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Kathleen Booth, early British computer scientist, died one month ago on Sept 29 at the age of 100. The Register published an obituary for her titled "RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language."
One month later, yesterday, a link to the obituary was the top (I think) post 1, 2 on both Hacker News and Reddit's programming subreddit
Many of the commenters lamented that they had never heard of this highly influential person, and other commenters suggested that the reason most people hadn't heard of her is because she was a woman.
Ironically, I would contend, the only reason we are hearing about her is because she was a woman.
Calling her the inventor of assembly language may be a stretch. One HN comment points out that the IEEE has already given a computer pioneer award to David Wheeler for inventing the first assembly language in 1949.
You can read her 1947 paper and decide if the table at the end counts as the first assembly language. It is a numbered list of 25 operations, a symbolic description of their action, and in a few cases an English description of their operation. It is, at least superficially, similar to the list of 30 operations Wheeler created for the EDSAC.
Ran out of time to delve into:
Grace Hopper falsely being credited for inventing COBOL
If Ada Lovelace invented programming, and if she did but no one knew about it and it didn't influence anyone else, should we credit her?
Booth's credit being recently discovered/promoted in 2018 Hackaday article
Margaret Hamilton being the only programmer popularly known for Apollo work, despite leading a small team of 3 people.
Hamilton and Booth both marrying their bosses.
All of these women being impressive in their own right, and exaggerating their contributions for Girl Power is a disservice to them.
The etiology of the gender achievement gap has been debated considerably. Boys and girls test roughly the same in terms of IQ, and in elementary school and even up through college, females tend to outperform males. Yet something changes after college. Obviously, parental obligations. But I wonder if it can be explained by other factors, such as personality. Some have posited that men are more interested in 'things' whereas women are more interested in people. Maybe men are better at entering flow states and concentrating, which is necessary for success at competitive, cognitively demanding activities , whereas women get distracted too easily.
Yes, that men and women have different personalities and interests is one of the largest and most replicated results in psychology. I realize this is somewhat discouraged knowledge, but it's not too hard to find, e.g.:
Men and things, women and people: a meta-analysis of sex differences in interests
Why can't a man be more like a woman? Sex differences in Big Five personality traits across 55 cultures.
The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality
Note that the differences tend to be actually larger than many of these suggest at first glance, as there tend to multiple, at-least-partially-independent, so if you take multiple traits at once, the means move further apart.
Scott also has a great discussion on it in Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences
I also think the 'greater variability hypothesis', namely that men tend to have greater variability in most traits, is both true, and explains a lot of the differences we see (more homeless men, more Nobel prize winners), because it means many more men at the extremes.
If you look at top scores in the math SATs, for example (over 750?) you see many more men than women. Sorry, I don't have a source easily on hand for this one, but I've verified it a few times, and welcome you to do so. (Women tend to outscore on the verbal, and their scores tend to be more correlated, which has implications for chosen careers.)
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IQ tests are gender-normed. They're the same for boys and girls because they're forced that way.
Is Greater Male Variability a property of the real world, independent of the IQ norming process? I would be astounded how our genetics or socialization techniques somehow cause GMV.
Really? It makes sense, so to speak, from an evolutionary standpoint, in that one male can impregnate many females, so a species can afford to produce a bunch of 'waste' men, as long as some turn out well. It's like VC investing in companies. Women, on the other hand, cannot be easily replaced -- if a tribe loses half its women, it loses half its next generation, more or less. If it loses half its men, it has labour and fighting problems, but no problems producing enough children.
There's also the detail that women have two XX chromosomes, but men have an X & Y. That's why many diseases hit men more frequently (e.g. color blindness), because they only need one defective X chromosome for it to hit. Similarly, if they get a helpful mutation, it isn't drowned out by the partner gene.
And for what it's worth, apparently you do see more male variance in the world, although I think in the mental domains it's not as clear-cut.
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Wait, please explain. How are things gender normed? How are the scores manipulated?
The people who designed the original IQ tests included a balance of (I forget the specifics, take these as possible examples) spatial-reasoning tasks which men are better at, and conditional hypothetical verbal problems which women are better at. The number of each kind of question is calibrated such that men and women will both get an average score of 100. But it's a kludge; IQ tests could be more sensibly understood as "intelligence test to grade women against other women" and "intelligence test to grade men against other men" smushed into the same paper.
They did this because they couldn't be bothered to do two separate normalisation operations, but their laziness has had the tragic knock-on effect of giving entire generations the chronic misconception that women are as smart as men.
From what you've said it sounds like IQ is a grab-bag of different things. What does "women are as smart as men" mean? Are you saying:
men & women have "different" intelligences (your post is phrased far more controversially) or;
do IQ tests weight verbal questions more than spatial ones? (are there any other interpretations than the one I'm thinking of??)
I mention question weights because this guy sounds knowledgeable.
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Might this be testable?
IQ is valuable as it tracks actual intelligence fairly closely; if you are good at IQ-test-style puzzles you're very likely actually intelligent. This will be detectable in other things like complex creative tasks, and even practical areas like average income, crime rate, and so on. If the test was biased towards one gender by adding questions that the gender did better at, but weren't as strongly correlated with actual intelligence, you'd expect their IQ scores to be less correlated with the downstream effects of intelligence itself than it is for the other gender.
(Theoretical example: If men were a lot dumber than women in general, one could add "ability to lift weights" or the like to the IQ tests until both genders had the same average score. This would however result in IQ no longer being able to predict the ability of men to e.g. lead a company, like it still would for women.)
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I don't follow, why give preference to spatial-reasoning tasks when defining who is smarter? Why not the one at which women are better?
I don't follow, who exactly is preferencing [whichever one men were better at] tasks? The IQ test designers didn't preference them, they finely balanced them against the [whichever one women were better at] tasks.
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I'd be fascinated to know how men-smart (spatial) the average woman is, and how women-smart (verbal) the average man is.
Also to what degree each correlates to the positive traits IQ is usually held to be associated with (health, income, etc.)
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My understanding is that on IQ tests and proxies for it, men and women score about the same (men maybe a bit lower on average), but the standard deviation is higher. At the tails, the representation due to greater variance dominates. (Can someone well-versed in IQ comment on this?)
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