On the carafe belonging to our coffee maker, there is a barely discernible spot that tells you how far to unscrew the lid in order to open it so that you can pour coffee from it without getting a flood of it in your lap. I never found this spot until it was pointed out to me. For years I overlooked it. Fortunately, along with the helpful hint as to its location, came the explanation: I’m a man, so I don’t understand coffee makers.

I get it. Men are genetically programmed to understand power drills, women are programmed to understand coffee makers. They’re both electrical, relatively low-tech tools, but our chromosomes know the difference. There is that particular base pair sequence in women’s DNA that encodes the unique neurotransmitter that binds to the receptors on the coffee maker lid scanning neurons. (They’re in the occipital lobe.) And if women make coffee, it’s a feminine activity. And if it’s a feminine activity, women should do it, right? And if only men write computer programs, then of course it’s masculine. And if it’s masculine, then men should be doing it.

It’s called circular logic. It’s almost, but not quite, entirely unlike regular logic.

Marching on: As you may have noticed, today is Ada Lovelace Day. I didn’t sign the pledge. I read about it yesterday, but like a few others I’ve seen on Planet PHP, I’m uncomfortable with singling out one person. So, instead, I would like to perform a bit of mythbusting.

As I tried to hint in the beginning paragraph, gender sterotypes are not terribly logical. Nor are they supported by hard facts and scientific evidence.

So here is a fact that’s not much appreciated, but still a fact: men and women are more similar than people tend to believe. This has been known for decades, but is not universally recognized.

This snippet from Scientific American expresses the essence of it. (Unfortunately, the whole item is not freely available. It’s good, but short.)

Men and women are not nearly as different as the media and pop psychologists would lead us to believe, according to a new metastudy of gender research.

Girls don’t have the same mathematical proclivity as boys? Not true. Men can’t communicate as well as women can in relationships? Not so either. And it turns out that the self-esteem problems usually associated with teenage girls are just as pronounced in teenage boys.

Here is some more information on the same metastudy.

Another excellent source of information is this book extract.

In The Essential Difference [Simon Baron-Cohen] offers the following “scientific” careers advice: “People with the female brain make the most wonderful counsellors, primary school teachers, nurses, carers, therapists, social workers, mediators, group facilitators or personnel staff … People with the male brain make the most wonderful scientists, engineers, mechanics, technicians, musicians, architects, electricians, plumbers, taxonomists, catalogists, bankers, toolmakers, programmers or even lawyers.”

…

Baron-Cohen classifies nursing as a female-brain, empathy-based job (though if a caring and empathetic nurse cannot measure dosages accurately and make systematic clinical observations she or he risks doing serious harm) and law as a male-brain, system-analysing job (though a lawyer, however well versed in the law, will not get far without communication and people-reading skills). These categorisations are not based on a dispassionate analysis of the demands made by the two jobs. They are based on the everyday common-sense knowledge that most nurses are women and most lawyers are men.

Yes, it’s the coffee maker thing again, and it’s ridiculous.

The comment about nurses is particularly interesting to me. I’ve witnessed nurses at an intensive-care unit talking to each other, and I remember thinking “wow, these ladies know some heavy technical stuff”. They were not discussing feelings and people, they were talking about the apparatus. And not in a way that I could understand.

On the other side of the coin, even getting up at night to feed a baby doesn’t take a “maternal instinct”. I’ve done it, and I’m pretty sure I know what required: you have to understand that it’s necessary, and stop feeling sorry for yourself. Without the self-pity, the discomfort of interrupted sleep is tolerable. It’s a relatively mild physical hardship, certainly one that should be within the capacity of “real men”.

Gender discrimination and segregation in the workplace is harmful and irrational. But it’s not easy to abolish, partly because gender stereotypes and mythical differences seem to be considered much more interesting and edible to the media than gender similarities.