[throwawaylinux]

> So .. you've had no actual experience of living with hunter gathers then?

This is not an argument.

> The women do a lot of work digging ants [1], digging lizards, trawling through sands for cockles [2] (and leaving massive midden piles in their wake over centuries), and retire to a life of painting and laughing at the quaint notions of the clueless.

Great.

> Many such cultures share childcare across a wide network of extended kinship [3], both male and female - everybody works to bring food, tools, and culture to the group.

And yet despite having nary a biology degree among them, even they will tell you that men can not gestate or nurse a child. And that men are biologically more suited to some types of primitive hunting.

[ehnto]

Those are just two points out of a long list of actions required in a society. I don't think it really adds that much weight to the argument, even though it is true.

To go back to your other comment:

> Why is that a problem, and if it was due to upbringing then why that would be a problem?

It would be a problem for upbringing as that is something adults have agency over. It's a bias that may not need to exist.

A great example of that is when women were highly represented in computer science as it was initially becoming a field of study, but later got pushed out by boys who'd had technical skills nurtured in them when they were young while the girls did not. Oversimplifying that a little bit, but most of us have experienced it or seen it in action.

Women in STEM is a supply issue that starts with parenting, and continues all the way along the pipeline, with schools, universities and peers all filtering girls out of the pipeline that puts butts in seats in tech roles, even though they're perfectly capable of the roles.

[throwawaylinux]

> Those are just two points out of a long list of actions required in a society. I don't think it really adds that much weight to the argument, even though it is true.

I think it does add a lot of weight. Certainly it casts doubt to the idea that you could observe a primitive hunter gatherer society to rule out any kind of cultural bias.

> It would be a problem for upbringing is that is something adults have agency over. It's a bias that may not need to exist.

This is just restating the assumption. Why is that bad? Culture causes an innumerable number of "biases" to exist, not just between different sexes either. Would there be a problem if people living in one state liked country music and in another liked rap? Should such a learned bias be stamped out? How about pizza vs hot dogs?

> A great example of that is when women were highly represented in computer science as it was initially becoming a field of study, but later got pushed out by boys who'd had technical skills nurtured in them when they were young while the girls did not. Oversimplifying that a little bit, but most of us have experienced it or seen it in action.

I've never heard of it before and I'm skeptical it's true, so I don't know how great the example really is. But let's set that aside for a minute and think about it if it was true it's not a case of a learned cultural personal preference by the women, it was that they got "pushed out". That is the problem.

But that's really besides the point here I think. I don't see why you go to a different situation to claim this one is bad. Because we have the actual at hand, which is that women like working with people and men like working with things. I'm asking specifically why that would be bad, not whether there are any aspects of culture and learned behavior that could be bad (certainly there are many examples that can easily be argued are bad, and many others could be argued are good).

[realjhol]

> It would be a problem for upbringing as that is something adults have agency over. It's a bias that may not need to exist.

There's no evidence that adults are creating this bias. They are not.

On average women find tech work grindingly boring.

Why is it a problem? It isn't. Just let people do what they want with their lives.

[ehnto]

> On average women find tech work grindingly boring.

No evidence of that.

> There's no evidence that adults are creating this bias. They are not.

Are you absolutely certain? It's the subject of quite a bit of research.

> Why is it a problem? It isn't. Just let people do what they want with their lives.

Kids don't know what they want to do with their lives, they get lead down various paths by their upbringing. Plenty of people end up in careers they don't like because it's what their parents wanted them to do, regardless of gender.

[realjhol]

>> On average women find tech work grindingly boring.

> No evidence of that

Are you for real? Have you ever tried to talk to any women about technology? With occasional exceptions, the response you will get is a face that has completely glazed over.

This is only a problem for people who believe in egalitarian ideology - where every group is supposed to be at all times "equal" in ways that are simply not bourne out in reality.

[defrost]

> Have you ever tried to talk to any women about technology?

All the time - they love technology.

Sue <redacted> runs all the books on the local family farm (which is a large multi million $ enterprise), she pulls in all the GPS logs to a NAS, databases the livestock tags, has bots watching the stock sales.

Robyn runs a super computing facility for the local SKA project (Square kilometre array) after being the Vice C. of the local university, after consolidating the Comp Sci, Math, Engineering Streams overlap into a specialised STEM course.

Danni next door hacks J.Deere software and runs an agronomy consulting group with web prescence.

Joy left running a heavy industry electrical contract company behind after selling it and now runs a GIS consulting group.

I'm guessing it's you and where you are - in this part of the world there are plenty of women into tech.

[realjhol]

This is so tedious. I said there were plenty of exceptions. As with many human traits it's a distribution with long tails at the extremities, and plenty of overlap between groups.

This doesn't in any way negate the existence of a mean difference between groups. In the real world innate sex differences are a fact of life.

That's the whole point of the paper attached to this thread.

Egalitarians believe that society would be better off if we made all efforts to flatten these differences out or ignore them. This is an article of faith, that is in no way reflected in the real world.

[ehnto]

You wanted evidence, not anecdotes. But if you want anecdotes then yes, I've even worked with a bunch of women in tech. You can't make generalizations based off your own experiences though, obviously I'll bump into women in tech while working in tech. But similarly, if the people you bump into aren't already in tech, then it shouldn't be too surprising that they're not as excited as you are about it. You believe they're not in tech because they are born without the ability to like it, I believe it's because more often than not they're guided away from it during their upbringing.

You can be right that it's common to see and still wrong that it's an innate part of being a woman.

[mpweiher]

> You can be right that it's common to see and still wrong that it's an innate part of being a woman.

It's not "an innate part of being a woman".

It's an innate part of being human.

Last I checked, around 2% of people go into tech. That means that 98% of all people prefer something else.

Is there something wrong with them that needs explaining? Don't think so.

Is there something wrong with society because these 98% of people enjoy something else more? I don't think so.

Who made the 2% of people who like being in tech the standard? So that any deviation from this standard must be explained by ... evil forces? Genetics?

Is there something wrong with the 2% of people who do enjoy going into tech because 98% of people do not? I don't think so.

Now the genders skew slightly differently, for men it's more like 97% prefer to do something else, and with women it's 99% who prefer to do something else. So what? Let people do what they want to do.

[realjhol]

> I believe it's because more often than not they're guided away from it during their upbringing.

That is indeed an article faith - one that is disproven in reality

Sex differences manifest more strongly in more egalitarian countries:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30206941/