Why Aren’t There More Women in Science and Technology? | Hacker News Reader

Why Aren’t There More Women in Science and Technology?

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29 pointssethbannon8 comments

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510586, which is a longer interview with the author on the same topic.

I guess it's foolish to hope that, at least once, in a single article, the utterly unfounded "must have 50% representation" would actually be supported by some kind of argument.

Or to anticipate at least someone mentioning that equality of opportunity is already present, while equality of outcome is inherently tyrannical.

Or to expect that anyone will demand that coal mining and manual labor have 50% female representation as well.

> unfounded "must have 50% representation"

The problem is not that it is unfounded, it is that it’s an ideological stance. Poundering it is out of question as it does not advance the agenda. The real issue is diversity of opinion in mainstream news outlet.

You basically have to behave as a parsing script with the media now. I find myself immediately scanning the article for links to sources and emphasized data points, especially if the headline is clearly exaggerated.

Yes, more that ever we have to be critical of what we read. A problem I see is that some people now distrust so much the mainstream medias that they turn to unreliable or complotist sources of "information". This could be largely avoidable if the existing plurality of opinions were more broadly expressed by publishers.

In my country the press developed a whole lexicon of expressions to avoid speaking of any senstive topics. But once you know some keywords and watch what information was left out, you could build a more accurate image of the underlying fact. But that required some awareness.

> equality of opportunity is already present

is it? You don't provide any argument to back this up. Legally maybe there are equal opportunities but is does society provide them? And if not should we do something to fix that?

Equality of outcome is a proxy for opportunity so if outcomes are radically unequal, surely that means something needs changing to make opportunities more equal?

Of course it may not always be a precise proxy, but its a lot easier to measure and at least gives a clue that something is up.

That's a flawed argument that has no coherent cause-and-effect chain.

"Legally" is the only thing that matters and can be regulated in any tangible way. You cannot and should not enforce artificial constraints on legal and humane social trends, because unequal outcomes are the result of free will and a free market -- yet the prevailing narrative now essentially equates lack of equal outcome in professional fields to human rights violations, and that's a terrible thing to do.

It is neither the government's nor anyone else's obligation to make certain people (of both genders) who are not hardworking, intelligent or ruthless enough have the same outcome as those who do achieve great things due to those and other factors specific to them (this includes such simple things as requesting/demanding higher pay, which in itself requires certain characteristics present in a larger quantity in men due to being inherently aggressive creatures biologically).

This kind of argument reminds me of a comparison I heard a while back between the left and right: the left believe humanity is inherently nurturing, while the right believe humanity is inherently competitive.

Both are true, but the left-aligned media is currently pushing the former at the expense of the latter, resulting in the right-aligned media going hyperpartisan as well.

Meanwhile, they're forgetting that the truth of competition (ruthless, primal competition that's masked by modern civility) has always and will always remain an inseparable part of humanity, resulting in all sorts of inequalities and differences in outcome based on human input, in the same way my Macbook could have produced the Evernote app had I been the one with the idea and skills and foresight to create it at the right time rather than someone else.

This is the sort of generic comment we all need to resist posting here. It turns out you're responding to precisely the kind of "single article" that you're wishing for "at least once". When a response has so little with the particular thing it is responding to, that means it's generic, i.e. predictable and information-poor, so it is a bad comment for HN.

Put differently: if a comment could just as easily be posted anywhere remotely related to some huge, divisive topic, then it's a bad discussion for HN. Having the identical flamewars over and over is an information heat death nightmare—exactly what we're hoping to avoid on this site.

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