Unless you think there is some sort of overt discrimination happening that's stopping females becoming senior engineers, in which case you'll need to define it.
I think it's pretty likely that the environmental conditions that hinder women from ever becoming engineers in the first place don't all suddenly go away for the ones who manage to do it anyway.
Or are we talking about first principles here? Because I also think that a lot of maybe-not-intentional-but-pretty-much-everywhere-nonetheless discrimination hinders young girls from having early lifestyles that lead to becoming women engineers. I don't really see how one could reasonably argue otherwise. And if discrimination prevents LARGE_% of A, and B requires A, then discrimination has almost certainly also prevented SOME_% of B. That's just basic middle school math.
If you're talking about culture or traditional gender roles, then I put forward that these are not primarily a result of discrimination but mostly evolved over quite a long time based on biological differences.
If we are going to deconstruct aspects of culture because we consider them unjust, we'd better be honest about why things are and what we might lose if we try to force certain outcomes.
A recent examination of a Scandinavian country purported to be globally the least discriminatory (Denmark or Norway - I don't recall which) of gender distributions in different fields showed increased unevenness.
In other words, given the agency by their culture, women tend to avoid STEM fields.
I think it's fair to say that everyone should be given the opportunities and challenges they can rise to, but no one should be coerced into any role for the sake of an asinine idea like "gender representation".
(I buy the argument that there are statistically-significant differences in some strengths that apply in some industries, yes. I'm curious to see how this applies to software engineering in particular.)
This correlates with the low numbers of women that choose to enter the industry, despite increasing incentives. It also correlates with female domination of fields such as nursing.
Of course this is just my belief, as a member of the industry, and not a scientifically-researched conclusion.
So, again, I'm curious to see evidence of why women's aptitude is poorly correlated with the specific industry of software engineering. (I would even buy, based on your argument, that women's aptitude is poorly correlated with academic computer science, but that's a very different field.)
It's clear women on the whole are not drawn to STEM. It's not clear why but there does appear to be a biological component. It's certainly not primarily socially constructed.
That's my observation anyway. I haven't studied the issue in great detail.
It's also clear that girls on the whole are not driven toward STEM by their adult mentors, and outside the bubble are actively discouraged from it.
> It's certainly not primarily socially constructed.
Certain, are you? Based on what?
Today, different families and schools push varying expectations onto children. This cultural aspect is layered on top of biological differences in body and intelligence.
If we remove cultural impediments and allow biology to express itself more fully, the uneven distribution of gender in different fields increases. In other words, the relative evenness of the distribution we currently have is socially constructed.
So I'm not convinced by the argument that women (and indeed many men) are dissuaded because they hold negative stereotypes of people and working culture in STEM fields. However, I'm willing to keep an open mind on this, so if this is true then more effort should be made to welcome in talented outsiders.
I don't think I believe any of these three claims.
For these I don't think asking for supporting evidence would help - these aren't claims where you can easily point to a research paper, but these are interpretations of a large amount of data (some rigorous, some anecdotal).
But it's interesting that we have such different interpretations, worldviews if you will, of the data we've seen. I think women are drawn just fine to STEM as a whole (if by "drawn" you mean "innate interest"), I think they're somewhat structurally discouraged by socially-constructed barriers to STEM as whole and, importantly, quite a bit more discouraged to software engineering in particular. And I don't think there's anything biological about it (unless you count the fact that many people with wombs plan to bear children and nobody without wombs does, and long parental leave is a serious career hit, but I'd still argue that 90% of that is a socially-constructed barrier and not a biological one).
> women, in particular, are statistically-significantly less strong at the software engineering industry
I think that what was they indicated was that because individual strengths may vary, because there likely isn't a strong balance of genders in the workplace. It would be obvious that due to different strengths of individuals that there would could be an apparent bias.
As it turns out the distribution of IQ in men and women is different[0][1][2][3], with men having more variation (more extremely dumb men and more extremely smart men), and an ever so slightly higher median (men have slightly higher IQ on average). These small differences lead to huge difference in representation of exceptionally smart people, because of how normal distribution works. These differences manifest themselves in tasks requiring high intelligence, such as chess, go, engineering and software development.
I say this as a scientific statement, with zero sexism implied. I believe that people should not be afraid to state scientific truths, no matter how controversial they may seem.
[0] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289606...
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886911...
[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289606...
[3] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289604...
So when you cite evidence that says men are smarter than women conducted by men standing on the shoulders of a society built for men, you can't be shocked when people question it.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_the_United...
[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6323/389
[2] http://www.uchastings.edu/news/articles/2015/01/double-jeopa...
I argue that there are biological differences between men and women, and these differences are causing different representation in STEM fields.
I would also say that today, we're living in the most equal opportunity society than ever before. Let the free market sort itself out. If you try to artificially increase the proportion of women in STEM fields, you will decrease the quality of engineers. I'm sorry, but that's how it is.
> So when you cite evidence that says men are smarter than women conducted by men standing on the shoulders of a society built for men, you can't be shocked when people question it.
So, did they use a flawed methodology? Were these studies sexist? Could you point in which way these studies are sexist? Do you disagree that males often have higher variance in different traits in many species? Do you disagree that men have higher variance in IQ?
I argue that you don't actually have any reason to believe that the differences are biological instead of social. Certainly, while extremely interesting (I mean that. Not sarcasm.), none of your links demonstrate it. Your links claim to show a difference, but they do not claim to explain the cause of said difference.
> I would also say that today, we're living in the most equal opportunity society than ever before.
You could say all kinds of things and more. But, and I'm not agreeing here that it is actually true, because I'm not fully convinced that it is, even if it _is_ true, being better-than isn't the same as being good.
> Let the free market sort itself out.
Only a properly regulated market ever sorts itself out. Otherwise you end up with natural monopolies, because barriers to entry are historically compounded. This has always been true of marketplaces.
> So, did they use a flawed methodology? Were these studies sexist?
Well, one flaw is that your conclusions don't follow from the studies.
I could provide studies on how IQ development is set by genetics and very early childhood. So yes, I do have a reason to believe IQ is biological.
> Only a properly regulated market ever sorts itself out.
This is true, but "we must hire women otherwise people think we're sexist" is not a properly regulated market.
> Well, one flaw is that your conclusions don't follow from the studies.
But my conclusions do follow from studies. If you take top 2% of people by IQ from a random population sample, you expect to have more men. The same would be true if you took the bottom 2%, but that doesn't interest anyone.
Well I could provide a tortoise that speaks seven different languages. Saying what you could provide is fairly bad form.
> and very early childhood.
Wait, how early? Which part of childhood is the genetic part? Heck, what about the potential for non-uniform distribution of teratogens? Has that even been studied?
> but "we must hire women otherwise people think we're sexist" is not a properly regulated market
"We should prefer to choose an equally qualified woman because not only is she presently equally qualified, but she has achieved being equally qualified in an environment that in-many-small-ways-collectively-and-constantly tries to prevent it" is, though. There is no shortage of well-qualified individuals in the world. And if you don't agree, then we must first begin another conversation on what exactly you think qualifies someone to develop software.
> But my conclusions do follow from studies.
They certainly don't follow from the ones you linked, even though you said they would. I know that because I read the studies you linked. So maybe these other ones also don't support your conclusions any better?
> If you take top 2% of people by IQ from a random population sample, you expect to have more men.
Maybe. Now tell me the part of the study that says why. And further tell me the part that indicates a positive correlation with success in computer software production. And then tell me the part that indicates positive correlation with representation in the field. And then tell me the part that indicates...heck, maybe that indicates that g is even a useful measurement to begin with.
Because you said, and I quote, "[biological] differences are causing different representation in STEM fields", which is an unsupported conclusion.
One line of argument occurs to me: my understanding is that the breakdown of incoming freshmen at top colleges (by which I mean the sorts of colleges Facebook tries very hard to recruit from) is very gender-balanced, much more so than would be implied by the normal distributions you cite. This raises two questions:
1. Are these colleges selecting students for some reason other than general intelligence (whether this is "political correctness" or "intelligence isn't everything" is irrelevant to this question), and if so, can we measure the IQ of men and women at these colleges and find a significant difference? Even if men and women as a whole have different IQ distributions, I would initially assume men and women at top colleges to have comparable IQ distributions (because that's what college admissions should select for), but I can believe that this is not true.
2. How much is raw general intelligence useful for software engineering compared to the pedigree of having attended one of these top schools? I would assume that being in the 95th percentile of intelligence and having a degree from one of these schools is more likely to lead to success than being in the 98th percentile and not, but, again, I can very easily be convinced otherwise.
I'm open to being wrong, but my prediction based on the data I have is either a) the measured IQ distribution is going to be different, with equal representation of sexes; b) the representation of sexes is going to be different with equal IQ distribution;
> 2. How much is raw general intelligence useful for software engineering compared to the pedigree of having attended one of these top schools?
That's a really good question, and the answer again is that I don't know. I don't even know how to measure this.
As an anecdote, I didn't attend a top CS college, but I'm a high-ish ranked software developer.
There will be biases (in the scientific sense) in the data because of how the interview process selects for successful candidates, which is going to be correlated with these three and probably many other things. But I think the study would still be sound.
(Also, it occurs to me that I've been making about one assumption that is likely to be untrue: that people who do better at top software engineering companies are actually better software engineers. It is entirely possible that software engineering companies are systematically failing to hire and promote the best software engineers, because their interview and review processes are broken. In fact, that is what the pervasive-sexism-in-tech hypothesis implies: that individuals are so sexist that they would prefer to hire a man over a more qualified women, possibly because they're subconsciously failing to realize that the man is actually less qualified. If we want to test this hypothesis seriously, we need to separate "actually a good dev" and "recognized as a good dev". I could easily believe that being in the top percentile of g is correlated with hiring and promotion, because it's easy to measure, but less tightly correlated with actually being good at your job.)
Of course we all here understand that 80% of software development as practiced commercially is not especially intellectually demanding, being as it is essentially a series of variations of transforming database rows into text markup and back again.