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Disclaimer: I am not saying that every man is better than every woman at software development. Of course that would be untrue. However, it is a lie, and a dangerous one, to say that men are not statistically better and more interested in software development than women are. And if you want women to be better at software development, you must understand in detail why this is so. It is anti-woman to say that there isn't a biological difference in statistical ability between men and women for certain fields including software. To say that is to harm women's ability to succeed in those fields because it undermines the opportunity to incorporate the very strengths that make men good into women. SJWs should put women's interest before their politics.

I was going to post this in Brave engineer at Google states biological facts but this is enough of a tangent to warrant its own thread. That other thread is more about the political correctness, and this thread is about the differences in men's and women's thought processes and how to overcome those differences.

Men and women have vastly different brains, so much so that a person who isn't a doctor can tell the difference simply by looking at a cross section of it. Men have more grey matter, the neuron cell bodies, and women have more white matter, the myelin coated axons, by percentage. Men and women are evolved to have different minds because of the asymmetry in their biological needs and for specialization.

A system is more than the sum of its parts because of specialization. Florida grows oranges and Idaho grows potatoes, and they trade. Both states are better off than trying to grow both the oranges and the potatoes they consume or switching to consuming only one of these foods. Specialization allows increase productivity and is the entire reason why our economy and society is so damn advance.

The specialization of the body and the brain by gender in our species allows for increase production and for both intrasexual and intersexual competition. This is a cold, hard fact. Denying it is a lie, and a dangerous one, for political correctness is no different than any state mind-crime culture. It's what allows despots and psychopaths to gain power and to imprison, torture, and kill people.

What does this all mean? It is prejudice to pre-judge a person based on a group. It is not prejudice to post-judge a group by the behaviors of those in it. It is sexist to judge an individual woman as incapable or inferior at STEM simply because she is a woman. It is not sexist to judge women as being inferior to men at STEM based on the multitude of evidence that can be statistically confirmed. Nor is it sexist to acknowledge that these differences are both largely biological, not cultural.

The entire reason men and women have different brains is for specialization of the mind. This means that statistically men will do some mental tasks better than women, and statistically women will perform other mental tasks better than men. In order for this to not be true, men and women would have to think exactly the same way. Furthermore, this is not a judgement, but a fact, and any culture that demonizes stating factual truths is a scary and dangerous culture that will lead to witch hunts and human rights violations.

Quite frankly, one must question why some people are insisting there be more white women in STEM, and I say white women because there is no shortage of female software developers. There is a shortage of WHITE female software developers. To be fair, there is also a shortage of black female software developers, but no one cares about that. They only care about the white women. The fact is that you cannot swing a dead cat without hitting an Indian and a Chinese female software developer. And that's just counting the ones inside the United States. There are countless more working for U.S. companies in China and India through outsourcing.

This shows that culture does indeed affect the numbers of women in STEM, but the culture that is doing this is the bigotry of white American women against STEM, a bigotry that was created by Hollywood in the 1970s. The Hollywood image of the computer nerd cause women to suddenly stop majoring in STEM fields especially computer science. Today Hollywood continues to portray male developers as incompetents idiots and nerds while making female developers look like wizards, which also is bad because it makes software development looks easy and when women find out it's not, they give up.

Is sexual dimorphism in career preferences a problem? Well, no one is demanding more coal miners or sewer repairers be women. The only reason that the conservative left is now demanding more women in software is because there is so much money in software. Without the money created by the development of the Internet, the left and women would still look at software like it was coal mining, completely undesirable. And quite frankly, to be good at software development, you must enjoy writing software, which is a purely logical task. Those who get into any field for just money, won't be good at that field.

That said, if the goal is to maximize human happiness, coercing people into entering fields they wouldn't go into otherwise is counterproductive. In developed countries where people can choose what they do for a living, sexual dimorphism in jobs is greater than in countries that are poor. This is because people in poor countries have to work where they can find work. Developed economies allow for men and women to choose different careers, and so they do because of their innate desires.

But let's say we considered the sexual dimorphism to be a problem. If you want to solve a problem, any problem, you must first acknowledge its existence and second understand the problem. To understand why women are less drawn to software development, you must accept the real reasons for it, bigotry against STEM due to Hollywood making STEM low status for 50 years and the evolutionary psychology that makes women less interested in STEM fields and more interested in liberal arts fields. To understand why women are statistically less able than men at software development, you must not only acknowledge the differences of male and female thinking but also understand those differences in detail. If you don't understand those differences precisely then you cannot handle those differences.

The fact is that most STEM fields involve compartmentalization. This is exactly why women are less drawn to those fields and why most women do worse in those fields. The women who do well in those fields do so precisely because they compartmentalize like men do. Compartmentalization is the most important mental tool for many fields, while it is counter-productive in other fields like ecology and language where things are highly and haphazardly interconnected. Software is not like that.

www.youtube.com/embed/SZ6mVumHY9I

Software is composed of boxes whose contents don't touch the contents of other boxes. These boxes are called modules. And the separation of the boxes is called separation of concerns, which is the most important principle of software development. Only women who have highly compartmentalized thinking are good at software development, and such women are a tiny minority of all women. Put simply, if you want women to be better at software development, you must teach them to think like men, to compartmentalize.

There are also other thought processes that are statistically more common in men than in women that aid in certain fields like software development, but compartmentalization alone makes a huge difference. There are also thought processes statistically more common in women that are useful in other fields like caretaking, language, biology, and ecology that make women statistically better than men. Of course a small minority of each gender will be really good at the opposing set of fields, but their rarity proves the innate differences between the sexes. Anyone who cannot or will not acknowledge this scientific fact cannot be taken seriously on any scientific or engineering field because both science and engineering absolutely requires truth and understanding of nature. You cannot do science or engineering while putting politics before truth. It simply does not work because you cannot bullshit nature, and even software development obeys natural laws, mathematics and logic.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

This is as true for software as it is for space travel.

#scitech #politics #politicalCorrectness