Reply to post: Re: You might have also looked up "Social Darwinism"

Re: You might have also looked up "Social Darwinism"

"glass ceilings, pulled up drawbridges, hereditary wealth and writing laws to benefit a specific class " are unfortunately part of the landscape that ideally will change and disappear over time. But using Lovelace and Hopper misses the point. Exceptional people will always rise to the top. The argument in the memo was about group averages.

This point seems to have been spectacularly missed by the author of the article when saying:

"If you ever make a statement about what a broad group of people are like, especially in comparison to another group of people, you are going to be wrong. And the bigger that group, the more wrong you will be. And, no, simply inserting the word "average" does not excuse you ".

That is a completely rubbish statement. Pretty much all of social science is based on comparing large groups of people to another, in their aggregate or average. It has to be a large group to be statistically significant. It is the outliers that cannot be used to make a case for the group as a whole.

I'm not in any way taking a position one way or another about whether men are any more predisposed to IT than women. "IT" is itself such a broad term as to make comparisons meaningless anyway. I do not thing it is outrageous at all to postulate the theory that based on genetics and evolution, females (on average) may be better suited to some roles than males (on average) and vice versa, and thus that gender might be over- or under-represented in those roles even in an optimally-functioning meritocracy. Such a theory can be put to the test with a well-enough designed research / experiment (which will have to involve large groups of people).