And you seem to be conflating two separate issues, romantic attraction, and ability to handle criticism.

Such is the apparent resolution of Tom Hunt's map of the territory.

The rational response would be to look into the matter to see which is in fact the case.

As I have already said, it is not a question of which is the case any more than the case of the unobserved falling tree is a question of sound or non-sound.

Well, you're link is more like, a woman after a lot of effort improves her criticism taking ability. And even then she would rather the culture change so that she doesn't have to exercise it. The question of whether criticism is necessary for the institution achieve whatever it's actual goals are is not addressed.

To represent my position or that comment's position as a claim that criticism is unnecessary in research or business is a straw man. You are not entertaining the possibility that women in general may adapt to the particular quality of criticism in predominantly male professions as that woman did, nor that a cultural change is possible, or furthermore, optimal.

Yes, if only there were a mathematical theory of how to update on that kind of evidence.

I use the word 'how' qualitatively, not quantitatively. I don't mean, "How well do women take criticism on a scale of positiveness?," I mean, "By what internal mechanisms and social norms do women tend to interpret and exchange criticism, and how is it different from the way men do?"

How about not going out of our way to actively promote more women in research, e.g., with all the "women in science" programs.

The problem with affirmative action is not encouraging minorities to participate in activities in which they have not historically participated; the problem with affirmative action is using a minority's membership test as the selection criterion as opposed to using the selection criteria that would maximize the intended effect of said activity. We can broadly encourage minorities to attempt to become researchers without letting people who are bad at research be researchers. Where affirmative action is suboptimal, 'negative action' is not the solution. It would be suboptimal for an NBA talent scout to exclude a seven-foot-tall white basketball player from consideration because he had precommitted to excluding white basketball players because being of African descent positively correlates more strongly with height than does being of European descent. It would be suboptimal for a senior researcher to exclude a woman with an IQ in the top 2% from consideration because he had precommitted to excluding women because having an IQ in the top 2% correlates more strongly with being male than with being female. Respecting the precommitment in those scenarios while keeping the ultimate size of your selected populations constant would not maximize the average height or IQ of your selected population, and the original purpose of the precommitments was to maximize the average height or IQ of your selected population; the precommitment in each case is a lost purpose. If you use race or gender to inductively infer someone's basketball-playing or research ability without using height or IQ when those data are available, then you are failing to update.

Except women appear to make up less than half of the intellectual elite, largely because they're IQ's have a smaller standard deviation.

Deary et al. (2006) estimate that ~1/3 of the top 2% of the population in IQ is female. 46.2 million people is non-negligible, to say the least.

Then you should hold women to higher standards without excluding them completely.

So, historically this is somewhat similar to what happened--if a woman managed to get some sort of advocate / ally, she had limited access to the scientific / mathematical world as a scientist or mathematician. (Getting access to that world by hosting a salon was the typical path women would take, but that would put them much more in a support role.) But it had clear inefficiencies--Emmy Noether was unable to get a professorship in Germany, for example, and then even in America taught at a women's college, despite being a clearly first-rate mathematician.

One partial solution is to have some procedure by which Noether is declared an honorary man, and then gets full access. It is interesting to try to figure out how much of the distance this would cross between how things actually were and the ideal case, for varying strength of filtering. One can also imagine this smoothly progressing from a minor, reversible change to the ideal case, but because of that one can also see the slippery slope arguments that would have defeated it (since probably someone thought of this at the time).

(Whenever this subject comes up and we talk about people who managed to get around restrictions, it's probably also important to talk about people who couldn't get around those restrictions, not because of their ability but because of the economics or power dynamics involved. Noether had trouble getting paid for doing math, but it's cheap to do math; Jennie Cobb could find jobs flying planes but it's not cheap to go to space.)