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Comment by hackinthebochs | Hacker News Reader

>The gender gap is purely cultural, and we should be learning from what those cultures are doing that's different than us.

The countries with low gender gap in science/tech are also the countries that measure low on general measures of gender equality. It turns out there isn't anything to learn from these cases. In regions with low gender equality and weak social safety nets, technology is seen as the means to economic security and thus empowerment. Conversely, regions with high gender equality and strong social safety nets have the largest gender gaps. There is something to be learned from this, but we probably won't like what we find.

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Maybe one day people are going to learn to not treat "the other" as a homogenous invariant being. Your comment blindly factors out for example the possibility that the social class the science and tech folk originate from is different from a more ample and lower class suffering more gender-related inequalities which when factored in skews the picture dramatically. Many of the regions you refer have largely multifaceted and mostly multi-ethnical demograpic structures.

Yes, I was puzzled at first, reading the article. Because I don't think of India as a paragon of sexual equality. But then, I realized that the author is probably upper-class.

Well this does not simply boil down to economics, too. In Turkey for example (where I'm from), we have a very complex gradient of secular and religious cultures, where the economical situation of the individuals or of the families are only a small determinant in what part of such a gradient they are. Especially in this day and age where local cultures are becoming but a simple debile component of a more global archi-culture.

Yes, thanks. I didn't mean to imply economic wealth. Because she notes that money isn't an important goal. I'm too ignorant about South India to know what her background might be. Maybe something like academic? Or intellectual?

Read the whole article. She makes it abundantly clear that her parents were not upper class. Just middle class what in the context of that region means "no private transportation of any sort let alone a car". I assume they had bicycles at most.

As I clarified, upper-class doesn't equal wealthy.

Just because a culture scores low on overall gender equality doesn't mean you can't learn something by looking at it. Your point about an inverse correlation of gender equality and gender gap is certainly interesting, if true, but that doesn't mean we can't make useful observations like the GP's. Even if a particular culture has low gender equality overall, if they have high gender equality in a particular area it might be useful to look at it.

Instead of hinting at something, why not just tell us how you really feel? Is it because it's a conclusion that is generally not accepted when put in plain terms?

Not op but since you asked, I will draw the conclusion.

Given that we observe a larger gender gap in countries that are more gender equality we can conclude that when men and women feel more equal their choice of profession diverge.

i don't think you're allowed to speak that heresy in polite society.

Which is a shame, because even though it makes sense, I am not sure it is true because it isn't debated.

You can say it as much as you want. That won't make you any less wrong, of course.

You've got a huge number of confounding variables here that you're not accounting for. Gender equality and cultural attitudes towards gender roles are not simple metrics, you can't infer that just because some aspect of a culture demonstrates superior gender equality to another that this culture is necessarily superior in gender equality in every way. Attitudes are vastly more complicated than that, and there's no reason to believe that a society that is more progressive in one sense can't be more regressive in another.

It is definitely possible that it is just confounding variables, I don't know I haven't really looked into it. One thing I know is that if the correlation went the other way, it would be a good data point that the gender gap is cultural.

The HN guidelines ask you not to take HN threads further into ideological flamewar, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I disagree with being categorized as such, but respect your decision.

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