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Comment by kondro | Hacker News Reader

I look at the comments here and it becomes blatantly obvious why we have trouble getting women into STEM.

Has anybody said anything about her gender?

I thought it was pretty clear that the surprise and skepticism is around her background as an actress.

If the article mentioned that she had been studying Math/CS/etc. in her private time to get the background needed to contribute to the paper, I'm pretty sure the comments would be pretty different, though her gender wouldn't have changed.

How does it become obvious? (Not snark, actual question)

Women who do not follow the domestic norm are looked down upon in society. Beauvoir is explaining that woman referred as “the other.” She states, “What is a woman?’ […] The fact that I ask it is in itself significant. A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: ‘I am a woman’; on this truth must be based all further discussion. A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man. […] It would be out of the question to reply: ‘And you think the contrary because you are a man,’ for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity.” (34-5) As for man there is no need to define what is to be a man, there is no reason because they identified themselves as the superior part. Man represents both “the positive and the neutral,” which doesn’t need to be explained or defined, and it is self-explanatory. “Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in relation to herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being.” (35) Men are the default setting and women are considered a recessive gender. “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.” (35) It is like an asymmetrical comparison, but masculine and feminine aren’t asymmetrical. De Beauvoir defines women as the “Second sex” because women are defined in relation to men. Aristotle referred that women are “female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities.” De Beauvoir also points out that St. Thomas referred to the woman as the “imperfect man", the "incidental” being.

unification of the symbols from current context with this paragraph are left as an exercise to the reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_de_Beauvoir#Existential...

I doubt it would have been that different if the person in question was Robert Pattinson. I think the condescension is more about a "lol as if some dumb actor knows anything about AI".

https://www.google.com/patents/US2292387

Reply on news.ycombinator.com