Maybe some things are stupid to do, and men tend to get tricked into them more often. Maybe moderately high pay is a trick to get people to do draining, unhealthy jobs, and men are more likely to succumb to the temptation.
It's not a good idea to become an underwater welder, but you do get paid a lot. It all goes into medical care, but you do get paid a lot.
For whatever reason (and while it pains me to generalize), the high-risk, high-reward jobs are all almost all men. Any woman who feels a calling should of course go for it, and no one should stand in that person's way, but I wouldn't ever expect, say, a 50/50 perfect proportion of gender participants at some future date (as this article indicates, this is a dysfunctional expectation)
Back when bitcoin was only $10 a pop, a bunch of guys in our programming shop wanted to get involved. 100% of their wives nixed it. 100%. I was the only single guy, so I put in some money... Crazy at the time? Perhaps. Crazy now? Not with 20/20 hindsight...
It is a fact.
There is an evolutionary reason for men to take more risks and have a desire to engage in hunting behaviours. We just have to be conscious of that and as per one of the top commenter's remarks not "fall" for something irrational or be driven by societal pressures.
"What on first inspection seemed like a sex difference was actually a difference between white males and everyone else."
http://nautil.us/issue/48/chaos/the-hidden-sexism-of-how-we-...
> Interestingly, a recent study conducted in the more socially egalitarian and gender-equal Sweden failed to find the “white male effect.” This national survey of nearly 1,500 households found that, all else being equal—and in stark contrast with the U.S. data—Swedish men and women had very similar perceptions of lifestyle, environmental, technological, health, and social risks
However, our societies are considerably more complex than that one fact; it's a mistake to use it to explain the fundamentals of everything our society does.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
https://www.google.com/search?q=risk+taking+and+testosterone...
http://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-mens...
The article even generously suggests that many women are adept in BOTH math and verbal, but end up in more verbal jobs because men are typically NOT adept in both, so all the high-math low-verbal guys end up doing mathy jobs, and all the high-math high-verbal women do verbal/people jobs, because the mathy jobs are all the guys can do, while the women can do either (but take the non-mathy jobs due to market effects).
Software is kinda mathy, I guess.
Food for thought: Software has a bizarre curve if you look at it from a math/verbal skills perspective. For what could very well be the first 10-15 years of a software career, software is very math-y. Then, if you want to continue to grow, it takes a very verbal turn. If you want to continue to grow in software leadership and capabilities, you need to be able to express yourself, convince others, navigate politics, and figure out how to translate these issues into the code you structure and write. It isn't a sudden transition and some may transition earlier than 10 years, but it's an interesting way of looking at things.
(Note I'm not talking "management", but continuing up an engineering path.)
A lot of engineering looks like that. If software has any unique characteristics it is how far a single math-oriented programmer can get due to our unique abilities to pull down huge libraries with incredible functionality without having to work with anyone to do it.
Again, just food for thought with no particular argument in sight here.
Right. Even if you are unable or unwilling to play those political games, you can stop at the senior SWE or equivalent level at Google/Facebook/Amazon and still have an income that's well into the top decile. I'm not aware of any other field where you can get that kind of compensation without management or leadership responsibilities.
What is high-risk for women in STEM is the risk of having to work with/for sexist idiots.
Betting on bitcoin is as risky as becoming choosing to be a starving artist with the chance that one day you'll be the next James Pollock, and as Su. et. al pointed out (cited in article), women are the majority in creative fields. STEM requires a different explanation than "high risk" because it isn't.
They hold more power deciding which job gets paid how much, which group of people gets a parade on July 4th (soldiers, not nurses), and which profession to glorify in the next credit card commercial.
So, yes: our impression of a job's prestige is formed by culture, and that culture certainly was–and largely still is–dominated by men. And yes, of course that culture has the same impact on mens' and women's views. They are people, you know?
How does that do anything to patriarchy except by reinforcing it?
If those who are not in the roles patriarchy has defined as desirable, and are in the roles patriarchy has defined as less desirable, by doubling down on the patriarchy's preferences, they have rigged the game and declared themselves the losers. How can equality be achieved?
Verbal brilliance of women is also a purely biological thing. Their brain is wired for it.
These things influence and create inequalities.
There's no discrimination in modern western world capable enough and encompassing to create that kind of impact.
It might be that exactly discrimination (as is done in Iran) influences women to pursue STEM fields (and they do) but in the free world women go for their own desires.
And yet there are plenty of successful male writers. I don't know the demographic breakdown, but they might even be in the majority?
I think we can say there are plenty of successful male stand up comedians.
It is more related to the issue.
And yet the more verbally competent the woman, more she's inclined to go away from stem.
More women played the piano during the era when blues was in the making, yet it was mostly african-american men that pushed the genre, and women inventing no genres at all.
There's obviously an inherent biological drive making men do stuff large scale, and women do stuff in their small circles.