Hacker News Reader

As it turns out women have barely had any time at all being afforded the same privileges as men[0], and that's just the United States, there remain cultures that are extremely oppressive to women. It also turns out we still tell women from a young age that "they can't".[1] It also turns out there are a ton of biases pushing women out of STEM[2][3][4][5].

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...

[3] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/12/4403.full

[4] http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full

I understand that there are biases against women in our society, and I don't argue with that.

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 there are biological differences between men and women, and these differences are causing different representation in STEM fields.

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 argue that you don't actually have any reason to believe that the differences are biological instead of social.

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.

> I could provide...

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.

This argument founders against a pretty simple rebuttal. Unless you believe software development of the variety practiced at places like Facebook is so intellectually challenging that its demands outstrip molecular biology, mathematics, and indeed all of science save the fields of physics, computer science, and engineering --- despite the fact that virtually all of science now requires deep facility with computers! --- then that argument has to account for the fact that every one of those fields has much better parity between men and women than software development.

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.

Thank you! I think this analysis is simplistic and has a lot of room for questions, but it is an analysis and it is data-supported, and I respect that. (And I don't think that citing these facts is sexist in any way.)

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.

> 1. Are these colleges selecting students for some reason other than general intelligence, and if so, can we measure the IQ of men and women at these colleges and find a significant difference?

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.

I'd think that it would be fairly easy to measure, honestly: do a longitudinal study of new hires at several top companies, and come back 5 years later and see who's still in the industry and what their level of promotion is if so. You know both their educational history, their demographics, and their standardized test scores (a close-enough proxy for g), and you can see how well they predict success.

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.)

That's a pretty solid argument that a lot of people aren't going to like.