[wongarsu]

>When 90+% of developers are men, of course men are going to assume you're not a developer if you're a female

For one, that's a crime against statistics and formal logic itself. "90% of RAM is not fault tolerant, of course men are going to assume it's not RAM if it's fault tolerant" would be a ridiculous thing to say, because you just can't reason that way.

The kind of reasoning you want to do works like this: 90% of developers are male. Given that there are about as many men as there are woman, a randomly chosen woman has a 10% chance of being a developer. That's valid statistics. The problem is that this works relatively good while speaking to people in a subway, but at a tech conference you don't have a fair sample of either males or females. You aren't choosing at random but from an extremely skewed sample.

Of course there's instances where these kind of assumptions are valid, but most often (and with most stereotypes) it's just people applying statistics wrong.

[alexmat]

>"90% of RAM is not fault tolerant, of course men are going to assume it's not RAM if it's fault tolerant" would be a ridiculous thing to say, because you just can't reason that way.

If you had to make an assumption, and all you knew about an item was that it was fault tolerant, ruling out RAM is not a terrible strategy if 90% of all RAM is not fault tolerant.

Likewise, if all you know about someone is they are a developer, assuming they are male is not a terrible strategy since you are correct 90% of the time! I'll take those odds of being right without having to gather facts in most circumstances.

Obviously in a social setting (especially a tech conference) being wrong even once can be painful to the other party, so we should avoid making our assumptions known until we've verified them when trying to be civil.

But in most matters it's not unreasonable to prejudge and then verify, otherwise we'd spend too much time being uncertain. And in some cases, choosing to act on certain assumptions leads to a higher payoff than waiting to act on facts (which can be expensive to procure).

Until passing over women for developers costs more than assuming they're not developers, this will continue. The strategy being used by disgruntled female developers seems to be to inflate the social cost of not assuming all women are equally likely to be developers. In some circles that will matter, in others it won't. I don't blame women for using guilt to gain leverage. I'd do the same thing in their place.

[wongarsu]

>Likewise, if all you know about someone is they are a developer, assuming they are male is not a terrible strategy since you are correct 90% of the time!

Yes, and I'm not questioning that. The problem is that that same statistic says nothing about the likelihood that a given female is a developer.

[alexmat]

But if about half the people in the world are female and there are more male than female developers, then isn't it safe to assume that the likelihood of a random male being a developer is going to be higher than that of a random female?

[wongarsu]

When picking a random person from a phone book, yes. But that's not what this whole discussion is about. In virtually any real situation you don't have a completely random female. In most relevant situations you don't even have even close to equal amounts of men and woman in your sample.