Comments on: Do men and women have different standards of success?

By: Talia

Talia — Tue, 04 May 2010 20:20:04 +0000

Yeah, this. As a woman with a physics degree, I know that in academia and industry, if I can’t prove with hard data (grades, scholarships, grants, etc.) that I’m 125% better than all the guys out there, I’m getting no slack, no networking, no promotions, no job offers, nothing to build a career on.

Not to mention that mediocrity is pretty hard on self-esteem, and enthusiasm for subject matter can’t always make up for it.

By: Ancalime

Ancalime — Mon, 03 May 2010 04:02:18 +0000

I can’t help but wonder if it’s because women seek out studies where they can excel simply because they MUST excel to be considered equal to men.

By: Good girls don’t linkspam (3rd May, 2010) | Geek Feminism Blog

Good girls don’t linkspam (3rd May, 2010) | Geek Feminism Blog — Sun, 02 May 2010 22:01:53 +0000

[...] Peters asks, Do men and women have different standards of success? (particularly in geeky fields) and spawns a discussion in [...]

By: Fri13

Fri13 — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 12:01:52 +0000

I can see the point.

What my mother long time ago told about difference of mens and womens working way, it is still valid. It is about cleaning the house.

For mens, cleaning the house is just a task what is needed to complete.
For womens, cleaning the house is job what is needed to get a clean results.

That in rough translation.

By: Danilo

Danilo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 13:40:03 +0000

Actually, as far as enrolled students in the computer science course at my university, there’s more women than men. With very crude name-gender-detection (might turn out a few false positives and a few false negatives), it comes out to 663 female students out of 1306, or 50.77%

Anyway, I was always under the impression that we had about an even number of boys and girls, and this just confirms my intuition. My intuition also agrees with your statement in the article: girls tend to have better grades, but they do not tend to enjoy “hacking” as much as boys. Now, to put that into perspective, out of perhaps 200-300 students that I am acquainted with, I know about 10 guys who are “really into it”, and no girls: this obviously skews the “general opinion” that all guys are there for the fun, and girls for the career. All those guys are usually not very good at completing their courses. I know 5 guys who are really after their grades, and something like 20 girls in the same position (my outside guess as to their motivation: I am not claiming it to be true).

These might be useful data points, but I am definitely positive that the percentage of women in computer science is not the reason behind this all. I think it’s just about how many real, deeply involved geeks you have out of each (the usual “vocal minority” theme). And at this time, it’s probably more socially acceptable for men to be such, or perhaps there are ultimately entirely different reasons for it.

By: Joseph

Joseph — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 13:33:49 +0000

Part of it is^H^Hmay be (must resist urge to take WAGs I’ve heard before as fact) that traditional women’s jobs are (relatively) low-paying compared to traditional men’s jobs and therefore men aren’t clamoring to join up.

Of course, that rests on numerous untested assumptions. Just like any good take on statistics.

By: Joseph

Joseph — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 13:30:40 +0000

Interesting. FWIW, comments get assigned to the wrong thing if you have JavaScript disabled. Urgh. JavaScript Must Die.

Anywho, my original comment, currently associated with http://stormyscorner.com/2007/08/stormys-blogs.html/comment-page-1 because of the aforementioned JavaScript error:
This. I suspect (here, “suspect” means “have a Wild Ass Guess” that it’s as simple as external vs internal validation. E.g. men are driven by society to be individuals and women are driven by society to be collective.

As is the case with WAGs, I could always be completely off the mark.

By: stormy

stormy — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:13:47 +0000

Yeah, most of our teachers – especially at the younger grades – are women. I’d like to have more men teachers as role models too.

By: Martin Sevior

Martin Sevior — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:44:04 +0000

Hi Stormy,

My day job is in a discipline whre women are also under represented on average, (Physics,) although it is somewhat better than Free Software at least. We have around 25 -30% women now.

My observation is that women tend to do about the same on average as men. ie The fraction of first rate as compared to passing for women is about the same as men at all levels in Physics. (undergrad, MSc, Ph.D.)

What I find interesting is that disciplines that are dominated by women (like biology) don’t seem to have the same urge to attact men as we do to attract women.

Biological sciences are about 80% women these days. At least in Australia.

By: Chani

Chani — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 05:21:47 +0000

and that’s the thing… there are no below-average women in CS, because if a woman isn’t above average she’ll go do something else.

so… basically, women are perfectionists? … do women in other areas behave like that? there’s lots of women in .. say.. education. do those women tend to quit if they get bad grades? or not?