Item — HN Reader

Singapore is 48.25% women in STEM vs 28% globally. https://www.ntu.edu.sg/docs/default-source/default-document-...

However that number drops after graduation until it reaches a low 13.1 percent in management. The fact of the matter is that it isn't the lack of jobs or role models etc that's causing the issue, its the fact that females are worse at handling acute stress which is associated with STEM related jobs. Women require alot more emotional support that would simply be unavailable during a "facts only" argument or discussion. This is also partly why there are so little women in very early stage startups.

That being said, women are well suited for companies that have already gone past the initial growth stage, so instead of fighting against how different gender works, it may be better for everyone to focus on what they do best.

7 comments

While I agree that there are certainly different interests and other various non-nefarious reasons for why we won’t get a 50/50 gender division in all possible fields, I’d suggest you rethink the idea that women can’t handle stress.

For one thing, nursing is usually almost exclusively women and I don’t think that can be called a stress free environment.

Is significantly more related to physical and emotional stress than the stress of white boarding the next release with your coworker that has tone problems, but is otherwise effective.

> the fact that females are worse at handling acute stress

Do you have a source for this alleged fact?

There are countless studies you can find with a quick google search for

stress women men study

btw. for the other readers: the 48% f/m in STEM is split as follows according to the linked study above: 74% (f/m) in health sciences; 27% in engineering; 32% in information technology; 60% in natural, physical and mathematical sciences.

I think the most relevant sentence comes on page 8: "In short, data tell us that the gender gap is not consistent across STEM disciplines. Women generally prefer STEM studies and careers which are people-oriented (e.g., medical science) over careers which are things-oriented (e.g., many branches of engineering) (Su & Rounds, 2015)."

Stress is probably not the most important factor; at least it's not in this study. I'd argue that women simply know that people are more important than money.

as mentioned, women gravitate towards careers that provides for or provide women with emotional support to help with stress. That cannot be said of engineering-related or "things-oriented" jobs, stress is not factored into the development cycle.

> the fact that females are worse at handling acute stress

Or, maybe, they just know better that enduring acute stress is a bad career choice.

People who are female, smart, unhindered by their society and sufficiency wealthy to have agency can choose what they want to do. Why choose software development when medicine, finance and science are open? Yeah, some are introverted and are into programming but even for those, there’s way easier money owning the developers than being one. Far too many “fail” the last two criteria.

> females are worse at handling acute stress which is associated with STEM related jobs

I don't believe that jobs like programming involve more "acute stress" than medicine or law, which many women have moved into. Not to mention nursing, as Swenrekcah pointed out. Or teaching for that matter.

I would have expected it to be because roughly 80% start making babies after graduation.

Not Singaporeans no. I'm pretty sure their birth rate is below replacement.

well if that's the case then that's certainly a more important issue than the one being discussed here...

funnily enough, it might be due to the fact that more women participate in STEM for Singapore than other countries in the region that causes an overall lowered birth rate due to psychological stress.

> females are worse at handling acute stress

Every time this kind of issue comes up on HN there's someone who comes along to mansplain why women are inherently less able to do tech jobs. It's not a good look for our profession and we really should be above this by now.

What good about being "above this" by avoiding the issue at all. Understanding this fact and owning it means to increase women in tech, we need to factor in stress in the development cycle, we need to make sure that there are more or better avenues to enable social sharing of stress, and that may or may not even be incentivised at the corporate or tax level. This all comes with first accepting that women need help handling stress, so we can actually work on the problem and not hand waving it away by pretending that it isn't a problem.

HN has millions of users, so of course there's a wide spectrum of views. Any view that is sufficiently represented in society as a whole will appear here, regardless of how bad the argument is or feels. Moreover, HN users are all over the world, and geography (as a proxy for background and culture) has a huge influence on how people view these things. Surprisingly many of these disputes on HN come from people in one part of the world arguing with people in another part of the world without necessarily realizing it.

So while you're right that someone regularly "comes along to say $X", that's a function of population size and distribution. You can't generalize from that to the community as a whole, any more than to the human race as a whole. In the latter sense, sure, maybe "we" should really be above $badness by now, but saying that doesn't contribute to the hard work of persuasion, and neither does condemnation or name-calling or fulmination—however justified those reactions feel, they just contribute to cementing things as they are.

Edit: just for clarity:

I understand and sympathize with the frustration when you (I don't mean you personally) feel like a site is 'your' community on the internet and then you run into posts that aren't just wrong but are squarely outside the bounds of what decent people believe or say. It creates a feeling of a hostile environment that is even worse than if you had gone in expecting hostility. I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.

The problem though is that those bounds are drawn very differently in different subgroups of society (and the world at large) and the population here is large and distributed enough to include all those subgroups. That means it's constantly and unavoidably pregnant with conflict. For most of us, any social conflicts we're implicitly part of are insulated and regulated by the subgroup(s) we belong to. In our world, for practical emotional purposes, approximately 'everyone' agrees. There may be an occasional holiday family dinner where the larger divisions break out, but (at least for a lot of us) that's about it. The population as a whole, however, can't regulate itself that way. A population as large as HN is in the 'hostile family dinner' situation all the time, only orders of magnitude more complex and worse, and spread all over the world.

I don't think the solution can be to exclude subgroups. It has to be to communicate across differences. One could call it 'supported communication across differences', where by 'supported' I mean having a scaffolding of principles that everyone is expected to follow (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, in HN's case.)

In practice, yes, that does mean going backward and having arguments that "we" should be beyond by now. But that's because there are many different versions of "we" here. If you take all the basis vectors of HN and consider the full opinion space they expand into, I'm not sure it's that much less complex or diverse than the entire world.

> ny view that is sufficiently represented in society as a whole will appear here, regardless of how bad the argument is or feels. Moreover, HN users are all over the world, and geography (as a proxy for background and culture) has a huge influence on how people view these things. Surprisingly many of these disputes on HN come from people in one part of the world arguing with people in another part of the world without necessarily realizing it.

100% fair. That doesn't annoy me, that's the internet in general. What annoys me is the general air of arrogance from the HN community about how things are so great here and it doesn't have the problems of (whatever site you don't like), especially when I routinely have more intelligent discussions in Discord servers nowadays.

From my perspective, there's more than one "general air". There's the air that you describe, and there's also an air of "I can't believe how bad/awful this place is" (presumably emanating from different users). Which feels the most "general" is really a function of the perceiver's preference: whichever you dislike more will feel the strongest. (You're referencing the same 'dislike' principle, actually, when you say "whatever site you don't like". I completely agree that that's how it works.)

These "airs" may not be as opposed as they appear. I think it has to do with how people identify. If you identify with HN (or whatever $object), you'll be more likely to say things about it that come across as triumphalist or arrogant. Someone who identifies against HN (or $object) will be more likely to say things about it that come across as supercilious or putdowns. Since that's just a mechanical consequence of identification, it's not that interesting—which explains why such comments (on both sides) tend to be generic and lack information—they're really not about $object, they're really about oneself. The interesting question is what drives the identification in the first place. That's not so easy to figure out from internet comments!

Re more intelligent discussions in Discord servers—I don't disbelieve you. The sad thing is that group size is one of the biggest variables affecting online discussion quality. Maybe the biggest. I say sad because it's sad to me—it means there's a cap on how good HN can ever get, and mostly all we can do is try to stave off decline. Or—to be superoptimistic—maybe it can slowly get a little better, if we spend a lot of energy.

While I agree with the thrust of your post, I also think it's misleading to view HN as a proxy for all of society. HN is not a random sample of the world's population, and that skews discussion in all sorts of ways.

For example, HN quite clearly has more male commenters than female commenters. If we had an equal number of men and women, I suspect comments like the ones GP is referencing would be less frequent.

I wish GP hadn't made their point the way they made it (if at all), but I do believe they're reacting to something real.

> I don't think the solution can be to exclude subgroups.

I agree, but I do think a solution is to include more subgroups. I have no advice on how to do that. But, this is in fact why I'd like to see more women in technology.

> it's misleading to view HN as a proxy for all of society

I know I'm getting finicky here, but I am careful not to say that. What I say is that any view which is sufficiently represented in society as a whole is going to appear here as well. That doesn't mean it will appear in the same proportions.

> If we had an equal number of men and women, I suspect comments like the ones GP is referencing would be less frequent.

The point is that their frequency isn't the issue. The issue is their existence, and they will continue to exist here no matter how many more women or members of other underrepresented groups join HN (which I certainly hope they will!)

This is a thorny discussion, but it appears that IQ is unevenly distributed and the differences in variance are even stronger. And the end result seems to be that if you select for IQ > 150 people, then you expect to see 80% men 20% women purely due to biological causes. Whether or not we (the society) should accept that outcome is a completely different thing. But if you average over enough people, there are very real development differences between genders and some of them are related to brain energy supply and/or brain volume. And I believe the GP was right, stress response is also heavily biologically modulated. It kind of makes sense that the average 1.6m women would respond differently to a hungry tiger than a 1.9m bodybuilder... right?