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Author here. Altman provided no argument whatsoever in his post that the existence of a sexist act is the cause of women's underrepresentation in tech. He was

Author here. Altman provided no argument whatsoever in his post that the existence of a sexist act is the cause of women's underrepresentation in tech. He was fairly careful - he didn't even explicitly state causality, he merely implied it. Maybe an argument is out there somewhere, but not in Altman's post. I think the fact that sexism reduces the desire of women to participate in something is established. Directionally, maybe, but I've seen little evidence the magnitude is significant. In spite of the built in sexism, Catholicism and Islam both have far more women than Atheism (or technology). I don't see any reason to believe medicine or law are less sexist than tech, or were less sexist back when women started flooding into those fields. If you have evidence of correlation, link to it - Sam Altman didn't. I do have a "reactionary axe" to grind against bad reasoning and this particular topic is a huge source of bad reasoning.

cynicalkane 12y ago
> In spite of the built in sexism, Catholicism and Islam both have far more women than Atheism Let's break down what's bad about this sentence. It contains: * a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the sexism we're talking about. A woman who walks into a church will not be constantly devalued for her gender and/or treated like a hot piece instead of a colleague, while simultaneously having their feelings devalued with neckbeardy thought-terminating "rationalism". In technology and business, sexism isn't an abstract teaching most people ignore, it's something in the air. * At least two of the statistical fallacies you just decried. * The 'appeal to worse problems' fallacy, and * the hidden assumption that women's participation in religion is comparable to their choice of careers, as though they 'join' the Catholic Church or Islam the same way one might join a technology company.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Yeah 'something in the air'. What does that mean? That some people (many women) don't like the culture of technology. That's not sexism; that's just a fact. E.g. Some people (many women) don't like hunting - does that make it sexist?
  - DanBC 12y ago
    You risk losing money and market share if you think like that. If you make smaller guns and if you make guns in a range of colours and you make nice clothing you then open up the market beyond its current range. The people currently hunting make dislike a powder blue rifle and may scoff at comfy footwear, but you don't care because you're not selling to those people, you're selling to the peple who are not traditionally hunters.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Excellent observation. But still not sexism. Its gotten popular to use blaming language, paint everything with the sexism brush, and generally polarize discussions about workplaces. I don't think that helps get us anywhere. If only more folks thought like you.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    No, hunting isn't "sexist", it's gender biased. "Sexist" is a normative term. It's easy to see where the gender bias comes from: most hunters come to the sport via their fathers, and hunting as a father-son tradition is deeply ingrained in the culture. There are, despite that, plenty of women hunters. That's the case with hunting. But it's hard to extrapolate from hunting to technology jobs.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  In your first bullet point, you are stating a very detailed theory - near as I can tell, A && B && C => low representation (where A is a particular sort of sexism, B is low status men being rational, etc). That's not what Altman did, nor did he provide evidence for that theory or any other. The "appeal to worse problems" is not a fallacy - I'm advocating searching for examples which vary the inputs. That will allow you to actually measure correlation - if inputs and outputs vary together, you've got correlation. If they don't, you've got nothing.

cynicalkane 12y ago

> In spite of the built in sexism, Catholicism and Islam both have far more women than Atheism Let's break down what's bad about this sentence. It contains: * a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the sexism we're talking about. A woman who walks into a church will not be constantly devalued for her gender and/or treated like a hot piece instead of a colleague, while simultaneously having their feelings devalued with neckbeardy thought-terminating "rationalism". In technology and business, sexism isn't an abstract teaching most people ignore, it's something in the air. * At least two of the statistical fallacies you just decried. * The 'appeal to worse problems' fallacy, and * the hidden assumption that women's participation in religion is comparable to their choice of careers, as though they 'join' the Catholic Church or Islam the same way one might join a technology company.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Yeah 'something in the air'. What does that mean? That some people (many women) don't like the culture of technology. That's not sexism; that's just a fact. E.g. Some people (many women) don't like hunting - does that make it sexist?
- DanBC 12y ago
  You risk losing money and market share if you think like that. If you make smaller guns and if you make guns in a range of colours and you make nice clothing you then open up the market beyond its current range. The people currently hunting make dislike a powder blue rifle and may scoff at comfy footwear, but you don't care because you're not selling to those people, you're selling to the peple who are not traditionally hunters.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Excellent observation. But still not sexism. Its gotten popular to use blaming language, paint everything with the sexism brush, and generally polarize discussions about workplaces. I don't think that helps get us anywhere. If only more folks thought like you.
- tptacek 12y ago
  No, hunting isn't "sexist", it's gender biased. "Sexist" is a normative term. It's easy to see where the gender bias comes from: most hunters come to the sport via their fathers, and hunting as a father-son tradition is deeply ingrained in the culture. There are, despite that, plenty of women hunters. That's the case with hunting. But it's hard to extrapolate from hunting to technology jobs.
yummyfajitas 12y ago
In your first bullet point, you are stating a very detailed theory - near as I can tell, A && B && C => low representation (where A is a particular sort of sexism, B is low status men being rational, etc). That's not what Altman did, nor did he provide evidence for that theory or any other. The "appeal to worse problems" is not a fallacy - I'm advocating searching for examples which vary the inputs. That will allow you to actually measure correlation - if inputs and outputs vary together, you've got correlation. If they don't, you've got nothing.