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Comment by notjack | Hacker News Reader

This is not a disagreement on political positions, this is a belief that women are inherently less capable than men at software engineering. It's a direct attack on the legitimacy and humanity of his coworkers. A disagreement over political positions would be if the author wrote a manifesto about the efficacy of sin taxes or nuclear treaties, not that his teammate Sandra is biologically inferior at her job and undeserving of it.

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It's no different than a guy in the NBA wondering out loud if the bias towards men might have a biological component, so that even if the systemic barriers are removed, we might expect far different than 50/50 female/male in the NBA. But no one thinks that - it's obviously silly because physical attributes are so obvious.

So we'll use Wikipedia as a perfect summary of all the research on this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenc...

"significantly higher variance in male scores, resulting in more than twice as many men as women scoring in the top 2%."

But certainly that study and all the others are just wrong, or they're measuring the wrong thing and it's not applicable to software.

I dunno, perhaps the ratio should be 45/55 once the systemic bias is removed. Or maybe it's 55/45 - maybe the systemic bias is beyond terrible and males are worse at software and we've got it all backwards. Doesn't seem like there's anything supporting 50/50 other than some weird notion that everyone's not physically equal at all, but somehow our brains are.

I hate the high end examples, because people want to argue them. The case is also true the other way - there are more men at the bottom of the IQ scale. Can someone come up with a reason why an IQ test would make men appear more often in the bottom of IQ distributions?

I have no evidence, only speculation, but it could be because boys do not receive the same type of nurture and care growing up compared to girls. As well as, anecdotally, being more likely to engage in dangerous (for the brain) activities and take less care of themselves. The last point manifests itself in many ways, but the most important one I can think of is diet.

Again, this is all conjecture and I don't know how I would go about finding the studies to link it together.

Because of "significantly higher variance in male scores"

It's completely unreasonable to take a critique on hiring practices or a broad statement about demographics personally. I'm not going to take offense to the statement that men tend to be more aggressive than women. Likewise, if someone claims that Google's policy of favoring elite schools leads to hiring underqualified candidates, would Googlers from MIT suddenly be offended? Of course not. However, that's precisely what you're suggesting with women.

Would you take it personally if those statements were commonly used to explain why you don't make as much money as your co-workers? Why you're more likely to be neurotic?

Those sorts of demographic statements might be fine to you, because they're not being used to explain why any current discrimination practiced against you is actually fine.

These statements might be hurtful and counterproductive, but they are a reaction to other statements which are perceived as being simply disregarding the reality of things. I can understand somebody making them just for the sake of reminding others what he thinks reality is. You can imagine plenty of situation in which the truth is ugly and hurts everybody- is that a good reason to let people do all sorts of intellectual contortionism just to avoid mentioning it?

On the other hand, any female engineer in Google earns more than I do, and deservedly so. I don't work at Google and I strongly doubt I'd pass their interviews.

It still shouldn't be offensive. If anything, it is more offensive to suggest that wage discrimination is caused by sexism because that's an attack on character. Indeed, a lot of men are hurt by the suggestion that they may be sexist. However, it obvious that such discussions are necessary.

> this is a belief that women are inherently less capable than men at software engineering

Should we therefore assume that women are equally capable as men at running the 100 meters, or at playing football? Don't get me wrong, I'm a male and probably half the women my age run faster than me or play football better than I do. But you know that this doesn't generalise: on average, men are faster runners and better football players. And you're ready to admit that because the thing is unequivocally measurable. Nonetheless, you consider any statement about gender differences that are not as easily measured as unthinkable and unacceptable. How is that?

edit: downvoters, please care to answer my question. I'm interested in your opinion.

At the end of the day, not a single answer. Good.

Would you please not post this sort of meta dross? That includes adding references to downvotes in your comments. For a substantive comment, all of this stuff needs to be edited out.

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