Comment Re:Someone doesn't undestand the Bechtel test. (Score 1) 522
Like I said, this prof is a great deal more respected and a good deal more well-read in the field than the authors of the PNAS paper. You are also making the supposition that he doesn't know about that paper, but in fact in a recent paper he goes so far as to cite it.
You are pitting recent findings from a small, limited, non-blind and uncontrolled study against this professor AND his peers' decades of peer-reviewed, blind and controlled studies. It is way too soon to invoke as-yet-to-be-determined factors as an explanation over existing explanations that have been the results of decades of study and research.
The PNAS study shows one thing for certain - bias in this particular field did not lead to the female under-representation at the level we see in information technology fields. The PNAS study serves as a good control for future studies of this sort, but in no way does it actually present any conclusions due to the lack of a control itself.
Many of "problems" that are being highlighted by sociology studies are due to the current crop of unemployable sociologists not having sufficient training in critical reasoning and/or statistics.