Why There Are No Women on Twitter’s Board, and So Few in Technology

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.

I agree. Research and data might make people feel bad, and not making people feel bad is obviously way more important than increasing knowledge.

> 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.

I agree. Personally I think we should withhold all math education to males until they are 21. We can discontinue this policy when there is a 50/50 gender split among all STEM workers, educators, and investors.

> we should assume and act as though differences are due to bias long after the differences are well proven to be natural

Yep. 1+1=3. Doesn't matter if you can prove that 1+1=2.

> 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.

Yep, unimaginable catastrophes.

Two similar but not identical dichotomies: * A population difference is due to innate differences vs a difference is due to systemic biases * An individual difference is due to innate makeup vs a difference is due to individual choices

The question: Why is the % of people with X characteristic in Y profession lower than the average. Applying my proposed standard above to that question, assume differences are due to biases until sumarily proven, we still aren't encouraging or abiding discrimination when X characteristic is sexual orientation.