[jorgemf]

> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

What are your opinions about this? Do you think biological differences leads to social differences (not only gender but race, height, etc)? Do our "intelligences" [1] differ based on our gender? [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligenc...

[2] https://www.elsevier.com/connect/can-brain-biology-explain-w...

[freshhawk]

I often ask people who talk about this two simple questions:

- Is the extreme sex disparity in the prison population in the United States a result of a massive system of anti-male oppression or a result of population level sex differences between men and women.

- How do you interpret the experiences of trans people on hormones who experience their personalities change after taking hormones.

I'll admit it is a bit of a cheap shot, those are carefully chosen to cause cognitive dissonance, but that's an effective tool for getting people to clarify their opinions.

[saimiam]

Of course there are gender differences..but the only relevant question in this context you or anyone should ask is whether those gender differences justify lower participation of women in technology.

If you're a capitalist, if you believe in exploiting the market to the benefit yourself, you would be stupid and shortsighted to not find a way to utilize women and minorities in any way possible to serve your business.

Say you discover that women and Indians are biologically incapable of working more than 3 hours at a stretch without taking a tea break. Use that tidbit of knowledge to maybe place women and Indians closer to the breakroom. Don't brush their individual idiosyncrasies under the carpet. Use them.

And once you start using them to benefit yourself, realize that companies like Google are doing exactly that by promoting policies to bring in and retain women. It's not altruism - it's pure business.

[jorgemf]

> you would be stupid and shortsighted to not find a way to utilize women and minorities in any way possible to serve your business.

> companies like Google are doing exactly that by promoting policies to bring in and retain women

The problem is that they do it in the extreme. They want to achieve 50% of male and 50% and currently that distribution is not real, there are much more men that women in technology. So they have a positive discrimination for women to get a position even when there is a man that fits better, so they can achieve the 50/50.

If you want the best people and the pool of candidates is 70/30 you cannot have the best candidates with 50/50. You should have like 70/30 that is something proportional to the pool of candidates.

This leads to the question why there are less women than men in technology. Is it discrimination, oppression, a free choice?

[biocomputation]

>> The problem is that they do it in the extreme. They want to achieve 50% of male and 50% and currently that distribution is not real, there are much more men that women in technology. So they have a positive discrimination for women to get a position even when there is a man that fits better, so they can achieve the 50/50.

Yes, but women are 50% of our society. Why would it be wrong to try and make a company represent society? The world is absolutely full of utterly brilliant women.

[josephg]

> The world is absolutely full of utterly brilliant women.

... Brilliant women who aren't interested in programming. Why not?

If they're turning away from programming because of sexism, we can and should be fixing that.

If they're turning away from programming because women are less likely to be interested in systems thinking, and thus fewer women find programming as interesting as men do then its fine. Let the women who want to program be programmers. Let the women who want to be lawyers, or mums, or doctors do that instead.

The research suggests that both of these things are happening. If you talk to girls thinking about careers they say "programming is for boys". Also, men and women have very different interest distributions. And one of the clearest ways people express their personal interests is via their career.

You could also ask the same question about a career with an inverse gender distribution like nursing. Why are only ~10% of nurses male? Some of the effect size is probably sexism, but probably a lot of it is that (statistically) fewer men are as interested in caring for other humans as women are. Any sexism found should be fixed. But if the difference is due to expressed preference, its fine and we should all chill out.

[biocomputation]

No one should be forced to become a computer programmer just to satisfy some notion that companies should be 50% men and 50% women. No one should be forced to become a nurse just to satisfy some other notion that there should be equal numbers of men and women in nursing.

It's also not wrong to say 'maybe we should try to make our company more representative of society'.

>> But if the difference is due to expressed preference, its fine and we should all chill out.

The problem is that systemic prejudice causes long-term harm to human society. Women whom make less simply because of their gender have access to fewer opportunities. So do their children. They retire with less. It goes on and on...

For many people this issue isn't something that can be summed up as simply as perhaps you would like. It has real, long term consequences.

[jorgemf]

The north countries of Europe are consider as the ones where there is more equality between men and women, and on those countries the ratio women/men in some careers are more far from the 50/50 than in others with less equality between women and men. Why is hat? Some researches think it is a cultural issue others think it is a free choice, people feel more free and chose careers that suits more for them.

50% of our society is below the average height, why would it be wrong to try and make the basketball represent our society?

Maybe short people don't want to play basketball or they are just not good for it because of biological reasons.

[freshhawk]

First off, if you found those population differences they wouldn't be usefully predictive when it came to your actual employees. The effect sizes are too small and other individual factors much too large.

Second, those differences wouldn't "justify" anything, they would only explain that a disparity would exist in a perfectly just world.

Mainly though, you say "of course there are gender differences" when that's literally not an acceptable thing to say publicly right now. Especially as a corporation. And the evidence showing irrational sexism and racism in tech is even better than the evidence around sex differences.

The question is how to tell how much each factor contributes, because one we want to correct and the other is just a part of the human condition. Since we can't ask the question right now, that's probably step one.

As to just letting the market sort it out ... I find it completely unconvincing that that would ever work. I think that's a naive view of how culture, human social organization and human rationality work. Not even mentioning the fact that serfdom and slavery are very efficient structures from the market point of view.

[wpietri]

The right topic isn't biology, it's history.

Historically, for millennia women were treated as property of men. This was justified with all sorts sexist jabber. The same is true of race; ou can read all sorts of racist nonsense from the era of slavery. E.g., the Cornerstone Speech, in which the vice-president of the Confederacy said straight out: "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition."

The important thing to note from this is that people will justify the status quo, whatever it is, in terms of what is "natural". They are not really rational, but rationalizing.

For the last hundred years or so, we've been struggling our way out of that long era of institutionalized sexism and racism. If we don't fuck it up, we might be truly out of it in another hundred years. Until we have ripped up its roots, then questions of biology should be ignored.

Why? One good reason is that historically those arguments have proven incredibly wrong over and over. There's a whole host of things that women supposedly couldn't do that they now do just fine.

Second, we should learn a lesson from the long history of rationalizing the status quo. People who do well by the current system will tend to argue to maintain the system. Whenever we find ourselves arguing like that, we should be very suspicious.

Third our enormous history of discrimination by gender and race entirely confounds attempts to answer questions of what is truly innate. If we want to get any sort of real answer, we need to build a world with no remaining trace of bias. Only then can we start to see the nature that might exist behind culture.

Fourth, and most importantly, it doesn't fucking matter. If men turn out to be naturally, as a group, less good at math than women, does that mean we should stop training men on math? No. We should train men more at math, because math is a valuable skill, humans are very plastic, and nobody should be denied an opportunity just because somebody reduced them to a single bit, and then condemned them to ignorance. It's dumb, it's unkind, it's wasteful.

TL;DR: Let's focus on the well-documented historical distortions of massive gender and race bias, not subtle, possibly imaginary gender and race differences that have been used over and over to justify that bias.

[jorgemf]

watch this: https://youtu.be/cVaTc15plVs?t=1851 (even better if you see it all)

biology comes before history, history can be a consequence of biology

> If men turn out to be naturally, as a group, less good at math than women, does that mean we should stop training men on math? No. We should train men more at math, because math is a valuable skill

This is what scares me of this society. If someone is bad at something lets force him/her to improve at the things he/she is bad at. Instead of focusing on the things a person is good at and try to put them on the next level and make a difference that way, let's focus on the bad things and get a mediocre individual.

I love maths, but are you saying art is not a valuable skill compare with maths? Should the great artist bad at math study math and give up in art?

You might think that not training someone at something that he/she is bad at is stupid, but some people like me think the stupid thing is to no to focus in what make someone special and good at.

And finally, why do you think there is a bias? Couldn't be the reason that there are not more female CS engineers that they choose freely not to be because they just don't like it? The answer is in the video I put before.

[wpietri]

This is basically a long exercise in missing the point.

That I think one skill is good does not mean all other skills are bad.

Your basic notion seems to be that even though most historical bias has turned out to be totally unjustifiable, maybe the exact amount of bias we have today is perfectly justifiable by facts that we just don't know yet.

I can't say that's impossible, but I can say that a) it's not a smart or useful argument, and b) it totally ignores the actual harm done by today's bias in favor of worrying about what might happen if we're just too good to everybody regardless of gender.

Maybe you're the one guy in the world who spends a lot of time arguing in favor of gender bias not because he benefits from it and has soaked up society's pro-bias conditioning. Maybe you're the one pro-bias dude who comes upon it for purely intellectual reasons. But per Occam's Razor, you can guess which way I'm betting.

[jorgemf]

I am against any bias, I want to asses people by their skills. What I am saying is that some skills are in our genes and we cannot/shouldn't change that (not even with positive discrimination).

And you, instead of taking a look to the video I put in my previous comment, you decided to call me stupid. Great, do you know how I try to cure my stupidness? Reading and watching videos of people who knows more than me.

Food for your brain: how created a prejudice first about the other in our conversation?

[wpietri]

Yes, I will not be watching any videos. I don't like videos. If you have a point, feel free to make it.

I also didn't call you stupid. Sorry if I was unclear. I am suggesting you are a bigot.

[jorgemf]

The video is called Hjernevask [1] and it is a Norwegian documentary. Norwegian is one of the highly gender equal countries [2], for your information. The reporter is interviewing Norwegian social scientists about their theories of gender and social constructionism. The documentary generated much public debate in the country.

I knew you weren't calling me stupid. I called you stupid because you weren't able to spend 1 minute to check a reference and decided to throw up all your speech without even knowing what I was talking about.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask

[2] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

[szemet]

Yes. It is the is-ought [1] distinction. People differences may be a biological fact, but this factual knowledge does not informs us what to do with it. We can do then anything: amplify it, suppress it, or don't care

"Natural"[2] - if it has any meaningful definition at all - is not an ethical category. Evolution is not normative.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is–ought_problem

[2] For example for a naturalist everything is natural :)

[wpietri]

Absolutely. It maddens me how few people can see this point.

[thisiszilff]

I don't think the author denied any of that history. The fundamental question posed is why do we see 50/50 male/female in tech as some kind of gold standard to known we've reached gender equality, and why does that discussion often revolve around getting more underrepresented segments of the population to participate in tech.

Fundamentally the whole gender equality thing is about whether any given individual feels that they can live their life to its full potential. If those potentials were to differ in the large between men and women then that is fine.

Alternatively what if the problem had a lot more to do with how ingrained the drive for status is in men compared to women? That women are underrepresented because they're more likely to want work-life balance and they're competing with a horde of men willing to be miserable for years to attain status. The problem in that case isn't that there are too few women, but that there are too many men.

[wpietri]

> why do we see 50/50 male/female in tech as some kind of gold standard

This isn't even a hard question. The short version is, "duh, history". The slightly longer version is that many, many other fields have shifted from "no women" to "50/50" over the last century because patriarchy is finally starting to fall apart. Tech is a weird exception:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

Maybe you could read a book or take a class before opining much more on this?

> what if the problem had a lot more to do with how ingrained the drive for status is

You mean what if our organizational cultures are so fucked up as to reward status-seeking behaviors rather than more healthy ones? Organizational cultures that derive from patriarchal dominance hierarchies? The answer is to shift to more healthy and inclusive models of working, which is why modern diversity/inclusion programs do much more than fix hiring. Which fits nicely in with a lot of organizational improvement efforts that have nothing to do with bias reduction, because it turns out that raw primate dominance behaviors are a pretty terrible way to organize knowledge work.

[Zarath]

How would we ever know if men actually were worse than women at math? There will always be a sufficient number of confounding variables as to have plausible deniability, not that it really matters. I think the line for when we're grasping at straws (or when we have enough evidence to draw a conclusion) is different for different people, which is why there is debate over such stupid things in the first place.

[wpietri]

I doubt we ever will know. But we certainly won't know until we eliminate the effects of the enormous confounding variable of our centuries of sexism.

[Zarath]

The point is that will literally always be a confounding variable.

[wpietri]

I and many others are working for that not to be the case.

[Zarath]

I get that, but when can you possibly say that centuries of sexism no longer have any effect, or centuries of trying to shift back to center have swung the pendulum in the opposite direction? Equality of outcome?

[biocomputation]

Amazing. Thank you for writing this.

[Noxchi]

I recommend this documentary which goes into that question

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

[jorgemf]

I already saw it and that is why I am asking people here. And thanks so much because I was searching for it and couldn't find it. This is my favorite part (her response): https://youtu.be/cVaTc15plVs?t=1851

[remarkEon]

How can they not? It's an optimization problem, of sorts, from an evolutionary psychology prospective.