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>You could argue, as the "manifesto" writer did, that there's some kind of innate biological explanation. To me, that's a pretty extraordinary claim and require

>You could argue, as the "manifesto" writer did, that there's some kind of innate biological explanation. To me, that's a pretty extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary proof. I don't understand why people think this is such an extraordinary claim. It would be extraordinary if the sexes were exactly equal. There are very obvious and enormous differences between men and women in numerous areas. Why would we expect them to come out exactly equal? But if you want stronger evidence, try this: http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x >Results show that gender differences in Big Five personality traits are ‘small’ to ‘moderate,’ with the largest differences occurring for agreeableness and neuroticism (respective ds = 0.40 and 0.34; women higher than men). In contrast, gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d= 1.18), with women more people-oriented and less thing-oriented than men. Gender differences in personality tend to be larger in gender-egalitarian societies than in gender-inegalitarian societies, a finding that contradicts social role theory but is consistent with evolutionary, attributional, and social comparison theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences. The point about differences in personality was brought up in the Google memo and perhaps explains your "please" thing. But look at the "interest in people vs interest in things" statistic. A d value of 1.18 is enormous. That means 93% of men are more "thing oriented" than the average women. And that's assuming there is no noise in the measurement, likely the true value is even higher! There's also this later on in the document: >When Del Giudice computed the Mahalanobis D for gender differences in Big Five traits, based on a published data set, he found that although the mean d for gender differences in individual Big Five traits was 0.27 (conventionally considered to be ‘small’), the Mahalanobis D was in contrast 0.84, suggesting a relatively large mean separation of men and women in the multivariate ‘space’ of personality

rayiner 9y ago
The problem is two-fold. First, how do you distinguish how much of those results are innate from how much are the result of how we socialize girls? Second, how do you get from "men are more thing oriented" to "men prefer programming." To give an example: In the U.S., teaching is consider a woman's profession, because it involves "nurturing." But in India, teaching is a man's profession, because it involves training the next generation workforce to participate in the economy. Even if you suppose women are more "nurturing" innately, that doesn't explain any particular demographic distribution among, say, teachers. Another example is the fact that 60% of accountants are women. Accounting is not only about "things" rather than people, but it's often about completely abstract "things" (e.g. accrued tax credits). Women also are more "agreeable." But within, for example, the legal profession, the cooperative practice of transactional law has a lower representation of women than the conflict-oriented area of litigation. Within STEM: over 40% of math majors are women, but only about 20% of CS majors. In other words, "social" and "people-oriented" women evidently prefer a field where people work almost completely alone on completely abstract concepts. Meanwhile, Pinterest's engineering team is almost all men. The point isn't whether biological differences exist. The point is whether the evidence for biological differences explains what we observe in reality. And it really doesn't (not without egregious handwaving, anyway).
- Houshalter 9y ago
  >First, how do you distinguish how much of those results are innate from how much are the result of how we socialize girls? There have been a number of experiments trying to remove all cultural influences from kids and see what toys they prefer. Despite their best efforts, boys still prefer trucks and girls prefer dolls. Why should we expect the differences in interests to disappear with age? Second, where do you get the statistic that 40% of math majors are women? Just a quick Google search and I found this: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/math-women/506417/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/math-wom... >In mathematics, just 15 percent of tenure-track positions are held by women, one of the lowest percentages among the sciences, along with computer science (18 percent), and engineering (14 percent) They are even worse than computer science. This is about exactly what I would expect. (The article of course blames sexism. Since they can't consider any other explanation. But they don't present any evidence to support that.) Even if the differences aren't perfectly predictive of real world outcomes, so what? I'm not claiming they are. All I'm saying is we shouldn't expect the distribution of interest to be a perfect 50:50 split between men and women. If the personality differences between men and women are as significant as these studies show, it would be very surprising if every profession had a perfect gender ratio. Computer programming in particular is extremely interest driven. Programmers like programming and do it in their free time. Most of them taught themselves to do it before they studied it formally. As opposed to your other examples like accounting. How many people do accounting in their free time just for fun?
  - rayiner 9y ago
    This is one of those situations where you have to exercise your logical reasoning skills. Why the hell would there be an innate gendered preference for a toy that represents something that's existed for only about a hundred years? Indeed, a 2013 study shows that both girls and boys prefer dolls at 5 months: http://www.sciencealert.com/boys-prefer-dolls-to-trucks http://www.sciencealert.com/boys-prefer-dolls-to-trucks. And even if there was a gender difference in terms of preferring trucks to dolls, what would that really be measuring? Again, a five month old couldn't possibly have an association between trucks and building things. You could just as easily be measuring the degree to which infants have an affinity for faces. You can't get from that to a preference for/against CS without a whole lot of handwaving. Which is ultimately the big problem. You're pointing to biological differences and saying that must explain observed occupational differences, without providing any theory of causation. It's an argument that doesn't just have little explanatory power, what explanatory power it does have is based on gendered characterizations. (E.g. hypothesizing women prefer teaching because it's a "nurturing" profession, while ignoring societies that don't view it as a nurturing profession at all, where teaching is male dominated). As to math preferences, you're comparing tenure track professors, while I was referring to undergraduate degree holders (hence "math majors"). Women earn over 40% of math/stat undergraduate degrees: https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajors.cfm https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajor....

rayiner 9y ago

The problem is two-fold. First, how do you distinguish how much of those results are innate from how much are the result of how we socialize girls? Second, how do you get from "men are more thing oriented" to "men prefer programming." To give an example: In the U.S., teaching is consider a woman's profession, because it involves "nurturing." But in India, teaching is a man's profession, because it involves training the next generation workforce to participate in the economy. Even if you suppose women are more "nurturing" innately, that doesn't explain any particular demographic distribution among, say, teachers. Another example is the fact that 60% of accountants are women. Accounting is not only about "things" rather than people, but it's often about completely abstract "things" (e.g. accrued tax credits). Women also are more "agreeable." But within, for example, the legal profession, the cooperative practice of transactional law has a lower representation of women than the conflict-oriented area of litigation. Within STEM: over 40% of math majors are women, but only about 20% of CS majors. In other words, "social" and "people-oriented" women evidently prefer a field where people work almost completely alone on completely abstract concepts. Meanwhile, Pinterest's engineering team is almost all men. The point isn't whether biological differences exist. The point is whether the evidence for biological differences explains what we observe in reality. And it really doesn't (not without egregious handwaving, anyway).

Houshalter 9y ago
>First, how do you distinguish how much of those results are innate from how much are the result of how we socialize girls? There have been a number of experiments trying to remove all cultural influences from kids and see what toys they prefer. Despite their best efforts, boys still prefer trucks and girls prefer dolls. Why should we expect the differences in interests to disappear with age? Second, where do you get the statistic that 40% of math majors are women? Just a quick Google search and I found this: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/math-women/506417/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/math-wom... >In mathematics, just 15 percent of tenure-track positions are held by women, one of the lowest percentages among the sciences, along with computer science (18 percent), and engineering (14 percent) They are even worse than computer science. This is about exactly what I would expect. (The article of course blames sexism. Since they can't consider any other explanation. But they don't present any evidence to support that.) Even if the differences aren't perfectly predictive of real world outcomes, so what? I'm not claiming they are. All I'm saying is we shouldn't expect the distribution of interest to be a perfect 50:50 split between men and women. If the personality differences between men and women are as significant as these studies show, it would be very surprising if every profession had a perfect gender ratio. Computer programming in particular is extremely interest driven. Programmers like programming and do it in their free time. Most of them taught themselves to do it before they studied it formally. As opposed to your other examples like accounting. How many people do accounting in their free time just for fun?
- rayiner 9y ago
  This is one of those situations where you have to exercise your logical reasoning skills. Why the hell would there be an innate gendered preference for a toy that represents something that's existed for only about a hundred years? Indeed, a 2013 study shows that both girls and boys prefer dolls at 5 months: http://www.sciencealert.com/boys-prefer-dolls-to-trucks http://www.sciencealert.com/boys-prefer-dolls-to-trucks. And even if there was a gender difference in terms of preferring trucks to dolls, what would that really be measuring? Again, a five month old couldn't possibly have an association between trucks and building things. You could just as easily be measuring the degree to which infants have an affinity for faces. You can't get from that to a preference for/against CS without a whole lot of handwaving. Which is ultimately the big problem. You're pointing to biological differences and saying that must explain observed occupational differences, without providing any theory of causation. It's an argument that doesn't just have little explanatory power, what explanatory power it does have is based on gendered characterizations. (E.g. hypothesizing women prefer teaching because it's a "nurturing" profession, while ignoring societies that don't view it as a nurturing profession at all, where teaching is male dominated). As to math preferences, you're comparing tenure track professors, while I was referring to undergraduate degree holders (hence "math majors"). Women earn over 40% of math/stat undergraduate degrees: https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajors.cfm https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajor....