[burkaman]

His points about stress tolerance and anxiety are clearly ability-related. He didn't say women are less interested in stressful work, he said they are biologically inclined to be less capable of handling stress.

Which might be true, I have no idea, but it's not true that he only talked about interests.

Edit: When I say "might be true", I mean it academically might be true, but it clearly has no practical application to job performance. If women can perform equally well at a job as stressful as surgery, they obviously will not have a problem helping Google sell more ads in one of the most comfortable offices in the world.

[turtleofdeath]

This was posted the other day: http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...

It's a great read and the sort of lead-out at the end yields some more useful insight:

> Prior art aside, I would like to leave off on a high note. I mentioned earlier that men are doing a lot better on the platform than women, but here’s the startling thing. Once you factor out interview data from both men and women who quit after one or two bad interviews, the disparity goes away entirely. So while the attrition numbers aren’t great, I’m massively encouraged by the fact that at least in these findings, it’s not about systemic bias against women or women being bad at computers or whatever. Rather, it’s about women being bad at dusting themselves off after failing, which, despite everything, is probably a lot easier to fix.

To me this is more useful than "women are less interested in tech on average," or "there's a hiring bias in favor of men over women."

[burkaman]

It's also not just about self confidence and "dusting yourself off", but about being immersed in the field and understanding how the process works. If you're a CS major, and all your friends are CS majors, you've heard everything there is to know about the interview process, you know it's normal to bomb one or two, it takes some practice, maybe you borrow someone's copy of Cracking the Coding Interview to get better, etc.

But if you come from outside that culture, and you don't have many friends in the industry, you might bomb one algorithms and data structures interview and think "wow I guess I'm not cut out for this". The only reason I didn't think that after my first interview was because I knew so many people who had been through it before me.

It might be easier to frame the problem as "how can we reach people outside our circle" rather than "how can we reach more women", even if it amounts to the same thing.

[yellowapple]

I'd argue that stress tolerance affects both ability and interest. If you're averse to stressful environments, then you're going to be less interested in working in such an environment.

Of course, even people who tend to avoid stressful environments are still capable of high performance in such environments. That doesn't make such environments any more attractive.

For reference, the stressfulness of certain tech environments has been cited (or at least I think it has; I'm on my phone on my lunch break, so pardon my lack of URLs) as one of the factors behind the underrepresentation of women in technical fields. Even things like long and unpredictable work hours can (I would guess) have a chilling effect on working moms (and dads, but there's arguably less social/cultural pressure there, at least here in the US) wanting to actually spend time with their families.

[macrael]

That point especially and specifically has made every woman I've talked to about this laugh and laugh.

[irrational]

Apparently he has never met a stay-at-home Mom and he clearly doesn't have kids.

[collyw]

He did reference a paper to back up his point.

[burkaman]

He referenced a paper that noted differences in levels of neuroticism, but he did not defend his point that this affects software engineering performance. Some people will say it's common sense, but I would say it's common sense that this is irrelevant to software engineering (if not every job in the world), so common sense obviously varies a lot and should not be relied on in discussions like this.