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Comment by foldr | Hacker News Reader

Fair enough. I believe those stats are skewed by a small number of pilots doing relatively dangerous kinds of flying. In any case, yes, more women would be doing these jobs if sexism were eliminated.

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OK, but would you expect a 50/50 split if it was? And if you do not expect it, then how would you explain any remaining disparity?

You are talking about a hypothetical scenario where all sexist stereotypes are eliminated. It’s obviously silly to guess at what the numbers would be. I see no reason to expect a precise 50/50 gender balance in every one of the listed fields. Conversely, I would also not expect to see the massive disparities that we see currently.

The problem in STEM isn’t that the gender balance isn’t exactly 50/50. It’s that substantial numbers of women are discouraged from STEM careers by sexism.

If you cannot guess what the numbers should be then how would you know the problem is fixed? Or even if there is any problem at all?

First of all, note that this argument works both ways. You also can’t put exact numbers on how many women we’d expect there to be in the industry in the absence of any sexism whatever. So how do you know that there’s no problem?

But actually, the question is quite easy to answer for me. I am more interested in sexism per se than in the gender distribution. When women in the industry infrequently report that they are experiencing sexism, then I’ll consider that we’re well on the way to solving the problem. The current gender imbalance is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.

> When women in the industry infrequently report that they are experiencing sexism, then I’ll consider that we’re well on the way to solving the problem.

This is the fox guarding the henhouse. There is no incentive for women to ever stop crying "sexism!" if this is the criterion in use.

I think you're being overly literal, not to mention suspicious. I'm not suggesting that we turn off our critical faculties and reflexively believe everything that we hear. At the moment, we'd have to reflexively disbelieve everything women tell us to conclude that there's no sexism problem in tech.

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