It's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature. To get girls to major in computer science, you are dealing with forces you cannot possibly understand.
There can be a reason for a girl in college to take some courses in computer science: Look for a husband!
Having women pursuing computer careers will stick like water on a duck's back -- not a chance.
What possible avenues for a "reasoned rebuttal" do you see here?
(I am not being sarcastic. I am with you on approaching an opposing opinion from a constructive point of view but how do you rebutt butt-headedness of such epic proportions)?
Of course if you take quotes out of context they're going to look a lot worse. Plus his lack of tact, or a strong grasp of english isn't helping. But his arguments aren't that outrageous.
His main argument is: women are more social than men, and thus are more strongly influenced by social factors limiting their career choices.
This doesn't seem all that outrageous to me. And honestly, a cursory glance at the state of the world seems to support this opinion. Now of course, it may be completely wrong, but I don't see how this is a sexist position.
Look, the "not nice to try to fool Mother Nature" is easy to understand and nothing to object to: We just admit that we do not know all about women. You'll go along with that, right? If you do actually know all about women, then hurry up and tell the rest of us! In the meanwhile, clearly likely that stuff we don't understand has effects. So, as we try to understand what's happening, there are effects from stuff we don't understand. So, a simple, intuitive description is that, in what we don't understand, we are fighting against 'Mother Nature'.
If you want a little more, got to tell you, the deeper you look into the behavior of women, the more surprising stuff you find. It is as if the woman with the characteristics we would find ideal for computer science, business, etc. now DID exist 20,000 years ago but is just not one of our ancestors. So, chalk this up to "Mother Nature was there long before computer science.".
It's actually not very difficult.
Here's another point easy to see: Take a women of Western European descent and one of Japanese descent. Look at them and find things in their 'personalities' that they share and that are particular to women. So, in these ways these two women look close.
Now we can get an intuitive view of how strong those ways are, that is, in how long they have been strongly in the gene pool. The simple answer is: May I have the envelop please. And the answer is, 40,000 years.
Here's how that works: The evidence is that humans walked out of Africa and at about 40,000 years ago reached, say, Iran or some such. Then one branch went to Western Europe and another branch went to China and, then, to Japan. So for those two women we started with, their youngest common woman ancestor is about 40,000 years old.
I claim that common ancestor was a LOT like what those two women have in common, and here's how that goes: Pick, say, the woman of Western European descent, go backwards in time in her tree, noting all the changes, to the common ancestor and then go forward in time in the tree of the Japanese woman, again noting all the changes, to the woman of Japanese descent. Now note that all these changes don't add up to much change, and the common ancestor has fewer changes and, thus, is closer to each of the two modern women than they are to each other.
So what you see in common in women in Western Europe and Japan has to go WAY back, at least 40,000 years (unless what is in common developed independently, which we have to assume is very rare). So, those common things have changed very slowly.
In particular, when we are looking a modern women, we are looking at at least some characteristics that worked at least 40,000 years ago. So, when we are guessing at what Mother Nature has in women, some of it, maybe a lot of it, is really old. So, we can expect surprises from 40,000 years ago, and simple models of how women work and what they can do or are happy doing need not work. In particular, the simple view that, "Of course, women can do well in computer science and be happy doing it" doesn't have to hold; there can be reasons 40,000 years old we don't understand that can block us. Net, in simple terms, Mother Nature was there a long time ago, and what she has in the genes it's "not nice to try to fool" with. So, be CAREFUL.
You 'get it' now, right?
Now hurry up and write us that book that explains all about women.
There can be a reason for a girl in college to take some courses in computer science: Look for a husband!
Having women pursuing computer careers will stick like water on a duck's back -- not a chance.
What possible avenues for a "reasoned rebuttal" do you see here?
(I am not being sarcastic. I am with you on approaching an opposing opinion from a constructive point of view but how do you rebutt butt-headedness of such epic proportions)?