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> It'd be one thing if we discovered that male brains were inherently better at tech thinking (it would be an extraordinary hypothesis that would need correspon

> It'd be one thing if we discovered that male brains were inherently better at tech thinking (it would be an extraordinary hypothesis that would need correspondingly extraordinary evidence, but it's certainly possible that evidence could be found). Given that males and females have vastly different reproductive strategies, the extraordinary claim is that male and female minds don't display the same sexual dimorphism as male and female bodies.

geofft 10y ago
Oh no, I totally believe that the minds exhibit dimorphism. The claim I think is extraordinary is that the dimorphism is correlated with tech thinking, which, for starters, isn't a well-defined term. Is it raw programming ability? (If so, there are lots of reasons to believe that women are more suited to it than men, which were common folklore in the middle of last century when programming was low-status.) Is it project management? Business sense? Insight into emerging industries? The ability to learn new complex systems? The ability to work with other people effectively? Once you have that, what's the argument that male brains are better at that particular type of thinking? The fact that more men happen to be employed to do this thinking isn't an argument; at best it's initial evidence that would inspire you to create a hypothesis, but it's not the end of the study by any means. The interpretation that seems most likely to me, but which is unfortunately horribly politically incorrect, is that men are more likely to be territorial assholes about high-status positions in society, and we'll preserve our exclusivity when we have it. This manifests as us being better at $field for any $field because we don't allow women to have a chance to succeed. (We might allow enough of a chance to succeed so we can avoid accusations of sexism, which would risk our exclusivity, but we don't want to go so far that we concede the exclusivity on our own.) At least this hypothesis has the advantage of the known fact that having an aggressive personality is correlated with gender.
- toasterlovin 10y ago
  This is a hunch on my part, but I think the place to look for dimorphism isn't so much in raw ability as it is in motivation and willingness to take risk. This is a non-PC opinion to match yours (which I largely agree with), but I think the desire to learn how to program is highly related to the desire to tinker and build, something which my life experience has shown to be much more prevalent in males than females (wood working, model building, car tinkering, etc. being largely male hobbies) In addition to that, until recently, programming was a pretty high risk career choice. I think most people would not have predicted the sheer quantity of upper middle class careers that now exist in technology. I know when I was in college the received wisdom was that you became a doctor or a lawyer if you wanted a low-risk path to an upper middle class lifestyle. And I think those two professions are much more evenly balanced between males and females as a result.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    For every male I know that has strong opinions about IPAs and Overwatch, I know two women that spend their weekends working on things we call "maker projects" when dudes do them, but other things when women do them because women have been doing them forever. Have you ever paid serious attention to a real sewing project? It's a lot more like software construction than most of the things dudes do in their spare time.
    - toasterlovin 10y ago
      > Have you ever paid serious attention to a real sewing project? It's a lot more like software construction than most of the things dudes do in their spare time. Yes, my wife sews and knits. Hence my position that it's not really about raw ability. I think the entry route to programming has historically had a lot in common with how somebody starts tinkering with machines (cars, appliances, farm equipment, timepieces, etc), despite the fact that programming is about manipulating abstract concepts and tinkering is about manipulating physical machines. When telling their origin stories, many programmers will start by recounting the first physical computer they owned and how programming was a result of learning how to manipulate that machine. To me, it sounds an awful lot like how car guys talk about their first cars. Anyway, just a hunch.
  - geofft 10y ago
    I'm not sure I buy the tinkering argument. There are types of tinkering that are stereotypically male, but also types that are stereotypically female: see "old wives' remedies," cooking, sewing / knitting, etc. I buy the risk argument in theory; anecdotally, friends who are women in tech seem to worry a bit more than friends who are men in tech about long-term career stability. But tech has been low-risk for the last few decades. Even when I was very young I remember being aware that Bill Gates was the richest man in the world, and he did programming, and programming was a thing I could learn. And the number of women in tech has been dropping since approximately the time Bill Gates became the richest man in the world. I think the risk argument could apply well to high-risk tech career decisions, though, of which there are still quite a few like founding startups. But becoming a rank-and-file software engineer at a big corporation has been a low-risk high-reward career choice for a good while. See, for instance, this graph of the proportion of CS graduates by gender (from ComputerWorld): http://core0.staticworld.net/images/idge/imported/article/ctw/2013/04/04/women2-100386539-orig.jpg http://core0.staticworld.net/images/idge/imported/article/ct...

geofft 10y ago

Oh no, I totally believe that the minds exhibit dimorphism. The claim I think is extraordinary is that the dimorphism is correlated with tech thinking, which, for starters, isn't a well-defined term. Is it raw programming ability? (If so, there are lots of reasons to believe that women are more suited to it than men, which were common folklore in the middle of last century when programming was low-status.) Is it project management? Business sense? Insight into emerging industries? The ability to learn new complex systems? The ability to work with other people effectively? Once you have that, what's the argument that male brains are better at that particular type of thinking? The fact that more men happen to be employed to do this thinking isn't an argument; at best it's initial evidence that would inspire you to create a hypothesis, but it's not the end of the study by any means. The interpretation that seems most likely to me, but which is unfortunately horribly politically incorrect, is that men are more likely to be territorial assholes about high-status positions in society, and we'll preserve our exclusivity when we have it. This manifests as us being better at $field for any $field because we don't allow women to have a chance to succeed. (We might allow enough of a chance to succeed so we can avoid accusations of sexism, which would risk our exclusivity, but we don't want to go so far that we concede the exclusivity on our own.) At least this hypothesis has the advantage of the known fact that having an aggressive personality is correlated with gender.

toasterlovin 10y ago
This is a hunch on my part, but I think the place to look for dimorphism isn't so much in raw ability as it is in motivation and willingness to take risk. This is a non-PC opinion to match yours (which I largely agree with), but I think the desire to learn how to program is highly related to the desire to tinker and build, something which my life experience has shown to be much more prevalent in males than females (wood working, model building, car tinkering, etc. being largely male hobbies) In addition to that, until recently, programming was a pretty high risk career choice. I think most people would not have predicted the sheer quantity of upper middle class careers that now exist in technology. I know when I was in college the received wisdom was that you became a doctor or a lawyer if you wanted a low-risk path to an upper middle class lifestyle. And I think those two professions are much more evenly balanced between males and females as a result.
- tptacek 10y ago
  For every male I know that has strong opinions about IPAs and Overwatch, I know two women that spend their weekends working on things we call "maker projects" when dudes do them, but other things when women do them because women have been doing them forever. Have you ever paid serious attention to a real sewing project? It's a lot more like software construction than most of the things dudes do in their spare time.
  - toasterlovin 10y ago
    > Have you ever paid serious attention to a real sewing project? It's a lot more like software construction than most of the things dudes do in their spare time. Yes, my wife sews and knits. Hence my position that it's not really about raw ability. I think the entry route to programming has historically had a lot in common with how somebody starts tinkering with machines (cars, appliances, farm equipment, timepieces, etc), despite the fact that programming is about manipulating abstract concepts and tinkering is about manipulating physical machines. When telling their origin stories, many programmers will start by recounting the first physical computer they owned and how programming was a result of learning how to manipulate that machine. To me, it sounds an awful lot like how car guys talk about their first cars. Anyway, just a hunch.
- geofft 10y ago
  I'm not sure I buy the tinkering argument. There are types of tinkering that are stereotypically male, but also types that are stereotypically female: see "old wives' remedies," cooking, sewing / knitting, etc. I buy the risk argument in theory; anecdotally, friends who are women in tech seem to worry a bit more than friends who are men in tech about long-term career stability. But tech has been low-risk for the last few decades. Even when I was very young I remember being aware that Bill Gates was the richest man in the world, and he did programming, and programming was a thing I could learn. And the number of women in tech has been dropping since approximately the time Bill Gates became the richest man in the world. I think the risk argument could apply well to high-risk tech career decisions, though, of which there are still quite a few like founding startups. But becoming a rank-and-file software engineer at a big corporation has been a low-risk high-reward career choice for a good while. See, for instance, this graph of the proportion of CS graduates by gender (from ComputerWorld): http://core0.staticworld.net/images/idge/imported/article/ctw/2013/04/04/women2-100386539-orig.jpg http://core0.staticworld.net/images/idge/imported/article/ct...