[temphn]

Unfortunately this entire article is pseudoscience. The obvious fact is that men have founded and built the vast majority of technology companies, manage most of the largest businesses, and built up most of modern science.

To state these obvious facts at Harvard is verboten; even if you are the President of Harvard University, you cannot speculate that there might be more men capable/motivated to do top notch science/engineering/business.

And forget about linking these observed differences to evolutionary underpinnings; while it is a fact that wealthier men reproduce more (and that in particular the very wealthy men through history could have almost unbounded numbers of children, while a woman can have at most 20 or so), this cannot be used as a theoretical basis for differing incentives to achieve greatness (from the conscious down to the evolutionary levels).

Instead we have to read articles like this, grinning and smiling and playing along. At some level even the authors must know that they are trying to disprove the obvious, commonsense point: men are simply more innovative, harder working, and more likely to have extremely high levels of technical ability. Women have other strengths but we are prevented from acknowledging those as well; biology denial is a peculiarly common feature of our modern era, soon to be washed away by science.

[marquis]

I don't think this is about whether men are capable or not, that was never brought into question. It's about whether a team can work more efficiently if there is more of a mix of capabilities and interests.

The last paragraph of yours I'm going to pretend I didn't read, as I've probably met my gender-allocated quota of how hard I can work for the day, my sense of innovation is too limited to imagine that increased efficiency is possible and my technical knowledge means I really should be spending my time reading "How to pretend you know C, for Dummies", again, rather than procrastinating on the internet reading HN, most of which flies over my head.

[nkassis]

If I read this correctly, this article has nothing to do with Individual ability but of ability to work in groups. A lof of those rich successful men are loners. How many major new scientific theory have come out of a group? Quantum Theory maybe?

But in the end you are probably right, this isn't very solid science. But isn't it possible that woman have better group dynamics than all man groups?

[ugh]

Why should I believe you?