Pinker in many ways downplays the differences between the sexes, as increasingly being shown by research into the neurobiological differences between male and female brains. Richard Haier is probably at the leading edge on this.
This peer-reviewed paper (2012), appearing in the preeminent academic journal in the field, is characteristic of recent research and has direct relevance for the questions being posed in this thread:
The phenomenon of sex differences increasing in adolescence (noted somewhere in the comments above) has been well-noted literally for decades in intelligence research, and is consistent with the decades-old findings that heritability of intelligence increases from a relatively low 50% pre-adolescence to 80% by mature adulthood. Most researchers in the field attribute this increasing heritability to children increasingly being able to make their own choices as they age, with the “big break” occurring around 12 or 13 years old, as any parent of a teenager can tell you.
I am always struck by how little the actual research findings have seeped into the public’s consciousness. I guess it’s the willingness to dismiss data based on adherence to what Hume termed the “moralistic fallacy” (because something shouldn’t be, therefore it isn’t).
Well I don’t have time to read the paper now, but I’d say if something increases during adolescence that’s because society pushes gender roles even more strongly when kids are adolescents, not because of heredity.
Well, the paper doesn’t address that issue specifically, so it won’t help you clarify your intuition. Because it is so well accepted (since the 1970s and 80s at least) that practically all psychological and behavioral traits show increasing heritability with age, all academic papers basically assume this knowledge. But before we casually blame “society” it should give us all some humility to consider that we see the same patterns of psychological characteristics as regards females versus males in all cultures, from Ghana to China, from the US to Portugal (the location of the study I linked), and at all times in recorded history.
One way to think about heritability is to think about “innateness.” We all have a particular makeup, and while our parents tightly control our environment when we are very young, as we age we increasingly “choose” our own environment, which includes our peer groups as well as those we choose to regard as role models. Our innateness gradually reveals itself.
The mechanisms for this heritability are no doubt genetic (there really are no doubts here and there haven’t been any in at least two generations), but the main question is to what extent this increase in “innateness” reflects interactions between our broader environment and our own makeup. It is often summarized that we “grow into our genes.” Why this is so is really the focus of research today, and the general public is basically where the flat-earthers were 50 or 100 years after the Copernican revolution.
An extremely readable introduction to these exact questions of heritability versus environment is Robert Plomin’s just-published Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are. If you have the time, I’d read that instead of that particular study.
I must concur with @57special that something is different about CS in comparison to other math/science fields but I am not sure what it is. I have 4 close female relatives who are all in the physical sciences/engineering disciplines and all had early access to CS classes and had great early success, but not one ever seriously considered CS. My daughter’s teacher told me that my daughter was the most unique/creative coder that he had encountered in 10 years of teaching AP CS A, but she did not once consider CS as a possibility for a college major. My son (in the exact same class) was a good student without the glowing assessment, but he is a certain computer engineering/computer science double major to be. All of those close female family members have encountered sexism in their current pursuits, but they were not deterred by those encounters from pursuing math heavy STEM disciplines. Sexism is surely a part of the pipeline issue, but there is also something else going on with CS that attracts more male students.
“Tim Berners-Lee, who created the first graphic browser did great things, but, as far as I know, he never did an IQ test.”
Berners-Lee is not some random dude, he got his Physics degree at Oxford and came up with the hypertext/WWW concepts at CERN and later MIT. It’s possible CS was not a major at that time.
“who had top test scores and a great undergrad GPA in engineering”
Given his admission into the physics program at Oxford, I’m going to assume he had one of the the highest scores in Great Britain on their entrance exam.
“If you want to improve existing products, you look for the people who did best on tests, and are great at learning how to do everything in the manner it is taught, in the fastest and best way possible. If you want to create new and innovative products, you look for people who think differently and look at the world differently. You do not hire another clone. Most tests identify clones of the existing workforce as the best people to hire.”
Huge generalization there - do you have a list of companies that you think are more innovative than Google and don’t use a hiring process of whiteboard and/or tests? I agree with you on the think differently kind of people but by definition there only be a few of those around.
Except this argument falls apart when looking at med applicants. Sure, med applicants can major in anything, but they still have to ace organic chem and physics. Thus, those girls in middle school are still doing well in math & science to build the basis to even take Organic chem, much less do well in it.
Exactly. And if you search the history of some of those other companies, you’ll find a hard-nosed geek as co-founder.
Zuck was a computer whiz before he enrolled in H. And he was in Psych AND Comp Sci. (per wiki)
Specialist researchers looking at this do not believe this explanation, not least because male outperformance post-adolescence has been universally observed in all cultures and at all times.
Here is the more accepted view, and yes, the slight advantage of girls on calculation tasks has been known since the Project Talent work in 1960, and confirmed since then in literally tens of thousands of samples:
Here is also part of the thinking on why girls tend to do better in the early- and mid-adolescent years:
[quote]
Young boys outperform girls by 2 IQ points, whereas this average difference increases to 4 IQ points for the old adolescents[, consistent with developmental theory] based on the fact that boys and girls mature at different rates. The growth of girls accelerates at the age of about 9 years and remains in advance of boys until 14–15 years. At 15–16 years the growth of girls decelerates relatively to that of boys, who continue to grow…consistent with developmental IQ data from Britain, the United States of America, and Spain./quote
No one is saying that women cannot do significant work in STEM fields, but the idea that the underrepresentation of women in some of them results solely from discrimination is just not supported by the data on ability we have. To say nothing of the data we have regarding preference of career - again, invariant as to time, culture and place - some of which is covered in the video linked in post 160.
Wow. Reading the posts here helps me to understand why women are hesitant to enter the tech world and why they leave it in droves. I’m reading that the status quo is reasonable, the companies’ policies make sense and don’t need changing. Whiteboarding is based on reason–never mind that there have been many, many articles written about the ways in which the practice has been used as a hazing ritual and that google’s well documented past use of it was not designed to test basic CS knowledge at all. If women can’t find their way in, it’s on them. In the meantime it’s appropriate to continue hiring men who think and perform in a way that’s comfortable for the men already in power.
And now we are seriously entertaining the idea that women are less suited to CS than men because their brains are less able to manage math. I’m not in the tech world but what I am told and what some have said here, is that coding doesn’t require higher math. A great deal of it is based on logic; the level of math that’s required is not out of reach of either sex.
Again, I urge you all to read Brotopia in which Emily Chang discusses in detail the way in which the notion of a “meritocracy,” based purely on traditional male traits, arose and sustained itself in the tech world, regardless of its validity and regardless of whether there might be an array of other traits, more traditionally attributed to women, that would also be valuable in coding. Even if we allow for innate neurobiological differences in male/female brains, it’s quite a leap to conclude that the male brain makeup is the only one that can excel at programming. In fact, if you look back, Grace Hopper encouraged women to enter the field by selling it as the kind of multitasking thinking that women naturally do well: one example was creating seating at events that require juggling variables to create a set of workable groups.
@MWolf said it better than I can. There is value to embracing a variety of diverse perspectives in CS. The products we create will reach more of us in ways that are more innovative and useful and safer besides.
“No one is saying that women cannot do significant work in STEM fields, but the idea that the underrepresentation of women in some of them results solely from discrimination is just not supported by the data on ability we have.”
Discrimination is a big piece of it, absolutely no doubt about that. And the IQ tests have shown that on average women are smarter than men, women are at 102, men 98 for the 100 average that the tests are based on. Now as you get to a couple of standard deviations away, you get more men, on either side, i.e. more men at 60 an below, and more men at 140 and higher. At the middle where the hiring gets done and frankly where most of the people are, there should be no reason not to have more women and more balanced product teams in tech.
This is an example of the type of thinking required on the logic games on the LSAT Even if it is ‘sold’ to women, men still score higher on the upper echelons of the test (175+) in part, by acing the logic games. Men also have higher top-end SAT math scores (and lower).
Besides the discrimination/bro-culture, women are also limited in CS due to math choices in middle & high school.
Some random thoughts here on a snow day The elitism in the software tech industry is not unlike the type of academic elitism I encountered later in my graduate work at a top tier math department. As an undergrad at a mid-level flagship, I did not run into those types of attitudes.But some of the male grad students, especially those that were not married or in a relationship, really felt the need to make snarky comments etc. And this was in a department that was known to have many professors who were very supportive of female grad students. (Of the 90 or so math faculty - 2 - yes -2 - were women)
FWIW, I did ask my two boys to read the NY Times article and we did discuss. DS1 studies CS at a mid-tier university and doesn’t see too many of these snarky, elitist types in his classes. He occasionally runs into Google/Facebook types at hackathons etc and said to me "mom, it’s not just women - they won’t even consider any Asian or white male from a non-HYPSM "
And I am not so convinced of Google being all that hot- at least in my world .They make a product called Google Classroom that I use as a professor. I don’t think they had any input from anyone who actually teaches in K-12 or at a teaching focused university. It has some interesting features that I use - but no gradebook! And don’t even get me started about the new Google sites with stripped down features. They need to get a variety of perspectives - which they don’t. Ditto for FB and others of that ilk.
Coding may not require higher level math, but getting a coding job does. You need a CS degree to get a coding job, and most CS programs will require math at least through differential equations.
@3girls3cats I hear you. I can’t believe after all this time the old “essential differences” argument is still presented as valid, in spite of fields where the same argument was offered for years turning themselves around.
So in high school, only 28% of AP CS test takers were female. I have two theories about why this is the case.
Teen boys spend more time playing video games than teen girls and that gets them interested in computers and programming.
Computer programming is considered nerdy/geeky in high school. Teen girls care more about their social status than teen boys and therefore are less willing to do nerdy/geeky activities which could lower their social status.
We still conflate CS with coding. CS is not about coding. One doesn’t even need a CS degree (or any degree, for that matter) to be a relatively decent programmer (some formal training and knowing some theoretical background helps but is far from necessary for a typical programmer). Very little coding is involved in the upper echelons of CS, where heavy doses of math (and physics, in the case of quantum computing) are required. The stereotype of a nerdy programmer may have turned off some women, contributing to the gender imbalance.
On these forums, it seems that lots of parents mention middle and high school math tracks which are very rigid (no way to switch to the honors track, for example) and dependent on placement decisions made in 6th or 7th grade. If there is still a notion that “math is for boys” that middle school teachers and parents hold, that may affect placement decisions that could limit what the student can do for math in high school. Even if placement mostly removes subjective recommendations by teachers (e.g. by using course grades or testing), parents who hold the “math is for boys” notion may push their boys to prioritize choosing the highest math track, but not do so for their girls.
If there is great value in embracing diversity of perspectives in CS by changing the hiring screens and culture, then surely companies will arise that embrace this change. Those new companies should then, over time, outcompete the entrenched troglodytes who cling to their old ways. I am serious: that is the way competition works.
It may well be that Google, Facebook and others are missing something very important in their processes. This presents a competitive oppor tunity. Why are women banging their heads against the doors of Brotopia when they could found a new world? No doubt there are men who feel the same way, and so again there would seem to be a competitive opportunity here.