Inequality of opportunity is part of what made the U.S. a 20th century powerhouse. Bright, educated women had two career choices pre-1965: nursing or teaching. (Even in 1960, the state school my mom went to did not accept women into engineering or architecture and she could only take higher science classes if she planned to teach.) All those bright women with no options boosted our educational system to great heights for little cost. Once they had choices, many women spread out into other better paying fields.
It's not surprising that a business could succeed by following the same blueprint.
If you haven't read SuperFreakonomics and you're interested in this comment, get a copy of the book: the first chapter is about how the "decline" of the education system is linked to rising professional opportunities for women.
It used to be that highly competent women often became teachers because that was the only thing available to them. Now women can be professors, work in business, etc.
Note: this is not an argument for restricting female choice or anything else. It's about diagnosing how one (good) thing can lead to unintended consequences.
What this really indicates is that teachers need to be paid more, and the working environment improved. Then the profession will become more attractive to talented who are currently choosing other careers.
The United States is about 5% of the World's population, and produces about 25% of the World's economic output. This has been true for about the last 60 years. The USA and Western Europe have had the most expensive labor, focusing on high-quality products and services that require more education, but justify the higher labor cost.
I'd say that the educational system is uneven: elementary and high schools are just "good enough" to not completely screw the country. The university system, though, is really good: http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp .
I think it's generally agreed that the U.S. was the world's foremost economy and the home of many of the major innovations of the 20th century. I'm contending that our public education system was a major enabler of that creativity and productivity.
Simply because not everyone who innovated went to college doesn't negate the value of our public education system. Nearly everyone in the United States after World War Two went to public school for some time.
I wasn't saying college negated the value of public education at all. I was pointing out that a huge number of the people who contributed to US prosperity did not attend US public schools.
Einstein didn't attend the American public school system, nor did Dyson, or many of the other great scientists of the early 20'th century. In the present day, Sergei Brin only spent 4 years in US public schools. Elon Musk didn't, nor did Max Levchin (Thiel's wikipedia page is ambiguous). Zuckerberg didn't go to a public high school either (don't know what he did before that).
You can't point to a country with massive contributions from immigrants, and then declare that services those immigrants didn't use (or used minimally) are the cause of prosperity. The logic just doesn't work.
Enumerating a list of successful people who didn't attend public school doesn't say anything about the utility of the public school system, especially without looking at the people who did.
It also ignores the armies of undergraduates and computers (the human kind, mostly public school educated women sitting at adding machines) that made most American discoveries and inventions possible. Individuals do make some leaps, but on the whole it's massive collaboration that advances science and technology.
I'm not disputing the utility of the public school system. I certainly agree that literacy/numeracy is a good thing.
I'm disputing the idea that the public school system made the US into a "20th century powerhouse". If you want to attribute all of a person's success to the school they pass through, be my guest. I can similarly say the IRS is the cause of the US being a "20'th century powerhouse" - after all, 100% of US businesses are taxed by the IRS.
But the fact is, the US is fairly unique in terms of innovation and growth. The education system is, by most measures I've seen, fairly mediocre [1]. And additionally, a fairly large amount of our workforce, particularly at the higher ends, didn't even use the public education system. It seems like an extraordinary claim to attribute the success of the US to our public schools. Yeah, we need public schools/indoor plumbing/electricity, but it would be similarly silly to claim we are a powerhouse as a result of those services.
[1] As far as I'm aware, this was always the case. I know that during the Cold War, we were deathly afraid of the Soviets with their high test scores gaining a scientific advantage over us.
You also can't just look at the owners of major company's and think their background was the only thing that mattered. Drawing from a large, stable, educated workforce is a requirement for any large technology company to succeed.
PS: China and India both have huge public education systems.
I know of many female chefs of great repute and talent - and I know some very good female professors.
I don't see the link between "most good chefs are men" and "women should not be chefs". It's a bit like "no Black people ride at the front of the bus" and "Black people should not ride at the front of the bus" - you've conveniently assumed a level playing field where there likely is none, and you've also erroneously linked the current state of things to the ideal state of things.
As for the military - not being a military man I'm not sure I am qualified to comment... but are there not many more roles in the military that do not require the massive amounts of brawn that "only men" can provide?
>military requires more endurance that women normally have.
my understanding (and experience) is that women tend to have better endurance than men. I remember a few years back I was running with a friend of mine, a girl who was probably 10" shorter than I am, who had a notably worse BMI than I did (at least, she did when we started running together. she improved significantly more than I did during the course of our efforts. Maybe she was just more motivated than I was?)
All along, I could out sprint her, but when it came to distance running, from day one, half way through the run she'd start leaving me in the dust. Oh man, it was so humiliating, getting left in the dust by a short fat girl. (It was good for both of us, I think, really;)
Now, if you loaded us both down with 100Lbs of equipment and had us do the same run? sure, I'd kick her ass. I don't think she could lift a pack of that size.
So yeah, men are nearly always stronger but that does not mean we have better endurance.
Anecdotal evidence. You are simply on the low end of the bell curve for men.
Endurance is simply how long you can use your muscles before they give out; it's not independent of how much muscle you have. If you are very weak, you will have terrible endurance.
Yes, there are things called fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers; the greater proportion of the latter, the better endurance you have. The greater proportion of the former, the faster you go.
There doesn't seem to be evidence of gender difference in the ratio, but Google could have failed me. There is, however, an argued difference along ethnic lines. (East Africans have a much higher slow twitch/fast twitch ratio than other ethnicities.)
Even if there were, though, a marathon is an endurance race. You rely primarily on your slow twitch muscles, except perhaps in the home stretch, if you have anything left. Men win the marathons.
First, I bet in my case neither one of us was really being pushed to the limit. two suburban white kids trying to become slightly less fat? not exactly running for our lives, you know? So it probably has more to do with will and pain tolerance than anything else.
weird, so I thought that the statistics backed up my anecdotes, but at least for pain tolerance, apparently the studies seem to show that men can tolerate more pain... which seems really weird to me. (Have you ever seen a woman give birth? I watched all five of my siblings being born, without any sort of anesthesia. I'm pretty sure that would kill me, or, at least, deter me from having more children.)
So yeah, the first couple pages of google results seem to show that you're right and I'm wrong, though, so eh, whatever. I guess I'm just a wuss.
Among those who run marathons, the top men put in better times than the top women. However, I know _far_ more female marathon runners than men. (OTOH, I know far more male distance cyclists, so I wouldn't jump to any particular conclusions from either data point.)
Really? Are we arguing about this? The males in all mammal species are better at physical tasks. It's called testosterone. It allows you to build more muscle mass. If women take it, they also build more muscle mass. So do female bunny rabbits.
There are other things that go into it, obviously, like body shape. Women are 8 times more likely to tear their anterior cruciate ligament because their wider hips cause them to impact the ground at problematic angles. And boobs are a dead weight.
But yeah, this is something where the biology is very well understood.
Yes, it is very well understood. Muscle mass has little relationship to endurance.
In endurance events (real endurance, not wimpy things like 2-3 hour marathons) women are highly competitive with men, and there is some evidence they have an advantage.
For example, in the 235km Badwater Ultramarathon, women consistently finish top 5, despite representing only 5-10% of the field.
Long distance swimming is even worse for men. Shelly Taylor-Smith has held the record for the 48km Manhattan Island swim since 1995. Women are within 28 minutes of the outright English Channel swim crossing record (6:57 vs 7:25), and based on this older swim time list, women have 9 out of the top 20 times: http://www.channelswimming.com/solo-time-HTML.htm
I'm going to resort to quoting papers to you:
"When performing certain isometric exercises, the endurance of women is almost twice that of men performing the same exercise, according to results presented at a meeting of international scientists. Both sexes performed the exercises at the same percentage of their maximum strength.
The study, conducted at the University of Colorado in the US, confirmed that women outlasted men by an average of 75 per cent and, importantly, showed that the reason women had longer endurance times was not due to differences in the motivation levels between men and women, or within the nervous system, but due to differences within muscle." http://www.mydr.com.au/sports-fitness/women-beat-men-on-musc...
"The negative slope and the X-axis intercept of this equation at 66 km supports the hypothesis that women ultramarathon runners have greater fatigue resistance than do equally trained men whose performances are superior up to the marathon distance." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9044230
Muscle mass seems fairly clearly distinct from endurance, given that most distance athletes aren't particularly bulky. And I'm highly skeptical that "The males in all mammal species are better at physical tasks". Among humans, I think it's generally accepted that women have better fine-motor control (for example, women were hired to assemble early core memories for this reason). Another well-known counterexample is lions: "Lionesses do the majority of the hunting for their pride, being smaller, swifter and more agile than the males" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion)
I don't see how that follows. Most chess grandmasters are men; should women not play? If you accept the hypothesis that males have greater genetic variability than females, it shouldn't be surprising to see men overrepresented at the very top (and bottom) of just about everything.
And military requires more endurance that women normally have.
It also requires more endurance than most men have. But if an individual woman can legitimately meet that standard, why deny her the opportunity?
You can't disprove a statistical assertion with a single counterexample. Kudos to Jeanne Bamberger, but she's not, by herself, statistically significant.
I'm not saying that your conclusions are wrong, but "one of my best professors was a woman" is a very weak argument.
The original assertion (All the best chefs are men, best professors I know are men too) is unprovable, because none of us are xentronium and the professor part of his assertion was based on personal experience ("I know").
However, the first part of his statement (I firmly believe there are three areas women should not generally be part of: military, cooking and teaching) can be argued against quite effectively by showing a single counter example.
xentronium needs to either argue the counter example (ie, argue that Jeanne Bamberger is not a good teacher), or narrow down his argument (eg, argue that only women who's first name starts with "J" make good teachers). Both lines of response weaken his argument considerably.
Anecdotal, but fairly true in my experience; when I did water polo in high school, it was coed. We didn't have many women interested in putting in the effort to land on the varsity team, probably for social reasons, but the handful that did were terrifying. I would rather have gone up against any two other people on the team than play polo with one of the women, because as it turns out there are certain things that guys just won't do to each other.
Believe it or not, I deliberately didn't mention that I know there are areas where women are much better than men just for the sake of experimenting with HN public opinion.
Why? Because I feel the smallest glimpse of non-tolerable way of thinking is going to get downvoted. Unless it is coming from Zed or DHH. If I am right, I am going to be told I am wrong with a wording like: "It's not because you say what you think[, it's because you're troll without proofs]" (last part is optional because people don't want their opinion to have a tiniest trail of subjectivity).
Guess it's time to become one of them rockstars and have an ability to speak freely.
One of the reasons I got tired of Reddit was people claiming to be persecuted by the Hivemind. Here's a thought experiment. Suppose you had said that you firmly believe that women will be dramatically underrepresented in cooking, teaching, and the military, if selection for those things is based on merit.
This is different from what you said; it implies that women are, on average, not as good at those things as men. For whatever reason. You seemed to be saying that there's such a huge difference between men and women in those fields that women might as well not even try, except for really exceptional cases -- a much less defensible statement.
A question for everybody: how would you have reacted to the statement above? Personally, I would have attacked it for rashly generalizing from a small sample without proper controls, but not for thinking Damned Thoughts.
Well, let's do some projection on the IT, because I think it's somewhat better known for most of us here.
How many good women programmers do you know? Do you remember them because they're exceptionally good or because they're women? If you believe my statement that they're "dramatically underrepresented in IT" (if you don't, I'll have to bring in some statistics like [1]), is it because they're:
a) less suitable for IT jobs (for whatever reason)
b) don't tend to like IT
c) b) because of a)
d) a) because of b)
e) strongly abused at IT work [2]
f) not their fault, employer's
Given that I don't believe that IT guys are aggressive towards women, I am left with five options. f) is probable but I thought USA was an example of sex tolerance and stuff. So I am left with statements a) to d) with d) being my argument of choice.
There was an interesting insight on the subject of gender differences in [3] and some not-statistically-worthy-but-probably-scientifically-correct proof of the fact that women's brains are wired differently than men's.
Now back to military, cooking and teaching. There is a reason why women were "dramatically underrepresented" in military in Paleolithic era. If you pick most animal communities the male species are generally the defenders, the warriors, the aggressors. I believe that to be hard-wired to the brain. I admit that point about endurance is probably not valid, my bad, but women still can't run kilometers with full equipment on them. There was another point with totally anecdotal evidence: women-only teams work worse than men-only teams in my experience. Is it because males tend to be ultra-competitive and better team players? I think so.
Teaching. Now don't get me wrong, I admit that mothers have really great positive impact on their children, but I also think that in school and universities the teachers should be mostly men, at least for the "male audience". Boys need an authority, an example, a leader.
Cooking. I guess that's most controversial of three, because there shouldn't be any hard prerequisites for chef that women cannot meet. Yet they're "dramatically underrepresented" for one reason or other.
This is a long comment already, but the core idea is that in a good company you shouldn't be afraid to express your opinion, even if it doesn't have some fundamental research base behind it. There's nothing wrong in being wrong. It's wrong to be wrong and not admit it.
Clearly not - Larry Summers never made any gender-based value judgements, nor did he even draw conclusions. He got into trouble for asking questions people didn't want the answer to.
Inequality of opportunity is part of what made the U.S. a 20th century powerhouse. Bright, educated women had two career choices pre-1965: nursing or teaching. (Even in 1960, the state school my mom went to did not accept women into engineering or architecture and she could only take higher science classes if she planned to teach.) All those bright women with no options boosted our educational system to great heights for little cost. Once they had choices, many women spread out into other better paying fields.
It's not surprising that a business could succeed by following the same blueprint.