Why Women Leave Engineering (2011) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Why Women Leave Engineering (2011) [pdf]

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114 pointsmpweiher90 comments

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Incidentally, Professor Fouad has follow-up studies:

- NSFGears: why men leave

- NSF ENGAGE: why men and women stay

Should be interesting, but I haven't seen any published results yet.

https://uwm.edu/education/people/fouad-nadya/

Thanks for the information, interested to see the results of those studies.

This study is consistent with another internal study that I read about. Essentially, working conditions, bosses, crazy hours, generally unreasonable expectations, and lack of appreciation all combine to make an unpleasant work environment. In that other study they also made the point that men felt exactly the same way about their job - but more women had the freedom to take action and leave the job. So this isn't just about women in the workplace. It is about how corporations are allowed to create jobs without any consideration for their employees - we are simply resources to exploit so that they can get rich.

Perhaps tangential but related is the notion of wholly worker owned businesses - if jobs suck, why do we not leave the top-down run businesses to form cooperatives where we collectively define our own roles?

On deeper analysis the worker-owned business concept seems like it would improve things a lot for men and women ("people") alike. But I genuinely wonder why this isn't already more common. Is it an entrenchment thing? Is it really that the elite have so much power us wage-slaves are still scratching our way up from the bottom? Are worker self-directed businesses truly not viable?

---

Like I said, a tangent. But this article notes that both sexes ("people") don't like working and this does seem to match my lived experience. I always wonder why we don't do more to change that...

> Are worker self-directed businesses truly not viable?

I think that's it. There's nothing stopping us from making such corps. I'm sure it must have been tried multiple times in history. The fact that no successful company like this exists probably means the concept is unviable.

As to why, that's anyone's guess. Maybe any org without a single-minded purpose is doomed to fail. Maybe if our arms and legs had a say in what we do, we wouldn't survive. Maybe that's the reason millions of years of evolution has turned out a body with a single organ controlling everything else.

It seems to work when it starts as a benevolent dictator taking care of employees. I like examples with razor-thin margins since they show the rest could probably pull it off:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2013/07/24/the-wal...

It's more a right mix between worker's ideas and worker-approved management, though, instead of purely worker-directed. Same happened with Ricardo Semler's company that was even more radical.

Communes exist, and people start them regularly. Unfortunately, they tend to be unstable and disintegrate. The most famous one is probably San Francisco's "Summer of Love" in 1967. It lasted just a few months.

It's a stretch to describe the Summer of Love, even just in San Fransisco, as a commune. If anything, there were many communes that existed or maybe started in that time.

Not a stretch at all. There were organized efforts to provide free food, clothing, shelter, health care, and entertainment. People were encouraged to contribute what they could, or nothing at all, entirely up to them. They thought they were building the perfect society.

Probably similar to herding cats – too many opinions and too many directions to get pulled in. My girlfriend worked in an artists' co-op with equal share and high level of democracy. Everybody's ideas are always great so as to not to hurt anybody's feelings and if anything needs to get done, it takes weeks of roundabout talk just to end up with a monstrosity full of compromises.

I guess there needs to be some degree of hierarchy, just like with state elections, to constrict opinions and epitomise the main idea so there are not too many cooks undoing each other's work.

Here's a list of worker co-ops:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_cooperatives

Self-directed businesses are totally viable - until they need funding. Then any approach to possible investors is likely to be met with "Ha ha ha ha no."

We simply don't have a culture that supports non-hierarchical businesses. There are no role models in the media, hardly anyone has personal experience of a working in a co-op, and most of the population doesn't even know what a worker co-op is.

Wall St and VCs are implacably hostile to any business model that gives workers economic power.

Given those challenges, the fact that successes still exist suggest the idea has unexplored potential.

You seem to be assuming bad faith in place of a more likely explanation.

Various models of funding are predicated on taking equity, either directly in exchange for cash or as collateral for a loan. The problem is that as soon as you issue equity to investors, the business isn't worker-owned (and, crucially, worker controlled) anymore, it's (at least partially) investor owned.

> Why do we not leave the top-down run businesses to form cooperatives where we collectively define our own roles?

Founding a business requires considerable access to capital. Investors are less likely to invest in an unusual coop structure than in a bog-standard company. Workers may have to pool their own resources to found the company, which means that they are risking their own financial assets.

> Founding a business requires considerable access to capital.

Not necessarily, especially not with software.

Especially in software. See how much Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Google have raised.

Can you give an example (business -> success in software) without outside capital investment? Most of the time the sequence is software -> success -> business, and the event chain is exceedingly rare.

My own companies (Zortech, Digital Mars). Id Software. I believe Microsoft borrowed $5,000 (outside investment, but it's not remotely "considerable").

Saying “my own companies” only proves my point. You are risking your own personal assets only, while a coop structure would involve risk for everyone. Furthermore, you are founding a small business that you hope to eventually grow in some direction. That is very different from a whole set of workers founding a business where they wish to continue doing the same work they were doing before, only on a coop basis.

>You are risking your own personal assets only, while a coop structure would involve risk for everyone.

That would actual make risks smaller, as the investment and risk is spread across more people.

>Furthermore, you are founding a small business that you hope to eventually grow in some direction. That is very different from a whole set of workers founding a business where they wish to continue doing the same work they were doing before, only on a coop basis.

That's both not accurate (in the first part) and a shifting of goal-posts.

Who said Walter founded a business to try whatever and "eventually grow in some direction"? He had specific things in mind for the business to do, and pursued those.

Second, and inversely, who said people doing co-ops are against pivoting and trying stuff? That they "wish to continue doing the same work they were doing before" is a new, arbitrary, constraint.

Heck, people could start co-ops a) without having worked before, b) with people from different backgrounds, where the "same work they did before" doesn't apply, c) with people wishing to do something different than what they were doing before, not just with a different organizational model (e.g. build software of type X instead of working on mindless features upper management demands).

I'm sure you can talk yourself into believing it cannot be done. Heck, with my companies, I was universally told it was not possible for me to do them.

Maybe you only consider as "software business" the kind of "software businesses" of VC fame today, like Facebook, Google, and the tons of web based ones, where huge investments are needed for the scaling and infrastructure?

I think the parent has in the mind the more traditional (but still widely present outside the VC echo chamber) model of a company writing some software package and selling it.

(Of course some people don't believe making $5 or $10 or $100 millions a year, as successful such companies do, qualifies as a success, but that's another story).

Fog Creek, 37 Signals, GitHub, Mailchimp, WooThemes, AppSumo, Grasshopper...

There's a very well worn path from consultancy -> productized consulting -> success in software or day gig -> side project -> success in software. Patio11 bangs on about it incessantly, because he's completely right - the majority of HN readers are more than capable of launching a successful SaaS business without quitting their day job or taking a huge lump of VC.

Sure, the problem is always the idea. I don't know how many more times someone can make another bingo card maker or time scheduling system and have it still work.

I'll agree to disagree. For example, github certainly did use a chunk of capital.

Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett spent quite a bit. You may not care about the amount here on YC, but it's a non-trivial barrier, regardless.

About 20 years ago I first heard about co-ops, and I thought it was a great idea. So I literally bought every book on the subject that I could find (spent many hundreds) and read all those books. There is a long and rich history of co-ops worldwide. My take away: Most co-ops end up either failing or replicating a power hierarchy - with workers on the losing end. Very few avoid that end, and those that do are those that either exist in markets where they don't have to execute perfectly (such as many successful businesses today) or those that figure out some way to cultivate leaders who make good business decisions (giving them a market advantage, and again letting them operate without exploiting their workers.) In other words, markets still operate as markets, and force business to operate in particular ways unless they can create what are sometimes called "effective monopolies" (based on regions or differentiation or some other advantage). I've become convinced that we need to change the way markets compete if we want any real change.

Agreed. The root of the problem is that exploiting workers can - and usually does - give one a competitive advantage. If we can somehow fix this, the entire problem will solve itself.

Isn't it more of a game theory situation? If your competitors exploit their workers and you don't then you will be too expensive?

Yes. That's exactly what I meant by referring to competitive advantage.

Are you accounting for the benefit to workers of not having (some) authority? Decision-making itself can be extremely stressful! Ceding authority to someone else also relieves you of the associated responsibility and that can and probably does have significant benefits e.g., psychologically, emotionally.

Consider a pretty analogous industry – musicians, musical artists, etc. I've noticed that a lot of 'bands' I like are really 'dictatorships' run by a single highly-motivated artist that recruits other musicians to act as 'employees' to realize their, the dictator's, vision. It doesn't seem inherently bad to allow people to be employees.

Regardless, it seems impossibly to perfectly negate any advantages (or disadvantages) of "exploiting workers". I think a better vision is to help and encourage everyone to become more 'powerful', e.g. more skilled, wealthier, open to more possibilities. But I also admit I don't have a plan to prevent the already-powerful from becoming more powerful themselves, and at a faster rate than everyone else. I'm still undecided whether that's generally good or bad. Perhaps it's (effectively) undecidable!

I agree. IMO, the problem is not that companies aren't made of equals. Hierarchies serve a valuable function. The problem is that the lower bound of how much the bottom of the hierarchy can be abused is far too low. I don't think we need to abolish hierarchies - just raise the floor.

> o form cooperatives where we collectively define our own roles?

This is attempted in organizations that have a flat organization. The problem with that, eventually it forms a hierarchy based on the most agressive and most bullying.

We wanted to found a collective of programmers and admins in the 90s, because we all felt cheated by companies for money and didn't like company politics. From around 50 people it slimmed down over a year to 3 during discussions and legal work - and the 3 of us then founded a startup because it showed others were not really interested in a collective idea but 9-5 jobs that brought in consistent money.

I don't know what to take away from that. My impression was they would like to work for a collective but not found one perhaps.

I was always amazed by

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Sounds like a common case of loving the idea of something but not having the will to carry it out. That's most of humanity in my experience. People, even experienced tech professionals are far more likely to bitch about a problem vs actually taking steps to solve it.

It's like people who will bitch about how lousy customer service is at company X, but if company X raised the prices on their products by $1-2 to hire full time customer support staff, those same people would take their business elsewhere. So really they don't want better customer support, they just want the genie to grant wishes.

3 out of 50 people actually serious about solving a given problem fits pretty well with my life experience. :P

> 3 out of 50 people actually serious about solving a given problem

That seems high.

These things don't happen on accident. Somebody has to take charge, and whoever does is likely to want a disproportionate amount of power and wealth for doing so. And then they just set up a traditional business.

> men felt exactly the same way about their job - but more women had the freedom to take action and leave the job.

Is there a simple explanation of the year award trophy I can nominate you for?

Maybe our field just sucks a bit more than we like to admit. Women find it easier to take the family route and possibly make a career change post child rearing, while poor Dilbert with his Y chromosome is stuck with the pointy haired boss. Maybe the gender gap problem is caused by a more universal set of problems that irritate everyone.

Of course for women take all the problems of tech and add sexual harassment. Not only does the PHB waste your time and make dumb decisions and force you to implement them but then he comes over and rubs your shoulders and talks about how much fun the swinger lifestyle can be.

I was probably first exposed to the concept of sexual harassment as a teenager, just before college. Clinton had just diddle an intern. Clarence Thomas was accused of it while he was up for Supreme Court confirmation. I remember a lot of apologia, "he got his signals crossed" or something like that. And that was my impression going forward.

The "honest mistake" trope is not sexual harassment. Now that I know more about how the world works, that story was clearly a PR push to de-legitimize the complaints of both the particular people accusing these public figures at the time, and anyone who might try in the future.

I very soon had a fast primer on what is real sexual harassment. One coworker at my first job out of college was constantly haranguing another. Overt sexual advances that were always met with "that's just <him>. It's just a joke." It made me uncomfortable just to watch it. I know it made her uncomfortable because she would lock herself in her office and cry at least once a week. I don't know why she confided in me about it. I begged her to file a complaint. She was probably right that it would do more harm than good. I complained to my own boss and got told I was too young to understand. I suppose I was too young to understand, but only because I had not yet reached the point where I rejected any authority figures who told me shit like "you're too young to understand" at 22 years old.

The guy did this in the open, during project status meetings. This wasn't Uber or UploadVR or whatever other Silicon Valley brogrammer startup we're going to tsk-tsk "boys will be boys" and never actually do anything about. This was an established engineering firm, with a very strictly worded employee handbook, and an HR director that literally looked the other way.

So I don't want to hear anything about it not being systemic.

I've personally never found sexual talk of any nature in the office to be comfortable. I've had gay bosses hit on me. I've had straight bosses "jokingly" touch me inappropriately. I've had female bosses make jokes about my love life. Sat by while coworkers traded stories about sexual conquests. Even if the sexual advances are towards someone else, if they make you uncomfortable, it's still sexual harassment.

But we've had this trope that it's some sort of attack on lonely men who take a risk on finding love. And I think that active misdirection has not only (obviously) harmed so many women, it's harmed quite a few men, too. Probably most of us, in some way.

It's not "getting along with a woman at work and ask her out and she rejects you." It's about creating a hostile work environment. Anyone who can't tell the difference has got a serious problem. You do not have to put up with being made to feel uncomfortable like that at work.

I have a history in customer services, spent 7 years dealing with the general public on a returns desk. As a result, in a friendly setting I enter my swearing mode which I developed to cope to balance out having to be perfectly pleasant to extremely rude and unpleasant people 7 hours a day. This makes people uncomfortable sometimes and I have received complaints about it from management which made me feel uncomfortable as quite frankly, that is who I am.

Co-workers routinely ask personal questions, expect small talk about details of their lives out of work. I find this uncomfortable to, but am forced to participate so I don't become seen as 'not a team player'.

To be absolutely clear, I am not condoning the kind of behaviour you have experienced as something I consider to be ok. By the sound of it, it's certainly not.

However, my point is that almost always its a matter of perspective, its not just sexual related topics that make people uncomfortable. For many of the individuals you have spoken about, their personal understanding of the situation could legitimately be that it was ok.

Quite frankly, I just don't know what can be done to solve a problem so complex as individuals understanding matters in different ways.

It really isn't a complex problem. The "misunderstandings" trope is part of the system that allows it to continue. There is a huge difference between being rude to others and being asked to not be rude to others.

> Sat by while coworkers traded stories about sexual conquests. Even if the sexual advances are towards someone else, if they make you uncomfortable, it's still sexual harassment.

Not to belittle your other experiences, but I never understood this. If you hear a conversation about sexual experiences and it makes you uncomfortable, I don't think it's immediately sexual _harassment_. I would probably feel uncomfortable listening to those kinds of talks too but I don't think I'm entitled to claim it's harassment just because I felt uncomfortable.

Sorry, it was late when I wrote this. It was more like, "being belittled and threatened after questioning whether or not Pick-Up Artist style techniques were moral or ethical, or respectful of their existing marriages".

Ok, that's a totally different story. Of course if you get threatened, that's some kind of offense but again if you get threatened after a discussion about sexual experiences doesn't make those threats immediately sexual harassment.

Maybe you should also consider how wise it is to question other peoples "pickup techniques" or ethics of their sexual life without knowing the details of their existing relationships. And even if you know a lot of details, one could say it's none of your business really.

Let me clarify, as it was late when I wrote this.

By "hit on by a gay man", I mean "cornered in his office, he being a man twice my size, being told he could make life either really easy or really hard".

By "joking inappropriate touching" I mean "groping at my genital area, specifically because it made me uncomfortable, and only doing it more often when I asked it to stop".

By "listening to stories of sexual conquest", I mean "belittled and threatened after questioning whether or not Pick-Up Artist style techniques were moral, ethical, or respectful of their existing marriages".

Sorry I wasn't more clear.

If someone asks you to stop anything and you stop, that's a misunderstanding. If someone asks you to stop and you keep doing it, do it more, and threaten the person about it, that's harassment. It's not really a grey area. The perception that it is a grey area is the system routing around damage and mobilizing spin to make you think so, so they can continue to be rude, domineering, narcissistic assholes.

What aligns with this would be the fact that women in developing nations are more likely to choose a career in technology[1]. An overlooked factor in why there are few women in technology might very well be that women feel less pressured to earn a high wage due to remaining housewife/working husband stereotypes.

[1] https://erzaehlmirnix.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/unterschie... (from the ROSE project, excuse the hotlinking)

> Women find it easier to take the family route and possibly make a career change post child rearing, while poor Dilbert with his Y chromosome is stuck with the pointy haired boss.

Ah, yes… the smart man's burden.

> Maybe our field just sucks a bit more than we like to admit.

That would imply that men are lying when they tell us their field is perfect for them and women should just learn to fit in without changing any culture.

Not necessarily. Self reported data is not renowned for its reliability. People often act self destructively or suboptimally. Incidence of burn out in tech is, AFAIK, much higher than any equivalent in other white collar careers. Tribal identification may blind some to endemic structural issues. "Lock in" to decisions causes the mind to value said decision more highly (skub/Robber's Cave study).

There's also a hazing culture in effect. "This is what I had to go through/I paid my dues" sort of thing. Maybe we can just stop paying harassment forward.

Shhh, don't tell everyone that "privilege" is a double-edged sword.

Women find it easier to take the family route and possibly make a career change post child rearing

According to the original article, this is only 1/3rd, so it doesn't go very far as an explanation.

This is similar to something Jordan Peterson has argued [1].

In short: Societies which afford economic rights to women have flourished, but women pay a huge price for it. The question shouldn't be "why aren't more women in positions of power", but really "why are there any men who are insane enough to occupy those positions" when social science has already proven that money beyond a certain number doesn't make you happier and the work conditions are absolutely atrocious.

Women are much more sane than men, and anyone who argues that we should have more women in power is arguing that women, as a class, should be terminally unhappy. Which isn't to say that the same opportunities shouldn't exist, and in many fields they don't, but be careful when conflating opportunity and outcome.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvUtDdlNGwY

Thats funny! By your summary women have poor representation in tech fields because the working conditions are bad, so people should stop trying to get women into the sector because the will get crappy jobs. Let me suggest that a sane person would argue in support of improving working conditions instead of perpetuating suffering, but I guess thats a point of contention in these contexts....

Perception vs. reality

The general perception is that programming is a socially isolating, boring, monotonous job where you stare at a screen all day.

People making career choices don't know about the lax environment.

So tech completely aligns with what he/she wrote.

edit: and your sarcasm is hostile

This will be an unpopular opinion here but it's true in my experience.

It's time to leave your employer and do something that makes you happy

I was recently reading that there are estimated to be 6 billion people in the world who want jobs, and estimated to be 2 billion jobs. So advice to "leave your employer" reflects a very narrow world view - a view from those having privilege, and without empathy for those with different choices.

The op speaks about the choices of people based on thier lived experience of working these jobs, and the grand parent is also arguing inside that context. You present arguments that clearly seek to support of the GP, but talk about the outsiders erroneous perception of these jobs when their harshness is an agreed premise. And its not even my premise you argue againts, I merely inherited it from the the user you try to defend!

By that line of reasoning, wouldn't you expect a better total outcome with saner people in positions of power?

Sure, but you have to challenge the "insane" focused competition to attain that power, and you'll likely lose to their ambition and drive.

But sane people, generally, do not attain positions of power. If they did, our system would usurp them in favor of someone "insane". Its something that is fundamental to how some humans operate.

If I'm President and I don't wake up at 4am to handle a crisis in Syria, I am showcasing a pattern that will probably mean I won't be re-elected. What I've described is horribly unhealthy, if done consistently. Yet, we need people like that if we want to scale and grow as a species. We need crazy Presidents, crazy CEOs, crazy engineers, crazy doctors, crazy lawyers, etc.

The point I wish were more widely accepted is that its alright to not be in these positions. I've heard people say "Its unacceptable that we haven't had a female President because I want my daughter to grow up in a world where she could be President." Two things: First, yeah! If that's what your daughter wants, then she should have that option, and having precedence and a role model helps. But, more importantly: You as a parent don't understand what it takes to be President. You should want your daughter to be happy, not powerful.

Jordan Peterson also argued that "Now only rich women get married." [1] Someone who has no idea what a dowry is has no business trying to teach anthropology. Peterson gets attention for being an obnoxious know-it-all but he just repeats well known ideas in psychology and ethology; when it comes to anthropology Peterson does not have a clue.

[1] This quote is in one of Peterson's many digressive rants somewhere in the first seven lectures of the 2017 Maps of Meaning course: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQAT-0aSPq-O... I gave up on it after realizing he was just basically making shit up as he went along when it came to his ideas about anthropology.

"Jordan Peterson also argued that "Now only rich women get married."

I couldn't decide from your comment, if you think the fact is wrong, or you disagree on ideological grounds, or he is a nutcase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowry is an extremely common practice across the world going back a very long time. The fact that Peterson asserts that "only rich women get married" was not the case in the past shows an atrocious lack of knowledge about anthropology.

When Peterson makes authoritative claims, it's important to recognize that he's only talking about Western countries. That's where his expertise is focused. Dowry is almost non-existent today in Western culture. Divorce rate is extremely high among lower status people. Single motherhood is alarmingly common.

Take a gander at his Biblical series. It's 100% about Western civilization.

> Dowry is almost non-existent today in Western culture.

Do you not understand that being able to provide a dowry in the past is being "rich" today? Peterson's whole approach to evolutionary psych can be summarized as "this is what people have done in the past, therefore it is a big problem that people are now doing something different." The problem is that Peterson does not seem to actually know what people have done in the past, and how similar it is to what happens today. The result is a lot of ignorant ranting about problems that do not exist.

> Divorce rate is extremely high among lower status people. Single motherhood is alarmingly common.

This was actually the start of Peterson's rant that I mentioned. When in the history of "Western civilization" was this not the case? Lower class women were always treated as slaves, serfs and/or prostitutes and constituted the majority of the population in Europe. Out-of-wedlock births and maternal material deprivation is the historic norm. Forget even having a single mother, many more children than today were raised in orphanages because their single mothers were too poor to provide for them. The only discernible reason Peterson finds this novel or "alarming" is because of his misogynist views on women now having the choice of marriage and divorce.

>Dowry is almost non-existent today in Western culture.

I would say it still exists. It just changed its name to alimony. In India, women don't pay dowry. It's the parents, usually the dad. The alimony system just changed it so that now the ex (usually husband) has to pay. I would call alimony/maintenance as divorce dowry.

>That's where his expertise is focused.

Out of interest, what expertise? He seems to be a psychologist who has multiple times talked about Marxism and postmodernism with the utmost ignorance of current research and philosophy. He also makes "authoritative claims" completely outside his "focus of expertise"[0] and is very wrong about them. Why should he be trusted outside his actual field of expertise?

[0] https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/40520012623631155...

I hadn't seen that Twitter post. Then again, I don't read Twitter. Pretty embarrassing misread of Gödel, though. I don't know why he would say that. It can't be easy being in the spotlight with such intense scrutiny over every word you say.

As for why he should be trusted? He has achieved heroic status for putting his job on the line to stand up against political correctness overreach. He has riveted tons of young men with his demonstration of the archetypal parallels between various pieces of Western mythology, Christianity, mainstream fiction, and psychology.

Sometimes he has me nodding my head, other times I'm shaking it in disbelief. I know very little about Jung or Nietzsche. Sometimes I worry I may be suffering from the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. [0]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

I would hardly call it "heroic" to be standing up against political correctness overreach. Everyone is against this, in fact aside from gaming it's the biggest subset of Youtube, even roping in figures as unrelated such as Pewdiepie. Some of the world's largest internet forums are dedicated to being against it. It's just not that impressive any more, and to me he comes across as just another "hey does anyone else think SJWs are bad?" type of person. He acheived fame only by a single incident in which he was recorded dissing some university students, and the typical "I identify as an attack helicopter" jokers are presumably the "young men" you're talking about.

I've seen his polemic rants on Youtube and they appear to be so mean-spirited and ignorant. He can't talk seriously about Marxism without bringing up Solzhenitsyn and confusing Communism with specifically Marxism-Leninism.

It would be better I think if he sticked to something I have heard he is good at doing - helping people out, rather than diverting into a strange strawman of someone extremely ignorant about political philosophy, though I suspect he must continue to do that in order to keep the little bit of fame he has managed to cling to since he was recorded "schooling" some (also ignorant) university students.

People aren't interested in his psychology, because the same people interested in him who weren't before are the people who'd be listening to Ben Shapiro and the philosophically ignorant, scientism-adhering side of Christoper Hitchens (poor Peter is too "normie" for them). He's not the first to so desparately cling to and place empiricism on a pedestal.

People are totally interested in his psychology. They watch his lectures. He is earning an extremely respectable amount on Patreon (>$57000 / month). He is planning to build an online university to give a classical humanities education, whatever that means. His advice to "clean your room" has become a meme among his fans.

Maybe you should perform even a rudimentary google search before dismissing others:

Marriage is for rich people

https://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/economix/2012/02/06/marriag...

"A new report, by Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project, looked at the decline in marriage rates over the last 50 years and found a strong connection to income. Dwindling marriage rates are concentrated among the poor — the very people whose living standards would be most improved by having a second household income."

"Whatever the case, the concentration of marriage among the richest Americans is amplifying the increase in income inequality."

Yes, Peterson must have read that exact article because the wording he used was almost verbatim. The problem is that he is convinced that this is somehow a new phenomenon in the context of European society going back to Roman times, which is what his lecture was about. The study is about the United States going back to 1970. It is extremely ignorant of Peterson to make that generalization.

I found this longer video of his on the same subject to be better at explaining the nuances of his viewpoint: https://youtu.be/NV2yvI4Id9Q

Men are disposable and get no sympathy from anyone in the society.

No one attaches any "inherent" value to a man. It's all about their power and status.

Women also contribute to this by rewarding the high status men.

From a feminist point of view, this is how patriarchy negatively affects men, too.

>when social science has already proven that money beyond a certain number doesn't make you happier

I've read that's a media misinterpretation of the results. From what I understand a certain salary satisfies your basic needs, as in Maslow's Triangle, but further income improves happiness. Of course, if you work in a shithole, you're going to be miserable no matter how much you make.

That might be. I'm not up to date on the research. That being said, very few people just "get money" without working an incredibly demanding job.

There have been plenty of stories into lottery winners, who after winning become completely miserable, many of which end up killing themselves. Of course, you don't hear about the success stories, and there's also a certain type of person who plays the lottery which might attract insanity when they win. [1]

The "rest and vest" story from a day or so ago was also interesting. It might be that these people were happy just sitting around collecting a paycheck and vesting. But the story talked about how many of these people say they want to leave and start their own thing, but can't/don't because the position they are in is too good. Is that happiness? Or is it complacency and "good enough"?

Another angle is "trust fund babies"; people who receive large inheritances and don't generally have to work. I'm not sure if I'm aware of any studies into their happiness.

I'd love to see more research and stories on this. The traditional saying is "money can't buy happiness"; maybe that's absolutely true, or maybe it should be tweaked to say "the average work it takes to have a lot of money will leave you unhappy."

[1] http://time.com/4176128/powerball-jackpot-lottery-winners/

In book 1 of the republic, socrates discusses (with cephalus) inherited vs earned wealth, and concludes that those who earn it tend to become obsessed with it.

I believe there's some truth to that, but I also believe that there's a fear/weakness in those with inherited wealth that if they became destitute, they do not have the ability to rebuild the wealth.

Yes, I think a lot of that is attributed to not having a sense of purpose. Philanthropy is a good cure in that situation.

I believe the media's interpretation is that over $70,000 people cease to become happier, which is obviously false. Of course managers are trying to use that as a reason to stop paying people more.

Anyway, if you make more than $70K now, and you suddenly were reverted to making $70K, you wouldn't retain the same level of happiness (obviously), unless you were already wealthy. It makes for an juicy headline though.

>But more women had the freedom to take action and leave the job.

Sounds about right in my estimation. It fits the pattern of social/economic leftovers from when women weren't expected to be a significant economic contribution to the household.

Women are less likely to be the source of the large majority (e.g. 60% or more) of household income for households > 1. Those that are the primary source of income aren't expected by society to do that job.

At the statistical level this results in more women quitting because the negative economic and social implications of doing so are less severe (at the statistical level) than for men.

Edit: tl;dr women are statistically more likely to be in a position to be more picky about working conditions.

> when women weren't expected to be a significant economic contribution to the household.

This is wrong. One, domestic labor is still economic activity. Economy used to refer solely to the activities of maintaining a household. Ironic how it has been transformed so that unpaid labor is not considered economic.

Two, proletariat women have always been expected to and have contributed a wage to the household. This is on top of being expected to perform all unpaid domestic labor. The idea of a woman who only works at home was a middle class and upper class phenomenon.

A strong impact on how women's work was divided was the advance in technology that vastly reduced the amount of domestic labor required to maintain a household.

I think you have to elide a lot of points about problems specific to women to make this the narrative you write. You have to also just take it as a given that women are to do the lion's share of child rearing (since this is, after all, the main reason why long hours are viewed as a women's issue rather than an issue for all workers).

In that other study they also made the point that men felt exactly the same way about their job

This rather completely flushes over the issue that the extent of those conditions may not be the same between men and women.

I mean, a key finding is "...the engineering workplace culture (as) being non-supportive of women." and there's the whole equal pay for equal work issue.

I don't plan on leaving but there are a few fears that make me think about it. These are: Not being taken as seriously as my male colleagues (by men and women). Worrying about being hired for the wrong reasons. Getting boring grunt work that deadens my brain. Not being asked by the team to join them at beer events. And I like beer.

A lot of these things I mention actually happened to me at a few software corporations where I worked early in my career.

My solution was to code my own products on the side. The products became very popular, made much more than I did at the corporations I worked for, so I started my own business.

In those early days before I left, I was starting to drink the coolaid that I deserved grunt work because I sucked, but that turned out not to be the case in the end.

Fun anecdote: My girlfriend's mom has a double PhD in both computer science and accounting. Her dad is also an electric engineer. She is also really good in math.

She passed advanced math classes in a few months of studying. Did her algebra and got into a top school for engineering. After months of me persuading switches to SWE.

Few semester after despite having top grades she drops out of CS and now does design

I've asked her many times what happened and the only reply I got was: it's not for me. Given her incredible talent I find this hard to believe.

I still catch her checking out CS course material and even her mom argues with her over this. She can get her a top position in SWE team at top company as she is a senior analyst there.

Yet she still insists she likes graphic design more.

Either we are pushing women too much to get into CS or there is something inherently wrong in this field that disallows them to get in, it might be the culture, it might be the hours, who knows.

For her, I know for a fact the issue wasn’t that she found it too difficult, she had top grades during her last semester in CS

Anyways, just my own personal experience with this issue

I am really baffled.

I tried changing industry and feel as a man it's very difficult to change once you've been pigeonholed. maybe for women there's this thought, "oh of course she's had enough of it" and they are taken seriously in their switch.

Not that it's of any benefit to either gender.

I'm mildly interested that the document has this quote:

> It is nice they brought me in for equal opportunity survey points but don’t waste my time if you don’t take females seriously.

which uses "females" instead of "women". Recall, that was the offense the March for Science twitter account got lambasted for[0], for which they later apologized[1]. I remember being surprised at the time and wondering if it was just a few inane twitter followers, but I found a lot of articles, e.g. this one[2] by Jezebel about how it's rude and offensive.

Still don't know what to think. I never really thought anything about using "females" that way, but nonetheless filed it away as a usage to avoid, so it caught my eye to see it here.

[0] https://twitter.com/sciencemarchdc/status/834840542848679936... [1] https://twitter.com/ScienceMarchDC/status/835145373098323969 [2] http://jezebel.com/the-problem-with-calling-women-females-16...

It's common in clinical and academic language. There's a certain kind of creep who uses them to describe social relationships, usually in a reactionary way. The clinical connotation coupled with the regressive opinions has turned it into a red flag of sorts for when someone's about to say something gross about humans.

Depending on the context, one norm is more relevant than the other.

If Jezebel finds it offensive that's a good indicator that it's perfectly normal.

Are there any studies for why men leave engineering? For a point of comparison.

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