mklg1266

"In terms of objective reality this assumption is unwarranted. There are significant documented differences between the distributions of intellectual capabilities of genders including the higher variance in IQ for men and men's aptitude skew towards maths and away from language."

Are there? Cite some for me. And then explain why they mean there are fewer women in tech but not in other fields. Higher IQ variance means that there are more super geniuses and more mentally retarded men. You don't actually need to be a super genius to go into tech. Maybe to found a startup, though that's also a reach, but certainly not to go be a dev somewhere. And moreover, why do you assume that those differences are innate? Maybe they are, but there is also plenty of [uncited] evidence that suggests that many of those differences are learned.

I'm not assuming a priori that women are being screwed, but it mystifies me as to why this community tends to assume A) that the tech community is totally immune to societally constructed gender forces that have at some point affected pretty much everything else in the world and B) discrimination is the only bad thing in society that could be keeping women out of tech.

"It isn't as if it is a area that has ever been reputed as having a history of institution chauvinism."

…say what now? Maybe not like law/medicine did, but there's been plenty of chauvinism in tech.

"To me, the weight of evidence points more and more towards the differences in distributions of capabilities and preferences between genders playing a significant part in participation rates in tech. However much of an 'Inconvenient Likelihood' this may be for both the tech industry and many women, it shouldn't blind us to evaluating the evidence as objectively as possible."

What evidence? I'm very happy to evaluate the evidence objectively. But it seems so far that there's been very little evidence presented either way, and a common response then becomes "well, I don't see a problem, there must not be one!", despite the fact that A) this hasn't worked out as an explanation in the past B) there exist several societal factors we could point to that might explain the problem, if we bothered to think about it for two minutes instead of constructing some complicated and totally unfounded explanation based on evolution.

Instead of assuming that I'm a crazy and irrational feminist who cannot be convinced by facts, which is not the case, why not respond to the original argument I made, which was that our society conditions women to be afraid, which may explain why they're more risk averse?

"I'd like to ask why you imagine that in any field there would be equal numbers of men and women? Or indeed why there should be any reason beyond simple preference."

Listen: "Women are choosing not to as a matter of preference so there's nothing wrong" is a cop-out. I'll grant you that the reason for the lack of equality is "simple preference." Clearly, because if women "wanted" to do startups/tech, they would. There are no laws preventing them.

"More women like milk chocolate; more men like dark (pulled that one out my arse incidentally). Does it matter?"

Intrinsically? No, of course not. But if we start from the assumption that gender shouldn't matter, we would expect a distribution that cleaves pretty closely to the gender distribution in the population. The fact that that it's doesn't isn't necessarily bad per se, but it suggests that maybe something is going on that may be worth investigating a little further. To do otherwise is intellectually lazy.

It's totally possible that the discrepancy is completely innocent, or that there's some reasonable gender-based explanation that involves no negative cultural messages, discrimination, whatever, to explain the massive differences in the number of women and men who choose to go into tech. <snark>I suppose there's a first time for everything.</snark> I just haven't been convinced by any of the pat explanations so far. None of them have explained, for example, the relatively low number of women working for large, stable tech companies (some of the best employers in the world if you're looking for benefits and stability), nor why the relative percentage of women in tech has been dropping pretty consistently over the last 30 years (actually since the early days of computing, but whatever). The point of my original post was mostly that we should go farther than saying something simple like "Women are risk averse!" and ask, well, why? Because it's not totally out of the question that cultural forces are at work, and it might behoove us to at least think about them a little bit.

"There's a natural skew I think: if both men and women equally wanted to start families then more women would normally be able to than men (artificial insemination, one-night stand, stop using birth control, decide contrary to the male to not have an abortion, whatever). This leaves more men doing startups whether they prefer that to starting a family or not."

If it were that simple then tech/CS/startups should have a gender imbalance roughly equivalent to that of the rest of the working world.

In the past, simple, personality/preference/constitution-based explanations for gender discrepancies have proven false many times - women didn't have the constitutions to be doctors, women didn't have the temperament to be lawyers, etc etc - so I'm inclined to distrust this sort of explanation, at least initially. I'm not saying "Oh because it wasn't true that women just didn't want to do law and medicine it can't be true here.", or that we need 50-50 male/female representation or I'm burning my bra, or even that we should change anything or that anyone is suffering any overt injustice at the hands of anyone else. I'm just advocating for a little critical thought about our society/culture instead of just shrugging our shoulders and assuming that there's no problem.

"Conversely, men are less likely to attend college, are more likely to be unemployed, are more likely be injured in the course of employment, are more likely to be the victim of a violent crime, are more likely to be incarcerated, etc etc, every single day."

Yes. I never claimed otherwise. I was making an argument as to the cultural conditioning that might lead women to be, on average, more risk averse than men. This doesn't mean that bad things don't happen to men. The two statements, in fact, have nothing to do with one another.

"Just because there are inequities in one direction does not mean that there aren't also inequities in the opposite direction."

Yes. Again, I never claimed otherwise. Inequities are bad. That's my point. Inequities that disadvantage men are also bad and, had that been the subject of the conversation, I would have made that point too. However, we're not talking about inequities that apply to men, we're talking about a field in which there are demonstrably fewer women participating than men and we're asking why. I was arguing that first, we need to go beyond a conclusion that states "women are choosing not to do X, so it's not a problem", second, that women may be risk averse for cultural reasons that may be worth addressing, and finally, by extension, that it's insufficient to claim that so long as women are legally treated the same way as men the playing field is equal so we shouldn't worry about it.

In other words, I'm not sure what your point is.

Wow. Way to not pay attention.

It's not that Sorkin didn't "manufacture a prominent female character." It's that he manufactured lots of other things about the founding of Facebook, Harvard culture, and Zuckerberg's motivations that all lead to a movie in which women are, across the board, portrayed as stupid slutty airheads who exist solely to serve as prizes for the awesome hackers.

To choose some examples at random: much of Zuckerberg's motivation in the movie come from his bitterness over being dumped by a girlfriend (...a fabricated girlfriend), which led him to make a site to let male students compare the hotness of female students (...modified from real life: facemash compared both men and women; the objectification overtones were far less substantial), which led to blow jobs from personality-less groupies in bathrooms (I can't speak to that, but it would surprise me), while being jealous he couldn't get into to final clubs that featured naked girls dancing on tables, having been bussed in by those final clubs for that purpose (I don't know if Zuckerberg wanted to be in a final club, but I can tell you that the rest of that clause is pretty much entirely fabricated, except for maybe the existence of the bus, which is probably referring to the shuttle that runs between Wellesley college and Harvard square).

I don't have a problem with movies being fiction, I'm just a little confused as to why this story had to be fictionalized in such a glaringly misogynistic way, especially given that A) there's no evidence that Zuckerberg hates women and B) the story is pretty interesting on its own.

"Nowadays there aren't any barriers preventing women from taking these paths (quite the opposite, actually). It's simply that less women choose these routes."

Begging the question. As you point out, there are no laws or physical barriers preventing women in the US from doing just about anything, so their heavy relative underrepresentation means by definition they're choosing not to. The question is: why not? Choices aren't made in a vacuum. What is it about our culture and society that has led to the percentage of women in tech/computing to drop pretty much consistently since the field was invented while their numbers increase in many other formerly all-male professions?

You posit that women are observed to be more risk-averse, and that this explains why they avoid founding startups. Leaving aside whether this is true, I repeat my question: why?

(Tangentially, as I think someone else pointed out, the "women are biologically risk-averse" trope can only explain why women "choose" to not found startups, not why they "choose" to not work as a dev at a big tech company, for example, where the risk level is close to nil. Have you looked at the health benefits/maternity leave/termination policies at places like IBM or Microsoft?)

Everyone loves to triangulate complex evolutionary explanations to this kind of question, but a cultural argument is even simpler to make: women get paid less, are taken less seriously, are subject to glass ceilings, harassment, discrimination, have a higher probability of being raped, etc etc, every single day. Moreover, women are explicitly told from an early age not to dress too provocatively, never leave a drink unattended, never ever ever walk home alone at night. . .and that's leaving aside the more subtle cultural pressures that discourage them from the sciences. Women are at higher "risk" than men just by virtue of their gender, and they're reminded of this, with an implicit or explicit injunction to be careful, all the damned time. That might serve as a reasonable explanation for why they'd be more risk-averse, but is unfortunate in that it can't be shrugged aside with a trite evolutionary explanation.

Just because there are no laws preventing women from doing something does not mean that the playing field is equal.

Ignoring even Penelope Trunk's tendency to extrapolate from her experiences to the rest of the female world, the conclusion she's drawing doesn't actually follow from her own experiences. She says she's taking time away from her third startup to spend time with her children. Therefore women don't do startups because they want to have time with their children. What now? Wouldn't that suggest rather that women who want to do startups can do so and then have time for children afterwards?

Part of the issue is that the whole incentive structure in education is set up such that there is no relationship between tuition and either the cost or value of a degree; universities survive/succeed on brand/rank, not value provided. This is a reason that throwing more money into the Pell grant program, for example, will basically not help maintain college affordability, because schools have strong incentive to increase tuition annually, ahead of inflation. I'm trying to remember which article I read that described this problem (it might have been in the NYT), but as far as I remember it, basically: schools pick tuition by looking at what other schools charge and figuring out roughly what they can get away with. Schools have a strong disincentive to lower tuition, because their success depends almost entirely on their brand, their brand depends on their rank, and part of the US News ranking scheme looks at $$ (spent, nominally, but that's considered to be related to the amount taken in) per student, so charging less lowers school rank. They therefore charge exactly what A) everyone else is charging and B) what they think they can convince people to pay them, and people are willing to pay a lot of money for the prestige associated with a particular brand. The actual sticker price of a school therefore explicitly does not consider the actual cost of running a school or the value that the degree will offer.

Mentally translate all the comments about women on Digg into comments about black or hispanic people, and then imagine how you would feel about participating. I don't go to Digg because the "conversation" there makes my skin crawl. I am not the only woman I know who feels that way. Hopefully the rest of the world has begun to notice, too, but maybe that's wishful thinking.

Professors work. A lot. Maybe not the ancient tenured ones, and not all of them, but the majority. It is far from a 40-hour job. And in the hard sciences/engineering/computer science, they could definitely be making more money in industry.

I hate being a 20-something women. Everybody on the planet, from doctors to HN, feels the need to comment on the apparently glaring biological clock ticking over my head, and make assumptions about A) my happiness and B) my nefarious ulterior dating motives.

I will posit that there exist women who don't base their self-worth and happiness entirely on the approval and acceptance of a man. I will further posit that there are women who aren't married by 30 because they haven't met someone they want to marry yet and are totally OK with that.

Later first marriages are more likely to last anyway.

(And do men really want to be settled for? Like "sure I'll marry you; you're not totally horrible"?)