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I think this post is skipping the crucial factor in all this. It's not about children--at least not directly. It's about risk. Several years ago I read an arti

by cletus 16y ago

I think this post is skipping the crucial factor in all this. It's not about children--at least not directly. It's about risk. Several years ago I read an article that analyzed the work preferences of the genders. It demonstrably showed that: - Men are more likely to do riskier jobs; - Men are more likely to travel further to work (including internationally); - Women tend to choose that are closer to home. Basically it came down to risk-aversion. Women are, on the whole, more averse to risk than men. A startup, compared to any salaried job, is far riskier. You can work for years on substandard pay and much longer hours and end up nothing. Of course you could also end up a millionaire (or even a billionaire). Obviously children will be a factor for some (both men and women but more women than men, on the whole) and you can argue that the risk aversion is a product of the child factor but I think you see these same traits in women who are childless (so you then have to stretch the child factor to women who may one day have children, which applies to pretty much any women under 40 so is really a non-argument). Tech Crunch had a post about this a few months ago. The tech press wants to write stories about women entrepreneurs. Companies and business schools have diversity policies the result of which is that the entrance requirement for women are generally lower than their male counterparts. Equality isn't the same thing as being identical. If less than 50% of entrepreneurs or programmers are women is not a failure of equal opportunity. Nowadays there aren't any barriers preventing women from taking these paths (quite the opposite, actually). It's simply that less women choose these routes.

shareme 16y ago
BS! The highest risk in the modern world for both men and women is to form a lasting marriage with children! The difference as in other professions is the unfair and unjust burden women face in having a family as Men of the world are not yet up to the task of full sharing of child rearing duties. Has very little to do with the want..cost of the want however different story
- Groxx 16y ago
  Risk aversion makes sense from a biological standpoint, though. Males are expendable, thus must show off to get mating rights (because we don't live in a world where women are won (in most places)). As to the Modern World, men rarely take maternity leave. That's a long time to be away from a job, a large risk for the company, at a possibly highly inopportune moment. Risk.
InfinityX0 16y ago
Yes, women are more risk averse... but why is that? Is it possible it cycles back to the same instinctual genealogical pulls to continue the bloodline?
- ewjordan 16y ago
  An evolutionary argument could be made that it's because a man that does extremely risky things (like, say, sleeping with every woman that he is able to) can spread his genes far and wide as a reward for such behavior (he'll have a lot of children). Whereas a woman engaging in the same behaviors can only be have one child every nine months, and for most of human history, every pregnancy carried with it a high risk of death, so there was a pretty hard limit to the "payoff" for such risk-seeking in women. Put another way: as far as natural selection goes, women undergo a selection process that, depending on their fitness (and chance, of course), replaces them with maybe 0-6 copies of their genes; men, on the other hand, can be replaced with many more (even if, on average, they are not, the distribution is much wider), and those that hit the "jackpot" will tend to very quickly spread their genes throughout the pool. The extent to which this actually happened is unclear; I don't know off the top of my head if there are good ways to investigate the landscape of possible fitness outcomes based on only the genome, but if this did happen to any significant degree we'd likely find that wild genetic variations stabilize more quickly on the Y chromosome than on the X (we'd also find that wild variations elsewhere, good and bad, tend to spawn more often from males rather than females, but I'm reasonably sure there's no way to see that without a full DNA history because any genetic material not on the Y chromosome ends up in females as well as males). I'm currently very interested in this because I think it might be a useful approach in genetic algorithms to cut a balance between the two common strategies for selection - the male replacement strategy (weighted by fitness) is very useful for spreading good characteristics quickly through a population, but the female one (flat selection via a fitness cutoff) is good at preventing one particular trait from forcing fixation of all the genetic cruft that happens to sit beside it. For instance, imagine that we're evolving zubbins, and each one has two traits, color and size. It turns out that the optimal zubbin for this environment is red and tiny, where "red" is extremely important, and "tiny" less so. If we started out with a population mixed between tiny green zubbins and large red zubbins, a fitness-weighted reproduction strategy would cause the large red zubbins to very quickly overtake the entire population, and we'd lose the "tiny" trait altogether, and the only way it could be recreated would be by mutation (which is a relatively weak evolutionary force, typically). On the other hand, if half the population was selected by a cutoff, there are more "spots" available for less fit zubbins, some of which will be tiny, so eventually we'll see some tiny red zubbins, which is what we're after, and these will still reach fixation quickly enough because of the massive benefit that the male offspring will have. If only the male reproductive strategy was in play, the crappy "large" trait hitchhikes along with the useful "red" one, destroying the "tiny" trait altogether; conversely, if only the female strategy was happening, fixation would take much longer. What I'm not sure about, though, is whether there's any real benefit to separating the two strategies (i.e. creating both male and female classes) rather than coming up with one method that cuts a good balance between them (offering a slight extra benefit to highly fit creatures, but just setting a cutoff at some point). There are a lot of other reasons that sexual reproduction is evolutionarily useful in the real world, and many of those don't carry over to code.
jdp23 16y ago
you're describing the stereotype about risk aversion, not the reality. in actuality women have been starting up companies at twice the rate of men for the last several years http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704688604575125543191609632.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870468860457512...
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  According to the article: "... their [Men's] aim is for their businesses to grow as big as possible. Women start businesses to be personally challenged and to integrate work and family..." It seems that men build startups, but women build lifestyle businesses.
mklg1266 16y ago
"Nowadays there aren't any barriers preventing women from taking these paths (quite the opposite, actually). It's simply that less women choose these routes." Begging the question. As you point out, there are no laws or physical barriers preventing women in the US from doing just about anything, so their heavy relative underrepresentation means by definition they're choosing not to. The question is: why not? Choices aren't made in a vacuum. What is it about our culture and society that has led to the percentage of women in tech/computing to drop pretty much consistently since the field was invented while their numbers increase in many other formerly all-male professions? You posit that women are observed to be more risk-averse, and that this explains why they avoid founding startups. Leaving aside whether this is true, I repeat my question: why? (Tangentially, as I think someone else pointed out, the "women are biologically risk-averse" trope can only explain why women "choose" to not found startups, not why they "choose" to not work as a dev at a big tech company, for example, where the risk level is close to nil. Have you looked at the health benefits/maternity leave/termination policies at places like IBM or Microsoft?) Everyone loves to triangulate complex evolutionary explanations to this kind of question, but a cultural argument is even simpler to make: women get paid less, are taken less seriously, are subject to glass ceilings, harassment, discrimination, have a higher probability of being raped, etc etc, every single day. Moreover, women are explicitly told from an early age not to dress too provocatively, never leave a drink unattended, never ever ever walk home alone at night. . .and that's leaving aside the more subtle cultural pressures that discourage them from the sciences. Women are at higher "risk" than men just by virtue of their gender, and they're reminded of this, with an implicit or explicit injunction to be careful, all the damned time. That might serve as a reasonable explanation for why they'd be more risk-averse, but is unfortunate in that it can't be shrugged aside with a trite evolutionary explanation. Just because there are no laws preventing women from doing something does not mean that the playing field is equal.
- cperciva 16y ago
  women get paid less, are taken less seriously, are subject to glass ceilings, harassment, discrimination, have a higher probability of being raped, etc etc, every single day. Conversely, men are less likely to attend college, are more likely to be unemployed, are more likely be injured in the course of employment, are more likely to be the victim of a violent crime, are more likely to be incarcerated, etc etc, every single day. Just because there are no laws preventing women from doing something does not mean that the playing field is equal. Just because there are inequities in one direction does not mean that there aren't also inequities in the opposite direction.

by cletus 16y ago

shareme 16y ago

BS! The highest risk in the modern world for both men and women is to form a lasting marriage with children! The difference as in other professions is the unfair and unjust burden women face in having a family as Men of the world are not yet up to the task of full sharing of child rearing duties. Has very little to do with the want..cost of the want however different story

Groxx 16y ago
Risk aversion makes sense from a biological standpoint, though. Males are expendable, thus must show off to get mating rights (because we don't live in a world where women are won (in most places)). As to the Modern World, men rarely take maternity leave. That's a long time to be away from a job, a large risk for the company, at a possibly highly inopportune moment. Risk.

InfinityX0 16y ago

Yes, women are more risk averse... but why is that? Is it possible it cycles back to the same instinctual genealogical pulls to continue the bloodline?

ewjordan 16y ago
An evolutionary argument could be made that it's because a man that does extremely risky things (like, say, sleeping with every woman that he is able to) can spread his genes far and wide as a reward for such behavior (he'll have a lot of children). Whereas a woman engaging in the same behaviors can only be have one child every nine months, and for most of human history, every pregnancy carried with it a high risk of death, so there was a pretty hard limit to the "payoff" for such risk-seeking in women. Put another way: as far as natural selection goes, women undergo a selection process that, depending on their fitness (and chance, of course), replaces them with maybe 0-6 copies of their genes; men, on the other hand, can be replaced with many more (even if, on average, they are not, the distribution is much wider), and those that hit the "jackpot" will tend to very quickly spread their genes throughout the pool. The extent to which this actually happened is unclear; I don't know off the top of my head if there are good ways to investigate the landscape of possible fitness outcomes based on only the genome, but if this did happen to any significant degree we'd likely find that wild genetic variations stabilize more quickly on the Y chromosome than on the X (we'd also find that wild variations elsewhere, good and bad, tend to spawn more often from males rather than females, but I'm reasonably sure there's no way to see that without a full DNA history because any genetic material not on the Y chromosome ends up in females as well as males). I'm currently very interested in this because I think it might be a useful approach in genetic algorithms to cut a balance between the two common strategies for selection - the male replacement strategy (weighted by fitness) is very useful for spreading good characteristics quickly through a population, but the female one (flat selection via a fitness cutoff) is good at preventing one particular trait from forcing fixation of all the genetic cruft that happens to sit beside it. For instance, imagine that we're evolving zubbins, and each one has two traits, color and size. It turns out that the optimal zubbin for this environment is red and tiny, where "red" is extremely important, and "tiny" less so. If we started out with a population mixed between tiny green zubbins and large red zubbins, a fitness-weighted reproduction strategy would cause the large red zubbins to very quickly overtake the entire population, and we'd lose the "tiny" trait altogether, and the only way it could be recreated would be by mutation (which is a relatively weak evolutionary force, typically). On the other hand, if half the population was selected by a cutoff, there are more "spots" available for less fit zubbins, some of which will be tiny, so eventually we'll see some tiny red zubbins, which is what we're after, and these will still reach fixation quickly enough because of the massive benefit that the male offspring will have. If only the male reproductive strategy was in play, the crappy "large" trait hitchhikes along with the useful "red" one, destroying the "tiny" trait altogether; conversely, if only the female strategy was happening, fixation would take much longer. What I'm not sure about, though, is whether there's any real benefit to separating the two strategies (i.e. creating both male and female classes) rather than coming up with one method that cuts a good balance between them (offering a slight extra benefit to highly fit creatures, but just setting a cutoff at some point). There are a lot of other reasons that sexual reproduction is evolutionarily useful in the real world, and many of those don't carry over to code.

jdp23 16y ago

you're describing the stereotype about risk aversion, not the reality. in actuality women have been starting up companies at twice the rate of men for the last several years http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704688604575125543191609632.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870468860457512...

yummyfajitas 16y ago
According to the article: "... their [Men's] aim is for their businesses to grow as big as possible. Women start businesses to be personally challenged and to integrate work and family..." It seems that men build startups, but women build lifestyle businesses.

mklg1266 16y ago

"Nowadays there aren't any barriers preventing women from taking these paths (quite the opposite, actually). It's simply that less women choose these routes." Begging the question. As you point out, there are no laws or physical barriers preventing women in the US from doing just about anything, so their heavy relative underrepresentation means by definition they're choosing not to. The question is: why not? Choices aren't made in a vacuum. What is it about our culture and society that has led to the percentage of women in tech/computing to drop pretty much consistently since the field was invented while their numbers increase in many other formerly all-male professions? You posit that women are observed to be more risk-averse, and that this explains why they avoid founding startups. Leaving aside whether this is true, I repeat my question: why? (Tangentially, as I think someone else pointed out, the "women are biologically risk-averse" trope can only explain why women "choose" to not found startups, not why they "choose" to not work as a dev at a big tech company, for example, where the risk level is close to nil. Have you looked at the health benefits/maternity leave/termination policies at places like IBM or Microsoft?) Everyone loves to triangulate complex evolutionary explanations to this kind of question, but a cultural argument is even simpler to make: women get paid less, are taken less seriously, are subject to glass ceilings, harassment, discrimination, have a higher probability of being raped, etc etc, every single day. Moreover, women are explicitly told from an early age not to dress too provocatively, never leave a drink unattended, never ever ever walk home alone at night. . .and that's leaving aside the more subtle cultural pressures that discourage them from the sciences. Women are at higher "risk" than men just by virtue of their gender, and they're reminded of this, with an implicit or explicit injunction to be careful, all the damned time. That might serve as a reasonable explanation for why they'd be more risk-averse, but is unfortunate in that it can't be shrugged aside with a trite evolutionary explanation. Just because there are no laws preventing women from doing something does not mean that the playing field is equal.

cperciva 16y ago
women get paid less, are taken less seriously, are subject to glass ceilings, harassment, discrimination, have a higher probability of being raped, etc etc, every single day. Conversely, men are less likely to attend college, are more likely to be unemployed, are more likely be injured in the course of employment, are more likely to be the victim of a violent crime, are more likely to be incarcerated, etc etc, every single day. Just because there are no laws preventing women from doing something does not mean that the playing field is equal. Just because there are inequities in one direction does not mean that there aren't also inequities in the opposite direction.