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Comment by kirillkh | Hacker News Reader

Not sure how from

> those fields are cognitively more demanding than commercial software development or, for that matter, undergraduate computer science

... you arrive at

> No cognitive ability or innate affinity explains the degree of disparity in computer science as practiced in industry.

Even if software development is "cognitively less demanding" in every sense (though I'm not convinced there is just one universal kind of cognitive ability), it may still be that women do not possess the "innate affinity" for it - namely, they do not like working in it, preferring other fields instead. To my understanding, there is nothing to contradict this explanation, and it makes perfect sense.

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> it may still be that women do not possess the "innate affinity" for it - namely, they do not like working in it, preferring other fields instead. To my understanding, there is nothing to contradict this explanation, and it makes perfect sense.

There's no evidence supporting the supposition that there is an innate ability gap. Social explanations are supported by the evidence and that's why people are trying to change the field to be more welcoming.

One of the key things to remember is that this isn't some fixed quantity – any argument for innate characteristics would have to explain why the rates started going down in the 1980s despite the field becoming increasingly popular and lucrative over the same decades and not seeing a similar trend in comparable fields such as math:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

> There's no evidence supporting the supposition that there is an innate ability gap.

First, this is a straw man argument: I never argued for "innate ability gap". I argued for "innate affinity", which I understand as (quoting myself) "they do not like working in it".

Second, I never claimed there was evidence to support the correctness of "innate affinity" argument. I only claimed that it is a possibility, and OP should not have ignored it.

Third, there is no consistent evidence supporting "social explanations", and that's why people resist attempts to "change the field to be more welcoming" at the expense of hard-working, deserving white males.

> any argument for innate characteristics would have to explain why the rates started going down in the 1980s despite the field becoming increasingly popular

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

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