Comment by nrjdhsbsid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nrjdhsbsid | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not ruling anything out. In fact it's been shown in studies that even at a few years old males prefer to play with traditionally masculine toys and girls the opposite. Does that extend to differences in career choice? Is it nature or nurture? We don't know.

If you're implying that race has something to do with career choice that's a much hotter potato that I'm going to deal with. It can't be ruled out because it's so polictically incorrect that nobody will research it.

Race and gender equality have a serious problem in that it's so dangerous to have the "wrong" viewpoint that any real research into the causes and possible solutions is never going to happening.

Something is stopping certain groups of people from persuing a career in CS and blaming tech companies for inequality is like blaming the sky for being blue.

We need to.research these things, even if we can't stop it we should know why. Knowing the reason alone would help tremendously whether it solves equality or not

> even at a few years old males prefer to play with traditionally masculine toys and girls the opposite

A gendered toy preference has been demonstrated in infants at 3-8 months (!!) using eye tracking software[1]. To make matters even weirder, the same gendered toy preference has also been demonstrated in rhesus monkeys[2] and vervet monkeys[3].

From [2]: "We present here striking evidence of a sex difference in rhesus monkey preference for human gender-stereotyped toys paralleling that reported in humans, suggesting that gender differences in toy choice may reflect evolved sex differences in activity preferences not primarily resulting from socialization processes."

[1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-008-9430-1

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2643016/

Is a statistical preference amongst small children a valid justification for offering less pay to equally qualified workers?

I personally think the regulators may be overreaching here, but have no problem with the regulations themselves. They are necessary, as humans living in the united states have historically been unable to rise above their biases. Without active pressure for integration, we end up with segregation, for reasons which have nothing to do with biological determinism.

Take access to schools and education. Education funding in the US is basically allocated through local property taxes. Thus, richer neighborhood have far better schools than poorer neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, red-lining and white flight have led to a society largely segregated on class and racial grounds. So certain racial groups have been systematically denied access to housing in areas with better education funding, leading to worse educational outcomes for their children, leading to less money for buying houses in nice neighbourhoods with good schools, and so on.

Programming used to be considered women's work, and was a primarily female occupation.

Programming then was very different and historical gender segregation in jobs, preceding the development of programming, led to the very earliest programming teams to be assembled from clerical workers which were at the time largely women.

By the time I started programming, 50 years ago, the field had shifted. In one class I took, in a large lecture hall at MIT there was only one female student. In that same lecture hall the organic chemistry lectures were very roughly 50% women.

Things have changed since, sure. My point is that gender roles can be fairly arbitrary.

It's not as if programming is a fundamentally different beast today.

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