Autism and gender imbalance in tech | Hacker News Reader

Autism and gender imbalance in tech

donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com

155 pointsimartin2k192 comments

Weird blog post. He never really attempts to answer his own question of if gender imbalance is a good thing. He just seems to be making the point that autism is imbalanced in sex distribution, and engineering is appealing to autistic people, so the imbalance in engineering is expected due to autism.

FWIW, as a woman on the autism spectrum myself, I actually kind of agree that some level of imbalance is due to this. But people on the autism spectrum make up such a small population of humans and software engineers (we are over-represented compared to other industries, but in my experience we are still very much a minority overall) that it cannot be nearly enough to account for the sex-imbalance numbers we see today.

Anecdotally, I've convinced two NT (neurotypical) women to switch from bio/chem degrees to CS (they are both software engineers now) and the reason they hadn't considered before was b/c nobody ever talked to them about it. Neither grew up playing video games (though one said she asked for a console and the parents put it in her brother's room for them to "share") and there weren't any mandatory programming classes, so they just were never exposed to it as an option, even though they are both highly logical people (thus the chem or bio degree paths before switching).

So I guess I'm still firmly in the "Its a pipeline problem" camp. Until we account for cases like the ones above, tech is going to lose out on some talented women, and some of those women will miss out on tech. I think mandatory high school programming and networking classes are what will really help.

While the autism imbalance may play a factor, I 100% believe it is mostly marketing driving the gender gap. Early on computers were marketed to men, because they were tools which were a "man thing". And now still video games are predominately marketed towards males, and I would be shocked if there isn't a strong correlation between interest in video games and computers in general. So if I understand correctly, I am with you, its a pipeline problem due to historical factors which are rapidly fading.

>Early on computers were marketed to men,

>, and I would be shocked if there isn't a strong correlation between interest in video games and computers in general.

Video games are marketed more to males but that didn't stop females from participating in large numbers.[1]

Why would "male marketing" dissuade females from computer programming but at the same time, it doesn't affect computer gaming?

https://www.google.com/search?q=more+women+play+video+games+...

The types of games primarily marketed to men are indeed primarily played by men.[0]

[0] http://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/

Genre specific games that appeal to different genders is not relevant to my point. I was responding specifically to the cause/effect of historical marketing -- specifically OP's sentence: "Early on computers were marketed to men,"

So "early on", we're talking about 1960s/1970s advertisements for mainframes of IBM, DEC, VAX, Burroughs, etc and the 1980s ads for personal computers like IBM PC (original), Apple IIe, Commodore 64, Radio Shack TRS-80, etc.

If we want to blame early period "marketing" for women's lake of interest in computer _programming_, we have to also explain the counterexample of early marketing for PacMan, DonkeyKong, Missile Command not having the same decades long suppression of female computer _gaming_. The video gaming magazines and its ads in the 1980s/1990s were heavily male-dominated. (Arguably, the videogames ads were more male-themed than mainframes' ads. The videogames' ads often had abundant cleavage and skin. The mainframe ads did not.)

that's actually bullshit, companies would love to sell their product to the other half of the population, it's all about money after all name a company that would turn away half the worlds population for no benefit. indeed many tried to make computers appeal to women especially in the early days of computing before giving up or going bankrupt.

> name a company that would turn away half the worlds population for no benefit.

A company that had internalized misogyny to such a degree that it couldn't function. All companies are sexist.

That makes a lot of sense from my perspective as well.

Playing video games and having the desire to make my own was a huge factor for me getting into tech personally. I had a subscription to "Nintendo Power" magazine, and I still remember reading an article in there about a programming school called "Digipen", and just being enthralled by the concept of going there and building my own games.

In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't have the patience to stick with game development. My career is probably better off for it. My real gateway into a tech career was when I got put into a Cisco networking class by accident. I learned there that Linux live-boot usbs were excellent for getting around permissions restrictions on school computers. I also learned that the school firewall could be bypassed by using IPs instead of hostnames. I never looked back from there.

Like your friends, I started out focusing on the sciences before switching to CS. But now that I think about it, if someone had told me that trick for bypassing the school firewall I would probably have landed on CS much sooner hahaha.

This right here ^. Though I would go further to argue that women were predominantly portrayed in advertising as not being able to understand how to use technology to begin with. I think it goes beyond video gaming but rather addresses the toxic gender stereotyping in marketing. As a result, you have a generation of women being told what things are meant for boys despite the decades of prior women involved in computer science. Not to mention years of hostility towards women being in the workforce at all.

>>> now still video games are predominately marketed towards males, and I would be shocked if there isn't a strong correlation between interest in video games and computers in general

I don't buy that. If you include mobile games, women outnumber men but female mobile game developers don't.

I don't think there's a causation between video games and programming. Correlation, sure. But not causation (Cod is insanely popular among non-programmers)

It's really hard for me to believe that this is the driving cause, but I cannot come up with a better solution.

This theory is advanced convincingly in a Planet Money episode -- the graph here is incredibly striking, and for me strongly challenges any talk about the gender gap being primarily genetic/trait-base:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

The shift from tracking progress with other STEM fields up to >35% female workforce participation in 1985, then suddenly breaking with their progress and going in the other direction is astounding. That's a clear exogenous change, nothing 'trait-based' could occur on that timescale.

The only other vaguely plausible explanation I've heard (but am unable to find anymore sadly) was a suggestion that in the late 70s, IBM changed their recruitment guidelines for programmers to rigidly select for what we'd now call autistic-spectrum / raw analytical personality types, which biased hiring towards males. According to this theory, other companies just followed IBM's lead, and this triggered the paradigm shift.

However that doesn't really explain why there was another massive dip from a fairly stable 10yr rate of ~26-27% down to ~18% in 2003; I can't recall anything particular in the news around then but wonder if there was another scandal or news cycle highlighting negative experiences of women in tech.

Potentially, the author is using this example as a vehicle to ask us to consider that a 50/50 gender split is unrealistic when you ever try to correct for a different inequality.

I think the author also intends to try and suggest that the 50/50 split doesn't need to be blamed on men.

Those are both fine points and I think we would find a lot of common ground if that was the topic.

However the title was: "Is gender inequality in technology a good thing?"

So is the author saying it is a good thing? Does he mean that gender inequality (as it presents today) is good? Or just that some gender equality (60/40 for example) would be as good as 50/50? I hope he means the latter, but the wording implies the former.

I'm just worried that he didn't acknowledge the potential for factors besides autism to be relevant or provide a more fair target equality ratio to strive for. That makes me think he thinks the current numbers are fine, which I disagree with. The level of imbalance we see today indicates to me we are missing out on talent, and my experience makes me think it's a pipeline problem due to underexposure of tech careers to logical, but non-tech hobbyist young females.

Perhaps a 50:50 split is unrealistic, but what about a 70/30 split? Representation is terrible across the board, with many universities seeing 10% female enrollment. People seem to come up with small reasons why 50:50 might be unreachable and use that as justification for halting change.

> But people on the autism spectrum make up such a small population of humans and software engineers (we are over-represented compared to other industries, but in my experience we are still very much a minority overall) that it cannot be nearly enough to account for the sex-imbalance numbers we see today.

Imagine a scale that goes from autism to whatever the opposite of autism is, with neurotypical as the middle. The hypothesis is that men are more likely to be on the autism side of dead center, even for people who are still in the neurotypical region. A higher percentage of men being diagnosed with autism is evidence of the hypothesis being true.

> So I guess I'm still firmly in the "Its a pipeline problem" camp.

They're kind of orthogonal. It clearly is the pipeline problem -- you can't hire people who don't get the relevant qualifications. But it's possible that biological differences contribute to the pipeline problem.

In reality anything is affected by everything. So it makes sense to work against the pipeline problem regardless, because some of it is caused by non-biological factors that could be addressed. But some of it may also be caused by biology, which means that even if some progress is attainable, expecting the end result to be a 50/50 split may be unreasonable.

I'm going to say something contraversial, let's allow it for the sake of discussion.

Is a biased pipeline even a problem? What are we trying to solve?

It seems there are separate issues: equal numbers, we need to tackle the pipeline and convince women STEM is great; what happens happens, we need to not be biased against a gender and admit proportional to applications.

I can see both sides; I think in different moods I ultimately agree with either.

At the moment, I think if we spend long enough with admission (universities, jobs whatever) reflecting competence in the pipeline, then the pipeline will gradually come to reflect the proportion that's interested - 50:50 or not (either way around).

>we need to tackle the pipeline and convince women STEM is great

"Great" is necessarily a function with (at least) 2 inputs, the thing being considered, and the person considering it (or their goals).

Who is more likely to have a better job security, a STEM graduate or a med school graduate? What are the failure modes of each? Is a QA career better, or worse than that of a nurse (just spit-balling here, it might very well be the other way around)?

I'd argue that men are more likely to be the risk takers, for evolutionary reasons. It makes perfect sense that they go for a career with lower chance at a bigger win. Less to lose -> take more risks.

Now, if you are a woman, you are extremely likely to have a quality of life higher than the average man. Why would you take risks when you don't need to?

Who is more likely to have a better job security, a STEM graduate or a med school graduate?

That is the elephant in the corner of the room, isn't it?

Maybe it's not the women are irrationally opting out of tech. Maybe it's the men are irrationally opting in?

> What are we trying to solve?

Lets stop there. What are we trying to solve? I'd say we are trying to solve this question: What makes a good life? STEM gets a lot of press because, obviously, it is a well paid field.

However, the answer to what makes a good life is not just money. I'd wager it is (almost) universally agreed that a good life consists of: (1) Enough money (see below), (2) a career you enjoy, (3) free time to pursue things you enjoy outside work, (4) good health ((4a) mental and (4b) physical) and (5) connections with other humans. Maybe people can quibble with this to some degree, but I think that is about as uncontroversial as anyone can be on the subject of a good life.

Accepting my definition for the sake of argument, how does a gender imbalance in STEM affect this? Does a STEM career affect all 5 of those elements? Just some? Just others? Certainly, a career in STEM provides "enough money". But is it a career EVERYONE will enjoy? Do you get a lot of free time? It seems rather unhealthy as well - there aren't a lot of healthy people in offices in general. As for connections, YMMV on that one.

I think we focus too much on money because it is so easily measured. But more money beyond about $75K in the USA doesn't appear to make people more happy: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2019628... If you make above $75K, then surely that is the time to optimise the hours of your day not towards making more money, but to add more of the other 4 elements of a good life.

STEM is not a panacea, and money is not the be all and end all of life. Trading better financial security for health, a career you enjoy and more free time and personal connections may be a sensible decision. I'm not convinced more people would enjoy STEM careers, any more than I think everyone would enjoy being a special units detective, and dealing with a lot of awfulness.

There are other studies that show increased life satisfaction with increased income well past $500k/year.

That's interesting 'cause the $75k figure/study is so commonly cited.

Well said. STEM is neat, but I don't think it's necessarily what every woman (or man, for that matter) is really missing in her life.

> We focus on money because it's easy to measure

My inner cynic thinks it's because it's the disparity that's politically expedient. Lots of other disparities are easy to measure (flexibility, workplace injuries and fatalities, etc), but we don't post much attention to those... :/

Yes, a biased pipeline is absolutely something that needs to be solved. Society should permit and facilitate people living their best lives and maximizing their potential. I found programming both incredibly rewarding and a wonderful way to jump start my career. So if there are lots of girls who would feel the same way if society didn't bias them against the profession from an early age, that's wrong and it needs to be fixed.

The idea that women want different things than men is pernicious and it's not something we should accept without proof. For a long time we rationalized keeping women out of the work force by saying that they preferred focusing on the home. Yet, I know more stay at home moms that are bitter about having given up their career than the other way around. It's a lie we told ourselves to justify a social arrangement that disempowered women. We should know by now not to fall prey to that sort of thinking.

> Yes, a biased pipeline is absolutely something that needs to be solved.

No it doesn't. Bias isn't always bad or oppressive. It needs to be proven that the bias is "bad".

If rich kids are underrepresented in tech because their families have connections in finance and they tend to major in finance more often, is this a problem that needs to be solved?

Frat bros are underrepresented in engineering in tech atm.

HR, recruiting and hundreds of other job families and careers have "biased pipelines". Should resources be spent to solve all of them?

Why only tech?

No matter which injustice we choose to address, there will always be other injustices unaddressed, many of them horrible.

So the goal for our society should be that the pipeline for every job from janitor to engineer to CEO should have a sex balanced pipeline? Or is there something special about programming?

The goal should be that everyone can freely decide which career path they want to join regardless of how the ratios in the final pipeline look.

This is a trope that recurs on every thread about this topic. It's insulting to everyone's intelligence. Clearly, the person to whom you're replying believes that, absent artificial and unnecessary barriers erected, deliberately or not, to keep women out of the field, far more women would choose technology career paths, just as they did when medicine cleared those obstacles and when law cleared those obstacles, and when biochemisty cleared those obstacles, and the field of mathematics, and actuarial science, and economics, and on and on.

I'm certain you know that's what he meant as well. You can disagree with him that any such obstacles exist (you'll be wrong, but at least you'll be coherent). But why instead waste our time and your own with a pointless no-op of a rebuttal?

I though that was pretty clear in my reply that people should not have to face unique (sex specific) barriers to enter a field i.e being able to 'freely decide'.

What exactly are the barriers that exist for programming that were not cleared at the same time as those for math, economics, and medicine?

I'm of the impression that women select out of certain fields because they have different priorities; if you're proposing pushing more women into a career they evidently don't want, I think the burden of proof is on you that women are, in fact, socially corrupted in a way that pushes them or of tech. If there is a bias against women, we absolutely should fix it, but I don't like how our society assumes all gaps are necessarily attributable to bias pending damning proof to the contrary.

Besides, men and women have had distinct gender roles (and largely the same roles) in every society since before history; while (or rather, "because") I support women's rights to do whatever they dammed well please, it seems unlikely to me that we discovered in the last fifty years that that was entirely an ancient conspiracy to make women miserable, and thus we should push women into the careers we know they want (never mind that the evidence points in all different directions) even at great expense to the industry.

Anyway, the question isn't "should we force women to be programmers or housewives?". It's not a dichotomy and we shouldn't be pressuring anyone into anything.

> Society should permit and facilitate people living their best lives and maximizing their potential.

I suppose the word I'm trying to unpick is 'facilitate': is that by fair treatment of those already making it through the pipeline, so that the bad reputation is reduced, and more enter it, and so on; or is it by pushing more into the pipeline immediately?

> So if there are lots of girls who would feel the same way if society didn't bias them against the profession from an early age

I'm just not sure to what extent society has a duty to 'make people realise' that they'd enjoy a particular career path.

That makes no sense. What is the opposite of autism? Please give a citation, because I've never heard of this condition you speak of.

The scale exists because it's a scale of severity in diagnostic criteria. The scale exists to distinguish between "non-verbal and incapable of ever caring for oneself" to "experiences impairment but can generally hold a job and live independently". It's not a scale of how good you are at finding boxes in colored square pictures.

Frankly it's kind of insulting to imply autism is just a grouping of logical behaviors and anyone who is good at those things has some "level" of autism. It's a disability. I got picked on, I got mocked, I struggled to understand basic things and it took me a lot longer than my peers to get this communication thing down.

Besides, if programmers had enough incidence of autism to justify this level of imbalance, would pair programming really be a thing? (this was a joke).

What is the opposite of autism?

If I had to guess, it'd be the extravert. The social butterfly, life of the party, comedian. The one who wins all the popularity contests and the weekly sales competitions. The person who finds math (and any math-related technical field) to be arcane and impenetrable but has all the business class profs eating out of his/her hand.

Yeah, but you can't guess. That's not how it works. It's a medically recognized neurological disorder, not a vague personality trait.

Maybe it doesn't get a named diagnosis because in our society, being an extrovert is hugely reward and isn't seen as a debilitating disease.

Are you putting suffering from autism and being extroverted on the same footing? Being 'an extrovert' isn't a disease, and it doesn't negatively impact your life. Nothing to do with "society".

I think the point was that extrovertism(?) is hiding whatever might be a disorder that is the opposite.

But there's no reason to believe there is "an opposite"... Would you say there is a scale ranging from having the flu, to being normal, to... having the opposite of flu, I guess? Makes no sense.

> But there's no reason to believe there is "an opposite"...

Nearly every disease has an opposite which is also bad. If something was an unmitigated evil then there would be strong selective pressure for it to not happen and nothing pressing in the other direction to cause it to actually occur in the population.

> Would you say there is a scale ranging from having the flu, to being normal, to... having the opposite of flu, I guess?

Contracting the flu is a failure of the immune system to fight off the virus, so the opposite of contracting the flu would be an autoimmune disease.

>Nearly every disease has an opposite which is also bad.

[citation needed]. Also, you can't use evolutionary arguments like that, to justify everything. What about the plague? What about an anvil to the head? What's the opposite of getting a heavy object dropped on your head and if there is none then why didn't we evolve a titanium skill? You see where I'm going? It just didn't because we don't immediately evolve defenses against every single danger and disease in existence. Evolutionary arguments aren't worth very much and certainly can't be applied in such a maximalist way.

> [citation needed]

"[citation needed]" is the claim that an argument is flawed because it lacks an appeal to authority.

An immune system that is too lax leads to infections, too stringent leads to autoimmune diseases. Pick almost any substance in the body -- glucose, sodium, serotinin, etc. Too little is one kind of bad, too much is a different kind of bad.

And as to the original point:

http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article/file?type=prin...

> What about the plague?

That seems to be in the same category as the flu.

> What about an anvil to the head? What's the opposite of getting a heavy object dropped on your head and if there is none then why didn't we evolve a titanium skill?

Are you asserting that there are no trade-offs there? Flexibility, self-healing, availability of carbohydrates vs. titanium compounds in available food sources, etc.

> It just didn't because we don't immediately evolve defenses against every single danger and disease in existence. Evolutionary arguments aren't worth very much and certainly can't be applied in such a maximalist way.

Evolution is not a divine engineer creating things that are maximally perfect, it's a brute force pragmatist that destroys anything that can't out-compete its neighbors.

It isn't that purposeless flaws literally cannot exist at all, it's that they are selected against. Something that beat improbable odds due solely to dumb luck.

The assertion that something is the exception to the rule is the one that needs independent support.

Lions, Tigers and Bears eat the talkers among the stalkers. Better stay home.

Autism and introversion are not the same thing

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/12/its-bayes-all-the-way-u...

So the opposite of autism would be something like hallucinations and delusions.

Or rather... politics. All about social interactions, group identity and building one's position in the social ladder, but with any information being only incidental.

(Idea not mine, it was somewhere in http://www.afieldguidetoearthlings.com/ book.)

> What is the opposite of autism?

Some would say Williams Syndrome. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1262248...

Is there a scientific basis for that statement?

Sure some of the symptoms seem opposite (but others are actually kind of similar), but the genetic component of that disease is pretty specific and well understood. Not like autism which has been much harder to pin down on any single chromosome.

If what we're talking about is the societal impact of people's behavior, does the genetic basis matter?

Maybe AnthonyMouse could've been more precise and said "personal behavior opposite of behaviors characteristic of people on the autism spectrum", but that's awfully wordy and pretty clearly what he was getting at.

> What is the opposite of autism?

Donald Trump

We've banned this account for trolling. Doing this will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't.

Yea, autism is a disorder, there's a lot of conflating that with the "autistic savant" myth in this thread, but I understand it's usually pretty debilitating.

Nonetheless I'd like to point out that there are broad, statistical, gender differences between those who are "thing-oriented" and "people-oriented", that would need to be addressed before we could hope to see 50-50 splits of M/F ratios in every subject today: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/gender-imbalances-are-m...

Well, not.

Autism is a spectrum and there is no clear cut between a perfectly neurotypical person and a profoundly disabled. You can measure number of autistic traits in general population and see that there are differences between groups, look e.g. here:

- The Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ): evidence from Asperger Syndrome / high-functioning autism, males and females, scientists and mathematicians (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A100565341147...)

There is no a single paper proving that HFA is a binary condition, and many hints that it isn't.

(BTW: I dived into this topic some time ago, with already linked here http://crastina.se/autistic-traits-science-and-the-nerd-ster...)

I speculate that the person has an intuition of human variation on any dimension as normally distributed, including performance on metrics on the Systemizing Quotient or the Autism Spectrum Quotient.

>Imagine a scale that goes from autism to whatever the opposite of autism is, with neurotypical as the middle.

There is no such thing that I am aware of in medical literature. Did you make that up, or can you point me to some reference(s) on this supposed scale?

> The hypothesis is that men are more likely to be on the autism side of dead center, even for people who are still in the neurotypical region. A higher percentage of men being diagnosed with autism is evidence of the hypothesis being true.

No it isn't

I have no horse in this race; Could you offer a more detailed rebuttal?

You mention people you consider neurotypical who were studying hard science subjects. I wonder whether they might, all the same, be quite field independent -- this is a trait that analytical people often have, without it putting them on an autism spectrum.

The visual test in the blog post is actually a field dependence test: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1...

What I'm getting at is that there are broader, non-clinical variations in cognitive style that complicate the notion of neurotypicality. Anyone studying science is unlikely to be at the extreme field dependent end of the scale. So part of the imbalance may rest on real but non-clinically significant cognitive differences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_dependence

Great links! But I'm confused by the definition of "autism" that you're using.

I'm referring to the DSM-V defined "autism spectrum disorder". In my comment, NT refers to "person not meeting criteria for DSM-V autism spectrum and not diagnosed as such". The field dependence test is interesting, but does not replace a actual diagnosis by an expert as far as I can tell.

While I can accept "most autistic people do well on the test " (it was pretty instant for me), I'm not convinced that a strong performance by someone who does not meet the criteria for autism spectrum disorder is proof that the person in question is actually somewhat autistic. Maybe there are other factors that make someone good at recognizing it?

And even if it was a good indicator, there is no guarantee that the 4:1 sex imbalance in diagnosed autism spectrum disorder translates to an equivalent imbalance in high-performing non-autistic-diagnosed (but hypothetically still autism spectrum by field dependence criteria) people. Would love to see some studies though.

>, I've convinced two NT (neurotypical) women to switch from bio/chem degrees to CS (they are both software engineers now) and the reason they hadn't considered before was b/c nobody ever talked to them about it. [...] Until we account for cases like the ones above, tech is going to lose out on some talented women,

Wouldn't that anecdote also apply to men? E.g. We take 2 men currently in bio/chem and talk to them about switching to CS which had never occurred to them?

Therefore, does the "uncounted" men cancel out the women "missing in the compsci pipeline"?

Wait could there really be two nerdy dudes interested in complicated stuff who never saw themselves as possibly working with computers? Like how could they have avoided the countless examples of famous male computer-related millionaires? Do you think, if there are such dudes, there are as many of them as there are women who never thought of themselves as "technical" or whatever? That seems really daft.

I was. I didn't learn to program until I was 28, despite being interested in maths, engineering and technical topics my entire life.

I started because I needed a statistical model that SPSS didn't provide, and quickly realised that coding is one of the most fun things in the world.

Indeed! And I'm not trying to argue that you should have learned programming earlier. Just that you weren't "nudged" away from technical topics as many times as a woman might have been. You would not, for example, have run into serious people who somehow believe (or seem to) that your whole sex is less capable of working in that area. On the scale of large populations, ideas like that would have an impact on enough career choices to move the needle. I don't think everything has to be 50/50 in order to be "right". But each person should feel like their choices in where and how to work are limited by their preferences, and actual success at carrying out the work, not by some BS assignment of "suitable jobs" made at birth.

My friend (also in bio/ochem) frequently says she's going to get into programming, and I frequently respond with encouragement, because it's a great skillset to have even if she stays in biology. I get her started with something, make sure she's motivated to approach the practice problems or personal project, but ultimately she just doesn't want to. She's smart and logical and all that, but I don't think that's the determining factor, and whatever that factor is, she doesn't have it.

I think there are also probably two camps of people, even among people who go into software: those who never needed to be encouraged or asked to do it, and those who eventually started because of some outside pressure or incentive.

A company I worked for actively seeks out and trains women for web development work for free in an effort to prop up their female numbers. They bring more than the total number of employees at the company through that program in a given year. Even with this intensely focused pipeline, they still can't keep up pace with the qualified men who arrive through normal hiring routes. It's even a bit unfair, I was hired at that company rapidly with no official credentials (granted earlier on), just an interview/demonstration; whereas apparently if I were a woman, I could still be hired even if I wouldn't qualify when I walked in, and I'd at least walk out with professional training. The men there trained and represented themselves, or paid for an education.

I feel like at some point you have to stop wishing something is within your control. I don't think you can construct a fair world where women freely choose to be software developers at the same rate as men.

A workplace has no obligation to be equally attractive to every working age person, I don't think they have an obligation to be attractive to exact proportions of men and women in gen pop.

But the big statistic is that autism in all of its forms is around four times more common in males than females. In other words the genetic components have a biologically sex-based component.

Does this account for the fact that women tend to be underdiagnosed? I have read that female autistics are very often a) not diagnosed and b) pressured to learn social skills anyway simply because they are girls.

PS: I am a girl. I could spot the bottom figure in the top, though it took me a few seconds. I have an unusually strong math background for a girl (perhaps especially a girl my age). I think it is ridiculous this is a test for autism. Why on earth is this is a test for autism?

I am pretty darn sure I am not autistic. My ex husband and both our sons probably all are and I taught all of them a lot of the social skills they have. My ex husband once told me that he was good at the technical aspects of his job, but his ability to manage people once he was promoted to that level in the military was largely rooted in what he learned from being married to me.

Took me a few seconds too, but I didn't think to rationalize it as "though it took me a few seconds", I thought "wow gee I got it in only a few seconds".

Assuming you are male, that may be the real sex difference: Girls aren't supposed to be good at anything, they apologize for not being "good enough" even when they perform as well as the guys and then if they are excellent, no one believes them.

(I think this is literally true, but it is intended as sort of humorous observation so maybe imagine there is a winky here and interpret that to mean "look, this is an injoke of sorts!")

"Girls aren't supposed to be good at anything"

I don't think anyone at all is claiming that. At most people are claiming that girls are better at verbal and emotional skills, while boys are better at visio-spatial things.

When the explanation for women being paid less / having less power overall is that men have superior bodies for tasks (from athletes to programmers), it does seem to come off that way.

It's little help that women have better verbal and emotional skills if they do not appear to be valued in our society.

The highest paying jobs are managerial not technical. If anything emotional skills are much more valued in our society.

Yet high-paid managerial and control jobs are dominated by men.

This is because emotions and empathy are a small part of management.

Bulk of it is politics. And politics is a ultra-competitive space which it own demands.

You should take care to separate these two very different questions.

You should also not forget that there are values other than monetary. I'm sure most people "value" their midwives or nannies infinitely higher than their plumbers or even bankers.

Yes, that is why nannies and so many other Pink Collar Ghetto jobs are paid so poorly: Because we value these people so much.

I don't know if this is sarcasm or too deep for me to grasp, but my point is that there are many forms of value. Not just economic. Income is not decided based on how much the majority of people value occupations, it's not even a factor.

Soldiers are usually highly valued but earn very little. Monks have often had even higher status and made no money at all. Money lenders were reviled but rich. Etc etc etc.

EDIT: Soldiers do earn little considering the risks they take, and the status of the job. This is still true in countries with modern professional armies, but it was much more true historically. So much so that many higher class people would actually _pay_ for the privilege. They had no shortage of money but wanted the glory that military service could bring.

Soldiers are usually highly valued but earn very little.

My father and ex husband were both career military. You are misinformed.

In the US, soldiers get relatively little cash pay because they are provided free room and board, free medical, a free burial, free life insurance, and can access a host of other free amenities for merely flashing their ID card, such as access to free legal services for some purposes. If they serve at least 20 years, they get a retirement check for life. If you join at age 18, as most soldiers do, you can retire as early as age 38 and readily pursue a second career. Unless you were maimed in war, you will still be young and able-bodied.

They can buy a house with no down payment and the federal government will help them pay for college. Military retirees tend to be in quite good financial shape. What the federal government does not give them in cash pay it more than makes up for in countless benefits.

People who say they value what you do but do not want to pay you adequately for the job are basically taking advantage. Women are routinely expected to do things out of the goodness of their hearts, because they care.

I am a woman. I have been homeless for 5.5 years. I am incredibly sick of people acting like "we love what you do!" And then not wanting to pay me anything. I have spent a lot of time deconstructing this problem space and I very much expect to get paid these days. I do a lot less giving it away for free. Because the vast majority of people expecting me to benefit them because I care absolutely do not care that I struggle to get enough to eat every month and I need money to get off the goddamn street and back into housing.

Poverty in the US is overwhelmingly an issue for women and children. If we valued women so much, this travesty should not be true.

>Poverty in the US is overwhelmingly an issue for women and children. If we valued women so much, this travesty should not be true.

This is incorrect. 14% of women are under the poverty line, to 10% of men. That's not "overwhelming". On the flip side, a significant majority of the homeless are men.

The gender difference seen in the poverty statistic is in my estimation due to the fact that women are generally less motivated than men to earn money, and thus less willing to make sacrifices to do so (which is why men overwhelmingly work dangerous jobs, and are 10X more likely to die in a work place accident as a result). This will result in the lower income levels seen in the female demographic, which will extend to more women having income levels that fall under the poverty line.

So, about 40% more women are poor than men and you think this is not substantial? We have expressions like the feminization of poverty and the pink collar ghetto for a reason. This has been studied and there are scholarly resources on the subject.

You explanation is a big fat blame-the-victim position.

I am aware there are more homeless men than women. The reasons for that are complicated. They typically tend to be less pathetic than homeless women. It in no way justifies acting like the difference in poverty rates is small and due to personal laziness on the part of women.

I tend to believe they're highly interrelated.

The belief in the superiority of a gender could very well lead to the belief in the superiority of both their abilities and the value of said abilities.

We live in a capitalist society, where both value and power is expressed through money. If you are to tell me that midwives and nannies are worth more than they are paid, what is your explanation for that?

It's all the same thing.

No, value in general is not expressed through money, only market value. For some things they correlate, for others not at all.

The reason a nanny makes very little is because of supply and demand. On the supply side most young women can become nannies, it requires no special education. Demand wise people would not hire them if their cost approached what the parent that would otherwise stay home makes.

At the same time you entrust your children, that you doubtless value more than anything in the world, to the nanny.

Same with midwives. The "value" they create is infinite, their salaries are not, mostly because it is not _that_ difficult to become one, so if the supply is low you can just raise the salary slightly and demand would catch up. You could even argue that the _economic_ value they create is many times what they earn. Without midwives a significant proportion of children would not survive, and GDP would fall appreciably. Yet they can not bargain with that, since they don't have a monopoly. If they won't deliver children, someone else will. That is not true for olympic sprinters or Fortune 500 CEOs, the supply of talent is so much smaller.

On the other hand you have particle physicists and accomplished poets. The supply of them is also very low, but so is the demand. I also suspect that neither group is very income sensitive, they do what they do because they have to, not because it pays more than something else.

Clearly income and value are very different things.

So what you appear to be saying is that the only thing women are good at is something they're all good at about equally and immediately.

And something that the current system is completely unable to properly monetarily register and the system just relies on them giving it away for free while getting nothing in return.

That all sounds very convenient. It's also interesting that all of these things seem related to children. Why don't you add childbirth to the mix.

I am not saying any of that, no.

I'm simply explaining why nannies don't earn much. Still, they earn more than monks, who in some societies are seen as pillars of existence in a very literal sense.

My point is again that income is set by supply and demand, not value in some deeper sense. The market "knows the price of everything and the value of nothing"

Well, there's also a lot of supply of sprinters. Anyone can be a sprinter. There are far more sprinters than the world needs. Yet, nonetheless, there is value found in the Olympic sprinter. Or the NCAA sprinter. Why? Well, because a high skill in sprinting is valued as opposed to a lower skill in sprinting. It's something you can train at, get better at, and get recognized for. Something that would set you apart from all the other sprinters. Well, where are the Olympic nannies earning millions of dollars, then?

If you're going to talk about supply and demand, you may want to think about why there's demand for something. Why is there demand for Olympic sprinters? Why is there no demand for Olympic teachers? That's really the question.

Simple. Teaching doesn't scale, an olympic sprinter will do their thing in front of hundreds of millions of viewers.

Of course no one is going to claim that and expect to be taken seriously. But as a fellow girl, in my years socializing in groups I have certainly experienced this sentiment. There seems to a tacit agreement that girls that are good at something traditionally male-dominated, like programming or math, are an exception to the rule. In other words, there is a rebuttable presumption of mediocrity in these areas. If you excel at them, good on you, you must be a true whiz to do so in spite of your gender.

Apparently physics checks your gender if you approach it and if it finds you female suddenly makes itself at least twice as hard.

At least this is the impression that a large part of the population seems to have, according to what they tell female students of physics.

It would be funny if it weren't so sad.

"good at something traditionally male-dominated"

Yeah but that's different, I was replying to someone saying that the general opinion was that girls are not good at anything at all. That is simply not true, almost nobody believes that.

... over the hole world, on average, and in the past?

I interpreted Mz's comment as a somewhat facetious internal monologue I myself am all too familiar with. I agree with you, most people don't believe that, but it is nonetheless a belief that some women internalize after years of the socialization I described above. Yes it's not true that we're not good at anything, but there are subtle and pervasive forces at work in groups that cause women to believe this about themselves.

People usually do not have to proclaim things that the larger culture implicitly agrees is simply so true that "it goes without saying." You will tend to not be aware of such implicit assumptions, because they aren't typically overtly signalled, unless you, yourself, regularly run into social friction for defying cultural expectations. At which point it will be maddeningly obvious, and the thing that is most crazy-making is the degree to which other people act like you are a deluded fruitcake or radical feminist or something for stating the obvious.

I would argue that there's a lot of friction you're not feeling by holding the mainstream position. For me, it's baffling that every disparity is assumed to be caused by discrimination despite so few actual cases of confirmed systemic bias, or that every conversation about inequality only examines the particular facets of life that are harder for women. It feels sooooo obvious to me that there is no significant anti-female bias, and it's almost certainly the case that men and women are bimodal in our preferences, and society is organized to accommodate the centers for each mode such that life is harder the further your preferences are from your gender's average.

Edit: The comment I replied to has been substantially edited, as has the follow-up reply to me. Thus, for people reading this, it may look like what I have said is "crazy" or reactionary or otherwise bad behavior on my part. I assert this is an additional means to be dismissive and disrespectful of me and I see no reason to try to further engage this individual. No good will come of it. But I am leaving this comment here anyway.

---

I was one of the top three graduating students of my high school class. I fully expected to be part of a two career couple. That never happened. Instead, I was a homemaker and full time mom for a lot of years.

So I have spent a LOT of time trying to parse how and why my life got so completely flushed down the toilet and did not turn into what I and so many other people expected of it. (One family friend bluntly told me "We all expected you to be a self made millionaire. What the hell happened?") This involved reading quite a lot of research about how and why the lives of men and women turn out differently.

We may well see it differently, but that sounds to me like a polite way to trivialize my conclusions. My conclusions have not been drawn in a trivial manner. There has been quite a lot of study involved in drawing them.

It's not an attempt to trivialize; I'm pointing out that other people have equally strong contrarian feelings, and that they can make the same arguments for their position (and then some).

I don't doubt that you've been compulsive about researching the subject (as have I).

Just saw Mz's edit. For those reading along, I posted initially and then immediately rewrote it for clarity, because I didn't think I did a good job articulating. I didn't think anyone would have seen it, but it probably took me longer than I thought as I'm posting from mobile. My edit was substantial, but my points are the same, so I'm not sure why the parent thinks this is an attempt to dismiss her. (Nor do I know why she thinks I'd try to dismiss her, I have better things to do with my time than plot conspiracies against strangers in the internet...).

Well that's sort of the idea of stereotype threat, in that it can warp your perceptions of not just other people, but also yourself, and that the self-doubt will cause you to do worse or drop out in the long run.

I recall we had a comment exchange awhile ago about optimism/pessimism in the parable of The Two Travelers and the Farmer. In this case both the parent commenter and I may have had the exact same score in terms of seconds to an answer, but we both perceived the significance very differently.

I also shared the idea that "it's easier to change ourselves than it is to change the world". I think this might be an example of where that could be applied. (Of course easy for me to say, I haven't lived my life with subtle social cues that told me not to be good at math or spatial reasoning, but there are other areas in life where I get to apply the same lessons).

I have spent a lot of years working on changing myself. My default preference is to focus first on what I have the most immediate control over.

A) I think it is debatable whether or not it is easier than changing the world.

B) For things like sexism (racism, etc), there comes a point past which the world needs to change if your life is to have any hope of actually improving.

> I think it is debatable whether or not it is easier than changing the world.

What if the inverse was true and changing the world was easy, and changing yourself was hard?

If somehow you managed to change the world and not change yourself, then the world will be entirely fine, but you yourself will still suffer from the same perceptions as before (this is entirely possible, I've seen many a white male strongly believe that the world is prejudiced against them, and I recall some stats showing an increasing number who believe similarly in polling). In that case, the world is relatively good to them, but the mind creates its own interpretation of reality.

Unless you believe people are un-changable, and changing the world means raising the next generation right and forgetting ours.

Anyways, I'm not advocating to forget about activism, just saying I recommend looking inwards first before helping others. Like on airplane safety directions. And that's not a comment directed at you specifically, just a general observation to those looking outwards before looking in (it sound like you've done your share of introspection).

I don't know where or in what decade this has been true, but in the United States for all of my life, media, every level of the education system, corporations, and governments do everything they can to communicate that women are as good as men at anything and better at many things, and that any disparity is necessarily caused by discrimination.

Sorry to go slightly OT here but just for my own sake... can someone tell me where the bottom figure appears in the top figure? Tried quickly googling for it but can't find this test anywhere other than on the OP blog.

No matter how long I stare at it, all I see is a flat yellow rectangle in the centre - it's driving me nuts!

Edit: scrub that! Finally figured it out by deduction i.e. move bottom figure up so front face aligns with central yellow square on top figure. Guess I was expecting something a bit more fun with a "magic eye" style ah ha! moment :D

Aye, it didn't appear instantly for me, but I broke the problem down like this: I decomposed the bottom figure into it's shapes, and the square stood out the most to me (it's composed of a square and 2 quadrilaterals). Then I looked for a square in the top figure, which happens to be in the middle.

Yep, similar here though didn't think to look for the quadrilaterals! Just broke the bottom figure in to it's component shapes/lines and then stared at the top figure to see where the front face and the top two diagonal lines coming off it would fit.

It doesn't seem like the same size though? Possible I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but the diagonals appear to be disproportionately shorter in the top image. Even tried measuring the lines on my screen to make sure it wasn't an optical illusion.

I wouldn't read too much into individual examples. However, in composite, these little tests do reveal how people think overall.

I often default to taking people literally. Because of that, people who don't like me sometimes suggest I am autistic as a faux polite way of publicly calling me a social retard.

Although ASD individuals are prone to being very literal, I have observed two other types of people who tend to do that.

The first are people from low context cultures, where you say what you mean and mean what you say. Except for certain aspects of military intelligence and information security, military culture is generally like this. My father and ex husband were both career military. So, I tend towards being blunt and direct. Some people find this refreshing. Others find it abhorrent.

The other group of people that I have observed as tending to be very literal and taking people at their word is people with PhDs. Less educated people routinely leap to conclusions that are rooted in personal bias. People with sufficient education tend to consider only the facts in evidence. They aren't stupid and they aren't unaware of the fact that there may be additional facts not currently in evidence. But they are less prone to shitty, prejudiced behaviors that are the lifeblood of sexism, racism, etc.

So, I am not at all confident that the way ASD individuals think is a) unique to them or b) evidence of mental defect.

I am highly skeptical of the degree to which all sorts of differences get labeled and medicalized and framed as a defect. They used to do this to homosexuals. IIRC, homosexuality is no longer officially listed as a mental disorder (aka form of insanity).

So, while I know that a battery of tests can cast light on certain things, I still fail to see why this specific test is seen as indicative of being on the spectrum.

I was under the impression that the primary characteristic is social; that is, you need to have some sort of difficulty in social situations to qualify at all for "autism". I would not imagine that these tests would be the line between "autistic" and "socionormal" (probably not the right term) but between "autism" and some other diagnosis.

So perhaps the problem here is either a) I'm missing something with respect to autism diagnosis or b) they shouldn't be portraying this as crucial evidence in public discourse, which is what i think you've been arguing for. Is this a good understanding?

I might add i agree; I think certain fields attractive a different way of thinking that overlaps heavily with the autistic spectrum.

A tldr of what I think is that the world has radically changed in the last 100 years and society has become openly hostile to people in ways that are more problematic for some people than others. Rather than wondering what the hell has happened at scale that the world is so problematic for so many people to navigate, we hand out diagnoses to those having the most trouble. It is a form of washing our hands of responsibility for shitting on people (at the societal level).

There is an autism "epidemic." So, either something has happened at scale to cause a sudden and dramatic increase in basically birth defects (which appears to be true, actually) or society is less people friendly in critical ways or both. Yet, we don't say "Shit! We have poisoned the environment and it is causing our babies to be defective! We need to fix this!" And we also don't say "Shit! What the fuck is wrong with the world that so many perfectly normal people cannot function in it?" No, we say "You, as an individual, are defective and you, as an individual, needs to try harder to fit in. Don't expect the world to be too accommodating."

Which must be some new record for politely telling people "Fuck you and the horse you road in on" with plausible deniability.

The findings are beyond just diagnosis statistics and have been shown to correlate with other biologically male traits, like fetal testosterone.

https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2...

"Why on earth is this a test for autism?"

I agree. There is a clear gender difference in seeing color [1][2][3][4]. The use of colors here would invalidate the test for autism, at least in the context of gender difference, since it would be testing for how well you see shapes versus colors.

1: http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2191999 2: https://www.livescience.com/22894-men-and-women-see-things-d... 3: https://www.colormatters.com/color-symbolism/gender-differen... 4: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/09/120907-men-w...

I've heard that autism can present slightly differently in girls than boys in terms of coping strategies, etc etc, which makes sense due to different external factors. This may lead to the underdiagnosis - it doesn't "look like" autism in boys.

Some studies make it quite clear that parents treat boys and girls different from the get go and even outright interpret identical behaviors differently depending on the gender of the child. Recent HN discussion about that, with citation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14875643

Does this account for the fact that women tend to be underdiagnosed?

Loads of people go undiagnosed: https://m.medicalxpress.com/news/2016-11-undiagnosed-adults-...

I know people in tech have a tendency to try and break things. But I think everyone should give professionals in their respective fields just a little bit of benefit of the doubt.

Remember, these studies probably talk about averages and populations NOT individuals. And that test was just 1 example of the problems they give.

This post is by some guy who calls himself Donald Clark and I see zero credentials given.

I am not "in tech." Posting to HN says nothing about one's profession. At one time, I was Director of Community Life for The TAG Project. It was an unpaid position, I took it because I was homeschooling my 2xE kids, both of whom are likely somewhere on the spectrum. So, I know something about the issues of people on the spectrum and I know something about testing generally and my interest in this subject is not just some passing fancy because I am bored on a Sunday.

Tests are just tools. They sometimes get misused. My question should be taken literally, not inferred to be outright dismissive, as so many people here seem to be doing.

Autism in females shows itself differently to autism in males, it tends to be a lot less obvious because the traits that they display are unlike those displayed by autistic males. Further they tend not to cause academic issues and as such are not picked up by schools. I am no expert but I have a friend who has an autistic daughter and both her and her partner are child psychologists and we had a discussion about it only 2 nights ago, which was the point that I learned that one of their daughters was on the spectrum (she is approx 6 years old) comparing this to another friend of mine who has an autistic son and the signs that he was on the spectrum were apparent even at the age of 2.5 years old.

I have heard first hand that there is a general rule among psychologists that its wrong and unethical to diagnose someone with neurodevelopmental disorder when there are no signs of impairments to the individual.

So if a person has impairments and visit a psychologist, the psychologist might use several tests to aid and guide them towards the right help (or cross out wrong ones). The image test in the article might be good to do that (I would not know), but without the initial impairments it does nothing to imply if a person has autism or not.

> I have heard first hand that there is a general rule among psychologists that its wrong and unethical to diagnose someone with neurodevelopmental disorder when there are no signs of impairments to the individual.

I've always found this a bit funny. I kind of understand why this is done this way, but it does imply that a person with a given disorder could end up diagnosed, or not diagnosed with it, depending on what kind of society/culture they're in, which doesn't sound right.

I would argue that things like autism should have a solid diagnosis regardless of how it influences a person's life in a given society. The reality seems to be that we're just very poor at diagnosing these things, so we diagnose by proxy.

It doesn't seem crazy that there should be differing diagnoses by culture. Autism falls along a spectrum, and there are obviously varying degrees of anxiety, depression, attention deficit, and many other symptoms of diagnosable disorders. The question of when it crosses the line to "impairment" is pretty arbitrary.

I find it similar to how a doctor diagnose malnutrition. The exact amount of vitamins, minerals, and proteins needed for each individual varies, so you can't be sure within the natural variance when a problem occur by just measuring each level in the blood. So you end up with lists of symptoms that may indicate a problem by malnutrition, but the existence of those symptoms (like fatigue, stress, sexual behavior) are all interpreted by the society/culture you are in.

I think the most important part is that people should not end up diagnosed unnecessary. Rather than rigid diagnosis, I rather have solid professional standards that require the psychologist to have a similar education and use techniques that will reduce cultural and social norms as influences.

But... you don't see a problem with this? I don't know if nutrition is the example you want to use. This is science we're talking about. It can't afford to be wishy washy like this and we don't change our ideas about how planets align based on which culture you're in. You suddenly not have appendicitis because you're screaming in pain below the acceptable cultural threshold.

In one society, being gay causes immense stress, and may therefore be classified as a mental disorder. As it was. Yet it isn't a mental disorder, obviously. Problems caused by the difference itself, and problems caused by society's attitude towards the individual must be separated.

On the other hand, certain problems, like autism, are fairly solid as to whether they exist or not. Whether you live in a society that mistreats autistic people or a society that idolizes them, there's a distinct difference people may possess.

Confusing disorders with inability to cope with an unaccepting society is very dangerous, because it leads to precisely what you're saying: overdiagnosis, and using diagnosis as means to shut people up and avoid critiquing society itself, and other things.

This is a false dichotomy, and derailing from the conversations about women in tech. Even the most generous estimates of autism prevalence put it at 1-3% of children -- you could hire every man and woman with autism and it would have an entirely negligible effect on gender diversity in the tech workforce at large.

On top of that, if you take ten people with autism spectrum disorder, not all of them will end up getting jobs at Google and SAP. And of the ones that do, the women with autism have to deal with both the barriers introduced by their autism and the barriers of sexist treatment from their peers.

The tech industry is only 2% of the US population. [0] The US also imports people from the entire world.

[0] - https://www.comptia.org/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/201...

1. "Even the most generous estimates of autism prevalence put it at 1-3% of children -- you could hire every man and woman with autism and it would have an entirely negligible effect on gender diversity in the tech workforce at large."

You need to check your math here; on the order of 1% of the US population works in software development.

2. It's called the "autism spectrum" because it's a spectrum, not a binary. People can share some autistic traits without their rising to the level of a diagnosable disorder. If a person is described as nerdy, introverted and eccentric, they probably are further along on the autistic spectrum than most, while not necessarily having full-blown autism.

> It's called the "autism spectrum" because it's a spectrum, not a binary. People can share some autistic traits without their rising to the level of a diagnosable disorder. If a person is described as nerdy, introverted and eccentric, they probably are further along on the autistic spectrum than most, while not necessarily having full-blown autism.

I thought it was called a spectrum because of the variation in severity and symptoms among people with diagnosable autistic disorders. As I understood it, if you don't have such a disorder, you're not on the spectrum.

I think you are getting into a map/territory issue.

We think of it as a spectrum because we observe a spectrum among people with diagnosable autistic disorders.

However, we do not have a fundemental understanding of what autism is, or a binary test to detect it. This would imply that in reality there is a spectrum that extends beyond the diagnosable region(s) we have.

The disorders do not cleanly cleave away from non-autistic. It really can be a judgement call at times.

Absolutely. But that's not, as I understand it, why it's called a spectrum. It's called a spectrum because it covers conditions as different as Asperger syndrome (which often isn't diagnosed until adulthood, and may never get diagnosed at all) and childhood disintegrative disorder, where the onset of symptoms is so sudden and dramatic that the child themselves may notice and ask what is happening to them.

Being "nerdy, introverted and eccentric" doesn't necessarily mean you are on the spectrum. It may do: you may have an ASD, diagnosed or undiagnosed. But it may just mean you are nerdy, introverted or eccentric.

> And of the ones that do, the women with autism have to deal with both the barriers introduced by their autism and the barriers of sexist treatment from their peers.

With the benefits of diversity hiring.

I'm not sure this is accurate.

Well roughly only 1% of the US population are software developers, so I think you could have a workforce only consisting of autists. Not only that, but if the autism ratio is 2:1 male and you filled all positions with autists, you'd have numbers near what Google has in reality for male/female.

Wikipedia suggests the ratio for autism is actually 4:1. So if a company had 50% autists and 50% non-autists with 50/50 balance, you'd get the ratios like Google has today.

If only 1/3rd of the workforce is autistic (4:1), then you don't need a huge bias in the rest of the hiring to get the 2:1 ratios we see in practise. Systemic bias and any other factors could easily bridge that gap.

This is a very good point. The only problem would be if people with an ASD are highly self-selecting into the technical field, thus being a significant influence.

Below is what I could find in academic journals. TL;DR it is not significant.

There are 2 studies I could find which found that:

- likelihood of autism (or being on the spectrum) is 3 to 7 times higher among maths students (Cambridge university, 1.85% vs. 0.24% in the control group)[1].

- [2]: People with an ASD (autism spectrum disorder), "have one of the lowest overall college enrollment rates", but "young adults with an ASD who attend college are most likely to pursue STEM majors". It is noted in the analytics section that those with an ASD have a 34.31% enrollment rate in STEM fields with a heavy bias towards maths and CS. This compares to >32.6% in the general population [3] (data from 2012).

So, it looks like the percentage you listed are correct, with a potential of it being quite a bit lower due to hiring practices within the industry.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26181845

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3620841/

[3] https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/college-08.html

I don't understand why so many discussions about this in the context of engineering / software jump to the idea that diversity is just have 50:50 of characteristic X and characteristic Y. Or why everyone makes assertions about what we know to be a very important and divisive issue without first stating what our own understanding of the words we are using actually is.

I think I have a very different idea of what equality and diversity means to this person (or that soon to be ex-googler), so I'd like the opportunity to talk about it with them, reach the same page of understanding, then talk some more.

In my view, it isn't as simple as 50:50 men and women in the room. It's about removing all barriers to that being a possibility that we can. Specifically, making sure we all have the same equality of opportunity, burdens of expectation and freedom of expression. Recognising some groups lack one or more of those things is a good start. Recognising some groups (deliberately or accidentally) monopolize those things to the detriment of others is a better start.

I guess people will bend further to justify the status quo than they will to better it.

Diversity seems to be just a slogan these days. There's few contexts where gender, ethnicity or race really matter as specific traits to bring to the table. And I wonder if human empathy is not sufficiently capable of overcoming those differences. I mean, me as a white male, should I expect that a black woman can not design a product for me because she doesn't somehow get what it is like to be white or male? Why would the reverse be true in any way?

It's not that you can't design a product, it's that you may not even think of the special considerations required. For example: think of facial recognition apps that fail for dark-skinned people, or apps that aren't usable by the visually impaired or colorblind. Cars, mirrors, and countertops that are inconvenient for people of below-average (male) height. Nobody is purposefully excluding these people in these cases, but nobody is going out of their way to be inclusive either.

So you're saying that people developing face recognition just forgot black people exist? That even with a few % of employees being black, there wasn't enough testing to figure this out?

Versus the obvious answer that there's less contrast on darker skinned people, making it harder?

Likewise for all these special considerations. That's the kind of stuff you can checklist. It's no different than keeping track of required behaviour needed to write, say, portable C. The idea you need a member of every group in order to write software for them is quite an odd one. I'm aware of ARM's endianness even though I don't use non-LE platforms for any development.

And even then, suppose you can't just go by a checklist, isn't that what testing is for? Kids make poor software engineers, but we figure out how to make software for them.

> So you're saying that people developing face recognition just forgot black people exist?

Yes. This happens all the time.

In addition, simply being aware of what problems exist to be solved is also a huge thing. Engineering isn't just writing good code. It is solving real problems. Having people from a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences will lead to more opportunity to identify problems that can be solved.

Although that's not a good example, I agree that there are cases where you need some "inside knowledge" from the group you're targeting. By products I don't mean only software. It could be a social project, or anything else where culture is significantly important and not being intimately familiar with it could endanger the success of the project.

These seem like edge cases. How many CRUD web apps have gaping holes that would be corrected had the developers only been less white? And are the consequences of failed facial recognition so severe? The racial issue was fixed years before I got a camera that could leverage it, and how many people critically depended on it in that window? In fact, I can't think of a single other issue of tech that works better for white people, much less one that is actually important. And even if you were concerned about this, it's not justification to hire in proportion to broader demographics. None of this is to attack diversity, just these particularly weak arguments. We should absolutely maximize opportunity for everyone, because it's the right thing to do; not because it might help to avoid the once-in-a-blue-moon racial faux pas.

The less barriers to entry, the more women chose to stay away from blue-collar jobs. That's diversity. Forcing half and half irregardless of merit nor interests is madness.

I'm all for equal opporrunities and encouraging education path that go above and beyond the male/female stereotypes, but without forcing the end result to be equality of outcome.

That never works.

Why do people jump to 50/50? Because that seems to be the goal of people pushing diversity: desirable fields like software should reflect the population at large [1]. I think the assumption that 50/50 is desirable is wrong, too. So far I haven't heard of any compelling reason that genders are equal in all jobs - only the opposite (in both directions - some jobs have way more women). In fact, how do these folks even know 50/50 is fair to women? What if it turns out that women are actually better at software engineering, and the ratio should be 2:1 in favour of women? How are they determining these numbers? Or are they just making them up?

He's also challenging the point that identity=diversity. Getting a man and a woman that were born in the same area, had similar wealth growing up, went to the same schools, have same "political" views, etc. is not nearly as diverse as getting two men from different parts of the country with different political views, differ in wealth, etc.

None of this should detract from trying to eliminate bias. Blind reviewing sounds great, for instance - perhaps they should do that for the first pass where it's feasible to hide the candidate's details. Or provide transcripts of phone interviews then have people rate them and see how biased things are. There's ways to do research on this issue, but it seems that even suggesting there might be differences is a way to provoke "outrage".

1: I see less outrage about low female representation in mining and hunting, for instance, or people demanding dentists stop employing so many females as dental assistants.

The point about ratios is that tech is where a lot of the money, and thus a lot of the power, is. If there's a perception that it's more difficult to access that power because of your presented gender, then there will be outrage.

Interestingly, there is also no outrage that men die on the job twelve times more frequently than women, nor that they're underrepresented in higher education. Note that men are overwhelmingly more likely to be homeless, commit suicide, be victims of almost every kind of violence (women are slightly more likely to be victims of sexism violence, but men also underreport, so who knows?), die a decade younger, receive far fewer social services, etc. But hey, as long as tech companies are 50/50, the gender problems are solved.

All good points. Too bad it's not trendy to fight for those things at the moment. Sorry.

From what I have seen and read, the biggest barrier to a 50:50 split is that we all have a tendency to define groups that we belong to and others that we do not.

Imagine a event that you enjoy doing (concert, conference, what have you). Now say that you find out that 95% of the participants is going to be part of a group that you do very clearly not self-identify as being part of. Would you feel equally confident going there if 95% of people were part of a group you did identify with? Many will ask "Why is my members of the group that I self-identifying with choosing not to go there?", while having the opposite effect when ones own group is a strong majority. Even if you had two equal choices to go to a place with 50:50 and one with 90:10, the reduce doubt will softly bias people towards the 90:10 if one self-identify with the 90% (exception naturally exist as with any soft bias).

I have seen some data on this from reports. A university student that fail an exam will be several times more likely to switch program if they belong to the minority gender in their class. The same effect can be observed for women in IT program as with men in education programs.

Basically, it is extremely hard (if not impossible) to get a 50:50 equilibrium without some form of homogenization where the unique identifies of the groups get merged into a single group. The one good thing is that as a matter of ability, people can belong to multiple groups and it can be enough to belong to one common group and have a perceived 50:50 splits based on other groups.

> the idea that diversity is just have 50:50 of characteristic X and characteristic Y.

There's more nuance to it than that. It's about having a profession be representative of the overall proportions of each characteristic within the population at large. It's only 50/50 because half of the population is men and women. For other characteristics, like say African-American, you'd be looking for 12/88, not 50/50. Instead, tech is more like 1/99, so clearly there's a lot more work to do there. And I'd like to point out that none of the so-called biological arguments that were advanced on sex apply to race, yet racial diversity is even worse than gender diversity. Clearly there's more at play here.

The problem is that if you force the exact ratio for every characteristic (sex, race, orientation, age, etc) for every job some people would end up being forced to do jobs they do not want to do.

I share your confusion about the 50/50 split.

> Recognising some groups lack one or more of those things is a good start. Recognising some groups (deliberately or accidentally) monopolize those things to the detriment of others is a better start.

If like to propose an even better recognition: that no one is monopolizing anything and both groups are making the choices that best match their priorities.

> What this implies is that to expect a 50:50 outcome is hopelessly utopian.

And why exactly do we need a 50:50 ratio of women to men in IT? I don't care who writes my code as long as it does what I want it to do.

the 50:50 ratio is taken to mean there are no inhibitions or advantages for one or the other as this is the rough ratio of male to female in the general population. The skew of the ratio can be read as there are some factors we aren't seeing. So the question isn't "why do we need this ratio" but "why isn't this ratio present?"

No one cares who writes their code either, but certainly we can agree that if there are systematic reasons preventing women from participating as much we can try to remove them?

But why is it even a goal? I don't think the world is any better or worse off for having any particular ratio of genders in tech. Just let the cards fall as they will.

Similarly, if this is such an urgent goal, why are we not seeing an even more strident push to even the genders in roles where direct human interaction occurs, like teaching and nursing?

If different genders offer such a unique perspective in tech, surely that perspective is even more important in teaching our youth or caring for the sick.

The fall in numbers of male teachers is causing concern, at least in the UK:

- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-37552056

- https://www.teachingtimes.com/news/primary-schools-male-teac...

- https://www.theguardian.com/education/2009/mar/23/male-teach...

The thought is that the cards aren't currently just falling as they will, and instead they're falling in a biased way due to prior decisions (and current ones!) that disadvantages certain people. The over-eagerness towards diversity programs and such therefore is in effort to push things to a neutral state so that the cards can indeed just fall as they will.

Who's to say what a neutral state is? And what mysterious conspiracy is holding back the admission office of universities and HR departments across the globe? I just think you're fighting ghosts.

Additionally, I don't buy that employing 100% of women is actually helpful. Children need a parent at home, and a mother makes more sense for younger children. We should be working towards decentralization of work, and allowing dads and moms to both have more time in the home, rather than racing to lock the entire human race in a cubicle.

Because tech is lucrative right now.

Well, if there is some systemic biases preventing women from successful careers in IT/tech/whatever that's a problem—the talent supply is artificially restricted and we get inferior products because of that.

That's an open question, of course.

I mean, that's a possibility, but could it also be possible that women, for whatever reason, just aren't interested in IT/tech/whatever in general in the first place? By this I mean to say, it could be simply that there are fewer women who want to go into tech. So to try and encourage more to come in, who perhaps don't want to, could be counter-productive. And if your goal is not to stop until there are more women in tech, what are you going to do then?

Speculation only gets you so far.

Agreed, and that's my point - it seems to be equally speculation that women are staying away from tech because it's 'toxic', and further it doesn't seem to be on sound basis that having more women in tech would lead to some necessarily good outcome. People say they want diversity. I would rather have diversity of opinion and style of thinking and strengths than diversity in things which are to me so inconsequential as race and gender.

Perhaps old friend Hegel is relevant here:

>When ... a man is told, “You (your inner being) are so and so, because your skull-bone is so constituted”, this means nothing else than that we regard a bone as the man’s reality. To retort upon such a statement with a box on the ear … removes primarily the “soft” parts of his head from their apparent dignity and position, and proves merely that these are not the true inherent nature, are not the reality of mind; the retort here would, properly speaking, have to go the length of breaking the skull of the person who makes a statement like that, in order to demonstrate to him in a manner as palpable as his own wisdom that a bone is nothing of an inherent nature at all for a man, still less his true reality.

A friend of mine makes a great point about this:

Regardless of the reasons for the differential, tech has so much impact on society - think about the cultural impact of video games just as one vector - it is meaningfully problematic if a non representative slice of society creates almost all of it.

> it is meaningfully problematic if a non representative slice of society creates almost all of it

this can take you down some socially controversial paths. if you apply the same judgements to other identity groups who dominate other extremely influential sectors, you are going to run into serious trouble.

You mean like mentioning that Facebook and Google are owned/led by minorities? Or?

Antisemites complaining about how Jews control Hollywood, the banking system, have 22% of nobel prizes while only being 0.2% of world population etc.

I really don't understand why that would be. In fact, given that most people are not software developers, we can be sure that the people making those high impact things are very non-representative of the population. Moreover, people can provide good services and understand others' problems without having to experience them themselves. Otherwise we wouldn't have male gynecologists for example. Sometimes, the distance is useful or even preferred.

Tell that to the crusade of people who are fighting for "better representation" in tech, and are happy to enforce non-official quotas.

FWIW, the diagram wasn't intended to be a TEST to determine if one is autistic. It was a test to indicate one's inclination for noticing certain detail.

Indeed, as another comment states, girls have historically been under diagnosed with autism, for a variety of reasons. (That's not to say males aren't more likely to have the condition.)

Simply put, employers need to do a better job of ensuring that those with talents (some female, some autistic, some minority, etc.)-- who are under represented in IT, are given fair opportunity to put their talents to use. I wouldn't get too caught up in worrying about how giving opportunities to one group takes away from another. We're all on the same team. It's not too different from how Affirmative Action (which I support) has its place in society.

Also, I was confused by the constellation bit. The spectrum descriptor is quite apt and just as generally accepted in the community as the idea that it's genetic in basis...well, unless you're an anti-vax kook. I've only heard the term constellation in the sense of describing the various symptoms. (As the adage goes, if you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism...no two are alike.) I'm actually in the middle of reading Steve Silberman's Neurotribes, which I would highly recommend to anyone who wants to know more about autism.

(Contrary to what the article says, Sasha Baron-Cohen (of Borat fame) is the cousin, not brother, of famed autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen.)

- Guy w/ Asperger's

> We're all on the same team.

I don't think this will go over well for as long as we're in a highly competitive society.

While autism spectrum traits are correlated with STEM (http://crastina.se/autistic-traits-science-and-the-nerd-ster...), I don't think it explains shortage of women in programming (there isn't in biology or medicine; these departments are places with many nerdy girls).

1. Not all engineers or scientists are even remotely autistic (think: Richard Feynman).

2. There are some big suggestions that women are underdiagnosed with Asperger Syndrome / High-Functioning Autism (due causing less problems for others, and their socialization giving them at least "passable" social skills).

> Try to spot the bottom figure within the coloured diagram.

So if I spot it then what does it tell me about the spectrum?

And what if I can't find it, yet I know that I'm in that spectrum?

That probably speaks to Baron-Cohen's point about it being a constellation rather than a linear spectrum.

Know that a simplistic test is not good enough to diagnose such a complex area of neuroscience.

> So if I spot it then what does it tell me about the spectrum?

Depends. Did you spot the rotated versions too? What do you want it to say about you?

Why should spot all? The question was not "count all versions of this form". Only find the picture. One time.

Moreover, this is a skill related with spatial intelligence and finding patterns, not with autism.

> So if I spot it then what does it tell me about the spectrum

Probably nothing - except that you don't see a box in perspective, looking at the diagram below, the "shape" synthesis in your brain might be different.

Your mind isn't taking the "box" below as a 3-d box in perspective automatically, which is what a filtered perception should have (just enough detail to be useful, not enough to overwhelm you).

If you, like me - see a square and two parallelograms instead, it becomes trivial to ignore the colours guiding your eyes on the top image.

Yellow square ... yeah. Red blue parallelogram to the top right of it, yeah ...

Whether you perceive reality as a mixture of abstract shapes or whether your brain smoothes over it to form meaningful structures (like a box) is relevant to autism (one assumes).

Reassembling fragments of perception is a very well exercised part of my brain, because it is necessary for me to operate - but beyond that, it gets easier to reshuffle them before reassembling, which is what this is test is about.

It is a test of being "mentally bilingual - reality and perception", which is necessary to overcome being somewhere on the spectrum and be functional.

Interesting assumptions that always seem to be present:

- autism is good for fields related to technology;

- other differences are not as good for fields related to technology;

- fields related to technology are the most valuable.

> Why are there so few women in IT?

...

> This is because they are good at localised skills, especially attention to detail. This is very useful in lab work, coding and IT.

IT is not the entirety of tech by any means. And if we're going to make large stereotypes, a bulk of IT work is about empathizing with users at least as much as attention to detail.

Coding is not the entirety of tech, either. Knowing what to code is more important than knowing how to code it. It may not have been, decades ago, but a significant amount of the code that people need has already been written and the challenge is to find it and deploy it / integrate the library / fork the open-source project / etc. An engineer that prefers to write code for the sake of writing code is generally not productive for the business (and probably counterproductive, by generating what will soon be legacy code).

I'm not sure what "lab work" means here but I've never seen that term applied to software engineering.

Also, autism is not the only way to be detail-oriented. The article is trying to claim that there's gender imbalance in autism, and autistic people are detail-oriented, and detail-oriented people are good at IT, and therefore there should be gender imbalance in IT. This is simply fallacious and illogical.

Autistic people are not your shield.

Am I supposed to see the shape or not? If I take the shapes separately yeah I can tell the shape exists, but my mind can't really "see" a 3D object there.

The 3D shape is there

I didn't see the image. I saw a flattened out pattern, like a paper craft template from which to make a 3d model. It was only reading the comments several hours later that I realised what I should have been looking for.

So... what is the proposal? Every time I read one of this articles about gender in IT I feel that I didn't get to anything new.

This guy tell us that it is because companies look for certain profiles more common in men. Ok, cool, I'm totally fine with it, but I don't think that will be appealing to all this people that is talking about discrimination against women.

> True diversity may be the recognition of the fact that all of us are not equal.

The proposal is that we recognize this fact, and realize that the mindset in which there must always be "the proposal," to fix "the problem," is misguided. Particularly when you have ideals like diversity, and equality which, the author argues, are at odds with one another. The rest of the essay is an argument that the two are, indeed, at odds with one another.

All those people telling me that boys and girls have the same interest in tech, and clichés is all that keeps girls from reaching their potential...

- Doesn't match with my observations of girls around me. My goddaughter was educated in a sexist way (barbies) by her mother. Men (me) have tried to interest her in tech, but what do you want! I'm not the role model! I can tell you it's been immensely frustrating for me to spend hundreds on Lego, take her to superfactories, make her visit workshops, teach her math and chemistry, and she still $&@" identifies to her "I don't get science" mother. Men are powerless here. Plus I still get told off as a machist by HN.

- Doesn't match with logic either. Women can get a job in IT and be promoted to passionating human jobs like management, just by participating in "I'm a woman" programs. Why would they work on their skills? Every single woman I've met in programming was utterly incompetent in technical skills because they weren't selected on their technical skills. So, yes, it's a bit painful when they're promoted as your manager "because [insert hand-wavy reason like people skills]".

The worsts parts are:

- I've done my part in being feminist in the early years of my career, and I'm unanimously recognized for the scientific education of my goddaughted despite the other directions given by the 7 women around her;

- And despite that, it's forbidden for me to discuss the reality I'm facing (=what's above) on social networks, including HN. I expect to be censored in a few minutes, but I'll wait for dang's actual actions to demonstrate what will happen to me. In real life, after I started recognizing the pattern that women are not competent when they're hired based on gender, I've been fired from a few places.

So, this misogyny problem that belongs to my parents' generation? We're reproducing it.

And I know I'm not alone, because, when I say it with careful respect, facts and fewer generalizations, I get a dozen upvotes.

Future won't be nice with this censorship.

The funny thing is that programming has become more male-dominated as it has become more social. Programmers once worked alone, in their own offices, coding quietly with occasional references to manuals. Now programmers are expected to work on laptops alongside other workers, constantly interact with others both on line and off line, and be active on at least LinkedIn, GitHub, and Slack.

We're missing something here.

So, autism diagnosis is based on whether or not you can parse an optical illusion? What kind of over-diagnosis fad-medicine quackery is this? When did personality types become diseases? Sure, there are some people with real mental illness who need help to function in society, but I think it's actively harmful to slap a pathology on someone who's not as sociable as others in a moderate way.

"This was followed by an altogether different talk by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen (yes – brother of)"

No he isn't. They're cousins, not brothers.

Tip for the diagram in the article: Look for just one of the shapes that comprises the bottom figure in the top figure, and you've found it. The front face is the easiest to spot.

That's how I found it too, and that suggests to me that this is more of a test of problem-solving heuristics than of perception at the neurological level. Someone who has solved a lot of math problems in geometry would seem to have a distinct advantage in finding that hidden shape.

Programming is about people not code. Great software helps people and communities. Knowing how to write code is a tiny part of the job.

Saying programming isn't about code is ... insane? Maybe you can be a programming manager without knowing how to code, kind of? You'll likely be a bad one.

This is the kind of thing you say after you've been coding for such a long time that you've forgotten how challenging it is to learn to code for most people. Sure, once coding is not the main challenge, you move onto new challenges like coordination, collaboration etc. But if you can't code, then you aren't a programmer.

More concretely: Managing communities and collaboration is neither necessary nor sufficient to be a programmer. Coding is necessary to be a programmer.

I agree. Don't misunderstand me, all great artist know how to use a paintbrush. Very few will tell you it's all about the paintbrush. Focussing on people who know how to sling code is like focusing on the carpenters who have great hammering skills. Knowing how to code great is necessary but not sufficient to make great software.

90% of graduates from law schools and medical schools are also men, so it's safe to assume there are some fundamental biological sex differences at work here. Oh wait, it's not 1970 anymore, and law and med grads are half women nowadays. Golly humans evolve quickly.

Well, at least he gave equal time to both of the viewpoints.

Why share this? It's minimal-effort baiting; a few paragraphs of vague opinions and a "once you see it..." gimmick to boot. Not a good start to an important conversation.

The hackernews re-titling of the article is pretty horrendous too. The title is "Is gender inequality in technology a good thing?" is considerably more controversial than "autism and gender imbalance in tech"

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