[10101011]

Any other female HN readers feel viscerally uncomfortable and discouraged after reading this?

I get that people =/= averages, but I don't want to bet on myself being even MORE of an outlier than the men who achieve what I want to (become a great programmer, found a wildly successful startup...)

Just want to get a sense of whether my reaction is normal. Bonus points if you can tell me how the hell you cope with seeing stuff like this.

[intarga]

Your reaction is totally normal. I think it's because the discussion comes from a male perspective, as given to an audience that is assumed to be male.

>Bonus points if you can tell me how the hell you cope with seeing stuff like this.

I think the solution is simply not to engage with it. The topic is indeed worth discussing, but only when women are given an equal part in the conversation. As you can see by the fact that I'm commenting here though, I've failed to take my own advice...

>but I don't want to bet on myself being even MORE of an outlier than the men who achieve what I want to

FWIW I don't think you need to worry, I've yet to see any evidence that women in tech are any less capable than men. Most of the discussion seems to revolve around men trying to justify why we're underrepresented.

[10101011]

Thank you for your response - glad to know I'm not alone.

To address your last point, I meant "more of an outlier" in the mathematical sense: if for a given trait that's beneficial to, eg, startup success (like dominance or risk-taking), the distribution is overlapping bell curves with similar SDs but a higher mean for men, then I am by definition less likely to have a high level of that trait. Obviously a simplified model, but the article seems to say it's a valid one.

Part of me says you're right and I shouldn't engage - the other part wants to gather more data to reason about this properly, but worries I'll see stuff that I'll wish I hadn't.

[10101011]

Update after talking to a friend: I (along with the rest of the commenters) failed to consider a major piece of information, which is that any study of people older than babies does not prove anything about those people's inherent characteristics.