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> 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: *

> 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.

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.