
Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences - gr__or
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/
======
ve55
If you enjoyed this post you should read a few others that have been posted by
Scott recently (on the linked website).

If any chance were to be made, the least that I would hope for is that people
stop responding to every argument with nothing but hatred. Just pure,
unfiltered, hatred. It's very difficult nowadays to find communities, or even
individuals, who are good at this.

~~~
smsm42
> If you enjoyed this post you should read a few others that have been posted
> by Scott recently (on the linked website).

In fact, you should read all posts in that blog (only joking a little here). I
am saying this as a person who disagrees with Scott on many political views.
If everybody approached to controversial topics the same way as he does,
Internet would be the best place ever for political discussions.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Interesting you say that, as this seems to be one of his weaker entries,
precisely because he's taking a mocking tone without sufficiently backing up
his case.

~~~
smsm42
> because he's taking a mocking tone

Given as the alternative is "punch the Nazis!" from one side and "lol libtards
are nutz, praise kek" from the other, I'd rather take a gentle mocking now at
then. Even if I disagree from time to time. Scott is not ideal, maybe, but
definitely in the top 10%. Maybe even 1%, but I don't read enough to claim
that.

Also, I don't see much mocking going on there, could you give a couple
examples, maybe my understanding of mocking is different?

> without sufficiently backing up his case.

There's plenty of links in the article. Which claim do you think is not
backed?

~~~
ZeroGravitas
See my other comment about women having "conquered" the field of law because
they have a representation in higher education 1 percentage point lower than
their proportion in society, falling to 36% working in the field and 30% at
state judge level.

It's such a superficial appraisal of the reality, it's insulting that he then
mocks people who think there may be systemic issues.

~~~
smsm42
> It's such a superficial appraisal of the reality

The reality is exactly as described, namely:

As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these
fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of
medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of
journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet
for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female.

These figures are accurate, as far as I can see. The only objection could be
to the word "conquered", which sounds to me like an attempt to mine outrage
out of nothing. The discussion is about why there's 51% of female law students
(despite huge gap existing not so long before) but only 20% of CS students
(despite having 40% 20 years ago). Clearly, there is something going on, and
that's the interesting part, not discussing whether 51% of female students is
"conquering".

> it's insulting that he then mocks people who think there may be systemic
> issues

I still had no examples of "mocking", but given the reality as described,
there should be explanation why "systemic issues" exist in CS and engineering,
but not in law, medicine, math, biology, etc. If the concept does not explain
that, it is not fitting the facts, and as such can be dismissed.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
So 30% of judges being women is what, the natural state of things? This is the
highest heights that women can reach? Or are you just ignoring the state of
gender in the law, even as you present it as a success story, just as the
original blog did?

Is there some collective blind spot here?

Let me spell it out. The reason that there is not a percentage of judges equal
to the prevelance of women in the population, is due to systemic factors.
Pretending those don't exist, so that you can mock people who think systemic
issues apply elsewhere, as if the very thought of it amuses you, is bizarre.

~~~
Confusion
Thinking that the natural state of affairs is 50% of both genders [1] in
_everything_ is exactly the assumption that Scott shows to be unsupported by
data. And just to be sure: unsupported does not mean 'false'. The 'opposite'
assumption is not supported either.

If there was no sexism, no racism, no *ism, no history and no cultural
predisposition towards anything whatsoever, it could still be that only 30% of
all leaders would be women, simply because women would be found to be less
biologically predisposed to wanting to be the leader and leadership would go
to the best suited person that wants to do the job.

Some women argue that in that situation 70% of all leaders would be women,
because everyone would recognize them as better leaders and would ask them to
lead. I recognize and acknowledge that as a fully valid option. That could
also be. The point is that we simply do not know.

[1] 'all identities in ratio of their self-identification'

------
luu
Am I missing part of the argument here? At the beginning of section IV, Scott
argues that stereotypes can’t explain the gender gap in engineering because of
the differential rate at which people major in math vs. engineering (45% women
in math, 20% women in engineering). He says:

> Might girls be worried not by stereotypes about computers themselves, but by
> stereotypes that girls are bad at math and so can’t succeed in the math-
> heavy world of computer science? No. About 45% of college math majors are
> women, compared to (again) only 20% of computer science majors.
> Undergraduate mathematics itself more-or-less shows gender parity. This
> can’t be an explanation for the computer results.

Later, he introduces the thing-people interest spectrum and makes a case that
it’s inherent. He then breaks down the gender gap in various medical fields in
way that’s suggestive that the differences are due to the thing-people idea.

But, how does that apply math vs engineering or math vs. programming? Or for
that matter, programming vs. chemical engineering or electrical engineering
vs. chemical engineering? During undergrad, my recollection was that there
were proportionally fewer women in electrical engineering than in chemical
engineering in the classes I saw, and some quick googling seems to bear this
out. If math vs. engineering is a mystery that can't be explained by
streotypes, it also appears to be a mystery that can't be explained by thing-
people. Although I think it's a long stretch, maybe you can argue that
computers are more "thing-like" than math, but I don't think you can really
push that argument through to explain the relative ratios in CS, math, EE,
CivE, AE, MSE, and ChemE? BTW, the reason I think it's a stretch is because
you could also argue that computers are more "people-like" than math, so you
could flip the arugment around if the ratios were reversed. For EE vs. ChemE,
maybe EE rates are depressed because there's a lot of cross-over between EE
and BME classwork and BME is arguably more people-like, so the would-be EEs go
into BME, but if there's crossover, maybe that makes EE more BME-like and
therefore more people-like. I don't think you can give an explanation that's
much stronger than a just-so story for some other set of observed ratios.

Sure, you can pick a subset of fields where thing-people appears to explain
the variance[1], but you can also pick a set of fields where it doesn’t appear
to explain the variance. Scott seems to view a set of counter-examples as a
knockdown argument against stereotypes. But then why doesn’t this other set of
examples invalidate the thing-people explanation he argues for? Why can’t you
apply the exact same line of reasoning he applied to stereotypes to thing-
people?

This line of reasoning seems internally inconsistent to me. Am I missing
something that would make this line of reasoning consistent?

One line of reasoning is that Scott is merely rebutting someone else's
argument and that he therefore doesn't need to explain what's going on and he
only needs to explain why the other explanation is wrong. But in that case,
there isn't a need to bring up thing-people. It seems like it's been brought
up because Scott believes thing-people has more explanatory power than
sterotypes and Scott is making a positive argument about thing-people, not
just knocking down someone else's argument.

[1] Even within the fields he picks, one example he gives is the rate at which
women go pediatrics at a higher rate than any other specialization he lists
other than ob/gyn. But why is the rate in pediatrics so different than in
psychiatry? He argues that they're both "people" fields, which sounds
reasonable. But there's one field is 25% male and the other is 43% male.
That's almost the same as the math/engineering difference he cites earlier
with the genders flipped. Is dealing with babies somehow more people-like or
less thing-like than talking to adults? It's certainly a strong stereotype
that women are more interested in babies than men, but this is cited as an
example of the explanatory power of thing-people, not of the explanatory power
of stereotypes.

~~~
Confusion

      If math vs. engineering is a mystery that can't be 
      explained by streotypes,
    

Scott gives an explanation in the article. Interestingly, it's exactly the
suggestion commenter peacetreefrog puts forward: relatively many math
graduates become teachers. And teaching is a 'person' thing.

As for engineering: the variation within engineering disciplines is much
smaller than the variation between engineering and other disciplines and since
we already have a hard time explaining the large difference, let's not worry
about the small differences. Perhaps chemical engineering is perceived to be
about 'people' more often.

~~~
peacetreefrog
Nice! Just went back and checked, I subscribe to SSC and read the original
version via email, that didn't really get into the math major thing. Scott
must have added the note on math afterwards (maybe he reads HN?) - anyway,
cool to see it born out by data.

------
peacetreefrog
"In the year 1850, women were locked out of almost every major field, with a
few exceptions like nursing and teaching. The average man of the day would
have been equally confident that women were unfit for law, unfit for medicine,
unfit for mathematics, unfit for linguistics, unfit for engineering, unfit for
journalism, unfit for psychology, and unfit for biology. He would have had
various sexist justifications – women shouldn’t be in law because it’s too
competitive and high-pressure; women shouldn’t be in medicine because they’re
fragile and will faint at the sight of blood; et cetera.

"As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these
fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of
medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of
journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet
for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female.

"And everyone says “Aha! I bet it’s because of negative stereotypes!”

"This makes no sense. There were negative stereotypes about everything!
Somebody has to explain why the equal and greater negative stereotypes against
women in law, medicine, etc were completely powerless, yet for some reason the
negative stereotypes in engineering were the ones that took hold and prevented
women from succeeding there."

~~~
my_first_acct
> In the year 1850...

The first women were admitted to Harvard Business School in 1963 [1], which is
a couple of years after Yuri Gagarin first orbited the earth. The first women
were admitted as undergraduates to Caltech in 1970 [2], which is a year after
the first moon landing.

> As the feminist movement gradually took hold...

"Gradually" seems to be the right word.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Business_School](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Business_School)

[2]
[http://archives.caltech.edu/about/fastfacts.html](http://archives.caltech.edu/about/fastfacts.html)

~~~
ZeroGravitas
He's also talking about a field being "conquered" by quoting stats on
graduating students. I would guess the split in law is less for Judges, in
business for CEOs etc. so if this process is happening, then it's still in
progress in all of those fields, and I'd guess you could look into each one in
turn and find that some started earlier and progressed faster than others. Be
interesting to see what the common points for the laggards are. I don't see
any great case being made for computing to be an outlier that's different in
kind rather than simply degree.

I googled some stats on judges, I was correct that it lags student numbers (I
say "lags" on the optimistic assumption that those students will eventually go
on to be judges in similar quantities. Possibly a judge will release a 10 page
manifesto about how the marxist left is forcing women to be judges when
they're rather be baking cakes though, so maybe we shouldn't count our
chickens until they've hatched):

[http://gavelgap.org/](http://gavelgap.org/)

in particular this infographic which points out that women have been 50% of
the students for 2 decades now, but still only 36% of the profession, and only
30% of state judges.

[http://gavelgap.org/assets/infographic-3-c78b5c8147005783a23...](http://gavelgap.org/assets/infographic-3-c78b5c8147005783a23e4bef667a804feb2b52bb357ec10ad984c3bec12c6a6c.jpg)

So it seems my use of "lags" was over optimistic and student numbers aren't a
great predictor, even after two decades.

------
whatrusmoking
If this makes sense to you, you haven't actually talked to women in this field
who trust you.

Scott has a bad habit of setting up bad strawmen and doing literature reviews
without talking to domain experts.

(Frankly the weakness of the arguments he's choosing to debunk make me doubt
that he even engaged in this topic with good faith. If you think the opposing
view point is summarized by ' "And everyone says “Aha! I bet it’s because of
negative stereotypes!” ', then you're not serious about this conversation.)

~~~
sparky_z
Feel free to get specific.

