First, I am not saying men cannot have feminine traits and women cannot have masculine traits on the individual level. Of course there will be exceptions, and those individuals deserve respect. But on average, I think biology is the dominating factor determining those traits due to mammalian evolution.

To address your points, I see accounting as administrative, akin to housekeeping, a supportive role of keeping the house in order.

Programming is more about problem solving, entering unknown territories, and has more risk involved.

And it doesn't sound like you've ever been hunting. It's a slog, where you're out in the woods for hours or days at a time, constantly paying attention to minute details to track animals. Finally there's an aha moment where you go in for the kill. Seems similar to programming to me.

Running up to the 80s, computers were a huge fad with promises of making big money. As such many were attracted, until some people realized it wasn't satisfying for them. My mother got a CS degree and quit IBM after realizing she hated being inside all day writing networking code. She's an extremely intelligent woman and I'm proud of that, but also grateful that she stayed home to raise me and my siblings.

And I never made any claims about women being better at communicating or working in groups. My claim is jobs that have similarities to mothering are more likely to attract women.

I'm not dismissing biological differences between men and women. I'm wondering how you're getting from "there are biological differences between men and women" to "biological differences explain explain why fewer women pursue engineering." There's a smoking crater where your causation argument should be.

> To address your points, I see accounting as administrative, akin to housekeeping, a supportive role of keeping the house in order. Programming is more about problem solving, entering unknown territories, and has more risk involved.

This is a superficial characterization (and also demonstrates an ignorance of what accountants do). In reality, the two jobs use basically the same skills: attention to detail, mathematical reasoning, and creativity within the very narrow frameworks of rules. Consider something like debugging code versus following money through a series of transactions. It's basically the same thing: keeping track of a lot of state in your head while going through various steps, each of which changes the set based on well-defined rules.

Anyway, I agree there's overlap in what accountants and programmers do like you described in your debugging example.

However, the main differentiating factors I pointed out were (1) more unknown territory (e.g. building things that don't exist yet) and (2) more risk involved in attempting the types of challenges programmers face (e.g. 50% of software projects fail). In contrast, accounting is a highly regulated field, more deterministic, and provides more job security. I'd say that puts it more in the middle of the spectrum between stereotypically female careers like nursing and stereotypically male careers like engineering.

[Citation needed].

> However, the main differentiating factors I pointed out were (1) more unknown territory (e.g. building things that don't exist yet) and (2) more risk involved in attempting the types of challenges programmers face (e.g. 50% of software projects fail). In contrast, accounting is a highly regulated field, more deterministic, and provides more job security. I'd say that puts it more in the middle of the spectrum between stereotypically female careers like nursing and stereotypically male careers like engineering.

This is again just handwaving. Most engineering, even computer science, is just keeping things running or making incremental improvements. I was an aerospace major, where the vast majority of jobs are in making 1-2% per decade incremental improvements in fuel efficiency. Very stable, great job security, not a lot of women! Likewise, most programming is CRUD apps or boring websites. (Sure you can point to SpaceX, but you can also point to accountants who work on teams that make billion dollar deals happen, or do forensic analysis of billion dollar disasters; both represent a tiny minority of their respective professions).

> The relatively small numbers of women in math-intensive careers result from many factors, one of which seems primary and should be accorded the greatest weight. Sex differences in mathematical and spatial ability, although substantial, appear unable to explain most of the shortage. Nor can the shortage be attributed to current discrimination, although historic discrepancies may be explained in such terms. The primary factor in women's underrepresentation is choices both freely made and constrained by biology and society.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2997703/#!po=37...

Can you call it "freely choosing" when they're treated badly when pursuing male-dominated fields and treated well when pursuing female-dominated fields?

People don't like swimming upstream, for the most part. What they would choose "freely" and what they choose in the real world are often very different.

B. They enter even uni or high school CS and physics courses at a fast lesser rate. Is that because of interest or because they make assumptions about being discriminated against 10 years down the line?

IQ distributions don't explain that at all. It is vastly more complicated than that.

IQ correlates almost perfectly (~ r = .95) with income at an ecological/epidemiological level (again, not at an individual level). The average IQ among the homeless is around 80. It may not be the only factor, but it's part of the story.

I am something of a subject matter expert in homelessness and I just wrote this a few minutes ago:

http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2017/07/ge...

Putting it here for the benefit of other people. I don't expect anything I say to sway you.

And no, anecdotes, cherry picking, conspiracy theories, and ad hominem attacks don't sway me.

The original test that some Frenchman was asked to create was not intended to measure intelligence. It was intended to measure school readiness of children of indeterminate age. In the era in question, city kids in France tended to have birth certificates and to also have plenty of familiarity with things involved in school readiness. Their ages could have been used to determine school readiness.

The problem was the rural children of that era often lacked birth certificates and also lacked experience with things like pre-school. They had more trouble fitting in at school already due to coming from a different background than the city kids.

This test then became the inspiration for IQ tests.

Feynman supposedly did not have a very high IQ. Some IQ test he took placed his IQ around 129, iirc. Yet he was widely regarded as a genius.

When I was actively involved in an organization that concerned itself with gifted education, I very often said that "tests are merely a tool." I have heard too many stories of young gifted kids who could not answer a question on a test because it was a multiple answer question and their rich understanding of the world meant that none of the answers fit.

A good example is "Who discovered America?" An average kid may know to correctly spit back the answer "Columbus" because we memorize that in school. A bright kid may answer such a question with something like "Well, it wasn't called America until x date after Amerigo Vespucci came here and before Columbus, the Vikings had settlements here and Columbus thought he discovered India, not a new continent...(blather on some more)...um, what was the question?"

Bright kids can be very hard to properly test. IQ tests are useful tools for trained professionals, but often don't stand well on their own. Furthermore, the last I was keeping up with such info, they were having trouble finding a new test with a high ceiling. The one test previously known to have a high ceiling was getting rather out of date and nothing new was being developed. It was a very serious problem and some professionals were resorting to using the out of date test as the least worst option available.

Most tests ceiling out around 130 or 145. So if you score anywhere near that, you can generally assume that is a minimum IQ. It is quite hard to find accurate tests for IQs above that IQ range and that only goes out 2 or 3 standard deviations above the norm.

I am homeless. I was one of the top 3 students of my graduating high school class and I have had a class on homeless and public policy from SFSU. My IQ is absolutely not 80.

In 5.5 years on the street, I have run into a lot of homeless people. They often do have mental health issues, but they aren't typically mentally retarded, which is your assertion. Homelessness tends to grow out of serious personal problems, such as mental health issues, medical issues and other special needs.

In my 5.5 years as a homeless person, I do very often run into people who are mentally retarded. They are typically in a group that shows up at whatever library or public park I am frequenting and they apparently come from some kind of group home.

There may be mentally retarded people on the street. But I have zero reason to believe that it is the norm or that it explains homelessness.

Sorry, not persuaded.

The source concludes:

> The relatively small numbers of women in math-intensive careers result from many factors, one of which seems primary and should be accorded the greatest weight. Sex differences in mathematical and spatial ability, although substantial, appear unable to explain most of the shortage. Nor can the shortage be attributed to current discrimination, although historic discrepancies may be explained in such terms. The primary factor in women's underrepresentation is choices both freely made and constrained by biology and society. Women choose at a young age not to pursue math-intensive careers; few adolescent girls express desires to be engineers or physicists, preferring instead to be medical doctors, veterinarians, biologists, psychologists, and lawyers. Females make this choice despite earning higher math and science grades than males throughout schooling. Although women earn a large portion of baccalaureate degrees in all fields of science, including mathematics, disproportionately fewer enter graduate school in these fields, preferring biology, social sciences, law, medicine, and the humanities—even when they possess math ability comparable to males. Of those who enter graduate school in math-intensive fields, more women than men drop out or change fields, and of those who complete doctorates, fewer women apply for tenure-track positions. (...)

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2997703/#!po=37...