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NancyLebovitz comments on "Can we know what to do about AI?": An Introduction - Less Wrong
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In Starship Troopers, women were the pilots-- iirc, because of better reflexes.
Not Heinlein's best moment, forecasting-wise. That males have better visuospatial skills and faster reaction times are stalwarts of the gender differences literature.
True, though... do you really think that was an actual forecast in any meaningful way? I mean, other than "the future will be different, and women are better than men at other things than housekeeping".
Well, even if it's not a forecast, it's still not a great example because anyone familiar with the facts (the reaction time literature and gender differences go back to the 1800s, for example) will dismiss it annoyedly ('no, that's not how it works. Also, explosions in space don't produce any sound!')
Still, flying was sufficiently new that most people wouldn’t probably be justified in reaching very high confidence about what abilities are needed and in what combination, especially for future aircraft, just by knowing all the literature existing up to then. (Also, if you live in a world where women almost never are trained and then work for years at some task X, it’s more or less impossible to compare (with statistical significance) how good experienced men and women are at X, because it would take years to obtain female candidates.)
Now that I think of it, that too. But I’m pretty sure it was something/someone else. Strange that two authors would use that particular speculation, in what I think were very different kinds of stories.