I don't know how to interpret that other than as men being more competent than women.
That boils down to not understanding statistics which is something for which you can get downvoted on LW.
You don't need a general difference in intelligence for the average person in a given hiring poll with gender A being more capable than the average person in the same hiring poll with gender B.
The job in question was as a lab manager in a university science department.
Whether or not men are on average smarter than woman has nothing to do with a particular job. It's a general statement.
with the caveat that if the author admits they're not well thought out, then "challenge" isn't exactly what's called for -- the author already knows they might be wrong
No, if someone posts rubbish the fact that they know they post rubbish doesn't mean they deserve less challenge.
That boils down to not understanding statistics
We can turn this into a mathematical-skill pissing contest if you like; for what it's worth, I don't much favour your chances. If you're talking about means versus variances: this is only a large effect when you're hiring from the tails of the distribution, and a lab-manager post doesn't require really exceptional ability in any domain.
has nothing to do with a particular job
The point of my specifying the job is that it's a job on which performance is (1) likely to be a matter of general competence in so...
There are some long lists of false beliefs that programmers hold. isn't because programmers are especially likely to be more wrong than anyone else, it's just that programming offers a better opportunity than most people get to find out how incomplete their model of the world is.
I'm posting about this here, not just because this information has a decent chance of being both entertaining and useful, but because LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles-- who knows what simplifying assumptions might be tripping us up?
The classic (and I think the first) was about names. There have been a few more lists created since then.
Time. And time zones. Crowd-sourced time errors.
Addresses. Possibly more about addresses. I haven't compared the lists.
Gender. This is so short I assume it's seriously incomplete.
Networks. Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up). Don't trust the words in the url.
Distributed computing Build systems.
Poem about character conversion.
I got started on the subject because of this about testing your code, which was posted by Andrew Ducker.