Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Changes in technology education

I would agree with chay - STEM careers does not automatically translate to workaholic lifestyle. The two companies I worked for, have been usually pretty flexible with schedules... it did not matter if I went to work at 6AM and leave earlier for training, or come in later and work later - and I had a co-worker who came in every morning at 6AM in her time zone and left by 3PM to be home in the PM with her child. And with my whole group having kids, where I see both moms and dad split the duties, I do feel I am starting to see a change in attitude where it is no longer unusual if it is the dad running out the door to pick up the sick child or having to do pickups for their children. I had a manager who always blocked out the afternoons his son was pitching in his baseball games because he said work would still be there after the games, but his son would not be in high school forever.

But... it is hard to shake those stereotypes of STEM fields, and change seems so slow. Then I think about how long it took for girls to embrace sports (I met women from the days before Title IX who finally started up sports in their 50s and 60s, and telling me how girls were told not to do sports for so many reasons) and yet I could not imagine not having played sports in high school. And yet - when I look at all the different sports available, it is even more normal today for girls to be in soccer, rowing, running and not limited to sports that were considered to be feminine (cheerleadering, ballet/dance, figure skating etc).

And I am hoping that the changes I have seen regarding attitudes towards men and women in high tech, and their family lives, persist and continue where it is no longer odd if dads take paternity leaves or spend time with their kids and women are not seen as inferior to their male counterparts - and maybe that will translate to the children not seeing STEM as a boy/girl thing but rather, just as an option that anyone can pursue if interested.

I do think men are better than women at some things on average (chess, programming) and that women are better at some things than men (verbal ability, including foreign languages). It's strange that an assertion about being better in a single domain on average is treated as an assertion of general "superiority". That would only make sense if we agreed that the abilities to play chess or program a computer are the only important ones. They are not, of course.

Women and men are different; most women have a maternal drive to have a child/ren that probably consciously (and subconsciously) affects them in ways which do not remotely register with men. They're just wired differently.

Computer programming was largely designed by men and for men, especially those who interacted more easily with tools rather than people. It's a type of thinking here with possibly some biological, genetic, or epigenetic components attached.

Yes, women did play an early role with computers, but many (if not all of these) women did not have a family or children. They could then devote their energies and attention to computer programming rather than to a husband and/or child.

Whether people want to admit it or not, there's a HUGE gender disparity in computer programming and within the tech industry that remains and is sexist (http://www.businessinsider.com/women-in-linux-quietly-running-the-world-2014-2). Yes, some women have been able to benefit and thrive. However, let's not forget that less than 3% of women are in open source and Google has been spending days/weeks on promoting the World Cup which indirectly sends a message.

WA Post recently wrote about Google too - http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...ees-are-white-men-where-are-allthewomen/

Lost me here, not sure what either part of this sentence means.

I also agree with chay. The workaholic stereotype may apply to other STEM fields, but we're talking about programming here. It's a lot more complicated to set up a home infectious diseases lab than it is to set up a home VPN tunnel into the corporate network.

I'd say you've both captured the conscious and subconscious messages our society tells young girls, which is why they don't go into programming. "Oh, no, I'm a girl, I'm wired differently, I'm better at verbal skills than programming..." etc. None of these tropes have anything backing them stronger than anecdata and social selection bias, but they're out there nevertheless.

Granted, it's not "a woman's place is in the home," so it clearly shows how we've made progress on equality, but it also shows there's a long way yet to go.

Hm, hm... and I guess you have never been in a workplace that was so slanted to the opposite gender (male or female). Or (over)hear comments where it was clear that for instance, the new female hires were picked partially for their looks (that was a long running joke about one hiring manager for marketing - that he was picking women more on looks than on their abilities)... that does tend to set up the sense that some groups lean towards a superior/inferior mindset regarding gender (not just gender either - I have seen cultural clashes where we have to deal with sites accusing another site within the same group of not thinking they were as capable and so on). Those are the mindsets that I hope will change over time - where people look past gender/race/religion/culture to leverage their strengths and value what each person can bring.

We are very far from that, and I doubt we will ever get there, but we can certainly try to work on understanding stereotypes, how they affect us and our children.

I disagree. It's easy to set up an infectious diseases lab at home. You just have a child, send the child to daycare or school, and start collecting samples within about two weeks.

Seriously, I think the workaholic thing depends on where you work. Bay area tech startups tend to be pretty demanding, and the demands increase as you climb the ladder. That said, even startups aren't always as bad as the universities, which are definitely high-stress, long-hour environments.


I'm not sure about making a claim that men or women are inherently better at certain things, given stereotypes and gender expectations. I accept that different fields are dominated by certain sexes right now, but that fact could be a correlation without causation via inherent ability.

For example, it used to be that nurses were nearly always women, and doctors were nearly always men. There was an assumption that this was a natural order of things. These days, you find nurses and doctors of both sexes. And let's not forget that women and certain minorities weren't even allowed to vote because they weren't considered to be capable of voting. I suspect that what was really going on with disenfranchisement (then, as now) was fear of change. Yet inherent lack of ability was claimed.

Biology is complicated; it's hard to say there couldn't be a fundamental issue that meant the average man was better/worse at something than the average woman.

BUT: let's talk about that after all the frank discrimination has gone, at which point we might have a hope of understanding something. We need to get rid of the discrimination anyway, since we're only ever going to be talking about overlapping distributions.

There is a lovely research methodology that involves taking paperwork about an individual, e.g. a CV, and manipulating it so that it shows the individual to be male/female/white/black/a parent/whatever you want to investigate, while not changing any aspect of the paperwork that ought to make a difference. Then you give contrasting versions of the paperwork to a group of evaluators. You find - robustly, and replicated in many fields now - that a candidate perceived as female will be judged worse than one perceived male, etc., even when there simply is no difference besides the name.

Moreover, humans are good at rationalising patterns, and it behooves us to remember that we are often confabulating. E.g. proportions of women in different subjects vary dramatically from country to country, casting doubt on the idea of innate biological influence. Another example: the proportion of women in mathematical computer science is much lower than that in less mathematical areas of computer science, which sometimes leads people in CS to claim that it's just that women don't do maths - except that the proportion of women in maths is much higher than the comparable proportion in pretty much any part of CS! (While elsewhere, people like to claim women are drawn to interdisciplinary areas ;-) I think a lot of it will be historical accident causing cultural differences - stuff like role models really matters, and those vicious or virtuous circles have a *huge* influence.

There might also (in principal) be the same average, but different standard deviation, so that one group is more highly represented at the extremes.