I feel badly for her, for you just mentioned her attractiveness when it has no relevance. Perhaps when we (being the male gender we) start considering females' intelligence as the _only_ factor and not half of the equation things will change.

Out of the 26 coworkers, you mentioned the physical attributes of the one female.

Sorry to pick on your one quick post, but it is just very representative of our society's lingering gender gap.

I think it has some relevance, because it shows that being in IT does not imply unattractiveness. Talk about unattractiveness of male geeks is quite common, too.

Also, I think it would be nonsense to deny our human attributes. Men are interested in women's looks, and vice versa. Actually, isn't it another complaint of successful women that to be successful, they had to become like men (a ka Margaret Thatcher)? So if a successful women is still attractive, it might be a good role model after all.

It isn't "human" it is "cultural". Still shouldn't deny it, but it can and will change. (And has changed a lot already!)

So you mean in other cultures looks don't matter? Maybe if the parents set up the marriages? Do you have any references?

I don't mean other existing cultures are different. (Although, there are differences.)

I mean it is a matter of culture (ideas) not "humanity" (DNA).

There are many reasons to believe this. Two are:

- memes evolve orders of magnitude faster than genes, so once they existed, they responded to almost all selection pressures first. anything with complex social interactions that require intelligence couldn't have evolved before memes (ie, before we had intelligence).

- people sometimes make changes to how they treat women, how they interpret appearances, to all sorts of related ways of thinking and behaviors. this points to culture because our ideas are designed to be changeable at runtime, and our DNA isn't.

Sexual attraction seems kind of important to the survival of humans, though. Or at least it used to be (cloning and stuff like that might change that).

Of course there are cultural aspects to how women are being treated. Granted, there could be cultures where people would not automatically remark on the attractiveness of a female colleague. For example, if all women are hidden behind veils, and infidelity can get you killed, maybe people are much more careful about what they say (just guessing, I don't know).

Before intelligence, there was no such thing as 'sexual attraction' in the current sense. There was only the exact same thing animals have: programs that behave in certain ways, based on certain inputs. Like a DARPA car steers left on certain input, an animal has sex on certain input.

With the advent of intelligence, came the ability for high-level interpretation of sense input -- we might say that events took on meaning. From a survival point of view, the ability to reinterpret arousal chemicals, and other things, was no serious danger: any culture that did that would die out. (And even if it was dangerous for the species, evolution doesn't do advanced planning of that sort.)

What we have today, and call sexual attraction, involves many layers of intelligent interpretation, which we (largely unintentionally) teach to the next generation -- ie, it is culture. If parents behaved differently, the meaning of sexual attraction would change.

Edit: By analogy, DNA = assembly language. We program in higher level languages. (Imagine programming in 500 years though, so it's much further removed from assembly). At some level of abstraction, the original details of DNA/assembly are totally irrelevant to the level we normally think in.

I remain skeptic. Sure, there are cultural signals we learn to interpret (short dresses, suits, marriage rings,...), but on a basic level, for the most part, women will be attracted to men and vice versa? Diseases will be repellent, as will other attributes of unfitness? You think you can raise men to be gay? (I don't know). Surely there is a lot of research on that, but the final word is perhaps not out yet?

People do raise men to be gay. Happens all the time. A few percent of parents do it (I don't know any reliable statistics). Not on purpose, sure, but parents don't raise straight kids on purpose either. (Yes, people try to "make their kid straight" occasionally, but there's no evidence the things they do actually have the intended effect.)

I definitely think one day we will learn how to analyze what parents do that causes men to turn out gay, and be able to copy it (or not).

However, I won't be surprised if the answer is: all present-day parents enact parenting strategies capable of causing homosexuality, but they only behave to cause it (unintentionally) when triggered in the right way (i.e., by some characteristic of young children other than homosexuality itself).

Just ask 10 guys and 10 girls what they think the average IT/programmer girl looks like and you'll see why it was a useful observation. Both men and women put emphasis on women's looks.

That will never happen. Read any book on evolutionary psychology to find out why.

I think girls tend to be more social than guys, thus less inclined to be lurking on yc all day...and may I note that no female has seemed to respond here yet...

admit it kids! hanging around on yc isn't helping us get laid! ;)

Current stats on this thread:

Mentioning dating: within 1 hour of original post

Mentioning getting laid: within 7 hours.

I was afraid this would happen, I just hoped it would take longer. Please lets be polite.

Is it impolite to talk about dating and getting laid?

Marriage was also mentioned, but I guess it won't appear in the list.

Hah, I'd say that the girls are fortunate. My life of programming is not so enjoyable at all. I just do it because I have to accomplish something big. I guess it's like being a pirate.

He he, I was kind of thinking the same thing: in my (jaded) opinion, girls are more likely to simply choose the career that is most fun, because they can always marry and have children, so no financial worries. So if few women choose programming, perhaps it tells us something about the job...

> I guess it's like being a pirate.

Being a pirate is an end unto itself!