Re:What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women
by yummyfajitas on Thursday January 29, 2015 @11:40PM
(#8970490)
Your claim (b) confuses me. First you try to paint CS as somehow special and requiring no quant skills, unlike the rest of STEM. Thus, the well supported "quant skill -> less women" correlation doesn't apply. But then you try to suggest other STEM fields do have the same problem as tech.
As for why intellect gap arguments persuade you and not me, I think I understand now. I tend to believe that there are very few independent dimensions in human intellect, you seem to think there are many. I'd suggest investigating psychometrics in a bit more detail - I found this idea very surprising, but it holds up quite well. Take tokenadult's linkdumps on hiring procedures as a good starting point.
Also, let me emphasize that I don't claim my theory is perfect - I just claim it's the best supported. Quantitatively, all the correlations point in the right direction. I see no reason to exclude other theories, e.g., Sapna Cheryan's "women avoid nerds" theory ( http://faculty.washington.edu/scheryan/research.htm ) - the correlations at least line up there, admittedly anecdotally (doctors and lawyers are high status, computer and math geeks are low status).
The idea that CS, math and physics are somehow uniquely unkind to women seems weak to me. I see no plausible reason why "bog-standard human behavior" would be worse in STEM - if anything, you'd expect objective fields to care less about human behavior. (That's probably why computing is so tolerant of weirdos.) Note that you haven't even provided anecdotal evidence that computing is somehow worse than law in this regard.
As for why intellect gap arguments persuade you and not me, I think I understand now. I tend to believe that there are very few independent dimensions in human intellect, you seem to think there are many. I'd suggest investigating psychometrics in a bit more detail - I found this idea very surprising, but it holds up quite well. Take tokenadult's linkdumps on hiring procedures as a good starting point.
Also, let me emphasize that I don't claim my theory is perfect - I just claim it's the best supported. Quantitatively, all the correlations point in the right direction. I see no reason to exclude other theories, e.g., Sapna Cheryan's "women avoid nerds" theory ( http://faculty.washington.edu/scheryan/research.htm ) - the correlations at least line up there, admittedly anecdotally (doctors and lawyers are high status, computer and math geeks are low status).
The idea that CS, math and physics are somehow uniquely unkind to women seems weak to me. I see no plausible reason why "bog-standard human behavior" would be worse in STEM - if anything, you'd expect objective fields to care less about human behavior. (That's probably why computing is so tolerant of weirdos.) Note that you haven't even provided anecdotal evidence that computing is somehow worse than law in this regard.