Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnarbarian | Hacker News Reader

I am mostly playing the devil's advocate. Both explanations may be true to a degree.

I believe it is misguided to shoehorn discrimination as the goto explanation for every statistical difference between groups of people. In this scenario the data literally implies the opposite conclusion yet danharaj was able to contrive an explanation that leaves women as the victim despite lliterally being promoted twice as fast. You can bet danharaj would still be arguing the same conclusion if the data had born out the opposite results.

View on HN

To be fair there it's likely that there's a bit of victimization there as well if it's harder to go into one field vs. another due to social norms. You get it from both sides, too! "You're a man, why do you want to be a nurse??". Going back to tech, if you were a borderline woman candidate that wanted to get in it seems that you would statistically be less likely to follow that dream.

I like to step back and just say that it's not something that has to be fixed if a cadre of people appear to "collectively decide" based on individual decisions. It sucks that if you are in the cadre and have to fight the perception that you should(n't) be doing something. But I think (as I suspect you do as well) that saying that your individual decision should be different simply because you share an identifying trait with others is broken.

Ideas that men or women are some collective that needs to be pushed one way or another are difficult. You can generalize based on the apparent preferences of the group, but then judging an individual based on those preferences is where it starts to get troublesome.

Try being a male who wants to go into education for young children. I have a friend who went through the process as the only male member of his entire graduating class, and he says the level of suspicion he had to face from his professors and fellow students was overwhelming at times.

It was consistently implied that a young male would only want to teach young children for puerile reasons.

Even when he was given the benefit of the doubt, it'd only be to say "oh, so you'll take your education degree and enter administration?"

Totally agree with you and I implore you to watch the video I linked above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70

There is growing scientific evidence (discussed in the video) that men and women have preferential differences that are exhibited as early as we are capable of measuring them. (Toys chosen days after birth)

The differences in choice of profession are seen globally across all cultures and are in fact stronger in places like Scandinavia which are arguably world leaders in gender equality and provide women with the most choice.

When you see something that all cultures have in common it hints that it is not a cultural phenomena and that there is something biological going on.

I am speaking by and large here and paraphrasing the evidence laid out by researchers in the video. There are plenty of exceptional outliers which buck the trend and any individual's choice in profession doesn't imply that the group as a whole has a poor aptitude or are incapable of it. It simply states that they prefer to do something else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com