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> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may

> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions. What are your opinions about this? Do you think biological differences leads to social differences (not only gender but race, height, etc)? Do our "intelligences" [1] differ based on our gender? [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligenc... [2] https://www.elsevier.com/connect/can-brain-biology-explain-why-men-and-women-think-and-act-differently https://www.elsevier.com/connect/can-brain-biology-explain-w...

remarkEon 9y ago
How can they not? It's an optimization problem, of sorts, from an evolutionary psychology prospective.
Noxchi 9y ago
I recommend this documentary which goes into that question https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask
- jorgemf 9y ago
  I already saw it and that is why I am asking people here. And thanks so much because I was searching for it and couldn't find it. This is my favorite part (her response): https://youtu.be/cVaTc15plVs?t=1851 https://youtu.be/cVaTc15plVs?t=1851
freshhawk 9y ago
I often ask people who talk about this two simple questions: - Is the extreme sex disparity in the prison population in the United States a result of a massive system of anti-male oppression or a result of population level sex differences between men and women. - How do you interpret the experiences of trans people on hormones who experience their personalities change after taking hormones. I'll admit it is a bit of a cheap shot, those are carefully chosen to cause cognitive dissonance, but that's an effective tool for getting people to clarify their opinions.
- saimiam 9y ago
  Of course there are gender differences..but the only relevant question in this context you or anyone should ask is whether those gender differences justify lower participation of women in technology. If you're a capitalist, if you believe in exploiting the market to the benefit yourself, you would be stupid and shortsighted to not find a way to utilize women and minorities in any way possible to serve your business. Say you discover that women and Indians are biologically incapable of working more than 3 hours at a stretch without taking a tea break. Use that tidbit of knowledge to maybe place women and Indians closer to the breakroom. Don't brush their individual idiosyncrasies under the carpet. Use them. And once you start using them to benefit yourself, realize that companies like Google are doing exactly that by promoting policies to bring in and retain women. It's not altruism - it's pure business.
  - jorgemf 9y ago
    > you would be stupid and shortsighted to not find a way to utilize women and minorities in any way possible to serve your business. > companies like Google are doing exactly that by promoting policies to bring in and retain women The problem is that they do it in the extreme. They want to achieve 50% of male and 50% and currently that distribution is not real, there are much more men that women in technology. So they have a positive discrimination for women to get a position even when there is a man that fits better, so they can achieve the 50/50. If you want the best people and the pool of candidates is 70/30 you cannot have the best candidates with 50/50. You should have like 70/30 that is something proportional to the pool of candidates. This leads to the question why there are less women than men in technology. Is it discrimination, oppression, a free choice?
    - biocomputation 9y ago
      >> The problem is that they do it in the extreme. They want to achieve 50% of male and 50% and currently that distribution is not real, there are much more men that women in technology. So they have a positive discrimination for women to get a position even when there is a man that fits better, so they can achieve the 50/50. Yes, but women are 50% of our society. Why would it be wrong to try and make a company represent society? The world is absolutely full of utterly brilliant women.
wpietri 9y ago
The right topic isn't biology, it's history. Historically, for millennia women were treated as property of men. This was justified with all sorts sexist jabber. The same is true of race; ou can read all sorts of racist nonsense from the era of slavery. E.g., the Cornerstone Speech, in which the vice-president of the Confederacy said straight out: "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition." The important thing to note from this is that people will justify the status quo, whatever it is, in terms of what is "natural". They are not really rational, but rationalizing. For the last hundred years or so, we've been struggling our way out of that long era of institutionalized sexism and racism. If we don't fuck it up, we might be truly out of it in another hundred years. Until we have ripped up its roots, then questions of biology should be ignored. Why? One good reason is that historically those arguments have proven incredibly wrong over and over. There's a whole host of things that women supposedly couldn't do that they now do just fine. Second, we should learn a lesson from the long history of rationalizing the status quo. People who do well by the current system will tend to argue to maintain the system. Whenever we find ourselves arguing like that, we should be very suspicious. Third our enormous history of discrimination by gender and race entirely confounds attempts to answer questions of what is truly innate. If we want to get any sort of real answer, we need to build a world with no remaining trace of bias. Only then can we start to see the nature that might exist behind culture. Fourth, and most importantly, it doesn't fucking matter. If men turn out to be naturally, as a group, less good at math than women, does that mean we should stop training men on math? No. We should train men more at math, because math is a valuable skill, humans are very plastic, and nobody should be denied an opportunity just because somebody reduced them to a single bit, and then condemned them to ignorance. It's dumb, it's unkind, it's wasteful. TL;DR: Let's focus on the well-documented historical distortions of massive gender and race bias, not subtle, possibly imaginary gender and race differences that have been used over and over to justify that bias.
- jorgemf 9y ago
  watch this: https://youtu.be/cVaTc15plVs?t=1851 https://youtu.be/cVaTc15plVs?t=1851 (even better if you see it all) biology comes before history, history can be a consequence of biology > If men turn out to be naturally, as a group, less good at math than women, does that mean we should stop training men on math? No. We should train men more at math, because math is a valuable skill This is what scares me of this society. If someone is bad at something lets force him/her to improve at the things he/she is bad at. Instead of focusing on the things a person is good at and try to put them on the next level and make a difference that way, let's focus on the bad things and get a mediocre individual. I love maths, but are you saying art is not a valuable skill compare with maths? Should the great artist bad at math study math and give up in art? You might think that not training someone at something that he/she is bad at is stupid, but some people like me think the stupid thing is to no to focus in what make someone special and good at. And finally, why do you think there is a bias? Couldn't be the reason that there are not more female CS engineers that they choose freely not to be because they just don't like it? The answer is in the video I put before.

remarkEon 9y ago

How can they not? It's an optimization problem, of sorts, from an evolutionary psychology prospective.

Noxchi 9y ago

I recommend this documentary which goes into that question https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask

jorgemf 9y ago
I already saw it and that is why I am asking people here. And thanks so much because I was searching for it and couldn't find it. This is my favorite part (her response): https://youtu.be/cVaTc15plVs?t=1851 https://youtu.be/cVaTc15plVs?t=1851

freshhawk 9y ago

I often ask people who talk about this two simple questions: - Is the extreme sex disparity in the prison population in the United States a result of a massive system of anti-male oppression or a result of population level sex differences between men and women. - How do you interpret the experiences of trans people on hormones who experience their personalities change after taking hormones. I'll admit it is a bit of a cheap shot, those are carefully chosen to cause cognitive dissonance, but that's an effective tool for getting people to clarify their opinions.

saimiam 9y ago
Of course there are gender differences..but the only relevant question in this context you or anyone should ask is whether those gender differences justify lower participation of women in technology. If you're a capitalist, if you believe in exploiting the market to the benefit yourself, you would be stupid and shortsighted to not find a way to utilize women and minorities in any way possible to serve your business. Say you discover that women and Indians are biologically incapable of working more than 3 hours at a stretch without taking a tea break. Use that tidbit of knowledge to maybe place women and Indians closer to the breakroom. Don't brush their individual idiosyncrasies under the carpet. Use them. And once you start using them to benefit yourself, realize that companies like Google are doing exactly that by promoting policies to bring in and retain women. It's not altruism - it's pure business.
- jorgemf 9y ago
  > you would be stupid and shortsighted to not find a way to utilize women and minorities in any way possible to serve your business. > companies like Google are doing exactly that by promoting policies to bring in and retain women The problem is that they do it in the extreme. They want to achieve 50% of male and 50% and currently that distribution is not real, there are much more men that women in technology. So they have a positive discrimination for women to get a position even when there is a man that fits better, so they can achieve the 50/50. If you want the best people and the pool of candidates is 70/30 you cannot have the best candidates with 50/50. You should have like 70/30 that is something proportional to the pool of candidates. This leads to the question why there are less women than men in technology. Is it discrimination, oppression, a free choice?
  - biocomputation 9y ago
    >> The problem is that they do it in the extreme. They want to achieve 50% of male and 50% and currently that distribution is not real, there are much more men that women in technology. So they have a positive discrimination for women to get a position even when there is a man that fits better, so they can achieve the 50/50. Yes, but women are 50% of our society. Why would it be wrong to try and make a company represent society? The world is absolutely full of utterly brilliant women.

wpietri 9y ago

The right topic isn't biology, it's history. Historically, for millennia women were treated as property of men. This was justified with all sorts sexist jabber. The same is true of race; ou can read all sorts of racist nonsense from the era of slavery. E.g., the Cornerstone Speech, in which the vice-president of the Confederacy said straight out: "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition." The important thing to note from this is that people will justify the status quo, whatever it is, in terms of what is "natural". They are not really rational, but rationalizing. For the last hundred years or so, we've been struggling our way out of that long era of institutionalized sexism and racism. If we don't fuck it up, we might be truly out of it in another hundred years. Until we have ripped up its roots, then questions of biology should be ignored. Why? One good reason is that historically those arguments have proven incredibly wrong over and over. There's a whole host of things that women supposedly couldn't do that they now do just fine. Second, we should learn a lesson from the long history of rationalizing the status quo. People who do well by the current system will tend to argue to maintain the system. Whenever we find ourselves arguing like that, we should be very suspicious. Third our enormous history of discrimination by gender and race entirely confounds attempts to answer questions of what is truly innate. If we want to get any sort of real answer, we need to build a world with no remaining trace of bias. Only then can we start to see the nature that might exist behind culture. Fourth, and most importantly, it doesn't fucking matter. If men turn out to be naturally, as a group, less good at math than women, does that mean we should stop training men on math? No. We should train men more at math, because math is a valuable skill, humans are very plastic, and nobody should be denied an opportunity just because somebody reduced them to a single bit, and then condemned them to ignorance. It's dumb, it's unkind, it's wasteful. TL;DR: Let's focus on the well-documented historical distortions of massive gender and race bias, not subtle, possibly imaginary gender and race differences that have been used over and over to justify that bias.

jorgemf 9y ago
watch this: https://youtu.be/cVaTc15plVs?t=1851 https://youtu.be/cVaTc15plVs?t=1851 (even better if you see it all) biology comes before history, history can be a consequence of biology > If men turn out to be naturally, as a group, less good at math than women, does that mean we should stop training men on math? No. We should train men more at math, because math is a valuable skill This is what scares me of this society. If someone is bad at something lets force him/her to improve at the things he/she is bad at. Instead of focusing on the things a person is good at and try to put them on the next level and make a difference that way, let's focus on the bad things and get a mediocre individual. I love maths, but are you saying art is not a valuable skill compare with maths? Should the great artist bad at math study math and give up in art? You might think that not training someone at something that he/she is bad at is stupid, but some people like me think the stupid thing is to no to focus in what make someone special and good at. And finally, why do you think there is a bias? Couldn't be the reason that there are not more female CS engineers that they choose freely not to be because they just don't like it? The answer is in the video I put before.