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Here's the thing. Your point is not incorrect. The language she originally used wasn't totally 100% bulletproof. Things people say rarely are.

But your argument distracts from the fact that the phenomenon she described is very real. Women face challenges at every turn as they try to get into tech. One of those challenges is people like you who want to nitpick everything they say.

Why are you arguing with her? What is the point of it? Can't you accept that the general argument that women struggle to exist in the tech industry is real?

You're like a global warming denier fixating over some discrepancy in the data. You're not wrong, it's just beside the point. We need to be arguing over how to fix our gender issues, not whether they exist. And one of those ways, without a doubt, is getting more women to take the AP CS exam and go to programming summer programs.

Just because you're factually correct (which I'm not conceding here, but it shouldn't matter) doesn't mean your point has any merit.

what parent doesn't want their child to program?

In a weird sort of coincidence, I was recently talking to all of my couple friends at a large party. Of the 5 couples there, only 1 person had any desire to see their child(ren) go into programming. That particular child was a boy.

So there's some more anecdata, but basically I've never heard a non-programmer parent say they want their child to go into programming. It's always been something along the lines of "I want my child to do the same thing I do" or "I want my child to be a doctor/lawyer/engineer"

No one claimed "most men _______." The claim is that your average woman who is employed in this sector faced more adversity than your average man who is employed in this sector. Therefore, you'd expect the average woman employed to have more grit than the average man employed, since the women with less determination were filtered by various filters that don't exist for men.

You could argue that it's not a filter against women but a magnet towards men, but that doesn't actually change the crux of the argument. There is clearly something that causes only 18% of AP CS exams being taken by women.

OP claimed most "most men _______." She made other claims as well, which I didn't respond to. She claimed "most men ________" when she implied most men experience code summer camps, parental encouragement to take AP CS classes, etc. She said "women don't usually get sent to coding summer camp as teenagers. Our parents don't usually encourage us to take AP computer science, and our best friends aren't in CS and don't refer us for sweet internships at Microsoft and Google."

Usually means "under normal conditions; generally." Generally means more often than not, meaning over half / most.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/usually

>OP claimed most "most men _______."

I did NOT, you are misquoting me. I claimed (and cited) that OF the people who take AP CS and have the other resources I mentioned, most are men. That is all I claimed and you are all over this thread misinterpreting this.

You can check my original comment's edit history. I've changed nothing about what I said and I stand by it 100%.

Maybe you didn't intend to make the claim, but it's a claim you made. I quoted you extensively and characterized your words fairly and in context. Please point out anywhere where that isn't the case. If you claimed that OF the people who take AP CS, most are men, I would do nothing but agree with you. That is the case. You did not make that claim - you instead claimed, via implication, that MOST men do take AP CS (or go to summer coding camps, etc).

>Maybe you didn't intend to make the claim, but it's a claim you made ... You did not make that claim

You sound like a bad politician here. All I said is that GIRLS don't take AP CS and do not go to coding summer camp. The people who are doing these things are boys.

You have terrible reading comprehension and your pedantic citations of dictionaries and incorrect use of set theory belong on /r/iamverysmart

You sound like a bad politician here. ....

You have terrible reading comprehension and your pedantic citations of dictionaries and incorrect use of set theory belong on /r/iamverysmart

Ad hominems aren't appropriate on HN. It might be better if you took a breather at this point:

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And under what logical system does "women generally don't do ____" imply that "men generally do ____?"

At most, it implies that "more men than women generally do ______," which is totally true. Even that implication would be a bit of a leap were it not for parent's later explicit clarifications on the point.

I want to talk to you about two groups - tall people and short people. Usually, short people can't reach items that are on very high shelves.

Above, did I imply something about tall people's abilities to reach items on very high shelves? I didn't claim anything about tall people specifically. But I think I did make a claim about their abilities here, by implication, given the context. It's natural to infer the claim - this is just part of how people communicate. The claim is strongly implied - tall people can reach items on very high shelves.

I believe OP's clarified claim (of people in AP CS classes, most are men; of people at summer coding camps, most are men; etc), rather than OP's initial claim (most men take AP CS classes; etc). The clarified claim seems accurate. The initial claim is clearly inaccurate - and OP "stand[s] by it 100%".

yea exactly. 'Usually people don't fly' is valid statement grammatically but makes no sense.

English is an ambiguous language interpreted by flawed humans.

It feels like we're dancing around the issue. There's no reason for this line of thought to have continued like it has. "My side" should have made a polite comment, and when rebuffed, thought "they don't think it's a problem," and moved on. "Your side" should have thought "a slight rephrase could increase clarity and address their concerns." Instead we're just pointlessly banging our heads against a wall.

As is, both sides of this argument are actually pretty stupid. Mine included.

Haha, the most valuable lesson I got from my linguistics class was that language is obscenely difficult to generate and understand – even without "mistakes," understanding can suffer. It's worth stepping back and re-establishing common ground or giving people the benefit of the doubt.

Good point, thanks for introducing some sanity.

Yes, that is the claim of white/male privilege.

However, the implication of saying that something "usually" doesn't happen to women, is that it usually happens to men. These were very specific benefits that do not usually happen to anyone. The statement is just as invalid as a privilege denyer saying "poor white people have less privilege than rich black people", except they were made for "your side" rather than "the enemy's side".