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by defrost 1273 days ago
> 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.

1 comments

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.

The interesting part here is that there are plenty of exceptions - and those exceptions tend be clustered in different societies and cultures.

I'm not advocating you change wherever you're at, I'm just delighted that where I am women drive road trains & haul paks, design ships, wire buildings, advance astrophyysics, etc (and, for that matter, so do the men).

It certainly makes your bemoaning "have you tried talking to women about tech?" a non issue hereabouts.

If you're happy with your bit of "the real world" (ie. a subset of the actual real world) then good on you, go forth and enjoy - and perhaps bemoan less.

This is just more egalitarian cope.

Of course there are local differences which is why these need to be normalized with a population-wide sample. In that case, sex differences present themselves clearly.

As the article states, surprise surprise, on average compared to men, women are more interested in people than things.

> Of course there are local differences

Differences by country and culture - the reason why are the interesting questions.

> these need to be normalized with a population-wide sample.

Need to be?

The US (for example) has a large population ( ~360 mill ) with a poor system of government and an excess of hold over odd little religious groups (and home grown product like Mormons, etc).

Other countries have smaller populations (eg 25 million here), better more responsive system of government with better oversight, better education, better health, etc.

I see no benefit in being blended in with a bloated mass of objectively worse and dragged down to US levels.

How could it be reflected in the real world if we're still encumbered by the status quo? That's like pointing to a lack of EVs and saying see, no EVs, people don't want them. (Talking specifically about women in STEM here)
You have to prove that we're "encumbered" by anything, and that the status quo is not merely the reflection of people's natural preferences, and that it would be better for society to break the status quo.

You can't prove any of these things. They are dogmatic assertions