I am reminded of Paul Graham’s explanation for the low number of female startup partners from Ideas for Startups:
I didn’t realize it till I was writing this, but that may help explain why there are so few female startup founders. I read on the Internet (so it must be true) that only 1.7% of VC-backed startups are founded by women. The percentage of female hackers is small, but not that small. So why the discrepancy?
When you realize that successful startups tend to have multiple founders who were already friends, a possible explanation emerges. People’s best friends are likely to be of the same sex, and if one group is a minority in some population, pairs of them will be a minority squared. [1]
I would suspect that all the more fundamental reasons (2, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8) are factors, but that they are then magnified by 1 and 3. As far as 9 is concerned, I am female myself and have never commented on Less Wrong before, to provide a single, anecdotal data point.
Not entirely sure, though I believe I did post a couple of comments to Overcoming Bias a while back. I used to comment on reddit and comment semi-regularly on Hacker News, which refutes the first explanation that I thought of, that it was a matter of my time, since clearly I do sometimes take time to comment on the internet.
The comments here are high quality, which is somewhat intimidating, and also makes things take longer, since I want to think more carefully about what I say, but that would probably apply to Hacker News as well.
A possible explanation consistent with the quotation I mentioned is that even though I read all the posts here and on Overcoming Bias, I don’t think I’ve thought about the issues deeply enough to have much original to contribute. And that may have something to do with the fact that most of my friends aren’t all that interested in the topics. I imagine if I were talking about the posts more often in real life I would feel like I had more to contribute.
I’m in a similar situation—I comment (sometimes) on reddit and HNews, and have occasionally posted a few sentences to OB, but I am much less likely to comment here. The high quality of the posts and comments leads me to agonize a bit overmuch about every part of a comment, and sometimes I will write, edit, and rewrite a comment before deciding to just not comment at all. I, too, often feel I would not be contributing anything original.
(I should also note in this comment that I am male.)
Well, I’m female and I agree with what you say. I often get the feeling that I’m barely well-read enough to follow a conversation here, and the comments I make are only on side-issues, or ones that I have experience of from “the outside” (eg IT or on being female).
I’ve made a few witty quips and minor points elsewhere… but they really aren’t part of a full discussion.
I get the feeling that I am a complete and total novice (not a problem), and that I need to have at least read all the way through all the sequences (million words or thereabouts wasn’t it?) before I can even get around a lot of the nuances brought up by the other commenters… and if I try posting before then, I’ll get it wrong, get some rather swift kicks in the premises (which are a downer even if well-intended) and feel less likely to stick my neck out the next time...
there’s an awfully steep learning curve here, and it feels very hard to break in unless you’re still suffering from serious overconfidence bias ;)
I lurked on lesswrong for about a year, because I used to be worried about losing karma and looking like an idiot. I guess I got used to it after enough terrific failures. If you want to appear consistently intelligent, this is a very hard site to do it on (even after you do the research)
I feel absolutely the same way but contribute it partly to having english as only second language. Although I am told to have a better grasp of it than most of my english-speaking peers, the high-level-concepts and language need a lot more time, and formulating original, coherent answers is even harder. I am male.
Huh, that minority-squared effect is interesting, but I’m not sure it need apply here. It’d be individuals coming here, right? It doesn’t take a group to, well, come to LW.
Network-effect makes a big difference too. After all—you have to arrive here some way—usually by being told about it by friends. Sure, some people arrive by accident—just happen to be browsing through HP fanfic or something… but a lot will arrive through their friends… and a lot will stay because they find friends.
...which leads us back to people’s friends tending to be same-sex. If there are few people of your own sex in the group then it’s got less… er… ambient friend-potential…
you have to work harder to be with a bunch of people that have a different culture than yourself. Genders have different cultures, so add that on top of the new culture of LW itself and unless you’re a particularly socially-capable person (and LWs tend not to be), then it’s less likely that you’ll find friends.
Obviously this is a generalisation and likely only a very small part of the pressures involved in a very complicated process… but it’s there.
While it’s ultimately true that individuals come to LW, not groups, I’m far more likely to follow and especially to comment on blogs that my friends also read. For me, one primary way I get really interested in subjects and motivated to understand them well is by talking about them to my friends in real life. And most of my friends are girls.
hrm… actually, I’m reminded of something. Several years back, someone designed these simulations that basically ran an algorithm like “assume people don’t mind being around people that are different, so long as at least some small fraction of their nearest neighbors are also like themselves.”, and basically simulated people moving around to fulfil those criteria.
I think the point is that there are multiple factors which all reduce the chances. In startup founding, you need multiple similar people; in LW browsing, you need multiple personal characteristics. Maybe 90% of women can handle the disagreeableness; maybe an independent 90% can handle the male-style-writing; maybe another 90% is unswayed by cultural gender differences; maybe another 90% are unaffected by a female genetic predisposition against reasoning (I’m just running down Eliezer’s list), and so on.
A LW commentor who is female would be in the subset of women who is in all these groups. (Just with these few factors, we’re down to something like only 60% of women are ‘eligible’ for LW membership to begin with!)
Sure, that all makes sense, but an LW commentor who is male would also have to fall into multiple subsets.
No, remember that our various sets are already biased towards males (obviously males don’t mind ‘male-style-writing’). The point of my comment is that a few small biases can quickly multiply up. If on all these factors, the males are at 95% where the females are at 90%, then we only need like 10 factors before we would expect twice as many males than females based just on those factors alone and ignoring any feedback or network effects.
Why we mostly have male-style-writing, or why there might be a female genetic predisposition against reasoning, are all different issues one would expect different answers to.
(That there are such gender differences isn’t too terribly surprising to me, personally—finding that males and females are exactly the same on all these factors would be like finding that all of humanity is 100% genetically homogeneous, and that there’s no truth to, say, the Japanese having a low tolerance for alcohol or some groups being lactose-intolerant or Africans being disposed to sickle-cell anemia.)
I am reminded of Paul Graham’s explanation for the low number of female startup partners from Ideas for Startups:
I would suspect that all the more fundamental reasons (2, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8) are factors, but that they are then magnified by 1 and 3. As far as 9 is concerned, I am female myself and have never commented on Less Wrong before, to provide a single, anecdotal data point.
Any idea why you haven’t?
Not entirely sure, though I believe I did post a couple of comments to Overcoming Bias a while back. I used to comment on reddit and comment semi-regularly on Hacker News, which refutes the first explanation that I thought of, that it was a matter of my time, since clearly I do sometimes take time to comment on the internet.
The comments here are high quality, which is somewhat intimidating, and also makes things take longer, since I want to think more carefully about what I say, but that would probably apply to Hacker News as well.
A possible explanation consistent with the quotation I mentioned is that even though I read all the posts here and on Overcoming Bias, I don’t think I’ve thought about the issues deeply enough to have much original to contribute. And that may have something to do with the fact that most of my friends aren’t all that interested in the topics. I imagine if I were talking about the posts more often in real life I would feel like I had more to contribute.
I’m in a similar situation—I comment (sometimes) on reddit and HNews, and have occasionally posted a few sentences to OB, but I am much less likely to comment here. The high quality of the posts and comments leads me to agonize a bit overmuch about every part of a comment, and sometimes I will write, edit, and rewrite a comment before deciding to just not comment at all. I, too, often feel I would not be contributing anything original.
(I should also note in this comment that I am male.)
Well, I’m female and I agree with what you say. I often get the feeling that I’m barely well-read enough to follow a conversation here, and the comments I make are only on side-issues, or ones that I have experience of from “the outside” (eg IT or on being female).
I’ve made a few witty quips and minor points elsewhere… but they really aren’t part of a full discussion.
I get the feeling that I am a complete and total novice (not a problem), and that I need to have at least read all the way through all the sequences (million words or thereabouts wasn’t it?) before I can even get around a lot of the nuances brought up by the other commenters… and if I try posting before then, I’ll get it wrong, get some rather swift kicks in the premises (which are a downer even if well-intended) and feel less likely to stick my neck out the next time...
there’s an awfully steep learning curve here, and it feels very hard to break in unless you’re still suffering from serious overconfidence bias ;)
I lurked on lesswrong for about a year, because I used to be worried about losing karma and looking like an idiot. I guess I got used to it after enough terrific failures. If you want to appear consistently intelligent, this is a very hard site to do it on (even after you do the research)
I feel absolutely the same way but contribute it partly to having english as only second language. Although I am told to have a better grasp of it than most of my english-speaking peers, the high-level-concepts and language need a lot more time, and formulating original, coherent answers is even harder. I am male.
Huh, that minority-squared effect is interesting, but I’m not sure it need apply here. It’d be individuals coming here, right? It doesn’t take a group to, well, come to LW.
Or am I misunderstanding your point in some way?
Network-effect makes a big difference too. After all—you have to arrive here some way—usually by being told about it by friends. Sure, some people arrive by accident—just happen to be browsing through HP fanfic or something… but a lot will arrive through their friends… and a lot will stay because they find friends.
...which leads us back to people’s friends tending to be same-sex. If there are few people of your own sex in the group then it’s got less… er… ambient friend-potential…
you have to work harder to be with a bunch of people that have a different culture than yourself. Genders have different cultures, so add that on top of the new culture of LW itself and unless you’re a particularly socially-capable person (and LWs tend not to be), then it’s less likely that you’ll find friends.
Obviously this is a generalisation and likely only a very small part of the pressures involved in a very complicated process… but it’s there.
While it’s ultimately true that individuals come to LW, not groups, I’m far more likely to follow and especially to comment on blogs that my friends also read. For me, one primary way I get really interested in subjects and motivated to understand them well is by talking about them to my friends in real life. And most of my friends are girls.
hrm… actually, I’m reminded of something. Several years back, someone designed these simulations that basically ran an algorithm like “assume people don’t mind being around people that are different, so long as at least some small fraction of their nearest neighbors are also like themselves.”, and basically simulated people moving around to fulfil those criteria.
The simulation would consistently produce highly segregated results. Aha! here’s a site with applets that run such simulations: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~segregation/segregation-simulator.html
Just an short addendum: Thomas Schelling is the one who originally thought up this model.
I think the point is that there are multiple factors which all reduce the chances. In startup founding, you need multiple similar people; in LW browsing, you need multiple personal characteristics. Maybe 90% of women can handle the disagreeableness; maybe an independent 90% can handle the male-style-writing; maybe another 90% is unswayed by cultural gender differences; maybe another 90% are unaffected by a female genetic predisposition against reasoning (I’m just running down Eliezer’s list), and so on.
A LW commentor who is female would be in the subset of women who is in all these groups. (Just with these few factors, we’re down to something like only 60% of women are ‘eligible’ for LW membership to begin with!)
Sure, that all makes sense, but an LW commentor who is male would also have to fall into multiple subsets.
The question isn’t “why are so few members of the total human population on LW?” but “what’s with the different proportion of males and females?”
No, remember that our various sets are already biased towards males (obviously males don’t mind ‘male-style-writing’). The point of my comment is that a few small biases can quickly multiply up. If on all these factors, the males are at 95% where the females are at 90%, then we only need like 10 factors before we would expect twice as many males than females based just on those factors alone and ignoring any feedback or network effects.
Why we mostly have male-style-writing, or why there might be a female genetic predisposition against reasoning, are all different issues one would expect different answers to.
(That there are such gender differences isn’t too terribly surprising to me, personally—finding that males and females are exactly the same on all these factors would be like finding that all of humanity is 100% genetically homogeneous, and that there’s no truth to, say, the Japanese having a low tolerance for alcohol or some groups being lactose-intolerant or Africans being disposed to sickle-cell anemia.)