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Comment by mynameishere | Hacker News Reader

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mynameishere·

Ummm...no

raw numbers

http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:_0JxL7T75-sJ:www.bls.go...

versus prominent programmers.

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

I would suggest if you strip off some of the dubious or ceremonial entries ("ada") the picture gets worse still.

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Computer Programmers .... 3.9%

I count 9 women out of about 230 which comes out to...

3.91%

What is the point you are trying to make anyway? Are you going to go on to tell me black people suck at programming to because they don't compose 25% of that list (but do compose 25% of graduates in CS from the stats you linked)?

Get over yourself.

Women comprise 25.3 percent, not 3.9 percent.

fair enough, I misread the chart, but my last statement still stands (with numbers swapped 3.9% black, 25% female). Your point?

His point was that female programmers aren't superior to male ones. Remember he quoted "women are better programmers because they have less ego". Which is a huge load on both counts.

Replying to that by "no, men are better programmers than women" doesn't seem the way to go. Especially in response to a rant about faulty statistics skills. That argument with 99% whatever certainly was extremely faulty (I can't even begin to describe how faulty, it is just waaaaaaay off). It just goes to show that some carefulness with statistics would be a good idea. Anyway, that response basically proved the point of the article.

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