This is an old post and I have little to add, but I notice that I’m very surprised and a bit put off by it. I’m surprised and put off by many similar things.
I speak as a female with an intuitive grasp of logic, anal-retentiveness and detail-orientedness. I also have primarily made friends with neurodiverse people, with a disproportionately large percentage being on the autism spectrum. I almost became a standard computers-and-stuff-that-xkcd-talks-about geek, but ended up becoming a video-games-and-anime-and-fanfiction geek instead. In an alternate universe, I might have eventually ended up a technical writer or computer programmer.
And as such, it always feels strange and off-putting to me when people talk about how there aren’t women on Less Wrong (/playing video games/whatever the “masculine” pursuit of the week is) and speculate about how these mysterious, socially-oriented creatures are put off by the most attractive qualities (e.g., people not being agreement-bots). I’m probably exceptionally prone to thinking that I should go away because nobody wants me here (or at whatever other place it is), but things like this make me feel unwelcome. But so does everything else anyone does, often. Also, I tend to feel that way all by myself before anyone says anything. So I wouldn’t worry all that much, unless women are more prone to...
Hey, that’s a possibility.
What surprises me is that I truly don’t know. I should… but I don’t. Until recently, I really hadn’t thought about it; I hadn’t noticed the trend, and if I did… it seriously didn’t occur to me. “Female (computer geeks/programmers/gamers/autistics/math geeks) are rarer than their male counterparts” never quite implied, to me, “female non-geeky, non-computer(/gaming/math)-oriented neurotypicals are more common than their male counterparts.” Almost as if women were just rare or something, except I obviously didn’t think that, either.
Wait a second, that actually makes sense, too. What if the skewed gender ratios in video games put off females, causing them to have less in common with the kind of person who plays games (and also is more likely to be geeky and more likely to be rational), making them gravitate toward different hobbies that bring them into contact with different kinds of people, influencing them in different ways?
My quick eyeball-it-probably-inaccurate guess from a relatively small sample is that the ratio is around 5:12.
Surely it wouldn’t account for the whole difference, though. That just seems kind of bizarre. Huh.
This is an old post and I have little to add, but I notice that I’m very surprised and a bit put off by it. I’m surprised and put off by many similar things.
I speak as a female with an intuitive grasp of logic, anal-retentiveness and detail-orientedness. I also have primarily made friends with neurodiverse people, with a disproportionately large percentage being on the autism spectrum. I almost became a standard computers-and-stuff-that-xkcd-talks-about geek, but ended up becoming a video-games-and-anime-and-fanfiction geek instead. In an alternate universe, I might have eventually ended up a technical writer or computer programmer.
And as such, it always feels strange and off-putting to me when people talk about how there aren’t women on Less Wrong (/playing video games/whatever the “masculine” pursuit of the week is) and speculate about how these mysterious, socially-oriented creatures are put off by the most attractive qualities (e.g., people not being agreement-bots). I’m probably exceptionally prone to thinking that I should go away because nobody wants me here (or at whatever other place it is), but things like this make me feel unwelcome. But so does everything else anyone does, often. Also, I tend to feel that way all by myself before anyone says anything. So I wouldn’t worry all that much, unless women are more prone to...
Hey, that’s a possibility.
What surprises me is that I truly don’t know. I should… but I don’t. Until recently, I really hadn’t thought about it; I hadn’t noticed the trend, and if I did… it seriously didn’t occur to me. “Female (computer geeks/programmers/gamers/autistics/math geeks) are rarer than their male counterparts” never quite implied, to me, “female non-geeky, non-computer(/gaming/math)-oriented neurotypicals are more common than their male counterparts.” Almost as if women were just rare or something, except I obviously didn’t think that, either.
Wait a second, that actually makes sense, too. What if the skewed gender ratios in video games put off females, causing them to have less in common with the kind of person who plays games (and also is more likely to be geeky and more likely to be rational), making them gravitate toward different hobbies that bring them into contact with different kinds of people, influencing them in different ways?
My quick eyeball-it-probably-inaccurate guess from a relatively small sample is that the ratio is around 5:12.
Surely it wouldn’t account for the whole difference, though. That just seems kind of bizarre. Huh.