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Comment by reroute1 | Hacker News Reader

> There’s a lot of motivated reasoning by men that their innate characteristics are selected for computer programming. There’s a lot of hostile behavior by men towards women who are in computer science. You can view this like any other resource scarcity turf protection gambit.

That is entirely your opinion. Framing biological differences as turf protection is laughable in my opinion.

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You're looking at a societal bias, and inferring a biological difference. In other societies, this bias is much reduced, which would not likely be the case if differences were truly biological.

In particular, Eastern Europe of all places is relatively egalitarian in men-vs-women in programming.

I could just as easily say you are looking at a biological difference and inferring a societal bias. Just because it doesn't exist in the same proportion everywhere doesn't mean that the difference is not biologically based. There are endless confounding factors that would lead to variations in different locations. The fact that the overall difference stems from biological differences doesn't require universal equivalence of the effect.

For example men on average have more muscle mass than women. If you found a random population of women that had proportionally higher muscle masses compared with their male peers, that doesn't discount the biological fact.

You're citing an actual biological difference in human biology to try and support an unsupported claim of a nonbiological difference...

One that is refuted by the history of computer programming, which used to be a female-dominated field back when programming was significantly harder than it is today.

I chose a clear biological difference to illustrate the point that was being argued, about one sample population disproving the larger trend. And it's not an unsupported claim there is plenty of science and argument for why men and women choose different careers.

Please note that this doesn't discount any actual gender bias that may exist. The biological claim is only that men and women in general have a given set of personality traits. That isn't controversial science. It also isn't controversial because it doesn't claim that men are better engineers or better anything, just that more in general may naturally gravitate towards certain activities.

Easter European here. I rather agree that Easter Europe is relatively egalitarian, but it doesn't seem to affect ratio of men and women in IT. There is less than 20 % female students in IT related fields and smaller percent of women stays in the field after graduation compared to men.

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