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Comment by jessedhillon | Hacker News Reader

I think it might bother you because the author assumes that's his own inability to navigate complex social relationships is innate to his maleness. In fact, many men are adept at understanding social and emotional subtexts very well. There's no magnitude-order difference in innate ability as described, or if there is, it's not a permanent, unlearnable gulf.

This comment bothered me because OP is fetishizing and tokenizing women in a way that purports to be admiring and supportive of them. In fact, he simply has weak social skills; for example, this post.

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Yes I think you nailed it. "I don't suck at this and can't improve at it because it's a male thing and I'm a male"

See, the problem is that the people who complain about this are also the ones who say it's valuable to add women to a group of men (or indeed the reverse), because it results in more balanced decision making.

It can't be both. Either men or women are (as groups, i.e. averages) innately differ on the social vs analytical axis, and diversity is a net plus, or gender is entirely socially constructed, and adding women to a group shouldn't do anything in aggregate.

Studies point to the former rather than the latter.

You have a weird definition of 'innate'. Socially constructed effects are still effects. You still want a mix of people that have different traits and skills, even if they have nothing to do with biology.

So your demand of advocates of inclusiveness is to either a) concede that their support for female participation stems from a belief in the existence of a sensory mode or organ which only females have; or b) concede that women have nothing to offer which cannot be replicated by men and therefore there is no need to include them?

You can't see a third possibility in between those two?

What about simply having different experiences?

Stupid analogy: I hate it that only tall people seem to design store displays of pants. Remarkably, tall people don't seem to notice that putting the small sizes on the top shelves and the larger sizes lower does not make sense. It's because they have a different experience of reaching for things on shelves. Height diversity, though, makes for a better user experience.

It is true in my stupid analogy that tall people and short people do have genetic differences, as on average they innately differ in height. But it is not their innate genetic traits that makes these tall people ignorant both on the social and analytical axes when designing store displays.

Or is it? Hm....

There's a big difference between "on average, women are more socially adept while men are more mathematically adept" and "women socially understand things at a level most men will never achieve". The former is a statement about averages; the latter is a statement about absolutes.

It's okay to make generalizations based on imperfect correlates - like gender - as long as you understand they're generalizations, and are open to revising your judgment if new, more specific information appears. The comment that sparked this thread didn't evidence any of that understanding.

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