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Comment by golemotron | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised to see this ranking so high on HN. Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time.

The current educational and political system is organized toward exclusively presenting the view that gender is a cultural construct and there are no differences between men and women other than plumbing.

Men and women, on average, differ significantly on career choice, likes, dislikes, and motivation. And, it has nothing to do with whether they were giving dolls or cars as toddlers. The differences are there as early as one day after birth [ http://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/godis/sex.pdf ]. Primate studies show the same differences with our relatives.

Everyone should be able to pursue any career they want to, but there should be no surprise when you see gender disparities across different occupations.

View on HN

A large part of the problem is the failure to distinguish between the aggregate and the individual. For the sake of argument let's say that the population of individuals who would make good engineers is 60% male and 40% female. From an aggregate level that's a huge difference. Once you gather enough of people that statistical inferences can be made, the difference becomes obvious. In a classroom, for instance. But at an individual level that difference becomes insignificant. If you grab one boy and one girl at random, there's a very significant chance the girl is better at engineering than the boy. At the individual level, there are much better predictors of whether a person is good at engineering than their sex. Five minutes of conversation wouldn't be authoritative but it would be much more predictive than the individual's sex.

That really is the crux of the matter. Everyone should be given an equal chance with no prejudice, and then if population differences still emerge, that's OK.

Unfortunately there isn't much room for this middle ground. People who want to acknowledge sex difference want to use sex as a filter, e.g. "no women in combat roles." People who want to give everybody a chance also want to even things out, e.g. "Allow women in combat roles, and lower the standards for women so they have just as much of a chance as men have."

> Everyone should be given an equal chance with no prejudice,

Agreed. But the way it tends to work is that if (say) 60% of all engineers are men and the rest are women, then a man more closely fits the idea of an engineer that those people who are in charge of giving the chances have in mind, and so they're more likely to prefer a man to a woman.

You sort of run into this chicken/egg problem though: are women underrepresented in engineering because of what I described above (bad), or do they actually have equal opportunities and simply aren't choosing to become engineers (okay), OR do they actually have equal opportunities and are simply not choosing to be engineers just because the profession currently comprises mostly men and they feel discouraged when they see that, even though they're otherwise interested (bad), or etc. etc.

> simply aren't choosing to become engineers (okay)

It is not certain that this choice is OK, though. While the causes of gender disparity are undoubtedly complicated, there seems to be some persistent factor in engineering & technology that results greater disparity than in other fields like medicine and law. It is unlikely that current participation levels are at their natural equilibrium; the gender distribution was more balanced in the past than it is today. The problem is not merely that women may "choose" not to enter (or that they choose to leave and not return) engineering, but that the status quo of the community might be actively driving them away. Engineering & tech have a reputation for allowing behaviors and personalities that would not be tolerated in other fields that are more gender balanced.

Finding the natural gender distribution in tech will require actively changing the culture to make it more inclusive and inviting, not merely removing explicit barriers to entry for women.

Yeah, I agree. Whatever the causes are, the best thing we can do is make the tech culture such that as many people as possible feel included as long they choose to be a part of it, so the decision to pursue it or not comes down to personal interest and nothing more.

Engineering and tech have a reputation for tolerating people (with "non-normal" characteristics), so we need active change to be more inclusive...

I hesitate to bring up extreme cases, but the relationship between social darwinism and the rise of the nazi party make many people, including myself, very hesitant to speak about differences in sex etc. Not because we deny their existence, but because we've seen how far large groups of uninformed electorate can be persuaded into supporting some scary stuff because of it. It's just a very tricky subject when it comes to the masses.

EDIT: Clarified to social darwinism from darwinism.

It's not the masses you need to be worried about, hiou. It wasn't the masses gassing people by the millions... it was the elites, who got a few people to go along with them. "The masses" organize poorly... it's the people who are smart enough to successfully do something with their bad idea, but not smart enough to see through the bad idea, that must be feared.

The deep-rooted fear of academia isn't that the masses may do something stupid with the idea of gender differences... it's the fear that they, the academics, will do something stupid. (Again. Although, not the same literal people, of course.)

Did you really manage to blame academics for the Holocaust in a mere four sentences? That's really impressive!

It's not just "academics". It's anyone who can take an idea and successfully run with it, without stopping to notice all the signs that are yelling at them "Stop! This isn't working as you expected!" Academia merely happens to have a large concentration of such people, for structural reasons. (The "ivory tower" is a real effect, and it is both a good thing because it permits concentration and focus, and a bad thing, because it begets people too stuck in their theories and smart enough to "explain away" anything, until it is much too late.)

This is not something "the masses" do, because "the masses" do not have the ability to successfully run with an idea and gather enough power to impose it.

It's not just the holocaust, either. There's a huge history of 20th-century "social engineering" that rather a lot of people would rather forget, because it pretty uniformly went badly. See also "eugenics" for another reason that academics are afraid to think too hard about how people may be different or how genes may determine things about people... and not entirely without reason. "The masses" did not impose eugenics. In fact a lot of eugenics had to be hidden from the masses.

With power comes the power to screw up. Academics have a lot of power. It would be strange if they'd never screwed up.

Academics have approximately zero power. This is the craziest conspiracy theory I've seen in a while, because it's just so obviously wrong. Oh yes, college professors need to be kept in check because otherwise they'll go out and kill all the Jews. WTF?

Go research where Lenin came from. Go research who did eugenics, and where they got their ideas from. Go research the origin of a lot of the Nazi figures and where their ideas came from. (Not just Hitler.)

Express all the humorous strawmen you like. How do you think these things happen? In the 20th century, the only bad social engineering event I can think of that could even remotely be considered the outgrowth of a broad movement of the masses is sort of Nazi-ism. Everything else was led by somebody with an idea from academia. "The masses" don't originate many ideas, and in the era of the all-powerful State (which the 20th century is firmly in), "the masses" don't run around committing genocide, or doing any of the things they may have done in previous social systems, because all that power is now reserved to the State.

And the State and academia have always been attached at the hip, as they are today. How else would it be? Do you think it's some sort of bizarre coincidence that the dominant ideology of academia today and the dominant ideology of the State are exactly the same? Of course they are... they're causally connected. (Where do the "technocrats" in technocracy come from? Certainly not the farm!)

As for this being "conspiracy" theory... no, it's just an understanding of how the world actually works. It may happen to explain this opinion of mine, but that's only because as a ground fact of the current world it explains lots of things. Academics wield power through the State. It's clear as daylight... it would be some sort of bizarre theory that they don't. What would that even look like?

Oh yes, the dominant ideology of academia is the same as that of the state, which is why academics universally agree that anthropogenic global warming is real while the government can't even agree on whether climate is changing at all, let alone the cause. This must be why universities are chronically underfunded and professors are constantly scrambling for their next research grant. This must be why roughly nobody in the top levels of government has so much as a PhD. The tight link between the two explains why governments persist in outlawing drugs even though research shows it's more effective to legalize them. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

Looks to me like Lenin graduated from university but didn't go anywhere near an advanced degree. I'm not sure which Nazis you're referring to but I'm not aware of a particularly large number of university professors among the ranks of the top Nazis.

I agree with mikeash on this. It's not the academics that are committing crimes. And anyway, I'm tired of people telling me whether a certain idea is right or wrong. I just want to hear the evidence, and I think that's how most "academics" are.

"Academics have approximately zero power."

Sure, academic don't rove about with black helicopters and guns, but academia has the ear of industry, politics and government for good reason. Applied academics has the ability to predict outcomes, grow economies, win wars and generate massive revenues.

But it also has the ability to go horribly wrong. It's undeniable that Nazi eugenicists modeled their ideology after the American eugenics movement, encouraged by American academics and NGOs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_eugenics#Origins_in_the_w...

Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. Even a bad idea.

Some academics have the ear of powerful people. Some don't. Like in any other field.

Academia tends to be where far-out ideas come from, just because it's an environment that encourages it. Some of those ideas will be discovered by people in power and used to shape policy. Other will not. To blame academia for this or point to this process as evidence that academics are powerful seems an awful lot like being afraid of language because language can be used to convince people to do bad things.

I agree. Language is just a form of communication, it can be used or misused.

It would be a fiction to downplay the power of academics in modern society. Academics has the power to mold and frame the minds of the next generation of leaders, alter government policy and to influence an entire populace from childhood.

I see your point that academics has been demonized at times, however I think it's more appropriate to judge it on outcomes.

You don't understand, recognizing sex differences leads to industrial-scale mass murder, just like it has in every human society that has ever recognized sex differences. Wake up sheeple!

No No No! I thought it was NOT recognizing sex differences that leads to industrial scale mass murder!

Now I'm confused. Not really, because this thread is nonsense -- confirmation bias mixed with absurdity.

I think clear-headed thinking along with a moral foundation of compassion for everyone is going to work out better in the long-run than attempting to skirt around possible truths deemed 'dangerous'.

What is the relationship between darwinism (what a ridiculous term, by the way) and the rise of the Nazis?

I think they're talking about social darwinism. The idea that "survival of the fittest" can be naively applied to politics is a pretty easy way to convince people to commit genocide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism

It appears you're right. However, I find it puzzling that it's mentioned here, since the gulf between "there are some genetic differences between the sexes" and "let's attempt to improve the human gene pool by murdering any group we find displeasing" is so great that they barely have any relationship at all.

There's also the eugenicist argument that the undesirables shouldn't be permitted to procreate.

For example, Margaret Sanger didn't want to round up people and exterminate them but she did want to keep them from reproducing.

Given that procreation requires one man and one woman to participate, it's going to be really hard to practice eugenics based on genetic differences between the sexes.

Did you miss China during the "one-child" policy era[1]?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#Effect_on_inf...

Sex-selective abortion is not eugenics. Nobody with even the most cursory understanding of human reproduction thinks that you'll permanently alter the gene pool by selecting one sex over another. This is totally unrelated, and I'm rather sad that I managed to get not one but two replies bringing it up, as if it were somehow relevant. The quality of this discussion is just astonishingly bad.

Beside selective abortion and embryo selection, it's already possible to derive gametes of both kinds from stem cells of arbitrary sex in mice, and it will most likely be possible to do the same with human cells soon.

Mice that descend from two males or two females have already been created in the lab.

You still need wombs, but they can be grafted and will probably be farmed from stem cells in the future too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uterus_transplantation#First_s...

Have you ever heard of sex-selective abortions?

It's not about murdering people. The problem is, if you support policies that disadvantage people based on their genetics, you can gradually dehumanize those people. The (real) disadvantages of that outweigh the (supposed) advantages.

But if you are disadvantaging people that have objectively inferior genetics? Do you actually lose anything? Otherwise, are those people taking advantage of medical advances that prevent their deficiencies from being fatal?

What does "objectively inferior" mean?

Celiacs, for instance, seem to be a group that in previous generations succumbed to their condition, if not directly than indirectly because of general unfitness. To be honest, as a survivor of childhood lymphoma, I ought to be dead, had I been born even 25 years earlier. I question whether my genetics have enough offsetting benefits to counter that predisposition to life-threatening cancer for any of my offspring.

Advanced medical care is part of the environment in a first-world country now. I'm sure a fish would think us genetically inferior for our dependence on air to live, but we don't see it that way. A dependence on advanced medical care is ultimately no different. Assuming civilization doesn't collapse, I'd expect various dependencies on medical treatment to gradually arise in the population, but there's nothing objectively wrong with that.

OK, but the gulf between that and "there is some genetic differences between the sexes" is still so large that you'd need a powerful telescope to see from one to the other.

As much as I disagree with your overall viewpoints, I'll agree on this one you have here. For a lot of individuals, the gap that you mention is huge such as to not have an immediate, explicit effect, and for one particular reason:

Something as simple as validating and completely "accepting" the notion that "there is[sic] some genetic differences between the sexes" requires individuals to throw out entire swathes of subsequent ideas/notions/etc, if we were to be logical about things. I.e. You now have "Men and women are equal but ..." or "Men and women are equal except when...", instead of the pure and logically consistent "Men and women are equal".

If you ask me, the entire thing (sex-differences topic) is starting to smell full of tiny errors and corner-cases. Perhaps we're on the verge of a paradigm shift happening once people clarify their ideas, without exceptions and acceptable-errors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift

Equality isn't about people being literally identical. Nobody actually believes that. There are troubling facts like how men as a rule have a really hard time becoming pregnant that nobody denies.

Equality is about equal treatment. It's about judging the individual on their own merits, not some group they happen to belong to. "Men and women are equal" doesn't mean women are equally muscular and men can have babies. It means that when writing a law, selecting an employee, or counting a vote, you don't change your approach based on whether the person is a man or a woman.

There is nothing wrong with saying, for example, most of our warehouse workers are men because more men are able to do the heavy lifting required. There's nothing unequal about that. What equality demands is that you never say, I will not consider you for a warehouse job, regardless of your actual strength, because you are a woman and all women are too weak for it.

It's not actually that complicated IMO.

And people with sexist and racist tendencies have those telescopes glued to their face.

And (at approximately same time) rejection of darwinism has stopped soviet regime from inducing famines, using slave labour and purges. Except it did not.

4th comment from the top of the thread and we've already reached Godwin's Law.

Have you ever wondered how the electorate becomes uninformed? Certain information is declared off-limits because of what it might make people think or do.

Don't read below the parent comment, the thread has devolved into an argument about Nazis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

> Unfortunately there isn't much room for this middle ground. People who want to acknowledge sex difference want to use sex as a filter, e.g. "no women in combat roles." People who want to give everybody a chance also want to even things out, e.g. "Allow women in combat roles, and lower the standards for women so they have just as much of a chance as men have."

I've literally never heard the latter argument made by any proponent of women in combat roles. The closest I've seen is calls for the requirements for certain combat roles to be reviewed for appropriateness to the real requirements of the specific role; most proponents of relaxing blanket restrictions on women in combat roles I've heard will explicitly accept that, for most roles, any reasonable set of standards will still make it easier for men.

Where have all the different standards for men and women in the armed forces come from, then? The Army and Navy both have different physical fitness standards for men and women. I didn't look up other branches but I don't expect them to be any different. I wouldn't expect there to be a big push for different standards because that's already where things are now.

> Where have all the different standards for men and women in the armed forces come from, then?

They came when women were first admitted to the armed forces at all, and are contemporaneous with the rules barring them from combat roles. They are not the product of pressure to include them in combat roles.

Roles (including, but not, AFAIK, limited to, combat roles) within the military can have physical standards above the minimum standard for the branch of service, and no one that I know of that has argued for removing the restriction on women serving in combat roles has advocated against gender-blind role-specific standards.

There are two separate reasons for fitness standards.

The first is the one you're probably thinking of - you need to be so strong or so fast in order to do your job.

The second is more subtle, along the lines of "we want soldiers to have the discipline and willingness to follow rules that physical fitness signals." This is why they want a drone pilot, for example, to meet physical fitness standards.

Really, the military should have three fitness standards: one for all male soldiers, one for all female soldiers, and another for the soldier's specific speciality.

That really is the crux of the matter. Everyone should be given an equal chance with no prejudice, and then if population differences still emerge, that's OK.

Yup. One of the things that annoys me most about prejudice and such is that it is inefficient. For a well-run and rich (economically, socially) civilization, we ideally want everyone to excel to the best of their best ability. To find the best use for everyone's talents. We want everyone to find their own niche, irrespective of their gender, race, orientation, etc.

Actually, I would say the vast majority of people not currently writing a post on an internet forum fall in some middle ground there. Like, the vast, vast majority.

Yes, but more and more, courts and laws try to enforce "equal outcomes" and not "equal opportunity."

Where do they do that? Even the notorious punching bag of Affirmative Action is intended to make up for prior bias, not force equal outcomes regardless of all merit. (Whether it actually does that is another question, but "try to enforce" is all about intent.)

Let's start with this NYTimes report about allegations of bias on teacher's qualification tests, because of the disparity in results:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/nyregion/questions-of-bias...

You probably assume that the test is unbiased unless proven otherwise, and that any discrepancy is therefore likely to be actual differences in the underlying populations. The court is merely assuming the opposite: that discrepancies in the test results are a result of bias in the test itself unless proven otherwise.

They aren't trying to force equal outcomes, they're trying to make sure that if a test produces worse results for minorities then it had better be because of actual differences in the population and not subtle bias in the test.

There's a slightly stronger argument to be made in this space. Signs of technical competence "screens off" the effect of gender. That is, once you've had that five-minute conversation with someone, learning their gender doesn't give you any additional information about their engineering competence.

Actually, no. When you pick out an individual there's still a 60% chance than one is better than the other given no other information than their sex. That's how statistics works.

But I agree that it's better not to make the prejudgement at all. The problem is that there are many things that are true in the aggregate but we can't acknowledge them because we are scared of demotivating people. Is that the best we can do?

That is not how statistics works. This is how you reverse a conditional probability (Bayes's Rule):

  P(B|A) = P(A|B) * P(B) / P(A)

If A is "female" and ~A is "male", and B is "good engineer", then what we know , including ancestor post's assumption, is this:

  P(A|B) = 0.4 (the population of known-good engineers is 40% female)
  P(A) = 0.5 (the population as a whole is 50% female)

We can further assume, arbitrarily, that P(B) = 0.02 (one in every fifty people make good engineers). So the likelihood that a person is a good engineer given that they are female is P(B|A).

  P(B|A) = 0.4 * 0.02 / 0.5 = 0.016
  P(B|~A) = 0.6 * 0.02 / 0.5 = 0.024

What we learn from this is that sex is not a good screening criterion for finding good engineers. You realize an advantage of only 0.8%, not 60%.

This also isn't how statistics works.

> We can further assume, arbitrarily, that P(B) = 0.02 (one in every fifty people make good engineers). So the likelihood that a person is a good engineer given that they are female is P(B|A).

  > P(B|A) = 0.4 * 0.02 / 0.5 = 0.016
  > P(B|~A) = 0.6 * 0.02 / 0.5 = 0.024

> What we learn from this is that sex is not a good screening criterion for finding good engineers. You realize an advantage of only 0.8%, not 60%.

if you multiply two numbers (here 0.4 and 0.6) by the same constant (here 0.02 / 0.5) you can't then say "You realize an advantage of only 0.8%, not 60%"... 0.016/0.024 == 40/60.

Re: OP's point ("When you pick out an individual there's still a 60% chance than one is better than the other given no other information than their sex"), I agree that's wrong, but not for the reason given. He's not reversing a conditional probability, but rather asking a question about the unconditional probability (the base rate), so the 60/40 conditional information is not relevant.

If you pick two random individuals, one male and one female, and the IQ average of the two groups is equal (roughly true, from the article), the chance that one has a higher IQ than the other is 50%.

  julia> sum([randn() > (randn() * 10) for i=1:1_000_000])
  499884

IE assuming that men have 10x the IQ variance, the variance makes literally no difference when comparing two random people.

Your post looks like a non-sequitur to me. But for the sake of math...

For an arbitrary variance multiplier of 10 (std. dev. sqrt(10)), there are no non-imaginary solutions for a high-pass threshold where you can achieve a 60:40 split between two populations that have the same median.

You can get about a 58:42 split, putting your threshold a bit below the common median. But to achieve a 60:40 split, you need one population to have 25 times the variance, or for the populations to have different medians. Above that, you have two possible real solutions for the threshold value.

You can try it yourself, and hopefully my math is correct for this one:

  60/40 * erfc( x / sqrt(2))/2 = erfc( sqrt( variance_ratio ) * x / sqrt(2))/2

Since the threshold value equates to a different standard deviation for each population, you can say with some certainty that given the knowledge of which population a person is in, there is a different probability that person is above the threshold value, which works out to be 60% and 40%, respectively. But that's just begging the question, since those are the same numbers you used to work out the threshold value, and you still had to assume values for the medians and variances of both populations.

I'm super confused by this reply. The article says that the stddev of the distribution of male IQ is larger than the stddev of the distribution for female IQ, and also seems to state the mean and median are equal. GGP threw out 60/40 as their believed split of men to women being good engineers. I took this to mean that GGP was saying he believed engineering talent to be independent of gender when IQ was present, and that engineering required a higher than average IQ. More formally:

  P(good engineer | IQ) * P(IQ | gender) == P(good engineer | gender)

In that model the 60/40 split comes from a conditional distribution of gender given an IQ above some threshold. So something like:

  julia> women = sum([randn() > 1 for i=1:10_000_000])
  julia> men = sum([(randn() * 2) > 1 for i=1:10_000_000])
  julia> women / (women + men)
  0.3395449535000696

Which isn't exactly 60/40, but is fairly close. It says that [iff the 60/40 split is true], the stddev difference needed is less than 2x.

If you prefer exact math, the ratio above is

  erfc(1/sqrt(2)) / (erfc(1 / (2 * sqrt(2))) + erfc(1 / sqrt(2))) =~ 0.339593

and the exact solution for a 60/40 split is

  1 / (sqrt(2) * inverseerfc((3/2) * erfc(1/sqrt(2)))) =~ 1.4

Though FWIW I find the simulation version more intuitive (likely because of a misspent youth programming rather than a misspent youth mathing :p).

Can you explain the model you were using to motivate the mean vs median calculation? I feel like I'm missing something interesting.

Easy to explain. I made a mistake in my math. The equation I needed to solve was

  40/60 * erfc( x / sqrt(2))/2 = erfc( sqrt( variance_ratio ) * x / sqrt(2))/2

Thanks for presenting this so clearly. However, note that, as you show in this scenario, males are, on a relative basis, 50% more likely than females to be good engineers, knowing nothing else about them other than gender (P(B|~A) = 1.5 * P(B|A)). While the absolute probabilities (and difference in probabilities) are small, the relative improvement in classification error rate attributable to knowing the person's gender could very well mean that gender is still a useful feature to include (among many others! it's not so useful on its own, as you note) in a classifier for good engineers.

If you were writing an automated Bayesian classifier to find good engineers, males would get one measly additional point towards the refer-to-a-human threshold.

In contrast, there are many other hypothetical rules that would be better predictors. Liking Star Wars, 4 points. Star Trek, 9 points. Knowing how much mana a Lightning Bolt costs, 6 points. Owning a 3-wolf shirt, 2 points. Being left-handed, 15 points. Reading HN, 40 points.

Anything you can glean statistically from a population of known-good engineers can be transformed into Bayesian classifier rules, in exactly the same way you can predict an e-mail is spam if it has certain strings in it.

But even including the one point for knowing the sex could be considered sex discrimination, even though it would be totally supported by the math. But since you likely want your threshold value to be high enough to weed out false positives, while still low enough to avoid false negatives, that one point rule is practically a waste of time. The cases where that one point makes a difference will be just those people who barely meet the threshold. If you have two people who are only just barely good enough to be considered good engineers, and otherwise exactly the same, the statistical argument says to prefer the male.

I have never met anyone that is content to hire engineers who are likely to be only barely adequate in preference to those who are likely much better. That hypothetical person is the only one who might care about male or female. Everyone else will be looking for the highest point totals, gained from criteria that are better predictors.

This assumes it's independent of other data.

If your classifier also knows that an applicant has a CS degree and hypothetically a higher percentage of females with CS degrees than males with CS degrees are talented. Then the relationship might reverse.

The point is stats about populations often fail to carry over to sub populations.

PS: This flip is actually fairly common in the face of discrimination. Basically, you would expect the first hundred female fighter pilots to be way above average.

There are three hypotheses:

1. The selection criteria are the same for different populations, and the there are significant statistical differences in the populations that may lead to the observed result.

2. The selection criteria are the same for different populations, and random noise produced the observed result.

3. The selection criteria are different for different populations.

You cannot assert one without ruling out the others.

In the fighter pilot case, I imagine that it would be easy to disprove #1 and #2. Not all cases of discrimination are so obvious that there are no non-imaginary solutions to the equations that conform to the assumptions of the hypothesis.

It makes some people uncomfortable to face the idea that in order to prove discrimination is occurring, they must first employ accurate statistics for partitioned populations, which may be unflattering to one or more of the partitioned groups. You can't really say "because race" or "because sex" or "because disability" with certainty over "because selection-relevant attribute" using a statistical argument without showing the statistics. But those who attempt to gather accurate statistics are often accused of something-ism and vilified just because some people don't like the results.

Some people just want to work without constantly watching their backs and covering their asses. And that's why we assume independence without having ironclad proof that is also easily understood by the general public. If you're going to suggest that there is something intrinsic to femaleness that causally links to less engineering skill, you had better have a flawless data set with mathematically perfect analysis, and then also invent a psychological "out" which absolves anyone of guilt for relying on the results.

This is why all HR departments suck. Most of their job is covering someone else's ass, and if they choose to use statistics, they must be both factually correct and politically correct.

I don't understand why you are taking the advantage between the two options to be the difference between their probabilities, rather than the ratio. If I am 2% successful at X and you are only 1% successful, I am 0.02/0.01 = twice as successful as you, not 0.02-0.01 = 1% more successful.

As dlss has explained, it doesn't matter what constant you multiply by, the ratio is the same.

You are taking the ratio of P(B|~A) over P(B|A):

  P(A) = P(~A) = 0.5
  P(B|~A) / P(B|A) = ( P(~A|B) * P(B) / P(~A)) / ( P(A|B) * P(B) / P(A))
  = P(~A|B) / P(A|B)
  = ( 1 - P(A|B)) / P(A|B)

I don't understand why you consider this to be a meaningful number. It isn't even a probability any more; it's just a dimensionless ratio.

In your example, your result is 2. That alone tells me it cannot be a probability, as those numbers are restricted to the domain from zero to one.

If you partition the population by sex, the probability of randomly selecting a good engineer from the all-male group is only 0.8% higher than picking from the all-female group. That is the advantage you realize by selecting that criterion for your partition. If you are taking a ratio of conditional probabilities, you are no longer partitioning the probability space by that condition.

Yup, "insignificant" is the wrong word, since it has a specific meaning in statistics, and for that meaning, my paragraph is definitely wrong. How about if I change that word: "But at an individual level, that difference becomes trivial."

I get what you mean, regardless of wording. People should be seen as individuals. I don't know how we can be blind to aggregate differences enough to not be perturbed when we have unequal outcomes but not so cognizant of them that we demotivate people.

But as I write this, I'm arriving at an answer: we need to recognize that people are making choices based upon who they are and what they like.

As I have read this thread, I keep coming back to how we measure competence and ability.

For example, at one point in history our IQ tests included questions based on baseball rules. So someone taking the test that didn't know the rules of baseball couldn't do well – regardless of their mathematical or logical ability, i.e. what the question was supposedly measuring.

Along those lines, I would strongly:

- recommend listening to the Hanselminutes episode on Women in Technology in the Muslim World (http://hanselminutes.com/203/women-in-technology-in-the-musl...)

- remind people that the first programmer was Ada Lovelace, and computers used to be actual people and mostly female (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer) & suggest reading some of the reasons this changed (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programmin...)

In other words, culture can strongly impact both perceptions of ability and measurements of ability, as well as impacting the equitable training and opportunity that people are afforded. I suspect that most differences in most fields are not actual sex differences (i.e. biological), but in fact are social differences based on gender (i.e. cultural based on a person's gender identity).

I recently took an artificial intelligence class that required writing an agent to answer non-verbal IQ test questions. One of the greatest challenges was that some of the questions had ambiguous answers. For example, an axial symmetry in the example frame could be reproduced with either a rotation or a mirror operation in the output frame, and both options were available as candidate solutions.

Naturally, the question came up: how do we define the "right" answer when there are multiple valid choices? As it turns out, the folks who write the test determine the correct answer to these types of question based on the most common response from test takers who get the highest scores on non-ambiguous questions. The thinking goes that if folks who get most of the other questions right largely agree about a preference for one answer over the other, that must be the most correct answer.

The most interesting part of that discussion to me was when a classmate observed that we use human intelligence as a baseline for measuring human intelligence, and then marvel at the extent of our own intelligence; if a machine used more sophisticated logic than a human was capable of to choose a different answer, we would look down on the machine for being less intelligent than man. It reminded me very much of Plato and the shadows in the cave.

You’re trying to redefine words out of context.

Significant is often used in science to mean large enough to be concerned with. So, a 1% chance of death tomorrow is a significant chance of death tomorrow.

Height is a good example to explain this with.

Everyone knows men are taller than women on average, and that a lot of women are taller than a lot of men.

I'm a female computer scientist / developer, and after my experience both online, at school, and at work, I would really just rather ignore it. I went to a college with 4:1 ratio of male to female.

I've had periods in my life where I felt like I was the beautiful princess at the school, and periods where I feel like a somewhat disfigured monster with an average intellect. It really sucks when culture places so much emphasis on appearance, and I don't have that when I engage in dialogue and activity online.

The fact that I've been able to think about this since I was maybe 14 years old, on a hypothetical and applicative level, shows that there is more that varies to predicting individual differences than what these tests measure, and what causes are inferred, as the act of measuring may change the outcome. Males may take more risks because culture rewards them if they do, supposedly, and I as a female have sought stability, predictability and consistency in my education. When people are trying very hard to either sleep with you, hit on you, or even screw with you (because for some reason, your existence bothers them), it's very hard to know whether you are learning the truth, or whether the truth has been distorted, made easier to swallow, or prepackaged otherwise, because of your teachers' and classmates' perceptive biases.

I take a lot of risks in learning. I try to avoid taking those risks in real life, because while at one point, I did, I found myself on the precipice of losing almost everything.

I agree with you wholeheartedly, that the individual is different from the aggregate. But even myself, I am a hypocrite, because these are cynical inferences I made along the way, about my education, while I was receiving it. And I made those inferences mostly from having a behind the curtain peek into boys clubs, online. I was judging my classmates and peers by assholes on the internet, and that really isn't right, but neither is it right to assume that a person fits on the distributive curve of which they can be categorized into, based on a very small subselection of data.

Thinking about this has led me to the conclusion, that I really don't know a lot of things, and it seems neither does anyone else. Every point in time can be as unpredictable as infinity. People make so many assumptions about what is stuffed up in other people's heads, what guides how they think, what they do with that knowledge, how it directs them, and the resulting thoughts, the determination of envisioning, assisting, and planning the life paths of others.

My greatest comfort level is being an anonymous blob with no face, on the internet, where I learn a little bit of haskell here and there, and maybe find some elegant nuance and subtlety in code, computational theory, mathematics, philosophy. It's a bit hypocritical for me to share my gender willingly, over and over, but at this rate, I go through probably hundreds of aliases in a year.

Thank you though, for clarifying an important point concisely. The last time sex differences came up on a forum, I don't remember feeling quite so calm.

A cousin of mine with a high IQ (TNS level) and who would be categorized as a 'cute blond' expressed similar laments. Moderately sociable as a kid, reasonably well-heeled, one who loved spending most of her time devouring science and math tomes, conducted experiments on her own; an individual. Then adolescence hit coupled with menarche and amplified social pressure to 'fit in' which caused her sense of strong individualization to wane. In late teens she talked to me about majoring in law or sociology and I questioned: 'is that YOU?' What followed was a long diatribe, de rerum natura, which had the earmarks of a 'something' being repressed. Using salient observations like those opined by Marilyn vos Savant in her old 'ask Marilyn' column it was conceded that individualization and mutualization are sustainable while open-end charity with no sense of culturally enforced mutualization is fatally maladaptive, given received human nature. And the old social dictates evolved for survival in times prior to the advent of modern medicine were just so THEN but this is NOW. And the great seminal inventors and scientists of the late 19th century, almost all of whom were male, were individualists by temperament who while developing their ideas would partition themselves off from the vicissitudes of life for the duration. That exchange was capped-off with a paraphrase of an extract from the 'Bulfinch's Mythology' section 'Glaucus and Scylla'. Glaucus was a river god who developed the hots for a maiden called Scylla, who scorned his every approach. Retreating in to sulk mode he was given a pep talk by a mentor goddess Circe (where the word cereal comes from). To paraphrase: Recognize and objectify your worth. Then realize you are someone to be sought after rather than one who seeks in vain. Be willing to meet people half way. But if they spurn you, spurn them! Why should they disturb your Wa? (Wa = inner harmony (jp); we were both into Japanese and anime). In any event, my cousin segued back into math and IT, is herself, and suffers no fools lightly (IE, abides no BS).

Right. You have to make your laws and policies blind to difference, even though they're necessarily operating at the aggregate level where there are differences, so that individuals don't suffer. An interesting example where willfully disregarding statistics is actually beneficial.

Having lived through so much of the polictically correct conditioning about equality of everybody I became pretty numb to it. Then having a child and seeing the stark difference between play habits of boys and girls made me think about it again. Anecdotal, of course, although consistent with many other people's anecdotes, which starts to look like data after a while.

Check out the work by Simon Baron Cohen at Cambridge, which includes studies on newborns showing clear differences between genders. http://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/godis/sex.pdf

Also check out the work of John Money, who popularised the concept of 'gender as a social construct', and wrecked the life of a young man whose penis had been destroyed by trying to raise him as a girl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer.

Yes, indeed.

If anyone ever fails us to understand how blind spots in our perception and cognition work, one of the best examples is to contrast the intensity of calls for equal treatment for the sexes with the fact that up to 80% by region of American baby boys [1] get a piece of their sexual organs removed shortly after birth.

Moreover, we even allow Mohels to suck the baby's penis clean and have a celebratory meal afterward, called a Seudat Mitzvah [2]. And the fact that babies sometimes contract herpes and die from it [3] doesn't stop it.

So that's a hell of a blind spot, although I won't say it's just academics with power, it's numerous institutions including the religious ones, the corporate ones and even outlaw institutions. The evil that happens to people is the accumulation of all the mundane evil people in institutions do to protect themselves.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_circumcision#/me...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brit_milah

[3] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2304793/Two-babies-s...

(currently finishing Masters in Methodology/Statistics in Psychology) There is evidence of inter-sex differences (and in many areas girls are at advantage), but the provably innate part is small, and the intra-group variance coming from other factors (that may include elements of culture) is much bigger. This allows for conclusions on population, not individual level. On a related note, affirmative action programs seem to work to societies benefit.

Another comment that phrased it well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9845165

And absolutely regardless of John Money being misguided and vilified (I don't think I even heard of him before recent Catholic backlash), gender is a legitimate and in depth academic topic.

> And absolutely regardless of John Money being misguided and vilified

I just saw this. It worried me that you're apparently studying psychology but consider someone who abused a child to prove a theory to be 'vilified'.

Yes, I understand that the means may differ significantly but the variances are fairly large so there is lots of overlap between sexes, just as the article linked by OP discusses. Although, there are many characteristics and they all aren't going to exhibit the same spreads. I wonder if some have significantly smaller variances. The characteristic I keep noticing is how rough young boys are when they play compared to young girls. My small sample shows a very tight variance; young girls are much softer in their play compared to boys. Is that cultural conditioning at such a young age?

> gender is a cultural construct

Trans people such as myself are proof that gender is not a social construct.

In my experience, the nastiest transphobes are the ones who believe gender is a social construct. They're called TERFs. They can't wrap their minds around the fact that we prove their pet theories wrong, so they stalk, harass, and doxx us.

Some aspects of gender expression are social constructs, but certainly hard-coded gender identity is real. This is a spectrum, and there are many people who don't identify as either gender, but somewhere between. You don't have to be a TERF to say that something as vague as "science ability" can't possibly be measurably linked to sex or gender. (one of my children is transmasculine, but he also likes to paint his nails and wear glitter. we refuse to assign him any sort of gender expression box, and still respect that he is a boy).

> TERFs

Despite knowing a couple trans people, I'd never seen this term that I recall. Some very interesting reading out there; hard to wrap one's mind around... but worth the effort.

I also got to read about intersectionality for the first time. There are aspects of this I've acknowledged for a long time, just didn't know a word existed for it.

SJWs in general are getting a bad rap from many corners now, and I think some of that is what I'd call a 'natural correction'. When a critical mass of people gets involved with anything, a few inevitably fail to understand alternate perspectives enough to consider how those views might harmonize with their own (due to rabbit holes of dogmatism, subconscious bias, inexperience, stubbornness or whatever else).

To me, it so very often seems to come back to one simple thing-- have you tried putting yourself in your neighbor's shoes lately?

Stalking, harassing and doxxing is indefensible, but not being able to wrap one's head around gender is understandable I think. Often people want, whether trans or not, to express their gender in terms of constructs like name, language, manner of dress etc which are clearly social (sometimes clearly invented in the last 100 years). We have no easy way of deciding how these seemingly superficial things relate to underlying gender.

Trying to explain to a girl who's never seen a kilt why you're "dressed like a girl" is a great exercise for anyone who thinks gender isn't at all a social construct.

Like many things, gender is a mix of both. It's an immutable core wrapped in various social and cultural markers we've come to associate with "masculine" and "feminine". And of course the range of possible cores is more of a continuum than a simple binary flag (even though we like sorting all the arbitrary markers into two neat piles as if that really means anything).

Considering we still largely refused to acknowledge something as intuitively obvious[0] as non-right-handedness less than two generations ago, I wonder how long it will take until we've learned to deal with the fact that gender (and sexuality) is as idiosyncratic as nearly everything else about an individual's identity.

[0]: Seriously. People generally have two hands. Why on Earth should we assume that there's something special about the one that is dominant for most people? Good luck explaining gender and sexuality to a society that can't even imagine not everybody is strictly right-handed.

This is absolutely true. A few years ago the majority of Americans couldn't even wrap their heads around marriage equality.

Most still can't. It was because 5 people "made it so".

You need to check the latest poll results: http://www.gallup.com/poll/117328/marriage.aspx

> Trans people such as myself are proof that gender is not a social construct.

I don't think the existence of trans people proves anything, in either direction, about whether or not gender is a social construct.

We live in a gendered society. Pointing out that some social roles are completely arbitrary doesn't actually change anything. Gender is in the home, on television, on the radio, in books, on the internet, in schools, and in the streets. It's being taught and reinforced everywhere. I don't think anyone could possibly credibly claim to have independently derived gender from their own innate personal characteristics that they were born with and thus have proved that gender is a biological reality.

To assert gender is real because you feel some kind of way after being brainwashed your entire life is... well, I guess that's actually very common but I don't think it furthers any kind of understanding or suggests anything about the way things should be.

I support everyone's right to live their lives the way they need to... but gender is entirely about arbitrarily restricting and labeling people's behavior and I can't endorse it--I'd rather live in a world without labels where everyone is allowed the full range of human expression.

Perhaps you could explain how the existence of trans. people is proof that gender is not a social construct?

Because physical dysphoria is a thing.

Whenever I've heard a suggestion that I should just live as a feminine guy, it just makes me feel sick. Even in a world where no gender stereotypes existed, I wouldn't want to be male. I'd rather not live the rest of my life with a masculine face, body hair, a flat chest, male fat distribution, etc. My transition has nothing to do with social roles and everything to do with my body.

Before I transitioned, I actually had problems recognizing myself in the mirror. It wasn't until I'd been on hormones for half a year that I could actually remember my face.

Also, my own hobbies and interests are more androgynous than anything else, but I probably lean towards being more gender non-conforming as a girl than as a guy.

It is unclear to me as why it contradicts the social construct part of the gender. Maybe some people negates the physical difference between women and men, but I doubt that it is the majority of people that believe that the social part of the gender is socially constructed. I don't understand that the fact that you couldn't stand being in a man body (I'm sorry for that BTW and glad you "escaped") does not invalidate the belief that the gender side associated with pink and blue, or which kind of job is socially constructed.

That all sounds like sex stuff, not gender stuff.

Trans people don't have significantly different socialization than other people. Therefore, socialization is not the cause of gender identity.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-mad...

Yeah, it's long. It's worth it!

So can you explain what gender is, then?

I've always viewed gender & sex as being an issue of parts or lack of parts a human is born with, and gender is their sexual personality or preferences.

Do you believe there are specific (limited in quantity) genders?

Gender is the sex of the brain.

I always assumed it was defined by procreation - when we assign gender to individuals of a species - the females lay eggs/give birth, and the males fertilize them.

This breaks down in hermaphrodite creatures and creatures who change sex.

Hermaphrodites are both, creatures who change sex start as one gender and become another. I don't see a problem.

Why are these labels important to those who use them -- why bother with a "gender" noun and instead use a description of what your sexuality functions as?

I'm not sure who's doing the harassing: http://terfisaslur.com

That site is lies and propaganda run by a hate group.

"TERF" is no more of a slur than "Neo-Nazi" or "rapist", and all those groups are the scum of the earth.

There is no moral difference between a TERF and a member of Stormfront or a known rapist.

That's a pretty ridiculous claim. I'm clearly not going to convince you of anything, but for anyone following this thread you can read http://www.troubleandstrife.org/new-articles/you-are-killing... for what I found was a level-headed explanation of the divide between trans activists and the so called "TERF"s.

Not particularly surprising. Feminists in a general sense are usually pretty bad people. They espouse their gender over masculine and other genders.

It is akin to saying that the Black Panthers are good, when the KKK is bad. They're both bad.

Feminism == Masculinism == sex discrimination

What an ignorant comment. Feminism is directly responsible for women getting their rights, like abortion. Saying it is "just as bad as..." is a clueless claim. What wrongs has Masculinism ever corrected?

'Masculinism' has corrected almost all wrongs since time immemorial. It has caused many of the too.

While what you are saying is partial true, the picture of genetics vs nurture is much more complex. I would recommend a excellent lecture series at (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&index=1&list=PL4...) which goes into quite into depth about the subject.

For example, while there are clear differences at birth, nurture can permanent shutdown genes. Additionally a lot of activators for genes are triggered by mental thought process and the environment around individuals.

To make a car analogy, we could assume that faster cars are more often breaking the speed limit than slower cars, and we might very likely find this to be true in practice regardless of the actually speed limit. From there we need to be careful to conclude that its the fault of the car when a driver choses to ignore the law, or that just because the acceleration is faster and it is easier to drive fast in a fast car a person is not conscious in their choice.

Most of what we believe about gender is based on societal beliefs rather than biological reality. I am reminded about how high heels were worn by men in the past and the preferred colors for boys and girls (pink and blue) were switched. (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-did-girls-st...; http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21151350)

Our faulty assumptions become clear when viewing other societies. For example, in the former USSR, 58% of engineers were women. In China, 40% of engineers are women, where less than 47% of the population are women. The communist countries placed a greater emphasis on gender equality in workforce. Sharp differences between west and the east are evident in other occupations such as medicine.

In the study cited, the mean age of the babies (neonates) was 3 days. That's enough time for babies to be influenced by adult interactions. Babies have been shown to be handled differently by adults based on their gender. Female babies are spoken to more, whereas male babies are handled more.

In the study, a substantial number of babies exhibited behaviors associated with the other gender. I would resist talking about a real sexual dimorphism when gender is not determinative of social vs mechanical preference.

The communist countries placed a greater emphasis on gender equality in workforce.

They also give the individual very little choice in their future career, while the final assignment is based predominantly on (at least in the case of China) the outcome of a single test.

So while it differs from the American process, I don't think you can hold it up as a correct normative solution.

> I'm surprised to see this ranking so high on HN. Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time.

Indeed, it's such a taboo that it's brought up here every time the subject is discussed here.

Unless you would take all your information from radicalfeminist.com, I never saw a reputable news channel denying there would be differences between sexes. Actually, I see this meme of "Gender differences are taboo!" MUCH more often than I see the actual behavior so decried in actual action.

Deleted comment

I was implying a reputable one but I can see where the confusion could arise, so I edited my post to make it clear.

> Everyone should be able to pursue any career they want to, but there should be no surprise when you see gender disparities across different occupations.

Even the word "disparity" (instead of difference) assumes that there should be some sort of parity between sexes. And I use "sexes" because "gender" is likely incorrect in reference to genetics. Unless they find some genetic link to it, in which case a lot of arguments will need to cease.

Yeah the challenge is the way we attach value judgements to the different things genders tend (generalization) to be better at.

This is purely anecdotal, but in my extended family many members believed the "we're all the same" view. I was given whatever toys I wanted whether they were considered masculine or feminine. It challenged people to see me grow up and be obsessed with heavy machinery - something they obviously saw within a masculine stereotype.

EDIT: I'm male

I've noticed the same thing with kids close to me.

I wonder how much is (1) subconscious reinforcement of tradition or influences from outside the home.

> gender disparities across different occupations.

I guess it would depend on the occupation. For example, I don't see much difference between nurses and doctors in terms of something that could be quantified as a gender-specific preference. It seems to me that the idea of "nurses are women, doctors are men" came about more from the idea that women were "too stupid" to be doctors and that it was a "man's job." Even today many doctors look down on nurses (as 'below' them; people whose opinions don't matter), and men that decide to become nurses also face a uphill battle of social acceptance.

It has more to do with the pay disparity between nurses and doctors, rather than gender, these days.

While only 30% of active physicians in the US are female, the gender split among residents (entering the profession) is close to 50%/50%.

Well, it's not just doctors/nurses. You also have dentists/dental assistants, which in my anecdotal experience is pretty heavily a male/female divide.

I will comment, that it seems easier for women to move "up" than for men to move "down." It seems like there is more friction against male nurses/dental assistants than there is against women doctors/dentists.

Where do you think the "friction" comes from? The men themselves?

Honestly, men really should consider these fields. In SF, the median pay for a dental hygienist is almost as high as for a software developer, and median pay is actually higher for a registered nurse (again, in SF, this isn't the case nationally) [1]. Nursing and dental hygiene have less upside, but less age discrimination and better career stability.

If you'd like more career flexibility, would like to be able to work part time, step back from the career track to take care of kids, and get back into it later, dental hygiene and nursing are probably better than software development. This is particularly important if you'd like to be able to have kids and spend time with them, while keeping stable employment and/or not badly harming your future prospects of employment.

[1] US news "best jobs", drill down to pay by region, will provide a summary of BLS data.

>Even today many doctors look down on nurses (as 'below' them; people whose opinions don't matter)

Is that really about gender these days? As a patient, I see it that way too. But that's because the doctor has significantly more education and training.

I thought the 'there is no differences' thing was debunked completely?

There will always be warriors against everything who will claim gender is just conditioning or whatever and probsly get eyeballs and publishing as a result. Happily you can completely ignore all that and lead a happy and productive life knowing the gender you were born with has a big factor in determining what you choose to do in your life.

Is the percentage of women in STEM low in all STEM degrees in the US? I'm Spanish and math and chemistry usually have a 50/50 or >50% of women here. Not sure if those are considered STEM at all in the US.

Our social constructions heavily influence how "Men and women, on average, differ significantly on career choice, likes, dislikes, and motivation," (from grandparent comment). In Spain and Italy and Portugal, math occupies a very different social role than it does in the US. In particular, it's not seen as so thoroughly unfeminine. This is one reason there are so many fabulous women mathematicians from Spain, Italy, and Portugal, and why they stay there rather than moving to the US for academic positions.

I think the GP has a point but sort of a weak understanding of what people are selecting for. We change the characteristics we find most important about many jobs to make them fit the gender roles our society has. It's not the act/job alone, it's the role in society. In Malaysia being a programmer is a job that doesn't require mythical powers, so it's close to 50-50 in gender split. In Italy being a mathematician does not stereotypically require brilliance, Asperger's, or general social ineptitude, so it's ok for women. Being a schoolteacher in the US has shifted from a prestigious starter job for educated men who could keep discipline, "a stepping-stone on [the] way to careers in the church or the law" (colonial times, 1800s) to a job for nurturing women who love children (today) [1]. And we can look at computer science: women went from being the original "computers" and programmers to being... not suited to it (?). Right, not interested. For innate reasons.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/timeline.html

Yes math and chem are STEM. In my experience, women were found in greater percentages in the basic science and maths (required for pre-med) and in the life sciences which were geared more towards medical professions.

> I'm surprised to see this ranking so high on HN. Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time.

In all honesty, I see more consistent whining about 'feminism taking over' than I do actual gender politics in day-to-day HN.

> Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time.

No, its not. Just about everyone, on all sides of the gender issues debates expressly acknowledges that sex-correlated differences exist, though the nature, extent, invariability, and policy relevance of those differences is endlessly debated.

The idea that the existence of differences is a "taboo" is simply a strawman constructed by one side to pretend to be a victim of suppression and avoid meaningful engagement on specific issues.

> there should be no surprise when you see gender disparities across different occupations.

On the one hand, anyone that ignores/denies the influence of different hormones [1] on body and mind is simply ignorant. On the other hand you can question how relevant hormones can be to a deeply cultural concept as 'career choice'. On the one hand tiny differences can accumulate over a lifetime, but on the other hand tiny differences can also cancel out and its hard to say what it will add up to via so many layers of indirection.

Accepting the existence and influence of physical differences does not imply having to accept all cultural differences. Some may indeed result unavoidably from the physical differences, while others may be impossible to link to physical differences.

Given differences in the relation between men and women, and career preferences, across cultures, I suspect the distribution of men and women over careers is often dominated by contingent cultural factors. I definitely believe this is the case for STEM careers.

[1] As an example of an undeniable physical difference, not the defining difference

An excellent read is Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about The Emerging Science of Sex Differences.

http://amzn.to/1NKVQ6d

Both "Why Gender Matters" and the study linked in your parent are discussed rather critically here http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=261

Another great read is Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine.

http://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-D...

See this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9845263 for a criticism of Fine and "Delusions of Gender."

I was with you until here:

"it has nothing to do with whether they were giving dolls or cars as toddlers"

Either you're being hyperbolic in which case I can't really parse your comment because I don't know which points you're serious about, or you actually believe that there is no relationship between the specific toys children play with and their development, which ignores a massive body of reasonably well conducted research in developmental psychology.

>The current educational and political system is organized toward exclusively presenting the view that gender is a cultural construct and there are no differences between men and women other than plumbing.

I think it's the right political conclusion, even if the reasoning is questionable. Just because you could conduct research to root out differences in populations of females and males, it doesn't mean that you should. What's the point? It seems to be that these arguments are used to justify gender disparity in occupations, achievement, etc.

I like Dan Dennet's response to this question:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beKC_7rlTuw&feature=youtu.be...

> Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time.

The problem is that correlating things with sex (even when such a correlation seems apparent) is just as bad as correlating things with race, ethnicity, religion, age, index finger length, eye color, and pretty much anything else.

It disadvantages those in the arbitrarily-designated outgroup, and subjects everyone to the Fallacy of Composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition.

Which means that you're STILL ideally stuck on evaluating each person on an individual level, anyway.

Correlating things to something like blood serum testosterone level would make more sense to me, than an entire sex.

The reason that is important for group differences to be studied and known is because the group level is where discrimination (and accusations such) seem to be studied.

If someone wants to hire the tallest 50% of the population to be fruit pickers and fairly evaluates every member of the population resulting in a 90% male workforce, how can they defend themselves against accusations of discrimination? In such an instance, it would be important to understand the height differences in male and female populations.

What about the most intelligent 5% of the population being best suited for STEM fields? With fair evaluations would that result in even splits across sex (or race, for that matter)?

Even with self selection, people are going to select into roles they are best suited for.

Does the Jamacian ACTN3 gene variation result in more Olympic gold sprinters, or is it a result of racial discrimination?

Articles like this on HN and the interest in studying differences between different groups is at least partially a direct result of pressure and accusations of discrimination based on sex/race distributions of groups.

I agree, ideally evaluating each person should be done on an individual level. I also think evaluating issues of discrimination should be done on an individual level.

Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time.

I'd argue that race-based differences are even more taboo. But it's close.

> The current educational and political system is organized toward exclusively presenting the view that gender is a cultural construct and there are no differences between men and women other than plumbing.

Gender is, by current academic definition, a cultural construct, an identity. Sex, i.e. "plumbing", is the definition of the difference between biological men and women. People with trans operations do not deny their chromosomes, and I'm sure they'd be the first to assure you about the hormonal differences between the sexes.

The problem people are grappling with is ascribing identity assumptions based on sex. You haven't listened carefully enough to understand the difference between gender, sex, identity, etc.

> Men and women, on average, differ significantly

The linked article explicitly does not take any stance on that. What the article points out is that males are more extreme in their traits, eg. exceptionally tall or exceptionally short, which in no way means that there are average differences. Even if the deviation is different, the mean may be the same.

Not that I'm saying that those differences are or are not there, but to say that the current differences are entirely due to biological differences would seem a bit naive to me.

You managed to misquote BADLY the article to support your point.

The article opens stating that there are TWO types of gender differences, one, like Height (that you quoted wrongly) is when the mean changes.

The other (like IQ) the distribution changes.

Then the article focus on theorizing why that second type happens, and don't discuss the first (wisely for the author, the same website used to have other authors on the subject, and they were all fired after public outcry after focusing on the first type of differences).

No need to SHOUT to convey your message.

Indeed, I wasn't really trying to quote the article when I was talking about height, I just took a bad analogy on my own (certainly influenced by what I just read, but that's not the point). Sorry for the confusion.

hence, if you sample either tail of the distribution you get on the average more men than women. and sampling one of the tails is exactly what selective schools/companies/sports clubs/etc tend to do.

More extremes in males is true, but height was exactly one problem where the mean really deviates and the curve is pretty much the same. IQ was one where males have way more extremes than women.

I fully agree with this and often make this argument, usually to 100+ downvotes on reddit and elsewhere. My only addition would be that there's probably as much deviation within the genders as between them. But that doesn't make gender a meaningless thing. The frequency of those aspects is important too. Only, say, 10% of women are "butch" personality types but 90% of men are. So holding up a butch woman as an example and going "See, see gender is meaningless" is unconvincing.

I think eventually society will sober up and realize that when we talk about social aspects, more than likely we're talking about personal types. Certain ones simply exist with higher frequency per gender.

I feel like we're on this long path of migrating away from "default brain" assumptions made about race, nationality, gender, etc and will probably settle on something like the modern day understanding of personiality types. Its scary how well I fit the INTJ mold. The idea that I represent all men or am part of masculine culture is fairly ridiculous. Ladies, I find male ISTJ's and ESTJ's hard to deal with as well.

>>My only addition would be that there's probably as much deviation within the genders as between them.

If you read the article, it makes the point that there that there is FAR more deviation within the genders as between (averages of) them.

You're just posting your agenda here.

What's in dispute is that there has been any reasonable natural experiment that has had the power to show that women have any functional cognitive differences with men. This is due to 1) the influence of pervasive beliefs in both experimenters and subjects that women are inferior to men (in often contradictory ways with specifics that vary by culture and over time), and 2) the actions of both men and women who subscribe to those beliefs to punish women for deviating from them. These beliefs are part of a large corpus colloquially known as "common sense," which purport to describe what is "obvious" but tend to simply defend what daddy said from the communists at the university.

The Saudis believe that driving is physically and mentally harmful to women. Dr. Pangloss believes that everything is as it should be.

edit: In addition, I doubt that the study that took place in a bubble that excluded or properly controlled for the influence of overt sexism and anti-female suppression was a group of Scottish IQ tests from 1932. 21 year-old Scottish women had been allowed to vote for at least three years by then. Get with the program you nurturers!

edit2: And to go on forever about this, I'll say how shocked I am to discover that a class of people who were constrained to a certain narrow range of education in a certain narrow range of practical skills intended to lead them to a certain narrow range of outcomes have test scores that tend towards a more narrow range than people outside that class.

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