6 ms·

That's exactly why we don't have many women in tech and most readers of HN are guys. All this political correctness and attacks on PG are simply BS: men and wom

• Fomite 13y ago
  How does this explain fields where the gender balance has drifted considerably over time?
  • api 13y ago
    Kudos sir or ma'am. The same argument can be levied at racism. If you go back to the year 1000AD, it's obvious that Europeans are of vastly inferior stock. The Chinese and the Arabs were doing optics and stuff while the Europeans were basically playing in the dirt.
    • mudil 13y ago
      These things are completely different. Races are not different species. All people are the same: race does not matter. Sexual roles (the evolution of sexuality) is a completely different game. Ever thought why peacock has a tail but not peahen?
      • api 13y ago
        I don't think anyone is arguing that males and females are identical. The problem is when the current social state of things (e.g. few women in CS) is used to make unwarranted extrapolations about what those differences are without strong biological supporting evidence. It's a weak argument since social effects have not been excluded at all from your model.
      • Beliavsky 13y ago
        "All people are the same: race does not matter." In the U.S. whites score about one standard deviation above blacks on IQ tests such as WISC and Stanford-Binet, and in adoption studies that try to control for environment, this difference does not go away. Race is more than skin deep.
        • sjtrny 13y ago
          Citation needed
          • Rimpinths 13y ago
            I'm reluctant to get involved in the politically incorrect side of this argument, but FWIW, that stat comes from "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns", which was a paper published in the mid-90s by the American Psychological Association (in response to the controversial book "The Bell Curve"). From the paper: "The differential between the mean intelligence test scores of Blacks and Whites (about one standard deviation, although it may be diminishing) does not result from any obvious biases in test construction and administration, nor does it simply reflect differences in socio-economic status. Explanations based on factors of caste and culture may be appropriate, but so far have little direct empirical support. There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation. At present, no one knows what causes this differential."
          • tw268 13y ago
            There's a lot of delicious scientifically-backed crimethink at Jayman's: http://jaymans.wordpress.com/hbd-fundamentals/ http://jaymans.wordpress.com/hbd-fundamentals/
        • scott_karana 13y ago
          I've seen studies demonstrating the reverse: controlled for poverty, school, and whether a student has one or two parents, white and black American schoolchildren tested the same. (Standard deviation of 0.06: http://www.nber.org/papers/w12066 http://www.nber.org/papers/w12066) EDIT: Sorry, wrong paper. Looking for the right one. Even the fact that you point out "in the US" should be an indicator of the racism. I've never heard any other modern countries seriously complain about the allegedly inferior intellects of their black populace. Are American blacks different?...
      • jarek-foksa 13y ago
        There could be great variance in intelligence, physical strength and aggressiveness between different races of the same species. For example Chihuahua, Doberman and Gray Wolf are races of the same species (Canis Lupus). Of course humans were not a subject to strictly controlled selective breading like dogs, which means we have much fewer and less diverse races. Still, this is not something that should be completely ignored when trying to understand human behavior, both social and genetic traits matter.
    • powertower 13y ago
      What are you talking about? By the year 1000 AD the Europeans had already built the most grandiose of structures that rival today’s standards, had the most extensive networks and cities, filled entire libraries with books on all manners of philosophy and science, explored all corners of the world, and so on and on. And it wasn't until about the 1900s (about 1920-1960), when the Western World (that primarily consisted of those same groups of people) exported its knowledge and technology (via a combination of globalism/capitalism + sharing + altruism) - that started to change the subsistence living conditions for everyone else to at least something higher. If something was not invented by the Europeans, it sure as hell was revised and improved to such a degree that you can't equate the two in any meaningful way.
      • vikiomega9 13y ago
        My understanding was that it was only during the Renaissance period and after that the Europeans had names attached to things. (I'd appreciate Book/source suggestions for my reading?)
        • powertower 13y ago
          Let me ask you a question... What is your definition of a European? It kind of sounds like you might be using a very geographically restricted classification.
      • Fomite 13y ago
        I hate to break it to you, but by 1000 the Roman Empire was well and truly gone. As much as I am fond of the medieval period, I wouldn't hold up 1000 as a bright and shining year for "The West". Hell, at that point, even the Eastern Roman Empire was struggling.
        • powertower 13y ago
          The point was they accomplished things that no one else had by that time. And eventually the doom and gloom that came afterwards was overcome fully with new civilizations, countries, etc... And by the 1800s the Western world and the European countries were so far ahead of anyone else that it's silly to even compare them to the rest of the world at that point in history in regards to reason, law, economy flow, technology, science/math, music, theater, culture, ideas, etc. By your logic I could point out that China before the mid-point of last century was a 99% peasant-class country full of hardship and misery, and make the argument that you are using - wiping out all their previous culture and accomplishments. We have to look at this from the totality point-of-view.
    • tw268 13y ago
      You're talking about the Great Divergence, the historical curiosity starting in 1400 or so when the development of Europe left the rest of the world behind: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Divergence http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Divergence
  • sliverstorm 13y ago
    Fields can drift too.
    • Fomite 13y ago
      My field hasn't substantially in terms of it's goals, aims or methods - and if anything, has moved towards more male-dominated fields, yet has gone from "All men" to a slight majority of women.
      • sliverstorm 13y ago
        And this field would be...?
        • Fomite 13y ago
          Epidemiology. Though it applies for public health generally as a field, or honestly anything under the umbrella of "Biomedical".
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• sp332 13y ago
  But you haven't even tried to make a connection between the physical differences and the social differences. You just assume that all social differences are explained biologically.
  • api 13y ago
    By default conservatives tend to assume that social differences are explained biologically while liberals assume they're explained culturally. Both are extreme and likely very wrong positions.
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    • ll123 13y ago
      As far as gendered behavior goes, I've never seen anyone say it's strictly biologically determined with no influence at all from culture. However many people do claim the opposite (100% socially constructed with no influence at all from biology).
  • bsdetector 13y ago
    What we know for sure is that there are physical differences, and from this study we know there are mental differences. The unknowns are how mental differences (expression of genes) are caused by environment or effect the environment. This means we don't know whether a 50/50 split in some field is natural or a result of society railroading people into the field. It seems to me that the best way to handle policy is not to base it on unknowns, so that's why I favor policy that ensures opportunity to work in specific fields but doesn't try to balance them.
• mudil 13y ago
  Those of you who downgrade my comment should put that PC stuff aside, and consider reading about the evolution of sexuality. Such as "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley, and "The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Geoffrey Miller. All your wishful thinking will never make women and men the same.
  • api 13y ago
    Nobody's arguing they're the same.
  • Fomite 13y ago
    That's not what I downvoted you for sparky, nor has anyone particularly made that argument.
  • acdha 13y ago
    You weren't downvoted for making the tautological observation that men and women aren't the same but for attempting to use science as a cloak for shoddy reasoning: There's no question that things like hormone levels are likely to have some sort of effect but your response begs huge questions such as how low-level differences affect incredibly complex higher-level processes like cognition, how much a skill like programming depends on such specific cognitive abilities, and even how important a single area of expertise like programming is to overall success in such a wide field which requires a range of different individual skills as well as complex social behaviour on multiple levels. There is still plenty of Nobel-level groundbreaking research yet to be done for each of those questions but instead you simply chose to ignore all of that hard thinking and simply assert that simple biological determinism explains the gender distribution across an entire profession.
    • mudil 13y ago
      Maybe you should educate yourself in general evolution, and evolution of sex in particular, and then figure out the obvious: men and women gravitate toward different things. Women are (generally) not discriminated in tech, they just don't gravitate towards it. They are not discriminated on HN, or in Trekkie conventions, they are practically not present there. They don't play computer games, they do social networking. And when in evolution, we say "they", we don't mean any individual members, we mean proportions. So women in general don't do some things that interest men. Now, if you guys want society to spend effort and probably money to push women in some roles that don't interest them (or vice versa for men), so be it. My opinion is that doing this will not make women/men any happier or even will not be good for society...