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Comment by RodericDay | Hacker News Reader

A lot of users seem to be having a really tough time with the conclusion of the story.

Here is the gist of it: The differences in participation and performance in math between women and men are due to cultural and environmental reasons, it has very little to do with intellectual capacity.

There seems to be a huge reluctance to give up this prejudice, it's always some sort of "there are exceptions, but women and men are different" and whatnot. They really aren't, not nearly to the degree indicated by the gender gap. Same with race.

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It seems weirder to me than that. Let us take it as a given that there really is a stereotype threat and/or that women are systematically discriminated against with regard to acquiring math skills. Let us take it as a given that damage is really being done. The natural conclusion is that regardless of what name is put on the top of the test, the women should still do worse, because they really are worse at math at the time the test is being given, which is to say, after 15-20 years of systematic discrimination. If the discrimination is effective, then by definition it must mean they really are worse. If they aren't worse, then the discrimination is either ineffective, or women are naturally better at math and the discrimination is holding them back (a position which would be quite complicated to establish and defend).

If the damage can be undone by merely putting a different name on the top of the test, then that strongly implies that the putative damage is itself illusory. If the damage can be wiped away so easily, then it can't have been that bad in the first place. If this is the extent of the "stereotype threat", then it's obviously not holding them back all that much if even so their real skill is equal to the men's.

I can't help but think that this study was indeed ideologically driven, and in the zeal the authors had to prove their point about how women aren't worse than men, they didn't think about the fact this accidentally "proves" that the discrimination can't be that significant. But perhaps it is just a neutral study performed out of sheer curiosity.

And just to make it perfectly clear, I am taking their own logic on their own merits. I'm not inserting my own opinions here, excepting on the question of whether there was potentially an ideological drive here. (My opinion doesn't really fit on this axis at all either way.)

>Let us take it as a given that there really is a stereotype

>the putative damage is itself illusory

>My opinion doesn't really fit on this axis at all either way.

lmao. here's a quote for you:

“It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.”

― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

You misunderstand. I think there probably is some bias against women going into mathematics. When someone say "let us take this as true for the purpose of argument", it does not mean that it isn't really true. It means simply that in this post, we're not going to analyze the possibility of whether that is true or not, we're just going to assume it.

There's also a class of people who are so smart they see sexism uniformly everywhere, even where it isn't. You're being a jerk, not proving how wonderfully not sexist you are. Refusing to even consider the possibility that someone isn't sexist is itself a form of discrimination, and I reject your attempt to pigeonhole me in an effort to make yourself look holier-than-thou.

I'm also not going to fall into the trap of endlessly justifying myself, so go ahead, have the last word.

jerf started from two propositions, 1) "a sterotype exists" 2) "the study is correct" he argued that these propositions imply the proposition "a stereotype does not exist." This contradicts the starting propositions. If you accept his argument then one of the starting propositions must be false. It could be the first, the second or both. He has not said which he believes to be true or false so your response is groundless.

I'd disagree on your conclusion in paragraph 2 for the following reason: it's not that there is damage done to women's mathematical abilities, it's that there is damage done to their psyches. That damage can be wiped away by "changing identity" because they can perform honestly without messing up their position in society. We can surmise that there is some adaptive reason women don't perform as well under their own names, and from that conclude that there may be difficult-to-see benefits to "playing dumb" if you're female.

Discrimination is no longer the scary evil force you seem to think it is. It's the pause that precedes the quick end of the conversation after you say you're a mathematician (female or male), it's the changing of the rules by which you evaluate someone depending on whether they are male or female, it's the slight cognitive dissonance that leads someone not to talk to a black physicist quite as long (what am I supposed to say?!)... that subtle social cue that you're not what you are supposed to be. People on the street, at the bank, at the library are just plain nicer to me when I'm performing the pretty female role and are just plain not nicer, or ignore me, when I'm looking ugly or smart. Is it so far to stretch that I might perform better on that math test when I don't have to own it and put my name on it? There is no cost when it's not my name.

To be clear, in my second paragraph, I'm referring to true damage to math skills. There's a world of difference between "woman are being discriminated against and it's destroying their ability to learn math" and "women are being discriminated against and they don't like to show off the skills they have". In particular, and this is important, the solutions are different. Although also the severity is different, too, which is also important in deciding what to do about it.

One of the problems I have with this whole debate is that people are so quick to jump down your throat if you don't simply parrot the party line, even when you mostly agree with it, that it isn't even permitted to deeply examine the problem. Nevertheless, step one, as in all engineering, is to figure out the problem. If you insist on short-circuiting that step, your solutions won't work. That doesn't change magically because it's a hot-potato topic.

A lot of the early programmers were women all the way back to Lovelace [1]. People seem to have thought of the hardware as masculine and the software as secretarial and therefore feminine. Then when it turned out there was money it men took over programming.

People seem very bad at recognising cultural programming, friends tell me their 3 year old boy just prefers train sets and their girl prefers to pretend to cook without recognising the millions of cultural signals they've received by that point. Actually cooking is another good example - look at the top chefs and how male skewed they are. A lot of it is about telling boys it's ok to be aggressive and acquisitive while telling girls it's better to stay in the background and adopt a supporting role.

[1] http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/...

It is actually well documented that males, independent of environmental influences, prefer "masculine" toys, such as trucks, while girls prefer dolls. While it's nice to think about nurture instead of nature, there are innate traits of each gender. Don't make the huge mistake in thinking that lead to David Reimer's suicide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

Here is an article citing several studies: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/homo-consumericus/201212...

If women really aren't naturally more comfortable in settings that society has dictated to them, why were those positions dictated to them in the first place?

If men aren't naturally disposed to be stronger and more aggressive then how were they able to develop that position?

Just curious.

> If women really aren't naturally more comfortable in settings that society has dictated to them, why were those positions dictated to them in the first place?

The context in which women live now is not the same as when the roles emerged; so, even if one assumes that there was a very good reason for the roles in the context in which they emerged, that doesn't imply that one must believe that reason continues to hold in the present context.

Are you implying that it takes an aggressive man who can deadlift 400 lbs to write an iOS app?

I don't think so.

So why is computer programming such a male profession today, seeing as it requires attention to detail, language skills, and ability to sit and type rather than strength or aggression?

Not only that, but it also means we have a simple (and cheap!) solution to the problem of female underperformance. Lets deploy the fix and be done with this, and scrap all of our other attempts at fixing this (e.g., affirmative action).

That's also a conclusion we can draw from this study, assuming we trust the conclusions to the same degree you do.

Don't be so quick to throw out affirmative action.

I don't think the whole of the problem of women almost entirely absent in positions of power is "women underperform due to internalized sexism", a significant slice of it is also "affirmative action" by the sexists, passing women over for promotion, disrespecting and devaluing their contribution. If you remove one thumb from the scales, consider that the other thumb might still be pushing them out of true. (This simple consideration is, alas, lost on the current USA supreme court.)

I think you lack some reading comprehension. My second paragraph summarizes the article.

My third paragraph on the other hand is a commentary on the tech community as a whole, which is backed by my personal experience.

Your snide "trust the conclusions to the same degree as you do" puts you squarely in the camp of those who think it's of paramount importance not to crush prejudice an inch more than is absolutely needed, though, which is a bizarrely regressive position imo.

The camp of people are both feminists and who care about making arguments based on good science called to say they want you to stop pretending they don't exist.

It's because the only way you can consistently react to the facts is to become a radical feminist.

Rather than do that, people retreat to pop evolutionary psychology, religion, devils-advocacy in the service of not having to learn anything, or "la la I can't hear you".

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See shawabawa's post below yours.

In fairness to many of the commenters in here, I don't think some aspects of that article are very clear. eg the comparison of the improvement seen by women under the alias vs the men under the alias was summarised in one sentence that I'd missed.

Plus it doesn't help that the experiment comes across rather unscientific (there's no figures published with their write up aside the sample of people tested, and even there, the numbers of men and women tested were quite different.

I'm not trying to undermine this study though. I do believe the differences are just cultural. Just offering up a possible reason why this article hasn't been received well rather than arguing that the male ego is too big to accept that men and women are equal.

You should really take a look Steven Pinker's presentation on "The Science of Gender and Science":

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/pinker.slides.html

This is the kind of agenda study that won't last a second under peerreview.

Hate those article press releases that don't even get close to explain the methodology and just jump to a sweet conclusion already analyzed.

Well this is not my field, but as far as I can see the study (DOI helpfully at the bottom of the OP) was published in a journal called "Self and Identity" and according to http://www.issiweb.org/ this is peer reviewed.

The official journal of ISSI is Self and Identity, which is published by Psychology Press. Self and Identity is a peer-reviewed academic journal that focuses on research and theory relevant to the aims of the society.

Could you clarify your remark further?

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