[yummyfajitas]

Not only does he make the logical fallacies you suggest, but he also ignores plenty of evidence that there might be natural causes:

For instance, there is plenty of evidence women are less likely to be very good (or very bad) at math: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/321/5888/494.summary http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21038941

There is also evidence women are more risk averse, making them less likely to work in startups: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/36/15268.full

There is evidence women avoid computing specifically because they are intolerant of geeks: http://web.archive.org/web/20100106021904/http://scicom.ucsc... (The original article was taken down)

This report also pushes the intolerance hypothesis, as well as women being less dedicated, being fearful of text interfaces, and preferring more collectivist environments: http://web.archive.org/web/20091007234852/http://opensource.... (Please go read the report before criticizing me for citing it. It's written by a woman who is allegedly a feminist.)

It's safe to say that none of this is ironclad proof that the only cause of women not being present in computing is natural causes. But the author's claims that "there's no such evidence" is utterly wrong. There is evidence, he just ignores it.

Lastly, the author completely ignores the fact that computing is very diverse. We have whites, all different types of asians, israelis and a smattering of euros (and of all sexual orientations). Our diversity may not be statistically identical to the general US population, but it's nonsensical to claim a lack of diversity in computing.

[cturner]

I was told I'd never be a programmer because I didn't get good marks in math and physics, that was sixteen years ago. Let's kill the myth.

I can't see any reason why being genuinely good at math is more important to effective programming than being good at chemistry (layers and sequence), biology (complex systems) or languages (building meaning from abstract or incomplete signals). You do not need to be good at late high-school math to understand Big-O.

I suspect people who are good at or passionate about math are far more likely to stroke their ego with premature optimisation.

Also, there's a vast difference between aptitude for maths, and performing well in maths tests. Attention to detail, regard for the education system, interest in the topic all play a part.

    > There is evidence women avoid computing because
    > they are intolerant of geeks

I see a different pattern that goes in mostly the reverse direction. Young men are a strange bunch, but young nerds in particular tend to act bizarrely towards women, and are therefore undesirable to be around. It can be more effort to deal with someone bizarre (has feelings but is draining) than someone who is just a bastard (quickly tell them to get stuffed). If you sense a concentration of draining people - avoid!

[yummyfajitas]

I can't see any reason why being genuinely good at math is more importnat to effective programming...

I would strongly suspect that just as math and CS ability are correlated, so would math and chemistry. Biology less so, since biology is mostly just memorizing (at least for the first 3-4 years of college).

Anyway, I cited math data mainly because it's so widely studied. I get so many downvotes when I discuss this topic with data that I'm not even going to attempt to write about stuff I have no readily available data on.

I see a different pattern that goes in mostly the reverse direction. [...] young nerds [...] are therefore undesirable to be around.

Um, that's not the reverse direction. That's the same direction as what I said: women avoid computing because they are intolerant of geeks.

Note that young nerds also often act "bizarrely" towards men and each other. I certainly did before I learned to pass. But the claim of the author of the studies I cited is that women are less tolerant of "bizarre" behavior.

[cturner]

    > I get so many downvotes when I discuss this topic with data

It's a bit like the flying spaghetti monster book where they correlate the decline of piracy with global warming. You need to present data, and then also provide a link between it and the point you're making. I dispute the strong link between math and programming.

I accept your correction in that we're making the same point about young men. What I should have said is that the way you phrase it makes it seem like it's women that initiate the pattern. I don't think that's so. Although perhaps you could go back further and ask, what made the men neurotic in the first place, was it cruel rejection or bullying by prom queens - no idea. I just found the phrasing backwards.

[yummyfajitas]

You need to present data, and then also provide a link between it and the point you're making. I dispute the strong link between math and programming.

Fair enough. I thought the link was obvious enough, but you are keeping me honest. I have no data proving this link myself.

However, I just messaged a friend of mine who occasionally dabbles in math-ed stuff. He recommends these (paywalled) papers as starting points:

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1500963&dl=ACM&col...

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1047480

And an older paper "Identification of Computer Programming Aptitude", by Alspaugh (one of the early works).

I'll asked him to give me copies next time I see him in person (I'm no longer an academic, so I can't access university libraries).

[cema]

  I would strongly suspect that 
  just as math and CS ability are correlated, 
  so would math and chemistry. 

I am not sure about that. In my experience, mathematics and chemistry were not noticeably correlated (either way). On the other hand, such ostensibly different subjects as mathematics and music were positively correlated. Experience is anecdotal but includes math classes in high school, applied math in college, and computer science in grad school.

[drumdance]

Music and computer programming are correlated as well. Once upon a time orchestras were overwhelmingly male, but now there are a lot more women in orchestras, not to mention world-class soloists. This is partly due to the blind audition process that became common ~40 years ago.

[roguecoder]

I'd assume music and CS would be more closely correlated, and there is lots of research into music too. Most relevantly, the transition to blind auditions wiping out gender disparities in orchestra makeups.

[wlievens]

> so would math and chemistry

Anecdotal evidence here: I'm pretty good at math, but failed several chemistry exams in high scool. I just didn't "get" it. Maybe I would be able now, because I'm better at thinking abstractly and systematically than when I was 16, but that would be because I'm a programmer today. For me the correlation definitely doesn't hold. Same goes (to a lesser extent) for biology for me.

[youngnerd112]

Sorry to be so brutally honest....but personally with women rejecting me everywhere in a downright rude manner as an undesirable nerd it is hard not to have a bias against them!

Agreed that perhaps not all women are like that...but for one that is nice there is at least a hundred shallow bitches around!

[bethling]

I've been called a bitch to my face during architectural debates. I've had responses to my technical comments come back as "whatever, sudo make me a sandwich". Been asked while doing interviews, "Oh wait you're not HR?" I've gone to many presentations contain sexist images, etc. Throughout my career I've been constantly had to deal with implications that I don't belong - and that my opinions can be dismissed..

Yet, somehow I manage to keep the perspective that technology isn't populated by sexist assholes - sure the ones that are there stand out and make up a lot of the things that come to mind when I'm stressed. But really it's a small percentage [even though that small percentage can really get to you].

Try to keep the same perspective about women, the vast majority of us aren't "bitches".

[youngnerd112]

Trust me I try....but being a nerd and a racial minority it is hard to keep a straight mind when nine out of ten women look the other way when you try to approach them to start a conversation.

I dont think you have been in a situation where "Can I buy you a drink" is replied with a "you're ugly ...go away".

[adrianpike]

I don't know you, so I can only make assumptions and extrapolations from what you've revealed here, but it sounds to me like you're crossing up "let's have a conversation" and "let me buy you a drink so we can go play some horizontal mambo." Now it's totally possible that you just want to chat, but "can I buy you a drink" is often interpreted as the latter.

As lots of us on HN trend towards the geekier side of life, social cues sometimes don't come as naturally to us as they do to many others - it takes time and effort to not be socially awkward, but it's 100% worth it.

The next time something like that happens, try reviewing exactly what happened, how things might have been misinterpreted, and how you can learn & grow from it.

Also keep in mind that there are lots of people who _are_ jerks, but gender has nothing to do with it.

Most importantly, don't let it bias you, and keep your chin up!

[youngnerd1121]

Thanks for the kind words man!...My situation is actually not as hopeless as I am leading people to believe here.

The point I was trying to make was that a bunch of negative experiences with women when you are young leaves very deep scars and these scars manifest themselves as unconscious biases so much that whenever you see a beautiful woman (who will most probably reject you if you tried!) you are automatically biased against her.My brain does this to me so often even though I think I am logical than most other people.

Now I will make another point that is also controversial.(someone needs to say these things!)

See when you grow your skills interacting with women a point comes when the things you cant change matter much more than the things you can, so much that the situation seems pretty helpless.

So at that point even if I bought really expensive clothes and bought myself a mercedes or say became a really smooth talker, how women respond to me would only marginally improve as compared to the non-possible changes such as changing my race to become white...changing my height to become six feet tall etc.

So no matter what I do a six feet tall white guy or a good looking muscular black guy will always have significantly higher odds of attracting a given woman over me.

The more you approach the limit the more you begin to see this brutal truth of the dating world.The things that matter most are things you are born with and this sometimes causes you develop significantly negative feelings towards women as a whole.

[roguecoder]

Nope, but I bet she's be in a situation where men expected her to drop everything to make herself sexually available for a stranger.

Everyone wants to be seen as desirable, but it is not an entire gender's fault that the specific women you've approached don't respond to your advances. It may seem counter-intuitive, but the best way I've found to get dates is to treat women like interesting people instead of potential dates, while putting effort into making myself conventionally attractive (working out, getting regular hair cuts, careful grooming, conversational techniques). It's a lot of work, but it's been more effective than deciding the problem is women. Women talk to each other: the friend you make today has a bunch of friends she can set you up with tomorrow. I mean, if the problem is "all women" you might as well give up.

Plus, in the meantime I've met a bunch of interesting people and had interesting conversations I'd otherwise have missed out on because I was only considering women as potential romantic partners. It is possible to have fulfilling intellectual, emotional and social relationships that have nothing to do with sex. If you do care exclusively about sex, I recommend escorts or online hookups.

[youngnerd112]

Although I fully agree with what the advice you are giving me.....I think you are wrongly viewing my motivations being primarily sexual...and the point is that most women do it too!

[Tichy]

While saying such things is really ugly (I don't want to defend such women), maybe it could help you a little to think about the asymmetry in dating. Attractive women get approached all the time, a feeling most men probably can't begin to appreciate. If you are a programmer, compare it to the emails from recruiters you get all the time... There are certainly lots of such emails that I have taken to delete without reply now.

[youngnerd112]

yes...but when you get a lot of rejections from recruiters dont you console yourself by saying/fantasizing that one day when you are truly successful you will ignore all recruiters and maybe get one or two out of a job...if you see all the threads on HN about recruiters people are easily biased against recruiters.

We are all human beings with weakly rational brains.Only thing wrong here is that it is not socially acceptable to be biased against women!

[jessedhillon]

Assuming that you are commenting here because you favor the theory that women are inhibited in some way from being effective software engineers -- and that is why they are underrepresented:

For women not to be represented in the population that practices software engineering indicates some intrinsic flaw or inability with them --

but for one that is nice there is at least a hundred shallow bitches around

-- But for you to fail to achieve representation in the population which can acquire a mate or find a willing sex partner is ALSO a flaw with women!

Brilliant! Heads: you win; tails: women lose.

[youngnerd112]

It was in response to the parents comment

"but young nerds in particular tend to act bizarrely towards women, and are therefore undesirable to be around."

and a personal explanation of why I as a young nerd is slowly developing this kind of a bias.

[cturner]

If you're having trouble of the sort of ratios you're talking about, you're doing something that alienates people. That doesn't have to be the end of things, because if you work at it eventually it'll change.

You can't change other people. Focus on the things you can affect, like finding ways to make yourself a more relaxed and relaxing person to talk to.

Some people are trying to give you feedback in other parts of this thread. Much of it is not constructive, but some is. But you seem to be focussed on reiterating your points rather than taking it on.

Work out how you can be more open to feedback. Find someone who will give you honest feedback. Distinguish between people who give good, direct feedback and people who get off by demeaning you.

I assume you created this account as a throwaway because you had an idea what you were saying would be controversial but this stuff is troubling you you and you wanted to talk about it. Good move. Now take the next step.

[theresaanna]

Reworded:

I either gravitate toward women who tend to respond to my advances negatively or have some behavior that puts women off. Therefore, I'm sexist and consider most if not all women inferior to men in ways including ability in math, engineering. Because I can't get them to sleep with me.

...What??

[youngnerd112]

Umm no...but let me try to reword what I said in that language:

Although I absolutely agree that it is totally irrational to think of women as inferior in anything , my primate human brain cannot be convinced by reason alone to discard all its biases.Therefore I stand as an example of a young male nerd who as a result of his interactions with the opposite sex is developing negative biases towards them.

[wlievens]

> Umm no

Read that post again very carefully. Either you look for the wrong women, or you do something women dislike. Both are relatively easy to fix.

[mattgreenrocks]

Brutally honest? You're projecting your own personal failings onto all women, and it has absolutely no bearing on this discussion whatsoever. What's more, it will haunt you if you don't deal with it now.

Go talk it out, either with a friend or a therapist. The longer you wait, the harder it will be.

[youngnerd112]

>You're projecting your own personal failings onto all women, and it has absolutely no bearing on this discussion whatsoever.

I think like all other people you are missing my point.Please read my other responses on this thread.

But Yes I am certainly a failure so far by all conventional standards......but that does'nt mean I have the magical ability to get rid of all my biases....dealing with them is going to take time and in case of this particular bias ,perhaps a lot of positive experiences of interacting with women.

[mattgreenrocks]

I didn't call you a failure per se; it was more an exhortation to quit the pity party, take responsibility for your misguided thinking, and do something about it. That is the point of my thread.

The specious arguments you put forth in the thread are not worth addressing.

[anigbrowl]

Then again, maybe it's you.

[youngnerd112]

It definitely is me....the point is about why as a young male with a not perfectly rational human brain I cant seem to be able to stop myself from developing biases.

[tptacek]

You realize that doesn't make it acceptable to harbor prejudices, right? The only reason you're not directly penalized for having them is that they're hard to screen for in job interviews... or were, before you gave the Google crawler trace evidence about one of yours.

[youngnerd112]

The unfounded assumptions that you have made are

a) Most people dont have any prejudices. b) I care about the societal acceptability of my thoughts before thinking them c) One's thoughts should be discarded if they can somehow be negatively viewed in job interviews d) I cannot have my own business and therefore not need anyone to give me a job.

[anigbrowl]

This report also pushes the intolerance hypothesis, as well as women being less dedicated, being fearful of text interfaces, and preferring more collectivist environments: http://web.archive.org/web/20091007234852/http://opensource..... (Please go read the report before criticizing me for citing it. It's written by a woman who is allegedly a feminist.)

That is a misleading characterization of the paper, which aims at establishing an analytical framework rather than offering itself as a 'report,' within an existing analytical framework. For example, rather than suggesting that women are 'fearful' of text interfaces, the author observes that their continuing popularity in the FLOSS community exacerbates past educational disparities: 'Instead of deducting from biological sex difference, the phenomenon suggests a lingering deficiency of women’s IT education and women-unfriendly products and tools.' The writer goes on to posit that many staples of geek culture (eg long coding pushes) act as exclusionary factors for women who may have to juggle coding with other tasks such as child-rearing, and that women's contributions in areas such as documentation or design are seriously undervalued.

Your summary of the paper is so far off base that I find myself wondering if you inadvertently linked to the wrong document.

[yummyfajitas]

The article certainly does not suggest a "lingering deficiency of women's IT education" w.r.t. the use of text. It suggests that women "usually obtain their programming expertise through the formal education system" and that schools teach primarily "Microsoft visual basic, visual C++ or Java." The only "educational disparity" is that women don't teach themselves to use the shell whereas men do.

You are correct, however, that my use of the term "fearful" was wrong. Thanks for the correction. In actuality, the article doesn't explain why women don't teach themselves how to use gcc.

And yes, you are also correct when you point out that one specific reason women are less dedicated and less willing to put the time in is that they have other interests (such as child rearing and housework).

Apart from the minor issue of whether "fearful" was correct, what do you object to about my characterization?

[keithflower]

The January 2012 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society presents a comprehensive review article disagreeing that there is "plenty of evidence" women are less likely to be very good at math based on "natural causes" (whatever the hell that kind of nonsense phrase is supposed to mean), and provides plenty of evidence that any disparity is due to attitudes toward women and other sociocultural factors:

"Debunking Myths about Gender and Mathematics Performance" http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf

Now for the anecdotes: in my experience there has been plenty of outright racial and gender discrimination in computing, science, math, and even medicine. I've seen it. I suspect most if not all of you have seen it. It persists into the 21st century.

That needs to continue to change.

[yummyfajitas]

Did you read the article?

It agrees completely with the data I cited. It shows a variance ratio of 1.1-1.2 across many countries (though not all).

Interestingly, it also shows very little correlation between gender equity and gender disparities in math performance. The strongest correlation it shows is that gender equity is positively correlated with math performance disparities! Gender equity seems to increase [1] math performance of both boys and girls, but it increases boy's scores more.

[1] Of course, the article only shows correlation, not causation, but I didn't feel like rephrasing what I wrote.

[bermanoid]

It agrees completely with the data I cited. It shows a variance ratio of 1.1-1.2 across many countries (though not all).

This was the most glaring example of statistical dishonesty in this paper: their data shows with perfect clarity that there's a > 1.0 male/female variance ratio for almost every country in the set, and I encourage anyone interested in this to look at their graphs and draw your own conclusions (http://imgur.com/39pja). To me, it looks like a typical noisy measurement (the authors note that the variation within a single country was about 20% from test to test, so we should expect a decently wide distribution (well, the authors don't actually admit that - as a first mathematical blunder in a series of many, they claim that 20% variation is very small and means we should expect a tight distribution)) with a mean somewhere between 1.12 and 1.15, a variance of maybe .1 (just about right for a measurement with around 20% variation, no?), and a decent bit of skew. Pretty good jumping off point for some analysis and explanation, I would think...

But not in this article. The authors merely point to those graphs and claim that they obviously disprove the greater male variance hypothesis. In other words - they point to a distribution of admittedly noisy measurements that is clearly centered around ~1.13 or so, with almost zero density below 1.0, and claim that it proves that the mean of the distribution is 1.0, (with an implicit "STFU Larry Summers"). When I first read this, I thought they were trolling me, the result is so clearly wrong.

[As an aside, it's worth noting that a variance ratio in the 1.1 to 1.2 range is enough to explain away most, if not all, of the gender imbalance in mathematics, if we make the assumption that the variance ratio is the same throughout all of mathematics education (which is not likely true - IIRC these measurements were all at the 8th grade level)]

Their argument? Because the measured variance ratios are not identical, we should ignore the mean of the distribution. Seriously, that's it. I'm not talking about a statistical calculation showing that the null hypothesis (that the variance ratio is 1.0) should not be rejected, mind you (because such a calculation would not allow us to accept the null hypothesis - a quick look at the graph is enough to be sure of that), or in fact any statistical argument at all. They quite literally claim that any variation in the measured variance means that the entire distribution is meaningless.

They also try to confuse the issue a little bit by pointing out that there's a bit of correlation between the variance ratio and the variance; while interesting and certainly worthy of further explanation (not done in this paper), this is completely and utterly irrelevant to the variance hypothesis, yet they imply that it somehow disproves it as well.

Quite frankly, the referees should have caught this, I can't remember the last time I've seen such bad statistical reasoning in a legitimate math journal. There are glaring issues all over the rest of the paper, too, where they've filtered and re-filtered data many times until they obtain the correlations that they want, where they chop data into bins in suspect ways, etc., but to actually enumerate all these errors in detail would make this a much longer rant.

It's a shame, too, because it appears that some of the article is solid, and it presents some interesting data that definitely warrants more investigation; unfortunately, they went absolutely bananas in several places, drawing completely unfounded conclusions from the data they generated, so I would be hesitant to cite this paper as proof of anything.

[bermanoid]

Just an additional FWIW:

While I do think the variance ratio in math is significantly different from unity (without speculating as to the cause), it's worth pointing out that while this does explain a lot of the gender imbalance in math, it doesn't come close in computing. Off the top of my head, in math it's something like 35% women, a 1:2 ratio, whereas in tech it's closer to 10%, or 1:9.

To explain a gap that wide based on variance, we'd have to assume that men are way more than 10% more variable in computer ability than women, probably more on the order of 100%, and that seems very unlikely to me (there's not really any data to look at there because CS performance is not as commonly measured as math is).

[roguecoder]

That study; I do not think it means what you think it means.

Especially the first one: women are better at math in some cultural settings and worse in others, suggesting that the gender gap is culturally determined. In order to prove that these things were biologically determined you would either need to show that they were present at birth, across a large number of different cultural contexts, or had direct, traceable biological causation. In the absences of any of those three, I and most social scientists will assume that gender differences are the product of culture.

[lancewalton]

> Our diversity may not be statistically identical to the general US population...

I think you've got an American bias there. :-)

I'm joking.