9 ms·

Can you name any of these male dominated companies that hire men disproportionately to the gender demographics of their applicants/interviewees? The issue isn't

by toolz 5y ago

Can you name any of these male dominated companies that hire men disproportionately to the gender demographics of their applicants/interviewees? The issue isn't the distribution of employees, it's whether there is sexism present or not and the first thing you'd probably want for evidence of sexism is disproportionate hiring of a demographic compared to their applicant/interviewee demographic. Just because something is more represented by a demographic does not make it sexist. e.g. Nordic countries seem to be generally celebrated as being socially progressive and ridding themselves of sexism, yet female representation in STEM fields is incredibly low.

SamReidHughes 5y ago
- spzb 5y ago
  > intelligence distribution skews more male at the higher end Really? You think there are inherently more intelligent men than women?
  - rajin444 5y ago
    You think it's equal? That seems so statistically unlikely I could only describe it as a miracle.
    - spzb 5y ago
      Exactly equal down to the single individual, yes that would be unlikely. Broadly the same, seems perfectly logical to me.
      - rajin444 5y ago
        Men and women share fundamentally different genetic configurations which makes it seem illogical to me. What makes it seem logical to you?
        spzb 5y ago
        Intelligence is not purely genetic.
        rajin444 5y ago
        Don't our genes dictate how we interact with the environment? I'm not sure how it could be anything but. That being said, yes, we can change our environment and see changes in measured intelligence. A person with a head is smarter than one without. To tie it back to your original point, you're saying the male/female differences in intelligence are purely environmental? As in, if two people with different genetic make ups were brought up in the same environment they'd have the same outcomes? If we're seeing equality it's likely the result of changing our environment to force this.
        spzb 5y ago
        Not really. Not the degree you seem to think. Otherwise identical twins would have the same personality. You’ve edited your post while I wrote this response. Your final point is a straw man. I didn’t say anything like that. Good day to you
        dragonwriter 5y ago
        Identical twins aren't exposed to identical environments; if the programmed response was particularly sensitive to small input variations, genes could completely determine interaction with the environment and identical twins could still be very different.
        spzb 5y ago
        Which is my point. Environment shapes the individual.
        rajin444 5y ago
        No. Genetics shape how the individual responds to the environment. Just because you can change the environment and get different results doesn't mean it's not due to genetics.
      - nomel 5y ago
        "Broadly the same" and averages don't work well when you're talking about a very specific sub population that would, necessarily, be picked from the few at the top end of the intelligence distribution.
        spzb 5y ago
        We’re talking about men and women. Approximately 50% each of humankind. Hardly “very specific sub populations”
        nomel 5y ago
        No, please see the context/comment chain that this comment exists in. We're talking about hiring in tech. The average person doesn't apply to, get hired for, or succeed in, tech positions. Most tech positions require a higher degree because most tech (programming, computer science, hardware engineering, etc) requires or directly benefits from that higher degree. Those that hold those higher degrees have an above average intelligence. Those with the highest intelligence usually having the most success in the technical part of the tech workforce. Tech prefers the higher side of the intelligence distribution, because it's hard.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - daenz 5y ago
    They said distribution. It also skews more male at the lower end, as in, far more stupid men than women. The mean is about the same for each group.
  - IanDrake 5y ago
    Before everyone gets upset, this is a known fact and it's not a bad thing for women either. The skew only means the smartest 1% of men are smarter than the smartest 1% of women. On the other side of the curve the same is true. The dumbest men are dumber than the dumbest women. That means a larger percent of women occupy the IQ sweet spot.
    - throaway_07_z 5y ago
      > The skew only means the smartest 1% of men are smarter than the smartest 1% of women. I don't think you can put it like that. Even if the IQ (or similar "cognitive capacity" score) distribution is broader&shallower for males, it doesn't mean what you had said. Judith Polgar was #7th in chess rankings, even if overall number of players scored with ELO is counted in millions?
      - IanDrake 5y ago
        How could it not mean that? Are you arguing with my 1% figure or the concept I was trying to relay? The concept is correct IMO, the percentage is a guess.
        SamReidHughes 5y ago
        Dumb people need to be handheld into understanding your precise meaning because you can't assume they'll attach correct qualifiers so that the sensible meaning is inferred. (And even then it probably won't work.) The purpose of your post was to communicate with dumb people.
  - SamReidHughes 5y ago
    > Really? You think there are inherently more intelligent men than women? Uh, yes. This is a well-established fact. Women have two X chromosomes, both of which get used [1], and men only have one. So this should be your baseline expectation. In women, that genetic information used to construct the brain, gets, loosely speaking, averaged together. It is of course also consistent with every empirical observation. E.g. the on the math SAT, 1.6x as many men score 700-800, 2x as many men score 800, despite the fact that the school system is biased against boys. And on grade school and high school math contests (such as the AMC, the AIME), the male/female ratio increases more and more the higher the scores go, up to 89% male before sample size was too small for me to get a read on the proportion. Of the top 10 Jeopardy champions, 9 out of 10 are male. [1] that both X chromosomes get used as they do in the rest of the body is something you wouldn't want to just assume -- among various ways to verify this, see https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/science/seeing-x-chromosomes-in-a-new-light.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/science/seeing-x-chromoso...
    - FredPret 5y ago
      Interesting thing about the chromosomes - in other species where the chromosome situation is reversed, like birds I think, the female is the one that displays more variability.
    - spzb 5y ago
      Sorry but that's pseudo-scientific bollocks. Far from being "well-established fact" it is actually contentious and poorly supported by the evidence. Intelligence testing is a human created concept. There are all manner of cultural biases encoded in it. Intelligence is more than just being good at sums which is what your math SAT example seems to suggest. Jeopardy champions are hardly a representative group. They're a self-selecting group by definition : those who chose to go on a quiz show. Maybe men show a bias towards showing off on TV or are better at remembering random facts. Your example doesn't control for any of those.
      - SamReidHughes 5y ago
        Yeah, Jeopardy could be self-selecting based on a sex-specific mental trait. But you seem to be ignoring the test scores. Why is that?
  - golergka 5y ago
    That's not what the parent comment said. You could see this picture even if average make intelligence was lower than female — all you need is a wider distribution.
  - throwaway980127 5y ago
    It's open for debate, but there's the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis
  - s_tec 5y ago
    I'm not the OP, but I'll bite. For many species, males have a higher standard deviation across a variety factors. There are biological reasons for this, since males are more disposable than females for reproduction. Think of one rooster for a dozen hens - this is still a viable flock, even if the other roosters get eaten. Nature can experiment more with males simply because the stakes are lower, and sometimes those experiments are worthwhile. [edit: Turns out this is not true for birds, so I learned something!] Now, if you have two normal distributions with the same average and area but a tiny difference in the standard deviation... well, let's not go there because the math is too politically incorrect. [edit: And besides, many other factors affect outcomes besides genetics, so I do believe we should keep policies gender-unbiased as a matter of principle].
    - SamReidHughes 5y ago
      > There are biological reasons for this, since males are more disposable than females for reproduction. Think of one rooster for a dozen hens - this is still a viable flock, even if the other roosters get eaten. Note that birds do not have mammalian sex chromosomes - males have ZZ and females have ZW - and females have been measured to have greater variability in birds. So there is not really a biological reason as you say -- it just happened to go one way or the other in the past, and now different trees of species are stuck that way.
      - james-bcn 5y ago
        I've not come across this before ("males have ZZ and females have ZW - and females have been measured to have greater variability in birds"). Do you have some references/books you can recommend? I'd like to find out more.
        SamReidHughes 5y ago
        For example there is this paper on repeated differences in variance for different sexes in different groupings: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.12224 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.12224
  - nomel 5y ago
    From the NIH: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20066931/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20066931/ > men on average have higher intelligence than women by 3-5 IQ points Maybe, but negligible. What's probably more significant, when looking at a sub-population, is the variation in intelligence for men and women: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26158978/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26158978/ The standard deviation for the population of men is higher than women, so you get more outliers for men, smarter and dumber, but the average is the same. If that's true, then the math says the upper percent will consist of more men than women, assuming a split population. The dumb end will also have more men. I realize this is taboo, but I don't see how any other conclusion can be made. I don't think it matters though, in the grand scheme of things, assuming the hiring is based on merit rather than bias. And, if the above is true, there's a better chance that you hire a dumb man than a dumb woman, so merit is important.
  - AdrianB1 5y ago
    Check the chess grandmasters distribution. Or Go.
    - Jabbles 5y ago
      Chess statistics do not show evidence of a significant difference: https://en.chessbase.com/post/what-gender-gap-in-chess https://en.chessbase.com/post/what-gender-gap-in-chess
      - satokema 5y ago
        "(6.1%) were female" This article doesn't prove the point you thought you were making.
        Jabbles 5y ago
        Your comment is so ambiguous that I'm not sure how to interpret it, but I encourage you to read the article completely, as the number you quoted is not part of the conclusion.
      - SamReidHughes 5y ago
        That is obviously garbage statistics, isn't it? The conclusion they've drawn about the female distribution is based entirely on the performance of one female player. And they're obfuscating rank ordering with rating gap. Also, for an unexplained reason, they only consider Indian players. That's weird, isn't it? Why Indian? Let's investigate. Using the Oct 20th 2020 data, since the Oct 6th 2020 data isn't available on the FIDE website, we could look Chinese players (birthday <2000 to follow their criteria): I picked China because they're a large country and because the top active female player is Chinese. Of the top Chinese players, the ordering is 8 males, 1 female (Hou, Yifan), 12 males, 1 female (Xie, Jun), then 3 M, 1 F, 5 M, 1 F, 1 M, 1 F, 2 M, 1 F, and so on. The overall Chinese female percentage is 30.47%. Here's a table of percentage over rating threshold, with cumulative sums shown. M F M Sum F Sum FSum/(MSum+FSum) 2800 0 0 0 0 - 2700 5 0 5 0 0.00% 2600 10 1 15 1 6.25% 2500 15 4 30 5 14.29% 2400 38 10 68 15 18.07% 2300 55 10 123 25 16.89% 2200 76 31 199 56 21.96% 2100 89 40 288 96 25.00% 2000 48 29 336 125 27.11% 1900 42 17 378 142 27.31% 1800 42 25 420 167 28.45% 1700 27 15 447 182 28.93% 1600 27 11 474 193 28.94% 1500 13 14 487 207 29.83% 1400 9 2 496 209 29.65% 1300 3 4 499 213 29.92% 1200 1 3 500 216 30.17% 1100 2 1 502 217 30.18% 1000 0 3 502 220 30.47% Here's the data for India: M F M sum F sum FSum/(MSum+FSum) 2800 0 0 0 0 - 2700 3 0 3 0 0.00% 2600 10 0 13 0 0.00% 2500 16 2 29 2 6.45% 2400 38 0 67 2 2.90% 2300 68 9 135 11 7.53% 2200 150 11 285 22 7.17% 2100 321 31 606 53 8.04% 2000 556 57 1162 110 8.65% 1900 591 42 1753 152 7.98% 1800 750 66 2503 218 8.01% 1700 920 53 3423 271 7.34% 1600 1321 74 4744 345 6.78% 1500 1585 117 6329 462 6.80% 1400 2135 129 8464 591 6.53% 1300 2671 141 11135 732 6.17% 1200 2962 165 14097 897 5.98% 1100 2566 139 16663 1036 5.85% 1000 1592 139 18255 1175 6.05% What is going on there? It is worthwhile to check out India having filtered out the inactive players: M F M sum F sum 2800 0 0 0 0 - 2700 3 0 3 0 0.00% 2600 9 0 12 0 0.00% 2500 13 2 25 2 7.41% 2400 30 0 55 2 3.51% 2300 36 8 91 10 9.90% 2200 44 6 135 16 10.60% 2100 47 7 182 23 11.22% 2000 56 11 238 34 12.50% 1900 51 8 289 42 12.69% 1800 72 7 361 49 11.95% 1700 128 6 489 55 10.11% 1600 179 3 668 58 7.99% 1500 234 7 902 65 6.72% 1400 370 8 1272 73 5.43% 1300 493 10 1765 83 4.49% 1200 605 14 2370 97 3.93% 1100 513 18 2883 115 3.84% 1000 296 20 3179 135 4.07% There is a big pile of low-rated Indian men with FIDE ratings, while mediocre women aren't interested. Note that the article fallaciously compares the male average to the female average as if that means something. If we were to compute the article's bogus statistical argument about the top woman, a more appropriate female percentage to use would be more like 12.69%, the maximum on that list, before the hoard of mediocre males, instead of 6.1%. It would make more sense to base our statistics on the set of all the world's active players, instead of one woman from a particular country against an irrelevant percentage. Here is that data: M F M sum F sum Fsum/(Msum+Fsum) 2800 2 0 0 0 - 2700 32 0 32 0 0.00% 2600 186 1 218 1 0.46% 2500 437 11 655 12 1.80% 2400 1049 39 1704 51 2.91% 2300 1928 87 3632 138 3.66% 2200 3385 156 7017 294 4.02% 2100 5699 231 12716 525 3.96%
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  I was willing to listen to your point (that perhaps some companies favor women and so women disproportionately percolate to those companies… at least in theory seems like a possible argument, even if I’m skeptical) until you got here: >> Also, because the intelligence distribution skews more male at the higher end, a company will be disproportionately male simply by being more technical and having a more difficult hiring bar. Okay, buddy. Women used to be dominant in computing. Literally were the computers. And when artificial computers came to the fore, many transitioned to writing programs for them. Until it became a more prestigious field and men came to dominate. And once the personal computer became widespread with computer game culture arising and a culture of harassing women until they leave became common enough to be an issue, why wouldn’t one expect that those who developed an interest in computer programming (ie from contact with computer games, etc) to be predominantly men? (And I love computer games, but there is an insane amount of harassment. Everyone who plays knows this.) It has nothing to do with intelligence curves.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > It has nothing to do with intelligence curves. Agreed. A vast majority of supposedly "high tech" jobs are solidly average intelligence, including coding, so if anything women should be rewarded in such positions because males' wider variance in I.Q. cuts both ways. It's only pure delusional thinking that keeps up the "muh I.Q. is one of the highest" attitude among "tech" bros.
    - AdrianB1 5y ago
      Average intelligence (around 100 points) does not get you hired in any high tech job. It is called "high tech" for a reason, it's not "average work" by any measure.
    - SamReidHughes 5y ago
      Programmers are not solidly average intelligence at all. Everybody writing software is at the upper end, even if defined very loosely to mean something like top 10% of Americans. Note that among SAT scorers, the top 11% of males score >700 on the math section and top 7% of females score >700. This isn't some super-elite group, and you're already looking at 1.6x as many men. But you're arguing somehow that we should specifically discriminate in an attempt to hire dumber people, so... well, that seems like a bad idea to me.
- cto_of_antifa 5y ago
- nullc 5y ago
  Most tech jobs don't actually require significantly greater than average intelligence. If you crunch the numbers it takes a pretty high bar to skew the gender of the posterior distribution much. It's not inconceivable and shouldn't be discarded out of hand, but there are plenty of other factors (including non-discrimination ones) worth keeping in mind. As an aside-- when you make the variance argument it's useful to point out that men are vastly more over-represented in convictions or some other negative characteristic... otherwise it's just too easy for people to read as a suggestion that men are better rather than simply being a population which as a whole tends to have more diversity in its performance. Communication is a two way street, and there are enough assholes out there who do think that men are inherently superior that it's in everyones interest to put in some more effort to make it clear that it isn't what you're saying.
  - SamReidHughes 5y ago
    I don't think it is useful here (on HN) to point out the low end. That just gets tedious and I think comes across as tedious. The pertinent fact is that m:f ratio increases at the top, and variance is just the most irrefutable factor that breaks apart any presumption that the distributions should be identical. Also, I'm not trying to pretend that's the only difference between men and women. Men sleep 20 minutes less than women. Is that "inherent superiority"? No, but it's an advantage. Or maybe men undersleep and it's a disadvantage.
    - nullc 4y ago
      Maybe it comes across as tedious. But -- we write because we hope to communicate, and if you're mistaken as a flaming misogynist then the communication will fail and you won't reach the people who could benefit the most from your perspective. I think it can be worth it to put on a bit of a dance to make it clear that you're not just looking for reasons to be dismissive towards women, even if in some cosmic fairness sense you shouldn't have to prove you're not a witch. In my mind a reasonable way to do that is to point out that variance differences often make men worse. Particularly so since someone one extra sd more intelligent on the top end probably has little benefit to their life, while someone being one extra sd more violent on the bottom end makes them much more likely to live a life thats miserable for them and those around them.
oslsla 5y ago
This really isn't a problem anyone wants to solve. STEM especially has unique issues where if you take extended absences things such as your skills or research will be invalided over the short periods you may be gone. Tackle that with a lack of a childcare and you have a system set to ensure the failure of women. Retention is close to impossible as the cost of childcare is impossibly high.
- SamReidHughes 5y ago
  I'd say this is more industry-specific than STEM. In software I can jump back onto a project I left behind years ago and get productive immediately. This is something I've done with multiple projects. But there is a difference between some of those and other kinds of projects where the deadlines are tied into hardware cycles, like, automotive engineering. And generally in engineering, childcare is affordable because your salaries are high.

by toolz 5y ago

SamReidHughes 5y ago

spzb 5y ago
> intelligence distribution skews more male at the higher end Really? You think there are inherently more intelligent men than women?
- rajin444 5y ago
  You think it's equal? That seems so statistically unlikely I could only describe it as a miracle.
  - spzb 5y ago
    Exactly equal down to the single individual, yes that would be unlikely. Broadly the same, seems perfectly logical to me.
    - rajin444 5y ago
      Men and women share fundamentally different genetic configurations which makes it seem illogical to me. What makes it seem logical to you?
      - spzb 5y ago
        Intelligence is not purely genetic.
        rajin444 5y ago
        Don't our genes dictate how we interact with the environment? I'm not sure how it could be anything but. That being said, yes, we can change our environment and see changes in measured intelligence. A person with a head is smarter than one without. To tie it back to your original point, you're saying the male/female differences in intelligence are purely environmental? As in, if two people with different genetic make ups were brought up in the same environment they'd have the same outcomes? If we're seeing equality it's likely the result of changing our environment to force this.
        spzb 5y ago
        Not really. Not the degree you seem to think. Otherwise identical twins would have the same personality. You’ve edited your post while I wrote this response. Your final point is a straw man. I didn’t say anything like that. Good day to you
        dragonwriter 5y ago
        Identical twins aren't exposed to identical environments; if the programmed response was particularly sensitive to small input variations, genes could completely determine interaction with the environment and identical twins could still be very different.
        spzb 5y ago
        Which is my point. Environment shapes the individual.
        rajin444 5y ago
        No. Genetics shape how the individual responds to the environment. Just because you can change the environment and get different results doesn't mean it's not due to genetics.
    - nomel 5y ago
      "Broadly the same" and averages don't work well when you're talking about a very specific sub population that would, necessarily, be picked from the few at the top end of the intelligence distribution.
      - spzb 5y ago
        We’re talking about men and women. Approximately 50% each of humankind. Hardly “very specific sub populations”
        nomel 5y ago
        No, please see the context/comment chain that this comment exists in. We're talking about hiring in tech. The average person doesn't apply to, get hired for, or succeed in, tech positions. Most tech positions require a higher degree because most tech (programming, computer science, hardware engineering, etc) requires or directly benefits from that higher degree. Those that hold those higher degrees have an above average intelligence. Those with the highest intelligence usually having the most success in the technical part of the tech workforce. Tech prefers the higher side of the intelligence distribution, because it's hard.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- daenz 5y ago
  They said distribution. It also skews more male at the lower end, as in, far more stupid men than women. The mean is about the same for each group.
- IanDrake 5y ago
  Before everyone gets upset, this is a known fact and it's not a bad thing for women either. The skew only means the smartest 1% of men are smarter than the smartest 1% of women. On the other side of the curve the same is true. The dumbest men are dumber than the dumbest women. That means a larger percent of women occupy the IQ sweet spot.
  - throaway_07_z 5y ago
    > The skew only means the smartest 1% of men are smarter than the smartest 1% of women. I don't think you can put it like that. Even if the IQ (or similar "cognitive capacity" score) distribution is broader&shallower for males, it doesn't mean what you had said. Judith Polgar was #7th in chess rankings, even if overall number of players scored with ELO is counted in millions?
    - IanDrake 5y ago
      How could it not mean that? Are you arguing with my 1% figure or the concept I was trying to relay? The concept is correct IMO, the percentage is a guess.
      - SamReidHughes 5y ago
        Dumb people need to be handheld into understanding your precise meaning because you can't assume they'll attach correct qualifiers so that the sensible meaning is inferred. (And even then it probably won't work.) The purpose of your post was to communicate with dumb people.
- SamReidHughes 5y ago
  > Really? You think there are inherently more intelligent men than women? Uh, yes. This is a well-established fact. Women have two X chromosomes, both of which get used [1], and men only have one. So this should be your baseline expectation. In women, that genetic information used to construct the brain, gets, loosely speaking, averaged together. It is of course also consistent with every empirical observation. E.g. the on the math SAT, 1.6x as many men score 700-800, 2x as many men score 800, despite the fact that the school system is biased against boys. And on grade school and high school math contests (such as the AMC, the AIME), the male/female ratio increases more and more the higher the scores go, up to 89% male before sample size was too small for me to get a read on the proportion. Of the top 10 Jeopardy champions, 9 out of 10 are male. [1] that both X chromosomes get used as they do in the rest of the body is something you wouldn't want to just assume -- among various ways to verify this, see https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/science/seeing-x-chromosomes-in-a-new-light.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/science/seeing-x-chromoso...
  - FredPret 5y ago
    Interesting thing about the chromosomes - in other species where the chromosome situation is reversed, like birds I think, the female is the one that displays more variability.
  - spzb 5y ago
    Sorry but that's pseudo-scientific bollocks. Far from being "well-established fact" it is actually contentious and poorly supported by the evidence. Intelligence testing is a human created concept. There are all manner of cultural biases encoded in it. Intelligence is more than just being good at sums which is what your math SAT example seems to suggest. Jeopardy champions are hardly a representative group. They're a self-selecting group by definition : those who chose to go on a quiz show. Maybe men show a bias towards showing off on TV or are better at remembering random facts. Your example doesn't control for any of those.
    - SamReidHughes 5y ago
      Yeah, Jeopardy could be self-selecting based on a sex-specific mental trait. But you seem to be ignoring the test scores. Why is that?
- golergka 5y ago
  That's not what the parent comment said. You could see this picture even if average make intelligence was lower than female — all you need is a wider distribution.
- throwaway980127 5y ago
  It's open for debate, but there's the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis
- s_tec 5y ago
  I'm not the OP, but I'll bite. For many species, males have a higher standard deviation across a variety factors. There are biological reasons for this, since males are more disposable than females for reproduction. Think of one rooster for a dozen hens - this is still a viable flock, even if the other roosters get eaten. Nature can experiment more with males simply because the stakes are lower, and sometimes those experiments are worthwhile. [edit: Turns out this is not true for birds, so I learned something!] Now, if you have two normal distributions with the same average and area but a tiny difference in the standard deviation... well, let's not go there because the math is too politically incorrect. [edit: And besides, many other factors affect outcomes besides genetics, so I do believe we should keep policies gender-unbiased as a matter of principle].
  - SamReidHughes 5y ago
    > There are biological reasons for this, since males are more disposable than females for reproduction. Think of one rooster for a dozen hens - this is still a viable flock, even if the other roosters get eaten. Note that birds do not have mammalian sex chromosomes - males have ZZ and females have ZW - and females have been measured to have greater variability in birds. So there is not really a biological reason as you say -- it just happened to go one way or the other in the past, and now different trees of species are stuck that way.
    - james-bcn 5y ago
      I've not come across this before ("males have ZZ and females have ZW - and females have been measured to have greater variability in birds"). Do you have some references/books you can recommend? I'd like to find out more.
      - SamReidHughes 5y ago
        For example there is this paper on repeated differences in variance for different sexes in different groupings: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.12224 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.12224
- nomel 5y ago
  From the NIH: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20066931/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20066931/ > men on average have higher intelligence than women by 3-5 IQ points Maybe, but negligible. What's probably more significant, when looking at a sub-population, is the variation in intelligence for men and women: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26158978/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26158978/ The standard deviation for the population of men is higher than women, so you get more outliers for men, smarter and dumber, but the average is the same. If that's true, then the math says the upper percent will consist of more men than women, assuming a split population. The dumb end will also have more men. I realize this is taboo, but I don't see how any other conclusion can be made. I don't think it matters though, in the grand scheme of things, assuming the hiring is based on merit rather than bias. And, if the above is true, there's a better chance that you hire a dumb man than a dumb woman, so merit is important.
- AdrianB1 5y ago
  Check the chess grandmasters distribution. Or Go.
  - Jabbles 5y ago
    Chess statistics do not show evidence of a significant difference: https://en.chessbase.com/post/what-gender-gap-in-chess https://en.chessbase.com/post/what-gender-gap-in-chess
    - satokema 5y ago
      "(6.1%) were female" This article doesn't prove the point you thought you were making.
      - Jabbles 5y ago
        Your comment is so ambiguous that I'm not sure how to interpret it, but I encourage you to read the article completely, as the number you quoted is not part of the conclusion.
    - SamReidHughes 5y ago
      That is obviously garbage statistics, isn't it? The conclusion they've drawn about the female distribution is based entirely on the performance of one female player. And they're obfuscating rank ordering with rating gap. Also, for an unexplained reason, they only consider Indian players. That's weird, isn't it? Why Indian? Let's investigate. Using the Oct 20th 2020 data, since the Oct 6th 2020 data isn't available on the FIDE website, we could look Chinese players (birthday <2000 to follow their criteria): I picked China because they're a large country and because the top active female player is Chinese. Of the top Chinese players, the ordering is 8 males, 1 female (Hou, Yifan), 12 males, 1 female (Xie, Jun), then 3 M, 1 F, 5 M, 1 F, 1 M, 1 F, 2 M, 1 F, and so on. The overall Chinese female percentage is 30.47%. Here's a table of percentage over rating threshold, with cumulative sums shown. M F M Sum F Sum FSum/(MSum+FSum) 2800 0 0 0 0 - 2700 5 0 5 0 0.00% 2600 10 1 15 1 6.25% 2500 15 4 30 5 14.29% 2400 38 10 68 15 18.07% 2300 55 10 123 25 16.89% 2200 76 31 199 56 21.96% 2100 89 40 288 96 25.00% 2000 48 29 336 125 27.11% 1900 42 17 378 142 27.31% 1800 42 25 420 167 28.45% 1700 27 15 447 182 28.93% 1600 27 11 474 193 28.94% 1500 13 14 487 207 29.83% 1400 9 2 496 209 29.65% 1300 3 4 499 213 29.92% 1200 1 3 500 216 30.17% 1100 2 1 502 217 30.18% 1000 0 3 502 220 30.47% Here's the data for India: M F M sum F sum FSum/(MSum+FSum) 2800 0 0 0 0 - 2700 3 0 3 0 0.00% 2600 10 0 13 0 0.00% 2500 16 2 29 2 6.45% 2400 38 0 67 2 2.90% 2300 68 9 135 11 7.53% 2200 150 11 285 22 7.17% 2100 321 31 606 53 8.04% 2000 556 57 1162 110 8.65% 1900 591 42 1753 152 7.98% 1800 750 66 2503 218 8.01% 1700 920 53 3423 271 7.34% 1600 1321 74 4744 345 6.78% 1500 1585 117 6329 462 6.80% 1400 2135 129 8464 591 6.53% 1300 2671 141 11135 732 6.17% 1200 2962 165 14097 897 5.98% 1100 2566 139 16663 1036 5.85% 1000 1592 139 18255 1175 6.05% What is going on there? It is worthwhile to check out India having filtered out the inactive players: M F M sum F sum 2800 0 0 0 0 - 2700 3 0 3 0 0.00% 2600 9 0 12 0 0.00% 2500 13 2 25 2 7.41% 2400 30 0 55 2 3.51% 2300 36 8 91 10 9.90% 2200 44 6 135 16 10.60% 2100 47 7 182 23 11.22% 2000 56 11 238 34 12.50% 1900 51 8 289 42 12.69% 1800 72 7 361 49 11.95% 1700 128 6 489 55 10.11% 1600 179 3 668 58 7.99% 1500 234 7 902 65 6.72% 1400 370 8 1272 73 5.43% 1300 493 10 1765 83 4.49% 1200 605 14 2370 97 3.93% 1100 513 18 2883 115 3.84% 1000 296 20 3179 135 4.07% There is a big pile of low-rated Indian men with FIDE ratings, while mediocre women aren't interested. Note that the article fallaciously compares the male average to the female average as if that means something. If we were to compute the article's bogus statistical argument about the top woman, a more appropriate female percentage to use would be more like 12.69%, the maximum on that list, before the hoard of mediocre males, instead of 6.1%. It would make more sense to base our statistics on the set of all the world's active players, instead of one woman from a particular country against an irrelevant percentage. Here is that data: M F M sum F sum Fsum/(Msum+Fsum) 2800 2 0 0 0 - 2700 32 0 32 0 0.00% 2600 186 1 218 1 0.46% 2500 437 11 655 12 1.80% 2400 1049 39 1704 51 2.91% 2300 1928 87 3632 138 3.66% 2200 3385 156 7017 294 4.02% 2100 5699 231 12716 525 3.96%
Robotbeat 5y ago
I was willing to listen to your point (that perhaps some companies favor women and so women disproportionately percolate to those companies… at least in theory seems like a possible argument, even if I’m skeptical) until you got here: >> Also, because the intelligence distribution skews more male at the higher end, a company will be disproportionately male simply by being more technical and having a more difficult hiring bar. Okay, buddy. Women used to be dominant in computing. Literally were the computers. And when artificial computers came to the fore, many transitioned to writing programs for them. Until it became a more prestigious field and men came to dominate. And once the personal computer became widespread with computer game culture arising and a culture of harassing women until they leave became common enough to be an issue, why wouldn’t one expect that those who developed an interest in computer programming (ie from contact with computer games, etc) to be predominantly men? (And I love computer games, but there is an insane amount of harassment. Everyone who plays knows this.) It has nothing to do with intelligence curves.
- deleted 5y ago
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- zozbot234 5y ago
  > It has nothing to do with intelligence curves. Agreed. A vast majority of supposedly "high tech" jobs are solidly average intelligence, including coding, so if anything women should be rewarded in such positions because males' wider variance in I.Q. cuts both ways. It's only pure delusional thinking that keeps up the "muh I.Q. is one of the highest" attitude among "tech" bros.
  - AdrianB1 5y ago
    Average intelligence (around 100 points) does not get you hired in any high tech job. It is called "high tech" for a reason, it's not "average work" by any measure.
  - SamReidHughes 5y ago
    Programmers are not solidly average intelligence at all. Everybody writing software is at the upper end, even if defined very loosely to mean something like top 10% of Americans. Note that among SAT scorers, the top 11% of males score >700 on the math section and top 7% of females score >700. This isn't some super-elite group, and you're already looking at 1.6x as many men. But you're arguing somehow that we should specifically discriminate in an attempt to hire dumber people, so... well, that seems like a bad idea to me.
cto_of_antifa 5y ago
nullc 5y ago
Most tech jobs don't actually require significantly greater than average intelligence. If you crunch the numbers it takes a pretty high bar to skew the gender of the posterior distribution much. It's not inconceivable and shouldn't be discarded out of hand, but there are plenty of other factors (including non-discrimination ones) worth keeping in mind. As an aside-- when you make the variance argument it's useful to point out that men are vastly more over-represented in convictions or some other negative characteristic... otherwise it's just too easy for people to read as a suggestion that men are better rather than simply being a population which as a whole tends to have more diversity in its performance. Communication is a two way street, and there are enough assholes out there who do think that men are inherently superior that it's in everyones interest to put in some more effort to make it clear that it isn't what you're saying.
- SamReidHughes 5y ago
  I don't think it is useful here (on HN) to point out the low end. That just gets tedious and I think comes across as tedious. The pertinent fact is that m:f ratio increases at the top, and variance is just the most irrefutable factor that breaks apart any presumption that the distributions should be identical. Also, I'm not trying to pretend that's the only difference between men and women. Men sleep 20 minutes less than women. Is that "inherent superiority"? No, but it's an advantage. Or maybe men undersleep and it's a disadvantage.
  - nullc 4y ago
    Maybe it comes across as tedious. But -- we write because we hope to communicate, and if you're mistaken as a flaming misogynist then the communication will fail and you won't reach the people who could benefit the most from your perspective. I think it can be worth it to put on a bit of a dance to make it clear that you're not just looking for reasons to be dismissive towards women, even if in some cosmic fairness sense you shouldn't have to prove you're not a witch. In my mind a reasonable way to do that is to point out that variance differences often make men worse. Particularly so since someone one extra sd more intelligent on the top end probably has little benefit to their life, while someone being one extra sd more violent on the bottom end makes them much more likely to live a life thats miserable for them and those around them.

oslsla 5y ago

This really isn't a problem anyone wants to solve. STEM especially has unique issues where if you take extended absences things such as your skills or research will be invalided over the short periods you may be gone. Tackle that with a lack of a childcare and you have a system set to ensure the failure of women. Retention is close to impossible as the cost of childcare is impossibly high.

SamReidHughes 5y ago
I'd say this is more industry-specific than STEM. In software I can jump back onto a project I left behind years ago and get productive immediately. This is something I've done with multiple projects. But there is a difference between some of those and other kinds of projects where the deadlines are tied into hardware cycles, like, automotive engineering. And generally in engineering, childcare is affordable because your salaries are high.