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Comment by SolaceQuantum | Hacker News Reader

From what I understand the issue is more complicated. Women are pursuing more college degrees than men, but also men still occupy the a disproportionate number of of administative, leadership, and professor positions. The overall story comes that women pursue higher education because they need to acquire more education/accolades to achieve the positions of male peers.

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Couldn't that also be explained by the fact that more women attending college than men is a relatively new development, and most administrative/leadership/professor positions are held by older people, hence the gender ratio will take time (>20-30 years) to reflect the new gender balance?

After all, the people that are professors now were studying in the 1980s-1990s, hence the current ratio of male/female professors should logically represent the gender ratio of the field in the 1980s-1990s if there is no inherent gender bias, not the gender ratio of the field in 2019.

From what I understand new professorships, NSF CAREER awards, and similar are still majority male. There is an observed phenomenon that when men enter a female-dominanted field they still gain leadership positions faster than women do. This happens in nursing and schooling, for example.

Answering to a "male problem" (e.g. men pursuing less education) by stating it's actually another example of bias agains women ("that's because women need more education to get the same job") is not really a constructive position, is it?

I don't actually know if it is another example of bias against women. I only know that the picture might be more complicated- men may pursue less education but also men can advance faster with less education comparatively. The overall picture is probably not so simple as that men pursue less education therefore men are systematically disadvantaged.

Arguably, it shows that men are disadvantaged in one axis and not necessarily the whole axis, which is why I'm bringing up that there are other spaces along this axis where men are not systematically disadvantaged. I do firmly believe that men are disadvantaged in several fields and spaces which require addressing, but not that that means men are disadvantaged overall.

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