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Comment by raldi | Hacker News Reader

> It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that a front line, if not the trench of the global gender war, is in Silicon Valley.

I agree that parts of the tech world are really horrible, and I think we need to be doing everything we can to make women feel more welcome in our industry (not just for them, but for us), but isn't it at least a little exaggeration to say that Silicon Valley is the main "trench of the global gender war"?

I'd think we'd be ranked after at least a couple of these:

* The construction industry

* The Bible Belt

* The restaurant industry

* West Africa

* The movie industry

* The Vatican

* The sportswriting industry

* The people who make Superbowl ads

* Japan

* The adult entertainment industry

* The Middle East

* Wall Street

* Nepal

* The upper echelons of American politics

View on HN

OK. Maybe I don't get this, but doesn't framing this as a "war" make the situation even worse? Isn't viewing the opposite gender as "enemy combatants" a really terrible thing to do?

I would think that women face enough challenges in their workplace without being viewed by their coworkers as being hostile and out for their livelihoods.

Maybe I have this all wrong, but this seems that "news" pieces like this do not help anybody but the media (though perhaps it makes those on either side of the gender divide who already view the others as enemy combatants feel validated).

> Isn't viewing the opposite gender as "enemy combatants" a really terrible thing to do?

Except that's not what's happening. The war is between the ideology that genders are equal and the ideology that genders are not equal.

Framing it the way you have is a standard tactic employed by people who are entirely aware they are at war and have set up feminists as enemy combatants already.

The war is between the ideology that genders are equal and the ideology that genders are not equal.

I think a better summary would be this:

The war is between the ideology that genders should have equal opportunities and the ideology that genders should not.

I don't think anyone outside certain religions[1] asserts that genders should not have equal opportunities. Could you link to such a person?

A better statement: The war is between the ideology that individual humans should have equal opportunities, and the ideology that certain groups should be statistically equally represented in all fields.

(Or sometimes it's all fields that result in "power", a poorly defined term.)

[1] Interestingly, those religions usually have more women than computing. I've never been to a church where women didn't outnumber men.

Since you're obfuscating, I want to clarify that your "better statement" is not a restatement of what I said. It's a disagreement.

Yes, I'm disagreeing. I guess my phrasing was unclear, my apologies. Again, if you can link to people of any significance who openly state opposition to equal opportunity for individuals, it would be fairly convincing.

What does "equal opportunity" mean?

https://inclusiveactioneverydaylives.files.wordpress.com/201...

Is it equal opportunity to see the baseball game, or equal opportunity to pick up a crate?

There are certainly people who state opposition to each of these forms, although they each tend to say they support "equal opportunity," meaning the other.

To translate my statement to the language used in your cartoon, "equality of individual opportunity" is "SAMENESS" and statistical equality is "EQUITY".

One major obfuscation made by various activists in this discussion is that lack of EQUITY can only be caused by a lack of SAMENESS. As illustrated nicely by the cartoon, some folks are short. If shortness is distributed unevenly, then SAMENESS will result in some groups being underrepresented.

Yes, but (to stretch this analogy quite thin) the goal here isn't shortness or tallness. The goal is being able to watch the baseball game. It just so happens that there's a big wooden fence there, which may or may not have some reason to exist, but its purpose is definitely not to block short people from watching the game. If it has a purpose, it's something else. Blocking short people is a side effect.

So, if shortness is distributed unequally, and there's a big wooden fence in front of the game, you could respond by saying that tall people are naturally more suited for game-watching, and argue based on tall people having historically been more successful at it. But that claim isn't likely to stand up to a deep examination of causality and reality.

There are two significantly more defensible responses: give short people enough crates to see over the fence, or tear down the fence (preferably by figuring out what purpose it serves, and building something else to serve its purpose without the side effects, like a Plexiglas fence).

Then your ability to watch the game will be determined only by your natural talent at game-watching, not by your natural talent at being tall.

> So, if shortness is distributed unequally, and there's a big wooden fence in front of the game, you could respond by saying that tall people are naturally more suited for game-watching, and argue based on tall people having historically been more successful at it. But that claim isn't likely to stand up to a deep examination of causality and reality.

Interesting observation. The questions that follow next are:

(1) What are the "fences" in Silicon Valley that lead to the issues described in the article (a single fence is interesting for illustration, but in practice there are probably multiple fences)

(2) Of those additional "fences" how many are the fault of culture (the article cites several such as viewing women entrepreneurs as potential mates first and funding opportunities second) and how many are circumstances beyond the control of anyone in Silicon Valley (like the last of STEM support during formative years (childhood/adolescence/higher education) or the fact that greater testosterone levels correlate with greater aggression and risk taking that VCs tend to look for (several times in the article there are examples of women not being forward and actually asking for money or not asking for enough). The self selection of female entrepreneurs only seeking out VCs that have funded women and or have women involved is yet another fence that no one can solve but the women (this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. what if several VC funds out there haven't funded a women because many women they may have wanted to fund never approached them to ask for money).

The former "fences" (like viewing female entrepreneurs as mates, we should drive out of the industry. But some of the latter issues are the responsibility of women (and the men whose exhibit the same traits) to solve. I know a ton of shy nerdy guys that would never get funding because they don't know how to pitch and get someone to cut them a check (close the deal). They either have to learn those skills or they have to pair up with another person who has skills in selling. Being tenacious and aggressive matters.

Of all the men working in Silicon Valley, a tiny fraction of them are actually fundable because they have the skills to be funded (technically brilliant and/or tenacious/alphas). The overwhelming majority do not get funded because they either don't have the technical skills or they are betas or omegas.

For startup ideas not reliant on some major, defensible technological advantage, the VC industry has a strong preference for founding teams teams that have at least one alpha among them regardless of gender.

One question I'd love to see studied is testosterone levels of people (relative to their own gender) pitching VCs and whether they get funded, and if so by how much.

Assuming there is a preference for investing in people with high testosterone levels, the second question which I'd like to see investigated (but I don't know how you'd design an experiment for this.) is whether or not investing in greater testosterone levels is a good investment thesis/strategy.

I don't think anyone outside certain religions[1] asserts that genders should not have equal opportunities. Could you link to such a person?

Some (fairly major) golf clubs don't let women play on their courses[1]. Plenty of people think women should not be allowed in combat roles in the armed forces[2]. I could continue...

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/10186258/Go...

[2] http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/should-women-be-allowed-to...

Will men be allowed to participate in Glassbreakers?

It would be pretty easy to cite circumstances when women are excluded and men are excluded. For example, there are men's only colleges and women's only colleges, and the number of women's only institutions of higher education greatly outnumber the number of men's only institutions (The only one I can think of is Hampden Sydney in Virginia).

Personally, I'm very anti-gender binary, so my purpose of commenting here is that it is intellectually dishonest to cite examples where women are excluded and conveniently omit examples where men are excluded.

Glassbreakers is currently only for any one who identifies as a woman (cis or trans). This is because on a global scale, women face different career challenges that are specific to their gender. We hope that by connecting the global female workforce to each other we can speed up the process of a true gender balanced workforce. We do, however, want to keep men a part of the conversation and a part of our community. Anyone who believes is the social, political and economical equality of sexes is a Glassbreaker. We're saving the information of the men who do sign up or reach out because they want to help and are brainstorming creative ways to keep them involved.

_tlf7's comment is spot on. Even though you aren't on the platform, how would you like to be involved? @malandrew

> Some (fairly major) golf clubs don't let women play on their courses[1].

Actually those clubs don't let women become members of the club, but they do let them play on the course. (Specifically, Muirfield does.) Or in some cases (I'm not sure if it's a nonzero number now that the R&A golf club has had its vote) they don't own the course.

So that is confirmation that women don't have the right to join the club?

Eh. I prefer mine. We're really just changing where we put the origin point for our coordinate systems, but I like mine better. :P

I would also swap out "opportunities" for "autonomies", but that's being pedantic and obscure.

Define equal. Then tell me what legal rights women have that men don't have. Because I can name about five legal rights that women have that men don't.

Legal rights are irrelevant if they cannot be exercised. In 1860, a runaway slave in the North had the right to life, liberty, and property; why did the Underground Railroad reach to Canada?

You didn't answer my question. What legal right don't they have? Or, as you say, what legal right can't they exercise?

Your repetition of ideological talking points is both inflaming this thread and making it altogether predictable. We don't need yet another flamewar. Please stop.

You misunderstand the enemy. The enemy isn't the other sex. The enemy is the culture itself that reinforces and perpetuates traditionalist gender roles.

In short, the enemy is the patriarchy, and if you think for a minute that that only negatively affects girls and women, well, then you've never been a shy nerd asking out that cute girl from your math class who's also a cheerleader. Spoiler alert, P(that goes well) < 0.01.

In this setting, you should refer to it as 'sexism'. It means almost the same thing as 'patriarchy', but isn't unnecessarily divisive. You can use 'culture of sexism' if you want to cut closer to 'patriarchy'.

I don't think sexism or culture of sexism is enough because the example I gave is entirely about gender. The cheerleader doesn't reject him because he's male; she's rejects him because he's not masculine. That has nothing to do with his sex, and everything to do with not embodying what a society says the is ideal masculine gender.

Certainly those ideals are rooted in sexism and are in many ways sexist, but the sexism isn't what caused the problem in my example. The gender norms by themselves (ie doesn't matter whether they're the way they are due to sexism) caused the problem, because they basically say that a guy is worthless if he isn't a nearly perfect example of the masculine gender.

She's rejecting him because he doesn't have enough of the traits that society says a man should have (and maybe has too many of the traits that society says women should have): He's not strong, he's not assertive, he's not domineering, he's not good at arbitrary athletic competitions, etc. etc. etc.

The cheerleader doesn't reject him because he's male; she's rejects him because he's not masculine. That has nothing to do with his sex, and everything to do with not embodying what a society says the is ideal masculine gender.

This has everything to do with his sex. He is being rejected (hypothetically - within our thought experiment here) because he is considered to be an insufficient exemplar of the male sex. To phrase it a different way - he is insufficiently masculine for this cheerleader (i.e. a very high-status female) to have an interest in him.

You correctly point this out later on - She's rejecting him because he doesn't have enough of the traits that society says a man should have (and maybe has too many of the traits that society says women should have): He's not strong, he's not assertive, he's not domineering, he's not good at arbitrary athletic competitions, etc. etc. etc.

If we don't explicitly define some terms first, we're just going to continue to equivocate. Sex and gender are two different things that you are conflating, and masculine, feminine, male, and female describe separate things.

Sex is purely genitalia. The two extremes are male and female, but this is a spectrum and not a binary.

Gender is all the other shit that society piles on top of that. The two extremes in western culture are masculine and feminine, but this is a spectrum and not a binary. That this mostly lines up with the sexual spectrum is an arbitrary decision by society; society could define gender in such a way that it is orthogonal to sex. Examples of where gender doesn't line up with sex in western society include butch within the lgbtq community: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butch_and_femme. Other societies have in fact defined gender in a way that doesn't line up with sex, so this isn't just theoretical: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity#Non-Western_gen....

In the thought experiment he is not being rejected because of his sex. He is being rejected because of the gender he presents is not sufficiently masculine enough.

> She's rejecting him because he doesn't have enough of the traits that society says a man should have (and maybe has too many of the traits that society says women should have):

That's sexism.

Gender-based prejudice is a separate thing from sexism (but they are interrelated). Point one and three from this page [1] do a good job explaining, but here's the crux of the argument:

"The first important thing to understand about sexism is that it is systemic. Gender-based prejudice, on the other hand, is individual, although it exists in the context of a sexist system."

"But men who experience oppression based on the way they express their gender are still not oppressed on the basis of their gender itself. That is to say, they’re not experiencing that oppression because they’re men. Non-men, on the other hand, experience gender-based oppression because they aren’t men."

[1]: http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/01/sexism-vs-prejudice/

How is it the fault of the "patriarchy" that shy nerds asking out cheerleaders tends not to go well? This makes it sound like a conspiracy.

So, sexism cuts all the way down to the bone of our daily interpersonal interactions. It creates the whole jock / nerd divide. It creates the difference between the hot cheerleaders and the normal girls.

What does this is gender roles and their consequent beauty norms. People decide that women are best off looking fit and have big boobs and are outgoing and have a certain personality. These norms are communicated to them all throughout their childhood through media and peer pressure. In exactly the same way, ideals create the jock as well.

When you actually look at the people embodying these stereotypes, there's nothing all that much different about them, they're just people who've managed to adopt these norms. They might even be meaner than normal, enforcing these roles themselves.

Gender roles, beauty norms are part of the culture that feminists call patriarchy. Patriarchy is just sexism at the social / cultural scale. They wouldn't exist without these broader cultural dynamics, people would just be people and you could ask out whoever you want and she wouldn't shut you down because she has a place to maintain in the hierarchy, a hierarchy created and maintained by sexism.

Once you realize that women perpetuate patriarchy too and how, that's when you start to really understand just what it is.

If you need an analogy, think about how the general lack of respect for privacy at both the individual and the legislative levels negatively affects all of us, even those who 'have nothing to hide'.

I'm not really clear on how such divisions emerges from sexism. At its root, it seems to come from primate status competition, within separate groups that happen to be divided out by sex.

Among the boys, the jocks are those who prioritize sports and physical achievement, while the nerds are those who prioritize academics and mental achievement. This divide persists even in the absence of females - for example, all-boys schools still have aggressive athletes and quiet, bookish introverts, regardless of the presence or absence of the opposite sex.

If anything, the thing you're describing as patriarchy and/or sexism is the effect, rather than the cause.

The enemy isn't the patriarchy, it's feminism. They create straw men to attack because they want power. There is no global gender war. It's being fabricated in real time to justify the ridiculous laws that arbitrarily make criminals out of men. And if you don't believe me, ask Byron Banks.

you've never been a shy nerd asking out that cute girl from your math class who's also a cheerleader.

Feminism is designed to make sure it's illegal for the shy nerd to ask out the prom queen. Spoiler alert: feminists are not the friends you may think they are.

Do you possibly mean Brian Banks, the Long Beach high football player?

False accusations of any crime are horrible, but they are in no way common: The United States Justice Department agrees [with the rough percentage of false rape claims], saying false accusations "are estimated to occur at the low rate of two percent -- similar to the rate of false accusations for other violent crimes."

Coincidentally, 2% is the number of rape accusations that ever result in a conviction: https://rainn.org/get-information/statistics/reporting-rates (this sources back to the DoJ as well. RAINN just has a nifty infographic.

The bible belt isn't exactly eating the world.

We live in a society where more people now aspire to be tech CEOs than pro athletes or rock stars, and tech is one of the main centers of power both politically and economically.

It's easy to dismiss the article because there are a few mischaracterizations and exaggerations. But you need to remember that most people get their information about the tech world from second hand sources, and SV is largely opaque and closed off to the general public.

If you actually read it for what it is rather than just judging the author based on her knowledge of obscure inside-baseball tech scandals then I think there are some valuable points.

Ah, you're saying SV is the front line not because it treats women worse than anyone else in the world, but rather (to use the military analogy) because it's an extremely strategic piece of territory.

It doesn't treat women worse than every other place in the world, no, but it treats them worse than many other places. Computer science has a sharply worse gender participation gap than other professions, and even from other STEM fields. It also continues to allow that gap to reinforce itself, for instance with apologia about how women aren't taught computers when they're younger and (by implication) how they're too far gone by the time they're 20 to remedy that problem. And that's one of the more charitable pathologies to focus on.

It doesn't actually treat women worse than lots of other places that have plenty of women. Islam, acting and modeling all treat women worse than computing (flogging them for rape, casting couches), yet have far more women.

Women are sometimes treated badly in technology. Technology also has few women. But what evidence do we have that the former is a significant cause of the latter? It's hard to even demonstrate a correlation, let alone causation.

The notion that there is some intrinsic property of women that makes them uncompetitive in computer science, but not in accounting, actuary, law, medicine, &c is an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. No such evidence has been presented.

The notion that a male majority which happens to almost entirely comprise the upper echelons of the technology industry might, intentionally or (just as likely) not, set up self-reinforcing cycles of encouragement for men and discouragement for women is not an extraordinary claim. It is bog-standard human pack-animal clique behavior. And nevertheless, clear, ringing evidence of these phenomena are published routinely.

I think you are ignoring the much more likely scenario that women see computer science/software development as a bad bet or it simply does not appeal to them.

For example it is a field where if you take 5 years off you are treated worse than a fresh graduate... Funnily enough a lot of women might want the ability to take a few years off.

Or for example it is an industry which has a lot of instability and lack of internal mobility. This means that you often are forced to leave jobs you love and where you have close friends in order to progess, or because they pivoted, or simply went out of business. Less women are willing to put up with this crap.

I've worked as a software developer at a couple of larger companies where maybe 15% of the developers were female. However, about 40% of the systems analysts/business analysts/project managers/testers/QA were female. These are roles in which you interact with the developers on a daily basis.... Surely if the issue was software developers being sexist then women wouldn't want to do these other roles either.

There is some sexism in the industry, but no more than many other industries which have plenty of women.

No offense, but I'm not sure you've actually said anything here. Take this exact comment, substitute "women" for "men", and it seems equally valid. If you can't explain why things would be different specifically for women, you're not addressing the fact that there are four men for every woman in software development.

I'm saying that women, on average, might value the attributes/factors I listed more than men. I.e.

Being able to take 1+ years off when you have children without serious career damage is more important to woman than men.

The research I have read suggests that women are much less likely to leave a job they enjoy and where they have made friends in order to get a pay rise than men are. It's not much of a leap for women to consider this issue before entering a field.

Likewise there is considerable research on women being more risk averse than men and surely this at least has an impact on joining the startup world.

My last two paragraphs basically boil down to a question for you: why are women who are, in your opinion, not becoming software developers because of sexism still entering into roles that interact heavily with these sexist software developers?

Easy: because those roles you referenced are fed by a career track that starts in university programs with a much better gender balance. Some of those role are MBAs, and some of them (the project management stuff) are generic liberal arts with some industry training (like PMP).

That doesn't mean that the solution to the problem is in university enrollment, but it does explain why it's easier to find women in non-tech roles in software companies: it's because those roles don't require an early life commitment to a career in technology.

Every field you mentioned had the same male majority, yet they all failed to keep women out. Well, almost every field you mentioned - actuaries were quite successful.

http://www.prb.org/pdf08/scientistprofiles/occprof08_actuari...

If you want to appeal to "bog-standard human behavior", it would help if you showed that computing, physics and actuary have "bog-standard human behavior" while law and medicine don't. As I said, not even correlation has been demonstrated.

Just so that you can understand what I mean by "correlations", let me demonstrate with a different theory. Theory: women are less likely to have high quantitative ability, so fields with higher quantitative ability requirements will have fewer women. Demonstrating a correlation would involve showing a downward sloping graph with quant ability requirements on the X-axis and %women on the Y-axis. Like the graphs here: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required...

Then I'd need to present evidence that women are less likely to have high quant abilities. Like in these papers here (note that the abstracts have been creatively worded to be published, skip to the data tables): http://www.sciencemag.org/content/321/5888/494.summary http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2889145?uid=3738256&ui... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21038941 http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf

Simply pointing out that humans act like humans fails - it predicts flat graphs rather than downward sloping ones.

I said extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

You just made two different extraordinary claims: that women (as a demographic) intrinsically lack quantitative ability, so much so that they're at a disadvantage in industry (not merely at a disadvantage in the competition for Fields Medals), and that computer science as an industry is uniquely dependent on quantitative ability, moreso than actuaries (where there is significantly greater female participation.)

Your extraordinary evidence for this is a blog post with regression lines.

Sometimes your rhetorical strategy on HN is bracing and useful. Like all message boards, HN is prone to flights to abstraction and goalpost moving, and the introduction of facts can cut through that and ground the discussion.

Other times, it seems like you simply have far too much confidence in the significance of the facts you choose, and your overconfidence hamstrings you.

I don't have to care whether male quantitative ability has more variance than female ability. I can sort of enjoy reading about it on Marginal Revolution without incorporating any of those conclusions into my identity or philosophy.

I do care about the idea that results about variance in quantitative ability speak to CS ability. For the great majority of specialties in CS, they do not, at all. I think you may be blinded to this by the specialty you've chosen to work in, which is math-intensive. I'm a systems programmer --- in fact, a crypto-intensive systems programmer! --- and I will go to the mat against the idea that computer science requires atypical quantitative ability.

At any rate: it is self-evident that professional software development doesn't require the quantitative aptitude required to compete for university math tenure.

I gather you assign a lower prior to cognitive variations - that's fine. No point debating that at the moment, it's just an example to show what evidence might look like: a downward sloping graph with your predictor on the X-axis and %female on the Y.

You don't have that graph. All you have is vague theories like "bog-standard human behavior prevents women from entering a field". This theory predicts that every historically male field should remain historically male, which is false.

Every historically male field will remain male in the absence of a focused effort to improve balance, which is what happened in the demanding (and often quantitatively rigorous) professions that improved women's participation, and what's being contested in computer science.

I am not making an extraordinary claim. I am looking at the numbers for female participation in CS, noticing that they are anomalous, all the more so given the relative size of the CS professions (they are enormous, which should have helped smooth out the anomaly), noting the incentives for participation (CS professions are, relative to the effort it takes to enter the field, well compensated, flexible, geographically well distributed, and not physically demanding) and observing that there are only two logical explanations:

(a) Social and process factors are having the effect of encouraging male participation and discouraging female participation, or

(b) Women are intrinsically sharply less capable of performing in software development despite a demonstrated ability to perform in law, accounting, medicine, and even other STEM fields.

In the absence of something much more compelling than a blog post on slatestarcodex, I feel pretty comfortable ruling out (b).

So where is your evidence that quantitative fields did not have this "focused effort", but non-quantitative fields did? Can you present some evidence of focused effort in medicine, law and biology but none in computing and aerospace engineering?

I.e., do you have an upward sloping graph with focused effort on the X and %female on the Y?

You can for instance read through 'rayiner's comments on how this happened in law.

I skimmed his comments, he hints it was discriminatory affirmative action but doesn't say much in detail. It's hardly clear that engineering and STEM didn't do the same thing - in fact, we know they have done this for some time.

I find it a bit surprising that you are so unconvinced by Scott Alexander's actual quantitative data (not to mention all the other academic studies I linked to), yet find vague hints at a single datapoint to be proof positive of an alternate hypothesis.

In the face of a gigantic participation gap, I am not persuaded by numerology. I don't find the data you have on this issue to be particularly compelling. I think it relies primarily on a vain misconception a lot of people have about the demands on software developers.

I think you find it persuasive because you work in a small specialty of CS that is particularly math-oriented (even if I don't buy that your facts apply to your particular specialty).

So in the face of weak but suggestive data, we should instead accept an alternate hypothesis with a single data point vaguely alluded to?

"Single data point vaguely alluded to". That's funny. Women compromise 20% of the software development workforce. For every woman developer, there are four men. Against that fact, you've got statistical studies on the variance of quantitative ability between men and women which purport to explain why women don't chair math departments and win Fields Medals, and which you'd also like to use to explain why there are four men writing SQL queries to every woman.

Just curious, what evidence (if any) would cause you to change your views?

Also, given that you keep bringing up CS as somehow unique, does this mean you attribute other STEM fields without women (e.g. physics, aerospace engineering) to a different cause?

Those fields are tiny compared to software development, so I guess I'm willing to believe (a) that there isn't enough social impetus to correct them and (b) whatever biased CS is probably very similar to what biased those STEM fields that have the same problem as CS.

Results from unbiased work-sample aptitude tests would influence my views. But they wouldn't influence the views of the "pro-gap" faction; I expect the results would be explained away as "well of course that cohort of women captured by your sample does well on the test; it's all the other women that have the problem."

Anyways, I'd pay attention to that, because: the biggest fallacy I see in arguments that suggest the gender gap is benign is the notion that it attributable to intrinsic differences in intellectual attributes between males and females; when people attempt to explain those differences, they appear not to connect to software development in any but the most naive, high-school guidance counsellor kinds of ways.

My sensitivity to that fallacy has, like, the inverse vector of what I think yours is: I started my career with a huge deficit in math (my worst subject in high school, which is where my formal education stopped), but was successful regardless, and not because I plugged form fields into databases: after doing somewhat interesting systems programming for an ISP as a network admin, my first real dev job was compiler-theoretic. So I'm automatically suspicious of the belief that software development is closely tied to math aptitude.

Your claim (b) confuses me. First you try to paint CS as somehow special and requiring no quant skills, unlike the rest of STEM. Thus, the well supported "quant skill -> less women" correlation doesn't apply. But then you try to suggest other STEM fields do have the same problem as tech.

As for why intellect gap arguments persuade you and not me, I think I understand now. I tend to believe that there are very few independent dimensions in human intellect, you seem to think there are many. I'd suggest investigating psychometrics in a bit more detail - I found this idea very surprising, but it holds up quite well. Take tokenadult's linkdumps on hiring procedures as a good starting point.

Also, let me emphasize that I don't claim my theory is perfect - I just claim it's the best supported. Quantitatively, all the correlations point in the right direction. I see no reason to exclude other theories, e.g., Sapna Cheryan's "women avoid nerds" theory ( http://faculty.washington.edu/scheryan/research.htm ) - the correlations at least line up there, admittedly anecdotally (doctors and lawyers are high status, computer and math geeks are low status).

The idea that CS, math and physics are somehow uniquely unkind to women seems weak to me. I see no plausible reason why "bog-standard human behavior" would be worse in STEM - if anything, you'd expect objective fields to care less about human behavior. (That's probably why computing is so tolerant of weirdos.) Note that you haven't even provided anecdotal evidence that computing is somehow worse than law in this regard.

That's a strawman. The actual claim is that playing with computers at a young age has a high correlation with becoming a great programmer later in life, and that generally young girls are not encouraged to play with computers.

So the claim is that playing with computers at a young age is vital to the development of programming skill, just as the Hasbro game "Operation" is for physicians.

See: "extraordinary claims...".

No, again, you're creating a strawman. I never said it was vital; just that it helps a lot. And I see no reason such a claim would require a similar effect to be present in every industry.

In fact, the evidence supporting the idea that programming is special in this regard is precisely that you don't hear doctors talk about how they had spent their childhood years endlessly playing Operation, while meanwhile you do hear many great hackers say they spent their whole childhoods playing with computers (or, when unavailable, then the nearest facsimile: taking apart electronics, playing with Game Genie codes, building erector sets...)

It's hard to tell whether you're missing my point or agreeing with it. The idea that computer science is unique among the sciences and professions --- including detail, abstraction, and symbol-intensive fields like aerospace engineering and forensic accounting --- is itself an extraordinary claim.

It's also a counterintuitive claim, given the reality of what software development work actually is. A plurality of professional developers do little more than plumb connections from SQL database tables they understand poorly to front-end frameworks they didn't write. That's the practice that requires exposure from preschool, like a competitive concert violinist?

No. Not buying it. Sorry.

Indeed, most tech industry jobs don't require the sort of deep hacking abilities you can only learn young. However, the hiring process puts high value on having learned to hack young, and the social scene tends to exclude people who didn't have lifelong exposure to hacker culture.

Changing both these things would improve the gender balance.

I'm glad to see you writing that, and thanks. Lemme just add that I think I might be able to surprise you about aptitude to and development of "deep hacking abilities". I don't know about robotics, but C/ASM RTOS-style systems programming? I think you can quickly develop that from people with no prior exposure. I built a hiring process on that hypothesis, and months after leaving the firm we used it at, it apparently continues to be working very well.

I think if you were able to somehow come up with a compelling way to get kids to play forensic accountant (perhaps a new J.K. Rowling series?), you would absolutely see in 20 years that the kids who did were significantly more likely to go on to become great forensic accountants. Same with aerospace engineering. The special thing that distinguishes programming from those skills is that programming skills do have many analogs in the world of childhood playthings and can thus give certain children a preparatory advantage over others when they all reach college together.

Actually, aerospace engineering might have a bit of that. Have there been studies to see if children with the opportunity and encouragement to design, build, and fly their own model aircraft might perhaps be more likely to grow up to be successful aerospace engineers than children who aren't exposed to such things?

Your intuition that the world's best forensic accounting game would produce a generation of the world's best forensics accountants might be useful, but it is not evidence. And the requirement here is for extraordinary evidence.

What do you see as my corresponding extraordinary claim?

Once again: the idea that computer science is unique among virtually all the professions in that performance at the median level of competence requires, like a concert violinist, exposure at the earliest possible age. This despite the fact that most of what programmers do is simply plumbing and diagnostics.

> performance at the median level of competence requires [...] exposure at the earliest possible age.

I never claimed that, though. I think my actual claims were pretty mundane:

1. Children who play with computers have an advantage when, later in life, they're learning programming.

2. Young girls, in many places, are not encouraged to play with computers the way that young boys are.

It's funny that you keep mentioning highly quantitative fields like aerospace and actuary, and then try and contrast them with computing.

http://www.ae.utexas.edu/news/students/683-more-women-ase

Undermines your point a bit.

This is sleight of hand. What you're doing here is crossing the streams between your conversation with me, which is about intrinsic male advantage in math ability, with my conversation here, which is about the supposed advantage men get from being exposed to computers at an earlier age.

The point of citing fields in your discussion with me is that there are quantitatively intensive fields which have significantly greater female participation than computer science, despite the dubious idea that computer science as it is actually practices is quantitatively more demanding than, say, the demands on corporate lawyers to structure debt and equity financing.

The point of citing fields in this particular discussion is that there are demanding technical fields in which practitioners generally get little to no exposure to the work until they approach the age at which professional software developers enter the industry.

Did you miss the distinction? I sometimes go "on tilt" in discussions and misfire like this too.

So is our primary goal increased representation of women, or treating women well? (Put more directly, if we find that mistreating women makes more of them enter technology, what should we do?)

It's certainly possible that not as many women are interested in technology careers as men. (Seems overwhelmingly unlikely to me based on both anecdotal and rigorous evidence, but as a good scientist, I should say it's possible.) But why does that justify mistreating those women who are interested? And why should we be satisfied with our behavior based on merely being not as bad as a religion or another industry?

People aren't complaining because they think SV treats women badly, they're complaining because they perceive SV as preventing women across the country from being as successful in business as men are.

> We live in a society where more people now aspire to be tech CEOs than pro athletes or rock stars, and tech is one of the main centers of power both politically and economically.

Citation? I would say this is a huge assumption, presumably backed by your anecdotal experiences. To offer an anecdotal counterpoint - from what I have seen of the majority of the college-going American generation, they do aspire to leadership positions in general, but seldom through purely technical means.

The Bible Belt has a pretty big impact just by its territory and the population within it alone.

I really, really don't think the broader population is anywhere near as enthusiastic about startup culture (which is probably what you mean by "aspire to be tech CEOs") as you think it is.

As for technology being a main center of power, that is correct. But probably not in the idealistic way you're thinking of, regarding entrepreneurship and "disruptions" or anything like that. The fruits of their labor may be used indirectly, but it's primarily closed-room contract work and military defense that is used to exert political power, not that trendy startup or open source project.

Wars are only fought where at least one side thinks they can win. SV is the front line because it is more egalitarian than those arenas you mention.

That's my thinking as well. I've read up a bit on feminism, the picture I get is of a movement that's trying really really hard to get people to take them seriously. They've chosen tech as the battleground for precisely that reason. Personally, I think it's great. I like seeing my compatriots forced to confront sexism.

If you think sexism is bad in technology, you should see it everywhere else. The gender gap has gotten a bit better in the last twenty years or so, but traditionally male occupations are still overwhelmingly male, and likewise for female occupations. And salary gaps where you do find men and women working together are just abominable.

Sexism is one of those things you just kind of ignore until you really start looking, then once you do you see it literally every fucking where. And it's utterly depressing. We like to think that because we gave the vote to black people and women that we're enlightened.

I think you're right. Highly educated, intellectual "nerds" who generally really want to do the "right thing" (however that is defined) are likely to be a lot easier to convert to feminism than, for example, (1) the NFL (2) Kentucky (3) Wall Street (4) Saudi Arabia.

Feminism, as a movement, is aimed at battles it thinks it can win. Nerds who aren't particularly attached to conventional forms of masculinity are already partly won over.

Or the skewed gender ratios in various fields are due to innate biological differences.

Sexual dimorphism, which includes psychological traits, extends to humans as well. We are animals too after all.

What an age we live in. Nearly every animal on earth, including our closests primate relatives, have innate morphological and behavioural differences between male and female. Yet noticing that homo sapiens exhibit the same differences has become a thought-crime of the highest order.

These differences cause a tendency for men and women to gravitate towards certain fields. Skewed sex ratios in a profession do not necessarily indicate discrimination and its time to stop pointing and sputtering when not everything is 50/50.

Gender ratios between fields aren't a huge huge problem, but it is something we could address and improve over time. We don't have to perpetuate the ratios by telling nerdier girls they're not good with computers and should really just be cheerleaders. Salary gaps, on the other hand, are clear evidence of discrimination. And there's plenty of those.

"Innate biological differences exist" isn't, by itself, a compelling argument. The closest argument you can make that's compelling is "Innate biological differences exist, linked with competence in computer science, and they are vast enough that the fraction of people who can make it skews heavily male." That's an actually-scientific hypothesis, which is great, because we can do some studies to determine whether it's true.

http://www.slideshare.net/terriko/how-does-biology-explain-t...

On the other hand, if you make non-scientific claims, it's pretty easy to push "innate biological differences" to mean whatever you want it to mean. Like that women are more naturally suited for programming than men, because it's just like prepping dinner.

http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-...

The slide share only attempts to address difference in ability, not inclination. If women are just as capable programmers, but, on average, tend to have a natural inclination towards more social and nurturing roles (teacher, nurse, etc... fields with the highest % of women) then we would still expect the same gender ratio skew we see.

Most troubling, any mention that innate biological differences between the genders could play a role in the skewed gender ratios is not even considered in these diversity attack articles. It has become a thoughtcrime.

Also "winning" the right to working in a coal mine or laying roofing wouldn't really be a victory after all compared to SV. These people want the upside of being a male without the risk that it carries. Yea some of us get to play this game in SV. What about the vast majority of us that have to work a shit job to support our family? Giving one gender privileged access to industries like SV while simultaneously sheltering them from industries like the coal mining industry would also be a horrible form of marginalization.

This argument is as terrible as it is old. Feminists have been fighting for the right to work in coal mines, and fight on battlefields, and everything else.

>Feminists have been fighting for the right to work in coal mines, and fight on battlefields, and everything else.

It's terrible because it doesn't fit the narrative you're trying to push. Paying occasional lip service isn't the same as "fighting for the right". Working in a coal mine or fighting in the battlefield isn't a "right". It's an obligation blue collar families fall into.

You are correct.

That said, from within Silicon Valley it sure looks like the feminists are coming for the supposedly easy money of engineering while ignoring the risky things like policing. True or not, it's sometimes the perception that matters.

This says more about Silicon Valley than about feminism, though.

My statement could be interpreted that way, yes.

I am a WIT. an actual, technical woman in tech, annoyed with myself for letting Newsweek basically troll me. I've noticed the MSM has "discovered" SV, and is doing the usual pieces (sexism! drugs! too much money!, etc.). While there are obviously so many problems in SV, they never seem to find any of the many, many, many (shudder! older) technical women at Google, FB, Intel, etc. to talk with. Everything is written through the more attractive, yet limited, prism of "young person asking for money, bad behavior ensues". I will not comment on the hypocrisy of bemoaning the limited access of women to the spotlight while turning to a self-styled male "expert" on WIT - it's easier to do that than track down actual women in SV to interview directly. I didn't feel represented by the article, I thought it was pretty opportunistic and to be honest, I don't think Newsweek cares for the "plight of women in SV", just about trying to become relevant again. And here I am, talking about it, so they were successful in their trolling.

If you don't mind me asking a personal question, I'm rather curious what your exposure to computers (or electronics that you could take apart, toys with gears, etc.) was like when you were a girl (say, ages 6-16).

Btw, I see some discussion on the thread about SAT Math, GRE Quantitative being skewed towards men (!) - every time I see this, I think of not just my experience, but that of so many girls I grew up with who _loved_ math and were good at it cause nobody had informed them they shouldn't. Look at the Eastern bloc, China, etc. - some of their idiotic policies had the unintended (perhaps) effect of making generations of women realize they can do math, physics, etc. I am not talking about being Alan Turing here, I can't comment on that. But calls to drop math from CS programs - no, just no :).

I am an immigrant. Grew up in the Eastern Bloc - no exposure to computers until high-school (given country), but tons of exposure in school to math, etc. Even in high-school, CS was absolutely more popular with boys and they were enacting the "hacker" model as they perceived it from distance, so there was some "girls don't belong here" attitude, but frankly, once you know you can do it, that stuff is much easier to ignore :). Again, they didn't know what "hacker" meant, more like adolescent posturing.

That's very interesting; I really appreciate your sharing.

Do you have any theories as to why, even in high school -- both in the US and the country you grew up in -- CS is more popular with boys than girls? And do you have any suggestions for how that could be changed?

Let me rephrase - it's not that CS was actually more popular with boys (it was fairly split, actually), it's that in addition to the CS courses there was a parallel community of teens trying to be "hackers". Mostly boys- and a lot of it had a social component (hanging out late, trying things out, etc.). Their parents got them computers - my parents, those of other girls didn't (I think it was a fairly new field). And they certainly wouldn't have been keen on their daughters staying up until 3 am with boys :) at the time. That's not a theory, just an anecdote. Things have obviously changed tremendously.

Also, let me say that I personally don't see any problem with CS being more popular with boys. Sure, I hope many more women go into the field because it's a great field! So don't stay out for bad reasons (e.g. "can't do math" - what?!, "it's not social enough" - BS, my college experience was all about being social, albeit with other CS nerds , etc.). Get kids (boys and girls) excited about math, building things (wth is more empowering than that ?) early and watch what happens.

Most of the things you listed are places where women's rights are well behind those of men.

I think those are all places that need to be fixed.

But at the same time it's possible to think of the front line as being the place where the battle to move forward is being fought now, instead of places where little progress has been made.

From that perspective talking of SV as a front line isn't wrong: if women can't be treated equally in the supposedly progressive environment of SV, then other places will be even further behind.

  But at the same time it's possible to think of the
  front line as being the place where the battle to move
  forward is being fought now, instead of places where
  little progress has been made.

How is that line of thinking, rational?

So you want people who are already putting up with plenty of progressive dogma to put up with more progressivism, when the rest of those areas that raldi [1] mentioned haven't seen a lick of the same progressivism, impacting their lives in decades?[2]

Dont you think that such unfair pressure solely on the tech world, will only serve to alienate them?

Won't it cause them to dig their heels in?

Is that kind of retrenchment desirable?

In what way does that make any sense?

This is isn't even the first time I've heard this line of fuzzy thought-leadership.

I find it grating when people offer such silly twisted logic to prop up their premises.

When any form of change is imposed on any section of society, at too fast a rate, there will be resistance.

When any form of change is unfairly imposed on ONLY one section of society or in ONLY one geographic region, within the same country, there is bound to be a even greater degree of resistance.

[1] The construction industry, The Bible Belt, The restaurant industry, West Africa, The movie industry, The Vatican, The sportswriting industry, The people who make Superbowl ads, Japan, The adult entertainment industry, The Middle East, Wall Street, Nepal, The upper echelons of American politics

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8964102

[2] I'm by no means advocating less than progressive conditions to prevail in any industry or any geographic region. This could be just as well, said of the conservative end of the spectrum. In other words, there are conservative pockets, hell bent on turning their already conservative professions even more rigid and unyielding.

How is that line of thinking, rational?

I'm a little unclear if you are arguing that the terminology of it "being the front line" is irrational, or if equality is irrational.

If the first then I agree that it's an odd way to describe it, but I'm not sure I could explain their thinking any better than above.

If you are arguing that equality is irrational then I have to say I disagree quite strongly.

When any form of change is unfairly imposed on ONLY one section of society or in ONLY one geographic region, within the same country, there is bound to be a even greater degree of resistance.

I agree that there is resistance to seeing changes only occur in some areas. I agree it is unfair that equality isn't equally distributed.

What's disagreement about?

Name one right men have that women don't have.

I don't see active fights over the gender war happening in those fronts. It's certainly true that those aren't territories that we control firmly, but it's also not territory that we're disputing very hard. Gender is what it is in the Bible Belt, and most of the pushback is from a younger generation who grew up on the Internet. Gender is what it is in film, but the Bechdel test entered popular consciousness on the Internet. Gender is what it is in the minds of the old advertising firms, but the new ones are often technology companies, their clients are often technology companies, and when you say "Super Bowl ads" and "what they think of women" I can't help but think "GoDaddy". Gender is what it is in the minds of the current elected officials, but Obama's election has been credited, in part, to his ability to use technology more effectively than his opponents (and, therefore, to effective technologists wanting to work for him). Silicon Valley is the trench and the fortification; if it falls, we can then march on the cities.

Now, of course, there's a question as to whether the gender biases of the makers of the Internet impact the gender biases of the things that happen on the Internet. But I think they do. At the least, for fora like Reddit and HN where the platform and editorial direction are linked, it seems obvious that they must. For platforms like Twitter or G+, policies such as harassment response and tradeoffs, whether real names are common or uncommon[0], what speech is considered appropriate or inappropriate, etc. can all impact what voices are heard and who is empowered by the platform.

[0] I don't mean by this to imply that there's a standard feminist answer on whether real-name policies are good or not. There are feminist arguments on both sides.

Many of the industries/groups you cited don't have nearly as much wealth wrapped up in them. That's what makes the tech one worse, more wealth concentrated with less gender equality than others.

Once you reduce that list to ones with as much wealth as tech, its a pretty dang short list and it'd be interesting at that point to compare gender % in each.

Out of curiosity why did Nepal make its way on to your list?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Nepal#Women.E...

Wall Street is much less sexist than Silicon Valley. I've been there. I know. Yes, there are some young men on Wall Street who act boorish, drunkenly hit on women, and generally cause a great deal of discomfort for those around them. They don't get promoted. They aren't trusted. They'll eventually get fired if they keep that shit up. In the Valley, they do get promoted. Misbehavior actually makes a young man more attractive to the VCs, deep in the throes of midlife crisis. That makes the difference. In one place, it's discouraged and relatively uncommon. In the other, it's rampant.

The amount of impropriety that you see in the VC darlings is off-the-charts. I worked (briefly) at an ed-tech where the married executives openly flirted with female subordinates (and one was fired for refusing advances). You'd never see that shit in finance, these days. That era ended when the people raising VC now were in diapers.

I would guess that "the upper echelons of American politics" are also less sexist than Silicon Valley, given that there are women succeeding in US politics, but wouldn't know from direct experience.

I've spent a fair amount of time working for Wall Street and the broader NYC financial industry as well, and got a quite different impression. And I'm not the only one. Examples: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/07/03/goldman_sach... http://gawker.com/5979679/id-do-her-a-brief-history-of-micha...

BTW, who's the Sheryl Sandberg, Meg Whitman, or Marissa Mayer of Wall Street?

Take your pick: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-most-powerful-women-on...

You aren't wrong that the author probably exaggerated with that sentence, but I think I am not alone in being awfully tired of your conversation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation

EDIT: I guess I am alone.

I'm not saying the article should be dismissed; just that I think the author is overplaying her hand a bit in this one particular sentence.

We agree, then! Should have worded my thoughts carefully.

Not alone, just on your own island here.

but isn't it at least a little exaggeration to say that Silicon Valley is the main "trench of the global gender war"

It's an exaggeration to say there's a gender war at all. It's feminists against the patriarchy. Feminists are real people. What's the patriarchy?

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