I'm not sure I'd say the headline is clickbait. It's describing a correlation from a new paper. Seems pretty non opinionated to me.

There's a couple places within the article that's more superficial though.

> Why are still people still confused about this?

Maybe because "positive discrimination" is pursued using equality of outcomes as a key indicator?

Let's assume we're not all disingenious a----les, trying for clickbait and gotchas, but still disagree on some points.

I would say that you're right, and this means that specific outcome equality is not indicative of equality of opportunity.

But, it's also true that equality before the law and other measures that have been tKe over the last 3 generations do not guarantee equality of opportunity. Opportunity is in itself a sticky concept.

If you grow up in a family/community where a lot of people are tradesmen then you'll be more likely to be a tradesman. Same for long term welfare dependance, academia, public services, fireman/police, housewives, medicine...

The dynamics are complex and not fully understood. People form an idea about what's normal, possible and such. This is a socially based phenomenon.

I would argue that it is important to the concept of opportunity. The boxes that you put yourself into by default, and others put you in.

There aren't necessarily physical barriers. Lots of people don't end up on the default paths, maybe even most. But, defaults matter.

Anyway, let's think about it in reverse. Let's say we are abolishing sexism, racism, caste systems or some other form of big societal discrimination. A generation later, no change in outcomes. Did we succeed?

OTOH, it's hard to know what to do with specifics like women in tech. It's not inherently bad for women to have different average preferences and that will cause unequal outcomes. But, we also can't ignore outcomes (imo) entirely either. There must be actual outcome changes.

There's also the issue of feedback loops. If certain spheres are male realms, with women in a tiny minority this makes it harder for women to enter in the future.

Preferences aren't static, and are part of a dynamical system. It needs to be explained why preferences are the way they are. Environment could be changed to address causes of preference

Most studies on this seem to show that gender based preferences can be at least partially explained from birth before any environmental factors play a part in it. People have been doing these studies for a long time now, but they get ignored because we don't like the results.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/

And of course, far more studies that have been going on for decades.

Biological preferences don't explain why careers preferred by women have less average pay than careers preferred by men.

No. But preferences do explain why women don't emphasize money in their career choice, whereas men do.

The vast majority of women will not continue dating a man who earns less than they do. Two thirds of young women in Germany expect their future partners to take care of them financially.

So for men, earning money and status is absolutely essential.

See also: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/02/a-lette...

What makes you think this is explained by biological preferences alone, or that those preferences scale to society-wide differences in salary?

(1) Actually, I didn't even mention biology. I just wrote "preferences".

(2) What makes you think it wouldn't? After all, it affects everyone in society. And motivation is a pretty powerful force, it is basically how our entire economy is structured.

See also:

https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/money-gender-a...

"...it typically takes a lot less money to get women to say they are satisfied with their work than it does to get men to say it."

"Women were more likely to tell PayScale that say they find their jobs “very meaningful” than men were, with 35 percent of women and 27 percent of men describing their jobs this way."

So women have more freedom to find meaningful jobs. Men less so.

I'm not entirely sure on which angle you're trying to discuss here. That biological preferences don't impact on the free market choice of employee-employer contracts? Or that biological preferences aren't overridden by a desire to earn higher wages?

For free market choice on which jobs pay more -- I think this one is pretty clear. Do you think differently?

As for biological preference, I don't think it takes into account the average pay at all. Career path is usually chosen at a younger and more idealistic age, and probably more importantly - poorer countries have women overriding their preferences and going into higher paid lines of work, while richer countries let women do what they want. As per this very study. In the case where money doesn't matter because your family is rich, biological preferences become more important and people stop choosing based on average pay. So the biological differences seem to explain it really well.

But it is also possible that the biology is affecting our inclinations, temper, or skills. After all modern psychiatry is attempting to look at the brain mechanically or to influence it with drugs. And intuitively, I find it hard to believe that our genes that affect so much of our physical abilities, likelyhood of illness, etc would stop at the brain and our behavior would be completely independent of our nature and purely a function of our environment.

Sure, and the study quoted in the article shows that. Environment is a factor, it just points in the other direction.

So if you assert that discrimination is the cause for the imbalance, the evidence shows that your assertion is wrong, because it makes the wrong prediction.

This is not just a matter of degrees it is a matter of sign (the arrow is pointing in the wrong direction).

One of the many simplifications in this debate. Another one: if someone is arguing that there is a difference in the distribution of a particular character between men and women. Immediatly I read comments jumping to the conclusion “my god it says women are more/less [whatever] than men”, as in “all women”. Lots of people seem to be incapable of thinking in term of distributions, which makes it really hard to have any discussion.

> Lots of people seem to be incapable of thinking in term of distributions, which makes it really hard to have any discussion.

Most people seem very capable of thinking statistically, but they don't communicate in distributions.

For two people communicating in good faith, the two statements (1) "Boys are taller than girls" and (2) "Anne is taller than Sean" don't prompt talk about how both can't be true at the same time, sexist. People communicate statistical differences as "absolutes", but when communicating in good faith, everybody knows what everybody means.

Look at stereotype research. Most stereotypes are statistically true. People communicate them "as if" absolute, but nobody's head explodes when individual examples don't "conform" to the stereotype. That's because people can think in distributions.

That's not surprising, it's how to survive in a stochastic environment.

This gap between thought and speech only becomes problematic ("makes it really hard to have any discussion") because we can rhetorically exploit the fact that most people can't explicitly communicate about distributions. Just tell them they're bigoted, and they don't know how to refute you. Yay, you win.

I am entirely capable of thinking in terms of distribution. It is people who suggest that small differences in biology would lead to large differences in outcomes that are incapable of that thinking and ignoring the large overlap between groups. Few people are protesting that marginal differences between sexes exist. It is just not relevant as a scientific explanation for gender distribution in e.g. CS.

In such discussions "most" is implied. Interpreting it as "all" is just a rhetoric trick to weaken the opponent's position.

Therein lie the dangers of categorical thinking, https://www.newyorker.com/business/james-surowiecki/categori.... Gender is probably the most loaded category there is (except for the other one). There is some movement on this front with acceptance of different gender identities but until society (in all its forms) can ditch categorical thinking and accept that all things in nature exist in distributions, I don't think there will be much progress on this - there's simply too capital to be made by perpetuating strict divisions which everybody must be crammed into in order to simplify the debate and upset everyone in the process.

Robert Sapolsky - we need you now more than ever, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky

They're confused because they're starting from the end (the outcome) and working backward.

Women get paid less than men for doing the same work, across all industries. Pay them the same and the "confusion" will diminish.

This is a common talking point of the dominant narrative but simply not true.

When you average all women and all men, you get a "gap". However, like the imbalance in fields, this is almost entirely due to different choices. When you control for factors such as field, hours worked, years worked the gap effectively disappears.

Yeah, isn't it wonderful that when you factor out the discriminating variables, discrimination all but disappears?

Choices made by women are influenced by the glass ceiling, society expectations that women will take care of children and the elderly, and the traditional fields where they're expected to work. The decision to measure the gender gap by comparing equal working hours and equal job positions is not innocent, is itself a politically motivated and comforting way to make rational people think "I told you, there's nothing to see here". You need to evaluate what causes women to have those less hours in less paying jobs, to see whether there's discrimination or not.

Yet the salary wages discrimination reappears when you factor in hours dedicated to domestic work (the "second shift"), differences in salary between fields with equal risks (exposition to chemicals, hardship) where workers are majority women vs those with more men, or companies' (irrational) tendency to default in promoting male workers over females in similar situations.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/women-...

Can people downvoting explain what part of my post you disagree with? I'd like to have a rational debate and maybe learn if there's something wrong in my assumptions, rather than discussion being suppressed by knee-jerk reactions.

I wonder how much of this is a result of female sexual selection pressure?

It is seen in human beings and animals that statistically females mate sidewards or upwards in terms of providability. This in turn applies a pressure on males to compete for more and accumulate more resources, whereas females are not measured by males on their providability hence have no pressure on them to fight for the same resources. So, men will always compete more to get a greater share of the pie, this combined with capitalism explains whatever income gap remains after attaining equality of opportunity. Shouldn't the underlying metrics of mating preferences also be taken into account before putting it all under male sexism and patriarch umbrella ?

You would first need to achieve equality of opportunity, which is not the current starting point.

You can't ignore that we come from a culture with a tradition of 60+ centuries of male-favouring sexism and patriarchy, which has not vanished merely because of a theoretical solution to it (legal equality) has been formally declared. There's a lot of social inertia introducing biases in the opportunities available to women.

You can take into account mating preferences all you want, but how do those affect choices of job positions other than very indirectly? On the other hand, irrational prejudices in recruitment and career advancement processes have a direct impact on the quality of job positions that women have access to, and therefore in their opportunities. Unless you're downright denying that such prejudices exist, this cultural factor would have a larger influence than biology.

When two people make two opposing theories it is often best to judge each based on their ability to predict, how it match current data sets, and how well it works out in experimental studies.

The incentive models, which take data from both biology and culture, claims a prediction that as you measure equality of opportunity and compare nations it will correlate to inverse gender segregation in the work force. The more equality of opportunity the higher gender segregation will be, caused by incentives that is derived from gender roles, sexual strategies, and sexual dimorphism.

The prejudices model make the opposite prediction. It claims that when measuring the equality of opportunity the higher it is the lower the gender segregation should be.

In order to resolve the question one measure equality of opportunity and gender segregation, creating data. This create a scientific valid argument in favor of one model over the other.

That is one aspect of the theory. An other aspect would be to measure difference in prejudices between different professions. If the model is correct then it should be able to predict based on such measure which professions are gender segregated and which are not, and inversely predict the level of prejudices exist per profession given any country. The incentive model claim that incentives are a large influence and such you could not make a predictive model based on measuring prejudices.

The incentive model also predict that nation where the incentives are different (based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs), you should see a correlated change in gender segregation. Incentives such as reproduction is listed last among the physiological need, so nations where water and food is scare for women should result in higher incentive to seek professions where those are easier achievable. The prejudices model would argue that there is no such correlation.

This is of course just a small sample in order to scientifically evaluate the two different theories. There is also matching philosophy theories (their names escape me right now), arguing in different direction to explain the data.

Thanks for the approach, I'll need to read about those models and how they correlate with real data. It seems likely that the gender gap appears from a combination of incentives and prejudices, so ideally we should use a combined model that describes how much each factor affects the final outcome.

If women choose to take less lucrative careers, make less lucrative family roles, and negotiate their salaries less than men, than that's fine with me. Personal freedom and equal opportunity will not always mean equality of outcome, especially in richer countries where women are free to live the life and career they want instead of the life and career they need to survive.

For some definition of "choose", a significant part of the choice is imposed from external forces, not freely decided. You're saying that you're OK with people not offering the more lucrative jobs to some people just because they're women, paying less for comparable works that are traditionally done by women, and men expecting that their wives - mothers - female relatives will adopt caretaking roles in addition to their professional careers; i.e. you're OK with the societal factors that make a high percentage of women put up with less income.

These aren't the 1950's anymore. The career choices of women _are_ freely decided nowadays. They have the ability to go to college, get a STEM degree, and become computer scientists if they want. Equal opportunity will not mean equal outcome when there are broad physical and psychological differences between the genders.

You're missing the part where those free decisions are made with less options from which to choose, because the people that would otherwise collaborate with women are restricting their options because of irrational factors like their gender alone (without physical and psychological differences having anything to do). You're missed to take prejudice into account.

I'm confused. Are you saying that women are kept from going into STEM careers? Because they have every incentive to do so currently, yet still choose other career paths.

The wage gap myth has been debunked time and time again.

a radical thought along the lines you are going....instead of striving to bring up the numbers of underrepresented group X in field Y, how about we strive to bring up the salaries/status of field Z (etc.) where group X is over represented?

Personally the reason I'm hesitant to entertain this argument is that code is so awesome - you can reach a billion (1,000,000,000) people practically overnight if your idea is good enough. While women traditionally are more interested in the design/social impact of what they're doing, if the engineering environment is easy enough there's no reason they can't code it themselves. And they are highly incentivized to do so.

I personally look at the outcome (you can reach a billion people just by having a cool idea and sitting down and doing it) then look at the hurdles to that outcome.

One of the hurdles is that engineers love wasting literally hundreds of each others' hours. If I were building something as a newbie, people have no trouble sending me off on a wild goose chase to spend a hundred hours with my head in documentation. When an alternative ecosystem lets me literally type a single line and it's done. (In this case the first ecosystem hates my time and the second one respects it.)

This isn't really related to gender, but it's another hurdle. So when you look at the incentive (reaching people, fame, fortune, money), if there is a highly unequal distribution you have to look at some of the hurdles.

By the way no one knows your gender online when you're learning stuff, you can use a non-gendered username and get treated exactly the same asking stuff online and so forth.

In this case the hurdle is artificial: being cooped up with a computer while the tools you're trying to use waste thousands of your hours. But it's still a hurdle that impacts genders in a different way, and that matters.