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The problem I have with that logic is, why wouldn't men decide the same thing? The author's reasoning seems to be 1. young men strive to achieve high statu

The problem I have with that logic is, why wouldn't men decide the same thing? The author's reasoning seems to be 1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group 2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?" but I ask, why? The article seems to be rejecting the idea that men are naturally better than women at programming (and some other ideas) and embracing the idea that women are naturally better than men at finding a suitable career. I suppose this is just as valid of a hypothesis, but I don't think it is good enough to simply dismiss the other one.

Tichy 16y ago
For one thing, achieving high status might not be so relevant for a woman. A womb is inherently valuable, whereas men have to prove by status that they can take care of a child. Or rather, in theory one high status male can make babies with a lot of low status women. It may not quite work that way anymore in todays society (? I am not high status enough to know), but it might still be genetically driving our behavior.
- cabalamat 16y ago
  > It may not quite work that way anymore in todays society Whether or not this is true today is irrelevant; what matters is whether it was true in the environment of evolutionary adaptation.
gwern 16y ago
> men are naturally better than women at programming (and some other ideas) and embracing the idea that women are naturally better than men at finding a suitable career. If it's plausible enough that millions of young women can have their career and life choices distorted away from STEM by a little sexism (a distortion in the dozens or scores of percents), then why isn't it even more plausible that millions of young men can suffer from well-known traits linked with autism or Asperger's (which are known to be vastly more common in males) and make choices distorted towards STEM?
- derefr 16y ago
  It's not that they're not equally plausible; it's that they're not equally solvable. We can "fix" sexism (and thus cause the "right" number of women to go into STEM); we can't "fix" Autism-linked chromosomes in people who have already been born.
  - gwern 16y ago
    Does reality care whether something you have a problem with is solvable?
- isleyaardvark 16y ago
  Or why not say "men are naturally more attracted than women to programming", and human beings have a decent track record of becoming skilled at what they're interested in. There's a big difference between not being interested in doing something and not being as capable at doing something.
  - gwern 16y ago
    I don't put it that way because it makes the causality sound wrong. If you think about men being attracted, then it all sounds neutral and due only to one factor, when it's that men being skewed to STEM makes the fields untenable to women who are, if anything, skewed away from STEM (consider the well-established superiority of women at verbal tasks and interpersonal skills). The question is not why are the other occupations that Greenspun characterizes as attracting women - doctor, psychologist, lawyer, etc. - so well paid, but why STEM occupations are so poorly paid. If we thought about it from the perspective of a Martian who has just landed, we might say, 'programming, especially in its niches like embedded or highly distributed scalable, is an intensely demanding task which can be profoundly alien to the human mind, and often requires years of training and experience starting as a child-user just to begin to grok things; therefore, I would expect it to be highly professionalized and to have salaries for its accomplished specialists quite commensurate with specialists in other fields like medicine.' The Martian, of course, would be quite wrong. In case you didn't bother to read my Greenspun links, he says that a motivated and very intelligent person - the sort of women whose absence is noted in STEM - could expect in their 40s to collect salaries in specialist medicine in the neighborhood of $300,000, or $500,000 as a law firm partner, or $90,000 as a tenured teacher; he didn't cover child psychologists, though I could swear he did somewhere, but those have similar or higher salaries. Assuming you're even able to get tenure in STEM, your salary will be nowhere near any of that... A software engineer elite enough to make it into Google will earn - while he's employed there - somewhere around $100,000. (http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm) So yeah.

Tichy 16y ago

For one thing, achieving high status might not be so relevant for a woman. A womb is inherently valuable, whereas men have to prove by status that they can take care of a child. Or rather, in theory one high status male can make babies with a lot of low status women. It may not quite work that way anymore in todays society (? I am not high status enough to know), but it might still be genetically driving our behavior.

cabalamat 16y ago
> It may not quite work that way anymore in todays society Whether or not this is true today is irrelevant; what matters is whether it was true in the environment of evolutionary adaptation.

gwern 16y ago

> men are naturally better than women at programming (and some other ideas) and embracing the idea that women are naturally better than men at finding a suitable career. If it's plausible enough that millions of young women can have their career and life choices distorted away from STEM by a little sexism (a distortion in the dozens or scores of percents), then why isn't it even more plausible that millions of young men can suffer from well-known traits linked with autism or Asperger's (which are known to be vastly more common in males) and make choices distorted towards STEM?

derefr 16y ago
It's not that they're not equally plausible; it's that they're not equally solvable. We can "fix" sexism (and thus cause the "right" number of women to go into STEM); we can't "fix" Autism-linked chromosomes in people who have already been born.
- gwern 16y ago
  Does reality care whether something you have a problem with is solvable?
isleyaardvark 16y ago
Or why not say "men are naturally more attracted than women to programming", and human beings have a decent track record of becoming skilled at what they're interested in. There's a big difference between not being interested in doing something and not being as capable at doing something.
- gwern 16y ago
  I don't put it that way because it makes the causality sound wrong. If you think about men being attracted, then it all sounds neutral and due only to one factor, when it's that men being skewed to STEM makes the fields untenable to women who are, if anything, skewed away from STEM (consider the well-established superiority of women at verbal tasks and interpersonal skills). The question is not why are the other occupations that Greenspun characterizes as attracting women - doctor, psychologist, lawyer, etc. - so well paid, but why STEM occupations are so poorly paid. If we thought about it from the perspective of a Martian who has just landed, we might say, 'programming, especially in its niches like embedded or highly distributed scalable, is an intensely demanding task which can be profoundly alien to the human mind, and often requires years of training and experience starting as a child-user just to begin to grok things; therefore, I would expect it to be highly professionalized and to have salaries for its accomplished specialists quite commensurate with specialists in other fields like medicine.' The Martian, of course, would be quite wrong. In case you didn't bother to read my Greenspun links, he says that a motivated and very intelligent person - the sort of women whose absence is noted in STEM - could expect in their 40s to collect salaries in specialist medicine in the neighborhood of $300,000, or $500,000 as a law firm partner, or $90,000 as a tenured teacher; he didn't cover child psychologists, though I could swear he did somewhere, but those have similar or higher salaries. Assuming you're even able to get tenure in STEM, your salary will be nowhere near any of that... A software engineer elite enough to make it into Google will earn - while he's employed there - somewhere around $100,000. (http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm) So yeah.