> yes, women really are on average less suited for many technical pursuits, a conclusion which some people are simply unwilling to accept, even though such an assertion actually says little about individuals.
The discussion of nurture and nature here is extremely important. Also on the front page of HN today: an exposition of the treatment that young girls are subjected to on the internet. Girls are "nurtured" (abused) into the belief or understanding that they are first and foremost sex objects.
Of the women I work with: over 90% in technical roles were told that "math/science isn't for girls" by at least one teacher in grade school, around 70% were told something similar in university. Of those with PhDs, more than half were told that women aren't cut out for academia by their supervisor.
So whenever folks claim "even though such an assertion actually says little about individuals," it's ignorant, at best, to how our society talks about this.
I'm willing to accept that "on average" adult women aren't cut out for technical roles. But given my experience at the helm of university calculus classes, I must say that "on average," adult men aren't cut out for technical roles either. But unlike women, they haven't been told repeatedly by parents, teachers, advisors, pastors, supervisors, that they're incapable on account of their gender.
With all that "nurture" it's incredible that folks are inclined to make such strong assertions about "nature."
> Of those with PhDs, more than half were told that women aren't cut out for academia by their supervisor.
I want to respond to this but I'm having a hard time thinking of a response that isn't profane. I don't mean to aim my ire at you, the messenger, of course.
But seriously, is it really that bad? I mean when I did my degree ('74-'77 Exeter Uni., Physics) out of about forty of us only three got firsts and one was a woman, she went on to do a Ph. D. I'm pretty sure no one said any such thing to her.
Does it depend on which country you are in? I know of plenty of women in high technical positions in industry in Norway and I can't imagine that they suffer from this, at least not to that degree. I also can't imagine them suffering in silence.
Can you provide one modern scientific paper which examines how much nature, and not nurture, can have an effect on variations in achievement and participation in certain fields? Untill then one cannot handwave all inequities away as simply discrimination. Particularly when we have ample indirect proof that men and women are not equally able to perform certain tasks on average. This isn't a question of superiority, simply different adaptation after millions of years of sexually dimorphic evolution:
1. Male and female score distributions have different averages on certain tests, like spatial reasoning and verbal
2. Brain scans show different structure, which is used to identify trans individuals
3. Hormone concentrations and responses are different (particularly testosterone/estrogen)
4. Members of probably any other sexually dimorphic species, across the kingdoms will show different innate behaviors, and humans have inherited those millions of years of gender specialization - indirectly, wouldn't such innate preferences in humans, if they exist, predispose men and women to different skillsets, on average? Sure, the nature of human intelligence may make it that humans are the exception, but there are far too many other puzzle pieces to assemble before we can take that as fact.
This list is incomplete, and examples are easy to find. The only reason OP had to write such an article, stating what should be obvious, is that because of the pressures of recent politics, our society has come to conflate equality of opportunity with equality of outcome, a result of the denial of even the possibility that gender imbalance may occur in part or in whole without discrimination and bias. The socially acceptable position is that male and female abilities are distributed equally in the absence of social conditioning, and this is simply an unlikely condition if one looks at the facts. Not to say discrimination doesn't exist, but when we set parity quotas we entirely ignore nature in favor exclusively of nurture.
Consider also: if these abilities are normally distributed, as suggested by proxies like IQ, and there is a small difference, say of 5 points in means between men and women, the effects are going to be amplified at the outer edges of the normal curve and the higher average population will be substantially overrepresented a couple standard deviations out.
