@Babli

I watched the videos you posted, the documentary was quite entertaining I have to say. It was really funny to see the social scientists squirm when presented with the studies. As someone remarked, social science will always be based on some theory of human nature, but why does it have to be based on theories that are couple of hundred years obsolete?

But that's not the point and if you're trying to convince me that men and women are biologically different, then you're barking up the wrong tree. I'm convinced. On a side note, I would recommend Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate as a thorough debunking of the blank slate-based theories.

Back to our discussion, the question is not whether men and women are biologically different, the question is rather, do biological differences account for the gap that we see in fields like software engineering or game development (or nursing). And, as I said before, I'm skeptical for several reasons.

First, the historical precedent. As I wrote before, every time women tried to enter a field, there was an outcry of protest, usually pointing out some biological differences and claiming that they prevent women from performing adequately. And so far, most of them (if not all) proven to be false. Which basically shows us that there are many possible ways of performing most jobs and conversely that it is pretty hard to convincingly connect any mental or personal trait with a job skill.

The second reason is pretty much what was mentioned by the Scottish evolutionary psychologist in the video you linked. For most (all?) traits there is a huge overlap between the sexes. It's not like each and every guy is a faster runner that all the women in the world. And the same goes for mental abilities and personality traits as well. Studies show that the performance gap between male and female long distance runners is approx. 11%. Interestingly enough, the differences shown in the Baron-Cohen study discussed in the video are actually in the similar range (~10% preference for faces in girls, ~20% preference for mobiles in boys).

So the question is if the differences seem to be roughly in the 15% range, why are certain fields almost exclusively male (or female)? Shouldn't we expect the similar range? Why are we getting a significantly larger differences?

One can expect a larger than predicted discrepancy in very exclusive, elite fields. If we're looking for the fastest 1000 runners in the population of 7 billion, they will likely be all men. However neither software engineering nor game development (or nursing) are that elite. So where does the difference come from?

If I were to speculate I would posit that the social nature of humans serves as an amplifier of innate differences. Once a majority in a neutral field gets established, it tends to get bigger, eventually creating and perpetuating the notion that the field is inherently male (or female). And then we get the situation like the game industry today. And that would also mean that we can reverse this process. If we manage to combat the associated social prejudice, we can narrow the gap to what's dictated by the biology. Which, if you ask me, is probably in the seemingly standard range of 20% or so.

The game industry still has a long way to go, it seems.

As far the other video goes, I'm not sure what's the outrage about. The notion that one has to stop and think before saying something does not strike me as an outlandish requirement. Not when applied to people older than 5 years of age anyway. Perhaps it is sad that a country has to pass laws to force its people to be polite, but oh well.

I guess we can argue the wisdom of legislating savoir vivre, but a demand that people are not assholes is reasonable in my book.

I consolidated (and somewhat mangled) the quotes here, I hope it's still readable.



First, about the wage gap. As far as I know this kind of statistics control for variables like this. So it's not likely that they conclude a wage gap exists by comparing the salary of a female janitor with a male CEO. To be entirely honest, controlling for variables is so standard that I didn't even check whether the Eurostat data does it. Any indication that it does not?

As far as my bloody business is concerned, I wasn't asking for a disclosure, I was merely proposing that whoever thinks a 9% gap is not a problem should not have any difficulty parting with 9% of their yearly income (a month's worth, roughly). So instead of information I was hoping to receive some cold, hard cash. I could use it.

And finally, I'm not advocating any kind of quota here. I am however tempted to ask questions. If a company hires based on merit alone, why the results are so overwhelmingly male?

Which leads us to...





In other words, one possibility is that women simply don't want to be software engineers/game developers/computer scientists/etc. Which again prompts me to ask why? If an individual makes a choice to avoid IT industry, that's perfectly understandable, but this kind of mass avoidance gets my statistical senses tingling. What, is XX chromosome pair somehow incompatible with x86 architecture?



Well, in my experience Internet debates are rarely conducted with a goal of convincing anyone, so lack of agreement should not be much of a deterrent. Anyway, "try harder" is always a good advice, but in order for it to work, the recipient has to be convinced that his or her hard work will bring results. If they believe that the deck is stacked against them then "try harder" is a short version of "why don't you waste more of your time on a pursuit in which you cannot succeed."

As far as complaints being laughable, maybe they are. But a brief look into the history of feminism reveals that pretty much every each one of their complaints was deemed laughable at the time. Women want to vote! Laughable! They want to apply for a loan without their husband permissions?! Ridiculous! Women doctors! Ha! And so on and so forth. Are you sure you're not standing in a long, sad line here?

Well, you're pushing the same argument further and I'm afraid it's still suspect. Even if we do have a fair and level playing field right now (which things like #1reasonwhy put in doubt), to take advantage of it, you need skills/contacts/networks/etc that you acquired 5 or 10 years ago. And to get these you need to be inspired/persuaded/pushed/etc 10, 15 or 20 years ago. So even if the playing field is level right now, the past matters and you cannot just discount it with "try harder." How women were treated in companies 5 years back and in universities 10 years ago does have an effect now.

As far Christine Love complaints go, gee I wonder why she's complaining... maybe she finally get fed up with crap and decided to talk about it?

Wiki disagrees. And Eurostat as well. To be fair, Romania is listed as having a commendably low wage gap of 9%, but it's only comforting until you realize that it is like losing one month's salary out of your yearly wages. If you think it's negligible, feel free to send me your (or your parents') February earnings.

Well, you're absolutely right that a male representative is no worse than a female representative. Still, if we truly didn't care about the gender, we could expect to have a randomly varied selection. It's like tossing a coin. If you have a coin that persistently goes: head, head, head, head, ..., how many of these will it take before you start suspecting that the coin is not entirely fair?

As far as qualifications go, this just moves the question one step further. Why aren't there qualified women?