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Comment by dilanj | Hacker News Reader

48% of the class of '06 at MIT were female (up from like 2% back in the day) and most of them were serious hackers. Yet today almost all of the girls who didn’t go to grad school are working for either a large corporation or an investment bank.

With the whole goddamn responsibility of keeping humanity alive on top of them undoubtedly there’s a genetic disposition for women to be more risk averse. Math and programming are relatively precarious. That though probably is easily overcome, since women have clearly been extremely competent in pretty much every other field now for decades.

So the problem has to lie in social conditioning. Cultural expectation and etiquette has always been the most powerful destroyer of potential in both men and women. Tradition is THE enemy.

(Heard this joke? Why do baby boys wear blue and baby girls wear pink? Because they don’t have a fucking choice.)

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Hi, you appear to be brainwashed by the PC establishment. Try this experiment: attempt to think for yourself for a few months. (Try out the craziest thoughts! If they're 'scandalous' you don't have to run them by other people, just evaluate them for yourself.)

Also, think critically about the people who promote these views. Most of them aren't very smart (in the sense that a tenured professor with awards can still be an idiot), or have a vested interest in promoting these views (typically racial).

Here's the first Google hit I could find disproving your joke. Someone else can find a blog post where a lesbian buys her daughter a firetruck and the girl begins to nurse the firetruck.

The world evolves in a certain way for a reason. Do you think this is the first era in which people thought that everyone might be equal? This is the first era in which we've had the luxury to attempt the experiment. The results are in: people aren't equal. Pack it up and go home. We're all tired of hearing this drivel.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/boys-like-blue-gir...

I don't think dilanj is suggesting that no biologically driven differences exist. I think that the argument is that at MIT there's a preselected, science focused group of women, who have their professional involvement with math decrease dramatically as they enter the working world and need to support themselves. There's a strong, though not certain case for a cultural effect here.

And by the way, on color?

"In Western culture, the practice of assigning pink to an individual gender began in the 1920s. From then until the 1940s, pink was considered appropriate for boys because it was the more masculine and decided color while blue was considered appropriate for girls because it was the more delicate and dainty color. Since the 1940s, the societal norm apparently inverted so that pink became appropriate for girls and blue appropriate for boys, a practice that has continued into the 21st century"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink

In response to the blue/pink thing, there's always some set of societal discriminators between boys and girls (and later, between men and women), and to a one, they seem to me to be completely arbitrary. Shoulder pads, now a staple of women's fashion, didn't use to be such http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoulder_pads_(fashion) , and long hair used to be seen as dreadfully un-masculine.

Frankly, I like to try and buck this kind of thing. I have long hair (longer than most of the women I know), and carry around a pink DS... not much, but it's a start.

And by the way, on color? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink

Did you check the references cited by that paragraph?

women, who have their professional involvement with math decrease dramatically as they enter the working world and need to support themselves. There's a strong, though not certain case for a cultural effect here.

It would be interesting if this phenomenon were correlated with 2D:4D ratio, wouldn't it? http://www.google.com/search?q=steve+sailer+finger+length

Even more interesting; the erudite scholars vanguard inquiry into the nature of a gay germ: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=steve+sailer+gay+ge...

Brilliance. To be cited in Nature, surely.

What, pray tell, is this "PC establishment?" It is odd to see such a concept invoked to defend a set of societal stereotypes, when "PC" is intended to raise images of, well, societal stereotypes. As other commenters have pointed out, the blue/pink thing is relatively recent, so it can't be "anti-PC" to insist that blue and pink are somehow inherently tied to gender.

Really, what it comes down to in my book isn't that people are equal because it's politically correct, or even that people are equal at all. It's that we should judge people for their acts, not their gender, race, sexual orientation or whatever else. If a particular woman is worse at mathematics than average, then so be it. If another particular woman is better than average, let's celebrate that for what it is.

The PC line is that everybody is equal, and if there are measurable differences between groups then it is due to white male heterosexual upper class capitalist oppression.

Except for the greater percentage of males who are on low tail of the intelligence curves or are in jail. Then it's just deserts.

>"So the problem has to lie in social conditioning. Cultural expectation and etiquette has always been the most powerful destroyer of potential in both men and women. Tradition is THE enemy."

And then we have one generation of childless hedonistic professionals, call Western civilization a wrap, and hand over the landmasses to the Latin Americans, Chinese, and Muslims (many of whom are very intelligent and successful scientists and engineers!) who did not view tradition as the enemy.

Indian culture interests me. I see a lot of Indian women in Grad school, but from my interaction with them they seem to respect cultural traditions and family values. I don't know how they manage to find time in their lives to be Mathematicians and wives and mothers, maybe the ones I know are just far to the right on the bell curve. But maybe the problem isn't with culture and tradition, maybe it's just the culture and tradition we've inherited needs tweaking.

> undoubtedly there’s a genetic disposition for women to be more risk averse

There are some reasons to think that. But they are not beyond doubt. There are smart, educated people who disagree, and even if there weren't, one of the important things about science is keeping the ideas open to doubt.

Did you consider the possibility that maybe people in general (and in this case, women) are capable of making their own decisions and maybe most women genuinely are not interested in pursuing a career in mathematics for reasons other than coercion by society/tradition/etc...

To be fair, most men aren't pursuing careers in mathematics either. The population of professional mathematicians is a puny subset of the population at large. Even a tiny effects of cumulative cultural mores, when working on people subject to a threshold so far out they're so far out on the bell curve, can have an exponentially disproportionate effect.

Many of the women physicists I've become friends with spoke fondly of the first time they encountered a female scientist, either on screen, in print, or in person. They said it was the first time they realized that one could be a woman, and a scientist. It sounds absurd, but remember, this happened when they were kids. No imagine it happened just two years later. A few year's head start on knowing what you want to be can make the difference on what becomes your professional identity, and what you explore and do, ie: your training.

I was only speaking last night about this with my friend, who just graduated with a PhD in astrophysics from Princeton, and is now a postdoc at Berkeley. She placed the turning point on when she heard about Jane Goodall, who wasn't just 'in' science, but revolutionizing it. I encountered science (and a notion of utilitarianism) through Marie Curie, what she discovered, what a revolution she sparked, and how it lead to her death. It was difficult emotionally, but I decided that to discover something so valuable, and so important, paying with one's life would have been worth it.

my friend, who just graduated with a PhD in astrophysics from Princeton, and is now a postdoc at Berkeley. She

http://www.google.com/search?q=princeton+affirmative+action+...

http://www.google.com/search?q=berkeley+affirmative+action+g...

Please post your friend's relevant scores (SAT, GRE, etc.).

Because there is no way a woman could be that smart, is there? Oh... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant

She must have the longest ring finger on the planet, yeah, that's it.

You're jumping to a conclusion. I think its fair to say that the the point the anti-"we are all equal" camp is trying to make is that men have higer representation on the ends of the bell curve. People at both ends (the truly brilliant and truly unable) of the bell curve are largely skewed towards men. Not entirely, but highly disproportionately. This is a perfectly viable explanation for the lack of female leaders in most any field. And freedom of academic choice and opportunities for several decades now, at least in the west, hasn't seemed to change the result, which would seem to reinforce this theory, whereas it would seem to discount the environment argument, in my opinion.

I don't think any of us have asserted that women can't be brilliant and compete head to head with men, but if you are looking at any field of expertise, with equal numbers of male and female participants, the top one to five percent of people will almost always be disproportionately men, consistently across fields, over time, and it seems to continue despite changing social and cultural norms.

I think the comment above calls into question the merit of your friends achievement, which will always be the result of affirmative action programs. It is well documented that affirmative action often (but not always) results in lesser skilled candidates from preferred disadvantaged classes (race, gender, etc) earning admission or appointments.

I think the comment above calls into question the merit of your friends achievement, which will always be the result of affirmative action programs.

How can you say that? Do you know her or what she is capable of? It seems pure idiocy to me to suggest that every woman graduating from a premier science program is never achieving it through merit.

As far as bell curves and distributions, who the hell knows? People tried to predict housing prices and stock portfolios on gaussians, and they seem to work until they don't. You cannot project your platonic ideal of how you think the world works because it seems to and then handwave on outliers.

You've excluded external factors (society/tradition/etc...). What's left? - Some sort of intrinsic motivation (meaning in-born). So you are basically saying that women are genetically less than men predisposed to math (and to explain actual data (male/female ratio in math) you must assume they are much much less predisposed.

It is more likely that society/tradition/etc... do matter after all.

My point taken to an extreme is:

"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, it is their social existence which determines consciousness." - Karl Marx

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