[marquis]

As a woman in a technical field who is fascinated by 'deep' technology, and mentors other girls to foster their own interests towards a technical career, your comment serves to isolate and offend. Please keep divisive gender-based comments out of this forum unless you have some very hard data to back this up.

[yummyfajitas]

Do non-divisive comments not require "very hard data"?

You realize that we create bias if we adopt stricter scrutiny of some hypothesis over others.

[parsnips]

So any explanation besides "Oh my they're being oppressed" is deeply offensive?

[vibrunazo]

Any explanation aiming towards "we're just born better" is.

[Drbble]

Your post is the first one that mentions being "better". Plenty of women don't think computer projects are better or for better people than non-computer projects. In fact, men of the past twenty years were more likely than women to pursue computer projects, a trend that is changing now in part because computers are becoming more sophisticated and capable of more modes of interaction, some of which women find more interesting than men.

[AlisdairO]

Not that I particularly agree with his argument, but your comment really doesn't follow from what he said, unless you think that being interested in deep technology makes someone 'better', rather than just different.

[vibrunazo]

There are two main problems with that thought. First is that, more often than not, lack of interest is used as an excuse to imply lack of skill. Which is why I used to wording "aiming towards". And second, falsely attributing lack of interest in itself can be considered offensive to many people. Maybe you wouldn't think it's offensive yourself, but it's clear many people do. On the very least, it's discriminating.

To make both points a bit more clear. Imagine that if I told you, that "it's not that I think you're bad at coding. But I just think that you're not interested in hard problems. You rather solve easy ones instead." I'm not (directly) attacking your skills, I'm just falsely discriminating your interests. But hopefully you can understand why this sentence would sound offensive to many people.

[AlisdairO]

I can see how someone might take offense, but at the same time accurate statements aren't always palatable.

I'm not sure your comparison is completely fair - you make it purely about deep technical problems vs 'easy' technical problems. My experience when I was a CS grad student was that the women there were interested in very difficult, important problems (particularly UX, for example), but weren't generally fascinated by, say, fundamental data structures research. Obviously there's notable counterexamples, and I am speaking in generalisations.

The reason I distance myself from the comment that sparked this discussion is not that I think it's wrong with respect to what men/women are, on average, interested in (it's hard to argue with basic statistics), but because I have no idea whether that's purely because of cultural influences or it's something more fundamental as well.