As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men • Hacker News Board

Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#211

Post by vorpalhex » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 2:50 PM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #93

torben-friis wrote: post #37

I wonder how it adjusts for culturally pushed gender differences. Women could have the same opportunities as men but be expected to have different tastes, be subjected to different experiences growing up, etc. which could affect their choices in latter life.

I'm fairly visual-spatial. I now make little websites and take photos and play SimCity. But when I was a homemaker, this largely got expressed as an interest in clothes and household decor because those were basically the avenues open to me. It wasn't particularly fulfilling. I thought dressing well and being pretty would get me a happy marriage. It didn't. I thought having a nice home would get me a satisfactory soc…

> inevitably other people will jump up and say (in essence) "Well, that isn't true for me and you are evil and bad and wrong for saying this is true for women generally and you don't represent me!!!!!" type nonsense.

Your detractors are engaging in the No True Scotsman fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman One of the issues is that identity is, for most, a very emotional construct and anything which threatens that will illicit an emotional threat response - anger, lashing out, attacking. The best response is to, as much as possible, simply ignore those responses and continue doing what you'd like to do - the same as researchers will hopefully continue to do. In old adage form - "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink."

Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#212

Post by wongarsu » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 2:51 PM UTC

Jweb_Guru wrote: post #129

wongarsu wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the programmer example is a much better example than the transgender example. If you are ostacized and disciminated for your choice, you are not "free to choose". It's "free to choose" in the same sense that everyone is "free to choose" to commit crime, with the risk of being put into prison for your choice. The "woman in programming" example is much better. Woman in programming started declining basically th…

Firstly, I think you are implicitly assuming that there's nothing dissuading women from being programmers--that if they join the industry, things go perfectly smoothly for them. That's far from the case, in my experience. Secondly, nowadays, men and women both play games at roughly the same rate (with women playing a little more by some metrics), but that doesn't seem to have improved the chances of women entering th…

I don't think that computer games explain the entire phenomenon, they are just one major factor that I chose to focus on.

It is true that the gender imbalance in gaming has mostly smoothed out, but until that happened the software industry already turned mostly male. And even if nobody intends to erect barriers, in a group that's heavily skewed towards one demographic everything starts to cater towards that demographic, pushing everyone else away. So unsettling the balance once for long enough may be enough to explain where we are today.

>Finally, what is your explanation for the huge increase in the proportion of women in biology?

I honestly have no idea.

Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#213

Post by jaxtellerSoA » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 2:51 PM UTC

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #201

toxik wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still pay the opportunity cost, even if you are getting a monthly income. Why should I hire the person who was away for a solid year on parental leave over the guy who has been working diligently during that time? Forcing parents to have equal amounts of parental leave, as we do in Sweden (well, we incentivized it,) is a form of imposed equality of outcome. Equality of outcome is often said to be some disease of…

> Why should I hire the person who was away for a solid year on parental leave over the guy who has been working diligently during that time? Maybe I'm coming from a place of privilege but that point of view makes me incredibly sad. I can't imagine being able to discriminate based on parental leave

> Maybe I'm coming from a place of privilege but that point of view makes me incredibly sad.

Why?

It makes me sad that anyone would want to force business to take on risk that it wouldn't otherwise in the name of "equality".

Choices have consequences, if you choose to stay out of work for a year to raise your child then you will be less employable.

Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#214

Post by grenoire » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 2:52 PM UTC

antt wrote: post #164

grenoire wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the difference for the CPU analogy might be that we know exactly what to have them do, and they do exactly that (sans bugs, hah). Brains, whether it's architectural or hormonal, have many other factors that influence their workings, and aren't necessarily deterministically programmable as processors are.

I would like some evidence that under normal [0] circumstances brains which look different act different. So far it sounds like phrenology at best and racist demagoguery at worst when you compare black brains to white brains instead of female to male [1]. I don't understand how someone who would (probably) call themselves progressive can use reheated talking points from 18th century eugenicists without noticing a pro…

I don't know man, I didn't even do a racial comparison. We just know that hormones do have an effect on how your brain works and that males and females do secrete hormones at different levels. You're strawmanning a li'l bit now...

Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#215

Post by trashtester » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 2:53 PM UTC

Frondo wrote: post #204

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should I hire the person who was away for a solid year on parental leave over the guy who has been working diligently during that time? Maybe I'm coming from a place of privilege but that point of view makes me incredibly sad. I can't imagine being able to discriminate based on parental leave

I'm coming from the same place, except I don't think it's privilege, I think it's wanting to build a world where anyone can take a year off for anything and not have that held against them if they later want to go work for someone. We're living in an era where, resource-wise, we could be post-scarcity, but politically, it's all locked up in a shitty, shitty system. I want to keep imagining a world in which people are…

Scandinavian countries do not go that far. This privilege is only granted to parents. The goal is NOT to give people the right to go on un-paid leave for any reason, but rather to promote gender equality as well as encourage people to have children. (The latter to prevent birth rates to fall too far below the replacement rate.)

The Scandinavian economic model relies heavily on high work life participation for funding, so encouraging people to take time off for other reasons would not make sense.

Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#216

Post by pron » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 2:55 PM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #133

pron wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equality of outcome is not about individuals but about statistics over groups (usually groups that have been treated as such by society).

Women and men, are groups. It's not a social distinction. It's a biological one. You don't want a doctor to treat exactly men and women alike, because they don't have the same metabolisms. It's not proven it's the right think to do to give exactly the same stuff to men and women in society either. I get why we are currently trying to promote it, as it makes sense morally, espacially with our history, but we are at th…

First of all, it's certainly not in our nature to fly, and yet building airplanes has been both successful and positive; we commonly fight and beat nature when we believe it's in our interest. Second, it is much better to potentially waste resources on what you believe is morally right, rather than save them and do what you believe is morally wrong. In other words, the two sides here are asymmetric, and the burden of proof is not on the side that wants to do what is morally right.

Of course, different people can have different moral values; so while I disagree with those who would say that they don't consider fairness a value (or interpret it in a different way), I don't think they're intellectually dishonest. However, I think that those that try to support their position with a "neutral" natural fallacy are intellectually dishonest.

Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#217

Post by naasking » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 2:55 PM UTC

throw2016 wrote: post #94

Here is an interesting discussion and debate between 2 experts in the field on sex differences. Cordelia Fine in her book Delusions of Gender [1] reports even something as simple as telling girls before a maths test that this is a test in which girls have done well results in dramatically higher scores suggesting the field is still in its infancy and fundamental questions about gender roles and culture remain. Simon…

> Cordelia Fine in her book Delusions of Gender [1] reports even something as simple as telling girls before a maths test that this is a test in which girls have done well results in dramatically higher scores suggesting the field is still in its infancy and fundamental questions about gender roles and culture remain.

This is called stereotype bias, and it's recently been debunked because replications have almost all failed.

Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#218

Post by kipchak » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 2:55 PM UTC

YinglingLight wrote: post #171

ekianjo wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want equality of outcomes anyway? It goes against individual Freedom. As long as opportunities are as equal as they can be, the rest is just the reflection of what individuals want to focus on and achieve. Equality of outcomes will force some people to do what they dont want to, which is undesirable on many levels.

>Why would you want equality of outcomes anyway? It goes against individual Freedom. "An interesting article in The Atlantic talks about studies showing that liberals think in terms of fairness while conservatives think in terms of morality. So if you want to persuade someone on the other team, you need to speak in their language. We almost never do that. That’s why you rarely see people change their opinions. ....If…

This sounds similar to the work of Jonathan Haidt. https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind?l...

Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#219

Post by koonsolo » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 2:56 PM UTC

jernfrost wrote: post #113

koonsolo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason I am a sceptic is because as a Scandinavian I notice easily how much more macho men are in less gender equal societies and how much more feminine the women are. I think it depends on what you're looking at. It is indeed true what you say. But if you look at % of women in tech, less gender equal societies will have relative more female programmers. This is from my own experience as a Belgian married to a…

I don’t necessarily reject that possibility. But I feel it does not capture the full extent of differences or similarities between genders. Can you really say genders are more similar because they have more similar jobs? Also I would caution agains making conclusions from Eastern European countries. Communism was very much into gender equality in some regards. Very high percentage of communist women worked. You see t…

> But I feel it does not capture the full extent of differences or similarities between genders.

The article indeed puts it into a really broad sense, and I agree that it should then look at it from more than 1 angle.

My experience with eastern Europe is that they are more traditional in their gender roles. Women get to stay at home with their kids for 3 years, and they actually prefer it that way. They also expect the man to do all the manly stuff. Quite different from what you see in Belgium and our neighboring countries.

Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#220

Post by jaxtellerSoA » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 2:57 PM UTC

Frondo wrote: post #204

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should I hire the person who was away for a solid year on parental leave over the guy who has been working diligently during that time? Maybe I'm coming from a place of privilege but that point of view makes me incredibly sad. I can't imagine being able to discriminate based on parental leave

I'm coming from the same place, except I don't think it's privilege, I think it's wanting to build a world where anyone can take a year off for anything and not have that held against them if they later want to go work for someone. We're living in an era where, resource-wise, we could be post-scarcity, but politically, it's all locked up in a shitty, shitty system. I want to keep imagining a world in which people are…

> I'm coming from the same place, except I don't think it's privilege, I think it's wanting to build a world where anyone can take a year off for anything and not have that held against them if they later want to go work for someone.

Do YOU want to have surgery from a surgeon that hasn't performed in year?

Your idea is fine utopian, fluffy unicorn, ideology. But practically it just won't work. This doesn't have anything to do with politics or a shitty system. It is just the facts of reality, if you are out of practice of your profession for year your skills won't be as sharp as someone who hasn't taken a year off.