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The problem with his argument is not the statistics, which are sound, but the fact that he begs the question and also ignores some obvious implications of the very data he presents. First, let's talk about mathematical ability. It's widely known that men outnumber women in the upper percentiles of mathematical ability. However, that's an explanation for why there are so few female Fields Medalists (in fact, there are none), not why there are so few female engineers. Among people who score a perfect 800 on the Math SAT (top 1% starts at 770), men outnumber women only 2:1. Even if mathematical ability is totally determinative, and being a programmer required top 0.3-0.5% of mathematical ability, we would expect to see ratios of maybe 65/35 in the programming world, not 90/10 or 95/5. Due to the shapes of the bell curves in question, the disparity between men and women gets quite large when you get into the 0.1% or 0.01% of mathematical ability. But, by and large, Silicon Valley isn't made up of those people. They're more run of the mill smart people (Stanford's SAT Math inter-quartiles are 93rd-99th percentile). With regards to the points about competitiveness versus cooperation and risk-taking and caring about people, they all beg the question. Why is competitiveness a good thing for the business of writing software? Don't you think cooperation would be better for such a deeply team-oriented discipline? Why isn't caring about people a positive strength, when much of Silicon Valley 2.0 is fluffy social stuff? Finally, while more risk-aversion might explain why there are fewer female founders, it doesn't seem to be the case that females are less represented in startups than in technology companies in general. What's risky about going to work at Microsoft or Google? The refrain of "these statistics are things nobody is willing to talk about!" is a cop-out. Most people will not pillory you for pointing out that women are more risk-averse or do things differently. Indeed, it's something women themselves often talk about. My wife was recently at a social gathering for women attorneys. She recounted a discussion of how women tend to disclose when they haven't done something before, while men tend to say "sure I can do that." It's not 1990 and people are quite willing to discuss how men and women approach work differently. But the statistics only support conclusions as strong as the scope of the evidence. And in this article, the author wanders far beyond what the statistics support into blatant conjecture and rationalization. |
Personally, I don't think that's the whole story (according to my observations, it's also upbringing, girls socialize more than boys, who are more likely to keep to themselves, and differences in topics of interest, which I have no idea what they come from).