Jason Dagit wrote:
On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 8:29 PM, wren ng thornton <w...@freegeek.org> 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.pdf
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-c...@haskell.org
--
Live well,
~wren
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