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Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

I would agree that there is a certain, eh... stupidity, around risk-taking, lol. Or perhaps just a "not giving into loss aversion."

For whatever reason (and while it pains me to generalize), the high-risk, high-reward jobs are all almost all men. Any woman who feels a calling should of course go for it, and no one should stand in that person's way, but I wouldn't ever expect, say, a 50/50 perfect proportion of gender participants at some future date (as this article indicates, this is a dysfunctional expectation)

Back when bitcoin was only $10 a pop, a bunch of guys in our programming shop wanted to get involved. 100% of their wives nixed it. 100%. I was the only single guy, so I put in some money... Crazy at the time? Perhaps. Crazy now? Not with 20/20 hindsight...

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Despite just-so explanations from evolutionary psychology, there is definitely an argument to be made that this is the byproduct of our culture, rather than something innate.

Culture is just as real as physiology and physics.

That a culture can survive the death of a much higher percentage of men than it can of women is not a "just-so" story.

It is a fact.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. Are there any studies showing men have a higher predisposition to taking risks? I cant quote one but I think there are.

There is an evolutionary reason for men to take more risks and have a desire to engage in hunting behaviours. We just have to be conscious of that and as per one of the top commenter's remarks not "fall" for something irrational or be driven by societal pressures.

white men, actually

"What on first inspection seemed like a sex difference was actually a difference between white males and everyone else."

http://nautil.us/issue/48/chaos/the-hidden-sexism-of-how-we-...

Interesting. The sexist aspect also seems to be a U.S. thing. From that article:

> Interestingly, a recent study conducted in the more socially egalitarian and gender-equal Sweden failed to find the “white male effect.” This national survey of nearly 1,500 households found that, all else being equal—and in stark contrast with the U.S. data—Swedish men and women had very similar perceptions of lifestyle, environmental, technological, health, and social risks

In order to make 100 babies in 1 year, you need a minimum of 1 man and 100 women. Men actually are more disposable in terms of propagation of the species.

However, our societies are considerably more complex than that one fact; it's a mistake to use it to explain the fundamentals of everything our society does.

On data point to help pull apart the nature vs nurture question is that very similar trends with respect to risk-taking behaviors occur in wild chimpanzees (who share nearly all our genes but not our cultural influences):

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

There is a clear relationship between testosterone and risk taking.

https://www.google.com/search?q=risk+taking+and+testosterone...

Men are 20 times more likely to die on the job than women.(at least in Canada)

http://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-mens...

Wow, it's closer to 12 here in the US.

What is the argument?

It's definitely true that guys are encouraged to take risks by peers, parents and others.

Software isn't high-risk for women though. Diversity thirsty companies are desperate to hire technical women with even a shred of competency. It's just not a cool thing to do though, women don't want to be geeks. There is much more stigma against non-normie women than there is men. Nay for men, there is a heavy stigma against being normal and boring.

The article pointed out that men are typically more interested in working with things than women, and women are typically more interested in working with people than men, and that this is highly correlative and can explain many of the differences we see in STEM, because most STEM fields have a lot of "things" going on.

The article even generously suggests that many women are adept in BOTH math and verbal, but end up in more verbal jobs because men are typically NOT adept in both, so all the high-math low-verbal guys end up doing mathy jobs, and all the high-math high-verbal women do verbal/people jobs, because the mathy jobs are all the guys can do, while the women can do either (but take the non-mathy jobs due to market effects).

Software is kinda mathy, I guess.

"Software is kinda mathy, I guess."

Food for thought: Software has a bizarre curve if you look at it from a math/verbal skills perspective. For what could very well be the first 10-15 years of a software career, software is very math-y. Then, if you want to continue to grow, it takes a very verbal turn. If you want to continue to grow in software leadership and capabilities, you need to be able to express yourself, convince others, navigate politics, and figure out how to translate these issues into the code you structure and write. It isn't a sudden transition and some may transition earlier than 10 years, but it's an interesting way of looking at things.

(Note I'm not talking "management", but continuing up an engineering path.)

A lot of engineering looks like that. If software has any unique characteristics it is how far a single math-oriented programmer can get due to our unique abilities to pull down huge libraries with incredible functionality without having to work with anyone to do it.

Again, just food for thought with no particular argument in sight here.

Which again, favors not a hypothesis of skills or abilities, but literally what options you have (or choose from) in college...ie, hysteresis.

If software has any unique characteristics it is how far a single math-oriented programmer can get due to our unique abilities to pull down huge libraries with incredible functionality without having to work with anyone to do it.

Right. Even if you are unable or unwilling to play those political games, you can stop at the senior SWE or equivalent level at Google/Facebook/Amazon and still have an income that's well into the top decile. I'm not aware of any other field where you can get that kind of compensation without management or leadership responsibilities.

I agree on the stigma point, although that's an extremely recent cultural development so if it was a big factor it would be very visible in the data. And it's already a dying trend, video games and computer use is for normies (thinking otherwise outs you as an old person) and gamergate/alt-light/alt-right trends among geeks has basically killed the whole "geeks are cool" fad.

What is high-risk for women in STEM is the risk of having to work with/for sexist idiots.

I think you're being downvoted for other reasons than your point. I think your point is STEM isn't really in the "high-risk, high-reward" category as is offshore drilling or underwater wielding but is compensated much more than the former.

Betting on bitcoin is as risky as becoming choosing to be a starving artist with the chance that one day you'll be the next James Pollock, and as Su. et. al pointed out (cited in article), women are the majority in creative fields. STEM requires a different explanation than "high risk" because it isn't.

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