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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

I'll take up that challenge with https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10670 which provides quantitative data indicating that male abilities vary more than female ones, and this fact is sufficient to explain why men should be overrepresented in CEO boardrooms and prisons.

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Mother nature does seem to roll the dice more when it comes to men. People then look at the outliers to the right and scream sexism while completely ignoring all the outliers to the left. There are many more profoundly stupid men than women. Men are incarcerated at a higher rate. Men kill themselves at 3x the rate of women. Yet this is quietly accepted.

This implies suicide and homicide are done primarily by stupid people by rhetoric?

Yes. Committing homicide is an irrational and maladaptive (i.e. stupid) thing to do in a peaceful 21st century society. Committing suicide is an irrational and maladaptive thing to do in almost all situations in history.

Maybe one has a temporary problem (depression) that pushes them to commit suicide. That doesn't mean they're stupid. Robin Williams was definitely not stupid, yet he commited suicide. Terry Pratchett was also diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and had contemplated the idea of assisted suicide in a country where this is legal (Switzerland).

Robin Williams had Lewy body dementia [0], which almost certainly contributed to his choice.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dementia_with_Lewy_bodies

Alternative reading: being stupid, getting incarcerated and committing suicide are all consequences of being an outlier at the negative end of the bell curve, where men are overrepresented due to higher variance of the respective trait.

Women have a much higher level of attempted suicide, possibly 3x as often as men. [1] I once heard a theory that women don't die from suicide as often because they tend to use less violent means of suicide. For example, if you swallow a bottle of pills you could survive or change your mind a few minutes later and get your stomach pumped, but this rarely applies to shooting yourself in the head.

1. https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/

"While males are 4 times more likely than females to die by suicide, females attempt suicide 3 times as often as males."

So a suicide attempt by a man is 12x more likely to succeed than one by a woman.

That is sexist! Are you suggesting that women are less skilled than men ??!!??

(/s, obviously. Sorry I have to point it out.)

I get /s :) And maybe they're more skilled. In that they get the message across without actually dying.

I suspect that many "suicide attempts" are more like emphatic communication ("See! I really care about this!") than intention to die.

When I've felt suicidal, it's always helped to imagine how one does it reliably. Then I've thought about how irreversible that would be. And then I've realized that I don't really want to die.

I think this is related with the XY chromosome. Because you have the Y instead of the X you have a part where you don't have 2 genes to encode a feature. So there is not gen dominant and recessive. This leads a more variation when the Y is passed to the offspring. This is the example I read when I was reading about this: if the parents are X5X7 X6Y (where the number represents a feature that is not in the Y chromosome). The offspring could be X5Y X5X6 X7Y X7X6, but the feature is expressed as the average of the numbers: X5Y=5 X5X6=5,5 X7Y=7 X7X6=6,5. The women are more close to the average (6) than the men.

Why is the feature expressed as the average? If one gene is recessive and another dominant only one matters. So it could be expressed like this: X5Y=5 X5X6=5 X7Y=7 X7X6= 7 where there are no differences between genders.

funny, I have no idea if this is true, but this was the "common knowledge" among hunting/truffle dogs breeders when I was a kid.

Something like "if you want a good nosed dog get a female pup, if you get a male it might be a champion, or terrible". It would be fun if this was true, and also applied to people.

If it based on the genes because of the chromosome X and Y then I think there is no reason why it wouldn't apply to any specie with chromosomes X Y.

Birds have the opposite arrangement of sex chromosomes - in birds the sex chromosome is carried by the female. I guess if we were all ostriches it would be the females that would be the CEO's.

That might explain the situation if board/C-suite presence was due to performance, merit, or other individual characteristic rather than a couple of centuries worth of old boys' clubs.

How do you get on a board? By being known to people on the board. They know who you are, what your history is, how you think.

Well, some would argue that many CEOs ought to be in prison ;)

I'm actually curious because I would think that even at higher levels, assuming the majority of women are stable performers and a minority of men are top producers there should only be a slight bump in the male representation in areas where "female" skills are paramount like CEO boardrooms, with the few men being he outlier performances. It would be the reverse problem of why it's unreasonable to say "we should go for 50/50 when the population representation is 20/80".

How much of a bump there should be will depend on how elite a slice you are carving. If you're carving a large slightly above average slice, then the mean matters more. If you're slicing off a thin slice from the very top, then variation matters more.

An example of a large slice is recent college graduates. Women in fact dominate this slice. But CEOs are presumably a thin slice of very capable people. So it would be no surprise for their ranks to be dominated by men.

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