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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

The opposite claim - that men and women are equal has the same problem. As far as I can tell we don't know how men and women are different other than a few physical factors related to breeding or hormones. Worse it is a controversial subject that you probably shouldn't study because when your results are other than what someone wants to believe true they will make your life difficult. Either you find a difference or you don't - either way you confirm the bias of one group and contradict the bias of the other.

I think there are real differences, other than the two I mentioned, but there is probably a lot of overlaps where you can find plenty of exceptions.

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I would probably believe that if we weren't talking about software.

But software is, what, less than a century old? What possible evolutionary differences could have risen in that time frame?

I mean, the number zero is very unintuitive and the ancient Romans/greeks/chinese/whatever didn't discover it, despite the fact all evidence shows they were very smart in many things.

Yet you want me to believe that men understand that arrays are zero based better than women.

Apply that to any software principle.

> But software is, what, less than a century old? What possible evolutionary differences could have risen in that time frame?

But guns are, what, less than a millennia old? What possible evolutionary differences could have arisen in that time frame? No way that women and men would perform differently in competitive shooting [0], right? And as it turns out, men shoot faster, women shoot more accurately.

There's all sorts of things that have only existed for a century or two where men and women perform differently. Adaptation for one task often has effects on similar tasks, after all.

This doesn't mean men are better than women at CS! But "this field didn't exist a century ago" isn't sufficient reason to assert no differences can exist.

0: http://www.realbiathlon.com/2011/11/who-shoots-better-men-or...

Oh come on, humans have been targeting and hitting targets with various weapons (or just rocks) from a distance since time immemorial.

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