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Comment by cjbos | Hacker News Reader

How can you argue that working as a programmer is more a hunter role than a gatherer/care giver role?

Lack of role models at the young age is a more likely cause imo. Who do young girls in the 12+ age group have to look up to in our industry or in pop culture? In the comedy "Big Bang Theory" about 4 male Nerds, the female lead character is the dumb blonde next door.

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Programming, especially at the start, is a very solitary thing usually. You sit hunched over a computer bashing out code. That really suits some people and not others - in generalities, I'd say it suits Men more than Women.

Just like a hunter, you're alone, competing with several other lone programmers/hunters.

I'd say roles that Women excel at in Tech are PR, design, managing communities, etc where art, communication and caring are more important.

In general Women are far better at communication than men IMHO.

Writing code is an act of communication. Your code must communicate clearly to the compiler. If you're really a rock-star coder, your code should communicate clearly to the next coder who comes along and has to maintain it.

That's an exact thing though. It's instructions. Map reading. It's not the same thing...

Perhaps one of the reasons that there are more male coders is the same reason that in general men are better at map reading than women.

Once you start stating things like this though you run the risk of people getting offended. The fact is though, men and women are very different creatures, often suited to very different jobs.

Anecdotal evidence at best. If anything map reading is akin to being able to spot a pattern (Where am I on this squiggle of contour lines). Woman are historically great at weaving and producing patterns, reading instructions is just like following a recipe.

A male (Charles Babbage) came up with the computer but a female (Ada Lovelace) came up with how to communicate with it. Men and Women are not so different at all.

http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n11/mente/eisntein/cerebro-ho...

There are several such results...

>> "One of the most interesting differences appear in the way men and women estimate time, judge speed of things, carry out mental mathematical calculations, orient in space and visualize objects in three dimensions, etc. In all these tasks, women and men are strikingly different, as they are too in the way their brains process language."

But human's didn't hunt alone until very recently. We are like all big mammals in that we hunted in packs (e.g. Lions, Wolfs, Dolphins). The invention of the spear/bow made solitary hunting possible.

If anything the gatherer was a role that could be done in a solitary fashion, even today woman usually take the solitary role of staying home to care for children while the male associates with his peers in the workplace.

So why aren't woman more suited to the solitary roles?

Also correct me if I'm wrong but historically, art has been a male domineered field, only recently (past few hundred years) have famous woman artists shone through. So why would art/design be a female role and not a male role?

LOL. since this topic is making HN worse than reddit anyway, I'll post a video link. Your comments remind me of David Wain's speech in this episode of Wainy Days:

http://www.mydamnchannel.com/Wainy_Days/Season_1/6AWomansTou...

Sorry... I forgot it's un-politically correct to point out obvious differences between people. Just like there can be no losers at sports day any more...

http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n11/mente/eisntein/cerebro-ho...

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/heshe.html

http://library.thinkquest.org/26812/gather/cgi-bin/messages/...

If you'd rather pretend we're exactly the same, up to you :)

That's not the point I was making but it would be impolite of me to make a "woosh" post two days in a row.

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