Most human behavior is not obvious on close inspection. And when what seems "obvious" happens to align with traditional expectations of historically oppressed groups we should be very very skeptical of our personal gut feelings.
I really don’t see the point in denying this, it certainly doesn’t benefit women. Most women probably wouldn’t like to be men.
That doesn't mean women are not interested in STEM though. I've seen a very interesting anecdote at a university in the middle east. It was segregated (men and women had different campuses), and for a certain amount of time, there were the same number, if not more, women than men in the engineering colleges. A nearby university, which was not segregated, and offered practically the same curriculum, had very few women in STEM, most women there ended up in business and media majors. Though things could probably change after graduation where female STEM graduates end up taking work that is less hands on and involves more dealing with people.
I’ve lived in Jordan, one of the freest and most tolerant countries in the region and I could definitely imagine that women would like to avoid atudying with men.
This was in a Gulf country. And it's not about avoiding studying with men (the majority of the population there are foreigners, and those schools attracted non-Arabs as well). Again, repeating what I saw, in the segregated school, the ratio of men to women in engineering was almost 1:1 (I don't know if that changed recently). In the university next door, it was closer to what we see in the West (way less women in engineering). However, in that same coed university, women ended up more in business majors where they were also studying alongside men. I've also seen a lot of women enter pharmacy and architecture majors.
1. Why it happens
2. Whether or not it is positive or negative
3. How to engineer society to work differently
But as it stands now, we don't know any of that and programs that try to force women into STEM fields are just weird. I mean, I am all for programs that help them feel welcome and accepted and uninhibited in STEM careers because some of them do choose to be programmers and such and they should be respected and treated fairly. But programs that look at the gender gap and assume it is a problem that needs to be fixed are just dumb.
Which is exactly what people said about unrepresented demographics in career XXX, for literally every XXX of the past few centuries in which the representation has since normalized. The example above was medicine, but we can play it with any high-status career you want: law, government, corporate middle management, academics, finance... Back up a hundred years and there were effectively no women (or african americans, pick your demographic) in those careers. Now they're much closer to parity.
And in all those cases, small-c conservatives interested in preserving the status quo trotted out all sorts of arguments just like this. And they were wrong every time.
So tell me again how your cool bit of jargon makes this all go away like magic?
The alternative - shaming women who do not go into tech - is unpalatable to most.
Go back and look at the scatter plot. It's a weak, but real correlation. The random deltas between nations are well above the significance of the gender signal. There's good science to be argued about there.
But it's being used here to justify an outrageous outlier. Women aren't just "less interested" in sofware at the scale we see in that study, they're outnumbered by literally a whole order of magnitude. Nothing from that study argues for this kind of effect, nothing at all.
>Women aren't just "less interested" in sofware at the scale we see in that study, they're outnumbered by literally a whole order of magnitude.
How can you be sure? Men are on average more interested in working with things, and women are on average more interested in working with people [1]. "...non-biology STEM majors showed lower [people-orientation] and higher [thing-orientation] interests than biology and health majors."[2] Self-efficacy and competence beliefs tend to be a factor that keep women away from tech [3]. The Gender Equality Paradox also mentions competency as a factor.
1. https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fa0017364 2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00018... 3. https://portal.research.lu.se/portal/en/publications/will-i-...
This claim doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Tech is not an "outrageous outlier". there are plenty of jobs that are over 95% male and female respectively: https://www.cheatsheet.com/money-career/segregation-work-ame...
Here's a much larger list: https://fourpillarfreedom.com/visualizing-u-s-occupational-e...
Software isn't an outlier. In terms of representation of men, it's just behind "printing press operators" and just ahead of "taxi drivers and chauffeurs". Women are about as overrepresented in "File clerks" and "loan interviewers and clerks".
Software is an "outrageous outlier".
I realize it's frustrating when it feels like you're surrounded by people who are wrong and unfriendly (and believe me I know how that feels), but everyone here needs to stick to the site guidelines no matter how wrong other people are or one feels they are.
And so, while we might hypothesize that a "natural/biologically driven" allocation be uneven (and I'm willing to grant), we have no idea by how much. Perhaps it's really 95/5, or who knows, perhaps it's 60/40.
The argument that where we're at now is where we should be (and thus why we shouldn't try to eliminate various obstacles to entry) is really just a form of status quo bias. It's the same argument that's been used over the years to justify why women couldn't go to college, be lawyers, etc... etc...
[1] https://capx.co/what-jordan-peterson-gets-wrong-about-the-no...
The gender-equality paradox does not just apply to Scandinavian countries, but reproduces pretty much around the world: female participation in engineering etc. is inversely proportional to HDI.
In fact, it even reproduces over time! I think we can all agree that, for example, the US is more egalitarian now than it was in the past. Yet female participation in CS has actually dropped since the 60s or 70s.
> we don't know what a "natural" allocation by gender in STEM might look like
This is both true and, maybe somewhat surprisingly, irrelevant. The reason is that the GEP is not about the absolute levels, but about the sign of the change. To be more precise:
If your hypothesis is that "societal forces/sexism/oppression are the main causes for lack of female representation", then you would expect higher levels of participation in societies that are generally more egalitarian and more free than in societies that are generally less egalitarian or not free, regardless of the absolute levels.
So your theory demands that there is a positive correlation between HDI and STEM participation.
If there were no correlation, that would probably already disprove that hypothesis.
However, it is worse than that, much worse, because the correlation is actually negative. I have to admit that this stunned me, as it apparently stunned the researchers working in the field, because it is such an unexpected and hugely significant result.
And once again, absolute levels are completely irrelevant here, it's just pretty clear that when you remove oppression, you get more gender-segregated workplaces at least when it comes to the empathising/systematising divide.
> The argument that where we're at now is where we should be
Who "should" be deciding where we "should" be? To me, it should be the people who decide what they want to do. If many more women than men now decide to go into veterinary medicine (used to be the other way around), who are we to second-guess them? If many more women than men prefer to go into early childhood education, who is to say that this is "wrong"?
That's the part I really don't understand, quite frankly.
I don't think this has anything to do with how sexist america is at any time, but rather how the gender roles have changed over a relatively short time period.