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[DJ]

As I explained, Minsc is just as weak and in need of rescue as Aerie, they're just different sides of the same coin. And yes, she fits a lot of the details of the Damsel in Distress trope. But it's still not sexist, because her condition has nothing to do with her gender, it's a result of experiences that would've broken any man or woman. The picture her writers paint isn't that women are fragile, it's that trauma victims are fragile.

I think even her passivity and lack of sidequest may be an intentional part of her characterization. It's a common thing among PTSD sufferers. A friend of mine has a brother who fought in the war in Bosnia. He's 40, strong as a bull, and far from incompetent at manual labour. But he's spent the last ~20 years living in a tiny house with his aging father, with no other people within an hour of walking. He just watches TV and waits for his father's retirement check so he can drink by the TV for a couple of days and get into fights with his father. He has like three war stories he always tells, and they're all about how he didn't kill an enemy soldier when he could've. Most people just call him lazy, but I can tell there's something more to it. My best guess, based on the apologetic stories he keeps telling, is that he killed someone and just can't get over the guilt.

Now, Aerie's PTSD was caused by a completely different thing, but the common note is being unable to cope with everyday life due to being stuck in the past. The only question is the point of such a character being in the story. I think the problem that the writers were facing is that fantasy worlds in video games are automatically seen as simplistic, so she was needed to establish a somber atmosphere. Her "good" ending not being all that good just makes the world even more real, because in real world there's no happy endings for people like her either.

[alexandertnt]

Yeah, but i'm talking at the dawn of home computing, amongst kids who had NO IDEA about the industry, didn't really know any other families with computers, before we even had internet or media protrayals of "hackers", and "geeks" on TV. How are kids who's only exposure and knowledge to programming is the book on programming which came with their new computer automatically dividing with 90% accuracy into boys who become computer obsessed, and girls who DGAF. We're talking little kids here who didn't know the first thing about programming courses being male-dominated.

Your "positive feedback loop" can't explain that. Little kids have NO IDEA about what's happening in any industry or college course. And this was pretty much universal over a decade before the web became a household reality.

My positive feedback loop was not trying to explain how it started, only how it continues (a positive-feedback rarely starts itself anyway) or more accurately, how next years set of students isnt going to suddenly experience a massive increase in females. Its not exactly permenant either, There have been steadily increasing numbers of women in computer science and IT for some time now.

Whilst kids do not have any knowledge of industry or college courses, their parents frequently do, and that probably has had some influence on their children.

As for how it all started, I don't know. scriver's idea seems pretty reasonable though, computer programming is seen as being to maths what engineering is to science, and in our society, engineering tends to be viewed as a "boys thing".

That probably came later when it was less "experemental" though (before being associated with engineering), as there are some prominent examples of women working with early computers.

So, the kibbutz data seems to show that forced gender-neutral-integration caused a self-assertion of existing "gender norms", rather than creating a "gender-neutral" norm.

Who said anything about forcing anything? I dont think too many people would disagreeing that forcing any significant change on society would likely do more harm than good.

[Reelya]

Who said anything about forcing anything? I dont think too many people would disagreeing that forcing any significant change on society would likely do more harm than good.

The main thing about this (see page 98 of Pinker's book), is that exactly zero of the 17,000 boys studied in the Kibbutz system chose to work with preschoolers or younger after 18 years of changing nappies. That's gotta be lower than the outside population, where you'd, i dunno at least find a few guys in a thousand who want to work with little kids. If you say "well 18 years of changing nappies would make ANYBODY not want to do it again", you have to explain why especially large numbers of females forced to do the same jobs chose to work with little kids later, whilst the boys all went the other way. Hence, innate gender effects on personality / life choices. Hence, you can't automatically say that every difference is socially-constructed gender bias, without some actual evidence.

[alexandertnt]

Are you suggesting that women just dont want to program?

Because this is true, and is why there are not many women programmers.

But are you suggesting that women generally dont want to program because they are women?

What is particularly "unwomeny" about programming and IT that goes beyond social influence?

Hence, you can't automatically say that every difference is socially-constructed gender bias, without some actual evidence.

I'm not saying that (where did I say that?). Im saying that the gender in specifically computer programming is a socially-constructed gender bias.

[scriver]

The social expectations does not just affect programming in itself, but extends to all technical, engineeringal and mechanical things. "Looking under the hood", as you so aptly described it, is in itself viewed as something boys and not girls should do, whether it comes to computers or cars.

Lol, my dad was no mechanic, and i never been encouraged to touch a car in my life, or saw him do any sort of electrical work etc except maybe change a light bulb. Gotta explain me, a son of a guy with zero technical aptitude, becomes a computer obsessive, and both my sisters, zero interest. They're both very strong-willed in what they do, so this "victim-mentality" where they've apparently been so beaten-down be society, to be too timid to touch machines, doesn't sit well with my experiences.

Do you understand the difference between family and society?

Who said anything about forcing anything? I dont think too many people would disagreeing that forcing any significant change on society would likely do more harm than good.

The main thing about this (see page 98 of Pinker's book), is that exactly zero of the 17,000 boys studied in the Kibbutz system chose to work with preschoolers or younger after 18 years of changing nappies. That's gotta be lower than the outside population, where you'd, i dunno at least find a few guys in a thousand who want to work with little kids. If you say "well 18 years of changing nappies would make ANYBODY not want to do it again", you have to explain why especially large numbers of females forced to do the same jobs chose to work with little kids later, whilst the boys all went the other way. Hence, innate gender effects on personality / life choices. Hence, you can't automatically say that every difference is socially-constructed gender bias, without some actual evidence.

A kibbutz does not exist in a vacuum. There is no reason the society outside it wouldn't affect people in it, nor is there ant reason old gender roles wouldn't persist among the kibbutz people either. Just because men change diapers doesn't mean they (or thr women for that matter) view it as a "manly" job.

[Reelya]

THe kibbutz were a closed-shop, with no direct child-raising by the parents, which ran for 70+ years of multiple generations raised to split all chores 50/50. They also had very little access to outside media as a part of their system. You'd have to explain how kid's brought up in a gender-neutral closed environment, with no experience of "manly" and "womanly" professions being segregated, and also with almost no access to TV, can know ahead of time that nappy-changing isn't "manly". If they viewed it as "unmanly" where did that viewpoint originate?

Btw, Pinker's book looks at the neuroscience and different brain-reward stuff. The brain starts out "vanilla" but pre-natal testosterone and other hormones cause wiring changes, this is mainly in the 2nd trimester of pregnancy. The effect of the testosterone is to inhibit the growth long-range synapses and to excite the growth of short-range synapses, causing particular sub-systems to be more highly-integrated at the expense of overall brain inter-connectivity.

Amniocentesis samples taken from pregnant women showed a strong correlation between 2nd trimester testosterone levels in the womb, and "geeky" characteristics (trend towards less verbal, more "mathy" with higher pre-natal testosterone) in the children as they grew into adolescence. Interestingly the traits heightened by this effect seem to match well with the aspbergers / auitism spectrum, and it also correlates well with the fact that males are very much more likely to have Asbergers / autism. The "slider" effect of the 2nd trimester testosterone levels could also explain why some women have more of these traits than others.

[chaoticag]

Do we have the name of the study?

[alexandertnt]

Hmm, maby there is some form of biological influence on behaviours like you describe. Perhaps a better comparison would be to compare programming to something like mathematics, or other "mathy"/"geeky" subjects then.

It would still be sexist to then expect an individual women to function in a certain way due to this (which, I know, the book you have linked to mentions this).

Did this have something to do with women in video games or was this just a standard derail? (Not as an accusation or anything, nothin' wrong with a good derail).

[Reelya]

Do we have the name of the study?

This is the main one:

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1871515,00.html

The researcher in this case was looking for a link between pre-natal testosterone and autism, but instead found a link between pre-natal testosterone and "typically male cognition", which was cited as criticism of the experiment failing, but is a remarkable discovery in itself.

[chaoticag]

Well, it is a derail, yes. Still regardless of how work gets divided up, I don't think that it's fair to judge people's involvement in fields by their gender.

Which study? there are dozens of them.

The Kibutz study conducted in the 70's that talked about none of the men working with pre-schoolers.

[Reelya]

The names of the Kibbutz researchers involved are in Susan Pinker's book, which I linked from google books in a previous post (page 98 of the cited work).

Yeah, sorry i thought you were asking after the pre-natal testosterone studies, which are much more recent.

[chaoticag]

It's just a little odd, since she says there is a book, but they're not in the bibliography anywhere as far as I know.

[Reelya]

Dude, i just googled the book's title no problem. You can buy it off amazon.

The reason you can't see it from Google Books is that those pages of the bibliography aren't available in the online preview - it only goes up to author's who's surnames start with "B". there's nothing to explain since it says right there "pages 310 to 328 are not available in this preview".

[chaoticag]

I know, I know, but it's something to follow up on when you don't find a book listed in the bibliography of a work cited is what I meant. I also prolly won't get it off of amazon, international shipping is a pain. Seems to be a fairly obscure work otherwise, can't find any criticisms or support for it, nor can I verify how things were conducted and so on, prolly not without ordering the book.

[Reelya]

You don't HAVE the whole bibliography, it even said so in black-and-white on the page you were looking at. That should have been clear if you'd read closer. Google Books only cites selected sections of copyrighted works, not the whole thing. A quick Google of the author's names gives the title of the book in question.

I think we can assume there are two possibilities: that that's what the source book actually says, or that Susan Pinker is outright lying. The second possibility is highly unlikely since she is pretty well-known and wrote a book on a fairly controversial topic, so those holding the opposing view would jump on any error she made. The lack of people calling Susan Pinker out on this statement, is actually evidence that she's truthfully cited her source.