Re: Mythical
>>"Are you sure there is anything telling girls they "don't do STEM"?"
Yes. Speaking from personal experience. There is a *lot* of cultural weight and peer-pressure against going science and engineering route as a young girl. For many, it starts even before school and a girl who is into tech is seen as an oddity. Hopefully this is changing but we need to keep the pressure on to truly change this.
>>"And why does nobody care about fields where men are underrepresented? "
Anyone here saying we don't? It is a problem. The reason it gets less attention as an issue is because the fields where men are under-represented are generally lower-paid than the fields where women are under-represented so it seems more "unfair". But of all the people here arguing that women should be more represented in science and engineering I don't think you'll find a single one who doesn't feel the same way about men in teaching, et al. You're basically attributing a false position to people in order to try and claim some sort of inequality. If you feel you're not, then ask people here if they feel men shouldn't be better represented in other fields as well. The answer you'll get is "yes."
>>"What we need to accept is that boys and girls are different."
IIRC, you trot this one out anytime there is a story like this on El Reg,. despite obvious flaws in it being pointed out. Firstly, if culture wasn't a HUGE factor in career choice for men and women then you wouldn't see large differences in adoption of careers by gender proportion in different countries or historically. Unless you think that the people of India or of the eighteenth century are deeply different genetically (which obviously isn't the case), then culture is the only explanation for wild swings in the proportion of female engineers / scientists, male teachers, etc. So if culture is a huge factor in this, let's remove barriers to entry.
Secondly, your understanding of statistics is awful. Suppose there were a difference in general ability between the genders in particular areas. The difference would have to be enormous to make generalizations a worthwhile basis to discriminate on or to show up in these sorts of proportions. Suppose (and this is for the sake of argument) that women were 5% worse at maths by nature than men on average. And that is a pretty fucking big percentage in biology terms, actually. It would still be much, much less than the standard deviation of the population. That is to say that if you took 50 men and 50 women, nearly half of the women would be better at maths than half of the men. I.e. it could not account for this gender discrepancies you see. To account for the level of gender discrepancies we see, the average difference in raw ability between the sexes would have to be enormous. And that plainly isn't the case to anyone who mixes with the other sex on occasion.
Two fairly basic and obvious refutations of your "we need to accept this" position. Though I think you've posted this stuff before, iirc, so clearly you are reluctant to accept a change to your worldview even when supported by facts.