Comment by etal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by etal | Hacker News Reader

Consider the following analogy:

  psychology researchers : gender differences :: moths : flame

Rosalind Chait Barnett at the bottom of the article has it right. Investigating gender differences is the first quest every psych grad student embarks on, and 19 times out of 20, they're disappointed to find nothing significant. (The other 1/20 is the false positive that comes with 95% confidence testing.) It bothers me that this article pursues so many hypotheses at once -- planning for career flexibility; language aptitude; discrimination; women fulfilled through biology, men through machines. None of them is a satisfactory answer because in a properly controlled gender-differences experiment, having filtered out the noise, there's no signal left.

On the surface, the differences are there, but it's not due to anything innate. The East-versus-West comparison in the article should make that obvious. (The article claims it's because we're more "free".) It's cultural. Duh. I don't see anything wrong with that, either; it doesn't mean there should be a 50:50 gender split in every field. But looking for the explanation in biology is a dead end that enough researchers have run into already.

If I recall, the article didn't mention any East-West differences, it mentioned GDP differences.

"The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. In countries with less economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, she writes, the number of women in physics is as high as 30 to 35 percent, versus 5 percent in Canada, Japan, and Germany."

Japan is listed as one of the countries where women don't don't pursue IT carriers. The common trait is economic, not social.

I think that we should deal with people on an individual basis and not a group basis. It does not matter why people choose the careers that they do, what matters is that they are happy where they are. If you find that a bunch of women are unhappy because they didn't choose or were denied a career in IT, then you have a cause. If you find a bunch of women who are unhappy because a bunch of other women didn't choose careers in IT, then you have a bunch of busybodies that don't have my sympathy.

You're right, I missed Japan in the other group. I'm always suspicious of industrialized-vs-developing groupings because the intersection of industrialized and Western is so large. What do the numbers look like in Latin America, for instance? And Russia seems to have a lot of respect for scientists, in particular.

Basically, the example countries look cherry-picked, where those researchers lined up the percentages of women in physics by country, then generalized about the high and low ends of the scale, rather than starting with a proper hypothesis and testing it.

It's totally possible that the countries are cherry picked.

Still, my own personal experience corroborates the theory. Examining just folks that I know, women seem to be more attuned to social pressures than do men. If this were even partly true of whole species, then it would more than explain the gap.

Still, as you said elsewhere, differences within the sexes are by all measures more significant than differences between the sexes. With this being the case, we could have a great deal of difficulty isolating specific differences and yet still have them exist subtly.

The countries weren't cherry-picked for this analysis -- the article says that they were data sets published in Science for different purposes.

Could you point us to some examples, please? Not saying you are wrong, but the researcher cited in the article didn't convince me. She just said "there are so many factors we can't possibly interpret them", but didn't really give a counter-argument. Sounded more political correctness to me.

My fiancee is a psych researcher; this is just what she's told me (via rant) a number of times. Plenty of studies showing significant gender differences show up on sagepub.com, but the findings usually have culture mixed in as well, and they aren't nearly as strong as Cosmo and the rest of pop culture would have us believe.

More precisely, the variation within a gender group is much larger than the variation between genders.

> variation within a gender group is much larger than the variation between genders.

You're measuring the wrong thing. If you look at the top percentage of performers in these fields then the differences become striking.

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