of a better way to accomplish the goal of reducing gender bias overall.
>that means some people are not doing what they they're best at //
It's a laudable aim to help people do what they enjoy as a career. It's laughably naive to suppose that we're able to have most people do something they're good at and enjoy as a career. That unfortunately is not the way that society is structured.
If education works and people have abilities and interests then who does the mundane and uninteresting jobs?
>a good reason to encourage well-suited women to go into the field //
Why do we have to be sexist about it, why not just encourage well-suited people?
Well, computers are what I know so I'm concerned about that. I guess if I were a male nurse I'd be saying the same thing about men.
I think it's important to have somewhat equal representation. First, we have a shortage of developers so this is an easy way to address that. Second, like the subject of this article, a lot of girls would be interested in CS but because of the lack of women they're turned off. This is a real shame. Third, CS people are literally designing our future. Do we want to live in a world as envisioned by men or as white men or as a fair balance of people?
There are 2^(6 billion) subgroups of humanity. A large number [1] of those subgroups are poorly represented among developers - the number is too large to represent with a long integer.
Why do you choose one particular subgroup to be concerned about?
[1] The number is, however, very small in comparison to 2^(6 billion).
Because this particular subgroup makes up the majority of the population. This should be blindingly obvious to anyone who isn't trying to be disingenuous.
This is an exceedingly poor way of looking at things.
First, and pedantically, your statement "are poorly represented among developers" doesn't make sense as I don't know what "representation" would mean in the context of arbitrary subsets of humans.
Admittedly, you could phrase it as "developers are poorly represented in the subgroup", and it would work, but given that you phrased it the way you did, I feel like you didn't really think through what you were saying.
As for why the particular subgroup in question is special, well, it has an important quality:
If you ask people to construct a model of a human in n dimensions, I guarantee you that almost everyone will include "gender" as one of those dimensions. So, it's an important characteristic.
Next, wouldn't you know it, this particular subgroup we're concerned with is one where every single member has the same value in that dimension, while every single member of its complement has a different value! Wow, what are the odds!? Among the powerset of humans, there are probably fewer than ~10^5 subgroups where the humans contained therein share the same value in an important dimension of our model. 10^5 / 2^(10^9), what is that, like, practically zero!?
Okay, so now we've narrowed down the practically limitless subgroups of humanity to a reasonable number -- but does that mean anything? Are we on the right track? Holy cow! It appears that humans with this particular value of this particular dimension have been treated completely differently from other humans with another value in that same dimension. This can't just be simple coincidence, we must be on to something here. When we've investigated this in the past and made changes, the collective social utility has increased. Cool.
So, to recap:
1) We've constructed a model of a human by characterizing them by their most important traits, as determined by an extensive survey of humans themselves.
2) We've used this model to narrow down the field of the powerset of humans to only subgroups whose representation or under-representation among developers may mean something.
3) We've seen that using this technique in the past to investigate the subset of humans with a certain value in a certain dimension has achieved positive results as measured by the increase in social utility per capita of that group, with a relatively minor decrease in the social utility per capita of its complement.
4) Yes, it is worth being concerned about this one particular subgroup, because among the 2^(6 billion) subgroups of humans, there might be something easily correctable which yields great results.
I'm not sure why it's a "poor way of looking at things". I'm an individualist, so I believe that only harms perpetrated against specific individuals matter.
You seem to disagree, so I'm asking for a philosophical justification for your beliefs. Apparently it's based on an argumentum ad populum - if the masses consider some dimension empirically meaningful, slicing humanity on that dimension is morally meaningful as well.
Then again, if you want to go down the road of argumentum ad populum, I can guarantee you that everyone will also consider "height", "weight", "hair color", "good looks" and "pleasant personality" as meaningful dimensions to classify humans.
People with high levels of "good looks" and "pleasant personality" are also treated differently than people with low levels of these values, as are people with a high level of weight / height.
Should we also be concerned if, e.g., ugly people or those with an unpleasant personality are poorly represented in some field?
Yes, it is worth being concerned about this one particular subgroup, because among the 2^(6 billion) subgroups of humans, there might be something easily correctable which yields great results.
If you want to appeal to historical discrimination as something easily correctable, we've already fixed it. It worked across the board, but to varying degrees (e.g. women went up to >50% of doctors, <20% of physicists, >50% of journalists, etc).
> Third, CS people are literally designing our future.
That's a little grandiose. Actually, that's a lot grandiose. CS people build things to other people's requirements. Even if you're an entrepreneur, odds are you're building Facebook or Zynga to satisfy the passing whims of, more often than not, women.
More fundamentally, there's no such thing as an overarching design for the world. You can't point to anyone and say the world came out the way they planned or intended it in any significant way. The only thing CS people can do is invent things. And inventing things never really reshapes society in a way the inventors can even predict, let alone effectively plan for. Frankly, at the end of the line there's usually someone who wants to make money from it, so as long as women have the power to spend money, some CS guys somewhere will be bending over backwards to invent something those women might want.
I'm concerned that men are underrepresented in nursing. It's a fairly remunerative career that I'm sure many men would enjoy if there were less societal baggage.
I hope you're just being snarky, or else you're missing the point entirely. The acknowledgement of "well its also hard for men in x" does not dismiss the fact that historically discriminated groups also deserve support.
The question is one of motive. If a person saying "we need to make things easy for women who want to do STEM jobs because of an imbalance in the numbers of men and women in these roles" but doesn't agree this is true for things like childcare or nursing then there is a question to answer as to why they don't think the imbalance is important in the later case.
It's not being snarky it's questioning whether the parent is interested in equality of opportunity or discrimination in favour of women. That's an important question in my view.
>"If a person saying "we need to make things easy for women who want to do STEM jobs because of an imbalance in the numbers of men and women in these roles" but doesn't agree this is true for things like childcare or nursing then there is a question to answer as to why they don't think the imbalance is important in the later case."
You're dancing dangerously close to a straw man argument here. Nobody has taken a position either way on childcare or nursing.
>"It's not being snarky it's questioning whether the parent is interested in equality of opportunity or discrimination in favour of women. That's an important question in my view."
It's an important question in everyone's view. My point is that it's rarely a valid point that $A should not be addressed because $B is also a problem; especially when $B is a rhetorical fringe case.
When I get in these discussions, invariably someone tries to boil it down to the following false dichotomy: Helping/encouraging/assisting $GROUP_A is discriminating/violating/hurting $GROUP_B. This is never necessarily the case.
I'm not being snarky, and I don't think this is about discrimination at all. It's about our culture directing people away from the jobs that best suit them. It's a problem that should be fixed for everyone.
>We need to do all we can to encourage girls in match/science/CS. //
Why is sex so important to math/science/CS that you must, presumably, aim for a population that is directly representative of the proportions in the wider population.
Presumably you're also concerned that there is an under-representation of men in, oh I don't know, 'family and consumer science'? If not, why not?