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Comment by jtr1 | Hacker News Reader

I find this fascinating and I wonder if simple cases like these could help steer the conversation about encoded bias in a verifiable direction. What sort of training material would you have to curate in order to achieve an outcome where She is as likely to be a professor as He is to be raising a child?

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Some training material not based in reality.

The idea that men and women are the same, is one not borne out by facts and evidence, yet it’s still being pushed by extremists who ignore the science.

The suggestion that differences in men and women are a result of sexism is not borne out by facts and evidence either.

Rather than trying to force google translate to lie (Suggest that men and women are the same), perhaps we should just accept the truth - eg that most Plumbers are men.

We could very well have accepted that some people are slaves. But we, as a society, decided that this is a bad idea. Why can't we do the same with gender roles?

Your suggestion that gender roles are entirely arbitrarily fabricated by society, is demonstrably false. There is an absolute ton of peer reviewed study and literature on it going back decades. People do what they want to do, and men and women have extremely different interests and motivations in life.

Why do you think women don’t want to be plumbers? Do you think it’s because society decided plumbers are men, lack of female plumbing role models, because plumbing customers are all sexist and only employ men, OR because women aren’t generally that interested in plumbing...

Why do you think in countries where they have tried the most to get them to be plumbers, women have rejected it even more?

Why do you think women should want to be plumbers?

Men and women are extremely different in so many different ways, which should be celebrated, not denied.

Obviously anyone male or female who wants to be a plumber should be encouraged. But we should also freely acknowledge that 95%+ of plumbers are men, and that isn’t a ‘problem’ to be fixed.

> is demonstrably false

Please demonstrate it then. Which research? Nothing you said demonstrates what you suggest.

Some basic research on "hormones and personality" or "empathising–systemising" will lead you to relevant works, such as:

"Results provide strong support for hormonal influences on interest in occupations characterized by working with Things versus People." - Gendered Occupational Interests: Prenatal Androgen Effects on Psychological Orientation to Things Versus People (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/)

"Gender differences in personality tend to be larger in gender‐egalitarian societies than in gender‐inegalitarian societies, a finding that contradicts social role theory but is consistent with evolutionary, attributional, and social comparison theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences." - Gender Differences in Personality and Interests: When, Where, and Why?" (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-9004....)

It would be ignorant to assume that biology has zero impact on occupational interest.

It’s not just biology, it’s thousands upon thousands of years of evolution.

The sexes evolved to share the workload, and specialise in different tasks. Men have greater spacial awareness so they can hunt better. Women have greater empathy so they can care for babies emotional wellbeing.

The “men and women are the same” lie is a very very recent ideological movement, and incredibly damaging.

95% of Plumbers are men.

Are you seriously suggesting this is down to ‘society’ telling boys they’re allowed to be plumbers and girls that they’re not allowed to be?

As I said, in countries where they have gone the furthest to try to eradicate ‘gender roles etc’, they saw the % of women plumbers GO DOWN. not up. Which would strongly suggest that it’s got nothing to do with ‘gender roles’

If you’re interested in looking at the research, go for it. There’s absolutely tons of extremely established studies into the differences between men and women, their different strengths and weaknesses, and why they decide to do different things in life, go into different careers etc (Unless it’s been cancelled or burnt, which is entirely possible)

It's sad to see no end to this kind of thinking. Here's some easy to read classic papers on sexism in tech:

[1] Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists (Ellen Spertus, 1991)

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7040

[2] How to Encourage Women in Linux (Val Henson, 2002)

https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/

[3] What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You (Kathryn S. McKinley, 2018)

https://www.sigarch.org/what-happens-to-us-does-not-happen-t...

[4] Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing (Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, 2001)

https://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Women-Computing-P...

I think you're leaving out cultural inertia as a contributing factor to this. If you want training data that's purely descriptive of the current state of the world then fine, but such data will naturally encode our own biases into it. Reality unfortunately carries a lot of bias. There's nothing that says that plumbers have to be a male, that playing house is a game for girls, or online video games is dominated by boys. But huge amounts of social pressure, environments that aren't inclusive, and monkey-see-monkey-do keep the cycle going. I find it funny that you're making this argument on a board for programmers which is basically the canonical example of a profession that underwent a gender flip.

Talking about gender roles on HN is odd because programmers tend to think so binary. Gender roles in modern society are informed by biology inasmuch as La Croix's flavor is informed by fruit but all you get in the discussion is "see gender roles aren't entirely arbitrary so everything about the status quo must be justified."

A non men/women example is neighborhood crime rates. A totally "unbiased" record of crime rates will show that black neighborhoods have on-average crime rates. But that ignores the fact that less policing is done in areas with lower crime rates and if you don't look you won't find it.

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