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What, precisely, is completely false? According to you, women were heavily underrepresented in medicine/law/HR/advertising, but were NOT so underrepresented in

What, precisely, is completely false? According to you, women were heavily underrepresented in medicine/law/HR/advertising, but were NOT so underrepresented in computing. According to belorn, the minority gender will be pushed out by the majority group. Based on what you say above, this effect should be larger in medicine/law/HR/advertising than in software. Hence, belorn's theory fails to predict reality. Your theory of government employment fails to predict reality as well. Academic sciences also have large gender disparities; physics has very few women, while biology has lots. These gaps pretty clearly mirror the CS/medicine gaps outside academia. Yet government involvement in physics academia is pretty similar to government involvement in bio academia.

pron 11y ago
The observation precisely follows the flow of power. See my other comment. > Academic sciences also have large gender disparities; physics has very few women, while biology has lots. Academia is less interesting to begin with because there is little difference in the power held by different fields (certainly between physics and biology today). Participation can therefore depend on many factors (perhaps side-products of some other process) that people have little interest to examine or change. Those differences are no different from the high participation of women relative to men in ballet dancing. It's hard to pinpoint the causes, and there's little reason or urgency to study them because there's little power imbalance involved (there is more funding directed to studying more serious diseases than less serious ones, unless there's some other good reason to study the less harmful ones).
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  There is plenty of reason to study them; they provide validation/rejection of our theories. If you claim that "power" drives everything, yet fields with no power difference have disparities which directly mirror the disparities you claim are driven by "power", that suggests there is an underlying theory that doesn't use power at all and which predicts more things. By Occams razor, the latter theory is the one which should be used.
  - pron 11y ago
    > There is plenty of reason to study them; they provide validation/rejection of our theories. That's not always enough to fund sufficient research, especially as those avenues of research show no more promise in uncovering a more fundamental model or validating/rejecting theories better than the ones that are currently explored. > yet fields with no power difference have disparities which directly mirror the disparities you claim are driven by "power", that suggests there is an underlying theory that doesn't use power at all and which predicts more things. If only you were right about the facts then your (unique, I must say) theory -- which I can only guess at[1] because you won't state it clearly -- would merit a closer look, but you're not. You are equating existence of bias with existence of bias, but with no regard to effect size. Here are the facts: http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelors-degrees-conferred-to-women-by-major-1970-2012/ http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor... CS participation was the same or higher than math and physics, and now it's significantly lower. The difference today between participation in math and physics vs CS (and engineering) is far higher than the relative difference between biology and physics. Indeed, it is higher than the relative difference between English and physics. The social power theory is currently the only theory that has enough evidence to support it, and it gathers more evidence every day, which is why it is the (current, at least) consensus of the scientific community. Your theory (whatever it is), describes neither the observed differences in academia nor in the industry and runs counter to the body of knowledge we've accumulated about power dynamics, group behavior etc. [1]: If your theory claims innate ability is a major cause of the difference, then it has been disproven. No differences in innate ability were found to be even in the ballpark of the participation difference we see in society. At this point in time, we can say with a high degree of confidence that innate ability is not a major explanation. Even evolutionary theories would reject ability-based explanations, as there is little reason for such huge differences in ability (way beyond difference in physical strength) in a species where the two sexes play almost identical roles (compared to, say, insects). If you have another theory, please state it.
    - yummyfajitas 11y ago
      CS participation was the same or higher than math and physics, and now it's significantly lower. Yes - and this contradicts belorn's theory. My theory is very simple: more math less women, with other factors being secondary. Here is Scott Alexander doing some pretty good regressions (r=-0.82, p=0.0003): http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required-ability-act-as-a-proxy-for-actual-required-ability-in-explaining-the-gender-gap/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required... There is lots of evidence of innate ability playing a significant role in this. Here are some papers: http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf http://itp.wceruw.org/Hyde%20Science%2008.pdf http://itp.wceruw.org/Hyde%20Science%2008.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3057475/pdf/nihms-232605.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3057475/pdf/nihm... (Note that putting agreement with me into an abstract is career suicide, so you'll actually need to skip ahead to the data tables.) My theory predicts % of women in academia in bio vs physics, % women in IT office work vs softer office work, % women in quant trading vs back office, and many more. Do you have any evidence at all which contradicts this?

pron 11y ago

The observation precisely follows the flow of power. See my other comment. > Academic sciences also have large gender disparities; physics has very few women, while biology has lots. Academia is less interesting to begin with because there is little difference in the power held by different fields (certainly between physics and biology today). Participation can therefore depend on many factors (perhaps side-products of some other process) that people have little interest to examine or change. Those differences are no different from the high participation of women relative to men in ballet dancing. It's hard to pinpoint the causes, and there's little reason or urgency to study them because there's little power imbalance involved (there is more funding directed to studying more serious diseases than less serious ones, unless there's some other good reason to study the less harmful ones).

yummyfajitas 11y ago
There is plenty of reason to study them; they provide validation/rejection of our theories. If you claim that "power" drives everything, yet fields with no power difference have disparities which directly mirror the disparities you claim are driven by "power", that suggests there is an underlying theory that doesn't use power at all and which predicts more things. By Occams razor, the latter theory is the one which should be used.
- pron 11y ago
  > There is plenty of reason to study them; they provide validation/rejection of our theories. That's not always enough to fund sufficient research, especially as those avenues of research show no more promise in uncovering a more fundamental model or validating/rejecting theories better than the ones that are currently explored. > yet fields with no power difference have disparities which directly mirror the disparities you claim are driven by "power", that suggests there is an underlying theory that doesn't use power at all and which predicts more things. If only you were right about the facts then your (unique, I must say) theory -- which I can only guess at[1] because you won't state it clearly -- would merit a closer look, but you're not. You are equating existence of bias with existence of bias, but with no regard to effect size. Here are the facts: http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelors-degrees-conferred-to-women-by-major-1970-2012/ http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor... CS participation was the same or higher than math and physics, and now it's significantly lower. The difference today between participation in math and physics vs CS (and engineering) is far higher than the relative difference between biology and physics. Indeed, it is higher than the relative difference between English and physics. The social power theory is currently the only theory that has enough evidence to support it, and it gathers more evidence every day, which is why it is the (current, at least) consensus of the scientific community. Your theory (whatever it is), describes neither the observed differences in academia nor in the industry and runs counter to the body of knowledge we've accumulated about power dynamics, group behavior etc. [1]: If your theory claims innate ability is a major cause of the difference, then it has been disproven. No differences in innate ability were found to be even in the ballpark of the participation difference we see in society. At this point in time, we can say with a high degree of confidence that innate ability is not a major explanation. Even evolutionary theories would reject ability-based explanations, as there is little reason for such huge differences in ability (way beyond difference in physical strength) in a species where the two sexes play almost identical roles (compared to, say, insects). If you have another theory, please state it.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    CS participation was the same or higher than math and physics, and now it's significantly lower. Yes - and this contradicts belorn's theory. My theory is very simple: more math less women, with other factors being secondary. Here is Scott Alexander doing some pretty good regressions (r=-0.82, p=0.0003): http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required-ability-act-as-a-proxy-for-actual-required-ability-in-explaining-the-gender-gap/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required... There is lots of evidence of innate ability playing a significant role in this. Here are some papers: http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf http://itp.wceruw.org/Hyde%20Science%2008.pdf http://itp.wceruw.org/Hyde%20Science%2008.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3057475/pdf/nihms-232605.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3057475/pdf/nihm... (Note that putting agreement with me into an abstract is career suicide, so you'll actually need to skip ahead to the data tables.) My theory predicts % of women in academia in bio vs physics, % women in IT office work vs softer office work, % women in quant trading vs back office, and many more. Do you have any evidence at all which contradicts this?