Comment by mikedilger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikedilger | Hacker News Reader

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Your hypothesis regarding harassment or being made to feel unwelcome is reasonable and always needs to be explored. But it is not the only hypothesis, and other factors are probably also in play. I disagree that there "is no obvious reason that men should be more successful than women in the tech industry" and I suppose the argument would then hang on the word "obvious".. are the other hypotheses obvious? Perhaps not to people who don't study evolutionary psychology.

There is evidence that more freedom and equality for everyone to be in any job they want leads to even less women choosing STEM careers (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...) That might be because of social issues you mention (harassment, under valued, talked over, underpaid, stalked, etc). It might also be a result of natural selection causing women and men to differentiate in useful ways wherein women were more attracted to nurturing roles, and men more attracted to technical challenges.

I don't think it's useful to pick one reasonable hypothesis and ignore other reasonable hypotheses. Let's explore all the useful ideas and recognize how little we actually know for sure.

I would want any analysis theorizing a difference rooted in biological dimorphism to work with sex as a multidimensional distribution, as that's what it is.

If you want to do one on gender, you would go in for self-reported gender, and have 3+ selection options (m/f/o).

If you're going to talk about natural selection resulting in career preference, you should talk sex, not gender.

I agree gender is irrelevant here. I'd even go so far as to agree that there may be more than two sex states on individual bases (multiple X or Y chromosomes, different levels of testosterone, hermaphordism, chimerism etc). But these are neither particularly common nor genetically transmissible and thus do not exert pressure on the nature of sexual dimorphism. Sex can be modelled quite accurately with a single binary bit even in individual cases, and entirely accurately for species in evolutionary terms. Distributions and multiple dimensions have not shown themselves to be useful. If you disagree I'd like to see references to the relevant research papers.

I don't mind recognizing any individuals uniqueness or their socially less-privileged situation for social or political purposes, but it shouldn't have any affect on the science of sexuality which should just reflect nature as it is.

Sexual dimorphism in animals can be dramatic. The male angler fish is a tiny parasite, the dramatically larger female does all the angling work. And we aren't seeing non-binary angler fishes. If none of the other species are coming up with non-binary specimens, why should we assume humans are any different?

> I agree gender is irrelevant here

Ah, if that's what you're getting from what I'm saying, then I don't think you getting what I'm saying.

If your theory is that biological factors drive differences in behavioral outcomes, then I'm saying you should measure those biological factors, and you should do so on a more detailed level than genitals. I'm not arguing that sexual dimorphism isn't a thing. I'm arguing that a simple m/f measurement of it is insufficient, particularly if you're trying to correlate it to behavioral outcomes. As for your science paper request, I'll just go with this, instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism_measures

If your theory is that gender (how society treats you) affects this, then measure /that/; which itself is more complicated than a simple binary. A masculine woman and a feminine man are treated very differently by society than a feminine woman and a masculine man. Although it's a lot more reasonable to go with a binary here, since basically all of society will put people into that binary, I'd definitely want some measure as to how well or poorly that category fits the person in question. It would make for a much more compelling case to see that the outcome isn't affected by that second measure.

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