Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamager | Hacker News Reader

Wow, are you seriously generalizing out of your anecdotes? This is incredibly harmful, and reason why women don't feel welcome in CS.

So I guess I can tell you a couple of my anecdotes, to make up for that one, uh?

One: I am an expat in a country with a pretty difficult language. Within my circle of expat friends (all couples), only the women had taken the time, investment and effort to go deep and learn the local language. In ALL cases she knows the language better than her male partner.

Two: At last job I met a woman who moved from accounting to CS in her late 30's. It was her second CS job, and in 3 years she "overtook" me in the company technical ranks, very deservedly so.

I could make a very long list, but I'll leave it here. So please stop being a judging jerk.

View on HN

Your experiences being positive while mine not so much automatically invalidates mine and makes your more valid? I believe not. I am happy that you have more positive experiences then mine, no worries. However, it is in the human nature that we can only extrapolate from personal experiences. You can believe in things which havent beeen confirmed by your experience, but that is mostly wishful thinking.

Wishful thinking: I believe that the earth is round, even if I have not confirmed it with my own experience by walking around it.

As I also believe that women are as willing and capable to learn "deep stuff" as men, regardless of my (or your) experiences.

Women likes language and things related to social experiences more than men, so you seeing women learning languages faster and better makes sense. You see girls outperforming boys in language classes throughout schools all over the world. But the other side of that coin, boys outperforming girls in technical classes is also a thing.

Both of those things are not true so.

It is 100% true according to all the data we have. Girls are relatively better at language, boys are relatively better at math everywhere.

Look at Figure 2 on page 7, shows every country has a massive gap where girls do much better on reading and boys do much better on maths relatively. The only effect you see is that more progressive countries the girls perform better and better on both, and the less progressive girls do worse and worse until boys are about as good as them at reading but massively better at math, but everywhere you see the same trend of girls preferring reading and boys preferring math.

https://docs.iza.org/dp6338.pdf

And all the studies done to understand those numbers show the difference in outcome is driven by tze social environment and esucation systems, and not the sexe.

You, of course, will ignore that I am sure. I hate it when the menoshpere invades HN, my last save place on the internet. If that continues, I'll just have to leave I guess.

> And all the studies done to understand those numbers show the difference in outcome is driven by tze social environment and esucation systems, and not the sexe.

No this is wrong, the studies done has shown that you can make girls do better and boys do worse by priming them. No study done has shown that you can eliminate this gap, just move it towards boys or girls being advantaged.

> You, of course, will ignore that I am sure

No, I read those studies. The stereotype threat paper just show that you can boost girls performance at the cost of boys performance and thus get equal performance at math, not that you can get relative equal performance at math and language. No such paper has shown that you can eliminate the language-math gap between girls and boys, and all data shows that the language-math divide for boys and girls stays the same.

So, all the progressive help to get girls better at math just made girls equal to boys at math, but now girls has an enormous advantage at language because they boosted girls score overall, they didn't make things equal.

The point made is correct.

Your own link shows that the "math gap" was eliminated in Finland and Sweden, both countries with very equitable education standards, Finland in particular is often cited for having the best education system in the world.

The very study you linked makes the point that male V. female performance in education appears to be linked to differences in how the sexes are treated, not to innate differences between them

There are other studies, but that is the study that you linked.

Perhaps you fell prey to the "reading gap" ?

> Your own link shows that the "math gap" was eliminated in Finland and Sweden, both countries with very equitable education standards, Finland in particular is often cited for having the best education system in the world.

At the cost of creating a massive language gap. The math-language divide is still there, they just boosted girls score overall they didn't close the gap where girls do relatively better in language and boys math.

So what the poster above saw was that math-language gap in action, women dominated the men in language in their experience, just like the data says we should expect.

The doing better part is correct, meaning there is no genetical basis for any difference in performance in MINT or language fields.

The part about making boys worse is something you made up.

If we continue this back and forth, I can play menoshpere / anti-feminism / incel talking piont bingo. I don't want to, so I think we can stop now.

> The part about making boys worse is something you made up.

Look at the data yourself, you clearly didn't read the paper, this is the data from the original stereotype threat paper, look at how much worse boys does.

https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C5612AQGW9DDN93toeA/articl...

Now can you please stop calling me ignorant, I clearly have better recollection of these studies than you do.

Recollection =|= Understanding

> And all the studies done to understand those numbers

Wait, you read "all the studies done to understand those numbers". Pretty huge task for a photographer, kudos!

Thank you! Just wait until you hear that I also have a day job, a family and other hobbies!

Let's rephrase it for the extremely pedandinc and semantic HN crowd: "All the reporting on those studies, and the executive summaries of the studies I read" Better to parse?

So you exaggretated your knowledge for the sake of winning an argument? That pretty much proof my point and experience.

Sometimes it feels like talking to a comoutet or a ginie on HN. Not the slightest ability to understand the meaning of what was said, even when the wording gets corrected, ignoring the whole point and moving the discusssion to input parameter semantics. And thinking this appriach is super smart and edgy.

Frustrating really, and a lazy, disengenious way of argueing a point.

Feel proven so, if it helps you.

Well, current results do not support your posotion. Totally out of chance, local news just reported that MINT-support programs are apparently not improving things. That is pretty much the contrary of what you are trying to claim, backed up by a news article released today

https://science.orf.at/stories/3223967/

But I am sure you will find ways to subsume all HN posters into a perceived partiarchy that is only trying to make your life harder. Go on, I no longer care.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com