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.

I've now got two prosthetic discs in my back; prior to the disc replacement I could not move head, arms, torso or legs without pain. I could not turn/twist my neck, wrists or torso. I could not not even take in huge breaths (increased the pressure in my chest and caused pain that made me pass out). Merely making a fist was painful.

And that was only two discs; someone else in the ward with me in hospital was there to get four discs replaced. Do not underestimate how even a small wound to the back prevents all your limbs from working.

I don't see unicorns either - doesn't mean I should waste my time looking for them.

Have you considered that you may not be missing the loss of male privilege because, on average, there wasn't that much to start with?

Yes yes, we have had our contentious discussions in the past but we tend to agree at least 50% of the time. Or maybe 25%. Well, sometimes :-), so I'm asking you to carefully step back and consider all the doors that were open to you before because you were male that are now closed to you because you are female. You are in a unique position to actually list those privileges (that you actually don't miss or care about) that you, personally, had before that you personally, do not have now.

He didn't say that his team was broken. He said it fails the test. Failing the test is no indication of a broken team. What would be interesting is comparing the performance of projects that pass the test and projects that fail the test.

Well, do you have any evidence that it is due to $SOC rather than $BIO?

You need to read more research papers by real scientists and not sociology grads. Start with this - a talk given by a real scientist who did actual peer-reviewed double-blind controlled studies for decades. I'll take his conclusions over your skepticism; most ofwhat we do is driven by instincts honed by evolution over thousands of years. Those who did things differently didn't have any progeny and so their instincts aren't around anymore.

So, now you've seen the argument, peer-reviewed and backed by controlled studies, supported by the most respected academics in the field. You are not going to be able to say "I've not seen that argument before" when you see this argument again.

You seem to be implying that it is all learned. You know, experiments with male and female monkeys show the different genders preferring different activities on average. It is not all learned, it is /mostly/ (but not all) hardwired.

Well, all the activists have yet to produce any evidence for me to accept - you can't very well ask me to accept that there is institutionalised misogyny without providing any evidence; after all, you are the one making the claim so you are the one who should be bringing the evidence.

All of the chick flicks fail the regular one.

A simpler method - ask why women prefer those movies that fail - almost all of the chick-flicks fail that test, yet women are the biggest demographic interested in chick-flicks.

What makes *you* think they all like it? *We* may think that they don't like it due in some part to occams razor - the simplest explanation that encompasses all available evidence is probably the correct one.

No, there aren't. There are a few brilliant females in tech but they aren't saying anything because they're too busy enjoying what they do. The ones I've seen saying that there is a problem in tech are those that have not displayed any technical ability. They are social science students, and *they* don't want to be in tech personally, they just feel that more women should be in tech (just not them, personally).

To be honest, it's the "for" gang that have been getting more strident and abusive; I expect that this is because too many people are posting actual statistics and asking the activist camp to provide some sort of evidence for their assertions. I ask for evidence all the time and never get any, but the minute you do you get labelled as a misogynistic, scared, white male. I'm not even a white male, but it seems that asking for evidence is the ultimate insult to a certain group of people.

No, it doesn't indicate that at all - there are many explanations other than sociological ones. Why do you believe that the change in numbers MUST BE because of sexism?

Evidence of a change in numbers is only evidence of a change in numbers, it is not evidence of your explanation for the change.

The problem that isn't going to go away is that sociology isn't taught as a real science and usually doesn't do real science. In real science you don't get to look at the numbers and then manufacture a reason for them, you need evidence to support your explanation for the observation of the numbers. Sociology is doing it the wrong way around.