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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And who can blame them really?

"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."

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-learning-brain/20121...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Mostly because compensation, benefits, raises, promotions and incentives are in most cases at individual levels. So people chase goals what you want them to chase.

Also note what's good for the team is often not good for the individual. I know this from personal experience, if you have a mix of high and low performers in a team and the rewards for them are going to be the same regardless of performance- The next thing that happens is the low performers make no attempt to increase their performance and high performers are always supposed to make up for it.

This creates immense frustration for people who are performing well. They see no reason why they must be doing heroics to take the same amount of money as the guy who isn't putting even a fraction of their effort. So the whole team collaboration stuff collapses.

That's true. But he described multiple factors that bias men towards programming. Even if individual factors (like mathematical ability) only cause 65/35 differences in isolation, combining a few of them together results in pretty extreme distributions.

So you are selecting outliers to justify the "proper" average outnumbering? That doesn't add up.

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?

sure...

I firmly believe that women will easily overtake men in technology

Huh?

I would love to see this theory getting more researched. So given that the original article used just numbers and assume that the time derivative of these are flat, you're suggesting that the time derivative is not, and I feel like there must be stats backing this in a more.. cited manner.

Except that they are. Do Chinese and Indian people cease to be minorities when discussing tech?