My kid has been in day-care for four years now and has been cared for by at least 25 different teachers. Not one of them was male. How can we correct this egregious disparity?
I agree, the lack of male teachers is a far more serious problem than the lack of female coders. Too many boys nowadays grow up without fathers. If they don't have any male teachers either, they'll hit puberty before they meet anyone whose behaviour is worth emulating.
I think there's a pretty good case out there for the fact that sexism hurts men as well as women. Sometimes profoundly. I can only imagine how devastating it would be to want to devote one's life to caring for, raising, and teaching children, while trying to deal with suspicions of, as others have suggested here, intending to sexually abuse!
I think there's a lot of work to be done if we want a better culture than that.
I have a question for readers out there: are there any specific instances in which gender stereotypes impeded or prevented or dissuaded you from pursuing something you would have liked to that you'd like to discuss? Sexism isn't one sided.
To be honest, some of the worst experiences with sexism I have nowadays revolve around the ludicrous extrapolations of the evolutionary psychology du jour that come up anytime a debate surfaces around gender equality on HN. The porn ridden CouchDB presentation didn't really rate for me (though I didn't attend) - it was the reaction afterwards that was more stressful. A single person can just be socially inept, but when it's clear how pervasive homebrew theories for why men are bred to prefer risk and have more variation in intelligence and aim for high status and pursue young women and are bred to be polygamous and on and on, it becomes much harder to forget, from day to day, that sexism is around me.
Occasionally I find voices being raised around some engineering issue. I feel like I need to yell to be heard - and being visibly upset doesn't do much to quell the intensity. In certain dark moments this has had me considering leaving engineering, though I doubt women have a monopoly on the sentiment.
To be honest I think a lot of the things that would have kept me from my career choice are behind me. I've heard people express surprise that I take on a technical role in my company, or that I founded it. Even around the liberal Berkeley I sometimes hear surprise, from strangers, that I of all people would have studied physics. There was a time when that would have impeded me more, but I avoided a lot of it dropping out of junior high - which seems to be the time when a lot of girls drop out of many stereotypically nerdy interests.
Sometimes the worst sexism experienced by women comes from women. The worst of it that I've experienced probably shouldn't go here, but some of it I've dealt with through HN. This is probably more annoying than anything else, but I had the privilege of reading Bonnie Ruberg write in "5 Reasons Why I Want Digg For Girls" say that a project I was working on (I started a company in the area, it's doing well) was interesting to her because "only because they're the kind of things I know my male, Internet-loving friends could sit around and blab about for hours."
One gauge for the degree of cultural influence on technical career choices is the nationality skew. Andreescu et. al. (http://www.ams.org/notices/200810/fea-gallian.pdf) note that the Bulgarian, Russian, and USA IMO teams perform at roughly the same level, and their female team mates perform at a similar level as well. But the Bulgarian team has had 21 girls in its history, the Russian team 15, and the USA team only 3. This, they argue, demonstrates that the disparity cannot be due to country specific difficulties for girls in qualifying for the IMO - instead "some countries routinely identify and nurture both boys and girls to become world class mathematical problem solvers; others, including the USA, only rarely identify girls of this caliber."
There's also the issue of stereotype threat. As Diane Quinn writes (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0341/is_1_57/ai_75140...) "Stereotype threat occurs when a person is in a situation in which a negative stereotype about that person (or that person's group) could be applied to the person and used to judge the person's behavior." Shih et. al. performed a study in which Asian American women wrote a math test. Before the test was taken, participants were asked to identify their race or sex. Those who were asked their race rather than their sex performed significantly better.
"That’s an important first clue to how culture uses men. Culture has plenty of tradeoffs, in which it needs people to do dangerous or risky things, and so it offers big rewards to motivate people to take those risks. Most cultures have tended to use men for these high-risk, high-payoff slots much more than women. I shall propose there are important pragmatic reasons for this. The result is that some men reap big rewards while others have their lives ruined or even cut short. Most cultures shield their women from the risk and therefore also don’t give them the big rewards. I’m not saying this is what cultures ought to do, morally, but cultures aren’t moral beings. They do what they do for pragmatic reasons driven by competition against other systems and other groups."
It's not the same thing. Not even close. For most of the modern era, the best jobs have been closed off to women. Men have wielded the power, at least in the workplace. While we'd all like to believe that the effects of that power disparity are now gone, it would be naive to think so, especially once we remember that the top executives at most large employers began their careers in a time when they could not imagine competing with women in the workplace.
You don't need to spend much time in a typical office to realize that women face challenges men do not when it comes to being taken seriously in technical fields. Don't believe me? Find your closest after-work bar and eavesdrop on the conversations around you. If you have a wife or daughter (assuming you're a man), would you want them to be the subjects of some of the conversations you're likely to hear?
Yes, there are fields in which men face special challenges (or at least the assumption that they're gay if they choose to go into those fields). However, the highest paying careers are in fields dominated by men.
I believe that computer programming is a skill that will dominate the professions more as the business world catches up with its potential. Nearly all business functions can be improved with the addition of automation and data analysis that programmers can provide. If some ability to program is not a future requirement for success in the business world, the ability to talk well with programmers and have a grasp of what it is they do will be. I also believe that programming is one of the best paths of upward mobility for people of a low socioeconomic background. If either of these beliefs are correct, the fact that women face greater challenges than men in entering this field is an injustice and should be corrected.
So you're saying a glut of childcare workers is responsible for lowering the cost of childcare wrt petcare. I think that's unlikely. It's more that sectors of society value pets above children, they pay more for the care of pets - the same way that people leave millions for the care of pets and ignore the plight of poverty stricken humans.
People pay a lot to take care of the people they're related to, and the pets they own. When people could own people, they spent a lot of money maintaining those people. I guess we might be more evil than slave owners, but I think we're basically operating with the same instincts in a different legal environment.
Comments
My kid has been in day-care for four years now and has been cared for by at least 25 different teachers. Not one of them was male. How can we correct this egregious disparity?
Perhaps by avoiding treating every man as a child rapist in waiting. At some point paranoia transforms into prejudice.
That disparity is pretty egregious. Modeling for children that men can also give care is actually pretty important.
I agree, the lack of male teachers is a far more serious problem than the lack of female coders. Too many boys nowadays grow up without fathers. If they don't have any male teachers either, they'll hit puberty before they meet anyone whose behaviour is worth emulating.
How about if they just emulate the female role models in their life?
I think there's a pretty good case out there for the fact that sexism hurts men as well as women. Sometimes profoundly. I can only imagine how devastating it would be to want to devote one's life to caring for, raising, and teaching children, while trying to deal with suspicions of, as others have suggested here, intending to sexually abuse!
I think there's a lot of work to be done if we want a better culture than that.
I have a question for readers out there: are there any specific instances in which gender stereotypes impeded or prevented or dissuaded you from pursuing something you would have liked to that you'd like to discuss? Sexism isn't one sided.
Some posts to seed the discussion:
- iamelgringo on his experience nursing http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=333168
- smoody on feeling isolated in an engineering culture in which women far outnumbered men http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=332894
- sanj making an analogy between a college experiences http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=332889
To be honest, some of the worst experiences with sexism I have nowadays revolve around the ludicrous extrapolations of the evolutionary psychology du jour that come up anytime a debate surfaces around gender equality on HN. The porn ridden CouchDB presentation didn't really rate for me (though I didn't attend) - it was the reaction afterwards that was more stressful. A single person can just be socially inept, but when it's clear how pervasive homebrew theories for why men are bred to prefer risk and have more variation in intelligence and aim for high status and pursue young women and are bred to be polygamous and on and on, it becomes much harder to forget, from day to day, that sexism is around me.
Occasionally I find voices being raised around some engineering issue. I feel like I need to yell to be heard - and being visibly upset doesn't do much to quell the intensity. In certain dark moments this has had me considering leaving engineering, though I doubt women have a monopoly on the sentiment.
To be honest I think a lot of the things that would have kept me from my career choice are behind me. I've heard people express surprise that I take on a technical role in my company, or that I founded it. Even around the liberal Berkeley I sometimes hear surprise, from strangers, that I of all people would have studied physics. There was a time when that would have impeded me more, but I avoided a lot of it dropping out of junior high - which seems to be the time when a lot of girls drop out of many stereotypically nerdy interests.
Sometimes the worst sexism experienced by women comes from women. The worst of it that I've experienced probably shouldn't go here, but some of it I've dealt with through HN. This is probably more annoying than anything else, but I had the privilege of reading Bonnie Ruberg write in "5 Reasons Why I Want Digg For Girls" say that a project I was working on (I started a company in the area, it's doing well) was interesting to her because "only because they're the kind of things I know my male, Internet-loving friends could sit around and blab about for hours."
One gauge for the degree of cultural influence on technical career choices is the nationality skew. Andreescu et. al. (http://www.ams.org/notices/200810/fea-gallian.pdf) note that the Bulgarian, Russian, and USA IMO teams perform at roughly the same level, and their female team mates perform at a similar level as well. But the Bulgarian team has had 21 girls in its history, the Russian team 15, and the USA team only 3. This, they argue, demonstrates that the disparity cannot be due to country specific difficulties for girls in qualifying for the IMO - instead "some countries routinely identify and nurture both boys and girls to become world class mathematical problem solvers; others, including the USA, only rarely identify girls of this caliber."
There's also the issue of stereotype threat. As Diane Quinn writes (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0341/is_1_57/ai_75140...) "Stereotype threat occurs when a person is in a situation in which a negative stereotype about that person (or that person's group) could be applied to the person and used to judge the person's behavior." Shih et. al. performed a study in which Asian American women wrote a math test. Before the test was taken, participants were asked to identify their race or sex. Those who were asked their race rather than their sex performed significantly better.
re 'homebrew theories' on risk:
"That’s an important first clue to how culture uses men. Culture has plenty of tradeoffs, in which it needs people to do dangerous or risky things, and so it offers big rewards to motivate people to take those risks. Most cultures have tended to use men for these high-risk, high-payoff slots much more than women. I shall propose there are important pragmatic reasons for this. The result is that some men reap big rewards while others have their lives ruined or even cut short. Most cultures shield their women from the risk and therefore also don’t give them the big rewards. I’m not saying this is what cultures ought to do, morally, but cultures aren’t moral beings. They do what they do for pragmatic reasons driven by competition against other systems and other groups."
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
It's not the same thing. Not even close. For most of the modern era, the best jobs have been closed off to women. Men have wielded the power, at least in the workplace. While we'd all like to believe that the effects of that power disparity are now gone, it would be naive to think so, especially once we remember that the top executives at most large employers began their careers in a time when they could not imagine competing with women in the workplace.
You don't need to spend much time in a typical office to realize that women face challenges men do not when it comes to being taken seriously in technical fields. Don't believe me? Find your closest after-work bar and eavesdrop on the conversations around you. If you have a wife or daughter (assuming you're a man), would you want them to be the subjects of some of the conversations you're likely to hear?
Yes, there are fields in which men face special challenges (or at least the assumption that they're gay if they choose to go into those fields). However, the highest paying careers are in fields dominated by men.
I believe that computer programming is a skill that will dominate the professions more as the business world catches up with its potential. Nearly all business functions can be improved with the addition of automation and data analysis that programmers can provide. If some ability to program is not a future requirement for success in the business world, the ability to talk well with programmers and have a grasp of what it is they do will be. I also believe that programming is one of the best paths of upward mobility for people of a low socioeconomic background. If either of these beliefs are correct, the fact that women face greater challenges than men in entering this field is an injustice and should be corrected.
What's the pay like for day-care as opposed to programming?
You can probably make more taking care of pets than children.
Which is sad.
Another way to say this is "People would rather take care of children than pets." I don't think that's sad at all.
So you're saying a glut of childcare workers is responsible for lowering the cost of childcare wrt petcare. I think that's unlikely. It's more that sectors of society value pets above children, they pay more for the care of pets - the same way that people leave millions for the care of pets and ignore the plight of poverty stricken humans.
People pay a lot to take care of the people they're related to, and the pets they own. When people could own people, they spent a lot of money maintaining those people. I guess we might be more evil than slave owners, but I think we're basically operating with the same instincts in a different legal environment.