I don't think this explains much. But of course, it is probably some component. It might also explain why women don't become IT workers, too, no? Other girls look down at those who are loners and spend their evenings tinkering...

Obviously, this is anecdote, but I had two friends who were elementary school teachers who eventually felt SO uncomfortable in their positions that they quit to pursue another career.

The cause what, absolutely NOT, other men. It was the recent social stereotype of "men=predators". Female teachers would play board games with kids during lunch, and have students in their classroom after school, but the men were advised, both through "unspoken" rules, as well as format advice from administrators, that they were not to see kids after class and should never engage in any friendly activities with students.

This attitude of "men=evil" is pervasive in western culture, to the point that men aren't allowed to sit next to unrelated children on many airlines, despite the prevalence of "airplane molestation" being exactly ZERO.

I'm not the OP, but I wanted to point out a few things.

Unpaid internships are illegal where I live. Also, IT workers can't be "trained from nothing" in a year.

But I've had "entry level" job postings up for several months, requiring nothing but a basic background in computers. You should know what TCP is and how IP packets are routed, at a high level. All other experience is entirely optional.

I have 116 male resumes and 1 female.

70 of the males have extensive experience in the field. 30 are extremely qualified.

What exactly compels me to throw away 116 of the resumes, hire that single poorly qualified female sight-unseen and then spend a year training her, only to have a candidate that is paid the same and still has way less experience than half of my original applicants did?

I don't think you have ANY idea how unequal the experience level is in the field. It's wild.

And for your information, I did hire a woman in our last round. She was very qualified and we're happy to have her. She is one of the higher paid techs, because she's damn good at her job.

But I won't hire some random person with no qualifications, while tossing out 30 qualified applicants, simply because of their gender. That's just a silly business decision.

Also, according to my reading of anti-discrimination laws, I simply CANNOT hire someone unqualified, based solely on their gender. That's illegal. The law is very clear that I cannot "discriminate based on gender", and I could potentially have 30 qualified applicants filing a lawsuit if I trash their applications and hire a completely untrained person instead, based solely on their gender.

Just imagine if it were the opposite and I trashed 30 qualified female applications so that I could hire the sole, unqualified, male? Shitstorm....

In my employment, it's strongly prohibited, in some cases, you can be terminated for discussing this.

I make about 30% more than my boss, and 50% more than one of my co-workers with the same job title (who is the same gender and race as I am). It really depends on your value to the business, but it doesn't benefit the business very much to reveal those numbers to everyone.

The "study" makes this claim:

Given an equal number of candidates of each gender, who are all roughly similar qualifications, when using a strictly competitive process men may be favored, but if women are given a slight inherent advantage and/or competition is not emphasized, it does not appear harm group cooperation in subsequent testing.

Be careful not to go too much further than this with the data given. There is absolutely no performance metric for the outcome, there is no thought of unequal pools of applicants, there is no reference to the relative levels of qualifications. There is no data to support really much of anything, except that "if women are given favor in assessments of an equal-input application process, it doesn't necessarily harm cooperative nature of the resulting team".

The real trick is that in fields like very specialized areas of IT, the applicant pool is 90-95% men (in my last round of hiring. I have 117 resumes, 116 male, 1 female). It really doesn't matter what kind of selection criteria I use, up to and including "hire all women with a pulse", I will still end up with an unequal gender balance.

What kind of changes to the 'competitive process' do you propose?

Sorry... but... what?

Scientific proof that if you have an equal pool of men and women, that the group "behaves cooperatively", regardless of whether or not women are given a *slight* preference in selection.

Go try hiring in IT. Applicants are 99.95% men. In order to hire even 40% women, you have to hire EVERY SINGLE ONE who applies, sight unseen. And then you get to select the 0.05% of men who are qualified.

If you want to gripe and moan, go train some female IT workers. Seriously. Until then, don't place the blame on corporate HR departments and hiring managers. That's just asinine.

1) This study assumed an equal pool of men and women (it breaks, badly, if there is an unequal pool)
2) This study assumed or selected men and women who are very closely matched in terms of problem solving skill
3) This study simply concluded that affirmative action does not impact "the ability of the group to cooperate".

I hire for technical computer-related positions. I advertise in all the standard places, ranging from craigslist to the variety of job boards, as well as on our website. I will interview EVERY SINGLE woman who sends me a resume with even the most remote bit of experience. To contrast, I only interview about 5% of men who do.

I have hired EVERY SINGLE women who has come through the door for an interview. EVERY SINGLE ONE. (That is 3 people in the last 2 years)

I hire about 2% of men who apply. My standards for the men we hire are EXTREMELY strict.

I still hire over 80% men.

I'm not sure what kind of affirmative action would be required to rectify this, but it certainly isn't up to my HR department to go out and train more women, or convince them to look for jobs.

My boss is female. Our CEO is an immigrant who is decidedly not white. But we end up with a bunch of white guys applying for positions. That's just the nature of it and Apple, being ONLY 55% white and 60% male has done something remarkable with their diversity... In my experience, that level of diversity is unheard of...

Only ones who speak the truth.

What, other than meritocracy, is even possible?

A person's IQ score at age 6 is already a stronger correlation with their future income than any other factor (including their parents income). This is pretty well known.

How does this make a meritocracy unethical? I can tell you, with some degree of accuracy (in aggregate), which members of a class of 6 year olds will fall in society based on a cognitive and spatial reasoning test. But if any one of those "smart" kids simply smokes weed all day and doesn't do anything, obviously, his "station" isn't reserved.

That's the nature of a meritocracy. It encourages those who have talents, to develop and use them.

Otherwise, everyone who is brilliant might just become a poet. The world only needs so many poets.

Skills in leadership are almost entirely down to confidence. People who are good leaders generally have almost irrational confidence.

I wonder if this is genetic, too, or learned?

To be pedantic, "has a substantial genetic component" is just a rewording of "is caused, in substantial part, by genetics"

I suspect they mean "linguistic" skill when they refer to reading.

These are the "general" divisions of learning aptitudes in primary school, reading and math.

In the long run, reading skill seems to tend to dictate aptitudes in reading, writing, speaking, etc.

I regard it as *almost* unethical to NOT have a meritocricy.

Imagine a factory, where you had certain specialist robots that were three times as fast at assembling engines, but average at everything else. For the sake of simplicity, imagine all other robots were at the same level for everything else and had no specialization.

Let's assume all the robots *want* to do easier jobs, because there is more idle time, and all robots are paid a fraction of the production of the factory.

If the specialist robots can be convinced to assemble engines presumably by paying them double to do it), the whole factory makes more cars, and everyone is better off.

Now the specialist robots are being paid more than everyone else. Essentially a meritocricy.

This benefits everyone, however, as all robots are paid more (even if the specialists get larger share). Choosing to not allow specialists to be paid more, essentially, is damning the entire group to substandard status because of an argument against meritocracy, on principle, even if it is simply how the robots are constructed and is unchangeable.

While focusing on racial issues to the exclusion of other things is asinine and silly, it's also asinine and silly to claim that groups of disparate people will not have differing talents and abilities, in aggregate.

Of course, aggregates tell us very little about individuals, and can't (and shouldn't) be used to make policy, social or legal.

Well, that's a bit absurd to claim.

I can certainly genetically differentiate between a Swede and a Spaniard and a Moroccan just as well as I can genetically differentiate between a dalmation, a basset and a corgie.

But this has more to do with regional origin than the relative colour of one's skin, they ARE related and to deny the mere fact is just silly.

Apple's win with the iPhone wasn't the concept of "smartphone", but the concept of "humanist UI design".

The idea of scrolling, zooming, pointing and manipulating objects as if they were paper on a roll, or physical buttons eschewed the previous generation of phones which used a stylus and scroll bars down the side of the window.

It's this humanist user element that represents the revolution if the iPhone, rather than the anything of the "smart" features, which people rightly point out were rather underwhelming when it was released.

That might be overstating one thing, however. The one other innovation was the integration of a full Safari rendering engine, as it was far better than comparable phones at the time. Other vendors assumed that the UI would be too clunky to display full pages on a small screen. Apple, again, worked on the UI and made it work.