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Comment by mcguire | Hacker News Reader

Possibly somewhat, given that the same issues seem to be mentioned often recently.

"The principal conclusions of this report are:

"Although not a generally accepted fact, the women here are as qualified as the men.

"In order to realize their potential, women must be given the same opportunities as men to participate in and benefit from all aspects of the professional community.

"Many individuals in the community, either consciously or subconsciously, have expectations of women that are different from their expectations of men.

"Pervasive subtle discrimination can do as much damage as, if not more damage than, isolated incidents of overt discrimination.

"An uncomfortable social atmosphere interferes with a woman’s ability to work productively.

"Responsibility for change rests with the entire community, not just with the women.

"Many problems would be alleviated by increasing the number of women."

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I think a lot of people would challenge the applicability of many of those statements to the modern incarnation of the industry.

Can you be specific about which of those statements you think don't apply anymore?

I'm skeptical that there is a significant part of the industry that considers women less capable than men; I'm also skeptical that women have fewer opportunities than men. I believe there are a few bad apple companies, but mostly I see companies tripping over themselves to hire and retain as many women as they can. I simply haven't seen any compelling evidence, and I know that there is a large group of powerful people spreading misinformation about discrimination against women (e.g., wage gap myth). Lastly, the different-interests hypothesis seems to better explain the various gender/tech gaps and it fits pretty perfectly with my experiences. I'm happy to be persuaded otherwise, however.

There is also a large group trying to hide the issue under some "different-interests hypothesis" but it's in fact the core problem. Just look at other cultures to see that there is nothing inherent to women not interested in CS.

The debate would be more honest if the "different-interests" group were just saying that they don't want our culture to change. As for me like I said there is no evidence that there may be some genetic predisposition other than cultural ones.

An interesting talk that gave me some perspective (not sjw, just someone's experiences): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FEeTLopLkEo

Edit: clarified second paragraph

Through, the culture is not just what people in tech do. These debates often comes up as accusing men in tech of being worst, but the "I am girl therefore I can't possibly like it, a girl who like tech (cars) have something wrong about her, it is not for me, wow I did not knew women can be programmers you must be smart" is internalized much sooner.

What also definitely does not help are odd ideas about what kind of personality can enjoy tech work. The best predictor imo is willingness to solve puzzles and personality that likes to learn. Meanwhile, people use "playing action games or clash of clans" as proxy. When i was studying, dudes who spend all their time on irc or muds were seen as potential genius programmers, cause they spend all time with computer. Most of them could do only a bit of administration, but they acted confidently.

Different interest thing is cop out. Tech is not magic, interest in it develops exactly like interest in anything else - starting from litterature and art, continuing though biology to astronomy or sport.

Whenever topic came out, it was "women just have different brain and are not naturaly as good". And people truly believed that. So I am kinda glad for "actually women have same aptitude" change, but if you are convinced the child is incapable in x, child will grow less interested in it - even if it is a music.

I don't think the different interests group is being remotely dishonest. Their started claims are pretty consistent with what you would expect from someone who is skeptical of the discrimination hypothesis. Namely if discrimination isn't the primary driver of gaps in tech, pushing for equal representation is going to pressure some women into jobs they don't really want and prevent some men from getting jobs they want. As for dishonesty, the discrimination hypothesis group can't even seem to debate the issue without misrepresenting their critics and accusing them of bigotry (for example, the reporting and comments here regarding the Google memo). I don't want to get into a tit-for-tat, because I'm sure discrimination skeptics have some pretty silly or dishonesty arguments as well, but dishonesty seems like the rule for discrimination hypothesis folks, not the exception. I'm happy to agree to disagree on this point since it's not likely to go anywhere productive.

Regarding the "just look at other cultures" point; that actually supports the different-interests hypothesis, because those other cultures are almost always those cultures with the least gender equality. The countries with the greatest score on the gender equity index have larger gender occupation gaps. The discrimination hypothesis actually fails to explain this, while the different interests hypothesis does a pretty good job.

Lastly, given that women achieved parity with men in law and medecine in the 80s and 90s (fields during a time that were far more hostile to women than now); women didn't need special programs, diversity officers, scouting programs, pipeline investment, etc, none of which are significantly helping tech now. The discrimination hypothesis fails to address this as well.

Hopefully this at least makes it clear that there are legitimate reasons to be skeptical of discrimination. At worst I'm simply wrong, not dishonest.

Sorry for typos, sending from phone.

I didn't talk about the discrimination hypothesis group, let's not fall into the trap of a false dichotomy. Did you watch the video I linked? It's a long time since I did but I don't remember the word discrimination being even pronounced.

I specifically presented a third hypothesis, that the primary driver is cultural (in the sense opposed to natural, not the "tech culture") i.e women having internalized since childhood "it's not for me", and men internalized "women have a different brain", like stated in the sibling comment. Different interests is not wrong but it's a symptom, same as discriminations exists but they are more of a symptom reinforcing the cause for me.

I don't think the different-interests hypothesis group is dishonest, my opinion is that they are wrong and that some might instead switch to "my culture and gender roles are fine, don't want to mix things up with feminized men and women having boy's center of interests etc..." (and that's often what comes out when I start digging when debating this topic). I disagree with this opinion but at leat it's debatable (vs some pseudo-scientific genetic predisposition).

Edit: for the other cultures point, I didn't say the gender equity was good, just that more women were interested tech in some.

"Although not a generally accepted fact, the women here are as qualified as the men."

I'll believe it when I see the admission statistics. Do they have gender segregated admission statistics for MIT? Anecdotally, I had a (male) friend in high school who was waitlisted with a 34, yet a girl in the same class with a 32 got in (no waitlist).

Are those ACT scores? Surely you realize that an ACT score is not a sole determinant of "qualification" for admittance into college. If it were, there would be no such thing as an admissions department. Everyone would just use ACT scores instead.

The difference between a 34 and a 32 on the ACT is the difference between the 99th percentile and the 98th percentile. This is well within the range of an individual's personal variation. A given ACT taker's score can vary by a couple points around their "true talent" based on short-term environmental factors (e.g. the quality of their pencils, the temperature of the room, their luck with guessing...) An admissions process that admitted a student with a 34 and not a student with a 32 would be deeply arbitrary. Which is why every college admissions officer I've ever spoken to has said they use standardized test scores as a rough initial screen and then never look at them again.

The relative qualification of students should be measured by their performance at the school, not by their standardized test scores.

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