Another brilliant insight from the alternate reality known as the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit: the definitive answer to the question of why there are relatively few women in STEM fields.
Our MGTOW brain genius figures that it’s because they can’t use their sexy feminine wiles to manipulate computers the way they can manipulate men.
ZarBandit explains:
Once you understand that most women have one tool in their toolbox: manipulation, you might have an idea why they don’t do stem. You can’t manipulate computers into doing what you want. A mathematical proof can’t be manipulated into being correct.
As far as I can tell, the only thing that will get a computer doing what I want is for me to shut it off and turn it on again.
However, softer science subjects that involve teamwork are infested with women because they can manipulate group dynamics. Coding is a solitary pursuit. Mathematics is one of the most solitary of the sciences. I know of a Mathematics dept where a homeless man lived there for a year and no one noticed.
I’m not sure that’s making the point you want it to, dude.
She’ll never be the best scientist or thinker. But she can be the best manipulator, especially in a group of men. Queen bee. There are plenty of drones who will work for her.
Besides, “thinking too much gives you wrinkles”.
I’m pretty sure the real reason a lot of women stay away from STEM is that they don’t want to be surrounded by idiots like this.
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@Battering Lamb : that depend what you think “truth” is.
Mathematics and logic is very reliable for what it do, which is mostly deduce consequences from premises. The thing being that the colloquial sense of truth, and the one used by Kant, isn’t particulary well defined ; and often philosophers are more concerned about finding premises than conclusions. (in my opinion at least)
Also, mathematics and logics have quite litteraly proven that any complex enough system have propositions that cannot be evaluated to either “right” or “wrong”. Regardless of how many premises your world rely on, there will be ambiguities and unknowable stuff.
@Alan Robertshaw
Speaking as an (amateur) musician rather than a dancer I suspect it’s because musicians count in musical bars (which most commonly have 4 beats to a bar), will be counted in before the music starts, and keep right on counting 1,2,3,4 over and over again throughout. If someone is bringing in the dancers, this will be on the middle of the piece, so they will have been following the music bar by bar counting “1,2,3,4” over and over in their head until they get to the correct point, whereupon they will continue out loud “5,6,7 8” when counting the dancers in.
(This is my best guess as to how it started, anyway, the most likely reason now is probably just “habit”.)
Based on the sheer amount of time our software team spends debating implementation during standups, no, often there isn’t one right way to solve a given problem. Our team has a product owner (female), program manager (female), 5 developers (four male and one female), and 2 QAs (female). Because we’re an agile team, we all work in collaboration with each other. Developers don’t get to retreat into their lair and create the whole thing in a vacuum. We’ve had a few “lone wolf” coders in our organization, but they tend to get shown the door.
A bigger reason for the lack of women in STEM is men manipulating them into doing what they want, i.e. quitting.
Does…does he know that Malibu Stacy is satire? I don’t think he does.
@ohlmann: indeed. In my day, pseudo intellectuals pretended to understand Gödel rather than pretending he doesn’t exist.
I am quite far from working in STEM. All I know is that whenever I tried to “manipulate” a cis-guy into fixing my laptop half of the times they just showed off and weren’t capable at all.
About the manipulating: it’s a virtue as long as men do it. Pick up artists? Trading? Not to speak of the really brilliant work of spies. Walsingham (chief spy under Elizabeth 1) is still adored and he was way ahead of her when it came to manipulation. Manipulating someone actually needs a lot of thinking and includes a high IQ and EQ.
Musicians chunk pieces in 4s because most Western music uses 4/4 time, while dancers chunk them in 8s because they have two feet and the measures are paired. The count-in tells them which foot to start with. For example, a salsa forward basic (leads with left leg) starts on 1, and a backward basic (leads with right leg) starts on 5.
Being of a certain age, whenever I hear “5,6,7,8…” I have an urge to shout “Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!…”
@rusalka
My guess is that social sciences are saying things they don’t like, so they have to contrive a justification that they’re not real science. Math, physics and (software) engineering are safe, they won’t ever tell them any offensive truths about the world.
Biology is right out though, since its findings don’t care about their transphobic, religious, etc. feelings.
@Terra
This is interesting to me because although I know very little about coding, both my brother in laws work in the field. One is extremely pragmatic, started making money at university just doing simple websites for small businesses, now earns megabucks (at least, in my estimation!) in a way involving the management of building apps for big business that I do not fully understand.
The other is much more of a “lone wolf” kinda guy and although is employed at the moment, his fortunes has been much more mixed. He is a self-described polymath (lol) and sort of views himself as a genius, but when the other brother in law talked about his work, he said that he does the coding equivalent of trying to make his own bricks before building a house, which is entirely unnecessary and also shows bad judgement. I like the guy despite his foibles but is this the kind of thing you mean by code guru types?
1992: Mattel releases “Teen Talk Barbie,” whose voice chip includes the phrase “Math class is tough.” The doll sparks controversy, with many pointing out that this line, while intended to be relatable, might inadvertently promote the idea that young girls should find math to be difficult. The phrase is ultimately removed from the doll’s repertoire.
1994: The Simpsons episode “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy” riffs on the above situation: Lisa acquires a new “Talking Malibu Stacy” doll and is horrified to hear that all of her pre-programmed phrases promote the idea of girls being vain, vapid, and submissive. One of these phrases is: “Thinking too much gives you wrinkles.” Lisa is framed sympathetically throughout the episode, showing that the writers agree with the Teen Talk Barbie protestors: toys positioned as role/behavioral models for girls should not disparage intellectual pursuits.
2021: ZarBandit, a MGTOW, quotes the line “Thinking too much gives you wrinkles” as part of a screed about how women are unsuited to intellectual pursuits, apparently in the belief that women actually do eschew intellectual pursuits in order to preserve our looks so we can use them to manipulate men. He is aware of the line from the Simpsons episode but has somehow come away with exactly the opposite position to the one espoused by the show’s writers. Not that we should be surprised, but come on.
@LollyPop – well, the thing is that the material is complicated. Without bragging, I am pretty good at my job, and I regularly have questions that I just cannot answer easily. What may have been a relatively simple and comprehensive field 30 years ago has splintered into a bevy of disciplines that half the time are nigh incomprehensible to one another. And given my education included journeys into other STEM fields (higher mathematics and physics), it is not any different in all these fields. Lone heroes exist only because they purposefully hide their sources.
You have to be a good and efficient communicator to get anywhere these days. Maybe it was different in the mythical beforetimes, but in my 15 years of experience, communication always beat out “smarts”. Someone else on your team can much more easily patch over gaps in your skillset than even the most broad-based person can handle themselves.
Building software is a lot like building a structure. You may be the world’s greatest plasterer, but if your foundations are shit, the house won’t make anyone happy. Similarly for all other parts. Heroes do not exist in my experience. Only assholes who have a problem either admitting to the help they had or worse, rejecting it and passing off bad software as the best thing since sliced bread. I hope your BIL is neither, or if he is, that he might eventually learn.
But there is this toxic macho cult of the “comprehensive designer”, and that has a lot to answer for. Including the notion that communication is for weaklings, and an ideal mathematician should look like a homeless person.
Of course, this assumes a stereotype of people living in precarious housing or being completely without shelter. Sorry for perpetuating that.
In unrelated but hilarious Jordan Peterson news
https://twitter.com/renfamous/status/1379388310007742464?s=20
Weren’t the original ‘computers’ mostly women doing the numbers longhand? And early coders were women, until men decided to push their way in and women out, because computers were suddenly cool and high paying?
I was originally a scientist, in that my BSc is in Natural Sciences – Chemistry and Earth Sciences – but I’ve never worked in academic STEM. I did a stint as a lab tech in a chemical factory for a year, and on and off for six years in a food factory QA kitchen. Most of the actual on the ground workers were women, with men for management. Men who thought they knew our jobs better than we did, including the CEO who proudly proclaimed that he’d got a C in GCSE science and never studied it after, but he still knew my job better than I did…At the time, I still thought I was a woman, and certainly the managers did too. I had a lot of friends during my student days who were women in STEM, and they had similar experiences in terms of getting funny looks from male students and lecturers, especially the ones in engineering and maths. The reason so many women whop graduate with STEM degrees don’t go on to STEM careers or leave early are having to deal with the constant misogyny of tits like the OP or because industrial jobs do not work around kids. At an interview for an oil refinery lab tech job I was once asked ‘what my family thought about me working shifts?’. They weren’t expecting my ‘What family? I live with my mum.’ response. They assumed as a twenty five year old ‘woman’ I would have a partner and kids.
Also, the toolkit in my cupboard has a hammer, several screwdrivers, clamps, assorted bits and bobs and gaffa tape. And a tape measure. But I’m not a woman, so maybe the pretty pink tool boxes made for women (eye roll) also contain a tub of ‘manipulation’?
@ Iain & Buttercup
Thanks for that. That sort of makes sense.
It is weird though. Like I try to imagine the Ramones, or even Outkast, starting 5678, and it just seems so odd and unintuitive!
@BeyondOcean : physics, engineering and math are choke full of truth the incels don’t want to hear. Social science comparatively don’t have many more. It’s much more based on how Real Man do maths and not “social” skill methink, because their loved STEM still bluntly say that the incel deny reality.
Note about hard and soft sciences : all fields (except maybe mathematics) have real problem in fake results (people inventing studies or results to help their conclusions) and with reproducibility. Social sciences have thoses problems with significantly more acuity than other fields. The aura of untrustworthiness of theses fields have some basis because of that, and that’s probably why they serve as scarecrow to theses “rational” types.
Buttercup Q.Skullpants: “A bigger reason for the lack of women in STEM is men manipulating them into doing what they want, i.e. quitting.”
That reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend a while ago where he argued that the problem is the raging toxic masculinity in STEM that doesn’t just target women but men as well – especially if they don’t wanna play the games. I’m not sure he really understood that for women (and minorities probably as well), there’s most of the time not even the opportunity to play said games in the first place.
@ Beyond Ocean: Yeah, that’s something I wondered myself before. But that just shows that these people have a completely skewed view of the whole field… and a kinda naive outlook on the world in general. And I guess that goes hand in hand with a certain intellectual privilege-ism.
It’s a little like some people (and I don’t think they actually all have some STEM degree) wanna beat up social sciences on the playing field but are basically playing against their own fantasies. Meanwhile social sciences sits in the stands, eating popcorn. And while I do think biology may have a nice spot to the side as well – those people just love to use some fake biology blow-up-doll to whack away at their SJW-mirage.
@North Sea Sparkly Dragon
Eh, you can call it what you like I’ll stick to calling it WD-40.
This has always worked for me!
Concept applies to many female brains, no side can use exceptions as the basis for their theory.
@Karalora
To be fair, math is tough. there is a reason my major is for archeology and my minor is history. My husband is so good at math and to me It’s like he’s doing witchcraft.
I obtained a degree in a STEM field, and am currently employed in a very different STEM field. Although the main reason I am employable is that I can write coherent emails to customers.
I _DID_ go into STEM. Dudes like this are why I took my buyout and never looked back.
Also regarding counting music:
I’m also a dancer and musician, and I concur with Buttercup. Dance patterns are 8 beats, i.e. 2 measures, and longer (sometimes MUCH longer in belly dance, which is what I know). Stepping out on the floor after counting 1-2-3-4 sounds like you’re beginning in the middle of a figure.
Also I have seen the distinction used to cue live drummers and live dancers separately. But this is uncommon.
Shout out to anyone who has had to maintain code written by one of those “lone wolf” developers. Sometimes it’s easier to throw it away and start again.
@Karalora– thanks for reminding me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbie_Liberation_Organization