It's evolution of sex, stupid.
PS. My previous comment on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7041221
The same argument can be levied at racism. If you go back to the year 1000AD, it's obvious that Europeans are of vastly inferior stock. The Chinese and the Arabs were doing optics and stuff while the Europeans were basically playing in the dirt.
By the year 1000 AD the Europeans had already built the most grandiose of structures that rival today’s standards, had the most extensive networks and cities, filled entire libraries with books on all manners of philosophy and science, explored all corners of the world, and so on and on.
And it wasn't until about the 1900s (about 1920-1960), when the Western World (that primarily consisted of those same groups of people) exported its knowledge and technology (via a combination of globalism/capitalism + sharing + altruism) - that started to change the subsistence living conditions for everyone else to at least something higher.
If something was not invented by the Europeans, it sure as hell was revised and improved to such a degree that you can't equate the two in any meaningful way.
Hell, at that point, even the Eastern Roman Empire was struggling.
And eventually the doom and gloom that came afterwards was overcome fully with new civilizations, countries, etc... And by the 1800s the Western world and the European countries were so far ahead of anyone else that it's silly to even compare them to the rest of the world at that point in history in regards to reason, law, economy flow, technology, science/math, music, theater, culture, ideas, etc.
By your logic I could point out that China before the mid-point of last century was a 99% peasant-class country full of hardship and misery, and make the argument that you are using - wiping out all their previous culture and accomplishments.
We have to look at this from the totality point-of-view.
It kind of sounds like you might be using a very geographically restricted classification.
Sexual roles (the evolution of sexuality) is a completely different game. Ever thought why peacock has a tail but not peahen?
In the U.S. whites score about one standard deviation above blacks on IQ tests such as WISC and Stanford-Binet, and in adoption studies that try to control for environment, this difference does not go away. Race is more than skin deep.
EDIT: Sorry, wrong paper. Looking for the right one.
Even the fact that you point out "in the US" should be an indicator of the racism. I've never heard any other modern countries seriously complain about the allegedly inferior intellects of their black populace. Are American blacks different?...
These differences are mirrored by PISA and IQ scores between nations, SAT scores within nations, and etc. It's not hard to find corroborating evidence, but most people don't want to.
http://jaymans.wordpress.com/hbd-fundamentals/#Race-IQ
It's hard to imagine that racism accounts for the entire explanation of such a global, consistent, and persistent phenomenon.
For 104 of the 185 nations, no studies were available. In those cases, the authors have used an estimated value by taking averages of the IQs of neighboring or comparable nations. For example, the authors arrived at a figure of 84 for El Salvador by averaging their calculations of 79 for Guatemala and 88 for Colombia. Including those estimated IQs, the correlation of IQ and GDP is 0.62.
It's not hard to find corroborating evidence, you can just make it up!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations#Na...
I guess what they intended was "African Americans have low IQ and so do Africans, ergo IQ is race-related". Yet African Americans have higher IQ than Africans, because they live in a more prosperous region, with less disease, more opportunities etc. so what does that tell us about IQ and race, and racial differences within countries? That maybe it's not all about race (and generally be on the lookout for stats that don't correct for factors like age/wealth/education/sex etc. I regularly see the "headline" figure being given uncorrected.)
African Americans are closer to European IQ levels than Africans, probably for several environmental and genetic reasons (better nutrition and schooling, ~25% European ancestry, etc)
From the paper:
"The differential between the mean intelligence test scores of Blacks and Whites (about one standard deviation, although it may be diminishing) does not result from any obvious biases in test construction and administration, nor does it simply reflect differences in socio-economic status. Explanations based on factors of caste and culture may be appropriate, but so far have little direct empirical support. There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation. At present, no one knows what causes this differential."
Of course humans were not a subject to strictly controlled selective breading like dogs, which means we have much fewer and less diverse races. Still, this is not something that should be completely ignored when trying to understand human behavior, both social and genetic traits matter.
The unknowns are how mental differences (expression of genes) are caused by environment or effect the environment.
This means we don't know whether a 50/50 split in some field is natural or a result of society railroading people into the field. It seems to me that the best way to handle policy is not to base it on unknowns, so that's why I favor policy that ensures opportunity to work in specific fields but doesn't try to balance them.
All your wishful thinking will never make women and men the same.
There's no question that things like hormone levels are likely to have some sort of effect but your response begs huge questions such as how low-level differences affect incredibly complex higher-level processes like cognition, how much a skill like programming depends on such specific cognitive abilities, and even how important a single area of expertise like programming is to overall success in such a wide field which requires a range of different individual skills as well as complex social behaviour on multiple levels.
There is still plenty of Nobel-level groundbreaking research yet to be done for each of those questions but instead you simply chose to ignore all of that hard thinking and simply assert that simple biological determinism explains the gender distribution across an entire profession.
And when in evolution, we say "they", we don't mean any individual members, we mean proportions. So women in general don't do some things that interest men.
Now, if you guys want society to spend effort and probably money to push women in some roles that don't interest them (or vice versa for men), so be it. My opinion is that doing this will not make women/men any happier or even will not be good for society...