But... the "effect" is part of the cause...
And there's evidence to the contrary. If you look at the career choices of women, to pick one contentious social issue at random, they tend to be different than the career choices of men, even in countries with a long history of gender equality.
So if I ask ChatGPT to make me a picture of trash collectors or fishermen, it shouldn't rewrite my query to force x% of them to be women.
Relative to the breadth of human history with little to no gender equality, there is no country with a long history of gender equality. And throughout the history of gradually increasing gender equality in human society, there are numerous examples of men structuring the rules of engagement to restrict access for the women attempting to break in. When the Royal Society commissioned a bust of mathematician Mary Somerville, they still refused to admit her.[0]
If women are biologically ill suited to compete with men in these fields, it seems it would be unnecessary to prevent them from trying, like med schools rigging their exams.[1]
[0]https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2010.004...
[1]https://apnews.com/general-news-1c2a635e9faa44daa1225a804288...
Aside, I think this is it for me, I’m changing my HN password to something I can’t guess or remember. This is one part of tech culture I am just sick of responding to. There is more than enough of it in real life and I will always feel obliged to respond. Especially on HN where so many voices are leaders in the real world, the disappointment of seeing it over and over again is just crushing.
Please…if you won’t alter this attitude, don’t bring it to work. For the sake of the women in this field.
I sometimes feel that Hacker News embodies the idea of having an 18 in INT and about a 4 in WIS.
Not what he said.
Guessing you had that comment loaded in the chamber ready to pull the trigger at the first mention of any gender differences, because it doesn't seem relevant to the claims in that comment and it seems like it's not giving the previous commenter a fair go.
The OP commenter seemed to be implying that Men and Women have natural career choices because even countries with long histories of "gender equality" see women and men aggregate in different careers.
The real reasons for much of these discrepancies, legal and social pressures/conditioning (If a father won't buy his daughter(s) computers to tinker with at a young age like he might his sons, how much less interest do you imagine daughters would have in CS?) are not natural.
It’s a pretty insulting view of women that eliminates female agency. Instead I think we should let women make their own decisions. If they sometimes differ in aggregate than men’s, that’s ok.
(And it should go without saying that all genders should feel welcome in all careers. That’s a different topic entirely.)
If a father is buying computers for his son then he damn well should buy for his daughters as well. You don't get to do anything else and go Pikachu face when she isn't as interested in those things.
Interest isn't magic. It's not spawned from the ether. Who you are today is in extremely large part, a result of what you have experienced right from childhood. Your upbringing especially will influence you for the rest of your life. You're not special. Neither am I. How much agency do you think children have or can have ?
The point is that gender equality or equality of any kind doesn't end with, "Oh it's law that women can do this now"- That's just Step 1. It's never that simple. Many countries still deal with blatant sexism and racism to this day.
Many women enter university to pursue STEM, get a degree, start work and ultimately exit the STEM workforce because the workplace is too toxic with coworkers that won't give them due respect and enormous uphill battle for career mobility.
These are the people with the interest, with the intelligence, with the competence. What do you think these women have to say? How do you think the resulting enthusiasm(or rather, lack thereof) affects the future generation of women?
Stating that there are inherent career preferences by gender is not controversial in scientific sense, it’s in the same realm as god existence. It’s untestable at large in the current society, and there are a ton of things indicating otherwise. Like a single exception who chose against the perceived career preference by gender is more than what can be shown for the inherent nature of it, because we know that that’s the status quo everywhere. It’s controversial because some people politically make it so.