"Men fail to enter [teaching|nursing|child care] at a rate much higher than other industries. The only conclusion is that [teaching|nursing|child care] is a hostile environment for men, or that men are intrinsically unable to perform in [teaching|nursing|child care]."
Which is it, in the areas I listed?
This is a tedious point, and it gets made every single fucking time there's a thread like this.
Use a search engine. You'd find, within a few moments, programmes across all of these industries to correct the gender imbalance.
And yet the number never budges, and we don't hear the president and the media blasting said industries over their shameful employment ratios day after day.
Instead it's just "hmm yes, that's curious. Well we're working on the problem. Carry on..."
Whereas in tech if the ratio isn't 50/50 there's hell to pay. In comparison there isn't a damn thing being done to address the imbalance in the industries I've listed. Yet women in tech, that's a national crisis.
Yet those are professions where sex-diversity has a real impact on society. It's far more serious than the sex of the person writing the code for a fucking social network.
There has been about 1 story in the NY Times about this issue in the past 10 years.
And tech sex-disparity? A near constant stream of articles.
By the way, 1% of carpenters are women and 98% of dental hygienists are women.[1] Is that catastrophic? Does it warrant NY Times articles or endless pontification?
[1] https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/occ_gender_share_em_1020_txt.ht...
Are you arguing that tech hasn't developed into a somewhat hostile environment for woman because men face difficulties in some industries as well? Because if so that's a poor argument. It's completely possible for both to be true for the same reason while have different underlying causes
Yeah...no. That's such a distance that "leaping" to conclusions doesn't quite cover it. How about: women are (statistically) less interested in tech? So there is less intrinsic motivation, so extrinsic factors become much more important.
Not entirely coincidentally, that is exactly what surveys starting at high-school age right through professionals leaving the profession show. And "leaving" tech is often "getting promoted to management".
UPDATE: Note that even if this explanation were not the correct one (though I think it is the one that's most correct), it would still invalidate your assertion about other explanations being the only conclusions.
The more accurate version of this is "women find less value in tech." It deserves more consideration than it gets. There are differences that aren't just cultural between genders, and its something that should be taken into account when forming a judgement on these issues.
Historically, your argument has been used to suppress women and minorities. It's weird that every time a group doesn't fit into an industry or a culture, that group is not white men.
Teaching, nursing, child care. Care to take a guess which group doesn't fit into those industries?
My comment was out of an interest in not being lied to more than anything else.
The subconscious forces that shape the way people think about these issues are the most pernicious.
Career meritocracy is, more or less, a myth. In technical fields, there is a merit baseline that has to be cleared, but after that, any further relationship between merit and position evaporates. That is inescapable. People sometimes think they've escaped it and found the promised land of meritocracy, but they haven't. That usually just means they have a politically-skilled manager who is good at keeping their belief in the fairy tale alive.
I agree that a good engineer is not necessarily a good engineering manager, but I don't believe there are good engineering managers who are not also good engineers.