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Comment by m0ck | Hacker News Reader

>laureates include first woman in 55 years Completely irrelevant information, yet it has to be in the title. Are there any statistics on how many left-handed people, or vegans are laureates?

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If you look at the distribution of gender in the field, it is very heavily skewed towards men. One can argue about why this is the case, but if you don't believe that women are inherently "dumber" or less capable of doing scientific work then celebrating one of them reaching such success is a great way of inspiring other women and girls of attempting the same.

In practical terms, imagine all humans have similar potential. If this is the case, then you must realize that the potential of nearly half the population is completely wasted. Indeed an entire gender is underrepresented in the tech & science field. Thus your best way of action should be to alleviate the issue and normalize the gender distribution. Inspiring younger women to enter the field is a step towards this goal.

Of course, if you cling to the notion that women are not capable enough of doing this demanding intellectual work and should rather stick to doing menial labor surely it must be a fantastically rare statistical anomaly to have a woman win the most prestigious scientific accolade, and thus mentioning it in the title makes complete sense.

The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

(Edit: for the record, the "simplistic summary" is not mine. It's the title of the article.)

This is rather simplistic way to summarize the article. From the link you provided:

> In this study, the percentage of girls who did excel in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with STEM degrees. That means there’s something in even the most liberal societies that’s nudging women away from math and science, even when those are their best subjects. The women-in-STEM advocates could, for starters, focus their efforts on those would-be STEM stars.

There are two takeaways for me:

- If people do not feel economic pressure (the need to find a high paying job) they might follow a non-STEM passion (the article exemplifies this in the case of women, who usually are not expected to be the breadwinner)

- Even in liberal societies (and I find it amusing that the US is taken as a beacon in this example) there is difference between "what percentage perform well in STEM" and "what percentage pursue STEM". It would be instructive to study why, not just assume why.

> In practical terms, imagine all humans have similar potential.

This is evidently false. The intelligence trait is at least partly inheritable, and not all humans are equally intelligent, so not all humans have the same potential.

Now, if what you actually meant was "both genders have the same potential in general" (as opposed to every individual human being), then it's not as simple as that. There's some evidence that although men and women are equally intelligent on average, the distribution is flatter and wider for men. This means that there are more men than women at the extreme high and low ends of the distribution. This is part of the reason (though probably not the only reason) why men are more strongly represented among the extreme overachievers in STEM fields.

> you must realize that the potential of nearly half the population is completely wasted

Umm you do realize there are important roles outside of STEM right?

This is hackernews, does something "non-STEM" even exist? :)

But seriously, of course other fields than STEM exist. And of course they are important too. But if you believe that the underrepresentation in STEM is not entirely due to beneficial reasons and that remedying that would be beneficial, then the above mentioned still holds true.

> In practical terms, imagine all humans have similar potential.

We should imagine all humans have the same rights, but not the same potential. If we all had similar potential, then we would all have the same shot at being top physicists, NBA players or chess grandmasters. But we don't.

We know that all humans don't have similar potential because there are women only sporting events. We created women's soccer and women's tennis and women's golf precisely because we acknowledge that all humans don't have similar potential.

> Of course, if you cling to the notion that women are not capable enough of doing this demanding intellectual work and should rather stick to doing menial labor

But most menial labor is done by males - especially the dangerous ones? Why are you so fixated on physics? Why aren't you demanding women go into garbage collecting, logging, steel work, etc which are some of the most dangerous and most male fields?

> surely it must be a fantastically rare statistical anomaly to have a woman win the most prestigious scientific accolade, and thus mentioning it in the title makes complete sense.

Can you please not do this? This type of feminism ( especially coming from a male ) comes off just as badly as chauvanism and extremely patronizing.

If you truly believe what you say, why aren't you out there protesting women's world cup or any women specific sporting event? All humans have the same potential right?

Also your argument would make sense if the west still discriminated against women. We haven't for quite a long time. As a matter of fact, we have had programs and scholarships specifically to encourage women to go into male dominated fields for generations. And yet, women choose not to? Should we force women to go into these fields since encouraging and giving them a choice certainly isn't working.

> if we all had similar potential, then we would all have the same shot at being top physicists

Even if we all did "have the same shot at being top physicists", some people may prefer to be something else.

Left handed people and vegans have not historically been the victims of institutionalized societal discrimination. Women have been (indeed still are).

Well, not that I agree with the grandparent comment, but in many parts of the world left-handers are indeed discriminated and forcefully trained to become right-handed, which leads to all sorts of problems. This was also commmonplace in Europe until not long ago.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Bias_against_left-handed_people#...

Lefthanders tend to suffer a higher rate of accidents and lower lifespan, typically attributed to having to operate machinery optimized for the right-handed.

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/04/us/being-left-handed-may-...

A relative of mine, currently in their 50's, was forced to write right handed while growing up in New York. They still do to this day, though they do everything else left handed.

Cesare Lombroso and the pathology of left-handedness: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

I don't deny that, but I believe the best way to stop it, is to stop giving so much attention to gender/race of people. That's why so-called "diversity" reports of companies make me sick. If you believe that all races/genders are equally capable to achieve greatness (as I do), then you should hire the best, give awards to the best and never spend a second thinking about their biological background. If we stop making big deal of these things, it won't matter anymore.

That's been tried. The situation doesn't improve when you stop paying attention to it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/race-ec...

https://academic.oup.com/socpro/article/64/2/219/3058571

> you should hire the best

That is hopelessly naive. Someone has to decide who is "the best", or, at the very least, someone has to decide on the quality metric that will be used to make this assessment. That inevitably leads to politics and gamesmanship.

Not at all naive. Asians used to face prejudice arguably as severe as that faced by blacks. Once discriminatory laws were lifted, they began a remarkable ascendancy--one that was in large part [1] due to the market re-pricing the value of Asian labor: " One explanation for rapid Asian upward mobility is, therefore, that earnings gaps driven by prejudice rather than productivity could not persist in a post-war labor market that eliminated most forms of legal discrimination against non-white workers"

[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w22748

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-ramakrishnan-lee-...

You don't balance an unbalanced seesaw by putting the same amount of weight on both sides

This is exactly the problem. You think in terms of "balancing a seesaw", but there is no reason to believe that in the complete absence of discrimination, the gender ratio will be 50:50.

Until we find any evidence that says there's something intrinsic in women that stops them from working and/or performing at the same level as men in physics research I think it's safe to assume the ratio will tend to that.

Considering the population is not 50:50 on gender... ;)

There's no need for arbitrary "balance". Let people do what they want, and make the process as fair as possible.

Anything else is just enforcing some ideaology or another.

Equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome.

Given how short your comment is, I am not quite certain what you are trying to say. However, in my experience, whenever somebody complains about "equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome", they willfully overlook a lot of factors that would be playing into the "opportunity" part of the equation.

If we stop making big deal of these things, it won't matter anymore.

What makes you think this?

Ignoring problems has not, historically, tended to make them go away.

I'm not a fan of pointing these things out so heavy-handedly either but I don't think it's productive to go out of my way to point them out, if you think it's irrelevant then ignore it and focus on what you do find interesting in this news. I mean, think about it, what kind of constructive discussion could possibly come out of your comment?

I agree with the parent. It's important to stop the soft bigotry of low expectations.

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