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Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

That's a particularly interesting one, because it's not susceptible to the usual charges of "no one cares because it's low pay/status". If you look to radiology rather than surgery, the gender imbalance is enormous.

Suddenly we're looking at gender skew in two highly technical, prestigious, lucrative fields, and seeing that they prompt totally different types and amounts of discussion.

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It's almost as if men and women have some fundamental differences in psychology that affect their preferred choice of career.

> men and women have some fundamental differences in psychology

This was largely debunked from a biological perspective [1]. Any psychological perceptions you may be referring to are largely cultural and subject to the biases that this product is trying to combat.

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468.full

The study you linked doesn't absolutely say what you are trying to make it say (that there aren't fundamental differences in psychology between men and women). It seems to say that male and female brains and cognitive abilities aren't as dimorphic as their genitalia, but instead there is a continuum and overlaps for many distinct cognitive traits. In other words: (almost) all men have normally formed penises, (almost) all women have normally formed vaginas. Mixed situations are rare. Brains are another matter, genders mix and overlap. That doesn't mean that there are NO genders though.

>That doesn't mean that there are NO genders though.

The study isn't saying that there are no genders - specifically it is saying:

Our results demonstrate that regardless of the cause of observed sex/gender differences in brain and behavior (nature or nurture), human brains cannot be categorized into two distinct classes: male brain/female brain.

"most brains are comprised of unique “mosaics” of features, some more common in females compared with males, some more common in males compared with females, and some common in both females and males"

Nothing in this view says it's not possible that, for example, an interest or a skill for engineering, while rare in both genders, might be n times more common in men than in women.

That paper has little, if anything, to do with aphextron's point. It's a study of brain anatomy.

Here's some directly-relevant literature, which points to a systematic preference for occupations in men vs women: [0]

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th...

Hence saying it was largely debunked from a biological perspective.

aphextron didn't elaborate on the source of the psychological differences. I was pointing out that it wasn't biological and most likely cultural.

And that's completely irrelevant to the current discussion.

BTW it's not even debunked from the biological perspective. It's debunked from a brain anatomy perspective.

Or perhaps many children are raised to conform to particular gender roles that affects their social development, and possibly, just possibly, this might also affect their job opportunities not just by self-selection, but by biases in the interviewer/hiring manager. It seems like a very complicated issue that doesn't have a simplistic answer.

Gender roles exist because they are adaptive. They are inseparable from actual average differences in characteristics.

There's a documentary titled Brainwash: The Gender Equality Paradox that explored those differences [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE

I worry about this mentioning occupations' "prestige." That seems to be incompatible with our goals of universal equality. We shouldn't discount gender bias because of privilege.

I didn't mean to address whether prestige is necessary to consider an occupation.

Rather, I was drawing parallels between software and radiology careers, and observing that one is considered a major, public issue while the other is basically an internal discussion within medicine.

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