@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year. Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
A doctor gets paid more for that as they get shift work allowances to etc and their career top end is a lot higher than the graduate software engineer
Also don’t forget their employers pension contribution is a sizeable sum and they get annual incremements on top of their pay award until they hit the top pay band. Their holiday entitlement is also very good. There is more to a job than just the base salary.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year. Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
A doctor gets paid more for that as they get shift work allowances to etc and their career top end is a lot higher than the graduate software engineer
Also dont forget the better pensions most software engineers might get 5% from there firm as mandated by law....doctors and nurses will be getting 20% +
So include pension contributions there you get
software engineer 39,007 to 42,166 doctor 39562 to 44764
for example and software engineers dont generally get paid for extra hours in my experience
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year. Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
A doctor gets paid more for that as they get shift work allowances to etc and their career top end is a lot higher than the graduate software engineer
Also dont forget the better pensions most software engineers might get 5% from there firm as mandated by law....doctors and nurses will be getting 20% +
So include pension contributions there you get
software engineer 39,007 to 42,166 doctor 39562 to 44764
for example and software engineers dont generally get paid for extra hours in my experience
I don't know any software engineers that have worked less hours because they reached the pension cap for sure
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
Here's the thing: even a small innate differences can result in big differences in choices. Let's say (making up numbers here) than men are 20% more likely to be into hard sciences than women.
What happens then is that - because women prefer to hang out with other women, and men prefer to hang out with other men - the Physics class ends up with a male teacher, 18 boys and 2 girls. Which in turn perpetuates the disparity.
And it's why - when you go to single sex schools - there's a much smaller gap in terms of girls' choices than in mixed schools. Simply, the societal impact might well be a lot larger than any innate one.
I think your single sex schools theory is correlation, not causation. Selective schools are much more likely to draw disproportionately from girls who go on to perform well in STEM subject assuming their entrance exams were anything like what I sat all those years ago. It's a failing of the test that it doesn't play to the strength of girls rather than it proving that single sex schools will help get girls into STEM subjects from my perspective.
I'd like to see how the data looks if you limit it to non-selective single sex state schools only but there's probably not enough of those. Even then it would need to be controlled for girls who go to selective schools in the area because entrance exams are, IMO, geared towards boys or at least aptitude tests that play to boys' strengths rather than girls' strengths.
Well, it's easy enough to tell if it's correlation or causation: we simply need to look at selective schools which are mixed (like grammar schools).
If they have significantly higher proportions of female pupils that take hard sciences, then that plays more to the nature side. On the other hand, if they look more regular non-selective schools, then that plays towards environmental factors playing a role.
There are also a significant number of non-selective girls schools in the UK. One can look at them too.
And the numbers are in (for Physics A Level, data is from 2013, but I'd be staggered if it had changed much):
Mixed State School: 2.7% of girls Mixed Grammar School: 6.2% Girls Private School: 11.9% Single Sex Grammar School: 13.2%
It suggests that societal pressures are a significant contributor to low uptake of the sciences. (I do need to check boys numbers throughout. What would be really interesting would be if boys uptake of Physics was lower in single sex schools than in mixed ones.)
I stand corrected, there's definitely a statistically significant uplift from mixed grammar schools to single sex grammar schools which I'd say are the most comparable. I wonder whether there's a reverse effect for boys taking languages in mixed schools vs in single sex schools...
27% probably think democratic governments are incompetent. They have yet to experience the true incompetence and corruption of the average dictatorship.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year. Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
A doctor gets paid more for that as they get shift work allowances to etc and their career top end is a lot higher than the graduate software engineer
Also dont forget the better pensions most software engineers might get 5% from there firm as mandated by law....doctors and nurses will be getting 20% +
So include pension contributions there you get
software engineer 39,007 to 42,166 doctor 39562 to 44764
for example and software engineers dont generally get paid for extra hours in my experience
I don't know any software engineers that have worked less hours because they reached the pension cap for sure
I think you'd need to get to Senior II/III before it became an issue, maybe Tech Lead/Principal for smaller companies.
If we put to one side what drives men and women to be interested in different things, I do think there is an innate difference in the likelihood of someone being deeply interested in something. This website is a case in point.
Also, take football. The number of women in football media has grown considerably over the last few decades. However, I've read World Soccer magazine for 20 years or so and in that time I don't recall reading an article written by a woman (there probably has been and I've forgotten, but I don't recall a regular contributor).
Now, World Soccer is quite a high brow publication. I'd also say it leans left politically (it's hardly political (aside from FIFA antics!), but the then editor Gavin Hamilton decried Brexit in his introductory words after the vote). Certainly many of its writers/former writers are left-leaning going by their Twitter accounts.
Most of the articles are on quite niche subjects, such as the oldest club in Spain, the Asian Champions League, or football on a Pacific island. The magazine also has a column dedicated to the women's game. That's written by Glenn Moore (e.g. https://x.com/GlennMoore7/status/1884160057493053859).
Perhaps I'm prejudiced, but my instinct is that on the whole, women are a lot less likely to want to pursue a career in football journalism that isn't about what they were interested in as a kid (I don't for a minute believe Steve Menary grew up wanting to write about football on the Marshall Islands (https://x.com/SoccerFedMI/status/1893310551985369184), but he's clearly passionate for it now). Men, I think, are more likely to be very happy to carve out a niche in a subject they love.
That's not to be critical of the women in the football media. I am, very obviously, insanely jealous of anyone who gets paid to watch Premier League or even EFL football. I have often wondered if I had enough love for football to do what some of the guys in World Soccer do. And the answer is, probably not.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
Here's the thing: even a small innate differences can result in big differences in choices. Let's say (making up numbers here) than men are 20% more likely to be into hard sciences than women.
What happens then is that - because women prefer to hang out with other women, and men prefer to hang out with other men - the Physics class ends up with a male teacher, 18 boys and 2 girls. Which in turn perpetuates the disparity.
And it's why - when you go to single sex schools - there's a much smaller gap in terms of girls' choices than in mixed schools. Simply, the societal impact might well be a lot larger than any innate one.
I think your single sex schools theory is correlation, not causation. Selective schools are much more likely to draw disproportionately from girls who go on to perform well in STEM subject assuming their entrance exams were anything like what I sat all those years ago. It's a failing of the test that it doesn't play to the strength of girls rather than it proving that single sex schools will help get girls into STEM subjects from my perspective.
I'd like to see how the data looks if you limit it to non-selective single sex state schools only but there's probably not enough of those. Even then it would need to be controlled for girls who go to selective schools in the area because entrance exams are, IMO, geared towards boys or at least aptitude tests that play to boys' strengths rather than girls' strengths.
Well, it's easy enough to tell if it's correlation or causation: we simply need to look at selective schools which are mixed (like grammar schools).
If they have significantly higher proportions of female pupils that take hard sciences, then that plays more to the nature side. On the other hand, if they look more regular non-selective schools, then that plays towards environmental factors playing a role.
There are also a significant number of non-selective girls schools in the UK. One can look at them too.
And the numbers are in (for Physics A Level, data is from 2013, but I'd be staggered if it had changed much):
Mixed State School: 2.7% of girls Mixed Grammar School: 6.2% Girls Private School: 11.9% Single Sex Grammar School: 13.2%
It suggests that societal pressures are a significant contributor to low uptake of the sciences. (I do need to check boys numbers throughout. What would be really interesting would be if boys uptake of Physics was lower in single sex schools than in mixed ones.)
I stand corrected, there's definitely a statistically significant uplift from mixed grammar schools to single sex grammar schools which I'd say are the most comparable. I wonder whether there's a reverse effect for boys taking languages in mixed schools vs in single sex schools...
Even however it should be noted without the uplift it doesn't imply physics appeals to a lot of girls, I can sympathise as I hated physics myself
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year. Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
A doctor gets paid more for that as they get shift work allowances to etc and their career top end is a lot higher than the graduate software engineer
Also dont forget the better pensions most software engineers might get 5% from there firm as mandated by law....doctors and nurses will be getting 20% +
So include pension contributions there you get
software engineer 39,007 to 42,166 doctor 39562 to 44764
for example and software engineers dont generally get paid for extra hours in my experience
I don't know any software engineers that have worked less hours because they reached the pension cap for sure
I think you'd need to get to Senior II/III before it became an issue, maybe Tech Lead/Principal for smaller companies.
I work with some in their late 40's, none of them are getting near a million
If we put to one side what drives men and women to be interested in different things, I do think there is an innate difference in the likelihood of someone being deeply interested in something. This website is a case in point.
Also, take football. The number of women in football media has grown considerably over the last few decades. However, I've read World Soccer magazine for 20 years or so and in that time I don't recall reading an article written by a woman (there probably has been and I've forgotten, but I don't recall a regular contributor).
Now, World Soccer is quite a high brow publication. I'd also say it leans left politically (it's hardly political (aside from FIFA antics!), but the then editor Gavin Hamilton decried Brexit in his introductory words after the vote). Certainly many of its writers/former writers are left-leaning going by their Twitter accounts.
Most of the articles are on quite niche subjects, such as the oldest club in Spain, the Asian Champions League, or football on a Pacific island. The magazine also has a column dedicated to the women's game. That's written by Glenn Moore (e.g. https://x.com/GlennMoore7/status/1884160057493053859).
Perhaps I'm prejudiced, but my instinct is that on the whole, women are a lot less likely to want to pursue a career in football journalism that isn't about what they were interested in as a kid (I don't for a minute believe Steve Menary grew up wanting to write about football on the Marshall Islands (https://x.com/SoccerFedMI/status/1893310551985369184), but he's clearly passionate for it now). Men, I think, are more likely to be very happy to carve out a niche in a subject they love.
That's not to be critical of the women in the football media. I am, very obviously, insanely jealous of anyone who gets paid to watch Premier League or even EFL football. I have often wondered if I had enough love for football to do what some of the guys in World Soccer do. And the answer is, probably not.
That's an interesting post, thanks.
As a matter of interest, what's football attendance like by gender? Or TV viewing?
Traditionally, it was very male, but I know that they've been keen to attract more women to watching matches live or on TV, for obvious reasons (as has F1...).
On Topic: Looks like Marine is done for! But it could be a case of "be careful what you wish for" when it comes to the French easbalishment as Bardella may end up being much more electable?
Off Topic: Good evening PB. What a lovely day its been! 😎
If we put to one side what drives men and women to be interested in different things, I do think there is an innate difference in the likelihood of someone being deeply interested in something. This website is a case in point.
Also, take football. The number of women in football media has grown considerably over the last few decades. However, I've read World Soccer magazine for 20 years or so and in that time I don't recall reading an article written by a woman (there probably has been and I've forgotten, but I don't recall a regular contributor).
Now, World Soccer is quite a high brow publication. I'd also say it leans left politically (it's hardly political (aside from FIFA antics!), but the then editor Gavin Hamilton decried Brexit in his introductory words after the vote). Certainly many of its writers/former writers are left-leaning going by their Twitter accounts.
Most of the articles are on quite niche subjects, such as the oldest club in Spain, the Asian Champions League, or football on a Pacific island. The magazine also has a column dedicated to the women's game. That's written by Glenn Moore (e.g. https://x.com/GlennMoore7/status/1884160057493053859).
Perhaps I'm prejudiced, but my instinct is that on the whole, women are a lot less likely to want to pursue a career in football journalism that isn't about what they were interested in as a kid (I don't for a minute believe Steve Menary grew up wanting to write about football on the Marshall Islands (https://x.com/SoccerFedMI/status/1893310551985369184), but he's clearly passionate for it now). Men, I think, are more likely to be very happy to carve out a niche in a subject they love.
That's not to be critical of the women in the football media. I am, very obviously, insanely jealous of anyone who gets paid to watch Premier League or even EFL football. I have often wondered if I had enough love for football to do what some of the guys in World Soccer do. And the answer is, probably not.
That's an interesting post, thanks.
As a matter of interest, what's football attendance like by gender? Or TV viewing?
Traditionally, it was very male, but I know that they've been keen to attract more women to watching matches live or on TV, for obvious reasons (as has F1...).
I went to a tech conference once that was a lot of developers but covered by the tech press, pretty much all the developers were male, all the tech journalists attending female.
The BBC leading with photos of rubbish piling up in Birmingham is, shall we say, suboptimal for the government (regardless of the how’s and whys that it is happening).
A bit of a generational trigger image, that - and not ideal for a Labour govt.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year. Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
Give it a few years 'On average, a GP partner takes home approximately £110,000.' Whereas 'The estimated total pay for a Senior Software Engineer is £73,305 per year'
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year. Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
A doctor gets paid more for that as they get shift work allowances to etc and their career top end is a lot higher than the graduate software engineer
Also dont forget the better pensions most software engineers might get 5% from there firm as mandated by law....doctors and nurses will be getting 20% +
So include pension contributions there you get
software engineer 39,007 to 42,166 doctor 39562 to 44764
for example and software engineers dont generally get paid for extra hours in my experience
I don't know any software engineers that have worked less hours because they reached the pension cap for sure
I think you'd need to get to Senior II/III before it became an issue, maybe Tech Lead/Principal for smaller companies.
Meanwhile, here in .ac.uk, we're trying to hire people on juuuust above minimum wage and expecting them (or to be more specific 'management' are expecting them) to just pick up 1/2 million-long lines of code in apps that have been 10-20 years in the making.
On science, I've just remembered that in Year 8, our classes were split into boys and girls, but then they didn't carry it on (perhaps because teachers who got the boys complained!).
But in Year 11, there was only one triple-award science class of 27, so that had to be mixed (and us boys were awful. Sorry girls...).
If we put to one side what drives men and women to be interested in different things, I do think there is an innate difference in the likelihood of someone being deeply interested in something. This website is a case in point.
Also, take football. The number of women in football media has grown considerably over the last few decades. However, I've read World Soccer magazine for 20 years or so and in that time I don't recall reading an article written by a woman (there probably has been and I've forgotten, but I don't recall a regular contributor).
Now, World Soccer is quite a high brow publication. I'd also say it leans left politically (it's hardly political (aside from FIFA antics!), but the then editor Gavin Hamilton decried Brexit in his introductory words after the vote). Certainly many of its writers/former writers are left-leaning going by their Twitter accounts.
Most of the articles are on quite niche subjects, such as the oldest club in Spain, the Asian Champions League, or football on a Pacific island. The magazine also has a column dedicated to the women's game. That's written by Glenn Moore (e.g. https://x.com/GlennMoore7/status/1884160057493053859).
Perhaps I'm prejudiced, but my instinct is that on the whole, women are a lot less likely to want to pursue a career in football journalism that isn't about what they were interested in as a kid (I don't for a minute believe Steve Menary grew up wanting to write about football on the Marshall Islands (https://x.com/SoccerFedMI/status/1893310551985369184), but he's clearly passionate for it now). Men, I think, are more likely to be very happy to carve out a niche in a subject they love.
That's not to be critical of the women in the football media. I am, very obviously, insanely jealous of anyone who gets paid to watch Premier League or even EFL football. I have often wondered if I had enough love for football to do what some of the guys in World Soccer do. And the answer is, probably not.
That's an interesting post, thanks.
As a matter of interest, what's football attendance like by gender? Or TV viewing?
Traditionally, it was very male, but I know that they've been keen to attract more women to watching matches live or on TV, for obvious reasons (as has F1...).
I went to a tech conference once that was a lot of developers but covered by the tech press, pretty much all the developers were male, all the tech journalists attending female.
I'll have to ask a (female) friend what the current ACCU C++ conference in Bristol is like wrt that. (She is a senior developer, and far better than me at C++)...
But journalism and engineering are different professions.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year. Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
Give it a few years 'On average, a GP partner takes home approximately £110,000.' Whereas 'The estimated total pay for a Senior Software Engineer is £73,305 per year'
27% probably think democratic governments are incompetent. They have yet to experience the true incompetence and corruption of the average dictatorship.
The remaining 16% are in the gulag so can't express an opinion either way?
27% probably think democratic governments are incompetent. They have yet to experience the true incompetence and corruption of the average dictatorship.
Young men will be very heavily overrepresented in the 27% I predict.
The BBC leading with photos of rubbish piling up in Birmingham is, shall we say, suboptimal for the government (regardless of the how’s and whys that it is happening).
A bit of a generational trigger image, that - and not ideal for a Labour govt.
27% probably think democratic governments are incompetent. They have yet to experience the true incompetence and corruption of the average dictatorship.
Maybe the 27% are classics students and are rightly fans of Quintus Fabius Maximus.
If we put to one side what drives men and women to be interested in different things, I do think there is an innate difference in the likelihood of someone being deeply interested in something. This website is a case in point.
Also, take football. The number of women in football media has grown considerably over the last few decades. However, I've read World Soccer magazine for 20 years or so and in that time I don't recall reading an article written by a woman (there probably has been and I've forgotten, but I don't recall a regular contributor).
Now, World Soccer is quite a high brow publication. I'd also say it leans left politically (it's hardly political (aside from FIFA antics!), but the then editor Gavin Hamilton decried Brexit in his introductory words after the vote). Certainly many of its writers/former writers are left-leaning going by their Twitter accounts.
Most of the articles are on quite niche subjects, such as the oldest club in Spain, the Asian Champions League, or football on a Pacific island. The magazine also has a column dedicated to the women's game. That's written by Glenn Moore (e.g. https://x.com/GlennMoore7/status/1884160057493053859).
Perhaps I'm prejudiced, but my instinct is that on the whole, women are a lot less likely to want to pursue a career in football journalism that isn't about what they were interested in as a kid (I don't for a minute believe Steve Menary grew up wanting to write about football on the Marshall Islands (https://x.com/SoccerFedMI/status/1893310551985369184), but he's clearly passionate for it now). Men, I think, are more likely to be very happy to carve out a niche in a subject they love.
That's not to be critical of the women in the football media. I am, very obviously, insanely jealous of anyone who gets paid to watch Premier League or even EFL football. I have often wondered if I had enough love for football to do what some of the guys in World Soccer do. And the answer is, probably not.
That's an interesting post, thanks.
As a matter of interest, what's football attendance like by gender? Or TV viewing?
Traditionally, it was very male, but I know that they've been keen to attract more women to watching matches live or on TV, for obvious reasons (as has F1...).
I went to a tech conference once that was a lot of developers but covered by the tech press, pretty much all the developers were male, all the tech journalists attending female.
I'll have to ask a (female) friend what the current ACCU C++ conference in Bristol is like wrt that. (She is a senior developer, and far better than me at C++)...
But journalism and engineering are different professions.
The last being my whole point....journalism is talking to people, coding is talking to the computer.
Girls seem to prefer the former and boys the latter
For a very serious topic, here is a brief account by women of the torture they were subjected to when taken prisoner by the Russians, as POWs.
It's a few minutes, and reminds me (if anyone has read such) of the account of Wing Commander Yeo-Thomas of his experiences of ritual humiliation when held by the Gestapo in WW2 - recounted in his book "The White Rabbit".
This is the type of account, of which they will be well aware if it is published, to which Mr Trump and Mr Vance have determined not to pay any attention or give any weight.
(It's also the 3rd anniversary of the release of images of the slaughter in Bucha. That is also being given no weight.)
On science, I've just remembered that in Year 8, our classes were split into boys and girls, but then they didn't carry it on (perhaps because teachers who got the boys complained!).
But in Year 11, there was only one triple-award science class of 27, so that had to be mixed (and us boys were awful. Sorry girls...).
One of the central mysteries of teenage boys.
All the awful stuff they do because they want to impress the girls which the girls don't find impressive...
Evolution will no doubt catch up eventually.
(I suspect that the caveman explanation is that, in very ancient times, the boys didn't have to impress the girls so much as scare off the other boys.)
On science, I've just remembered that in Year 8, our classes were split into boys and girls, but then they didn't carry it on (perhaps because teachers who got the boys complained!).
But in Year 11, there was only one triple-award science class of 27, so that had to be mixed (and us boys were awful. Sorry girls...).
We had a mixed sixth form because half of year didn't make the cut in both schools and it wasn't feasible to keep us separate for classes of 10 or 12 boys, shockingly everyone's grades went down quite substantially at AS level to the point where the school used to pre-emptively book resits for most of us in January because they knew we'd fuck up lower sixth and make it up the following year after getting the shock of Bs and Cs on our exam results day.
If we put to one side what drives men and women to be interested in different things, I do think there is an innate difference in the likelihood of someone being deeply interested in something. This website is a case in point.
Also, take football. The number of women in football media has grown considerably over the last few decades. However, I've read World Soccer magazine for 20 years or so and in that time I don't recall reading an article written by a woman (there probably has been and I've forgotten, but I don't recall a regular contributor).
Now, World Soccer is quite a high brow publication. I'd also say it leans left politically (it's hardly political (aside from FIFA antics!), but the then editor Gavin Hamilton decried Brexit in his introductory words after the vote). Certainly many of its writers/former writers are left-leaning going by their Twitter accounts.
Most of the articles are on quite niche subjects, such as the oldest club in Spain, the Asian Champions League, or football on a Pacific island. The magazine also has a column dedicated to the women's game. That's written by Glenn Moore (e.g. https://x.com/GlennMoore7/status/1884160057493053859).
Perhaps I'm prejudiced, but my instinct is that on the whole, women are a lot less likely to want to pursue a career in football journalism that isn't about what they were interested in as a kid (I don't for a minute believe Steve Menary grew up wanting to write about football on the Marshall Islands (https://x.com/SoccerFedMI/status/1893310551985369184), but he's clearly passionate for it now). Men, I think, are more likely to be very happy to carve out a niche in a subject they love.
That's not to be critical of the women in the football media. I am, very obviously, insanely jealous of anyone who gets paid to watch Premier League or even EFL football. I have often wondered if I had enough love for football to do what some of the guys in World Soccer do. And the answer is, probably not.
Your comment reminds me of reading this book a few years ago.
"The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women and the Real Gender Gap Susan Pinker"
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year. Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
A doctor gets paid more for that as they get shift work allowances to etc and their career top end is a lot higher than the graduate software engineer
Also dont forget the better pensions most software engineers might get 5% from there firm as mandated by law....doctors and nurses will be getting 20% +
So include pension contributions there you get
software engineer 39,007 to 42,166 doctor 39562 to 44764
for example and software engineers dont generally get paid for extra hours in my experience
I don't know any software engineers that have worked less hours because they reached the pension cap for sure
I think you'd need to get to Senior II/III before it became an issue, maybe Tech Lead/Principal for smaller companies.
Meanwhile, here in .ac.uk, we're trying to hire people on juuuust above minimum wage and expecting them (or to be more specific 'management' are expecting them) to just pick up 1/2 million-long lines of code in apps that have been 10-20 years in the making.
It's getting almost embarrassing.
That was pretty much how I got into the industry, when I was studying geo eng at uni. A friend knew I was good with computers, and got me a contracting role, which led me to another company that was trying to maintain their priceless data on a >20-year old Bull mainframe. They were basically a data company, but didn't want to spend any money on the systems that held the data. So they got contractors in to maintain an increasingly perilous hand-coded database. It had been created before SQL and RDBMS's were popular, and converted from some other language to C in the early 80s. It as code from the depths of Hades, the tenth circle of Hell...
I learnt a heck of a lot. Mainly how not to code. Oh, and the replacement system at a related company, introduced in 1994, was not Y2K compliant...
I would like to see more of this: taking young people for apprentice-style roles.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
Here's the thing: even a small innate differences can result in big differences in choices. Let's say (making up numbers here) than men are 20% more likely to be into hard sciences than women.
What happens then is that - because women prefer to hang out with other women, and men prefer to hang out with other men - the Physics class ends up with a male teacher, 18 boys and 2 girls. Which in turn perpetuates the disparity.
And it's why - when you go to single sex schools - there's a much smaller gap in terms of girls' choices than in mixed schools. Simply, the societal impact might well be a lot larger than any innate one.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
Please then could you point our where I specifically said that women were or are "inferior" to men. I'm seriously considering legal action at this point, there are a few people who read this website that know my real identity.
Show me where you've said you think women are equal to men, or, heaven forfend, better than men. As for your question: I'd say this entire thread is you excusing disparities between men and women.
As for legal action: that's lawfare, isn't it? And you *hate* that.
Firstly, you've made a specific accusation against me, the burden of proof rests upon you to back that up with specific evidence, you have failed on three occasions to do so only offering generic statements and nothing concrete or specific. Secondly, I literally said in the following post that I do not believe women or girls inferior to men in any way, even though I shouldn't have to defend myself from your unfounded bullshit. Thirdly, you are getting very close to libel and I know that the moderators take a dim view of such things on the site.
I take this thread as evidence.
Mods: if you disagree, please ban me.
So still nothing specific then? You can produce no evidence to backup your claims. I'll ask one last time. Produce any specific words or wording that I have written where I say women are inferior to men or retract your statement. I've given you three very fair chances to do so, last time of asking to do either one.
If we put to one side what drives men and women to be interested in different things, I do think there is an innate difference in the likelihood of someone being deeply interested in something. This website is a case in point.
Also, take football. The number of women in football media has grown considerably over the last few decades. However, I've read World Soccer magazine for 20 years or so and in that time I don't recall reading an article written by a woman (there probably has been and I've forgotten, but I don't recall a regular contributor).
Now, World Soccer is quite a high brow publication. I'd also say it leans left politically (it's hardly political (aside from FIFA antics!), but the then editor Gavin Hamilton decried Brexit in his introductory words after the vote). Certainly many of its writers/former writers are left-leaning going by their Twitter accounts.
Most of the articles are on quite niche subjects, such as the oldest club in Spain, the Asian Champions League, or football on a Pacific island. The magazine also has a column dedicated to the women's game. That's written by Glenn Moore (e.g. https://x.com/GlennMoore7/status/1884160057493053859).
Perhaps I'm prejudiced, but my instinct is that on the whole, women are a lot less likely to want to pursue a career in football journalism that isn't about what they were interested in as a kid (I don't for a minute believe Steve Menary grew up wanting to write about football on the Marshall Islands (https://x.com/SoccerFedMI/status/1893310551985369184), but he's clearly passionate for it now). Men, I think, are more likely to be very happy to carve out a niche in a subject they love.
That's not to be critical of the women in the football media. I am, very obviously, insanely jealous of anyone who gets paid to watch Premier League or even EFL football. I have often wondered if I had enough love for football to do what some of the guys in World Soccer do. And the answer is, probably not.
That's an interesting post, thanks.
As a matter of interest, what's football attendance like by gender? Or TV viewing?
Traditionally, it was very male, but I know that they've been keen to attract more women to watching matches live or on TV, for obvious reasons (as has F1...).
I went to a tech conference once that was a lot of developers but covered by the tech press, pretty much all the developers were male, all the tech journalists attending female.
I'll have to ask a (female) friend what the current ACCU C++ conference in Bristol is like wrt that. (She is a senior developer, and far better than me at C++)...
But journalism and engineering are different professions.
The last being my whole point....journalism is talking to people, coding is talking to the computer.
Girls seem to prefer the former and boys the latter
Google's synopsis: "In 2022, the UK journalism workforce was predominantly male, with 59% of journalists being men, a shift from 2020 when women held the majority. There's also a notable decline in female journalists in the UK since 2020. "
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year. Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
A doctor gets paid more for that as they get shift work allowances to etc and their career top end is a lot higher than the graduate software engineer
Also dont forget the better pensions most software engineers might get 5% from there firm as mandated by law....doctors and nurses will be getting 20% +
So include pension contributions there you get
software engineer 39,007 to 42,166 doctor 39562 to 44764
for example and software engineers dont generally get paid for extra hours in my experience
I don't know any software engineers that have worked less hours because they reached the pension cap for sure
I think you'd need to get to Senior II/III before it became an issue, maybe Tech Lead/Principal for smaller companies.
Meanwhile, here in .ac.uk, we're trying to hire people on juuuust above minimum wage and expecting them (or to be more specific 'management' are expecting them) to just pick up 1/2 million-long lines of code in apps that have been 10-20 years in the making.
It's getting almost embarrassing.
That was pretty much how I got into the industry, when I was studying geo eng at uni. A friend knew I was good with computers, and got me a contracting role, which led me to another company that was trying to maintain their priceless data on a >20-year old Bull mainframe. They were basically a data company, but didn't want to spend any money on the systems that held the data. So they got contractors in to maintain an increasingly perilous hand-coded database. It had been created before SQL and RDBMS's were popular, and converted from some other language to C in the early 80s. It as code from the depths of Hades, the tenth circle of Hell...
I learnt a heck of a lot. Mainly how not to code. Oh, and the replacement system at a related company, introduced in 1994, was not Y2K compliant...
I would like to see more of this: taking young people for apprentice-style roles.
Increasingly (experience of my last two companies) they are taking on apprentices rather than software grad as the latter still need significant train almost as much as an apprentice from scratch
If we put to one side what drives men and women to be interested in different things, I do think there is an innate difference in the likelihood of someone being deeply interested in something. This website is a case in point.
Also, take football. The number of women in football media has grown considerably over the last few decades. However, I've read World Soccer magazine for 20 years or so and in that time I don't recall reading an article written by a woman (there probably has been and I've forgotten, but I don't recall a regular contributor).
Now, World Soccer is quite a high brow publication. I'd also say it leans left politically (it's hardly political (aside from FIFA antics!), but the then editor Gavin Hamilton decried Brexit in his introductory words after the vote). Certainly many of its writers/former writers are left-leaning going by their Twitter accounts.
Most of the articles are on quite niche subjects, such as the oldest club in Spain, the Asian Champions League, or football on a Pacific island. The magazine also has a column dedicated to the women's game. That's written by Glenn Moore (e.g. https://x.com/GlennMoore7/status/1884160057493053859).
Perhaps I'm prejudiced, but my instinct is that on the whole, women are a lot less likely to want to pursue a career in football journalism that isn't about what they were interested in as a kid (I don't for a minute believe Steve Menary grew up wanting to write about football on the Marshall Islands (https://x.com/SoccerFedMI/status/1893310551985369184), but he's clearly passionate for it now). Men, I think, are more likely to be very happy to carve out a niche in a subject they love.
That's not to be critical of the women in the football media. I am, very obviously, insanely jealous of anyone who gets paid to watch Premier League or even EFL football. I have often wondered if I had enough love for football to do what some of the guys in World Soccer do. And the answer is, probably not.
That's an interesting post, thanks.
As a matter of interest, what's football attendance like by gender? Or TV viewing?
Traditionally, it was very male, but I know that they've been keen to attract more women to watching matches live or on TV, for obvious reasons (as has F1...).
27% probably think democratic governments are incompetent. They have yet to experience the true incompetence and corruption of the average dictatorship.
There is a real problem in comprehending what the 27% mean when they declare support for dictatorship. With 'democracy' there is a common understanding that a population have a peaceful means of getting rid of a leader/government/parliament they don't like.
Are we to suppose that the 27% who support dictatorship honestly believe there is a peaceful way of replacing one the population come to loathe? Or am I to suppose that they know there isn't, but prefer having an irremovable leader who leads them into famine, war, plague and holocausts?
I think this is meaningless without deeper digging.
If we put to one side what drives men and women to be interested in different things, I do think there is an innate difference in the likelihood of someone being deeply interested in something. This website is a case in point.
Also, take football. The number of women in football media has grown considerably over the last few decades. However, I've read World Soccer magazine for 20 years or so and in that time I don't recall reading an article written by a woman (there probably has been and I've forgotten, but I don't recall a regular contributor).
Now, World Soccer is quite a high brow publication. I'd also say it leans left politically (it's hardly political (aside from FIFA antics!), but the then editor Gavin Hamilton decried Brexit in his introductory words after the vote). Certainly many of its writers/former writers are left-leaning going by their Twitter accounts.
Most of the articles are on quite niche subjects, such as the oldest club in Spain, the Asian Champions League, or football on a Pacific island. The magazine also has a column dedicated to the women's game. That's written by Glenn Moore (e.g. https://x.com/GlennMoore7/status/1884160057493053859).
Perhaps I'm prejudiced, but my instinct is that on the whole, women are a lot less likely to want to pursue a career in football journalism that isn't about what they were interested in as a kid (I don't for a minute believe Steve Menary grew up wanting to write about football on the Marshall Islands (https://x.com/SoccerFedMI/status/1893310551985369184), but he's clearly passionate for it now). Men, I think, are more likely to be very happy to carve out a niche in a subject they love.
That's not to be critical of the women in the football media. I am, very obviously, insanely jealous of anyone who gets paid to watch Premier League or even EFL football. I have often wondered if I had enough love for football to do what some of the guys in World Soccer do. And the answer is, probably not.
That's an interesting post, thanks.
As a matter of interest, what's football attendance like by gender? Or TV viewing?
Traditionally, it was very male, but I know that they've been keen to attract more women to watching matches live or on TV, for obvious reasons (as has F1...).
I went to a tech conference once that was a lot of developers but covered by the tech press, pretty much all the developers were male, all the tech journalists attending female.
I'll have to ask a (female) friend what the current ACCU C++ conference in Bristol is like wrt that. (She is a senior developer, and far better than me at C++)...
But journalism and engineering are different professions.
The last being my whole point....journalism is talking to people, coding is talking to the computer.
Girls seem to prefer the former and boys the latter
Google's synopsis: "In 2022, the UK journalism workforce was predominantly male, with 59% of journalists being men, a shift from 2020 when women held the majority. There's also a notable decline in female journalists in the UK since 2020. "
Possibly women are just better are spotting a job in decline. They've probably all become prompt engineers...
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year. Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
A doctor gets paid more for that as they get shift work allowances to etc and their career top end is a lot higher than the graduate software engineer
Also dont forget the better pensions most software engineers might get 5% from there firm as mandated by law....doctors and nurses will be getting 20% +
So include pension contributions there you get
software engineer 39,007 to 42,166 doctor 39562 to 44764
for example and software engineers dont generally get paid for extra hours in my experience
I don't know any software engineers that have worked less hours because they reached the pension cap for sure
I think you'd need to get to Senior II/III before it became an issue, maybe Tech Lead/Principal for smaller companies.
Meanwhile, here in .ac.uk, we're trying to hire people on juuuust above minimum wage and expecting them (or to be more specific 'management' are expecting them) to just pick up 1/2 million-long lines of code in apps that have been 10-20 years in the making.
It's getting almost embarrassing.
That was pretty much how I got into the industry, when I was studying geo eng at uni. A friend knew I was good with computers, and got me a contracting role, which led me to another company that was trying to maintain their priceless data on a >20-year old Bull mainframe. They were basically a data company, but didn't want to spend any money on the systems that held the data. So they got contractors in to maintain an increasingly perilous hand-coded database. It had been created before SQL and RDBMS's were popular, and converted from some other language to C in the early 80s. It as code from the depths of Hades, the tenth circle of Hell...
I learnt a heck of a lot. Mainly how not to code. Oh, and the replacement system at a related company, introduced in 1994, was not Y2K compliant...
I would like to see more of this: taking young people for apprentice-style roles.
Increasingly (experience of my last two companies) they are taking on apprentices rather than software grad as the latter still need significant train almost as much as an apprentice from scratch
20 to 25 years ago, I extensively recruited graduate software engineers. Bizarrely. I generally found that geography graduates were better than comp sci graduates. Less bizarrely, physicists were better than both. Despite being in Cambridge, Oxbridge comp sci graduates were fairly awful.
My rationale behind this was that geographers or physicists who applied to a popular tech company for a job had a genuine interest in the subject, and coded as a hobby on top of their degree. Whereas many of the comp sci graduates were in it because it was cool and might be a good earner.
Put simply, people not studying comp sci would generally have more of a passion for the topic.
20 years is an eternity in tech, so the situation may well have improved. Or got worse...
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year. Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
A doctor gets paid more for that as they get shift work allowances to etc and their career top end is a lot higher than the graduate software engineer
Also dont forget the better pensions most software engineers might get 5% from there firm as mandated by law....doctors and nurses will be getting 20% +
So include pension contributions there you get
software engineer 39,007 to 42,166 doctor 39562 to 44764
for example and software engineers dont generally get paid for extra hours in my experience
I don't know any software engineers that have worked less hours because they reached the pension cap for sure
I think you'd need to get to Senior II/III before it became an issue, maybe Tech Lead/Principal for smaller companies.
Meanwhile, here in .ac.uk, we're trying to hire people on juuuust above minimum wage and expecting them (or to be more specific 'management' are expecting them) to just pick up 1/2 million-long lines of code in apps that have been 10-20 years in the making.
It's getting almost embarrassing.
That was pretty much how I got into the industry, when I was studying geo eng at uni. A friend knew I was good with computers, and got me a contracting role, which led me to another company that was trying to maintain their priceless data on a >20-year old Bull mainframe. They were basically a data company, but didn't want to spend any money on the systems that held the data. So they got contractors in to maintain an increasingly perilous hand-coded database. It had been created before SQL and RDBMS's were popular, and converted from some other language to C in the early 80s. It as code from the depths of Hades, the tenth circle of Hell...
I learnt a heck of a lot. Mainly how not to code. Oh, and the replacement system at a related company, introduced in 1994, was not Y2K compliant...
I would like to see more of this: taking young people for apprentice-style roles.
I'd like that too. But sadly, we want ('we') people with masters degrees, and want to pay them £1, and expect them to out-perform the top googlers on day one.
And the expectations of 'the magic AI thing' are making it worse.
On science, I've just remembered that in Year 8, our classes were split into boys and girls, but then they didn't carry it on (perhaps because teachers who got the boys complained!).
But in Year 11, there was only one triple-award science class of 27, so that had to be mixed (and us boys were awful. Sorry girls...).
One of the central mysteries of teenage boys.
All the awful stuff they do because they want to impress the girls which the girls don't find impressive...
Evolution will no doubt catch up eventually.
(I suspect that the caveman explanation is that, in very ancient times, the boys didn't have to impress the girls so much as scare off the other boys.)
Funny what you remember. On our last day, our Chemistry teacher (fantastic woman) stuck one of these labels on the forehead of friend of mine:
On science, I've just remembered that in Year 8, our classes were split into boys and girls, but then they didn't carry it on (perhaps because teachers who got the boys complained!).
But in Year 11, there was only one triple-award science class of 27, so that had to be mixed (and us boys were awful. Sorry girls...).
One of the central mysteries of teenage boys.
All the awful stuff they do because they want to impress the girls which the girls don't find impressive...
Evolution will no doubt catch up eventually.
(I suspect that the caveman explanation is that, in very ancient times, the boys didn't have to impress the girls so much as scare off the other boys.)
Funny what you remember. On our last day, our Chemistry teacher (fantastic woman) stuck one of these labels on the forehead of friend of mine:
On my last day, a guy took a razorblade out of his sock and slashed a big 'smile' from one eye, across the mouth, to the other eye of a fellow student. Rather took the vibe out of the disco night.
27% probably think democratic governments are incompetent. They have yet to experience the true incompetence and corruption of the average dictatorship.
There is a real problem in comprehending what the 27% mean when they declare support for dictatorship. With 'democracy' there is a common understanding that a population have a peaceful means of getting rid of a leader/government/parliament they don't like.
Are we to suppose that the 27% who support dictatorship honestly believe there is a peaceful way of replacing one the population come to loathe? Or am I to suppose that they know there isn't, but prefer having an irremovable leader who leads them into famine, war, plague and holocausts?
I think this is meaningless without deeper digging.
One of the interesting things about dictators is that they can, rarely, be neutral, or even positive.
I can recommend Iain Dale's book "The Dictators". It gives pocket biographies of many dictators through history, and a precious few were probably positive. Take the Kang Shai-Chek quote: "If when I die, I am still a dictator, I will certainly go down into the oblivion of all dictators. If, on the other hand, I succeed in establishing a truly stable foundation for a democratic government, I will live forever in every home in China."
Kang Shai-Chek was certainly a dictator. Was Taiwan (or China...) better off for him, or without him?
And will Xi Jinping, who many call a dictator, be positive to China?
On science, I've just remembered that in Year 8, our classes were split into boys and girls, but then they didn't carry it on (perhaps because teachers who got the boys complained!).
But in Year 11, there was only one triple-award science class of 27, so that had to be mixed (and us boys were awful. Sorry girls...).
One of the central mysteries of teenage boys.
All the awful stuff they do because they want to impress the girls which the girls don't find impressive...
Evolution will no doubt catch up eventually.
(I suspect that the caveman explanation is that, in very ancient times, the boys didn't have to impress the girls so much as scare off the other boys.)
Funny what you remember. On our last day, our Chemistry teacher (fantastic woman) stuck one of these labels on the forehead of friend of mine:
On my last day, a guy took a razorblade out of his sock and slashed a big 'smile' from one eye, across the mouth, to the other eye of a fellow student. Rather took the vibe out of the disco night.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year. Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
A doctor gets paid more for that as they get shift work allowances to etc and their career top end is a lot higher than the graduate software engineer
Also dont forget the better pensions most software engineers might get 5% from there firm as mandated by law....doctors and nurses will be getting 20% +
So include pension contributions there you get
software engineer 39,007 to 42,166 doctor 39562 to 44764
for example and software engineers dont generally get paid for extra hours in my experience
I don't know any software engineers that have worked less hours because they reached the pension cap for sure
I think you'd need to get to Senior II/III before it became an issue, maybe Tech Lead/Principal for smaller companies.
Meanwhile, here in .ac.uk, we're trying to hire people on juuuust above minimum wage and expecting them (or to be more specific 'management' are expecting them) to just pick up 1/2 million-long lines of code in apps that have been 10-20 years in the making.
It's getting almost embarrassing.
That was pretty much how I got into the industry, when I was studying geo eng at uni. A friend knew I was good with computers, and got me a contracting role, which led me to another company that was trying to maintain their priceless data on a >20-year old Bull mainframe. They were basically a data company, but didn't want to spend any money on the systems that held the data. So they got contractors in to maintain an increasingly perilous hand-coded database. It had been created before SQL and RDBMS's were popular, and converted from some other language to C in the early 80s. It as code from the depths of Hades, the tenth circle of Hell...
I learnt a heck of a lot. Mainly how not to code. Oh, and the replacement system at a related company, introduced in 1994, was not Y2K compliant...
I would like to see more of this: taking young people for apprentice-style roles.
Increasingly (experience of my last two companies) they are taking on apprentices rather than software grad as the latter still need significant train almost as much as an apprentice from scratch
20 to 25 years ago, I extensively recruited graduate software engineers. Bizarrely. I generally found that geography graduates were better than comp sci graduates. Less bizarrely, physicists were better than both. Despite being in Cambridge, Oxbridge comp sci graduates were fairly awful.
My rationale behind this was that geographers or physicists who applied to a popular tech company for a job had a genuine interest in the subject, and coded as a hobby on top of their degree. Whereas many of the comp sci graduates were in it because it was cool and might be a good earner.
Put simply, people not studying comp sci would generally have more of a passion for the topic.
20 years is an eternity in tech, so the situation may well have improved. Or got worse...
You can ruin any subject by being taught it. It's why I have long had a jaded view of education, despite being in the education business. I love history, geography, film and literature mostly because I have never had to pass a serious exam in them.
On Topic: Looks like Marine is done for! But it could be a case of "be careful what you wish for" when it comes to the French easbalishment as Bardella may end up being much more electable?
Off Topic: Good evening PB. What a lovely day its been! 😎
The BBC have stated that a Bardella candidacy loses the RN a lot of their appeal.
I cannot see how they reach that conclusion.
He polls almost as well as her in the first round - I can’t see there have been any head to head polls for round 2 but with an RN bounce now looking likely it feels like he could conceivably do as well as her.
And what if he tries the Trumpski/Vance gambit some in the GOP have been dreaming about - he promises once elected he pardons MLP and makes her PM? Run it as a joint campaign.
On Topic: Looks like Marine is done for! But it could be a case of "be careful what you wish for" when it comes to the French easbalishment as Bardella may end up being much more electable?
Off Topic: Good evening PB. What a lovely day its been! 😎
The BBC have stated that a Bardella candidacy loses the RN a lot of their appeal.
I cannot see how they reach that conclusion.
He polls almost as well as her in the first round - I can’t see there have been any head to head polls for round 2 but with an RN bounce now looking likely it feels like he could conceivably do as well as her.
And what if he tries the Trumpski/Vance gambit some in the GOP have been dreaming about - he promises once elected he pardons MLP and makes her PM? Run it as a joint campaign.
Yes, I think it's unclear whether it is good or bad for RN. But if she's guilty, what alternative is there? You can't go letting people off because you dislike them and want to look fair minded.
On Topic: Looks like Marine is done for! But it could be a case of "be careful what you wish for" when it comes to the French easbalishment as Bardella may end up being much more electable?
Off Topic: Good evening PB. What a lovely day its been! 😎
The BBC have stated that a Bardella candidacy loses the RN a lot of their appeal.
I cannot see how they reach that conclusion.
He polls almost as well as her in the first round - I can’t see there have been any head to head polls for round 2 but with an RN bounce now looking likely it feels like he could conceivably do as well as her.
And what if he tries the Trumpski/Vance gambit some in the GOP have been dreaming about - he promises once elected he pardons MLP and makes her PM? Run it as a joint campaign.
I would say that Bardella potentially has much more upside because he doesn't have the baggage of the Le Pen name. It could be the moment France votes for the far right which is a pretty scary thought.
Immigration and economic issues don't disappear because MLP can't run for president. Putting up a new face, IMO, will end up being beneficial for RN after a short adjustment period.
Can I just say, faffing about writing computer programmes cannot in any way be regarded as Engineering.
An interesting claim. IMV the specification, design, writing and testing is engineering. That's why pure coding is not IMO engineering, but software development is.
What is the name for the little loop on a watch strap in which you insert the scrag end of the strap? Because the one on my Garmin's broken. I reckon the extra drag of the loose bit of strap was the reason I was slower in the pool today, and not the drinks I had last night.
And am I the only person who (incorrectly?) uses 'scrag end' for that part of the strap?
On Topic: Looks like Marine is done for! But it could be a case of "be careful what you wish for" when it comes to the French easbalishment as Bardella may end up being much more electable?
Off Topic: Good evening PB. What a lovely day its been! 😎
The BBC have stated that a Bardella candidacy loses the RN a lot of their appeal.
I cannot see how they reach that conclusion.
He polls almost as well as her in the first round - I can’t see there have been any head to head polls for round 2 but with an RN bounce now looking likely it feels like he could conceivably do as well as her.
And what if he tries the Trumpski/Vance gambit some in the GOP have been dreaming about - he promises once elected he pardons MLP and makes her PM? Run it as a joint campaign.
Yes, I think it's unclear whether it is good or bad for RN. But if she's guilty, what alternative is there? You can't go letting people off because you dislike them and want to look fair minded.
From my understanding, and I will admit my knowledge of French politics is limited, everyone had sort of come to a consensus that if found guilty it was likely the court would give her a short ban but was unlikely to want to make her ineligible for 2027. There’s some policy reasoning behind that - similar to how SCOTUS played the insurrection clause (I know, it was SCOTUS, but they did give a unanimous verdict) - it’s easy to see courts having a certain queasiness about the judiciary being seen to prevent a leading candidate in an upcoming election from standing.
Of course, they didn’t go that route, so they are where they are. I suspect this benefits RN, in all honesty - and I wish it didn’t.
Can I just say, faffing about writing computer programmes cannot in any way be regarded as Engineering.
An interesting claim. IMV the specification, design, writing and testing is engineering. That's why pure coding is not IMO engineering, but software development is.
+1 - most of my life is spent nowadays telling halfwits in India that they I don't want them to put the same code in X different places, it should be a child function you call on demand.
wouldn't be so bad but the people we have a expensive, supposed to be good (they really aren't) and I could have done the entire project in 4 weeks by myself without any of them.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
And I can point to anecdotes that say the opposite.
You don't know what you're talking about.
Much of it is nature versus nurture.
How much of anyone's character is nature, or nurture? My dad ran a building/demo and plant hire firm. My sister co-runs a classic tractor company. My brother is a mechanical engineer. I, the black sheep of the family, went into geo eng, but then went into the dark side of software. It seems obvious to me that all three of us got a heck of a lot from nurture.
Take the classic "pink is for girls, blue is for boys." There's nothing 'evolutionary' about that; it's all modern. In fact, it used to be the other way around.
You are saying that a million years of accumulated evolution means that women are inferior. I say that's bullshit. Utter bullshit. And really, really dangerous bullshit.
The argument though is not women are inferior...merely that there are careers that appeal more to girls and those that appeal more to boys.
As I said I don't see complaints that 50% of bricklayers aren't women or that 50% of primary school teachers aren't men. When I was responsible for interviewing it IT I interviewed precisely 2 women...we employed them both but the only 2 cv's we got from women in the first place. Both were good people and worked well but I can't interview people who don't apply as they are not interested
"The argument though is not women are inferior..."
Oh, there are plenty of dog-whistles towards that.
"As I said I don't see complaints that 50% of bricklayers aren't women or that 50% of primary school teachers aren't men."
I have commented several times on the primary schools situation, and that boys with single parents (almost always mothers) are unlikely to get a male role model at primary school. But AIUI the upper levels - head teachers - are more likely to be male, even if the teaches are predominately female. But perhaps that has changed...
I've also commented that I saw an all-female surveying team a year or so ago. That warmed my cockles.
Surveying isn't hard brutal labour like brick laying......how many female bricklayers are there and do you we think we do need to do more to encourage more woman to become brick layers.....pretty sure the answer will be no
I think the answer is yes.
And I've done surveying. And a tiny bit of bricklaying. And both can be brutal and physical - certainly compared to flipping bits.
Like lorry driving, bricklaying is becoming *less* physically demanding. In ye olden days, a lorry driver would have no power steering, and mostly do not need to lift heavy boxes to offload. In bricklaying, you don't need to climb ladders with heavy brick hods on your shoulder (*); the telehandler delivers the bricks to you on the second floor.
As an aside, I recently saw roof trusses being delivered *and positioned on the roof* straight from the delivery lorry. No putting them on the ground in between. My flabber was ghasted.
(*) Which was often the apprentice's job...
And the percentage of female bricklayers despite that is I am guessing still low
Yes. And your point is? That there is some intrinsic, genetic reason why women are massively less able to be bricklayers than men?
Even in the mechanised age, there is still a requirement for strength on building sites.
Women have a lot less strength, on average. Especially upper body strength.
Voters consistently say issues like the economy and reproductive rights are their top concerns in this election. But in the closing weeks of the campaign, Republican ads focusing on transgender rights are dominating airwaves all over the country.
Desperate for answers on what went wrong on Election Day, finger-pointing among Democrats and media pundits has been swift. Many — in private — are holding President Joe Biden responsible. Others are blaming the operatives who have run the party’s last several campaigns. But some are pointing to an issue with far less power in American politics: transgender rights.
“The Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left,” Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., told The New York Times on Wednesday. “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.”
Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., shared a similar view, telling the Times on Thursday: “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
But you said Harris was banging on about transgender rights when she should have campaigned on other things. Do you have any evidence that she spent time campaigning on transgender rights? Because so far as I can tell she avoided the issue as far as possible and it was the Republicans who spent a lot of time and money campaigning on the issue.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year. Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
A doctor gets paid more for that as they get shift work allowances to etc and their career top end is a lot higher than the graduate software engineer
Also dont forget the better pensions most software engineers might get 5% from there firm as mandated by law....doctors and nurses will be getting 20% +
So include pension contributions there you get
software engineer 39,007 to 42,166 doctor 39562 to 44764
for example and software engineers dont generally get paid for extra hours in my experience
I don't know any software engineers that have worked less hours because they reached the pension cap for sure
I think you'd need to get to Senior II/III before it became an issue, maybe Tech Lead/Principal for smaller companies.
Meanwhile, here in .ac.uk, we're trying to hire people on juuuust above minimum wage and expecting them (or to be more specific 'management' are expecting them) to just pick up 1/2 million-long lines of code in apps that have been 10-20 years in the making.
It's getting almost embarrassing.
That was pretty much how I got into the industry, when I was studying geo eng at uni. A friend knew I was good with computers, and got me a contracting role, which led me to another company that was trying to maintain their priceless data on a >20-year old Bull mainframe. They were basically a data company, but didn't want to spend any money on the systems that held the data. So they got contractors in to maintain an increasingly perilous hand-coded database. It had been created before SQL and RDBMS's were popular, and converted from some other language to C in the early 80s. It as code from the depths of Hades, the tenth circle of Hell...
I learnt a heck of a lot. Mainly how not to code. Oh, and the replacement system at a related company, introduced in 1994, was not Y2K compliant...
I would like to see more of this: taking young people for apprentice-style roles.
Increasingly (experience of my last two companies) they are taking on apprentices rather than software grad as the latter still need significant train almost as much as an apprentice from scratch
20 to 25 years ago, I extensively recruited graduate software engineers. Bizarrely. I generally found that geography graduates were better than comp sci graduates. Less bizarrely, physicists were better than both. Despite being in Cambridge, Oxbridge comp sci graduates were fairly awful.
My rationale behind this was that geographers or physicists who applied to a popular tech company for a job had a genuine interest in the subject, and coded as a hobby on top of their degree. Whereas many of the comp sci graduates were in it because it was cool and might be a good earner.
Put simply, people not studying comp sci would generally have more of a passion for the topic.
20 years is an eternity in tech, so the situation may well have improved. Or got worse...
I'd say that a Graduate Software Engineer is a graduate with a degree in software engineering. A geography degree makes someone a Graduate Geographer.
My 1980s degree is actually in software engineering - under the title of Information Systems Engineering. The core was about engineering principles applied to software systems, rather than "programming".
I rarely post these days, but saddened to see an interesting thread ruined by one poster horribly misrepresenting another. Whether you agree or disagree with @MaxPB he on no occasion said (or even implied) that women are inferior. @JosiasJessop should retract and apologise immediately, but he probably won’t. Another grim PB spectacle.
What is the name for the little loop on a watch strap in which you insert the scrag end of the strap? Because the one on my Garmin's broken. I reckon the extra drag of the loose bit of strap was the reason I was slower in the pool today, and not the drinks I had last night.
And am I the only person who (incorrectly?) uses 'scrag end' for that part of the strap?
Isn't scrag end a particular inexpensive joint of lamb?
The thing on the end of a watch strap into which you insert the loose end, is surely a "buckle"? Or "loop"?
What do you call the loose end of the belt in your trouser waste band?
I rarely post these days, but saddened to see an interesting thread ruined by one poster horribly misrepresenting another. Whether you agree or disagree with @MaxPB he on no occasion said (or even implied) that women are inferior. @JosiasJessop should retract and apologise immediately, but he probably won’t. Another grim PB spectacle.
Another storm in a teacup. @Cyclefree 's response was on point.
People chat shit all the time on PB.
The obvious response to "so you're saying that" is "no, I'm not". Which ends the argument.
Can I just say, faffing about writing computer programmes cannot in any way be regarded as Engineering.
An interesting claim. IMV the specification, design, writing and testing is engineering. That's why pure coding is not IMO engineering, but software development is.
+1 - most of my life is spent nowadays telling halfwits in India that they I don't want them to put the same code in X different places, it should be a child function you call on demand.
wouldn't be so bad but the people we have a expensive, supposed to be good (they really aren't) and I could have done the entire project in 4 weeks by myself without any of them.
They aren’t halfwits. They just don’t know. And knowing is the expensive bit.
Some years ago, I worked for a company that had development teams, around the world, working on the same software platform. Perfect time for a comparison.
The cheapest development was in London - in cost per delivered feature. Eastern Europe was next. US was a way down the list. India was dead last. By a distance.
As Neville Shute Norway put it - an engineer is someone who can do for a shilling what any damn fool can do for a pound.
Voters consistently say issues like the economy and reproductive rights are their top concerns in this election. But in the closing weeks of the campaign, Republican ads focusing on transgender rights are dominating airwaves all over the country.
Desperate for answers on what went wrong on Election Day, finger-pointing among Democrats and media pundits has been swift. Many — in private — are holding President Joe Biden responsible. Others are blaming the operatives who have run the party’s last several campaigns. But some are pointing to an issue with far less power in American politics: transgender rights.
“The Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left,” Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., told The New York Times on Wednesday. “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.”
Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., shared a similar view, telling the Times on Thursday: “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
But you said Harris was banging on about transgender rights when she should have campaigned on other things. Do you have any evidence that she spent time campaigning on transgender rights? Because so far as I can tell she avoided the issue as far as possible and it was the Republicans who spent a lot of time and money campaigning on the issue.
So Dems bang on about trans rights, Harris keeps quiet and the GOP say that a vote for Harris is a vote for 'they/them' while a vote for Trump is a vote for 'you'.
27% probably think democratic governments are incompetent. They have yet to experience the true incompetence and corruption of the average dictatorship.
They also assume that the dictatorship will be one of preference.
With regard to the headline, and with all due deference to Sunil, the comedian Paul Sinha has just observed that "Le Pen is not mightier than the Fraud".
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
Here's the thing: even a small innate differences can result in big differences in choices. Let's say (making up numbers here) than men are 20% more likely to be into hard sciences than women.
What happens then is that - because women prefer to hang out with other women, and men prefer to hang out with other men - the Physics class ends up with a male teacher, 18 boys and 2 girls. Which in turn perpetuates the disparity.
And it's why - when you go to single sex schools - there's a much smaller gap in terms of girls' choices than in mixed schools. Simply, the societal impact might well be a lot larger than any innate one.
That's a good point. There are no doubt some innate differences between how the average woman and the average man thinks. But the same is true about left- and right-handed people. In some ways, their brains tend to work a bit differently, and you can find higher proportions of left or right handed people in certain professions. But differences are less obvious, and less contentious, because being left or right handed isn't such a big part of people's identity, and they generally aren't compounded by these kinds of societal effects.
NEW: Several top US officials were put on administrative leave after denying DOGE access to the federal payroll system that, among many other things, issues paychecks to Supreme Court justices.
With regard to the headline, and with all due deference to Sunil, the comedian Paul Sinha has just observed that "Le Pen is not mightier than the Fraud".
With regard to the headline, and with all due deference to Sunil, the comedian Paul Sinha has just observed that "Le Pen is not mightier than the Fraud".
I rarely post these days, but saddened to see an interesting thread ruined by one poster horribly misrepresenting another. Whether you agree or disagree with @MaxPB he on no occasion said (or even implied) that women are inferior. @JosiasJessop should retract and apologise immediately, but he probably won’t. Another grim PB spectacle.
Another storm in a teacup. @Cyclefree 's response was on point.
People chat shit all the time on PB.
The obvious response to "so you're saying that" is "no, I'm not". Which ends the argument.
This particular storm in a teacup passed me by as I've been out and about enjoying the sunshine most of the day
What is the name for the little loop on a watch strap in which you insert the scrag end of the strap? Because the one on my Garmin's broken. I reckon the extra drag of the loose bit of strap was the reason I was slower in the pool today, and not the drinks I had last night.
And am I the only person who (incorrectly?) uses 'scrag end' for that part of the strap?
The one on my old Garmin broke, it was very annoying as I have small wrists so the watch strap had a long scrag end. The elastic bands holding asparagus bunches together are a good substitute, the ones for spring onions, less so
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
They fuck you up your mum and dad.
Steven Pinker says they don't make any difference other than through genetics.
Voters consistently say issues like the economy and reproductive rights are their top concerns in this election. But in the closing weeks of the campaign, Republican ads focusing on transgender rights are dominating airwaves all over the country.
Desperate for answers on what went wrong on Election Day, finger-pointing among Democrats and media pundits has been swift. Many — in private — are holding President Joe Biden responsible. Others are blaming the operatives who have run the party’s last several campaigns. But some are pointing to an issue with far less power in American politics: transgender rights.
“The Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left,” Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., told The New York Times on Wednesday. “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.”
Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., shared a similar view, telling the Times on Thursday: “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
But you said Harris was banging on about transgender rights when she should have campaigned on other things. Do you have any evidence that she spent time campaigning on transgender rights? Because so far as I can tell she avoided the issue as far as possible and it was the Republicans who spent a lot of time and money campaigning on the issue.
So Dems bang on about trans rights, Harris keeps quiet and the GOP say that a vote for Harris is a vote for 'they/them' while a vote for Trump is a vote for 'you'.
Guess what conclusion the voters draw ?
Trans rights may well have been a vote winner for Trump, I'm just disputing that Harris chose to campaign on the issue, and that she lost because she was 'banging on about abortion and trans rights' and if only someone in the Democratic party had told her to campaign on some other issues she might have won. I'm not convinced that Democrats generally were either - which Democrats are you referring to in the 2024 election campaigns? Republicans definitely were banging on about trans rights.
I also think that abortion was probably a vote-winning issue for Harris.
Voters consistently say issues like the economy and reproductive rights are their top concerns in this election. But in the closing weeks of the campaign, Republican ads focusing on transgender rights are dominating airwaves all over the country.
Desperate for answers on what went wrong on Election Day, finger-pointing among Democrats and media pundits has been swift. Many — in private — are holding President Joe Biden responsible. Others are blaming the operatives who have run the party’s last several campaigns. But some are pointing to an issue with far less power in American politics: transgender rights.
“The Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left,” Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., told The New York Times on Wednesday. “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.”
Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., shared a similar view, telling the Times on Thursday: “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
But you said Harris was banging on about transgender rights when she should have campaigned on other things. Do you have any evidence that she spent time campaigning on transgender rights? Because so far as I can tell she avoided the issue as far as possible and it was the Republicans who spent a lot of time and money campaigning on the issue.
So Dems bang on about trans rights, Harris keeps quiet and the GOP say that a vote for Harris is a vote for 'they/them' while a vote for Trump is a vote for 'you'.
Guess what conclusion the voters draw ?
Trans rights may well have been a vote winner for Trump, I'm just disputing that Harris chose to campaign on the issue, and that she lost because she was 'banging on about abortion and trans rights' and if only someone in the Democratic party had told her to campaign on some other issues she might have won. I'm not convinced that Democrats generally were either - which Democrats are you referring to in the 2024 election campaigns? Republicans definitely were banging on about trans rights.
I also think that abortion was probably a vote-winning issue for Harris.
People who thought strongly about abortion, one way or another, were going to vote one way or the other.
People who don't wondered instead why politicians are talking about abortion instead of 'everyday life issues'.
As to trans, after the election but the general principle applies:
US Senate Democrats block bill to ban trans athletes from women’s sports Democratic senator says trans athletes ‘deserve an ally’ after Republican-led bill quashed in razor-sharp 51-45 vote
US Senate Democrats banded together to torpedo a Republican bill that would ban transgender athletes from women’s sports, defeating the legislation in a razor-sharp party-line vote of 51-45 on Monday evening.
The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, led by Tommy Tuberville, a senator from Alabama, crashed before reaching the 60 votes needed to advance, halting the proposal that had passed the House in January.
A New York Times/Ipsos poll from January found 79% of Americans opposed transgender female athletes competing in women’s sports, a statistic Republicans hoped would bolster their position. Democrats, however, swiftly branded the bill a cynical political distraction.
This is now ingrained in the public mind - Dems are for trans rights and the GOP are against them. The problem for the Dems is that they're assumed (whether accurately or not) to be on the deeply unpopular side of the issue.
What the Dems need is for the whole trans issue to disappear, which it will not if they keep playing into the GOP's hands on the issue.
Can I just say, faffing about writing computer programmes cannot in any way be regarded as Engineering.
An interesting claim. IMV the specification, design, writing and testing is engineering. That's why pure coding is not IMO engineering, but software development is.
+1 - most of my life is spent nowadays telling halfwits in India that they I don't want them to put the same code in X different places, it should be a child function you call on demand.
wouldn't be so bad but the people we have a expensive, supposed to be good (they really aren't) and I could have done the entire project in 4 weeks by myself without any of them.
They aren’t halfwits. They just don’t know. And knowing is the expensive bit.
Some years ago, I worked for a company that had development teams, around the world, working on the same software platform. Perfect time for a comparison.
The cheapest development was in London - in cost per delivered feature. Eastern Europe was next. US was a way down the list. India was dead last. By a distance.
As Neville Shute Norway put it - an engineer is someone who can do for a shilling what any damn fool can do for a pound.
This is a supposedly Microsoft Inner Circle Partner. My first step on this project was to point out that it doesn't take 16 hours to do work I can do myself in 10 minutes when all you are doing is adding 10 fields on a form in the order we've asked you to.
Can I just say, faffing about writing computer programmes cannot in any way be regarded as Engineering.
An interesting claim. IMV the specification, design, writing and testing is engineering. That's why pure coding is not IMO engineering, but software development is.
+1 - most of my life is spent nowadays telling halfwits in India that they I don't want them to put the same code in X different places, it should be a child function you call on demand.
wouldn't be so bad but the people we have a expensive, supposed to be good (they really aren't) and I could have done the entire project in 4 weeks by myself without any of them.
They aren’t halfwits. They just don’t know. And knowing is the expensive bit.
Some years ago, I worked for a company that had development teams, around the world, working on the same software platform. Perfect time for a comparison.
The cheapest development was in London - in cost per delivered feature. Eastern Europe was next. US was a way down the list. India was dead last. By a distance.
As Neville Shute Norway put it - an engineer is someone who can do for a shilling what any damn fool can do for a pound.
We just migrated an application written by a team in India from an on-prem data centre to the cloud.
It is the jankiest app in the entire portfolio
It was supposed to be a multi-tier application, with three distinct environments, but they just used any server for anything. They wrote some code on one server, then did a fileshare to all the others to distribute it...
We moved the QA servers, then they complained because one of them had production code on it.
I rarely post these days, but saddened to see an interesting thread ruined by one poster horribly misrepresenting another. Whether you agree or disagree with @MaxPB he on no occasion said (or even implied) that women are inferior. @JosiasJessop should retract and apologise immediately, but he probably won’t. Another grim PB spectacle.
Another storm in a teacup. @Cyclefree 's response was on point.
People chat shit all the time on PB.
The obvious response to "so you're saying that" is "no, I'm not". Which ends the argument.
Leon is in Bokhara, I believe MaxPB is in Florence. There’s something weirdly comforting that they’d still rather spend an evening bickering on the internet than enjoy their locale.
Voters consistently say issues like the economy and reproductive rights are their top concerns in this election. But in the closing weeks of the campaign, Republican ads focusing on transgender rights are dominating airwaves all over the country.
Desperate for answers on what went wrong on Election Day, finger-pointing among Democrats and media pundits has been swift. Many — in private — are holding President Joe Biden responsible. Others are blaming the operatives who have run the party’s last several campaigns. But some are pointing to an issue with far less power in American politics: transgender rights.
“The Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left,” Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., told The New York Times on Wednesday. “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.”
Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., shared a similar view, telling the Times on Thursday: “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
But you said Harris was banging on about transgender rights when she should have campaigned on other things. Do you have any evidence that she spent time campaigning on transgender rights? Because so far as I can tell she avoided the issue as far as possible and it was the Republicans who spent a lot of time and money campaigning on the issue.
So Dems bang on about trans rights, Harris keeps quiet and the GOP say that a vote for Harris is a vote for 'they/them' while a vote for Trump is a vote for 'you'.
Guess what conclusion the voters draw ?
Trans rights may well have been a vote winner for Trump, I'm just disputing that Harris chose to campaign on the issue, and that she lost because she was 'banging on about abortion and trans rights' and if only someone in the Democratic party had told her to campaign on some other issues she might have won. I'm not convinced that Democrats generally were either - which Democrats are you referring to in the 2024 election campaigns? Republicans definitely were banging on about trans rights.
I also think that abortion was probably a vote-winning issue for Harris.
The pro life evangelical and RC vote at least matched the pro choice female vote given the Trump and GOP win
I rarely post these days, but saddened to see an interesting thread ruined by one poster horribly misrepresenting another. Whether you agree or disagree with @MaxPB he on no occasion said (or even implied) that women are inferior. @JosiasJessop should retract and apologise immediately, but he probably won’t. Another grim PB spectacle.
Another storm in a teacup. @Cyclefree 's response was on point.
People chat shit all the time on PB.
The obvious response to "so you're saying that" is "no, I'm not". Which ends the argument.
Leon is in Bokhara, I believe MaxPB is in Florence. There’s something weirdly comforting that they’d still rather spend an evening bickering on the internet than enjoy their locale.
Unfortunately my daughter caught some vomiting bug so I've been stuck with her in the Airbnb all day but she seemed better an hour ago, or at least she hadn't thrown up for a couple of hours. The better half won the coin toss and got the day out and about visiting the various cafes, bars and restaurants of Florence while I had to make do with Glovo...
Comments
software engineer 39,007 to 42,166
doctor 39562 to 44764
for example and software engineers dont generally get paid for extra hours in my experience
He’s superb in this. It’s very absorbing.
TTFN.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqa83PrZSVE
UK, Focaldata poll (ages 16 to 29):
Support for democracy vs dictatorship
Democracy: 57%
Dictatorship: 27%
Fieldwork: 4-12 February 2025
Sample size: 2,039
https://bsky.app/profile/europeelects.bsky.social/post/3llp2tsufyc2k
27% probably think democratic governments are incompetent. They have yet to experience the true incompetence and corruption of the average dictatorship.
Also, take football. The number of women in football media has grown considerably over the last few decades. However, I've read World Soccer magazine for 20 years or so and in that time I don't recall reading an article written by a woman (there probably has been and I've forgotten, but I don't recall a regular contributor).
Now, World Soccer is quite a high brow publication. I'd also say it leans left politically (it's hardly political (aside from FIFA antics!), but the then editor Gavin Hamilton decried Brexit in his introductory words after the vote). Certainly many of its writers/former writers are left-leaning going by their Twitter accounts.
Most of the articles are on quite niche subjects, such as the oldest club in Spain, the Asian Champions League, or football on a Pacific island. The magazine also has a column dedicated to the women's game. That's written by Glenn Moore (e.g. https://x.com/GlennMoore7/status/1884160057493053859).
Perhaps I'm prejudiced, but my instinct is that on the whole, women are a lot less likely to want to pursue a career in football journalism that isn't about what they were interested in as a kid (I don't for a minute believe Steve Menary grew up wanting to write about football on the Marshall Islands (https://x.com/SoccerFedMI/status/1893310551985369184), but he's clearly passionate for it now). Men, I think, are more likely to be very happy to carve out a niche in a subject they love.
That's not to be critical of the women in the football media. I am, very obviously, insanely jealous of anyone who gets paid to watch Premier League or even EFL football. I have often wondered if I had enough love for football to do what some of the guys in World Soccer do. And the answer is, probably not.
As a matter of interest, what's football attendance like by gender? Or TV viewing?
Traditionally, it was very male, but I know that they've been keen to attract more women to watching matches live or on TV, for obvious reasons (as has F1...).
Off Topic: Good evening PB. What a lovely day its been! 😎
I went to a tech conference once that was a lot of developers but covered by the tech press, pretty much all the developers were male, all the tech journalists attending female.
A bit of a generational trigger image, that - and not ideal for a Labour govt.
It's getting almost embarrassing.
But in Year 11, there was only one triple-award science class of 27, so that had to be mixed (and us boys were awful. Sorry girls...).
But journalism and engineering are different professions.
https://uk.indeed.com/career/surgeon/salaries
Girls seem to prefer the former and boys the latter
It's a few minutes, and reminds me (if anyone has read such) of the account of Wing Commander Yeo-Thomas of his experiences of ritual humiliation when held by the Gestapo in WW2 - recounted in his book "The White Rabbit".
https://youtu.be/dOEQXegQ74U?t=2398
There are more detailed accounts in the Telegraph, in a publicly readable article (I think):
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/terror-and-security/ukraine-female-prisoners-of-war-russia-putin-prisons/
This is the type of account, of which they will be well aware if it is published, to which Mr Trump and Mr Vance have determined not to pay any attention or give any weight.
(It's also the 3rd anniversary of the release of images of the slaughter in Bucha. That is also being given no weight.)
All the awful stuff they do because they want to impress the girls which the girls don't find impressive...
Evolution will no doubt catch up eventually.
(I suspect that the caveman explanation is that, in very ancient times, the boys didn't have to impress the girls so much as scare off the other boys.)
"The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women and the Real Gender Gap
Susan Pinker"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/161976933-the-sexual-paradox
I learnt a heck of a lot. Mainly how not to code. Oh, and the replacement system at a related company, introduced in 1994, was not Y2K compliant...
I would like to see more of this: taking young people for apprentice-style roles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NWVEYdNxLE
"In 2022, the UK journalism workforce was predominantly male, with 59% of journalists being men, a shift from 2020 when women held the majority. There's also a notable decline in female journalists in the UK since 2020. "
https://archive.org/details/1-j.-b.-priestley-dangerous-corner
Also his "I have been here before" which is a bit less known :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L0ppOY34Ug
And possibly my favourite dramatisation of his work 'Salt is Leaving' :
https://archive.org/details/j.-b.-priestly-salt-is-leaving
https://thefsa.org.uk/news/national-supporters-survey-2023-more-stats/
Gender breakdown
Male – 83.8%
Female – 14.5%
Non-binary/other – 0.7%
But that's who answered that survey, so perhaps not representative. That said, 15% feels about right in terms of Arsenal.
Are we to suppose that the 27% who support dictatorship honestly believe there is a peaceful way of replacing one the population come to loathe? Or am I to suppose that they know there isn't, but prefer having an irremovable leader who leads them into famine, war, plague and holocausts?
I think this is meaningless without deeper digging.
My rationale behind this was that geographers or physicists who applied to a popular tech company for a job had a genuine interest in the subject, and coded as a hobby on top of their degree. Whereas many of the comp sci graduates were in it because it was cool and might be a good earner.
Put simply, people not studying comp sci would generally have more of a passion for the topic.
20 years is an eternity in tech, so the situation may well have improved. Or got worse...
And the expectations of 'the magic AI thing' are making it worse.
A look at his IMDB shows a fantastic career.
Lived to a ripe old age too.
I can recommend Iain Dale's book "The Dictators". It gives pocket biographies of many dictators through history, and a precious few were probably positive. Take the Kang Shai-Chek quote: "If when I die, I am still a dictator, I will certainly go down into the oblivion of all dictators. If, on the other hand, I succeed in establishing a truly stable foundation for a democratic government, I will live forever in every home in China."
Kang Shai-Chek was certainly a dictator. Was Taiwan (or China...) better off for him, or without him?
And will Xi Jinping, who many call a dictator, be positive to China?
I cannot see how they reach that conclusion.
He polls almost as well as her in the first round - I can’t see there have been any head to head polls for round 2 but with an RN bounce now looking likely it feels like he could conceivably do as well as her.
And what if he tries the Trumpski/Vance gambit some in the GOP have been dreaming about - he promises once elected he pardons MLP and makes her PM? Run it as a joint campaign.
Immigration and economic issues don't disappear because MLP can't run for president. Putting up a new face, IMO, will end up being beneficial for RN after a short adjustment period.
What is the name for the little loop on a watch strap in which you insert the scrag end of the strap? Because the one on my Garmin's broken. I reckon the extra drag of the loose bit of strap was the reason I was slower in the pool today, and not the drinks I had last night.
And am I the only person who (incorrectly?) uses 'scrag end' for that part of the strap?
If it is an app on Android...
Of course, they didn’t go that route, so they are where they are. I suspect this benefits RN, in all honesty - and I wish it didn’t.
wouldn't be so bad but the people we have a expensive, supposed to be good (they really aren't) and I could have done the entire project in 4 weeks by myself without any of them.
...a loop.
possibly a keeper loop, or some other variation including the word, loop
Women have a lot less strength, on average. Especially upper body strength.
Hence - https://rowinglevel.com/rowing-times/2000m-times
But you said Harris was banging on about transgender rights when she should have campaigned on other things. Do you have any evidence that she spent time campaigning on transgender rights? Because so far as I can tell she avoided the issue as far as possible and it was the Republicans who spent a lot of time and money campaigning on the issue.
My 1980s degree is actually in software engineering - under the title of Information Systems Engineering. The core was about engineering principles applied to software systems, rather than "programming".
https://x.com/VFinnishProbs/status/1906759581432246294
The thing on the end of a watch strap into which you insert the loose end, is surely a "buckle"? Or "loop"?
What do you call the loose end of the belt in your trouser waste band?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oSyJMFZKD0
@Cyclefree 's response was on point.
People chat shit all the time on PB.
The obvious response to "so you're saying that" is "no, I'm not". Which ends the argument.
Some years ago, I worked for a company that had development teams, around the world, working on the same software platform. Perfect time for a comparison.
The cheapest development was in London - in cost per delivered feature. Eastern Europe was next. US was a way down the list. India was dead last. By a distance.
As Neville Shute Norway put it - an engineer is someone who can do for a shilling what any damn fool can do for a pound.
Guess what conclusion the voters draw ?
https://x.com/HuffPost/status/1905920689602691517
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/4524/politicalbetting-com-blog-archive-more-gloomy-by-election-news-for-ukip-and-the-ld-surge-continu/p6
One type is the 'do nothing, let mother nature take her course' religious nutter.
Another is the quack salesman who supports treatment but only of the variety they're flogging.
NEW: Several top US officials were put on administrative leave after denying DOGE access to the federal payroll system that, among many other things, issues paychecks to Supreme Court justices.
https://bsky.app/profile/couts.bsky.social/post/3llpatsv4y22n
"Has the government really 'returned' 24,000 people?"
I also think that abortion was probably a vote-winning issue for Harris.
https://x.com/Noahpinion/status/1906198836688867392
People who don't wondered instead why politicians are talking about abortion instead of 'everyday life issues'.
As to trans, after the election but the general principle applies:
US Senate Democrats block bill to ban trans athletes from women’s sports Democratic senator says trans athletes ‘deserve an ally’ after Republican-led bill quashed in razor-sharp 51-45 vote
US Senate Democrats banded together to torpedo a Republican bill that would ban transgender athletes from women’s sports, defeating the legislation in a razor-sharp party-line vote of 51-45 on Monday evening.
The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, led by Tommy Tuberville, a senator from Alabama, crashed before reaching the 60 votes needed to advance, halting the proposal that had passed the House in January.
A New York Times/Ipsos poll from January found 79% of Americans opposed transgender female athletes competing in women’s sports, a statistic Republicans hoped would bolster their position. Democrats, however, swiftly branded the bill a cynical political distraction.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/04/democrats-block-trans-athletes-bill
This is now ingrained in the public mind - Dems are for trans rights and the GOP are against them. The problem for the Dems is that they're assumed (whether accurately or not) to be on the deeply unpopular side of the issue.
What the Dems need is for the whole trans issue to disappear, which it will not if they keep playing into the GOP's hands on the issue.
It is the jankiest app in the entire portfolio
It was supposed to be a multi-tier application, with three distinct environments, but they just used any server for anything. They wrote some code on one server, then did a fileshare to all the others to distribute it...
We moved the QA servers, then they complained because one of them had production code on it.
Chaos.
There’s something weirdly comforting that they’d still rather spend an evening bickering on the internet than enjoy their locale.
https://x.com/10downingstreet/status/1906803720127750169