women, get into IT... or else [LWN.net]

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 4:49 UTC (Sat) by elanthis (guest, #6227)
In reply to: women, get into IT... or else by mattdm
Parent article: To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Eh, classic nature-vs-nurture arguments. The world may never know. ;)

[I very strongly believe both are huge factors. Experiences may differ, I suppose.]

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women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 17:11 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

It's not really meaningful to divide them. The nature/nurture divide would
make sense if all we had was `heterogenous genetic factors without
environmental influence' and `homogenous genetic factors encoding systems
influenced by the environment', but there are a *lot* more options than
that, and for most of them `versus' isn't even the right word to use.

(Pinker had an excellent analogy in _How The Mind Works_, describing this
as being akin to someone pointing at a high-end computer and saying `that
hardware is really powerful, so the software must be correspondibly
inflexible'.)