Pink brain, blue brain
A neuroscientist shatters the myths about gender differences, arguing that the brains of boys and girls are largely shaped by how they spend their time, and offers parents and teachers concrete ways to avoid reinforcing harmful stereotypes.
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What Hacker News says
- Boys tend to be more active and do more sports, which causes a bit of a virtuous cycle where because they're more active, they get better at things like sport than girls simply because they're practicing. Girls raised with brothers tend to also be more active and better at sports.
I recently read Pink Brain, Blue Brain by Lise Eliot, which explores a lot of these differences, where they come from, and to what extent we can find biological causes for them. It's really interesting, and she gets into a lot of details analysing various studies and theories.
- If you don't have time to bother to learn about a topic, why do you assume you are more knowledgable on it than people who do spend their time studying the topic at hand? Your theory boils down to "Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that." You can "take apart" as many papers as you want to maintain your ignorance, but all you do is make yourself irrelevant to the discussion.
If you want to "prove" that the disparity is due to men and women experiencing different cultural dynamics in male-dominated spaces (which is why research regarding male-dominated scientific fields and financial firms are relevant to the question at hand) all you need is the Census Bureau's labor statistics. The interesting research questions are what specific dynamics are at play and how we can disrupt them.
Lest you assume my contemptuous response to your willful ignorance can be ignored due to a [citation needed] tag, one paper that perhaps offers more of the background you are looking for would be the FLOSSPOLS overview of their gender-related findings in Open Source communities: http://www.flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gender_I... For background on the mechanisms involved on a micro level I'd suggest the book Thinking, Fast and Slow, and on a more macro level specifically regarding gender, I recommend Pink Brain, Blue Brain.
If you want to claim that the highly statistically-unlikely and culturally-variable gender disparities in pay, promotion and participation are not due to sexist dynamics, you need to provide both an alternative theory and evidence to support it. Given that the only evidence required to prove that sexist behavior is present in technical spaces are the comments to this article, the burden of proof is on those who disregard the published research on the topic and claim those behaviors are either isolated aberrations or have no effect on women's willingness to be employed in the field.
- I've read a very good book on the subject, Pink Brain Blue Brain, in which the author writes about what are the really physical differences between genders and which are social differences (basically nature vs. nurture). A good read for anyone trying to understand where science stands as of today on the gender gap questions.
The main theme of the book is, there are differences, but not as dramatic between genders as between two individuals; and much of the differences may be alleviated by paying attention to stereotypes when raising or educating children.
- Yes, scientific disagreement. These are scientists who study gender and evolutionary psychology and say that Damore's scientific claims are unjustified.
If you follow through from the links in the article I posted, you'll find further links to comprehensive sources. I'll do some of the work for you:
> Lise Eliot, associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School, did an exhaustive review of the scientific literature on human brains from birth to adolescence. She concluded, in her book “Pink Brain, Blue Brain,”[0] that there is “surprisingly little solid evidence of sex differences in children’s brains.”
> Sex differences in cognitive abilities have been well-studied, so it’s intriguing that Damore chooses to ignore this vast literature to focus on personality[1]. The reason, however, quickly becomes clear when we look at the evidence: namely, there’s zero evidence that suggests women should make worse programmers.
> There is much literature that flat-out contradicts Baron-Cohen's study, providing evidence that male and female infants tend to respond equally to people and objects, notes Elizabeth Spelke, co-director of Harvard’s Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative[2].
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Pink-Brain-Blue-Differences-Troubleso...
[1] https://sites.google.com/site/dianehalperncmc//books/sex-dif...
- I'm just going to leave this here for further discussion.
http://www.newsweek.com/why-parents-may-cause-gender-differe...
In one, scientists dressed newborns in gender-neutral clothes and misled adults about their sex. The adults described the "boys" (actually girls) as angry or distressed more often than did adults who thought they were observing girls, and described the "girls" (actually boys) as happy and socially engaged more than adults who knew the babies were boys. Dozens of such disguised-gender experiments have shown that adults perceive baby boys and girls differently, seeing identical behavior through a gender-tinted lens. In another study, mothers estimated how steep a slope their 11-month-olds could crawl down. Moms of boys got it right to within one degree; moms of girls underestimated what their daughters could do by nine degrees, even though there are no differences in the motor skills of infant boys and girls. But that prejudice may cause parents to unconsciously limit their daughter's physical activity. How we perceive children—sociable or remote, physically bold or reticent—shapes how we treat them and therefore what experiences we give them. Since life leaves footprints on the very structure and function of the brain, these various experiences produce sex differences in adult behavior and brains—the result not of innate and inborn nature but of nurture.
For her new book, Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps—And What We Can Do About It, Eliot immersed herself in hundreds of scientific papers (her bibliography runs 46 pages). Marching through the claims like Sherman through Georgia, she explains that assertions of innate sex differences in the brain are either "blatantly false," "cherry-picked from single studies," or "extrapolated from rodent research" without being confirmed in people. For instance, the idea that the band of fibers connecting the right and left brain is larger in women, supposedly supporting their more "holistic" thinking, is based on a single 1982 study of only 14 brains. Fifty other studies, taken together, found no such sex difference—not in adults, not in newborns. Other baseless claims: that women are hard-wired to read faces and tone of voice, to defuse conflict, and to form deep friendships; and that "girls' brains are wired for communication and boys' for aggression." Eliot's inescapable conclusion: there is "little solid evidence of sex differences in children's brains."
Yet there are differences in adults' brains, and here Eliot is at her most original and persuasive: explaining how they arise from tiny sex differences in infancy. For instance, baby boys are more irritable than girls. That makes parents likely to interact less with their "nonsocial" sons, which could cause the sexes' developmental pathways to diverge. By 4 months of age, boys and girls differ in how much eye contact they make, and differences in sociability, emotional expressivity, and verbal ability—all of which depend on interactions with parents—grow throughout childhood. The message that sons are wired to be nonverbal and emotionally distant thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The sexes "start out a little bit different" in fussiness, says Eliot, and parents "react differently to them," producing the differences seen in adults.
Those differences also arise from gender conformity. You often see the claim that toy preferences—trucks or dolls—appear so early, they must be innate. But as Eliot points out, 6- and 12-month-olds of both sexes prefer dolls to trucks, according to a host of studies. Children settle into sex-based play preferences only around age 1, which is when they grasp which sex they are, identify strongly with it, and conform to how they see other, usually older, boys or girls behaving. "Preschoolers are already aware of what's acceptable to their peers and what's not," writes Eliot. Those play preferences then snowball, producing brains with different talents.
- About the labor statistics: if you say they're all I need, it seems that you dismiss the argument I made above, that disparity of outcome does not imply discrimination all by itself. Why?
About the paper: it looks much more sloppy to me than the previous one you linked. This quote from p.12 is at the root of my dislike:
> Unlike the survey data, where claims to generality can be made via mathematical operations, generalising from ethnographic work is done via interpretation as in the humanities.
The humanities haven't been scientifically tested, so we don't know if their method leads to truth. For example, on pp. 16-17 the authors note that many women are computer users but few become IT professionals - and immediately conclude, from that fact alone, that hostile work environment must be the reason. It's fishy that there are no intermediate steps of reasoning and no alternative hypotheses. There are many such examples in the paper.
About the books: I'm already a big fan of Kahneman. Why specifically do you mention his book as support? Pink Brain, Blue Brain seems to deal with the development of children rather than with sexism in mostly-adult fields like IT, and if its conclusions are right, then sexism of male IT workers is not required to explain the small number of women in IT because differences in development are already enough. Why are you mentioning it as support?
Also, do you disagree with what I said about the previous paper? It's a little frustrating when people abandon lines of argument to start new ones.
