The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
EDIT: unintentional tl;dr as it seems :)
> “Countries with the highest gender equality tend to be welfare states,”
> they write, “with a high level of social security.” Meanwhile, less
> gender-equal countries tend to also have less social support for people
> who, for example, find themselves unemployed. Thus, the authors
> suggest, girls in those countries might be more inclined to choose stem
> professions, since they offer a more certain financial future than,
> say, painting or writing.
I come from Morocco (quite similar to Algeria/Tunisia, which seem to have the highest % of women in STEM), and people are first looking for a job that will guarantee financial freedom. STEM jobs seem to be the most likely to guarantee this, and as such there's more women interested in these fields.
Looking at the graph however, this doesn't seem to explain the full variance (many developing countries have lower levels of representation).
And not gonna lie, even I, a guy, picked STEM partly because I see it as the best escape route from this country, I would have picked something more fun and less demanding otherwise
In other words, this is not about what the article claims (girls are just not interested, presumably for biological reasons) but about expectations hammered into all of us by society.
Also, over the last two decades there has been a significant increase in cultural recognition and representation of male "nerds," as people who belonged to that category have gained positions of influence, thanks to the tech boom in the 90s, which can sometimes inspire students to pursue their interests despite the bullying. The lack of such representative role models for young females is disconcerting and could even cause some people to be slightly more affected by the bullying, because perhaps they don't know a female who works in STEM or know of anyone in recent years who made it big, and simply didn't know it was possible to go against the social tide (which happens all too frequently.)
All in all, I think there are a lot of factors at play here and reducing it to one cause seems like wilful ignorance at best.
The impact of all of these weird pro-STEM programs is a really complicated discussion, but let me suggest that it doesn't really make high school any easier for the vast majority. (The social structure of kids doesn't really look to DuPont for ideas about which way is up...) Your response almost reminds me of how some people are feeling left out of minority help programs ("what did I do to deserve a landscape devoid of scholarships," that kind of thing.) without realizing exactly how little help those programs really provide. In a sense, overestimating the effectiveness of a response to privilege so harshly that you think the privilege has been reversed.
I didn't mention my geographic location (Toronto) or the root causes of the cultural shift (I can't speak to that), so these are some strange assumptions to make. I'm also not really following the rest of your argument, tbh.
In any case, I stand by my argument that this:
>are you implying that male students who go for stem don't face bullying akin to being "geeky" or "nerds"? Please...
is a fairly tall order in 2018. Positioning yourself as someone who seeks a career in STEM, regardless of your gender, is not marking yourself out for bullying, and hasn't been for a long time.
Sure, but we can also present similar anecdotal evidence of visible forms of bullying from fellow male students for having geeky interests. So, where does that leave us, really? Similar to your criticism about jumping to causative conclusions, you've determined that this passive-aggressive bullying is the case of gender roles rather than the more obvious case of bullying nerds.
That's "natural inclinations" for you.
I also think that blanket questions such as "Would you like to have a job where you sit all day at the computer?" would be rather unhelpful because it really depends on the nature of the job. Both theoretical physicists and people working in building security have to sit at the computer all day, but that in no way implies that the nature of the job is similar.
The simple fact is that if your claim is that discrimination is the primary cause for the lack of representation of women in STEM fields, then these data show that you are wrong. Not because we can eliminate subtle pressures with 100% certainty, we don't need to do that.
The hypothesis is wrong because it makes the wrong prediction: if discrimination were the major cause, then more discrimination would lead to more unequal distribution. And the data show that it's the other way around: less discrimination leads to more unequal distribution.
It's not a matter of degrees, it's a matter of sign, of the direction of the change. And that's effectively boolean, the sign is either positive or negative. The "discrimination" hypothesis predicts the sign is positive, in reality the sign is negative. Can't really get any more clear-cut than that.
The question is: how do we measure the problem of discrimination? Many people assume that we can measure discrimination by looking at the percentage of women in engineering and comparing it to the percentage of women in the general population. Many people believe that any difference between these numbers proves discrimination. But an increasing amount of evidence suggests that this a bad assumption.
Compared to Algeria, Albania, Turkey, Tunisia, UAE, Romania, etc? Please get your head of western social "justice" bubble. The factors that you think the article doesn't take into consideration are not explicitly there because they are implicit to everybody who really knows these countries.
Slightly baffling to see this celebrated by men in these careers as some kind of vindication.
The data appears to be saying you (we) suck, but that's a win if you think the data was going to show that one gender sucked (and you ignore that you secretly thought it was them).
Edit: and I obviously do not imply with my tongue in cheek joke that women are the ones cleaning toilets. Just going the extra mile here to avoid offending anybody.
What I find onerous is that it's perfectly acceptable to make blanket statements about women being better at things than men, while it's now literally a sackable offense at many major tech companies to even imply the opposite. This doesn't seem like "progress towards equality" to me.
When an individual is going through a difficult time, it's normal and considerate to be sensitive to that.
Society is currently going through a difficult period of transformation regarding its perspective on women. During this time, sensitivity is much appreciated. It might be frustrating in some cases, but viewing society as a person makes this more understandable, at least for me.
One easy way to have done this is by starting with your explanation before saying the thing that could be perceived poorly in the current context.
In the future, when this current period has mostly ended, it may be easier to speak more frankly on formerly sensitive topics.
An amusing and insightful observation.
I would say it's baffling until you realize that the alternative is that the whole the gap in female STEM employment continues to be attributed solely to male sexism. It's better to be perceived as stupid than evil.
Also, are we all now in agreement that there are likely cognitive differences between men and women, and that it is beneficial to explore those differences scientifically? Honest question.
edit: missing word
> are we all now in agreement that there are likely
> cognitive differences between men and women
If this is claiming they're actually better skilled than the men, then it opens up more space for the comparative sexism option I would have thought?
Just the fact that it contradicts the common wisdom that "women aren't capable of STEM" seems to lend some support to sexism clouding people's objective evaluations.
It seemed like it was "women don't enjoy it" was largely the point. That even if women are just as good at math and science as men, that they are even better at other things, and that in societies with greater equality of opportunity women prefer to work at those other things.
> If this is claiming they're actually better skilled than the men, then it opens up more space for the comparative sexism option I would have thought?
Again, it the article emphasizes that women are better at other things, not necessarily science or mathematics (in some countries they are, but not all).
> Just the fact that it contradicts the common wisdom that "women aren't capable of STEM" seems to lend some support to sexism clouding people's objective evaluations.
Perhaps people are misreading a lack of interest as a lack of ability. In any case, it weakens the notion of sexism as a causal factor in the employment gap.
Vindictive? No really. The research seems to suggest woman prefers STEM more, when there is no other viable economic opportunity, which makes such choice a conscious calculation, and do render the past accusation that there is an systematic oppression in the society to keep women away from taking the initiative, groundless.
This at least speaks some volume, the current diversity program is incapable to achieve its own goal, thus further enforcing such agenda might not be fruitful.
What exactly is the goal of this "diversity program"? Maybe they are completely capable of achieving their goal, it's just not the one you think it is.
(This is the curse of technical people: when you spend so much time thinking and solving problems rationally, it's easy to assume all situations can be approached in this way.)
50/50 is the "goal", but what's the motivation? Let's assume that we're talking increase in people, i.e. you want more women in STEM/tech/whatever, not simply less men (for some reason this option is rarely mentioned. You could fire enough men to get to 50/50, mathematically that's equally valid). Say I wanted more qualified employees without paying more - I can't think of a better to achieve this.
Of course, I have no evidence for this and it's super paranoid, but it's just one example how the goal might still make sense.
So why don't men avoid it? It's hardly a high-status role for them, either. I hope my kids don't go into tech, regardless of gender.
The most cynical part of me thinks that this "equality" agenda isn't put forward to further humanity, but simply to get more people into the job market and drive wages down. Then I realise I should probably lay off the drugs, or become a lobbyist (or worse).
(I also just replied to someone else to point out that "putting more people into STEM" could be considered good for the human race. I personally think that more people should be allowed into Medicine for example, because there's some monopolies there that are driving costs up. Probably feels like an attack if you're a highly paid doctor though).
How is it baffling when the dominant narrative is "men in STEM are such horrid creepy sexist misogynists that they are driving the women out"?
Now that was always risible, but still it is the dominant narrative.
I'm fine with it if that's what you're telling yourself to cope with why you in particular were unable to enter the field, though.
Let’s not pretend that cranking out CRUD apps is in any way intellectual, outside of Silly Valley the pay is nothing special and “geek” is synonymous with “total loser”.
I'm not sure that was the conclusion of the research:
"But when it comes to their relative strengths, in almost all the countries—all except Romania and Lebanon—boys’ best subject was science, and girls’ was reading. (That is, even if an average girl was as good as an average boy at science, she was still likely to be even better at reading.) Across all countries, 24 percent of girls had science as their best subject, 25 percent of girls’ strength was math, and 51 percent excelled in reading. For boys, the percentages were 38 for science, 42 for math, and 20 for reading."
That being said, you could also read this as boys are so much worse than girls at verbal skills that by default, their best subject was science or math.
Statistics say boys are more heavily inclined to have a STEM career. Does this mean they feel they cannot consider a career in other fields like teaching, nursing or other female-dominated fields?
As a woman I often wonder, what's so great about STEM aside from the paycheck? It depends on your bosses (or being your own if you are lucky and that way inclined), but I don't think we've shown many girls that STEM is really rewarding and it looks on TV like it involves a lot of staring at computer screens. Boring! So I expect that will change when we get to use more interactive interfaces. Also, I hope society does more work to let boys grow up feeling STEM isn't their only hope.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology
I'm saying it is irresponsible to advice boys to make live choices that are at odds with female mating behaviour, because it adversely affects their life outcomes.
Your comments read as weirdly patriarchal, and dont reflect at all close to my experience with women.
Here is just one study I quickly dug up, there are others confirming this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726811...
Another one: https://etd.ohiolink.edu/pg_10?0::NO:10:P10_ETD_SUBID:113754
I don't understand whats patriarchal about my comment, care to elaborate? If you have a more solid data point than "thats not my personal experience", I'd be certainly interested in it.
>>> I don't understand whats patriarchal about my comment, care to elaborate
I mean seriously, the answer is in your own comment.
Edit: I don't understand the downvotes.
His own comment implies income is an important factor to attractiveness for men then asks why is that a patriarchal thing. I'm not being patronising but it's obvious that it's expected for the man to be the bread winner which is patriarchal in nature. The man doesn't have to be the bread winner.
Why isn't a high income woman attractive?
Let's be clear who expects this: women do.
Most women will stop dating a man if they discover he makes less than they do. When I was still in the Bay Area I was on match.com for a bit. >90% of the women's profiles stated they expected their match to make more than they do (even having this information in the form felt a bit weird for me).
And no, this is not because of the "pay gap", which is a myth, or because they can't. In fact, the unwillingness actually increases with income levels, so the women who could most afford it are least willing to date a guy who makes less than they do.
Or capable. I imagine the IQ bar is set quite a bit higher for STEM-like courses and careers... Also, there's much less room for bullshit (at least in programming - your code either works, or it doesn't work, and that's really easy to verify at university and when applying to jobs - as opposed to e.g. marketing, where it's much harder to quantify someone's skill).
Gender equality in STEM is more about just getting them in.
It's about social mobility for women. Which is why nobody cares about getting women as miners, plumbers and getting men as social workers.
Actually, I remember hearing quite a bit of complaining back when I was in middle and high school. However, it occurred alongside a concerted effort by the Province of Ontario to increase the supply of tradespeople at a time when there was a shortage of 'qualified' (read: certified by provincial licensing bodies) ones in Ontario, which led to exorbitant prices on associated goods and services. So, to be cynical, this could be much more about price correction than anything else.
It really does involve a lot of “staring at a screen” (or paper/whiteboard brainstorming) though, and just talking about it excites me, still — it’s the intellectual/mathematical beauty and creative potential of what is being sketched on those “authoring mediums” that is so very stimulating.
When I first started coding, I was 8 years old, and I didn’t even know the first thing about whether this field would pay well, whether it would be socially engaging, etc. In fact to some extent I was actively doscourage from it, rather than joining the family gardening business (manual labor care of plants — just not for me).
None of the circumstantial reasons for or against programming mattered to me. It was the coding, the very process of staring at a screen with complex patterns and ideas as they’re authored, that excited me. It still does; creating beautiful code that does intricately complex things, that all work correctly every single time to produce the designed results, feels almost like being a modern day wizard creating magic.
Because the work itself is intrinsically motivating, it never gets old, and no amount of social pressures could sway me away from doing this.
These are both STEM fields (Science, technology, engineering, mathematics). Doctor is a crossover in my view, anyway. Sounds like she would like more autonomy with her career choices, rather than not be in a STEM field.
When you get all the time exclusively negative news about men, you could start thinking that this is a coordinated (or emergent?) campaign.
I'll take concrete, quantifiable rewards over nice words in an opinion piece any day.
I am sure women are better than men at a lot of things, and equally good at other things. What are men better at? We know men are better at some things than women, but currently nobody is willing/interested/daring to report on this.
Does it matter who is better? It seems yes, since lots of news are talking about how much better women are.
Come on, I am extremely positive about equality; if you are starting to antagonize people like me, something is going really wrong.
You don't have to read about it. Most people already think men are better at everything. Most CEOs, established scientists, famous chefs, and philosophers are almost all men.
The trendline cited in the article isn't even conclusive, either—eliminating outliers would reduce it almost to noise. Even if it were, there hasn't, to date, been any reasonable explanation for why women's "innate" biology would make them any less interested in professions whose parameters and limitations are purely human-constructed and invented in the past century. Whatever happened during the evolution of the sexes was certainly not informed by the interestingness of C++.
Your hypothesis is in fact the radical one: that programming is somehow such an unseen before ability, that evolution until now has not evolved any machinery to repurpose for its realization. Given everything we know about the very obvious cognitive limits we do have, and where they come from, that seems implausible.
The common reasoning by the way does dismiss reports from men and women alike that all this diversity mongering has poisoned the workplace atmosphere and mostly serves to enrich and flatter the egos of people who wouldn't show up unless they got special treatment for their own demographic, with special segregated events, hiring pipelines and accolades. The old "women in X" spiel. These things are most definitely constructed, and not for the reason they advertise. The standards of evidence demanded to abolish them are sky high compared to the spurious reasoning that spawned them.
A follow up question then to people pursuing STEM fields....are you in it because you're interested in the subject or because of the promise of money/status? An age old question I've heard since I was a young boy.
As a side note I see a lot of women engineers start out as saying they want to do Biomed and the switching to something else. Not totally sure why but I find it interesting.
Also, you cannot call all of Sweden, Norway and Finland "outliers"? To me, that looks more like you deliberately destroying data, until the remaining data set fits your world view. Hmm I live in Scandinavia and I feel mildly annoyed that you apparently want to ignore this part of the world :- P
Women breast feed babies. To me it's natural and obvious that evolution has therefore made them feel happy when they take care of others, and that a bit more women like working as doctors, nurses, psychiatrists and such things.
(With that said, I think it's a good idea to encourage more women to choose STEM jobs. The article seems to agree with this and that they're good at it.)
The second reason is that highly skilled Iranian women stem graduates qualify for immigration points in receiving economies like Australia.
I've worked with some, and know some. They're good. The system works for them as individuals if not in the wider sense of what we'd want in an equal society.
(Actually, people aren't confused about this, but it makes for great clickbait articles and ad revenue because it fans the flames of both sides of the argument.)
There's a couple places within the article that's more superficial though.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/
And of course, far more studies that have been going on for decades.
The vast majority of women will not continue dating a man who earns less than they do. Two thirds of young women in Germany expect their future partners to take care of them financially.
So for men, earning money and status is absolutely essential.
See also: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/02/a-lette...
(2) What makes you think it wouldn't? After all, it affects everyone in society. And motivation is a pretty powerful force, it is basically how our entire economy is structured.
See also:
https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/money-gender-a...
"...it typically takes a lot less money to get women to say they are satisfied with their work than it does to get men to say it."
"Women were more likely to tell PayScale that say they find their jobs “very meaningful” than men were, with 35 percent of women and 27 percent of men describing their jobs this way."
So women have more freedom to find meaningful jobs. Men less so.
For free market choice on which jobs pay more -- I think this one is pretty clear. Do you think differently?
As for biological preference, I don't think it takes into account the average pay at all. Career path is usually chosen at a younger and more idealistic age, and probably more importantly - poorer countries have women overriding their preferences and going into higher paid lines of work, while richer countries let women do what they want. As per this very study. In the case where money doesn't matter because your family is rich, biological preferences become more important and people stop choosing based on average pay. So the biological differences seem to explain it really well.
So if you assert that discrimination is the cause for the imbalance, the evidence shows that your assertion is wrong, because it makes the wrong prediction.
This is not just a matter of degrees it is a matter of sign (the arrow is pointing in the wrong direction).
Maybe because "positive discrimination" is pursued using equality of outcomes as a key indicator?
I personally look at the outcome (you can reach a billion people just by having a cool idea and sitting down and doing it) then look at the hurdles to that outcome.
One of the hurdles is that engineers love wasting literally hundreds of each others' hours. If I were building something as a newbie, people have no trouble sending me off on a wild goose chase to spend a hundred hours with my head in documentation. When an alternative ecosystem lets me literally type a single line and it's done. (In this case the first ecosystem hates my time and the second one respects it.)
This isn't really related to gender, but it's another hurdle. So when you look at the incentive (reaching people, fame, fortune, money), if there is a highly unequal distribution you have to look at some of the hurdles.
By the way no one knows your gender online when you're learning stuff, you can use a non-gendered username and get treated exactly the same asking stuff online and so forth.
In this case the hurdle is artificial: being cooped up with a computer while the tools you're trying to use waste thousands of your hours. But it's still a hurdle that impacts genders in a different way, and that matters.
Robert Sapolsky - we need you now more than ever, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky
Most people seem very capable of thinking statistically, but they don't communicate in distributions.
For two people communicating in good faith, the two statements (1) "Boys are taller than girls" and (2) "Anne is taller than Sean" don't prompt talk about how both can't be true at the same time, sexist. People communicate statistical differences as "absolutes", but when communicating in good faith, everybody knows what everybody means.
Look at stereotype research. Most stereotypes are statistically true. People communicate them "as if" absolute, but nobody's head explodes when individual examples don't "conform" to the stereotype. That's because people can think in distributions.
That's not surprising, it's how to survive in a stochastic environment.
This gap between thought and speech only becomes problematic ("makes it really hard to have any discussion") because we can rhetorically exploit the fact that most people can't explicitly communicate about distributions. Just tell them they're bigoted, and they don't know how to refute you. Yay, you win.
When you average all women and all men, you get a "gap". However, like the imbalance in fields, this is almost entirely due to different choices. When you control for factors such as field, hours worked, years worked the gap effectively disappears.
Choices made by women are influenced by the glass ceiling, society expectations that women will take care of children and the elderly, and the traditional fields where they're expected to work. The decision to measure the gender gap by comparing equal working hours and equal job positions is not innocent, is itself a politically motivated and comforting way to make rational people think "I told you, there's nothing to see here". You need to evaluate what causes women to have those less hours in less paying jobs, to see whether there's discrimination or not.
Yet the salary wages discrimination reappears when you factor in hours dedicated to domestic work (the "second shift"), differences in salary between fields with equal risks (exposition to chemicals, hardship) where workers are majority women vs those with more men, or companies' (irrational) tendency to default in promoting male workers over females in similar situations.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/women-...
It is seen in human beings and animals that statistically females mate sidewards or upwards in terms of providability. This in turn applies a pressure on males to compete for more and accumulate more resources, whereas females are not measured by males on their providability hence have no pressure on them to fight for the same resources. So, men will always compete more to get a greater share of the pie, this combined with capitalism explains whatever income gap remains after attaining equality of opportunity. Shouldn't the underlying metrics of mating preferences also be taken into account before putting it all under male sexism and patriarch umbrella ?
You can't ignore that we come from a culture with a tradition of 60+ centuries of male-favouring sexism and patriarchy, which has not vanished merely because of a theoretical solution to it (legal equality) has been formally declared. There's a lot of social inertia introducing biases in the opportunities available to women.
You can take into account mating preferences all you want, but how do those affect choices of job positions other than very indirectly? On the other hand, irrational prejudices in recruitment and career advancement processes have a direct impact on the quality of job positions that women have access to, and therefore in their opportunities. Unless you're downright denying that such prejudices exist, this cultural factor would have a larger influence than biology.
The incentive models, which take data from both biology and culture, claims a prediction that as you measure equality of opportunity and compare nations it will correlate to inverse gender segregation in the work force. The more equality of opportunity the higher gender segregation will be, caused by incentives that is derived from gender roles, sexual strategies, and sexual dimorphism.
The prejudices model make the opposite prediction. It claims that when measuring the equality of opportunity the higher it is the lower the gender segregation should be.
In order to resolve the question one measure equality of opportunity and gender segregation, creating data. This create a scientific valid argument in favor of one model over the other.
That is one aspect of the theory. An other aspect would be to measure difference in prejudices between different professions. If the model is correct then it should be able to predict based on such measure which professions are gender segregated and which are not, and inversely predict the level of prejudices exist per profession given any country. The incentive model claim that incentives are a large influence and such you could not make a predictive model based on measuring prejudices.
The incentive model also predict that nation where the incentives are different (based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs), you should see a correlated change in gender segregation. Incentives such as reproduction is listed last among the physiological need, so nations where water and food is scare for women should result in higher incentive to seek professions where those are easier achievable. The prejudices model would argue that there is no such correlation.
This is of course just a small sample in order to scientifically evaluate the two different theories. There is also matching philosophy theories (their names escape me right now), arguing in different direction to explain the data.
I would say that you're right, and this means that specific outcome equality is not indicative of equality of opportunity.
But, it's also true that equality before the law and other measures that have been tKe over the last 3 generations do not guarantee equality of opportunity. Opportunity is in itself a sticky concept.
If you grow up in a family/community where a lot of people are tradesmen then you'll be more likely to be a tradesman. Same for long term welfare dependance, academia, public services, fireman/police, housewives, medicine...
The dynamics are complex and not fully understood. People form an idea about what's normal, possible and such. This is a socially based phenomenon.
I would argue that it is important to the concept of opportunity. The boxes that you put yourself into by default, and others put you in.
There aren't necessarily physical barriers. Lots of people don't end up on the default paths, maybe even most. But, defaults matter.
Anyway, let's think about it in reverse. Let's say we are abolishing sexism, racism, caste systems or some other form of big societal discrimination. A generation later, no change in outcomes. Did we succeed?
OTOH, it's hard to know what to do with specifics like women in tech. It's not inherently bad for women to have different average preferences and that will cause unequal outcomes. But, we also can't ignore outcomes (imo) entirely either. There must be actual outcome changes.
There's also the issue of feedback loops. If certain spheres are male realms, with women in a tiny minority this makes it harder for women to enter in the future.
> The findings will likely seem controversial, since the idea that men and women have different inherent abilities is often used as a reason...to argue we should forget trying to recruit more women into the stem fields. But...that’s not quite what’s happening here. > In wealthy nations, [women] believe that they have the freedom to pursue [other] alternatives and not worry so much that they pay less.
The research does not seem to find that it is gender aptitude or interest differences that accounts for the disparity in STEM graduates.
> ...the percentage of girls who did excel in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with stem degrees. That means there’s something in even the most liberal societies that’s nudging women away from math and science, even when those are their best subjects.
Where's sexism in medicine, sociology, biology?
I didn't glean it from the article but if you have can you tell if they suggested a reason for this? What is this "something" that’s nudging women away from math and science?
> And the more gender-equal the country, as measured by the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, the larger this gap between boys and girls in having science as their best subject.
The research seems pretty clear.
> ...the percentage of girls who did excel in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with stem degrees.
This quote is not related to whether there are interest differences or not. They may be equally good in science/math and something else and decide they want to do the other thing without that automatically implying "society is causing this preference" (and by the way, medicine is not "STEM" for some reason, but no one is becoming a doctor without strong aptitude for math/science).
If the research results I quoted above are to be believed, regarding aptitude, someone may excel in A (say girls in these countries get "very good" scores in math at the same rate as boys) and be much better in B (they excel in reading/other skills at a higher rate than boys) and it would be natural for this person to pursue B in that case, no?
Could you clarify what does this mean (what is special about Hungary, Russia, Sweden)?
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/globally-women-tend-...
based on:
Another Hungarian woman, Marianna Csörnyei, proved the equivalence of the zero measure notions of infinite dimensional Banach spaces.
(Upon skim, this does not seem to be a duplicate per se.)
Here's a link to the actual paper: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617741719
I'm not sure I understand the choice of countries in the regression either. Where are India and China, for example?
Still, why are we surprised? We know instinctively, that there will never web 50/50 in some fields, because man/women just don't like it as much. It's sad that some people have to pretend to agree with the feminist narrative
"Oppressive" only because they don't like to face reality, no matter whether it is told gently, supportively or bluntly. All they can do is self-deny, and then project their pain and self-blame onto others, because it is too much to accept, push through and go beyond, because that is the beginning of self-healing.
Even those who don't have equal capability compared to others can contribute in small ways, and so, they can indeed achieve merit based on merely doing what they can do, even if it is small.
But, it is many small things that add up to massive changes, and that is what a meritocracy is ~ just chip in where you can contribute, and you can make a difference, no matter who you are.
However, there are issues where a meritocracy cannot be of use, and that is in a system designed deliberately to exclude merit, and instead empower those who prefer there be imbalance, injustice, and unfairness. SJW ideologies which seek to belittle and mute those they consider the "enemy" are like this.
If we want equality, let's treat everyone equally. No special programs for any gender.
We're constantly told that men and women are the same, and that you can even switch between them any time you want, but then we hear the complaints that gender X does better/worse at task Z. This narrative doesn't make any sense to me.
Men and women are psychologically-different, and no amount of trying to force a desperate sameness will change that. In fact, it might even cause people to want to be even more different than before.
The SJWs campaign for "sameness" but act like the complete opposite.
Maybe they're just in denial of who they truly are, and are unconsciously asking for help and recognition that they truly matter, but cannot help but unconsciously portray this in a destructive manner for all to see, except themselves and their blind peer group.
It's not just the SJWs, but also companies and corporations that cooperate with the ridiculous bullshit of the utterly divisive and politically-correct gender/race insanity that's corroding various aspects of Western culture.
I've been verbose enough, because I'm quite fed up with how much this utter crap is infesting culture and causing so much trouble for innocent people who don't remotely deserve to have be treated like they have been.
Don't try and drag science into this, when this is a set of social issues based on a bunch of people's mental health issues and how they're taking it out on other people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology
It's far from being proven yet. Even with anti-trust laws, breaking out companies in smaller entities does not challenge their market position that much, and anti-trust laws have a nasty effect: they encourage companies which are close to monopoly to let a weak competitor survive just to say "hey, at least there is one competitor left so we are not a monopoly". It's just not working well.
Such a company could be at an advantage in a free market where there were no rules on employment discrimination.
There's only one way to know: get a free market and see whether the companies that hires all Malasians or no Malasians or a mix of Malasians and non-Malasians comes out on top in aggregate.
(Malasians used as an example, not because of anything specific about Malasians. Feel free to replace with Lithuanians if you want. Although the specific cultures involved are probably very important. A culture that has a focus on technology and work ethic would likely beat out a culture that focuses on extended deep sea fishing when it comes to building a startup.)
If in your post one would switch the term black woman into white man it would become "If you create a company with only white men.... you could create a very unique culture.". etc
That kind of post would cause a massive uproar for rather obvious reasons.
Yet it's interesting that these kind of posts don't.
We've stopped discussing some key concepts just because it's not allowed anymore. I guess we need the bravery of enlightenment era philosophers once again - to stand up to social pressure in the name of open ideas.
I don’t think that means what you think it means