[Wintamute]

I think the statement that on average women are less likely to be interested in tech careers is likely reasonable. For example, take veterinary science ... this is a rigorous and demanding area of study previously dominated by men, but now dominated by women. You can Google about this yourself, but here's an article I just found [1].

So why has this happened in the veterinary sciences, but not tech? One answer could be that somehow male computer scientists turn out to be horribly sexist compared to male vets. A more plausible explanation could be that with meaningful swathes of societal gender discrimination against women removed they are perfectly capable of moving into and dominating a technical field when that chimes with some aspect of female nature. In the case of veterinary science that synergy would come from the female predilection towards caring and nurturing. I'm not saying every woman cares about things like that, but on average more do than men. The male predilection towards abstract and systematic thinking could in my opinion go a long way to explain their over-representation in the tech industry. I think those are uncontroversial statements, although sadly after 30 years of sub-standard echo chamber research in the social sciences that may not be a popularly held opinion.

The benefit of this way of looking at things is that it doesn't paint women as somehow deficient and needing of special treatment. Rather than bombarding them with negative messaging it recognises that women are perfectly capable of reaching out and taking what they want from society. A more empowering feminist message, no? And indeed neither does it paint an entire industry as systematically sexist - which sounds to me like the sort of oversimplification you take objection to? But there's big social media capital and real world rewards propagating sexism in tech memes.

> We know that women make less than men in most environments ...

> ... it needs to also be the case that women are making equal pay

I'm not sure it's fair to start these sorts of statements with "We know that..." - the most charitable depiction would be to characterise such statements as debatable. In the UK women under 30 now earn more than similarly aged men, in other words they have reversed the pay gap for that age group [2]. Again this suggests to me that until biological imperatives take hold women are more than capable of competing with men in the workplace. What happens post 30 is down to life choices. As a whole women are more likely to value family life and make life choices based on that, whereas men are more likely to devote their energies to their careers. It's not a zero sum game, there are sacrifices on both sides there. And again, that doesn't hold true for every woman and every man, but to claim entrenched massive systematic discrimination seems to me at best tenuous.

[1] https://www.avma.org/News/JAVMANews/Pages/100215g.aspx

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-e...

[kbenson]

> perfectly capable of moving into and dominating a technical field when that chimes with some aspect of female nature.

It doesn't have to be female nature. It could just as easily be culturally encouraged nature, or a combination of the two (a culturally encouraged aspect that was originally developed from human nature, in a self reinforcing loop).

> The male predilection towards abstract and systematic thinking could in my opinion go a long way to explain their over-representation in the tech industry. I think those are uncontroversial statements...

They should be uncontroversial. It's obvious there are actual differences between male and female minds, and plenty of studies have shown physiological differences. Unfortunately, bringing science of this nature into a discussion about equality is often immediately vilified. On the other hand, this information can be used for the basis of some fairly horrendous reasoning, so it's easy to see why people are quick to discount it.

[Wintamute]

Care to expand on what you think that horrendous reasoning could be?

[kbenson]

For example:

Since all people aren't created equal, we shouldn't strive for equality, since some people are clearly better than others, so let's embrace that.

Since we aren't all physically or mentally equal, and some people are clearly "better" with respect to some aspect X that we/I/some group I'm part of has classified as important, those people are more worthy than others.

Etc.

There are arguments that can be logically made for a society based on those, but not if you want a society like we enjoy and promote in western civilization (not no imply a specific difference in other cultures, I'm just not qualified to comment on them). I think the world is a better place in many, many ways because we've promoted values of inclusion, equality, happiness and life. I'm happy to discuss alternate societies with different values and how what that might be like as a thought experiment (some of the best science fiction is in thus vein), but I'm not really interested in that when discussing problems our society currently faces. We should be able to agree on those core values I mentioned earlier, and taking time in each discussion to reassert and prove that those are important to everyone involved just detracts from useful conversation.

In other words, it's entirely possible that in some instances negative steroetyping based on race, sex, nationality or any number of other attributes is actually somewhat accurate, but we've decided as culture that the downsides are fairly bad, so for the most part we shouldn't do that. I agree with this.

[bzbarsky]

The point when you transition from "X and Y are different" to "X is better than Y".

It commonly takes the even more pernicious form of going from "X and Y are different on average" to "any given X is better than any given Y". If you're lucky, this last statement at least has a "until proved otherwise" caveat.

Unfortunately, history is rife with this sort of reasoning. People slip into it _really_ easily. It doesn't help that there is a natural tendency to perceive your in-group as better than out-groups, so to the extent that X above ends up feeling like someone's in-group and Y ends up feeling like an out-group, the "X is better than Y" conclusion is very hard to avoid.

[Grishnakh]

>In the case of veterinary science that synergy would come from the female predilection towards caring and nurturing. I'm not saying every woman cares about things like that, but on average more do than men.

I think that's BS. From what I've seen throughout my life, women are much more likely to be cold, uncaring parents than men. Notice how you always hear horror stories about mothers-in-law, but you almost never hear anything bad about fathers-in-law. I think we as a society have somehow gotten the idea that women are nurturing and caring, because we want them to be, but it's entirely wrong for the most part.