Of Gender and Rationality

We should also look for specific, teachable “gateway” skills that might allow more women to participate in LW.

I remember reading some story about how women did persistently worse in a particular organic chemistry course than men did, until they added a training session explicitly teaching mental rotation (there’s a gender gap in visual/spatial abilities), after which point test scores equalized because mentally rotating the molecules was no longer a barrier, and other skills could come into play. I can’t find the webpage, though (though there’s a bit of corroboration here), so take the story with a grain of salt.

Given the comments elsewhere in the thread about gender differences in expected agreeableness, and about women being discouraged by downvotes, it sounds like one plausible barrier concerns how to have heart in the face of criticism. Maybe someone should write a post or two on process/growth vs. trait models of ability, and how to have the former. Or on how to keep in mind that people are responding to your words, not your inner soul, and that there’s some system of rules that determines their responses that you can learn to hack. Or something along these lines. There are skills here, and they can be broken into small, learnable chunks. And probably many LW-ers could use a boost here; I know I’d like one.

Such posts could be linked to a welcome page for newcomers, with mention that some find LW difficult at first and later like it and that these posts might help the transition period, but without mention of gender.

I was talking to my brother the other day about the blinders that come from hanging out only with math/physics/compsci nerds. And he suggested that yes, it is valuable to expose oneself to many types of people, but looking for “normal people” or “non-nerds” is the wrong way to do it; normal people are boring. The thing to do is to find people who share some other kind of passionate interest -- people’s whose enthusiasm for public speaking, or windsurfing, or whatever it is has driven the creation of their own interesting, idiosyncratic culture.

As a student, I participated in a (fairly small) number of programs for women in math. The programs were all lousy. I love it when I find other women I can really talk to -- it makes me feel more at home with myself, my gender, and my ability to learn to think. But these programs weren’t like that. These programs were blah. “Adding more women” is a boring aim, like “meeting normal people” or “meeting non-nerds”. Usually it’s achieved by taking whatever it is that might make the program distinctive (e.g., math talent, or an analytical/argumentative spirit) and watering down that distinctiveness until more women are involved.

I don’t know if there’s a viable alternative here, but it’s worth asking if we can find something distinctive and interesting that:

1. Usefully adds to, compliments, or extends the existing OB/LW content base, and
2. Automatically includes more women in its set of skilled/passionate practitioners, without need to water down its distinctiveness or its virtues.

Pjeby, elsewhere in this thread, suggested that instrumental rationality (using rationality to achieve visible, concrete aims) might be a useful, distinctive skill-set that naturally includes more women among its passionate practitioners. Another candidate might be rationality components that emphasize inter- and intra-personal skills, such as emotional self-awareness. (I’m fairly lousy at that one myself, but understanding one’s own motives is clearly part of making good decisions in the face of human biases. And stereotypes suggest we might get better gender-balance here.) Anyone have any other suggestions?

I've lurked OB/LW for quite some time now (about a year) and haven't posted much for many of the same reasons as divia (intimidated by the quality, felt like I wasn't familiar enough, etc) and have tried to get a few people that are interested in this kind of thing to follow along with me to little success. This post made me wonder why people I was so sure would care about rationality didn't care to join the community here and further why I sit on the sidelines.

My first thoughts were that this group feels "cliquey". There are a lot of in-phrases and technical jargon floating around, which to an outsider can be very intimidating.

On top of that every incorrect comment is completely and utterly destroyed by multiple people. I know and you know we're dismantling ideas in an attempt to kick out biases and fallacies every time they appear, but to an outsider it looks/feels like an attack on all fronts. I think this stems from the separation of ideas from the self, which is really the first step on the road to rationality. Anyone who hasn't made that step feels like they are being personally attacked, and it isn't an easy step to make. Dislodging your ideas from your self-image is already required by the sciences, which may be part of the reason science-types are so well represented, but there are many fields where it isn't necessary (or even beneficial). Consider business where defending your ideas like they were your life will get you ahead most of the time.

I know of no "fix" for any of these, but perhaps a section for beginners would be beneficial. Perhaps something similar to simple.wikipedia.com would work. The OB backlogs are useful, but there is something to be said for being able to discuss new topics and it just isn't available for the older posts. How to implement such a thing without creating in/out groups I don't know. Maybe just flagging submissions as beginner->advanced would be helpful (along with actually posting things for beginners). In any case, some more "back to basics" posts couldn't hurt.

There are a number of average sex differences in personality traits that would contribute to more males identifying as "rationalists" than females.

Here are the sex differences found in the Big Five personality inventory, from a cross-cultural survey by Costa et al.:

• Women score higher on Agreeableness

• Men score higher on the Assertiveness facet of Extraversion

• Men score higher on Openness to Ideas, especially in the US. Women score higher on Openness to Feelings and Openness to Aesthetics. In the US, men also score higher on Openness to Fantasy.

• Some particular items, such as identification with the word "logic," were skewed strongly towards males

An interest in rationality may depend on Openness to Ideas. Otherwise, someone just isn't going to care about the kind of things we talk about here.

Furthermore, the identification of males, but not females, with words like "logic" suggests that perhaps part of the gender gap of interest in rationality is about words like "logic," and "rationality." Women are often labeled as "irrational" or "illogical" when they are perceived as overemotional, and this labeling may put them off words like "rationality," regardless of whether they appreciate the underlying thought processes of rationality.

Another major sex difference relates to Simon-Baron Cohen's theory of autism as an example of the "extreme male brain." Baron-Cohen argues that males tend to be higher in "systemizing" traits, while women tend to be higher in "empathizing" traits:

Empathizing is a drive to identify another person's emotions and thoughts and respond to them appropriately. Systemizing is a drive to analyze systems or construct systems. The Empathizing-Systemizing (E-S) model suggests that these are major dimensions in which individuals differ from each other, and women being superior in empathizing and men in systemizing. In this study, we examined new questionnaires, the Empathy Quotient (EQ) and the Systemizing Quotient (SQ). Participants were 1 250 students, 616 men and 634 women, from eight universities, who completed both the EQ and SQ. Results showed that women scored higher than men on the EQ, and the result was reversed on the SQ. Results also showed that humanities majors scored higher than sciences majors on the EQ, and again the result was reversed on the SQ. (cite)

Here is an interesting summary from Baron-Cohen:

Evidence is reviewed suggesting that, in the general population, empathizing and systemizing show strong sex differences. The function of systemizing is to predict lawful events, including lawful change, or patterns in data. Also reviewed is the evidence that individuals on the autistic spectrum have degrees of empathizing difficulties alongside hypersystemizing. The hypersystemizing theory of autism spectrum conditions (ASC) proposes that people with ASC have an unusually strong drive to systemize. This can explain their preference for systems that change in highly lawful or predictable ways; why they become disabled when faced with systems characterized by less lawful change; and their "need for sameness" or "resistance to change". If "truth" is defined as lawful patterns in data then, according to the hypersystemizing theory, people with ASC are strongly driven to discover the "truth".(cite)

This sounds like a rationalistic cognitive style.

If autistic-spectrum traits, or "systemizing," are related to interest in rationality, and in identifying as a rationalist, then it would be unsurprising that females are less likely to do those things.

Do women, on average, have more connected social lives than men do? It's very easy for a few people with no life to effectively dominate a community like this simply by spending more time than any "normal" person would want to. If women are more likely to have "a life" and less likely to become fixated on a specific hobby, that could explain why we see fewer women commenters. (One reason I'm here is that I have very few people in Real Life that I talk to regularly.)

A possibly relevant data point is that males are roughly four times more likely to have autism or Asperger's syndrome than females.

Far from a complete explanation, but it often is hard to simultaneously view oneself as female and as intellectually able, even given evidence of intellectual ability. Role models can help, but artificially manufacturing role models (e.g., by preferentially making women’s writing visible) has its own costs. Others’ remarked surprise at how one is at once female and intellectual/rational/etc. can make this harder.

One relevant subskill here is... I don’t know how to say it. Something like “the ability to keep in mind the whole complex layout of the evidence, without letting your anticipations get overwhelmed by the nearest cliche”. So that even though gender is terribly salient (more salient than, say, GRE scores), gender doesn’t affect one’s views of one’s abilities to a greater extent than do similarly informative non-gender data points.

A second relevant subskill is the ability to put in a full effort even in the presence of threatening stereotypes and probable failure. Eliezer has written about many aspects of this one, but not the “in the presence of threatening stereotypes” part.

If anyone feels up to writing a tutorial on one of these skills, I'd like to read it. And it might be useful to both members of underrepresented groups and everyone else.

A few thoughts:

(1) I agree with Nanani, and think it would be awful to actively try to "recruit" females, or even really do anything to entice them to come/stay. Though I appreciate the spirit of the post nonetheless because I think it's a very interesting and important issue, and I think it's okay to acknowledge it and question it. If anything, efforts to even out the male/female imbalance would have to be made on a much greater scale to start to see change.

(2) Do people really think that it's an issue of females frequenting Less Wrong and then LEAVING? I doubt it. I suspect that a much lower proportion of females even happen upon the blog in the first place. This would eliminate a number of the explanations.

(3) This is an issue that deeply intrigues me. I have some fairly simple theories. Unfortunately, I am not well-versed enough in evol. psych., gender studies, history, sociology, etc. to feel like I have enough background to really get at the heart of the matter. So most of my ideas are purely anecdotal.

I believe that females on a whole are less interested in intellectual pursuits. Particularly intellectual pursuits that are HARD and take a higher amount of mental horsepower to grasp. Period. The question is: Why?

From my own experience, I've found myself to be less INNATELY CURIOUS than many of my male counterparts. Once I get onto a topic, I can puzzle over it for hours at a high level, but if the topic is not in front of me, my brain can be content to space out and think trivial things. Once I realized this was the case, I started to actively work to be more curious and to think more. When I'm sitting around spacing out, I will actually tell myself that I should start thinking about a problem. My brain does not do this automatically.

Now, I don't know if this is purely a messed up issue that I have to deal with, or if it extends across the female gender. From observing other females, it doesn't seem unreasonable that others would face the same lack of intellectual curiosity.

My big question is where does this come from? It's either biological or social. I used to think it was biological (this helped me reconcile the fact that I had to work overtime and be more aware so that I could become more interested in things in the first place). Now I think it's entirely possible that the explanation is social and that females, through media/peer groups/etc. simply are not encouraged to be as curious about intellectual issues and by the time they are older, they've simply stopped thinking. (This is all pertaining to females as a group, not particular individuals).

(4) I don't think the atmosphere (meanness) of this site is the problem. Enough females are thick-skinned. I think it's simply the subject matter. Though I agree that it's possible that the ratio of females is slightly higher than what is apparent because of their relative silence. I personally have a much higher fear of rejection to comments, etc. This extends to in-person interactions, and upon the slightest rejection, I will quickly shut up.

Remember that to name two parts of a community is to split that community

Gender's far from the only division here, I would say. There's also a difference in approach to rationalism, that may also have some overlap with gender differences.

I personally consider myself interested in rationalism for the practical benefits: models that are useful, for real-life definitions of useful... not useful for "Knowing The Absolute Truth And Being Right". However, this doesn't appear to be a common attitude on LW.

In the computing field, there's a stereotype that says the difference between men and women is that men care about computing for its own sake, whereas women care about doing other things with computers, how computers can be used to interact with people, and so on. In other words, that women have a more instrumental view of computers than men.

Of course, some men take this to mean that women are therefore not as skilled as men with computers, but I have not found this to be true. The women I've known in computing were happy to develop as much skill as was required by their instrumental aims -- quite often more skill than the men I knew! They just didn't make a religion out of it.

Now, in the case of rationalism, I have to say I've seen what looks like the flip side of the stereotype: namely, a bunch of guys ranting about what's true or right and correcting what they see as "mistakes" in a patronizing manner... whether their targets are male or female. (And I have to admit, I was doing some of that here myself at first... and maybe still am, relative to non-tech discussion norms.)

Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say that LW is not (IMO) an especially friendly forum for instrumental rationalists at the present time. And if the gender stereotype from computing applies, then it is therefore also not a particularly friendly forum for women who haven't already gotten thick-skinned through similar experiences in a technology field. (i.e., if we assume that women are statistically more likely to orient on practical and social applications of a field than men in that same field are.)

If you really truly want to improve the gender balance on LessWrong.com, you will delete this post from the sequence, and never bring it up again. I know it's well-meaning, but as a woman it just makes me feel weird and singled out. I am convinced from long, sad experience that as long as the conversation circles around gender, it'll do more harm than good; I find the research on stereotype threat to be powerfully convincing and explanatory.

In reading through the comments (I didn't get to all 240 of them, I'll admit), I found it striking that constructive suggestions occurred when someone reframed the question from "How can we make women feel more welcome?" to "How can we make newcomers feel more welcome?"

And to everyone who was so ready to come up with biological/evolutionary theories to explain this possible gender imbalance, I have a stunning, heretical statement to make:

Men's and women's brains are not significantly different. Observed differences between genders in thought patterns and behavior are cultural and can change.

I humbly suggest that if you disagree, then read the actual studies that make claims to the contrary. Ask yourself, "How emotionally invested am I in the idea that men and women are fundamentally different in the way their brains work? Would I find any of these conclusions to be convincing if they didn't reinforce my preexisting ideas? Do these studies really meet a minimum standard of evidence?" I know I was pretty shocked at my answers to these questions.

"Delusions of Gender," by Cordelia Fine, is an excellent primer on this topic, btw.

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.

I have some conjectures.

1) People tend to hold beliefs for social reasons. For example, belief in theism allows membership of the theist community, the actual existence of a deity is largely irrelevant.

2) For most people, in order to maintain close social relationships it is necessary to maintain harmonious beliefs with nearby members of your social network. Changing your beliefs may harm your social ties.

3) The larger your social network, the more you have to lose by changing your beliefs.

4) Less Wrong encourages questioning and changing of beliefs.

5) On average, women have larger social networks than men.

6) Less Wrong encourages the adoption of strange and boring beliefs, largely based in maths and science.

7) Advocating strange and boring beliefs does not signal high status, rather it signals a misunderstanding of widely accepted social norms, and therefore poor social skills.

8) Much of a woman's percieved value as a human being is tied to her ability to navigate the social world, men may be forgiven for making the occasional faux pas, women are not. Women are therefore strongly averse to signalling poor social skills.

Some predictions:

1) Willingness to join Less Wrong is inversely proportional to the size of your social network.

2) The exceptions to this rule (Less Wrong members who have large social networks) will be members of fringe groups, where challenges to group beliefs are normal and do not lead to reductions in social status.

3) Less Wrong will never be popular among people with large, mainstream social networks, as long as it advocates self-examination and questioning of recieved beliefs, and promotes discussion of strange and boring beliefs. It will never be popular among women, and the women who do post here are unusual in some way.

ETA: for the sake of complete accuracy, let "fringe belief" be defined as one that is held by <0.1% of the population of the host nation.

I'm a female-type person. I can't speak to anyone else, but I did make a post a while ago, and it was met largely with indifference and I wound up taking a (small) karma hit. This did a variety of things, some useful and some not, but one thing it hasn't done is encourage me to take the time to write another top-level post.

If I'm wandering around a large in-person gathering and I drift over to an interesting conversation and say something and get shot down - even if it's because I said something stupid - I'm more likely to drift away or at least shut up rather than continue to hang out with and seek approval from Those People Who Were Mean To Me™. "Drifting away" is much easier on the Internet, and if more women are giving up after making one or two poorly-received comments, that could easily explain the gender bias.

Possible solutions if I have the right idea (no idea how palatable they are to others):

1) Be more parsimonious with downvotes and generous with upvotes in general.

2) Attempt to draw out individual women Less Wrong ers on particular topics (solicited input puts one out on less of a social limb).

3) Identify who makes each vote on a comment or post, so people can identify Those People Who Were Mean To Me™ and not have to consider the entire Less Wrong community as a whole to be united against them.

Eliezer,

You once responded to someone's comment by writing:

"It would seem we don't appreciate your genius. Perhaps you should complain about this some more."

I'm a professor at a women's college and when I read this comment I thought to myself that a significant percentage of women who read this would not want to participate in this site.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/7i/rationality_is_systematized_winning/4zp

Personally I'm really annoyed by all the complaints about gender imbalance in so many smarter-than-average communities. There is high male to female ratio on almost every possible extreme of the society, both "good" extremes and "bad" extremes. This is natural. Until rationality hits the mainstream, it will stay this way. If it hits the mainstream, it will automatically balance itself. That's all.

Unrelated to gender, but related to inclusion: should we make LW, or some portion of LW, more accessible to teenagers somehow? It's been argued that we'll the best rationalists will be people who learn it young; but to judge by introductions in the new welcome thread, and by responses to the current survey, we seem to have few to no teenagers.

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.

I've only just come into contact with this place, and normally I avoid commenting the day I start somewhere, but this post was compelling considering how I found LW.

A very good friend of ours sent a link to LW to my husband, but not to me. Usually he will send links to both of us he believes we'll both be interested in, and links only to me that he feels I'll be interested in but not my husband, and vice versa.

So clearly he felt I wouldn't be interested in this place, despite knowing that I am fond of rational discourse. Fortunately, my husband knew I would, and so I am here. I just found it an interesting data point in the context of this particular conversation.

Edit: Though this makes me wonder, why didn't I come across LW myself? Why didn't I bother searching for such things?

(This looks pretty old, but I decided it couldn't hurt to be the Female with an Anecdote)

I'd found Less Wrong when I was already looking for a better understanding of rationality than could be found browsing through random atheist blogs, so I pounced on the sequences like a rabid kitten. When I went looking for how to actually apply the general principles of rationality, my mind naturally gravitated towards, well... Its own functioning. And the ways I wound up applying what I learned were substantially less about the 'calibration' and 'winning' that had first caught my eye.

I came for the dissent, like a good Intellectual Hipster, but I think I stayed for Luminosity.

It's not true to say that I just don't have a great personal interest in abstract epistemics, or winning, or making sure that my beliefs are correct, because I do. I really, really do. But as soon as I calmed down from Man-With-A-Hammer-Syndrome, I found that I don't like straight-up arguing nearly as much as I thought I did, though I absolutely stand by the necessity of sharpening our minds against each other. I enjoy pieces on how fully rational people might interact with others more than I like the more abstract musings on the prisoner's dilemna and newcomb's box, as fun as they might be. And to me, being able to comprehend and influence your own mindstate has more obvious potential for benefit than the similar idea of improving your entanglement by knowing and correcting for your cognitive biases.

As Eliezer said, there's no real distinction between "masculine" and "feminine" rationality. The examples I listed do not exist in a vacuum, they depend on or lead to, connect, and interweave with every other facet of rationality. I just highly suspect that Luminosity is a better perspective to form a basic grasp of Rationality from for those who tend towards {Social, Emotional, Passive} traits. I could be wrong or overgeneralizing, but it definitely feels like part of my femininity (or at least the traitset associated with the female gender) exerting itself. A Social, Emotional, and Passive leaning as opposed to Experimentative, Argumentative, and Dominant. Whether that really characterizes women in general is something I'm much less certain about.

As a rationalist who happens to be female, here is my take on this:

1) On an ideal amount of agreement vs disagreement : while it may be true that female dominated segments of the internet have much more agreement in their comments than male dominated ones, these same segments are significantly less rational, on average, and to a degree so are the topics they revolve around.

Rationalists tend not to bother with stating the obvious, and there isn't much "nice post" type commentary around here, so even if the amount of agreeing were higher on this community, it would not be obvious. This "invisible agreement" issue has been discussed before isn't really all that tied to gender as far as I can tell.

2) Can't comment on this because obviously, LW and OB do not contain significant turn offs for me.

3) If a recruit is attracted because the poster shares their sex organs, they aren't a very promising recruit.

How about an experiment where a male writer posts under a more feminine name?

As for recruiting Japanese rationalists, good luck doing that in English. Maybe some of your key posts ought to be translated instead. Hire a professional.

4) Agreed.

5) Sad, but probably correct. (Though I can only say this by observation and not by biological study.)

6) Not all that different from 4), and again all I can do is agree.

7) Your armchair evopsych again... Have you read Cochran and Harpending's The 10,000 Year Explosion? It might significantly improve the quality of these thoughts.

8) Like 5), sad but probably true.

9) Seems very plausible to me. Female readers have probably experienced the GIRL reaction quite often.

Conclusion : There will, in all likelyhood, always be a higher proportion of males to females in rationalist communities. However, putting more rationality into the world at large is a good in itself regardless. I would vastly prefer to see the recruitment efforts continue to deal with people as individuals. Focusing on recruiting women is not likely to work very well, and is quite likely to cause backlash, especially if done badly. The rationaly inclined women, if anything like me, will not react positively to attempts to feminize the community.

Just treat people as people.

Perhaps, by sheer historical contingency, aspiring rationalists are recruited primarily from the atheist/libertarian/technophile cluster, which has a gender imbalance for its own reasons—having nothing to do with rationality or rationalists; and this is the entire explanation.

This seems immensely more likely than anything on that list. Libertarian ideology is tremendously dominated by white males - coincidentally, I bet the rationality community matches that demographic - both primarily male, and primarily caucasian - am I wrong? I'm not big into the rationalist community, so this is a theoretical prediction right here. Meanwhile, which of the listed justifications is equally likely to apply to both white females and non-white males?

Now, that's not to say the list of reasons has no impact. Just that the reason you dismissed, offhand, almost certainly dominates the spread, and the other reasons are comparatively trivial in terms of impact. If you want to solve the problem you'll need to accurately describe the problem.

Whatever it is that makes women less likely to participate in sites such as Less Wrong, I am completely oblivious to it. For whatever reason, a high percentage of boys would find Less Wrong boring, and so would an even higher percentage of girls. It is true that my everyday-life interests are more "feminine" than seems to be the LW average (writing fiction, composing music, singing in a choir, as opposed to hard-sciences math and physics, which I chose not to study in university partly for the reason that my teachers wanted me to because I'm a girl. And I refused to be told what to study based on the fact that "we need more women in X." So I'm in nursing, a program that fulfills my requirement of immediately providing me with a well-paid job.

1). There is a lot of, for want of a better term, "mental masturbation" around here: arguing for the sake of arguing, debating insignificant points, flashy but ultimately useless displays of intellect etc. Men tend to enjoy this sort of thing much more than women. Perhaps the female equivalent would be "social masturbation" -- endless gossiping about other people's trivia.

2). There's a major bias toward discussing math and science topics on here, and objective rather than subjective experience. Rationality, as a meta-construct, arguably isn't necessarily limited to these domains. I don't see why it can't be applied to equally good effect to literature and the humanities, art, interpersonal relationships, etc. Broaden your conversations to include some more of these topics (but, of course, with the same characteristic rational approach) and you may win over more female participants.

Conspiracy theories tend to be male dominated, much more so than LW is. Yet the anti-vax conspiracy seems to be female-dominated and cater heavily to females.

One explanation is that the issue has to do with children, meaning that it appeals to parents and general and mothers in particular (for, so sue me, evo-psych reasons).

Nonetheless, it would be interesting to study that conspiracy theory and see what sort of other effects occurred indirectly from any original significant difference.

Was there unfulfilled demand among irrational females for a conspiracy theory to join, as irrational males dominated all the others and were unwelcoming? Did men unused to not outnumbering women in political groups get spooked and leave, leaving women as a majority (as perhaps occurs in liberal religions)?

There may be lessons to learn from the anti-vaxers. I never thought I'd say that, but there it is. If anyone suspects they will want to make me look stupid by quoting me out of context, bookmark this comment!

One thing I'm sure it's not is the example in #6 - that men are more into self-improvement. My wife is involved in the female self-improvement community, and there are endless workshops, conferences, books, etc.

What is different is the approach - it's on things like becoming more integrated, more aware of cultural prejudice, more aware of the impressions you give other people, more in touch with your body, avoiding repression. Not how to apply Bayesian reasoning to ordinary life. (I know that's a caricature of LW, but you get the idea). Women, on average, seek to change in different ways than men.

Whether or not those ways are considered part of LW in theory, starting with mainly male posters and commenters starts a self-reinforcing pattern of focusing on the male parts of LW. I commend Eli for trying to understand the details, but no one should be surprised by this - men and women are different, cognition is an area where they are different, and something written by men about male cognition is going to attract more men. It would shock me if it happened any other way.

The gender ratio at physical meetups, while still unbalanced, seems noticeably better than the visible gender ratio among active commenters on the Internet.

That part is perfectly predictable. Men are less deterred than women by lack of face-to-face contact in relationships. Film at eleven.

I don't really know what the reason for the gender imbalance is, though I suspect reasons 4 to 8 all play a part, but I think it's highly likely that if you could find explanations for the gender imbalance in undergraduates studying math, physics and computer science, among sci-fi fans, programmers and libertarians and within the classic works of philosophy then you'd have sufficient explanation.

The fact that this question has been debated in all those areas for many years and we don't have very good answers suggests that it is not easy to answer. I think the suggestion of a greater focus on instrumental rationality and concretely useful applications for the real world is a potentially good approach to reducing the imbalance and likely to deliver better results than a likely extended effort to find an explanation for the imbalance.

I guess what I'm saying is that I think our efforts would be better directed to attempting to address the imbalance than in trying to explain it (though obviously theories about why it exists might be useful in guiding attempts to address it).

You're brave to even touch this topic.

The obvious evolutionary psychology hypothesis behind the imbalanced gender ratio in the iconoclastic community - the atheist/libertarian/technophile cluster - is the idea that males are inherently more attracted to gambles that seem high-risk and high-reward; they are more driven to try out strange ideas that come with big promises, because the genetic payoff for an unusually successful male has a much higher upper bound than the genetic payoff for an unusually successful female.

I don't know if that's a factor, but it's a very good idea.

One thing puzzles me about evolutionary arguments for genders being interested in different subjects: It would be an evolutionary win to be interested in things that the other gender is interested in. Many women value a man who knows fashion; many men long for a woman who likes sports and video games. I would have expected an equilibrium with nearly-equal interest in subjects across genders.

(Yes, video games haven't been with us for an evolutionary timespan; but if there's an evo-psych explanation for men liking video games, then the things that make them like video games have been with us for an evolutionary timespan.)

This of course just pushes the problem back a step, but isn't the breakdown in Myers-Briggs between Thinking and Feeling types something like 60:40 for men and 30:70 for women? Mightn't this have something to do with it?

Computer scientists are very highly represented here; a show of hands on IRC found more than half had some CS background. This site is particularly appealing to the CS mindset, so that's not so surprising, but it means that Less Wrong inherits the same massive gender imbalance that computer science has. Of course, this only pushes the question one step away, to the reasons why CS has a gender imbalance; but that's a question that's already been studied, with many hypotheses put forth.

i am a female and have been following OB and LW for about 3 months in googlereader, really liking it, although i never comment (how can i improve on elezier's genius?). may not matter, but i do work in IT. at any rate, i was compelled to register with this site since i wonder if the LW "group" doesn't contain more females than we think. Is the definition of a "member" anyone who consistently reads this blog, regardless of registration status, or anyone who has taken the extra 15 seconds to register, or those registered members who end up posting comments and/or posts? also haven't given this too deep of an analysis, but on the day the gender question came up, that morning i commented to a male friend of mine that i don't know how everyone can keep up this manic pace of reading & writing. it's a lot to take in. i love both sites, though, and i do feel like i'm smarter and think better for it.

I've noticed strong female representation (where I least expected to find it) in The Skeptic Zone,an Australian skeptics group. The feeling I get of that community (even just as a podcast lurker) is that it's much more lighthearted than LW/OB. Whether that makes any difference to sex ratios, I don't know.

For most of the time I've listened to the podcast, there's been regular strong contributions from females. My gut feel would have been that having good female role models would encourage more female participation, however I just did a quick eyeballing of the Skeptic Zone's FaceBook fans and it looks typically about 5:1 biased to males.

This touches on something that I've been thinking about, but am not sure how to put into words. My wife is the most rational woman that I know, and its one of the things that I love about her. She's been reading Overcoming Bias, but I've never been completely sure if its due to the material, or because she's a fan of Eliezer. Its probably a combination of the two. In either case, she's shown no interest in this particular group, and I'm not sure why.

I also have a friend who is the smartest person and the best thinker that I've ever met. He's a practicing rationalist but of the sort who uses it as a means to an end. In his case its the design of computer systems of all kinds. Now, I haven't even bothered to point out the Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong communities to him, as I can't imagine he'd have any interest in them, although I'm sure he'd provide useful insights if one could get him interested.

So, of the three most likely candidates to participate in this group that I know of, only one does. This may well be partly due to my own biases in which groups of people I select to tell about which blogs I read, but I think some of it has got to be due to this site being somehow appealing to a narrower segment of the population than those who it might be most valuable to.

I have no proposed solution. This is simply an observation.

Did you know that according to the last survey females (sex at birth) on LessWrong have a higher IQ with p=0.058?

Irresponsible speculation alert: people join LW because they dig the ideas and/or because they dig the community. The ideas are more enticing for people with higher IQ, the community is more enticing for.. guys. Thus, at equal levels of IQ more women will be filtered out because they feel (on average) less comfortable with the community.

Like I said, I don't assign the above explanation an overwhelming epistemic status, but I do think that the IQ results are non-zero evidence against point #8 and general arguments of the "women aren't smart enough for LW" type.

The obvious evolutionary psychology hypothesis behind the imbalanced gender ratio in the iconoclastic community is the idea that males are inherently more attracted to gambles that seem high-risk and high-reward; they are more driven to try out strange ideas that come with big promises, because the genetic payoff for an unusually successful male has a much higher upper bound than the genetic payoff for an unusually successful female. ... a difference as basic as "more male teenagers have a high cognitive temperature" could prove very hard to address completely.

You ask evo-psych why we have a problem, and evo-psych provides the answer. The gender that has a biological reason to pursue low risk strategies - shockingly! - tends to not show much interest in weird, high-risk, high-payoff looking things like saving the world.

Ask evo-psych how to solve the problem then. We already know that women tend to like doing highly visible charitable activities (for signaling reasons). Maybe we should provide a way for people to make little sacrifices of their time and then make it visible over the web. I am thinking of a rationalist social network that allowed people to very prominently (perhaps even with a publicly visible part here on LW) show off how many hours they had volunteered next to a picture of themselves. I once attended an amnesty international letter writing group that was 90% female, for example.

However, remember that association with any radical sounding idea is high-risk compared to association with a less radical but equally charitable sounding idea. Thus I would predict that women will, on average, tend to not get involved with singularitarianism, transhumanism, existential risks, etc, until these ideas go mainstream.

Exposing yourself to karma judgements is similar to asking someone out on a date, or otherwise risking rejection. Men have to do this all the time; I think a typical man has to approach or flirt with over 100 women just to get 1 date. Women don't have to do it, and so don't get used to doing it.

I was introduced to LW with a link and an endorsement that probably appeals more to the little boy in me than the little girl in others: "it's like martial arts for your mind."

Any thoughts on a 5 second sales pitch for women?

Perhaps women are less underrepresented on Less Wrong than may at first appear, and men are more likely to comment for some reason. Or perhaps women are less likely to choose visibly feminine usernames.

I think it's pretty frequent on the Internet, especially among those that have been around since the early-to-mid 1990s, to assume that everybody online is male by default until proven otherwise.

Being one of those, my first guess would be that the LW audience is > 90% male, but I'd love to see the results of an anonymous survey...

higher cognitive temperature

That sounds like something very similar to what the Big Five model of personality calls Openness (see here).

(By the same logic that if we wanted more Japanese rationalists we might encourage potential writers who happened to be Japanese.)

BTW, in the 2012 survey there were zero Japanese, one Chinese, and two Koreans. Any idea what's going on?

Hypothesis 8, male variance in IQ, is irrelevant to the extent that this site is about rationality, not IQ. Whatever IQ tests measure, it is neither instrumental nor epistemic rationality. See What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought by Keith E. Stanovich for extensive discussion of this point. Even if there is male-female variance in IQ, that does not imply a male-female variance in rationality.

Did you guys know that according to the last survey females (sex at birth) on LessWrong have a higher IQ?

Does anyone have any unbiased statistics on gender in workforce, career choice, education, and any other relevant statistics?

On this hypothesis, male writers end up with mostly male readers for much the same reason that Japanese writers end up with mostly Japanese readers.

Because they can speak japanese?

it looks like an easy way to get some karma would be to create a female username and post in this thread. If we say that women's comments in a thread about how to attract more women are more valuable we're making some unstated assumptions.

Could some of this be resolved through technology?

Imagine a voting system which takes into account the gender of the person voting, as well as the gender of the person viewing the page. A woman reader's view might place higher value on women's votes, relative to men's, such that maybe a single downvote from another woman will count much farther towards making a comment invisible than several upvotes from a men.

(with maybe a twiddle somewhere that says something like "show me the men's view" "show me the women's view" "show me both views, highlighting differences" "show me both views, ignoring differences")

I'll expand on the controversial stance as to why this is. It's obviously extremely complicated and I can't really do it justice in this specific comment. However I will try to give a cursory explanation. I personally tend to think that rational thinking may in part be genetically encoded in the brain and is a trait that may be somewhat distinct from aspects of general intelligence. I think its very likely that their has been differential selection pressures on male and female brain's over the course of evolution. There has been a lot of evolutionary selection pressure over the last 10,000 years in humans. You can think every time an important invention arose in a specific location of the world, then their were resulting shifts in human evolution as a result of that new technology. Genes that allowed their host vehicle to best exploit that new technologies propagated.

So in a society where the written language was more common (for instance), there was selection to build brains that could seek out and absorb more written material. People who had more analytical/rational/logical brains that could seek out the most salient written material were probably selected for. Those who spent a lot of time reading nonsense or were not good/logical readers were not as reproductively fit. They would probably have less information in painting a correct world picture and would be less likely to avoid dangers to their life. To me, it seems obvious that evolutionary selection pressures between men and women were different in this regard. This is especially true in societies where women were relegated to a much different societal roles than men. Gene expression patterns have been shown to be different in female vs. male brains, for instance.

Their is probably a huge variation of human brain abilities depending on where a person is located in the world and their unique evolutionary history on the branch of life. In places where a written language was uncommon until recently, then you might conceivably expect a different neural architecture to be in place. Evolution does not necessarily lead to improved abilities in all traits over time, though. For instance chimps have a superior numerical working memory than humans. So their is probably a wide swath of individual variation with people having specific aspects of intelligence that are quite different. I definitely believe in the construct of general intelligence, but I do think there are subsets to intelligence (working memory being one example, creativity being another that is a harder trait to define, logical/rational thinking).

Gregory Cochran has posited the unique history niche of ashkenazi jews as leading to their higher verbal IQ over non-jewish europeans. This is another instance of a historical branch on the evolutionary tree of life resulting in a shifted bell curve when comparing two population groups. I would imagine in certain historical evolutionary niches, men were probably in positions where they need to seek out and digest written material in a rational/logical way and women less likely to be in those positions.

However until you have a complete understanding of history, gene expression profile changes over the course of history, how they relate to brain/behavior changes, sex differences in phenotypical gene expressions and meme propagation, your always going to have an incomplete picture as to why any specific "macroscpic phenotypical trait" is different when comparing macroscopic "groups". All group categorizations are ultimately going to be fuzzy and phenotypical traits are as well. The evolutionary tree of life is complex and a group classification is ultimately going to have to have some arbitrary cut off. I think a lot of "macroscopic phenotypical traits" can be found on a bell curve. So the bell curve for any phenotypical trait (like a majority of Less Wrong readers being male) has a long universal evolutionary history behind it that defies easy synopsis.

My hypothesis: Women can find sexual fulfillment more easily and hence spend less time fantasizing and hence spend less time in communities that talk about fantastical things that have little to no relevance to things they could realistically achieve in their lives (rationalists, atheists, libertarians, WoW players, etc). Men have greater difficulty finding sexual fulfillment and hence spend more time fantasizing and hence spend more time jostling for social status in communities that talk about fantastical things that have little to no relevance to things they could realistically achieve in their lives.

Do we have any transexuals here? As a eunuch, I became more rational. I've tried testosterone replacement as well, with mixed results.