Good point. Well, let's do some projection on the IT, because I think it's somewhat better known for most of us here. How many good women programmers do you k

Good point. Well, let's do some projection on the IT, because I think it's somewhat better known for most of us here. How many good women programmers do you know? Do you remember them because they're exceptionally good or because they're women? If you believe my statement that they're "dramatically underrepresented in IT" (if you don't, I'll have to bring in some statistics like [1]), is it because they're: a) less suitable for IT jobs (for whatever reason) b) don't tend to like IT c) b) because of a) d) a) because of b) e) strongly abused at IT work [2] f) not their fault, employer's Given that I don't believe that IT guys are aggressive towards women, I am left with five options. f) is probable but I thought USA was an example of sex tolerance and stuff. So I am left with statements a) to d) with d) being my argument of choice. There was an interesting insight on the subject of gender differences in [3] and some not-statistically-worthy-but-probably-scientifically-correct proof of the fact that women's brains are wired differently than men's. Now back to military, cooking and teaching. There is a reason why women were "dramatically underrepresented" in military in Paleolithic era. If you pick most animal communities the male species are generally the defenders, the warriors, the aggressors. I believe that to be hard-wired to the brain. I admit that point about endurance is probably not valid, my bad, but women still can't run kilometers with full equipment on them. There was another point with totally anecdotal evidence: women-only teams work worse than men-only teams in my experience. Is it because males tend to be ultra-competitive and better team players? I think so. Teaching. Now don't get me wrong, I admit that mothers have really great positive impact on their children, but I also think that in school and universities the teachers should be mostly men, at least for the "male audience". Boys need an authority, an example, a leader. Cooking. I guess that's most controversial of three, because there shouldn't be any hard prerequisites for chef that women cannot meet. Yet they're "dramatically underrepresented" for one reason or other. This is a long comment already, but the core idea is that in a good company you shouldn't be afraid to express your opinion, even if it doesn't have some fundamental research base behind it. There's nothing wrong in being wrong. It's wrong to be wrong and not admit it. [1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Csbachelors.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Csbachelors.jp... -- data is somewhat old but it shows the proportion. Believe me, percentages are even worse for Russia (probably because Russia is overwhelmingly sexist) [2] Which makes me think of http://asset.soup.io/asset/1056/5293_e98d_500.gif http://asset.soup.io/asset/1056/5293_e98d_500.gif [3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646105 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646105