Looking at the data, I don't think the author did anything with it than see initial numbers matched her feelings, and then called on people to undertake a massive, actual study because she just know this is it.
I certainly think that there are problems with gender in society in virtually every place we could examine, and that we have a long way to go before things are what anyone could call ideal.
I just have trouble with a lot of the statistics used in these discussions, and find that they're very often 20+ years out of date (ie, from or before 1994-1995), don't control for confounding influences, make misleading comparisons, etc.
I would take posts like this much more seriously if she posted the dataset, but I'm not sure how she could do this without revealing personal details or editing the text (which likely would bias the choice of recipients further, or could introduce a new bias). I would even settle for the details of how she did the bucketing, correlations between words and numbers of entries per person, etc.
The short answer to why I think that this article isn't a real source of data is that the study in it has about the statistical power of just asking everyone who's a friend of a friend on Facebook for people with a moderate number of friends.
Everyone already knows that there's a problem with gender in tech. This article does nothing about saying where it is and doesn't really contribute anything to the topic.
I certainly think that there are problems with gender in society in virtually every place we could examine, and that we have a long way to go before things are what anyone could call ideal.
I just have trouble with a lot of the statistics used in these discussions, and find that they're very often 20+ years out of date (ie, from or before 1994-1995), don't control for confounding influences, make misleading comparisons, etc.
I would take posts like this much more seriously if she posted the dataset, but I'm not sure how she could do this without revealing personal details or editing the text (which likely would bias the choice of recipients further, or could introduce a new bias). I would even settle for the details of how she did the bucketing, correlations between words and numbers of entries per person, etc.
The short answer to why I think that this article isn't a real source of data is that the study in it has about the statistical power of just asking everyone who's a friend of a friend on Facebook for people with a moderate number of friends.
Everyone already knows that there's a problem with gender in tech. This article does nothing about saying where it is and doesn't really contribute anything to the topic.