It Seems We Are Not Allowed A "wrong" Opinion!

[ToraToraTora]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40859004

[sp1814]

Correction:

For

...except one.

read:

...but I have seen one difference.

[woofgang]

pixie, it was society in general that assumed that women couldn’t do those things.....

[sp1814]

Full text of Zunger's excellent piece:

https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788

[pixie374]

Hope this is the right one, woof

https://animalwise.org/2012/01/26/born-this-way-gender-based-toy-preferences-in-primates/

Apparently they were more interested in how the wheels went round.

[jno]

sp1814, I think your point 3 is simply standard internet behaviour. People write stuff and make it public because they can and therefore suppose they are entitled to; the idea that anything can have consequences is often not in their minds at all.

[pixie374]

That Zunger piece seems to be entirely missing the point about interest. It wasn't even interesting enough to more than skim through.

[woofgang]

I have never met Mr Zunger and I love him. Not because he thoroughly crushes the “hardwired not to be as good stuff” but because of what he says about what it takes to be a good systems person. He talks about IT and engineering systems and my experience is in paper systems and therapeutic practice but the interaction and change support process is the same and he has it nailed. Once you get beyond juniosity, you can be the best coder/systems analyst/process designer in the known universe and you will get NOWHERE if you can’t talk to people in their own emotional language and understand their hopes and fears in respect of the change you are managing. In other words, those “female skills"

[pixie374]

Nothing to do with not being good enough- it depends if you can tolerate the tedium. Are you now saying there are "female" skills, woof?

[jim360]

One thing about that study that seems interesting to pick up on is how, apparently, the female rhesus monkeys weren't quite so fussy about what they played with (graphs 1a and 1b, on the right, show that point fairly clearly).

[pixie374]

Yes- it shows male behaviour in both to be more extreme.

[woofgang]

no pixie...I am saying that the bloke who wrote the original memo, whose name I now can’t find, seems to believe that there are innate female skills.

[jim360]

That possibly speaks to another topic worth its own discussion, which is to say what societal expectations are placed on men. Another point in the memo, to be sure, but in the long run I think any coherence in his argument suffers by making it almost sound like he's moaning about how unfair it is for him and his ilk, and by overstressing the biological factors

[pixie374]

That goes without saying really.

[woofgang]

jim I also noticed the difference between the reported male and female monkey behaviour....I think it blows a hole in the boys’ toys and girls’ toys concept. I am not sure what it does say about the monkey behaviour though.....

[pixie374]

That was to woof...
I think they are underestimated jim- but they certainly aren't everything.

[jim360]

It's hard to know what to draw from such a study. I would like to see what would have happened if they'd thrown in an Action Man doll, or maybe a toy pram, and see who played with what then.

[-Talbot-]

To a monkey a toy pray would also be a truck

[-Talbot-]

Pram ... iPad doesn't like the word pram

[pixie374]

Yes- it would play with the wheels.

[naomi24]

Jim, //Is it reasonable to think that *small* biological differences between men and women are enough to entirely explain away a *large* difference in representation at any given job? Answer: no…… Either you agree with him or you don't but it seems that you ought to read it, at least partly, to find out, no?//

I see you’ve done a bit of selective editing in your post at 15:42
where you subsequently quote him as saying "Many of these [biological] differences are small” ….. so not actually all, as you implied in your earlier post – but I’ll ignore that.


I read the link provided and what I actually said was “I think there's something in what he said”, and that I think men and women are wired differently. However, like Pixie I don’t think the differences are “small”.

I haven’t read all the posts between then and now yet – but I will.