that men and women are actually different and that it implies different behaviour?
that actually you know what... the more freedom women get the /less likely/ they are to work in a stem field?
maybe we should pay them more in our naive quest to make the unequal equal - because it is 'politcally correct' - which ever kind of correct that is because it certainly isn't 'true'
This is a great example of why I was hesitant of entering the field. You feel totally comfortable saying this when your profile links to your blog with your real name and place of employment. If you're that comfortable in this belief you can't expect me to believe that you don't treat women in your work place differently and with less respect.
Gender roles still very much exist. If something biological were keeping women from entering the IT industry it wouldn't vary so much from culture to culture. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/g/gsf/12220332.0001.103?rgn=main;v...
I can believe that there are biological differences that make women, on average, less likely to enter STEM fields, and also treat those that do enter as equals.
it shouldn't be offensive to women imo. i am not offended by the many opportunities that women have and i don't - that they are /generally/ more socially adept, need to make significantly less investment to find a mate /in general/, and are constantly treated with special care an attention in particular areas (e.g. violence against women is constantly considered especially distasteful even though 90%+ of violent crimes are between men exclusively, there are more illnesses and disabilities specific to men - but most research focuses on those specific to women etc...)
i don't think my opinion that women and men are measurably different should imply that i will treat women with less respect... why should it? i'm not saying women are somehow distatsteful or undesirable in some moral or value sense - just that they are different, measurably so and that claiming we are all equal in the sense of political correctness, and shoehorning every possible behaviour into that ideal is ignorant - it does disservice to humanity - not just men or women as a sex.
i've had a look at that article, but it is authored with a tremendous bias imo... the fact that its hosted on an openly feminist website does of course skew me but the wording itself is highly presumptuous (perhaps iam too?). i will not deny that their data does show a large variation... but i will gladly deny your conclusion because reorganising that graph shows a reasonable correlation between those countries we consider 'most free' and those we do not... with outliers and natural variation as you would expect.
On a different note, given the large population, it is likely that there is a non-zero, biologically driven, difference that is statistically significant, even if it is of such a small magnitude as to be irrelevent. In this case, any such difference is being overshadows by the non-negligible cultural influence, but it is always worth keeping in mind what statistics actually say.
I don't think it is a result of supposed wage gaps (which supposedly exist in all fields) or supposed widespread sexism (as if other fields are any better). But I do think it is a problem. We have a shortage of good developers in this country and not being able to draw talent very well from roughly half the population is not helping.
The impressive and oft-reported increase of female representation in the biological sciences, to the point where they've reached a majority at all levels, degree programs happened in the meantime.
Related? Dunno. But something to think about.
http://psych.fullerton.edu/rlippa/abstracts_2009.htm
Don't tell the feminists.
see the stuff i linked and research the subject. there is plenty of research showing that tech/social biases are measurable from the earliest possible ages.
there are certainly lots of opinions that this is not true from sociologists and other 'almost doctor' types. and treating this matter seriously will make you unpopular with women and men alike...
i won't deny wage gaps or sexism. i just think its sexist in a sort of nasty and ignorant way, to try and incentive women to do things they may not want...
i don't really care to speculate on the cause - that can be debated. there are plenty of differences in brain physiology and development between sexes though. its a much weaker hypothesis to assume that there is no difference imo. we have every reason (including the objective data) to believe that there should be a difference - even if small.
No. Otherwise, "Storks Deliver Babies (p=0.008)" :http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9639.00013/a...
The way science works is that you start with a hypothesis of how the world works, based on cause and effect, then you test that hypothesis. Data by itself can have any number of explanations. In particular, you cannot construct a hypothesis from statistical data and expect that to hold water.
its a much weaker hypothesis to assume that there is no difference imo.
Nobody says that there isn't any difference. But you have to exclude the possibility that the difference is caused (primarily) by cultural factors. You also offer no explanation why, if there is a biological difference, it does not favor women instead; if the entire basis of your hypothesis is that men and women are different in some way (which is as of yet unknown), then any difference can go either way.
fine, if we are going to have a very serious discussion on this... (i'm always mildly flabbergasted this isn't common sense --- we have all met men and women right?)
this has been very well covered over the last half a century or so. we have the many 'sex reassignment' disasters on hermaphrodite babies showing us that women and men are intrinsically so - we can also point at the related psychological issues of transgender people... ( i don't want a negative connotation - but if you are confused about your sex - that is an issue for you i would assume )
sure this might not apply to precisely this, but afaik medical professionals believe that there are gender differences beyond naive physiology and treat their patients accordingly - when they assumed the differences were merely cultural they caused well documented suffering.
i'll recycle my previous links for something directly addressing this issue though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing-systemizing_theory and a related paper: http://docentes.cs.urjc.es/~odeluis/Docencia/ABP/Articulos/b.... this paints the male 'advantage' in a fairly negative light too and the underlying theory proposed is decoupled from but strongly correlated with gender.
looking around the area the nurture/culture side of the debate is very weak imo. but there are certainly ample studies and papers on both sides of the debate...
If science were just "common sense", we'd still believe in the impetus theory [1]. Plus, personal experience tends to suffer from all kinds of confirmation bias.
we can also point at the related psychological issues of transgender people...
Looking at transgender people is indeed interesting, if not the way you think it is. In particular, how the same person gets treated completely differently based on which gender he or she is perceived as [2]. E.g.:
"After he underwent a sex change nine years ago at the age of 42, Barres recalled, another scientist who was unaware of it was heard to say, 'Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister's.'" (Ben and his "sister" are one and the same person, of course.)
sure this might not apply to precisely this, but afaik medical professionals believe that there are gender differences beyond naive physiology and treat their patients accordingly - when they assumed the differences were merely cultural they caused well documented suffering.
And how do you conclude that any such difference reflects a higher aptitude of men for STEM subjects instead of a higher aptitude of women for STEM subjects?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_impetus
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07...
maybe i miss your point, but 'impetus' as classically defined is nearly equivalent to the newtonian concept of momentum and yes - the common sense there does make sense. the usual real problem here is that vaccuum is not something we experience - so the idea that the natural state is to be 'at rest' is common sense but misleading - one can of course argue that the presense of air and the resistance it gives is also common sense. its a wooly term.
when i use it here what i mean to say is that imo its blatantly obvious.
Note: Averages and standard deviations say nothing about individuals but they do explain trends.
Not related to IQ, but this study debunks the variability hypothesis in regards to mathematics performance: http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf
I think it's better to assume that two groups of people are less different than one would initially think, because of the natural tendency to create in and out groups. When there has been a history of systemic oppression between those groups, I'd lean toward requiring more rigorous proof of the differences before accepting it, and I'd be very careful as to what I accepted as rigorous proof.
This is my quick thought on the subject. Please don't consider it my philosophical magnum opus on discrimination.
it may be surprising but the lack of tact is intentional (and more muted than i feel i should feel free to use without lashback).
> I think it's better to assume that two groups of people are less different than one would initially think, because of the natural tendency to create in and out groups.
this is a very valid point and one i've never really considered before. i've never really fallen into that kind of behaviour but have observed it plenty (with some mystification tbh). thanks. you are probably right that the problems caused by discrimination against women in e.g. strongly patriarchal society in recent times (Saudi Arabia or something) massively outweighs the trouble caused by the reverse situation - botched gender reassignments and dubious equality policies, but nothing on a large scale directed against the whole of a portion of society. :)
And yeah, I definitely think it would be disingenuous for someone to say or imply that we haven't made a lot of progress in the last hundred years.
That being said, I'm on the side of the gender and ethnic fence that has largely benefited from discrimination in the past, so I try to be relatively sensitive to it, especially since it can be so subtle and hard to spot.
One example: http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/press/press_release... (this is ethnic, not gender discrimination)
Individual variation within gender is almost always far, far greater than demographic variation between genders.
Here's an easy example: most men are not in STEM and aren't all that interested in STEM. In these debates people throw around 'man' as a term, assuming the archetype of the engineer, when actually the 'average' man (if there is such a thing) is not particularly interested in STEM. So painting STEM as 'what men do' is inaccurate, because most men do not do it.
i think of the construction, driving/motor and manufacturing industries as being part of STEM and that covers a significant portion of men - several of the most common modes of employment for men if not all of them.
i could be wrong, but i am skeptcial - is this not a common interpretation?
It seems likely enough to me that this is true for men, too.
its a shame i cant find any of the studies on this to link. they are buried beneath rubbish populist/magazine articles on google...
here is some wiki on something related and well studied - which would not be contentious imo if it were not for the popularity of political correctness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing-systemizing_theory
and a related paper: http://docentes.cs.urjc.es/~odeluis/Docencia/ABP/Articulos/b...
i am ashamed to belong to a society that necessitates such an article saying in its opening paragraph 'Leaving aside politcal correctness, there is compelling evidence...'