[Retric]

The biological differences between genders are fairly small in comparison to the standard deviation. Consider on average men may have 20% more upper body strength than the average women. But, some men have 1/2 the upper body strength of the average women, and some women have twice the upper body strength than the average man.

Further there are lot's of trends that run counter to the biology, for example on average women make better snipers than men.

[TeMPOraL]

That's all good. In the case you described, in a perfect egalitarian, meritocratic society you would expect to find more men than women in the army in general, but maybe more women than men doing sniper duty. That's how averages will play out with zero gender discrimination.

In other words - just because an industry is not 50/50 men/women, doesn't mean there's sexual discrimination going on.

Even if the differences themselves are small, the very fact that they're there mean that women have comparative advantage over men in some areas, while men have that advantage over women in other. We exploit that concept in international trade, and yet many find it wrong to exploit it at the society level.

The question we should be asking is: which "social biases" arise from comparative advantage of sexes? Maybe they're ok and we should leave those biases be, while removing those that don't give any utility? Hard-equalizing everything (by e.g. pushing for 50/50 ration of genders in every industry) seems to be an outcome worse for everybody.

[aianus]

Even a small difference in the mean or sd for a given attribute will result in enormous gender imbalances for jobs requiring an extreme value of that attribute.

If you select people totally at random (no discrimination!) from the population of people with >130 IQ to work at Facebook and the sd for men in the general population is 11 IQ points instead of 10 for women, you'll wind up with a 70% male workforce at Facebook.

Similarly if men had a mean IQ of 101 instead of 99 for women, Facebook would have a 66% male workforce.

From R:

women <- pnorm(130, mean = 100, sd = 10, lower.tail = FALSE)

men <- pnorm(130, mean = 100, sd = 11, lower.tail = FALSE)

scaling <- 100/(women+men)

men * scaling

[1] 70.28561

women * scaling

[1] 29.71439

women <- pnorm(130, mean = 99, sd = 10, lower.tail = FALSE)

men <- pnorm(130, mean = 101, sd = 10, lower.tail = FALSE)

scaling <- 100/(women+men)

men * scaling

[1] 65.8503

women * scaling

[1] 34.1497

[osipov]

Bravo! You are a gentleman and a scholar! This comment if packaged a Jupyter notebook could move the world!

[Retric]

The centeral problem with that line of thinking is it's really hard to both set aside "social biases" and it's really hard to seperate what's useful for getting a job done and how we currently measure thinks. Consider, in an 100% egalitarian society the NBA might end up with 1-5 women. However, a similar game in an egalitarian society might be much closer to 50-50 if the rules focused on slightly different gameplay. Ex: does making the basket 5% higher change the gender balance.

Granted, the NBA is entertainment which complicates things, but the same line of thinking probably applies to the Navy Seals. IMO, whenever you see a biased rule you need to deside if it's useful before you can view it as egalitarian.

[Lawtonfogle]

Even if the averages are the same, differences in deviations could still result in differences in outcomes.

Say that men and women were, on average, completely identical at programming computers (average of 50). But say that men had greater deviation. So you had more men with a 10 and more men with a 90. But there were more women with a 40 and a 60. 75 and 25 are the break even points.

But, software development companies don't want average programmers, they want good programmers. So they only hire those who are a 80 or better. End result: more men hired as programmers even though men and women are equal on average.

[norea-armozel]

Nothing personal, but I'm calling bs on that statement of companies hiring the "best" in any position. The reality is that companies hire what they can afford and are willing to take a hit on productivity in the short term if it means getting a service or product out of the door. You can always make something better later but you can't make something if you have no one you can hire to get it done. As for women in programming, I would argue that I know more women programmers that are far better than me at the job despite my knack for teasing out oddities in bugs. My own talent doesn't always make up for solid performance. So that Cowboy Programmer schtick doesn't work when you're trying to get hired at any company that most of the Valley would consider boring.

[Lawtonfogle]

First consider that I was initially talking about all people. The average person probably can't even get hello world to run (also depend if we mean mean, median, or more).

>The reality is that companies hire what they can afford and are willing to take a hit on productivity in the short term if it means getting a service or product out of the door.

Redefine best to be a more complex variable that depends upon what the individual is willing to work for, how good they are, and set limits on the max they can pay.

For example, perhaps best is defined as highest skill for those willing to work for no more than 50k. Anyone who isn't willing to work for it is eliminated. You still have a remaining group, that when divided by gender, has both male half and female half each with an average and a standard deviation, and which the company is wanting to hire from the top.

>You can always make something better later but you can't make something if you have no one you can hire to get it done.

Perhaps best is defined not by who can make the most perfect program given infinite time, but who can make the program that best fits the business needs for a minimally viable product in the least amount of time. Once again, best can be redefined as you want. My argument doesn't depend upon any given implementation of best.

>So that Cowboy Programmer schtick doesn't work when you're trying to get hired at any company that most of the Valley would consider boring.

Once again (again), I never defined best. Best may mean a cowboy to some group who only needs one or two individuals, and it may mean a great team player to a far larger organization.

[mratzloff]

20% more upper body strength? Try 2-3x.

[Retric]

At similar body sizes it's ~20%, women are also generally shorter and often significantly less fit in the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_records_in_w...

At unlimited weight it's 151kg vs 212kg, but far more men get into weight lifting so there is bias in those numbers.

[mratzloff]

How many women are comparable to a 6', 185 lb man? And we're talking averages, not Olympic competitors.

[Retric]

Average man in the US is 5' 10" and out of shape. Which is my point the average is a low bar.

Now, 0.1% of females might be at the fit 6' male standard but that's over 150,000 in the US. And there are sub 6' NBA players which suggests is an unreasonably high bar for the vast majority of things.