 Thank you. Hello, I'm Brianna and this lighting talk is called Neurosexism and it's kind of a... Really? Press buttons don't work. No, that's not how it works. It's kind of a review of this book with reference to geek feminism. So it's called Delusions of Gender, How Our Mind, Society and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine. And this is what it looks like. For some reason, this cover on the right is the one that you get in Australia, but I think the one that you get off Amazon is much nicer. And so, you know, people have a lot of ideas about what men's minds and women's minds are like. There's a lot of stuff in popular culture that suggests that guys are systematizers and women are empathizers, that kind of thing. You know, people just have some ideas. But so, why are there so few women in open source? Isn't that what we all want to know? So, like, something is leading women to not choose careers in technology or computer science or floss. And so, as a typical example, I thought I'd take a sample from Slash Shot, which is the authority on all things technical. So just women tend towards more social careers. You know, there are exceptions, but they're not being kept out by any kind of discrimination. They just choose different careers. So it's out of choice, right? So, but why would we choose different careers? Well, so there might be two ideas. So maybe there's nurture and maybe there's nature. So, you know, maybe their experiences and society would lead them to choose different careers or maybe their brains are just hardwired to not choose computer science. But, you know, remember what this guy said. There's no more discrimination. Feminism has succeeded. Obviously, not nurture. So it must be innate. You know, except for the fact that, like, actually, there's still a lot of discrimination and sexual harassment, which is not because women are too sexy, but because guys create a hostile workplace that you don't want to stay in. And the second shift, which is that women go home and do all the housework and look after the kids. And we like what we think we're good at, which means, you know, everyone has this internal idea that, you know, women are not good at maths and women are not good at computer science or logic or rotating 3D things in their head or whatever. And this is baggage we all carry around. Even if we believe I personally am good at these things, we carry around this cultural baggage that everybody else believes this. And these kinds of things, like, if women are, you know, show not aggression, assertion, then they're, you know, like an ice queen or queen, so and so, or they're a bitch. But for guys, you know, that's just really manly, powerful stuff. And so there's actually an interesting side note in this book, which is she talks about some studies which were done, which is that if you are into techy stuff and you're a woman and you're a minority, the easiest thing for you to do to cope with that might be to kind of jettison parts of your identity that are more stereotypically girly, because it draws less attention to you. And I think that's a quite interesting idea. I mean, the alternative argument or an alternative argument is that women who are less interested in stereotypically feminine things are more drawn to computer science. But I think it's an interesting thing that goes both ways. I mean, I'm certainly not talking about the latest rom-com I've seen with my workmates, but if I was in a different workplace, maybe I would be. So, okay, so there must be innate differences, obviously. Well, but how are they actually different? You know, we're all scientists, maybe we can figure this out. So maybe we've got different brains, you know, and this is an idea that has a good history, you know, 150 years maybe. And so the first pass at this idea was there were angles in the face show that you have different brain structure, and that's why women aren't good at maths. Well, that didn't really pan out. And the second idea was, well, maybe it's the size of the skull, you know, tells you something about the brain inside. Well, that didn't pan out either. So it was just the size of the skull because, you know, guys have bigger brains. So there's just more going on in there. Well, that doesn't work out so well either. And brain light equally. Okay, so what are we going to do? Well, neuroimaging to the rescue, technology. And so we have this quote, which is just like a classic thing that I think, you know, even if you don't believe this, you know that other people believe this. And you know that this is a culturally kind of understood thing. And this is not like a pop site. It is a pop science book, but has more of a scientific underpinning than men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Yeah. Is that the female brain author? Or someone else? That's Simon Barrett. Oh, yes. P.B.L. Barrett and Arthur are just resonating. I haven't read that one, but she talks about it a lot in this book. So, you know, this is what's going to come to the rescue of scientifically proving once and for all that women cannot do maths. So we have blobology. It's a really, it's a new technology. Again, this is from the book. So, you know, there's pictures. And look, they're all on the left or they're all on the right. You know, it means something. Well, what does it mean? It's not really clear. You know, there's no clear idea that blobs over here mean you're happy or blobs over here mean you're sad or blobs over here mean you're doing tetris in your head or anything like that. And so trying to make that conclusion is like really premature, but that doesn't stop anybody doing it. And another point is that just because there's different blobs, just one second, just because there's different blobs going on doesn't mean that you're not reaching the same outcome but from a different path, which is this quote by Celia Moore. Joe? The salmon. The dead salmon? It wasn't going to because it is a lightning talk. Maybe you can tell that one. There was a study in... I think it was cited in the female brain or... It was in person things, right? Yeah. And it was about the brain activity and it turned out to be of salmon and by the way, they were dead. Interesting. And then finally, the file draw phenomenon, this is really interesting, which is where if you are doing a study that is doing some blobology and you happen to find... you're studying something else, you happen to find a significant, as in statistically significant, gender difference. You're like, whoa, a bonus paper. That's some hot shit right there. I'm publishing that. But if you do the study and you don't find any gender difference, you don't go, whoa, I'm going to publish that headline, no gender difference found. That doesn't get published. That stays in your file draw. And so that's the file draw phenomenon. Phenomenon. And then finally, that's this idea that it's kind of magic that the brain is hardwired. But the brain, if you think about where socialization and your experiences are going to go, they're not sitting somewhere else. They're in your brain too. So if you see something in the brain, you can't tell whether you were born with it or whether that came from your experiences, except if you're dealing with toddlers or two-year-olds. And the brain changes. So what is really hardwired? Maybe not all that much. And so there's another idea, or thing that is floating around, which is called the greater male variability hypothesis. So guys, you get your Mohs arts, but you also get your rain men or whoever else. Forest camps. Forest camps. OK. And women, we're just all clumped in the middle, something like that. And so this is seen in some, like a study of maths ability, for example. But it's not seen in all countries. It's not seen in the UK. It's not seen in Indonesia. I think Malaysia was the other one, or India. So there's nothing kind of inevitable, or well, you know, it's just the greater male variability hypothesis. There's nothing we can do, you know, wash our hands. Guys are geniuses. And, you know, it ties back to this idea of whether genius is something that you're born with and you just let it come out of you, or whether, you know, your experiences, you can actually teach people and they can learn shit and encourage people. So that's something to consider as well. And then, finally, this idea of equal but different. And, like, this is a really pervasive idea, and it's, you know, like some women embrace this, too. And maybe there's something to it, or maybe there isn't. But, you know, what might be wrong with it is go, well, just women have their own strengths, men have their own strengths. Why do they all have to be equal? Why does everything have to be equal? But as Cordelia says, gender equality 2.0, which is this idea that just women have strengths, men have strengths, and never the time shall meet. It justifies the status quo where, like, all the powerful, cool shit is in the hands of men. I want some of that. And this is a great, great quote from Neil Levy, who I think I'm going to read, because he gets quoted a bit, seems like a cool guy. He says, it's not an accident that there is no Nobel Prize for making people feel included. So all the stuff that our society values just happens to be all the stuff that guys are apparently awesome at. You know, so let's knock that off. And that's my lightning talk, and this is a good book, and you should read it.