This is one of those situations where you have to exercise your logical reasoning skills. Why the hell would there be an innate gendered preference for a toy that represents something that's existed for only about a hundred years? Indeed, a 2013 study shows that both girls and boys prefer dolls at 5 months: http://www.sciencealert.com/boys-prefer-dolls-to-trucks.
And even if there was a gender difference in terms of preferring trucks to dolls, what would that really be measuring? Again, a five month old couldn't possibly have an association between trucks and building things. You could just as easily be measuring the degree to which infants have an affinity for faces. You can't get from that to a preference for/against CS without a whole lot of handwaving. Which is ultimately the big problem. You're pointing to biological differences and saying that must explain observed occupational differences, without providing any theory of causation. It's an argument that doesn't just have little explanatory power, what explanatory power it does have is based on gendered characterizations. (E.g. hypothesizing women prefer teaching because it's a "nurturing" profession, while ignoring societies that don't view it as a nurturing profession at all, where teaching is male dominated).
As to math preferences, you're comparing tenure track professors, while I was referring to undergraduate degree holders (hence "math majors"). Women earn over 40% of math/stat undergraduate degrees: https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajor....
I agree with all your points here and I'd like to especially expand on this:
> (E.g. hypothesizing women prefer teaching because it's a "nurturing" profession, while ignoring societies that don't view it as a nurturing profession at all, where teaching is male dominated).
If women don't go into CS because society as a whole views it as a thing-oriented discipline and women are more people-oriented than thing-oriented, this opens up the possibility of reframing CS to be more people-oriented, changing its perception in society, thus causing more women to become interested in CS.
The memo had this to say on that topic:
We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming
and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how
people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive
ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get
female students into coding might be doing this).
While that 2013 study [1] did show that both boys and girls prefer faces to objects at that age, the results seem to support boys having lesser face/object preference than girls. Unfortunately raw data wasn't provided so we can only rely on researcher's conclusions that the difference was not statistically significant for female faces/cars, but was for male faces/stoves, although eyeballing the graphs, the only one where error bars don't overlap is the Real face (female) / Real car. Anyway, every face/object pair has boys showing lesser face preference than girls.
I really can't see how this can be cited as disproving innate gender preference differences - at best, it fails to _prove_ them, but still hints at their existence.
>a 2013 study shows that both girls and boys prefer dolls at 5 months
Might as well just measure what toys they prefer when they come out of the womb. No shit a five month old has no idea what a truck or a doll is. But by the age of four they will definitely prefer trucks as expected.
>You're pointing to biological differences and saying that must explain observed occupational differences, without providing any theory of causation.
I did provide a theory (things vs people), but it's not really necessary. The original comment suggested that there were no personality or behavioral differences between men and women. This is a ridiculous claim. I have showed there are huge differences between the preferences of men and women.
Why would we expect two different groups with (statistically) different personalities and interests to make exactly the same career choices? I can't necessarily predict which factors are the most relevant, or which traits correlate with which careers and how strongly. Those are specifics. But I would be completely shocked if the correlation between mental and personality traits and career choice is absolutely zero. And if they aren't zero, that will necessarily imply a difference between the genders.
The alternative theory is that "it's all cultural". This theory also makes no specific predictions. No matter what outcome is observed, you can blame it on culture. You can invent a just-so story about how mathematicians are less sexist than programmers or something. It doesn't require or present any evidence. It isn't falsifiable. If one cultural factor is ruled out (e.g. discrimination), you can always make another and shove it in (e.g. "role models".)
If you show evidence that one cultural explanation can't possibly be correct, they just move onto another. E.g. showing that there are the same percentage of female tech workers as female computer science graduates. So they move onto blaming sexism in universities. So you show there are the same percentage of girls interested in computer science in high school. And then the theory moves onto blaming parents for discouraging girls from computers... or something. And I can't think of any possible experiment that could test that and prove it false. So they say "aha, gotcha! It was culture all along!" as if they've proved something.
>E.g. hypothesizing women prefer teaching because it's a "nurturing" profession, while ignoring societies that don't view it as a nurturing profession at all, where teaching is male dominated
The link I posted sort of addressed this. In less egalitarian cultures it's possible differences are more cultural. E.g. Indians straight up discriminate against female teachers and don't even make it an option. Or Indian parents forcing their girls to learn computer science because they see it as a way out of poverty. But as cultures become more egalitarian, gender differences will become more determined by biology. The west generally gives children a lot more freedom to choose their career and doesn't discriminate by sex. So gender preference will become a lot more important in such a society.
And even if there was a gender difference in terms of preferring trucks to dolls, what would that really be measuring? Again, a five month old couldn't possibly have an association between trucks and building things. You could just as easily be measuring the degree to which infants have an affinity for faces. You can't get from that to a preference for/against CS without a whole lot of handwaving. Which is ultimately the big problem. You're pointing to biological differences and saying that must explain observed occupational differences, without providing any theory of causation. It's an argument that doesn't just have little explanatory power, what explanatory power it does have is based on gendered characterizations. (E.g. hypothesizing women prefer teaching because it's a "nurturing" profession, while ignoring societies that don't view it as a nurturing profession at all, where teaching is male dominated).
As to math preferences, you're comparing tenure track professors, while I was referring to undergraduate degree holders (hence "math majors"). Women earn over 40% of math/stat undergraduate degrees: https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajor....