[saraid216]

Individual agency en masse should be a random distribution, which results in a proportionate representation within reasonable error margins. Not having this suggests that there's another factor besides individual agency factoring into decisions. It could be something acceptable, like men can't biologically give birth (yet), or it could be something unacceptable, like blacks being targeted by police solely on suspicion of race.

This is one of the ways in which you recognize that something weird is going on with American politics. While it's a good thing to have lawyers in Congress, it's kinda weird that they're overwhelmingly lawyers.

[cobrausn]

I do not agree with the first statement - it supposes that men and women will, given an option and without external pressures, always choose the same thing in equal amounts. I don't think that is a settled question. But it is worth looking into, as are any external pressures that may be keeping women out of 'Tech'. Does a representative field such as you suggest exist? Genuine question. I'm thinking retail/service?

In regards to Congress, it kind of makes sense to me they would be overwhelmingly from a law background - after all, the ones who know law best and are interested in law are most likely to want to have the ability to change it.

[saraid216]

> I do not agree with the first statement - it supposes that men and women will, given an option and without external pressures, always choose the same thing in equal amounts.

That's not quite what I'm supposing.

I'm supposing that the choices of individual people without external pressures will always choose things unpredictably. In other words, correlation between individual choice and any particular demographic facet of a person should be pure chance.

This is how random number generators work. You want to provide as even a distribution as possible. That doesn't change the fact that, given a certain seed, the generator will always return the same "random" result.

The analogy comes back around like this: if you can reliably predict that a random number generator will return a number divisible by 3 if the input is odd, there's something weird going on even if some results are not divisible by 3. Chances are, if you look at the RNG's algorithm, you'll find something that creates that bias.

Do you care? Is that an issue? Is that a vulnerability? That's an entirely different question. As software engineers, we'd call it a business or design decision. In the wider world, we call it morality or ethics.

Edit to add: One of the consequences of this perspective is that it factors in any demographic variety, not just "men and women". If someone has a chromosomal set of XXY, then it still makes sense to consider their representation. That it's vanishingly small, such that they rarely register a blip on populations smaller than "the entire world", is part of the same analysis.

[pbhjpbhj]

>Individual agency en masse should be a random distribution //

Would you like a) a beer, b) a hot chocolate ...

Hmm, I'm sure it'll be a random distribution with equal weighting of men and women.

Is it really that weird that lawyers predominant in a legislative field? It seems like it would be the least weird tendency - like if street cleaners, dental hygenists or pop-stars were predominant that would be weird.

[saraid216]

> Is it really that weird that lawyers predominant in a legislative field? It seems like it would be the least weird tendency - like if street cleaners, dental hygenists or pop-stars were predominant that would be weird.

Nah. Usually I'm actually arguing on the other side of this one. But it seemed like a good example for illustrating how biases can be systemic to ethics-illiterate techies, since a remarkably large number of HNers are allergic to having respect for lawyers.

[nousernamesleft]

>Individual agency en masse should be a random distribution

What are you basing that assumption on? You are 100% certain that there is no possible way that men and women could have different preferences, priorities or interests?

[saraid216]

A basic understanding of math, mostly.

[nousernamesleft]

Shit, I guess I must have been sick the day we covered "men and women are statistically identical in all choices they make". Was that in calculus?

[saraid216]

Why would they be statistically identical? I'm pretty sure I gave a specific example of how this wasn't true. Did you miss English class in addition to math class?

[nousernamesleft]

You explicitly stated that any variation from a random distribution must be due to factors other than individual agency. But of course, you know that. How does someone whose posting history is almost entirely blatant trolling like that not manage to get banned more frequently?

[saraid216]

Oh, I see. That's why you're on a throwaway. Cool.