zlacker

>>andren+(OP)
it’s fine and valid to research whether people encounter improper bias in their careers, which is clearly often the case. But their discussion is incomplete without at least recognition of another possible partial cause of gender disparity in tech, the fact that many sexist anti-STEM cues are given to children at a much earlier stage, way before careers are even on the horizon. These cues are delivered by parents, teachers, parents of friends, other adults, and other children. Cues can be as subtle as a wide-eyed look while reacting to the news that Sally wants to be a programmer, where Joey gets no such wide eyes for the same news. Any study that overlooks that cause, in order to focus only on the causes highlighted in recent dramatic episodes, is an example of the phenomenon mentioned in the title of the book their chapter appears in: Groupthink.

>>natch+x3
Many girls decide at around age 12 that a better life strategy is for them to get a husband that will do all the heavy lifting. This obviously worked for thousands of years and is likely a result of evolution and specialization. I always admire when I meet an independent woman that rejected this conditioning but it's very rare :( Maybe there should be a better approach to early-teenage girls to help them to make a different choice that would not render them uncompetitive in STEM fields later? 10,000 hours to achieve mastery or childhood dedication seem to be increasingly more relevant in STEM, similarly to piano/violin virtuosos.

>>bitL+R9
Independent non-family women lead to less children. Thus society as a whole has motive to lead girls towards this specialization.

>>mantas+Md
This could be the culprit - those women, that became independent removed themselves and their traits from genetic pool due to not having children or having fewer of them. That might also explain persistence of religions that emphasize sexual relationships for reproduction only and banning abortions, as it leads to higher probability of carrying on with one's genotype. So what we are observing could be some stochastic optimum in some game theory of natural conditions. A question is if our civilization that could seemingly solve cutthroat problems of the past leading to brutal competition like food scarcity will have completely different, stable stochastic optima. I guess we will see (or generations after us).

>>bitL+se
Indeed. I wonder wether civilisations after reaching certain step sort of goes into self-destruction mode.

Maybe deep down humans feel that they're at evolutionary dead end and decide to off themselves as a society? I could easily see why today's western society (and possibly others as well) may be far from optimal. Yet I'd prefer to try to fix it.

What is funniest, people advocating for "progress" etc frequently are those who have no children. Although old good "you're not grown up till you got kids" outlook is looked down nowadays, I can see why it'd make sense. If you don't have kids - you don't have skin in the long game. Nor experience what it's like to play in that mode. I wonder how the world would change if we'd only allow people with kids to vote and/or participate in politics.