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Re:LinkedIn rejects engineering ads with female images, bans... by dragonwriter on Friday August 02, 2013 @06:11PM (#6149994)
> Well, it is in fact "unnatural".

Perhaps, in the sense that, ignoring the fundamental fallacy of the "natural"/"artificial" divide [0], software and software engineering and people being software engineers are all creations of humans and human culture, and thus would seem to be on what is generally described as the "artificial" side.

> Seriously, lets cut the PC nonsense; how many gorgeous female software engineers do you know? They are an exceedingly rare breed, and it can be proven statistically considering the low number of females in the industry and cut down further by the low number females in general who would be considered attractive.

This logic assumes that being attractive has no correlation to being a software engineer, such that the "low number of females in general who would be considered attractive" is a proper guide for how to reduce the "low number of females in the industry" to find the expected number of attractive females in the industry.

This seems counterintuitive; for one thing, subjective as attraction is, there are things that can be observed about general perceptions of attractiveness and how they correlate with other factors, and higher socio-economic status correlates positively with attractiveness, and being a software engineer has some correlation with socioeconomic status.

[0] Which, of course, there isn't. Humans and everything they produce are, themselves, products of nature.

Re:LinkedIn rejects engineering ads with female images, bans... by EpicEng on Friday August 02, 2013 @06:56PM (#6150188)
Note the quotes around "unnatural". I used it only because it was the term used by the parent comment.

Honestly, nothing that you said has anything to do with reality. I challenge you to find one, single male in software development who will say that our industry is even moderately populated with attractive women. We all know that isn't the case. Attractive women don't flock to software development.

And while, yes, beauty is somewhat subjective, it is not 100% subjective across the board. A majority of people would, for example, say that Jenifer Aniston is far more attractive than, say, Sandra Bernhard.