
Why There Are No Women on Twitter’s Board, and So Few in Technology - discolemonade
http://mikaschiller.wordpress.com/2013/11/16/why-there-are-no-women-on-twitters-board-and-so-few-in-technology/
======
thatthatis
Just positing that these things _might_ be true and should be investigated was
a key factor in Larry Summers getting drummed out of his position as President
of Harvard.

The world at large isn't ready to hear these statistics, and overall that is
probably a good thing. We shouldn't accept these disparities as driven by
natural forces until we've tried everything we can imagine to try to bring the
differences in line.

Over the course of history, far more bad has been wrought by assuming
differences were innate than assuming they were the result of bias. Given
that, we should assume and act as though differences are due to bias long
after the differences are well proven to be natural. It is a case where being
wrong in one direction is not very costly, but being wrong in the other
direction (and thus institutionalizing bias) is disastrous.

Tldr: we should err on the side of caution.

~~~
coldtea
> _The world at large isn 't ready to hear these statistics_

Not the "world at large". Just (provincial) middle/upper class America.

> _We shouldn 't accept these disparities as driven by natural forces until
> we've tried everything we can imagine to try to bring the differences in
> line._

Shouldn't we in fact try to understand what's going on, instead of trying to
change it because of a priori notion that there shouldn't be disparities
(which, if disparities exist due to natural forces will be unatural and
unjust).

Disparity (e.g less women in Tech) is NOT a problem in itself.

Obstacles to access is a problem (e.g a woman not being let to work Tech -- eg
not being hired because she is a woman).

Also, why is IT somewhat different? I don't see much push for more female
fishermen or male nurses, to name two random professions with similar
disparities.

~~~
makomk
IT's white-collar whereas the jobs you're talking about aren't. Apparently
there's never been a huge amount of feminist interest in getting women into
male-dominated blue-collar jobs or in working-class women in general; it's an
old and fairly well documented issue.

~~~
prodigal_erik
It's money more than status. In the early 1990s, programming was still white
collar but paid about the same as accounting, and nobody cared how few women
were doing it.

~~~
subsystem
There were also actually more women in computing back then...

[http://blogs.computerworld.com/sites/computerworld.com/files...](http://blogs.computerworld.com/sites/computerworld.com/files/u28/women2.jpg)

------
makomk
There's one really, incredibly glaring flaw in this argument right near the
start. He argues that it takes men to come up with sites like Twitter and
Facebook because most venture-capital-backed startups are created by men.
Except, of course, venture capitalists _openly admit_ they choose startups to
back not just on their merits, but "pattern matching" the founders to what
they expect a startup founder to look like - and everyone expects startup
founders to be male. Even if women were just as good at founding successful
startups, we'd expect them to be less common than male founders simply because
VCs go with what they're used to.

He is essentially arguing that women are inherently worse at founding tech
companies because they're under-represented in an area where people
discriminate against them based on the belief they're inherently worse at
founding tech companies.

~~~
unfamiliar
And your argument doesn't explain why venture capitalists would have got that
impression in the first place.

------
rayiner
The problem with his argument is not the statistics, which are sound, but the
fact that he begs the question and also ignores some obvious implications of
the very data he presents.

First, let's talk about mathematical ability. It's widely known that men
outnumber women in the upper percentiles of mathematical ability. However,
that's an explanation for why there are so few female Fields Medalists (in
fact, there are none), not why there are so few female engineers.

Among people who score a perfect 800 on the Math SAT (top 1% starts at 770),
men outnumber women only 2:1. Even if mathematical ability is _totally
determinative_ , and being a programmer required top 0.3-0.5% of mathematical
ability, we would expect to see ratios of maybe 65/35 in the programming
world, not 90/10 or 95/5\. Due to the shapes of the bell curves in question,
the disparity between men and women gets quite large when you get into the
0.1% or 0.01% of mathematical ability. But, by and large, Silicon Valley isn't
made up of those people. They're more run of the mill smart people (Stanford's
SAT Math inter-quartiles are 93rd-99th percentile).

With regards to the points about competitiveness versus cooperation and risk-
taking and caring about people, they all beg the question. Why is
competitiveness a good thing for the business of writing software? Don't you
think cooperation would be better for such a deeply team-oriented discipline?
Why isn't caring about people a positive strength, when much of Silicon Valley
2.0 is fluffy social stuff? Finally, while more risk-aversion might explain
why there are fewer female founders, it doesn't seem to be the case that
females are less represented in startups than in technology companies in
general. What's risky about going to work at Microsoft or Google?

The refrain of "these statistics are things nobody is willing to talk about!"
is a cop-out. Most people will not pillory you for pointing out that women are
more risk-averse or do things differently. Indeed, it's something women
themselves often talk about. My wife was recently at a social gathering for
women attorneys. She recounted a discussion of how women tend to disclose when
they haven't done something before, while men tend to say "sure I can do
that." It's not 1990 and people are quite willing to discuss how men and women
approach work differently. But the statistics only support conclusions as
strong as the scope of the evidence. And in this article, the author wanders
far beyond what the statistics support into blatant conjecture and
rationalization.

~~~
tomp
It could be the butterfly effect. It starts with children. Better at math ->
more interested in math -> better at math -> ... by they time young adults
start seeking jobs, a small initial bias has turned into a large gap.

Personally, I don't think that's the whole story (according to my
observations, it's also upbringing, girls socialize more than boys, who are
more likely to keep to themselves, and differences in topics of interest,
which I have no idea what they come from).

~~~
rayiner
First, it's probably not the case that interest and practice can have any
impact on your underlying mathematical aptitude. Second, regardless, the 2:1
ratio for perfect scores on the SAT Math manifests at 16-18, so when people
are already mostly developed.

~~~
selmnoo
> First, it's probably not the case that interest and practice can have any
> impact on your underlying mathematical aptitude.

What?! How did you arrive to that conclusion? This is a really bad myth. Math
abilities for the most part have very little to do with genes, and almost all
to do with hard word, motivation, and practice. See
[http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/the-
myt...](http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/the-myth-of-im-
bad-at-math/280914/) for more.

------
lemmsjid
The history of standardized testing and the history of statistics 'proving'
that minorities are innately different in some way are inextricably linked.
The original intelligence tests 'proved' to the American populace that Italian
and Irish immigrants were intellectually inferior to Anglo Saxons because of
their lower IQ scores. Magically, as those populations integrated, their IQ
scores normalized. Oops.

This article reads like those (thankfully) classic evolutionary biology texts.
Statistics bookend arguments that draw wild inferences. I feel sorry for the
numbers, they're crying out, "Wait a second, I'm just a standardized test
score, I can't tell you that it's because men always fashioned weapons!
Weapons didn't even factor into my study!" How does it follow that
standardized test scores can prove anything about nature vs. nurture,
especially when they have a history of not doing so?

It's a hallmark of that area of modern evolutionary biology to say, "I'm
saying what everyone else is afraid to." Well, people are afraid to say it
because they're afraid to say wrong things! One should not ignore statistics
that show differences between populations, but one should certainly not use
them to confirm one's own essentialist beliefs.

Especially in this environment. The burden of proof should be squarely and
severely on the one arguing that differences are innate, not on those arguing
that differences are malleable/cultural. Why? Because once society has
concluded that differences are innate, then glass ceilings turn into concrete
ceilings, and discrimination becomes institutionalized.

~~~
streptomycin
_This article reads like those (thankfully) classic evolutionary biology
texts._

Or those unthankfully modern evolutionary psychology texts.

------
USNetizen
This sounds like it was written for a 12th grade research assignment and makes
several incorrect inferences without a basis of fact, i.e. the male hunting
equating to math reasoning.

I tend to think of it as the same reason minorities are not prevalent in these
places either, probably because society held them as "lower class" until
recently and they are just now making gains which are long overdue.

All in all, women are catching up fast to men in mathematics as well. They
account for the fastest growing percentage of graduate degrees in the sciences
and I, personally, work in a high-tech field dominated still by male
developers, but also women managers who supervise them and do a fantastic job
at it.

It's not biological, it's history. Until recently those spatial learning and
building toys for children were all male-focused, but that is changing.

I firmly believe that women will easily overtake men in technology in the
future because attitudes have changed for the better.

~~~
tomp
> I firmly believe that women will easily overtake men in technology in the
> future because attitudes have changed for the better.

Do you have any reason for this belief?

Also, if you really believe that is true, wouldn't it be proper to start
promoting technology amongst boys?

~~~
unfamiliar
Women in my country have already overtaken men for final scores on mathematics
degrees.

------
dzink
Most of your research is from 20 years ago. Cultural norms play a huge part in
this and norms have been changing (compare what you'd read about the roles of
women in the 1950's vs today).

My mother built one business after another even though my grandfather was
forcing her to be a math teacher. She started 4+ businesses and each one
carried the name of a guy in my family (even my brother, as soon as he turned
18) because businesses weren't supposed to be led by women.

I am female. At 8 I was hit on as the only girl hanging out in a robotics lab.
At 13 I was mocked for writing code. At 15 I was asked to quit school to work
at a tech firm, but instead I kept working on my own freelance business in
parallel. At 18 I ranked second among peers in my country. I moved to the US,
kept working, and continue to grow my skills and tech startup in the valley
today. There are many more like me. Wait 10 more years and see what happens to
the statistics and attitudes. In the mean time, my job is to keep proving
those that bet against me and other female hacker-founders wrong through the
product of my work.

~~~
tekalon
While I agree that a lot of it is cultural based, I do agree that there is
some biological basis also. As a woman also, I can see myself in the points
the author makes. While I had good grades (was in high school math club) I
avoided risks in school and in career (went for 'easy' degree of history
first). Only recently did I go back and get a degree in programming, requiring
me having to learn differently than before. I tell my boss I don't a
managerial position because I don't want the responsibility (no matter how
much he throws it at me). I've also had everyone around me supporting me to do
what I want be it STEM or not. In many ways I see the cultural changes are
allowing women to use their biological strengths better (running a business
isn't too different from running a household of a large family). EDIT:typo.

~~~
dzink
Culturally, do you see the same demands placed on you as are placed on a male
peer/brother of yours? I bet when you start seeing those you will start seeing
similar behavior (because I have seen it).

------
dnautics
I invited three women to be on the board of my corporation. All of them turned
me down. All of the men I invited onto my board accepted.

~~~
CodeMage
Why?

Edit: I'm asking because @dnautics gave us an anecdote that doesn't add
anything useful. Knowing _why_ would be much more interesting, although still
an anecdote.

~~~
kordless
Because board meetings are, by design, a contentious environment?

~~~
dnautics
I discovered that this is not the case. In general, Board meetings don't work
like hollywood says they do. Usually my board meetings are pretty
uncontentious.

------
polemic
As commented:

This post could only come from someone sitting comfortably in a position of
considerable privilege and unawareness.

If you’re going to completely ignore issues of societal pressures, open
misogyny in technology industries and a thousand other subtle (and not so
subtle) ways that a fundamentally patriarchal society maintains the status
quo, then you gain no insight at all. A thousand studies will tell you the
outcome of this system of oppression – but you’ll interpret is “gender
differences” because you are blind to oppression that you have never been
subject too.

The sad thing is that you’ve now added another nail, unaware of the damage
that you do to the humans around you. Congratulations, you’ve helped to
solidify your position on top of the heap.

------
at-fates-hands
I wonder why nobody has brought up the fact when most women are starting to
climb the corporate ladder, or just come into their career, they start having
babies, starting their families and are less interested in ruling the
corporate world as they are being with their families and raising their kids.

And who can blame them really?

~~~
shriya
I wondered why the author didn't bring that up either. Just talking about how
women are nurturing / expected to be nurturing isn't the whole story. These
expectations translate into the idea that women have to be the primary
caretakers of their kids, but men do not unless they really want to and decide
to go against the grain. And lots of women feel guilty if they are a "bad
mother"!

------
ljlolel
This is pretty lazy thinking. It's hard to even call it a rationalization when
it makes no sense:

"Males around the world on average tend to be better at doing [math] than
females; likely due to the need to fashion weapons and objects for warfare,
hunting, and competing throughout evolutionary history."

------
matthewmacleod
This is a pretty shallow article - especially irritating because it's
referenced with a bunch of things that have no relevance. I love in
particular:

 _There are a lot of stupid guys out there. And when you mix stupidity and
risky behavior, you often get death. In the United States, men make up about
92% of workplace deaths_

Exercise for the reader to think about why that might be the case…

And another:

 _A study of attrition of women in engineering and science programs found that
frequently cited barriers were isolation, lack of self-conﬁdence, and lack of
interest in the subject matter (Brainard & Carlin, 1998). That’s hardly the
stuff of societal discrimination._

That is _exactly_ the stuff of societal (and social) discrimination. Not
because people are saying "You're a woman, and you'll be rubbish at this," but
because the extant lack of gender balance in these fields perpetuates itself;
if women don't want to be scientists and engineers, it becomes harder for
those women who do. There's a tipping point.

From a statistical point of view, there are ultimately psychological
differences between men and women. That fact has as near as possible no
relevance to this discussion - obviously so, because it's patently obvious
that men are not - what, ten times better at running tech businesses? Twenty
times better? And we can conclude from this that there is an obvious bias in
terms of the people who end up running them.

Mika points out that there has been decades of work put into encouraging girls
into STEM. That's true, kind of, but this is something which _does_ take
decades to achieve. Kids' career preferences can often start at a very early
age, and the only way to improve the proportion of women in tech is by making
the field open and accessible to young girls, and to promote that option to
them.

Hamfisted "women are just different and we shouldn't worry about it" articles
are probably not helping.

------
canistr
Let me posit another question, why are there no visible minorities on
Twitter's board?

And why aren't people getting up and arms over that?

------
DanBC
One consequence is that many people don't understand just how hateful the WWW
is for some other people.

Sure, anyone can be the victim of really unpleasant attacks from others on the
Internet, and it's been going on for years. But try creating different online
characters. Give one a male name, give the other a female name. And make that
the only difference. Now see the different ways people interact with you.

Having more diverse workforce can help you understand the problems of not
having good blocking tools or reporting tools or privacy controls.

But then again, Google has a ton of women working for them and they've fucked
up real names and G+ integration. So maybe I'm wrong.

~~~
ANTSANTS
I don't entirely buy this. Everyone can improve themselves by mingling with
their peers and listening to the pros, so if women were so easily dissuaded by
negativity on the internet, you'd expect them to do worse at everything, which
is clearly not true. I think a missing nuance is that _everyone_ is mean on
the internet, but people are much more likely to take meanness in stride when
it comes from members of their own gender.

The visual arts are very close to having gender parity (47.4% female in the
US, according to [1]). A quick look around a site like Deviantart reinforces
this. If you've spent any time around such communities, you'll know that young
female artists are just as mean and obsessed with petty drama as young male
computer geeks are with trying to look smarter than everyone else. Yet, the
amount of professional female artists that emerge from those conditions is
roughly equal to the amount of males that do.

This suggests that "guys being jerks to girls" is only a symptom of a
different problem; for cultural, historical, or perhaps, as the article
suggests but doesn't really back up, biological reasons, girls just aren't as
interested in computers as guys are. If we had gender parity in tech, little
Susan would probably be calling Anna a bitch for copying her code, and they'd
both get by somehow.

As an aside, I've noticed that artists are much better about giving and
receiving criticism than supposedly objective and "meritocratic" programmers
are.

[1]
[http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/96.pdf](http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/96.pdf)

------
marquis
>It turns out that being in technology demands a very masculine set of mental
qualities.

I stopped reading right there. Should I change from a dress to some pants? Cut
my hair short? Watch football? Didn't we have this argument about doctors and
lawyers 80 years ago?

------
jacknews
Many valid points, which are often either ignored, or deflected with the
argument that "men might be better at X, or women better at Y, but that's only
because the way society educates little boys vs little girls".

However, I think the real reason there are fewer women in tech is simply that
it can be a boring, solitary, highly detail-oriented and even a socially
confrontational job, ideal for "loners" perhaps.

People seem attracted to and revere other people who demonstrate leadership,
charisma, social grace, and so on, and actual tech jobs aren't a place where
those qualities are most highly valued or the best environment to nurture
them.

Aside from the exciting and highly social "Startup, VC, Marketing" side of the
industry, and of course the good salaries currently enjoyed by engineers, tech
has a fairly low social status.

I say this as a programmer myself, but I acknowledge it's still considered
(and in some ways, is) a job for unsociable loners. For whatever reason, women
seem to be more socially inclined, or at least very much more attuned to the
sociability aspect of social status, and tech is therefore not generally an
attractive proposition.

------
scotty79
Girls worse at math? In US yes, in Sweden no.

[http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-learning-
brain/20121...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-learning-
brain/201212/why-us-girls-underperform-in-math-swedish-girls-dont)

If you think the cause of girls being bad at math is biological you must
conclude that swedish girls are more biologically different from US girls than
from boys.

------
johngalt
Hardly a definitive proof that it's all just biology.

I'd scale it back, and draw the conclusions more conservatively. Along the
lines of 'employment statistics don't necessarily imply discrimination'. Just
because twitter's board is mostly male, doesn't necessarily mean that being
male was a requirement. No one would argue that truck drivers are mostly men
due to hiring policies.

~~~
arrrg
No, but people would argue that mostly men are truck drivers due to rigid
gender roles and strict gender policing of the patriarchy.

~~~
tomp
Do you have any statistics/reasoning that support this argument?

I'd say it's simply because it's a crappy, low-paying, exhausting job with too
many working hours, which not many people want. Men usually get such jobs.

~~~
arrrg
But why do they get such jobs? Because of rigid gender roles that force them
to be a certain way.

What’s your alternative explanation?

~~~
tomp
Because there aren't any other jobs.

The real question is, though, why don't the women get/take such jobs. I think
the answer is a mixture of the following: (1) they are worse at such jobs than
men (physically weaker and menstruating, which I assume might matter for a job
like truck-driving), (2) (I assume) women get more government help, because
they are more often (single) mothers and (3) women can play on other qualities
(more social, better caregivers, more attractive, less dangerous) that allows
them to get other jobs (nanny, waitress, secretary, ...).

~~~
arrrg
And this power imbalance between workers and employers is terrible. Yeah, all
pretty standard socialist stuff I’m a huge fanboy of. It’s of course not only
gender roles that play a role here.

You reasons are pretty bullshitty, so I don’t think I ever want to talk to you
again. Bye!

~~~
tomp
Don't shoot the messenger :) These are more guesses than opinions, so if you
have any better ideas, shoot!

------
cthom06
I'm sure black people just aren't genetically apt for STEM either?

Just because there's evidence for a correlation between gender and math scores
doesn't mean there's a genetic reason for the disparity.

~~~
rguzman
If I understand correctly, the idea here is that IQ is measurable (even if the
measurement is noisy) and real (has predictive power, doesn't change). This is
accomplished by studies that look to test individuals at different points in
life. Secondly, IQ is mostly genetic. This is evidenced mostly by twin
studies. Thirdly, math tests are okay IQ tests.

Note that I'm not saying that things are one way or another, or that the
reason there are so few women in tech is genetic. Just explaining how the
ideas go together. It COULD be that way.

~~~
shriya
But IQ is not that important when we're talking about being successful, making
money, or building a good tech tool. Otherwise people with genius IQs would be
the only ones ruling our society...but that's definitely not the case.

~~~
theorique
Some IQ advantage tends to help in these situations, but more isn't always
better.

In other words, you're likely to do better if you're a little better than
average (e.g. 1 SD or 115).

On the other hand, if you're one of those bizarro 180 IQ outliers who can't
connect socially and emotionally (to say nothing of _intellectually_ ) with
average people, you aren't likely to be able to be successful in a way that
incorporates and leverages the contributions of other people.

------
ojbyrne
"If you look at the profiles of Twitter’s board members, you'll notice that
all of them either have educational backgrounds in Computer Science and/or
have spent decades in the Silicon Valley tech trenches, clearly developing a
deep understanding of technology."

I looked at all of the board members, and only 1 out of 7 has a CS background.
4 out of 7 have B.As/MBAs from elite schools, and immediately stepped into
executive positions. I guess that's called "the trenches" these days. Their
background literally screams "Old Boy's network." Evan Williams and Jack
Dorsey have no education information mentioned and I don't think they did much
coding on their way up.

So whatever the merits of this article, I don't see how the argument that the
cause of this is in any way that not enough women go into STEM fields is a
valid one.

------
walshemj
One other reason(apart from gender stereo typing) is the women who could go
into traditionally male stem fields look at the poor pay and status and
rationally decide that whist probably still facing a glass ceiling and sexism
at lest they get paid better as Dr, Lawyer or Banker.

------
afthonos
What truth there is in this article amounts to a (significantly outdated)
survey of the state of women in society. All it presents is correlations. It's
a mathematical fact that you can know _nothing_ of causal effects between
correlated results based solely on such statistics.

In other words, what this article is saying is:

1\. Women are demonstrably less represented in STEM fields.

2\. Women do demonstrably less well in certain metrics we associate with STEM
fields.

3\. This is because women are biologically less interested/able/adept at STEM.

Every bit of evidence in the article supports 1 and 2 (at least as of 20 years
ago). The only support 3 gets is repeated statements that 2 is the natural,
inevitable order of things.

There is no reason to believe a word of it.

------
djKianoosh
Maybe the construct of a "management board" isn't appealing to the mentality
of women (huge generalization admittedly). Imagine a history of humanity
dominated by females as much as our human history was dominated by males to
this point. Would the female dominated society create something like a
management board? Would they create something different?

------
quadlock
This is utter baloney. For you who think systematic oppression of groups of
people isn't a real thing, think again. Take, for instance, the poor literacy
rate in the middle east. averaging 17%, now, are we to say "People of Arab
decent obviously have a biological disadvantage when it comes to reading and
writing, statistically it's clear!" um... no. How about Africans? Do we say
"They had a biological tendency to become slaves and not slave owners,
because, like 95% of slaves are from Africa, it's obvious"?

You can keep going back in history. How about those lowborn people during the
dark ages? they must have been real dunces.

The advancement of people has been a long slow march that builds achievement
upon achievement, with each achievement advancement can accelerate, but set-
backs can and do happen.

Don't fool yourself into thinking you'd have anywhere near the mental ability
you do today if it wasn't for all the work people did before you and the
society you were raised in and given encouragement, opportunities and
protections to pursue your goals. There are millions of techniques you use and
benefit from that other people worked out before you. If you didn't have them,
you'd be groveling in the dirt or likely gravely suffering or dead.

Women, it hasn't even been a hundred years since they've had the right to vote
in the U.S. Religious and cultural attitudes have kept them oppressed and
discouraged. Christian men(among others) have been encouraged to keep their
wives in line with physical abuse and the women pressured to accept it.

As a society, we've figured out ways to encourage and protect things to let
them advance and grow, things that wouldn't have gotten there without it and
we know it. Let's call it systematic freedom. People have fought and died and
worked their asses off for it. We do this. Let us(Society(men, women and
institutions)) do this for women. protect, defend, encourage. We are all
humans.

------
lotsofcows
I don't understand the competition argument. Technology is competitive?
Somehow I've missed that throughout my career.

I'm also not sure about the maths argument. Anyone got the stats for
accountants? There are more women, I think?

When I started in this industry, almost all the IT specialists had come
straight from the accounting department. And the sexes were split 50/50\. But
even then it was very obvious that the next, university trained, generation
were predominantly male.

This post has failed to convince me that the issue is anything other than
cultural - from the earliest age. By the time we're thinking about careers,
there are so many barriers against women that the effect seen is inevitable.

------
wishpishh
These studies just show that there is a difference. It doesn't say it's mainly
caused by innate biological differences between the sexes. These differences
could for all we know be the effect of the different social conditioning that
we all get from birth. In reality it's probably somewhere in-between - both
social conditioning and innate biological differences play a role but if I was
to guess I'd say that the social conditioning is the largest factor of the
two. But neither has been shown in these studies.

------
shriya
Just because the author cites studies doesn't mean those studies are not
biased, or that their limited scope is not distorting our ideas of people's
motivations or actions in the real world. Psychological and sociological
studies try to put people in situations that are meant to be "representative"
of how they react on a large scale in the real world, but the situations
themselves are small-scale, simple, and usually involved test subjects who are
educated, middle-to-upper class, white college students.

The entire section about men being competitive and how boys act on the
playground just demonstrates how little the author understands about social
dynamics between women. Women try to do pro-social actions because egotistical
actions get them ostracized very, very quickly. If a woman was so
transparently cocky, she would have absolutely no friends and an endless
gossip mill from jealous and/or insecure peers. We're also in a society where
women who are 20 years old or older have still grown up in a society where--
as much as they were told they could do any job a man could-- they still
mostly wanted to marry a guy who made more money than them, and knew that
their success was not as critical to their social status as their beauty,
kindness, or ability to do traditionally female activities well. Personally,
as much as I have loved math all of my life and programming for the past few
years, I have also been keenly aware that having a good sense of style, being
able to cook, being good at dance and art, and being friendly and outgoing
have been extremely helpful in my socialization as a female. Could I have
neglected all of those things to be even better at math and programming? Of
course. Would I have as much social status or friends? Definitely not.
Additionally, male success attracts attractive women, while female success
does not do the same. You have to be in a city or career or educational
environment with "the right kinds of guys" in order for them to respect you
MORE because of your intellect and accomplishments, not less. But for a man,
being successful will aid him in attracting women who he finds "up to par"
even if he is not in an environment full of other smart & accomplished people.
The easiest way to see an example of this is by comparing the romantic and
sexual experiences of smart males vs. smart females in high school. The boys
have gone on more dates and had more sexual experiences, while many girls--
even pretty ones-- have not had such experiences.

Girls are fine interacting with machines, but please take a look at all the
bazillions of articles written about Goldie Blox, and that great comic-
[http://www.smbc-
comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1883#comic](http://www.smbc-
comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1883#comic) -you can't just say "well there
are toys for kids made to be unisex" because most things that are unisex (ask
a woman how awkward and uncomfortable "unisex" t-shirts are) are really just
made for guys. I loved design as a kid. I thought it was arts & crafts,
because that's what everyone calls it when you're a young girl, but it was
really design. If I had toys that encouraged me to design webpages and
programs, there's no doubt in my mind that I would have loved them, but boys
toys involved rudimentary programming and engineering, while girl's toys were
all about playing house, hosting tea parties, and dressing up dolls. The most
mechanical they got were dolls who peed or said stupid phrases.

Business is very people-oriented! You are making products for PEOPLE. There is
no way the author can argue that business in general, and tech businesses in
particular, do not have aspects that appeal to both kinds of stereotypical
interests from each gender. Tech businesses are creative and involve selling
and designing things. Would this sexist author say that talking to a lot of
people and designing something beautiful are traditionally male functions?

Isolation and lack of self-confidence are EXTREMELY societal. How can
isolation be the fault of an individual? I DO feel very uncomfortable when I'm
the only woman in a room full of men. Who wouldn't feel uncomfortable walking
into a room and being the "only" of anything, especially anything REALLY
obvious-- like gender or race, which you display on your body and can't hide.

These caveman arguments are also stupid. Who is to say that the women who
would have to keep track of complex timing schedules for feeding their
children, who had to ensure that they had enough food to feed everyone in
their family or community, who counted and kept track of the objects stored at
home, etc. did not also develop mathematical skills in an evolutionary manner?
The author's reasoning is stupid.

Ever think those "sex" differences in spatial and mechanical thinking are
because boys are building little cars and rockets or tossing around a football
as a toddler, but girls are drawing and imagining and telling stories? Even if
kids gravitate towards those and it's not entirely the fault of toy companies
and clueless parents/educators, surely these years of practice can not be
discounted or called "natural".

In conclusion, I went into this with a semi-open mind because I'm always
waiting for an argument I will actually respect. But I was disappointed yet
again. [http://xkcd.com/385/](http://xkcd.com/385/)

------
gcb1
fact: there are less red heads with black eyes as ceo than women. or blacks.
or asians. or native americans.

non aryan gingers are the true minority!

------
sumoward
I enjoyed this rebuttal.

[http://ulobw.tumblr.com/](http://ulobw.tumblr.com/)

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jheriko
whilst this may be accurate i advocate the safer approach, but equally valid
argument that women don't want to enter technology.

this is easily backed by data which shows that the level womens rights in a
country has a strong inverse correlation to the number of women in STEM
fields. this way, even before we consider the merits of the sexes we have a
simple explanation which avoids the classic battle of the sexes arguments...
and actually i'm sure women know this themselves - after all they are the ones
who regularly decide that they would prefer to enter a non STEM field.

having few women in STEM fields is ironically an indicator of having a free
and liberal society with strong rights for women.

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secoif
Wow, this a perfect example of the dangerous thinking, the "facts", that got
us to this point in the first place.

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MilesTeg
Mandatory related non-xkcd comic: www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1883

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michaelochurch
Weak shit.

There _might_ be very slight natural differences in _variance_ of ability,
which would explain why more men come out at the top and bottom. I don't think
there's value into coming in to that argument on either side. At any rate, the
evidence seems to indicate that the gender disparity (at the relevant IQ
level) is at most 2:1.

Going 100 steps further and justifying the good-ole-boy network that has taken
over VC and Silicon Valley is another matter entirely.

------
nickthemagicman
Hahahaha

[http://thumbs.newschoolers.com/index.php?src=http://media.ne...](http://thumbs.newschoolers.com/index.php?src=http://media.newschoolers.com/uploads/images/17/00/42/13/91/421391.jpeg&size=600x564)

~~~
gcb1
nsfw.

