The hardcore downvotes on this comment, ostensibly given because it <i>seems to</i> run counter to today’s moral crisis of Women in Engineering, and it sounds <i>so very regressive,</i> despite the possibility it’s … not wrong, are a perfect illustration of <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;say.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;say.html</a><p>I have a simple thought experiment for those who have a strong impulse to downvote the parent comment (and doubtless my own comment): Imagine the discussion here were, say, a study that illustrated men naturally resorted to forming factions and solving disagreements with violence, and someone commented, “No, it’s 100% society, not innate whatsoever” and then someone replied to <i>that</i> saying “no, while individual variation is of course very real, there is some evidence that the general trends that inform some of our stereotyped intuitions of gender are based in biological fact.” Would you be quite so quick to mash the down arrow? … Perhaps. It’s a discussion fraught with a lot of charged emotions, and we collectively are not so good at dealing with points of view contrary to whatever we want to believe.