6 ms·

New study: Software teams with more women communicate better

16 points by singron 7y ago

twomoretime 7y ago
This is dangerous junk science and is only having a counterproductive effect on gender relations by cheapening the achievements of women. The same goes for other minorities who are treated like lesser people who need handouts. This is the softest of sciences, minimally quantitative, non-experimentally verifiable and therefore subject to massive institutional bias - the same way that proponents of forced equity believe that the institutions they are fighting with have developed their own biases. Equality of opportunity does not imply equality of outcome. But it doesn't matter - this post will likely be flagged because our own institution is increasingly biased toward certain unacceptable viewpoints - to the degree that we forbid discussion on nearly every popular forum. But you're only emboldening and recruiting extremists when you silence an entire alternative point of view. Edit: Let me explain further, and justify my use of the word "dangerous." Let's forget for a moment the specific topic at hand. Imagine a field of study which is strongly influencing corporate and, local, state, and federal policy, which is simultaneously immune from criticism because of cultural norms. That is where all of these pro-diversity and pro-inclusion studies are coming from. I'm not necessarily suggesting that they're wrong - only that systematically, institutionally, this is poor science and possibly leading society down a suboptimal path. One side of the diversity and inclusion discussion is forbidden. We are forced, top down, to take it as a given that this is how things should be done. I cannot support alternative viewpoints with sources because researchers who would publish anything against the grain would be, in modern parlance, cancelled.
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  Here's the study [1]. If you want to discuss it, address specifics from it. Right now, you are simply coming in and spouting your personal political opinions in a detached and needlessly argumentative way. [1] https://www.win.tue.nl/~aserebre/IEEESWGenderSmells-preprint.pdf https://www.win.tue.nl/~aserebre/IEEESWGenderSmells-preprint...
  - twomoretime 7y ago
    Thank you for linking. Now I can confirm that the study is, frankly, bullshit. Ignoring the ridiculous sample size of 34, the "smells" are totally subjective. In fact one could argue in favor of each of them - this reminds me of open concept cargo culting: Organizational Silo. Siloed groups in the community that do not communicate with each other, except through one or two of their respective members; >1. Organizational Silo. Siloed groups in the community that do not communicate with each other, except through one or two of their respective members; If I'm working on team A I don't need to know what literally every person on every other team is doing. >2. Black Cloud. There is an excessive information overload due to the lack of structured communication. This might lead to a huge increase of data exchanges across a community; What? Lack of communication leads to excessive information? That doesn't even make sense. >3. Lone Wolf. Unsanctioned or defiant contributors who work in an irrespective manner or regardless of their team; Where I'm from we call this initiative. I've been rewarded for showing it my entire life. This is not black and white. >4. Radio Silence. One team member interposes themselves into every formal communication across two or more sub-communities with little or no flexibility to introduce other parallel channels. I don't even understand what this means. None of the first three points are black and white, as they make them out to be. This is pure ideologically driven data mining playing off the stereotype of women being better communicators. Ironic.
- cardine 7y ago
  It's likely going to get flagged because you discard the entire article as junk science without even vaguely addressing the points of the article or study and reverting to the same tired, outdated, and in this case irrelevant to the article, talking points. I think it is you and not the article who is showing immense bias.
- briga 7y ago
  Do you know of any studies on this topic that aren't "junk science", or do you just not like the idea put forward here? In general it doesn't seem far-fetched to me that women might be better communicators than men in general, but I don't have any hard evidence for or against this.
- pdubs1 7y ago
  Here's an interesting summary of how usage of woke & SJW terminology dramatically increased in NYT publications since 2010 (alongside its increase in other forms of media). It's a "divide and conquer" social engineering strategy to get regular people fighting each other based on in-borne traits (via tribalist psychological manipulation -- pervasive in our entertainment & political media currently) rather than teaming up to fight corporate control of politics, media, & the military industrial complex. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/the-nytimes-is-woke.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...
thendrill 7y ago
Yeh... Cool story. That would work if you are "deploying" a "solution" like Facebook for work... Dynamix, SharePoint or office 365... Sap and Salesforce is where it gets complicated. Finding one female embedded engineer that knows the difference between a variable on the stack or the heap is basically like striking gold while winning the lottery. It is a problem of quality not quantity...
pdubs1 7y ago
Sample size: 34, for determining "community smell" ahh yes how quantitative their metrics for that must be. Nooo, this isn't politically biased at all ;) They didn't SEEK this outcome of their study to conform with currently in-vogue political trends, not at all-- it's in no way biased ;) No, no, you see-- We must get men to think, act and communicate like women! And women to think, act and communicate like men. Yes, that's the answer-- Confuse people into thinking they're the same while demonizing men and elevating women with fake, clearly ideologically biased, nonsensical studies which use terms like "community smell". Neomarxists/diversity-outraged: Women and men are equal. Neomarxists/diversity-outraged: Women are better than men. We need more women in positions of power! (Search: "Entryism") Noo... this couldn't be biased by current fad politics... not at all ;) /sarcasm In case anyone is wondering why Woke/SJW/identity-politics neomarxist messaging suddenly increased in the media in the 2010-2020 timeframe-- Here's an interesting summary of how usage of woke & SJW terminology dramatically increased in NYT publications since 2010 (alongside its increase in other forms of media). https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/the-nytimes-is-woke.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th... The use of "Woke" & SJW terminology rapidly increased following the dissolution of Occupy Wallstreet movement in 2010. Hint: It's almost as if media/politics/entertainment elites are encouraging the middle class to fight each other, rather than the top 0.001% ;)
- conductr 7y ago
  I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact we have a racist/sexist/while(bad)-ist president and resurgence of all these feelings a portion of the country
  - pdubs1 7y ago
    Yes, orange man bad indeed. Now that we are in agreement, please check the link I shared. It is a coordinated campaign that began around 2010 to distract away from the occupy wallstreet movement. It's an obvious "divide and conquer" strategy to take the social pressure off of the top class of ruling economic elites.
    - 7y ago
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
Does anyone have access to the original paper? From the look at this article, I am extremely curious as to how they quantified what they defined as "community smells". From the article: ---- For the study, the authors looked at four types of community smells: 1. Organizational Silos. Groups in the community don’t communicate with each other, except through one or two of their respective members. 2. Black Clouds. Community members are overloaded with information because communication isn’t structured well. 3. Lone Wolves. Defiant, disrespectful contributors won’t listen to others. 4. Bottlenecks. One team member wants to be the only way information moves between sub-communities. Previous studies have shown that women are fundamental to reducing community smells and avoiding accumulating social debt for teams in other industries. But these studies show that women increase team efficiency and organizational quality on software engineering teams specifically. Teams with no women have 7 mean community smells compared to 3 for teams with at least one woman. These results are statistically significant (p-value < 0.05) and have a large effect size (d=0.68). ----
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  This appears to be it: https://www.win.tue.nl/~aserebre/IEEESWGenderSmells-preprint.pdf https://www.win.tue.nl/~aserebre/IEEESWGenderSmells-preprint...
  - ghostpepper 7y ago
    Has this been proof-read? There's a grammatical error in the second sentence on the first page. > we found [...] a strictly connection between gender diversity and communication patterns Obviously this doesn't necessarily reflect the quality of the research but it is jarring to the reader and makes one question what else about the paper has not been checked over before publication
    - Pfhreak 7y ago
      I'm not sure. I found it by Googling. I think, given there are several authors listed that, yes, it has been proof-read. Generally I wouldn't consider the occasional typo to be indicative of the quality of the underlying research. Zooming in on a minor detail in an attempt to paint the paper negatively seems needlessly pedantic, but that's just my opinion.
blululu 7y ago
For the actual research, the cited paper can be found here: https://dibt.unimol.it/staff/fpalomba/documents/C43.pdf https://dibt.unimol.it/staff/fpalomba/documents/C43.pdf
all_factz 7y ago
Absolutely shocking, women are better at communicating than men.
- pdubs1 7y ago
  Shocking: Men and women aren't equal.
  - twomoretime 7y ago
    Which is exactly what the conclusions of the study imply... In which case, if men and women do not on average perform equally at given tasks, there's no reason to expect gender parity or even pay parity in meritocratic systems. That's an unspoken contradiction inmplied by many of these studies. But I haven't seen any researcher mention it recently, for increasingly obvious reasons.
    - all_factz 7y ago
      Well, they seem to be better at communicating, so maybe they should be paid MORE. But regardless, even if there’s a difference, we have to consider nature vs. nurture. I think men could be brought up to be more communicative, but that’s just me. Furthermore, it’s absurd to say the pay gap somehow reflects different skillsets. We’re talking about unequal pay for the same work. Of course women should be paid the same as men doing the same work as they are.
      - twomoretime 7y ago
        Why do you think differences in men and women would be limited solely to communication? You don't think millions of years of sexually dimorphic specialization might have lead to different behavioral tendencies? What about different hormone serum levels and metabolism? This utopian Western notion of the mind being a perfect clean slate from birth has no basis. Do you really think that the mountains of evidence, in the form of gender discrepancies which have been almost universal across time and culture, can be so trivially handwaved away as "social constructs"? What about different behaviors in other sexually dimorphic mammals? You know, like, literally all of them?
barnyfried 7y ago
Given that I have spent about 35% of my time on communication overhead with people who struggle to speak english at all and can't grasp basic concepts without on the job tutoring. I think maybe we should try to walk before we can run.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jph 7y ago
"As an important output of our survey, participants highlighted that besides technical expertise good communication skills are fundamental for developers within a software team ." Absolutely true in my experience. A high-performing team of majority women coached me to have our teams write "ground rules" for team communication. The improvement was a big leap forward. Many example ground rules are in my git repo: https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/ground_rules https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/ground_rules
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  > good communication skills are fundamental for developers within a software team This is absolutely true. Fundamentally, a great engineer is doing a TON of communicating -- writing technical designs, whiteboarding different approaches, explaining reasoning in code reviews, breaking down tasks for more junior engineers, coaching and mentoring others, interviewing... and about a million other things. The role of communication only increases as the problem complexity and scope increases.
pdubs1 7y ago
News flash: Women are more people-oriented while men are more thing-oriented, on average (1, 2). I don't think this is grounds for "All men should communicate like women" or "Women's style of communication is more productive in [name some male-oriented group]", or "We should prioritize women's communication style in [highly technical groups which rarely include women due to biologically factual statistical differences in occupational orientation ^]", which is a dubious proposition. (^ = differences between women and women in interest levels and at the tails of achievement in "thing"/"systems" oriented technology occupations -- see citations 1 & 2) Notice the pattern. Look at how much usage of words related to "patriarchy", "misogyny", "institutional racism", "diversity and inclusion", "social justice" have increased in NYT and other mainstream media sources from 2010-2020 (3, 4). We see this again and again in media. Here is some hard data on this mentality and its pervasion of politics, media, entertainment, -- an obvious social engineering effort to anyone paying attention over the last 10-15 years. Interestingly enough OP's particular study would not be here on HN if it had any other result. I highly doubt a sample size of 34 for something as ridiculous sounding as "community smell" is going to be in anyway groundbreaking, at least when compared to actual substantial research on the topic of male vs female occupational interests. The 2nd study here has 500,000 participants, for example. Not 34. Bottom line: Identity politics is a worthless, and came into vogue in order to dissolve the Occupy Wallstreet movement which sprang up in the aftermath of the 2008-early 2010's Recession. (5). [1] Gendered Occupational Interests: Prenatal Androgen Effects on Psychological Orientation to Things Versus People -- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/ [2] Men and Things, Women and People: A Meta-Analysis of Sex Differences in Interests -- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Things_Women_and_People_A_Meta-Analysis_of_Sex_Differences_in_Interests https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th... [3] The NYTimes is Woke "Many trends develop over decades but I’ve never seen change so rapid as the breathtaking success of what one might call social justice concerns. Beginning around 2010-2014 there appears to have been a inflection point. Here from Zach Goldberg on twitter are various words drawn from Lexis-Nexis." https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/the-nytimes-is-woke.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th... [4] Zach Goldberg on twitter "1/n Spent some time on LexisNexis over the weekend. Depending on your political orientation, what follows will either disturb or encourage you. But regardless of political orientation, I'm sure we can all say 'holy fucking shit'" https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1133440945201061888 https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1133440945201061888 [5] Discussion on how identity politics conveniently sprang up as a counter-movement to deliberately disrupt up the Occupy Wallstreet movement, which is corroborated by the timelines of sources 3 and 4 above. https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1wecyn/identity_politics_killed_occupy_wall_street/ https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1wecyn/identity...
david38 7y ago
On one hand women have innately different traits than men (but only good ones, except being physically stronger). On the other, women and MTF trans are the same because it’s all about how you feel and any differences are because of the patriarchy. Which is it? You can’t have it both ways. Hopefully such junk science stops being published. If there is a way of communicating that’s better for both guys and girls, and some of both are capable of doing it, then it can be taught to both with most learning it. Unless you’re going to claim most guys are simply incapable of reading social queues, or female social queues (excluding sexual attraction, where intent is often hidden).

16 points by singron 7y ago

This is dangerous junk science and is only having a counterproductive effect on gender relations by cheapening the achievements of women. The same goes for other minorities who are treated like lesser people who need handouts. This is the softest of sciences, minimally quantitative, non-experimentally verifiable and therefore subject to massive institutional bias - the same way that proponents of forced equity believe that the institutions they are fighting with have developed their own biases. Equality of opportunity does not imply equality of outcome. But it doesn't matter - this post will likely be flagged because our own institution is increasingly biased toward certain unacceptable viewpoints - to the degree that we forbid discussion on nearly every popular forum. But you're only emboldening and recruiting extremists when you silence an entire alternative point of view. Edit: Let me explain further, and justify my use of the word "dangerous." Let's forget for a moment the specific topic at hand. Imagine a field of study which is strongly influencing corporate and, local, state, and federal policy, which is simultaneously immune from criticism because of cultural norms. That is where all of these pro-diversity and pro-inclusion studies are coming from. I'm not necessarily suggesting that they're wrong - only that systematically, institutionally, this is poor science and possibly leading society down a suboptimal path. One side of the diversity and inclusion discussion is forbidden. We are forced, top down, to take it as a given that this is how things should be done. I cannot support alternative viewpoints with sources because researchers who would publish anything against the grain would be, in modern parlance, cancelled.

Pfhreak 7y ago
Here's the study [1]. If you want to discuss it, address specifics from it. Right now, you are simply coming in and spouting your personal political opinions in a detached and needlessly argumentative way. [1] https://www.win.tue.nl/~aserebre/IEEESWGenderSmells-preprint.pdf https://www.win.tue.nl/~aserebre/IEEESWGenderSmells-preprint...
- twomoretime 7y ago
  Thank you for linking. Now I can confirm that the study is, frankly, bullshit. Ignoring the ridiculous sample size of 34, the "smells" are totally subjective. In fact one could argue in favor of each of them - this reminds me of open concept cargo culting: Organizational Silo. Siloed groups in the community that do not communicate with each other, except through one or two of their respective members; >1. Organizational Silo. Siloed groups in the community that do not communicate with each other, except through one or two of their respective members; If I'm working on team A I don't need to know what literally every person on every other team is doing. >2. Black Cloud. There is an excessive information overload due to the lack of structured communication. This might lead to a huge increase of data exchanges across a community; What? Lack of communication leads to excessive information? That doesn't even make sense. >3. Lone Wolf. Unsanctioned or defiant contributors who work in an irrespective manner or regardless of their team; Where I'm from we call this initiative. I've been rewarded for showing it my entire life. This is not black and white. >4. Radio Silence. One team member interposes themselves into every formal communication across two or more sub-communities with little or no flexibility to introduce other parallel channels. I don't even understand what this means. None of the first three points are black and white, as they make them out to be. This is pure ideologically driven data mining playing off the stereotype of women being better communicators. Ironic.
cardine 7y ago
It's likely going to get flagged because you discard the entire article as junk science without even vaguely addressing the points of the article or study and reverting to the same tired, outdated, and in this case irrelevant to the article, talking points. I think it is you and not the article who is showing immense bias.
briga 7y ago
Do you know of any studies on this topic that aren't "junk science", or do you just not like the idea put forward here? In general it doesn't seem far-fetched to me that women might be better communicators than men in general, but I don't have any hard evidence for or against this.
pdubs1 7y ago
Here's an interesting summary of how usage of woke & SJW terminology dramatically increased in NYT publications since 2010 (alongside its increase in other forms of media). It's a "divide and conquer" social engineering strategy to get regular people fighting each other based on in-borne traits (via tribalist psychological manipulation -- pervasive in our entertainment & political media currently) rather than teaming up to fight corporate control of politics, media, & the military industrial complex. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/the-nytimes-is-woke.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...

thendrill 7y ago

Yeh... Cool story. That would work if you are "deploying" a "solution" like Facebook for work... Dynamix, SharePoint or office 365... Sap and Salesforce is where it gets complicated. Finding one female embedded engineer that knows the difference between a variable on the stack or the heap is basically like striking gold while winning the lottery. It is a problem of quality not quantity...

pdubs1 7y ago

Sample size: 34, for determining "community smell" ahh yes how quantitative their metrics for that must be. Nooo, this isn't politically biased at all ;) They didn't SEEK this outcome of their study to conform with currently in-vogue political trends, not at all-- it's in no way biased ;) No, no, you see-- We must get men to think, act and communicate like women! And women to think, act and communicate like men. Yes, that's the answer-- Confuse people into thinking they're the same while demonizing men and elevating women with fake, clearly ideologically biased, nonsensical studies which use terms like "community smell". Neomarxists/diversity-outraged: Women and men are equal. Neomarxists/diversity-outraged: Women are better than men. We need more women in positions of power! (Search: "Entryism") Noo... this couldn't be biased by current fad politics... not at all ;) /sarcasm In case anyone is wondering why Woke/SJW/identity-politics neomarxist messaging suddenly increased in the media in the 2010-2020 timeframe-- Here's an interesting summary of how usage of woke & SJW terminology dramatically increased in NYT publications since 2010 (alongside its increase in other forms of media). https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/the-nytimes-is-woke.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th... The use of "Woke" & SJW terminology rapidly increased following the dissolution of Occupy Wallstreet movement in 2010. Hint: It's almost as if media/politics/entertainment elites are encouraging the middle class to fight each other, rather than the top 0.001% ;)

conductr 7y ago
I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact we have a racist/sexist/while(bad)-ist president and resurgence of all these feelings a portion of the country
- pdubs1 7y ago
  Yes, orange man bad indeed. Now that we are in agreement, please check the link I shared. It is a coordinated campaign that began around 2010 to distract away from the occupy wallstreet movement. It's an obvious "divide and conquer" strategy to take the social pressure off of the top class of ruling economic elites.
  - 7y ago

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

Does anyone have access to the original paper? From the look at this article, I am extremely curious as to how they quantified what they defined as "community smells". From the article: ---- For the study, the authors looked at four types of community smells: 1. Organizational Silos. Groups in the community don’t communicate with each other, except through one or two of their respective members. 2. Black Clouds. Community members are overloaded with information because communication isn’t structured well. 3. Lone Wolves. Defiant, disrespectful contributors won’t listen to others. 4. Bottlenecks. One team member wants to be the only way information moves between sub-communities. Previous studies have shown that women are fundamental to reducing community smells and avoiding accumulating social debt for teams in other industries. But these studies show that women increase team efficiency and organizational quality on software engineering teams specifically. Teams with no women have 7 mean community smells compared to 3 for teams with at least one woman. These results are statistically significant (p-value < 0.05) and have a large effect size (d=0.68). ----

Pfhreak 7y ago
This appears to be it: https://www.win.tue.nl/~aserebre/IEEESWGenderSmells-preprint.pdf https://www.win.tue.nl/~aserebre/IEEESWGenderSmells-preprint...
- ghostpepper 7y ago
  Has this been proof-read? There's a grammatical error in the second sentence on the first page. > we found [...] a strictly connection between gender diversity and communication patterns Obviously this doesn't necessarily reflect the quality of the research but it is jarring to the reader and makes one question what else about the paper has not been checked over before publication
  - Pfhreak 7y ago
    I'm not sure. I found it by Googling. I think, given there are several authors listed that, yes, it has been proof-read. Generally I wouldn't consider the occasional typo to be indicative of the quality of the underlying research. Zooming in on a minor detail in an attempt to paint the paper negatively seems needlessly pedantic, but that's just my opinion.

blululu 7y ago

For the actual research, the cited paper can be found here: https://dibt.unimol.it/staff/fpalomba/documents/C43.pdf https://dibt.unimol.it/staff/fpalomba/documents/C43.pdf

all_factz 7y ago

Absolutely shocking, women are better at communicating than men.

pdubs1 7y ago
Shocking: Men and women aren't equal.
- twomoretime 7y ago
  Which is exactly what the conclusions of the study imply... In which case, if men and women do not on average perform equally at given tasks, there's no reason to expect gender parity or even pay parity in meritocratic systems. That's an unspoken contradiction inmplied by many of these studies. But I haven't seen any researcher mention it recently, for increasingly obvious reasons.
  - all_factz 7y ago
    Well, they seem to be better at communicating, so maybe they should be paid MORE. But regardless, even if there’s a difference, we have to consider nature vs. nurture. I think men could be brought up to be more communicative, but that’s just me. Furthermore, it’s absurd to say the pay gap somehow reflects different skillsets. We’re talking about unequal pay for the same work. Of course women should be paid the same as men doing the same work as they are.
    - twomoretime 7y ago
      Why do you think differences in men and women would be limited solely to communication? You don't think millions of years of sexually dimorphic specialization might have lead to different behavioral tendencies? What about different hormone serum levels and metabolism? This utopian Western notion of the mind being a perfect clean slate from birth has no basis. Do you really think that the mountains of evidence, in the form of gender discrepancies which have been almost universal across time and culture, can be so trivially handwaved away as "social constructs"? What about different behaviors in other sexually dimorphic mammals? You know, like, literally all of them?

barnyfried 7y ago

Given that I have spent about 35% of my time on communication overhead with people who struggle to speak english at all and can't grasp basic concepts without on the job tutoring. I think maybe we should try to walk before we can run.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jph 7y ago

"As an important output of our survey, participants highlighted that besides technical expertise good communication skills are fundamental for developers within a software team ." Absolutely true in my experience. A high-performing team of majority women coached me to have our teams write "ground rules" for team communication. The improvement was a big leap forward. Many example ground rules are in my git repo: https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/ground_rules https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/ground_rules

Pfhreak 7y ago
> good communication skills are fundamental for developers within a software team This is absolutely true. Fundamentally, a great engineer is doing a TON of communicating -- writing technical designs, whiteboarding different approaches, explaining reasoning in code reviews, breaking down tasks for more junior engineers, coaching and mentoring others, interviewing... and about a million other things. The role of communication only increases as the problem complexity and scope increases.

pdubs1 7y ago

News flash: Women are more people-oriented while men are more thing-oriented, on average (1, 2). I don't think this is grounds for "All men should communicate like women" or "Women's style of communication is more productive in [name some male-oriented group]", or "We should prioritize women's communication style in [highly technical groups which rarely include women due to biologically factual statistical differences in occupational orientation ^]", which is a dubious proposition. (^ = differences between women and women in interest levels and at the tails of achievement in "thing"/"systems" oriented technology occupations -- see citations 1 & 2) Notice the pattern. Look at how much usage of words related to "patriarchy", "misogyny", "institutional racism", "diversity and inclusion", "social justice" have increased in NYT and other mainstream media sources from 2010-2020 (3, 4). We see this again and again in media. Here is some hard data on this mentality and its pervasion of politics, media, entertainment, -- an obvious social engineering effort to anyone paying attention over the last 10-15 years. Interestingly enough OP's particular study would not be here on HN if it had any other result. I highly doubt a sample size of 34 for something as ridiculous sounding as "community smell" is going to be in anyway groundbreaking, at least when compared to actual substantial research on the topic of male vs female occupational interests. The 2nd study here has 500,000 participants, for example. Not 34. Bottom line: Identity politics is a worthless, and came into vogue in order to dissolve the Occupy Wallstreet movement which sprang up in the aftermath of the 2008-early 2010's Recession. (5). [1] Gendered Occupational Interests: Prenatal Androgen Effects on Psychological Orientation to Things Versus People -- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/ [2] Men and Things, Women and People: A Meta-Analysis of Sex Differences in Interests -- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Things_Women_and_People_A_Meta-Analysis_of_Sex_Differences_in_Interests https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th... [3] The NYTimes is Woke "Many trends develop over decades but I’ve never seen change so rapid as the breathtaking success of what one might call social justice concerns. Beginning around 2010-2014 there appears to have been a inflection point. Here from Zach Goldberg on twitter are various words drawn from Lexis-Nexis." https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/the-nytimes-is-woke.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th... [4] Zach Goldberg on twitter "1/n Spent some time on LexisNexis over the weekend. Depending on your political orientation, what follows will either disturb or encourage you. But regardless of political orientation, I'm sure we can all say 'holy fucking shit'" https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1133440945201061888 https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1133440945201061888 [5] Discussion on how identity politics conveniently sprang up as a counter-movement to deliberately disrupt up the Occupy Wallstreet movement, which is corroborated by the timelines of sources 3 and 4 above. https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1wecyn/identity_politics_killed_occupy_wall_street/ https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1wecyn/identity...

david38 7y ago

On one hand women have innately different traits than men (but only good ones, except being physically stronger). On the other, women and MTF trans are the same because it’s all about how you feel and any differences are because of the patriarchy. Which is it? You can’t have it both ways. Hopefully such junk science stops being published. If there is a way of communicating that’s better for both guys and girls, and some of both are capable of doing it, then it can be taught to both with most learning it. Unless you’re going to claim most guys are simply incapable of reading social queues, or female social queues (excluding sexual attraction, where intent is often hidden).