[interpol_p]

Fair enough. I'll do some homework.

Here [1] is an article on how cultural gender inequality leads to poorer maths results for women, and fixing that cultural inequality fixes the maths results. This was commonly attributed to differences in biological traits in the past, that was wrong.

Here [2] is another article where spatial abilities relate to societal roles. Another area commonly attributed to biological differences (and which the author of the manifesto still seems to believe).

I've linked to Arstechnica articles because they are good summaries and reference the sources.

Notice that the trend here is that we misattributed something to biological differences and then science showed us that things were more fluid than we initially thought. That attribution to biological differences propagated extremely harmful beliefs that still seem to resonate, though.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/06/why-judy-cant-...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/08/gender-gap-in-spatia...

[orangecat]

Here [1] is an article on how cultural gender inequality leads to poorer maths results for women, and fixing that cultural inequality fixes the maths results.

That is an interesting study which demonstrates the opposite of what you seem to think it does. Here's the PDF: https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/sapienza/htm/sc.... It shows that the as cultural inequality decreases, the relative performance of girls rises in both math where they end up about equal to boys, and reading where they end up even further ahead. Take the sum of the gap values in the first chart; they're all between 40 and 60 except for Iceland which is over 70. (Edit: no, I'm bad at math. Iceland's relative gap is about 50 as well).

So if you point to the more equal math scores as proof that there are no innate differences between boys and girls, you now have to explain why the reading scores become even more unequal with increased gender equality. Is it just that Norway and Sweden are hotbeds of discrimination against boys?

[josephg]

Alright, I'll bite. But, I've never heard of any research suggesting women have a different cognitive capacity than men. I read some research a number of years ago suggesting cross-culturally women had better language skills than men, but I don't know if this is still considered to be true.

I can't remember reading anything in the manifesto which suggested women are less capable as software engineers. The essay did suggest women were less interested in programming than men (obviously true - see enrolment figures) and that at least some of the effect size is due to biological factors (probably true - see below).

---

None of these links suggest any capacity difference. Only that there is a biologically influenced gender difference in interests.

Here's an essay contextualising and summarising the historical specifics of male and female gender roles in society: http://www.denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm

Here's a study of how prenatal androgen effects psychological thing vs people orientation, and how it influences career choice: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/

A summary of studies looking at big 5 personality distributions and other effects. Of note is the long section describing blindspots in current research: "Gender Differences in Personality and Interests: When, Where and Why?" http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x

Here's a Dutch documentary where they send a camera crew around asking different researchers about gender differences: https://youtu.be/cVaTc15plVs?t=30m49s The full documentary is great. Their conclusion is that biological factors result in an overlapping but different distribution of personalities between men and women. These differences result in statistically different career preferences.

A talk by researcher Steven Pinker on the subject, where he argues that biological differences result in at least some of the effect size in STEM interests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw&t=1057s This is part of a debate on the subject. (Not linked) Prof Elizabeth Spelke responds, but I found her argument to be much less convincing than Pinker. Watch both, make up your own mind.

[interpol_p]

> I can't remember reading anything in the manifesto which suggested women are less capable as software engineers.

It does suggest this:

> “I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes,”

Preferences and abilities. If men are in the majority of leadership, senior, and CEO roles, what is the author suggesting about the abilities of women?

[ukj]

He is suggesting that it's a difficult problem in a complex system and that it's likely that we don't understand all the factors at play? And that we need different perspectives in order to engage in the kind of constructive skepticism which ultimately leads to better understanding?

Making assertions, on the other hand... that suggests that we already know the answers; and that further scrutiny is not required.

The arrogance!

[fatso83]

Finally some meat to the discussion. This thread is one of the few to actually dig into the matter. Kudos.