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Comment by ectopod | Hacker News Reader

In the UK there is an often-repeated statistic: the 20% of girls who take A-level physics outperform the 40% of boys who take it.

And of course they do! It's like saying a team comprised of footballers from the top division will beat a team comprised of footballers from the top two divisions.

The few women who go into tech or board rooms or whatever will typically be the women who are good at it, and they will typically outperform the larger cohort of (necessarily) more average men.

You don't need tales of struggle or diversity to explain this. Minority groups will tend to perform better.

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You're so close! If the majority group and minority group have equal distribution of ability in a subject, why are the minority a minority?

Women are 55% of the population. Why aren't they 55% of tech workers? Why are only the 20% who are really good at it working in tech?

Saying "the minority are always going to be better" doesn't explain why. And the why is really important.

Pro tip: talk to women who would like to work in tech but aren't for an answer.

You say you don't need discrimination to explain it, but your explanation assumes discrimination ie. you have to be really damn good in order to even have a chance as a woman. There is another explanation, the distribution of IQ between men and women:

> Another factor affecting perception may be distribution of IQ ... Although [men and women] are on average the same, the people at the very top and the very bottom of the IQ bell curve are more likely to be men. That is a pattern that we see in the university setting, with men either being at the very top of the class or at the bottom.

https://www.newsweek.com/men-women-and-iq-87117

You also see a similar situation with "places in society". The majority of billionaires are men, but the majority of people in prison are men too. Women in general seem to have a more "stable" place in society compared to men. It seems harder for them to climb higher but also harder for them to fall completly at the bottom. If I wanted to sum it up, it would be something like "the glass ceiling comes with a glass floor". This is just my speculation though, and not in any way a judgment of value.

An important point here is that this glass ceiling or glass floor is only relevant to talk about on the level of all women. It has no bearing on an individual.

I'm not attempting to explain the under-representation of minorities. I'm explaining why minorities in teams will naturally perform better than average.

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