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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Who is naturally better at lifting heavy objects -- men or women?

Who is naturally better at bearing children -- men or women?

Reality isn't gender-equal, or even finely balanced like a Starcraft game. Equality means equal rights, not equal abilities. (A strict belief in the latter gets us into Harrison Bergeron territory.)

If we're talking cognitive skills, there is rough equality in ability, but a difference in approach which makes one sex better for a particular job than the other. If women tend more to seek social consensus, for instance, they would fare better in a software engineering job with a high degree of peer collaboration, as opposed to the same job in a more "cowboy coding" environment.

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My problem with this line of reasoning is the inferential leap. The other day my wife was surprised that I could box jump higher than her, even though I rarely work out, while she had been training for a stair climbing competition. Being a man has its advantages. But then we're going to make the jump from that to saying "and that explains why men just prefer/are better at programming and thus make up 90% of the industry!"

My second problem is that men set the metrics in ways that benefit them. Let's take the stereotypes as an assumption. What is a good programming team? One full of cowboys and rockstars, or one full of people who can concentrate on detail work for long periods at a time and communicate with each other? Studies of children show that girls are better at the latter (which is why they get higher grades).

>My second problem is that men set the metrics in ways that benefit them

If you think going to war is a benefit then you may have a different concept of "benefit" than most.

And you are extrapolating stuff, just because men are better at lifting weights doesn't mean we are going to close female weight competitions. The same thing happens with programming or any career where one of the sexes may be better by biological predisposition.

>My second problem is that men set the metrics in ways that benefit them.

To a greater degree than women do?

Your question doesn't matter if it's the men doing the hiring.

And GP's point doesn't matter if it's the women doing the hiring.

Sure, but which world do we live in?

Obviously it's not the whole picture, but I think the most quantitative answer is that the human resources field is one of the most female-dominated out there (source: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.pdf).

HR personnel don't make hiring decisions for programmers.

In companies I worked, they make a lot of them. HR is part of the panel that votes on a interviewee's fit and also handles a lot of the salary negotiation (which is as important as the whole hiring process).

I also detect a 'for programmers' added in that wasn't present before...

Handling negotiations != making decisions.

Handling salary negotiations means being able to say 'yes we accept your offer' or 'no, we don't think we can make that work'. That is making a decision.

They don't even do that. The company positions HR people between candidates and the hiring manager as a way of thwarting negotiation, but the HR person is invariably required to escalate back to the hiring manager if they can't get to "yes".

The idea that women have an outsized role in tech job screening because of the demographics of HR is totally specious. It also has nothing whatsoever to do with Rayiner's point.

>The idea that women have an outsized role

Odd, I never mentioned either side having an outsized role.

The notion that HR has any meaningful role in selecting candidates is fallacious. Any appearance of such a role in an HR organization is a deliberately constructed artiface, intended to take the heat off the real decision makers and to trap candidates with poor negotiating skills.

HR personnel don't make hiring decisions for programmers.

Neither. Hiring is done a thousand different ways involving both genders (and sometimes involving those who don't care to be classified by binary genders). Which group may be in the majority depends upon location and industry and even on the way hiring works; in some cases direct report has 100% control, in some cases direct report has 0% control and HR has all of it.

If you don't think that men are currently making the vast majority of hiring decisions for programmers in the US right now then you are simply unaware of what's going on in the world.

I quote myself from another post.

>I also detect a 'for programmers' added in that wasn't present before...

Also, 'no you're wrong' isn't going to get us anywhere.

Also a disingenuous argument, as the thread is rooted in an argument about hiring programmers.

Odd. See the original article is a discussion of needing people skills for the best jobs, and the branch that started this comment chain was based on someone calling out one gender for rigging the system, to which my only response was to ask if the other gender does not do the same. Programming was not the primary focus here and keeps being brought up to try to prove a claim that wasn't ever actually disagreed with, but which I just asked a question to give some equality to.

So you have problems with your own arguments?

Because from the posts I have read you are the one doing the inferential leaps.

Well the jerk store called, and they're running out of Shorel!

I'd argue that the above questions aren't well formed. Gender equality is such a sticky issue that it's really important to use precise language.

For the first question, it might be fair to say that the average amount men can lift is more than the average amount women can lift. However it's really important to realize that given 2 individuals of different genders, there's no reason to make any assumptions about which one is able to lift more weight. You could just assume, and if you had to assume, you'd be most accurate by assuming the man could lift more than the woman, but why assume?

Be very careful when taking a statement that's accurate wrt to populations and applying it to 2 individuals in the population.

This is a false comparison since even most industrial jobs have machinery which does the heavy lifting and most dangerous part of production (I know from personal experience). As for how women work in an office it largely depends on the job and the social norms in the office. I've seen women act as cut throat as the men in some offices and I've seen men work toward consensus in others. It's not biology that drives the behavior patterns at jobs it's the factors of production: the input, the tools, and the desired output. Everything else is an accident of history.

"Who is naturally better at lifting heavy objects -- men or women?"

Whichever one gets off their ass and stops stuffing their face with cheese doodles all day long.

Seems plausible on the surface, but not supported by research. The average elite female athlete is only as strong as an average male. Quote: The results of female national elite athletes even indicate that the strength level attainable by extremely high training will rarely surpass the 50th percentile of untrained or not specifically trained men.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17186303

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