Comment by rmc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmc | Hacker News Reader

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> "Women prefer working with people."

IMO the biggest counter-example of the "women are better at working with people / soft skill" theory is politics.

Politics is all about who you know, who has your back, how you can get people to do what you want (the voters, other party members), how you can get people to like you, can you predict when someone's going to stab you in the back? can you predict when to stab someone else in the back? Should you support person X? What will person/group X think if you support person Y/policy Y? It's all about soft skills, it's all about reading people, it's all about working people.

You don't need maths or logic, or numbers,or rationality, or science for politics. I'm sure we all know how bad many polticians are at science/STEM.

If these theory were true, you'd expect women dominate politics in the same way men dominate tech. But that's not what you see at all. Advocates for the "women are better at soft skills, and worse at numbers" need to explain this glaring counter-example. The other theory, of institutionalised sexism against women, fits observable reality better.

Politics at the national level is made up of outliers, like sports people and actors. It's entirely possible that women are better at politics but not better than this 0.01% of people at politics, especially considering that men deviate from the norm more often.

What about local politics? Surely that's dominated by women? What about the politics of a social club, a trade union, or similar groups? Are they all dominated by women? (Answer: No).

I'm not sure how you can merge the two theories that "Women are just better at people skills" and "Women aren't better than the best". The whole thesis is claiming that women are as naturally superior at people skills as men are naturally good at tech/STEM. Google is supposed to hire the best, and it's >50% men, so why isn't something that "hires the best" (in politics) still <20% women (e.g. US Congress).

It's a pretty drastic oversimplification to say "women have better people skills" but there are definitely personality differences between men and women [1]. (I don't know why this comes as a surprise to anyone)

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/

I've seen this article referenced a few times now. It's worth noting that the standard deviation between is more pronounced in western countries and even then more geographically pronounced in eastern states like New York, West Virginia, Mississippi..etc, and less pronounced in western regions like Utah, Colorado, Oregon..etc. The differences are there, but the deviation is minimal if not negligible in many parts of the world.

When people see a tech company that's 90% male, they say "Oh well, men and women are different, that's the explaination."

So where are the places which are 90% women? Why isn't politics 90% women. Instead it's about ~20% and that's after years of campaigning & activism.

Nursing, teaching. I'm sure there are others, especially if you look at industries and not companies, HR for instance.

Dental hygienists (98%), Occupational therapists (92%), nurses (~92%)[1].

[1] https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/occ_gender_share_em_1020_txt.ht...

The politics of social clubs and small organizations very often are dominated by women. It's just that these groups are often very gendered, and so if you're a male and don't make a conscious effort to cross gender stereotypes in your hobbies, you'd never know they exist.

I remember my time in the Harry Potter fandom, which is ~99% female. Boy, was there politics. I can remember some truly epic [1][2] incidents of Internet drama all driven by people seeking social status through any means of manipulation possible.

[1] https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Ms.Scribe_Story:_An_Unauthorize...

[2] https://fanlore.org/wiki/Victoria_Bitter_Wank#Further_Readin...

But what about the non-gendered "political" things, like trad unions, local political party organisations, universities, other non-gendered clubs, if women are really better at people skills, shouldn't them be dominating those areas in the same way men are dominating STEM? Can you find a group which, at the low levels is about 50:50, and yet women dominate the political/organisational level?

How much counter-examples can you ignore before you say well maybe this "women are good at people skills, men are good at STEM". It seems like people really think "well men are better at basically everything"

Most of those are gendered, but they're gendered in ways that are the "default" for society (i.e. masculine) and so you don't notice them. Traditional unions and local political parties, for example, represent industries and civic institutions that have historically been populated with men only.

In industries that actually are 50/50 or majority female, you do see a number of women in top leadership positions. For example, the president of the national teacher's union is a woman [1], as are the three co-presidents of the national nurse's union [2], as is my alma mater's (which only went co-ed in 1974) college president [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randi_Weingarten

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Nurses_United

[3] https://www.amherst.edu/amherst-story/president

Women in general used to have better cooking skills than men, but the majority of chefs were male and are still male.

Here's a UK survey of chefs: http://www.bighospitality.co.uk/People/Survey-finds-imbalanc...

A lot of the popular fashion designers are men too.

It's almost like there's some sort of social factors which will ensure men get to the top!

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