"By law, only men are eligible to apply for the SEAL program"
If that were the case, then we would indeed expect fewer women in tech. Just as if we eliminated gender from Olympic sports, there would be very few women at all competing, and pretty much none on the medal stands (except in sports that are mostly female only).
But that is not the case with computing. You have women among the elite of their male peers and not just elite, but pioneers. And they did this during a time, mind you, when women's equality was much, much less of a belief than it is now.
I did not attempt to. I clarified that your argument wasn't sound. My comment was not about the "general discource".
>You have women among the elite of their male peers and not just elite, but pioneers.
Eh. If women are not "genetically suited" for programming, then there can still be women among the "elite programmers and pioneers".
By the way, the fact that many women were pioneers in programming was not related to ability, it seems to be mostly an economical decision, as keypunch operators were often female.
Statistically, it becomes much less likely.
the fact that many women were pioneers in programming was not related to ability, it seems to be mostly an economical decision
Tell that to Ada.
Yes, I agree with that claim.
>Tell that to Ada.
Why? I said "mostly", referring to the era of modern computing. In addition, Ada Lovelace wasn't a pioneeri in programming, she was confused about the subject.
And it wouldn't be without other costs (if the vision of society where the imagined genetic differences became true wasn't bad enough): increasing the variation between sexes would mean far more complicated genetic code. That would almost certainly have hard to predict, weird costs.
So far it doesn't seem to be happening, so I'll put that together with Peter Watts' fear that sentience is a side-product that will get optimized out, but still, it's a fear.