Reply to Google male engineeer saying female engineers shouldn't be engineers

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/

Women with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a condition that gives them a more typically-male hormone balance, tend to show male preferences for things rather than people.

Consistent with hormone effects on interests, females with CAH are considerably more interested than are females without CAH in male-typed toys, leisure activities, and occupations, from childhood through adulthood (reviewed in Blakemore et al., 2009; Cohen-Bendahan et al., 2005); adult females with CAH also engage more in male-typed occupations than do females without CAH (Frisén et al., 2009). Male-typed interests of females with CAH are associated with degree of androgen exposure, which can be inferred from genotype or disease characteristics (Berenbaum et al., 2000; Meyer-Bahlburg et al., 2006; Nordenström et al., 2002). Interests of males with CAH are similar to those of males without CAH because both are exposed to high (sex-typical) prenatal androgens and are reared as boys.

Of course, this doesn't mean that one sex or another make better engineers but would appear to hint of a biological distinction that effects the initial pipeline.[/quote]

But who shapes the pipeline? It's not crazy to think that sex hormones can influence the brain.  But I just think we have very, very far to go with math education and gender, and workplace fairness, and fairness between spouses in household labor, before we can conclude that it's all to to "girl brain."[/quote]

About half the math majors in undergrad are women.

https://datausa.io/story/06-16-2016_math-teachers/

I was totally confused by this for a while until a someone directed me to the data on what people actually do with math degrees. The answer is mostly: they become math teachers. They work in elementary schools and high schools, [i]with people[/i].  (https://datausa.io/story/06-16-2016_math-teachers/)

Then all those future math teachers leave for the schools after undergrad, and so math grad school ends up with pretty much the same male-tilted gender balance as CS, physics, and engineering grad school.

This seems to me like the clearest proof that women being underrepresented in CS/physics/etc is just about different interests. It’s not that they can’t do the work – all those future math teachers do just as well in their math majors as everyone else. It’s not that stereotypes of what girls can and can’t do are making them afraid to try – whatever stereotypes there are about women and math haven’t dulled future math teachers’ willingness to compete difficult math courses one bit. And it’s not even about colleges being discriminatory and hostile (or at least however discriminatory and hostile they are it doesn’t drive away those future math teachers). [b]It’s just that women are more interested in some jobs, and men are more interested in others. [/b]Figure out a way to make math people-oriented, and women flock to it. If there were as many elementary school computer science teachers as there are math teachers, gender balance there would equalize without any other effort.

You actually see this in the medical field, where men and women graduate at similiar rates, but women cluster in people oriented specialties (OB/GYN, pediatrics, psychiatry, which skew 60-80% female)  while men cluster in thing oriented specialities where they don't interact with patients (radiology, anesthesiology) and surgery where the patient isn't concious.

I’m not familiar with any gender breakdown of legal specialties, but I will bet you that family law, child-related law, and various prosocial helping-communities law are disproportionately female, and patent law, technology law, and law working with scary dangerous criminals are disproportionately male. And so on for most other fields.  [/quote]

RIGHT.  It's all about a person's "interest."  And their "interest"  has nothing at all to do with the social and economic background and cultural expectations that surround them.  The "interest" all just arises from their brain, pure and simple.  [/quote]

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