15 Feb
2019
15 Feb
'19
4:37 a.m.
Actually, I suspect it's just the opposite. For example, veterinarians
used to be entirely male. Why, cause they made Big Bucks. Then, as
salaries went down, more women got into the field. Why, because they
cared about the animals. Now vets make something like $25K when they
get out of their 7-8 years of school, and they are almost all female.
I never did anything cause of the money (but then, I married very young
and had a quite capable husband who ended up a professor at Stanford).
At any rate, I chose my major, my grad studies, and my 2 careers cause I
loved the fields. Took a 45% cut in salary when I went from high tech
to Stanford/NASA. Didn't even think about that....
On 2/14/19 2:22 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
On 2019-02-14 3:37 PM, Jon Steinhart wrote:
Deborah Scherrer writes:
I was REALLY hoping gender essentialism wouldn't be enlisted in this
thread. Oh well.
> is that women think more about whether a profession will provide them with
> the security and stability necessary to support a family. ...
>
> Jon
> There have been several studies. As I remember,
girls in school do
indeed receive as much encouragement in computers as do males. And
girls do indeed have access to as many resources as males. So the
studies came to no conclusions.
My personal thought is that, in high school, it's the "nerd" factor. If
I were back in high school and saw the kind of guys that are getting
into computers now, I would stay a thousand miles away from them and
that field. But, alas, I don't think anyone has tried to research that
idea...
And/or: I have a friend who was a professor of CS in Amsterdam. She had
many grad students of both sexes. She says she had to practically force
the women to stay in the field. They would see the guys getting overly
focused on the computer details themselves, completely overlooking the
goals of the project. The women would get frustrated and complain to
the professor. She would have to convince them that the guys just did
that, and that the women should stay on track.
I do admit, I have a husband who does that. Personally, I have ALWAYS
looked at computers as a tool to accomplish something grander than just
being a computer. But I am usually out-shouted. ;-)
I think that many of us old
folk on this list started out in a time when
getting a computer to be a computer was an accomplishment. But I agree
that enough of that has been done that using computers as tools subservient
to larger goals is where the bulk of the work exists today.
There's a theory that sounds superficially plausible to me, which is that
women leave the field because they're more responsible than men. The theory