Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

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Yep, must have been discrimination, because we all know women can never be better candidates unless there's something else going on.

It's not that women can never be better candidates, it is merely that this is unlikely.

Consider a set of applications, 20% of which come from women (fairly typical numbers, from what I've read). Assume women and men are equally skilled. If 30 interns are selected without bias, the odds of choosing at least 60% women (18/30) is quite small:

    In [1]: from scipy.stats import binom
    In [2]: rv = binom(30, 0.2)
    In [3]: 1-rv.cdf(0.60*30)
    Out[3]: 2.8432472531925157e-07

So unless the applicant pool was extremely unusual, it is unlikely that a pool of 2/3 women was selected due to merit.

Anyone have more exact numbers to plug into this calculation? Perhaps kamens can give us some more exact numbers?

(Of course, in a much smaller applicant pool, e.g. 6 students, you might arrive at results like this due to random chance.)

Assuming men and women are equally skilled is a big assumption. Given that few women enter CS, and many who do leave, it would not be surprising to find that the remaining women who have not been selected out somehow are in fact more skilled than the average male engineer.

Your reasoning contains no fact specific to women. Thus, it should be valid for me to substitute any other group which is underrepresented in computing:

Given that few retards enter CS, and many who do leave, it would not be surprising to find that the remaining retards who have not been selected out somehow are in fact more skilled than the average non-retard engineer.

It also still doesn't make a >60% women class remotely likely - even if women make up 40% of the top engineers, the odds of recruiting at least 60% women in a 30 person class is only only 0.83%.

(PC note: I am only asserting that women are similar to retards in the sense that khuey's argument applies to both of them. No other similarity is asserted or implied.)

The selection pressures on women and retards are quite different.

That said the probability point is a good one.

If you want to add a "PC" note, it should include an acknowledgement that the term "Retard" is highly offensive to many even tangentially associated with the mentally challenged community.

I think he was referring to people that drive under the speed limit.

Looking at the average "non-retard" developer, it would not surprise me at all to discover they were less skilled than the "retards" that persisted with being software developers. Your social ineptitude would also place you in that average pool as this is is a social undertaking as much as an intellectual one. Fail fast, take up the monastic life.

From the original post (emphasis added): "we currently have 2x as many female interns as male ones who have signed their offers to join us"

From this post: "Even though we all knew it wouldn’t last as acceptances come in (it already hasn’t held), our team enjoyed a brief moment basking in the future that we (and all educators around the world) hope to build"

They never said they extended offers to more women than men and they never said the actual class had more women than men, they simply highlighted a point in the process that had more women than men and used it as an opportunity to be optimistic about the future.

But thanks for using math and stuff to enlighten us all.

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