Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Are there any female Haskellers?

Jason Dagit wrote:

On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 8:29 PM, wren ng thornton wrote:

...

Jon Fairbairn wrote:

...

Another (provocative) observation is that most of the women programmers I've known were good at it and thought they might not be, but most of the men claimed to be good at it but were not.

I've observed this too, but it's a bit droll. Let:

p = proportion of people who think they're good but aren't q = proportion who think they're not good but are M = number of men in CS W = number of women in CS

Given that M >> W, we'll naturally find that p*M > q*W if p and q are even remotely comparable, regardless of whether p and q are independent of gender or not.

I recall going to a PhD defense several years ago about gender differences in computer science. The dissertation is here: http://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/dspace/bitstream/1957/4954/1/FinalVersion....

A few take-away points I recall from the defense:

Oh sure :) I was merely stating that the null hypothesis is sufficient to account for the observations made. (As it almost always is for psycho/social studies of gender.) There's also an interesting result that there's an inverse correlation between actual skill and claimed skill (regardless of the particular skill, and AKAIR regardless of gender). But surely this discussion is more appropriate to cognitive-cafe@haskell.org -- Live well, ~wren