[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.

[josephg]

> Women whom make less simply because of their gender ...

My understanding is that most of this effect is caused by:

- Women taking breaks in their career to start families

- Women preferring jobs that give them more time to spend with their children. Jobs that have better benefits often have worse pay (Eg lawyer vs schoolteacher.)

- Society values traditionally feminine jobs less than traditionally masculine jobs

I'm not sure how pushing for more women to become programmers will help address any of these issues.

[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.