There has been policymaking about this in a bunch of european countries, and if they are released from financial constrains (handouts, public housing, whatever) they seem to double down on it.
Let's face it, working, for most people, is something you do out of necessity. Why do we really expect women to have a similar behaviour of men about work, when they have a socially aceptable and now economical venue to avoid it.
There's probably a small percentage of men that find their work interesting. Even smaller for all their work life.
Edit: Please, yeah, I know that raising children is work, pardon my lightly written comment.
Baby raising is quite important work. I would argue that raising the next generation of workers, taxpayer, customers and pension fund contributors is the most important work of all.
The top comment is asking why girl's perform better, and yet and under-represented in top tier jobs. The comment you replied to responds that they think it's because of having child and choosing not to go back to work.
At no point are they taking a stance on whether or not raising a child is as important as working a job...
That means most men won't do it, because they'll lose status. Meanwhile women will always place lower importance on status than on childcare, and so they will do childcare because no one is available to do it for them.
The disparity won't ever disappear until it's just as valid and socially supported for a man to stay home and raise children, as for a woman.
I don't know that is true of most men. Have children? Sure. Raise them? Not so sure. I once read that men wanting to have more children is inversely proportional to the amount of work the mother expects them to contribute.
Women tend to be more nurturing so their role is disproportionately more important during a child's earlier formative years. They also tend to have a stronger orientation toward domestic affairs. Men, on the other hand, tend to be more strongly oriented toward the public sphere. The home is the focal point. Thus women are at the center of the action, as it were, when it comes to the amount of time they spend with children, while men tend to be more strongly motivated to take care of affairs for the sake of their families outside of the home. The home is also associated with greater safety and comfort, which is something women tend to prefer (we also see this reflected in occupational preferences), while the public sphere contains more risk and discomfort, something men prefer to face esp. when the reward is sufficiently high (this is also reflected in occupational preferences; men tend to prefer taking on more dangerous and higher stress jobs and longer hours in exchange for more pay).
I have used the word "tend" for a reason. These are not two sealed off magisteria. Proportion is probably good way to frame things, though to a point. So men also participate in child rearing, esp. where discipline is concerned (the complement of maternal nurturing is the need for paternal authority which serves the child later in other ways like the ability to relate to authority elsewhere in a healthy way). Women also operate in the public sphere and often also work. Conditions and circumstances can also constrain how male and female roles are expressed.
Which is exactly why many women drop out of the work force to do this important work, and many men would, too, if it was more socially acceptable for them?
And sure, people do that all the time. People do all sorts of things. It doesn't mean they are communicating effectively, getting any kind of point across or coming to any conclusion at all.
I could start into semantics too, for example saying that people don't bring up tangential points because tangents aren't points they are lines. It wouldn't be a good idea, because it wouldn't further the discussion at all. That's basically what I see happened here.
You produce a small version of yourself and you are emotionally satisfied that something you did will mean something in the end. If you get to raise the child yourself then you get to perpetuate your mental life as well.
Still selfish reasons, but at least much better than producing... laborers.
Most everyone loves their mom more than anything else.
Curious as to what you mean by 'doubling down on it'?
You're not wrong in your statement that having kids kills the career of many women. The question is, why? The drive to reproduce is probably our second strongest in the human species, right after survival. Why, then, is it not easier to have kids and a career? It's about as universal a value as we have. Why is it not more supported? Why don't we have any guaranteed child leave in the US? Why don't we have universal daycare / preK?
I say all this as a guy who doesn't even want kids, but I do think it would be better for society if there was more support for parents, even if I paid more taxes to pay for it.
How about increasing the tax credit that goes to all parent, regardless of they choose to do childcare? Maybe for some parents that would be enough that one parent could quit their job and finally have the joy of spending more of their time with their own kid. I don't see why we should subsidize institutional childcare over other forms of caring for the very young.
People are complicated. I had a comment along the same lines as yours, but now that I talk about it, I'm not sure what I'd do. It's a total tossup. Moot point because I don't feel like I can leave the workforce, but it's not so clear.
I do think you brought up a good point though. It's kind of a forbidden dark point, but still one worth considering. What if it really is better to have less money, and not have to deal with any of this work stuff?
Anyway, whatever is the reason, they do take the tradeoff.
It was pretty obvious from the context that the person you're replying to meant "working" as in "working a job for money".
If I was woman and I decided to have baby, I'd probably be either very stressed with my current job, or looking for something part time.
Now imagine if I live in Sweden or the like where the state hands out money for raising children.
The personal and societal reasoning about parenthood changes, but they still do have babies, despite being on their own. For many people, children is their retirement plan.
Anyway, it's not the same to have a nice monthly stipend than a small cheque far in between. Spain, for example, is considerably worse financially-wise for raising a kid than countries more up north. Not only because the country job market is shit (which is important even if you don't work, because your partner has to bring money home), but because the state really doesn't do much about it.
Now imagine living in a place where there isn't really a functional state to look for.
i.e there are more men who are total geniuses at one end and total dumbasses at the other but the average would be the same.
https://qz.com/441905/men-are-both-dumber-and-smarter-than-w...
No idea if it's true though - not my field and not an expert.
1. Your cited article is correct.
2. The jobs that are "top tier" indeed require this "top tier" level intelligence. This second point would require some pretty extraordinary evidence to prove. Women have representation (only filtering among women under 40) in jobs that require "high intelligence" yet the discrepancy persists.
doctors: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/the-big-number-women-n....
lawyers: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/05/women-lawyers...
(just to use two popular examples. if you extend this out to a lot more professions the pattern persists)
You could be right, but I personally doubt it.
> What is behind this discrimination? One possibility is that teachers mark up students who are polite, eager and stay out of fights, all attributes that are more common among girls. In some countries, academic points can even be docked for bad behaviour. Another is that women, who make up eight out of ten primary-school teachers and nearly seven in ten lower-secondary teachers, favour their own sex, just as male bosses have been shown to favour male underlings. In a few places sexism is enshrined in law: Singapore still canes boys, while sparing girls the rod.
1. Time lag. Girls have only been exceeding boys' academic success for 20-30 years; in most fields the top tier of jobs is filled by people in their 50s and 60s, who were educated at a time when girls were underperforming academically. This hypothesis is supported by statistics showing that among childfree adults aged 20-39, women significantly out-earn men.
2. Grading bias. To the extent that success in the workforce correlates with academic success, one would expect it to correlate primarily with the extent of skills and knowledge acquired rather than with the grades received; it may be that girls' academic success does not reflect particularly greater academic skills. This hypothesis is supported by studies comparing coursework to exams; girls vastly outperform on homework but only very slightly on exams.
or maybe because your _official method_ was "under some assumptions" or "by guessing that"
I've heard that complain countless times from friends and I think always the reason was that it wasn't formally correct.
Especially with something broad like algebra, there are often many ways to solve a problem.
his job is mainly to teach you stuff.
Of course there are also tests where you can use anything you want as long as it is formally correct e.g leaving school exams, end of semester exams and many more...
It's not the greatest approach but I guess it scales?
I see the role of a teacher as someone who helps you learn, rather than someone who only teaches you things.
If a student finds a particular method or approach easier to comprehend, shouldn't the teacher adapt to that rather than forcing you to use the "correct" method?
If a teacher is dogmatic in their approach, I would call that poor teaching.
your school leaving exams or next school will probably not care
and they will test whatever they want, so why take a risk?
you can be challenged by a task which is doable in both methods, but "recommened" approach needs 3min in order to get this done,
meanwhile your's solution needs 15min. I mean here that standarized tests aren't some kind of trickery, they just tend to test how many various approaches do you know.
___________
also how many times can it be done? (deciding that it's ok to use other/easier method instead of "state of art" solution) once? twice? thrice? very often?
There are many situations where there are multiple approaches to a problem and none of them are more "correct" than the other ones.
> but "recommened" approach needs 3min in order to get this done, meanwhile your's solution needs 15min
The point is that what if the recommended approach takes someone 15min, and a different approach that they understand better takes 3min.
We're seeing this right now in my family as we have a young child. Both my wife and I are in demanding STEM fields (me in tech and she in medicine.) My wife is seeing an opportunity to cut back on her hours/pressure so she can spend more time with the baby. She's not "forced" to do it (plenty of women w. kids do her current job) but that's where her heart is leading her and we're lucky to be able to make this tradeoff.
I do think think this is a pretty universal thing. In two income families, if one parent wants to step back to do more family stuff, it's much more likely to the the woman who wants to do that. Similarly if one parent is much more naturally inclined to go conquer the work world, it's the father.
There are plenty of cases where that goes the other way but I think that is way less common. To be clear, it's not about the work place being hostile to women, it's not about "I wear the pants around here so you stay home w the babies" - it's about where our natural interests lie and how we act on them when we have a choice. Which to me sounds fine even if the outcome of it can be read as systemic imbalance.
I'd argue mostly for 1) and 2).
Here is my model:
1. Men have higher variance on any skill, even if men and women have the same average level, men will outnumber women at the highest and lowest levels by 2 or 3 to 1.
2. The median girl is much more likely to do her busy work because her teacher tells her to. Boys are more likely to do some bit of work only because they see some advantage to themselves. Boys are more likely to do unassigned work if they see some sort of long-term advantage to it (eg, learning programming on the side). The boy of 40th percentile aptitude, who knows he will never have a job doing math, isn't going to try that hard at his math homework. But that same boy might tinker with his car on the side and become a great mechanic.
When we reach the real world, males are finally doing work that has a pay-off, not just busy work. So they actually start trying hard, as compared to schoolwork where the median girl does more homework than the median boy.
The median girl works harder than the median boy at busywork. But when we reach the real world, the top man in a given career path is working just as hard as the top woman, and because of higher male variance, there are more men of top abilities that get the top positions.
On top of that, in my experience, women do make different choices with career paths. Men do seem to seek career paths that pay well, women often want to go into "non-profits" and areas with a "social mission." It's interesting how we moved toward an expectation that women work instead of staying home -- but we taught girls that the purpose of work is "self-actualization", while more men still have the expectation that they are to find a job that can support a family. (These are gross generalizations, and broad trends I have observed, obviously, many exceptions exist).
And as others pointed out, many women, correctly IMO, would much rather stay home with their babies or take a "mommy track" job than take a high-powered career path.
https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents...
That's one example but there are plenty of others.
One group of individual doing better at something does not mean the thing is favorable towards the group.
Perhaps you could provide us with some details about how education is not biased based on sex?
If every field is 50% or better in women, you need a heck of a lot more women.
Engineering is a field that selects for a certain personality, not all the time, but I think everyone here knows at least a couple classmates like this who are pretty arrogant, stubborn, self validating, the type to argue with the TA over their wrong homework answer for half the class, and never one to admit shortcomings. It's also a major that encourages regular group projects, where you might be stuck with personalities like this, or legitimately total creeps with questionable hygiene (I've seen all of this even outside CSE in my program). I think we all remember a few creeps from the undergrad days, too. Frankly, many of these men, especially in that age between 18-22 when you are basically a high schooler in maturity and might never had a female friend before due to social awkwardness, are overtly misogynistic, maybe without even knowing it just by cracking dumb jokes for cheap laughs among their male friends.
In majors with more representation among women, you are less likely to be saddled with these personalities (or even have to do massively weighted capstone group projects), and more likely to have camaraderie among people in the same boat as you, and are more likely to see through the major without switching to another one.
I'm not certain that's the right goal, but what I said above was working a model where 50% women participation seemed like the expected amount.
I don't really think job preferences are that strongly encoded in gender, I think far more men could be kindergarten teachers and more women carpenters, although men who try to become teachers face a huge amount of extra work because people don't trust men with kids as much.
I think it's better to ensure equal opportunities and let people decide.
I don't know if they actually perceive this, but, the fact that some people can automatically assume bias without deeper investigation when their whole fight is, trying to fight preconceived notions, its sort of ironic.
Sure, study WHY certain fields are underrepresented and try to fix systematic problems. But if your blind go to answer is, 'certain group of people are to blame' - just maybe you're exibiting behaviors that you are try to reduce in others and it may not lead to real solutions..
It's unclear, in a truly equal opportunity society, what the gender preference breakdowns for specific job roles would be. A simple first order approximation is "no preference".
I think the correct answer is to evaluate people as individuals on their merits. However, this is expensive (in many ways) and still flawed. My view is that we are much close to coming up with a "fair interview" than we are with understanding the massive amounts of complexity explaining discrepancies in human populations.
That's a reasonable first-order approximation, but it seems not to be reflected in the data, which show that as societies become more equal, gender disparities in field choice increase.
See: "Countries with greater gender equality have a lower percentage of female STEM graduates" (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180214150132.h...)
Why?
Maybe I misread, but I interpreted this follow up statement as "50% is correct, here's why (CS, physics) may not be at this level".
However, I could be totally wrong about this, as I've never bothered to check the figures.
If that were true, given that K-12 teachers are overwhelmingly female, then you would expect females to do better in school. Conversely I believe managerial jobs skew male, which you would expect to benefit the performance of males in such workplaces.
Again I don’t have a study handy so I’m not sure how empirical that is, it may just be conjecture.
Also, for many moms, working late in the office isn't even an option. They have to leave the office before day care closes. Or, in the case of women who can't afford day care, they have to take inferior job offers with inferior hours to work around their kids' school and care schedule. These things can make it extremely hard to be viewed as "managerial material" and rack up promotions. (Of course, dads face these issues too, and single dads have it especially hard. But it's statistically more likely to impact moms.)
Also, men just aren't as concerned over how much their significant other makes. Women, on the other hand, tend to more heavily judge the worthiness of a date on their career and income. So there's more incentive for men to chase after high paying, high power careers.
>women have no interest in money
Just to clarify, there is a difference between no interest and less interest, and also a difference between interest in money and interest in the status associated with a certain level of salary/income beyond what comes just from the money earned.
So those boys "did poorly in school" (which, to be sure, wasn't a great thing for e.g. college admissions above high-tier state schools) but that didn't give the full picture.
So the average may be higher for girls, but that’s across all girls.
This is what the bell curves are and a result of men’s being very wide and girls’ being very narrow.
This is known as the variability hypothesis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis?wprov=s...
I'd add that most men really don't have the opportunity to be a homemaker. So most men don't even have the option of ruining their career to take care of kids. It might be seen as "okay" for men to be stay at home dads, but I know all it's going to do is be devastating for my social status.
It's actually interesting to talk about because technically these things are true for women too, but we have a whole industry and philosophy around motherhood; it's seen as a more important role than fatherhood. I'm a guy that doesn't really care about money and it hasn't occurred to me to try being a full time father. It might be the better fit for me, but I don't see that as even an option. I'd be worried that I'd be judged as unuseful and unattractive, discarded, and left without any compensation (alimony, child support, ect.) or say in anything.
We need to be doing way more to soften the blow of parenthood for anyone. I also think we need some kind of way of honoring fatherhood, as we've done for motherhood, or to do so in a non-gendered way. It's not just about women not taking jobs that result in less pay, it's men refusing to take jobs (parenthood) that are harmful to their career, because their career is all they have.
FTA:
> Women who go to university are more likely than their male peers to graduate, and typically get better grades. But men and women tend to study different subjects, with many women choosing courses in education, health, arts and the humanities, whereas men take up computing, engineering and the exact sciences. In mathematics women are drawing level; in the life sciences, social sciences, business and law they have moved ahead.
This paragraph seems to support the idea of my above musing.
> academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs
I highly doubt that there is no correlation, but I doubt that education is the sole factor. Girls performance over boys is a slight, but significant, edge, but since success likely draws from a handful of other factors, a few of them having a counter slight, but significant edge, might be enough to swing the other direction.
This is close, but too strong. You only need women to have less interest in money than men to cause a difference.
A likely cause of such a difference is that men with high income and prestigious careers are very popular as romantic partners for women.
To spell it out, women in high paying jobs get a lot of money. Men in high paying jobs get a lot of money and improved romantic success.
Interestingly enough, that has a graph of the AMC math contest breakdown by sex. Check out page 7 (page number 115). When you start getting in the upper percentiles there I think that culture might magnify the male/female ratio a bit (this is based on personal experience), but at least in my high school the center mass of the scores up to 100+ or so was filled out by teachers just signing up a bunch of good students with no particular involvement in mathematical extracurriculars.
The problem is that people are risk adverse, and have varying levels of commitment towards continuing to winning the tournament. This variation has a gender skew, too, which IMO does a lot to explain much of gender disparity in multiple fields. FWIW I count software development in here, as tournament theory explains both developer wages, the number of unqualified applicants, and the gender disparity.
So if by 2015 girls are performing better academically, then the expected time to see this in society would be 2035 or so. Just as with universal education, it starts to be available from the early 20th century, but it's not until post-war that large numbers of men from previously uneducated families start making it into the skilled workforce.
Our limited view at any given point is just a snapshot on eternity.
This is a big part of it. Let's look at what "academic skills" means specifically in the US:
- you perform well on standardized tests - you perform well on rubric-graded essays - you do all of your homework, and you get As on every assignment
this leads to:
- you get into a good university - you (presumably) perform adequately or well at said university
Every student who performs well academically has a similar path to this point, but then there's divergency.
Tech is the only top tier job where your educational pedigree is not going to hold you back throughout your entire career. It's not going to hurt to have a degree from a top school, but it won't cripple your opportunities, unlike finance, law, and medicine.
Based on how top tier tech companies hire for engineering positions that aren't internships, it seems that they do not see a link between academic performance and engineering competency.
I agree with the approach taken by said companies. Thus (imo) for tech, it is fully expected for there to be no correlation between academic performance and representation in the top tier of jobs, because tech is the most meritocratic top tier industry. It's obviously not perfect, but it's leagues ahead of the other big industries.
Few years ago at a meeting (carbon emission reduction association) it was asked for the people in the room to send proposals / ideas on a google forms. After 5 minute the guy in charge of the meeting started to cough saying 'ok we found a few things we could do but we have a problem because there is not a single lady in the list'.
We were all newcomers, all unknown to each others, the tone was as chill as any meetup I've attended (no male dominated topic, no a-priori tribes or groups to scare new people from joining). My only idea so far is that women and men have different instincts on how to come forward with their ideas/desires.
Perhaps women have better work/life balance on average.
I fiddled with programming and computers as a young teen because I found it interesting, not because I thought I could eventually make money with it. My good friend wrote fantasy stories all the time, because that was her interest.
20 years later, I can retire whenever I want because of the choices I made as a nerdy 13 year old, whereas my friend is getting paid $40k/yr editing a small newspaper.
The top performers in my college class, struggled to get internships within my internship-mandatory program.
Also, for women anyway, the kind of work it takes to get to the top effectively means they aren't going to be having babies. A man aged 45 can marry a women aged 30 and become a dad - women who marry younger men aren't more likely to have kids because of it and at 45 it is unlikely for a woman to have kids at all.
- Behave better (lower energy and "disruptive behavior" in school)
- Are better at following instructions
These two traits, while rewarded in the school system, are not really relevant at the top tier of jobs. There's no instructions to follow when you are building the next Google: nobody did it before you.
That said, there is likely no single cause for the disparity, there are likely many factors at play at the same time.
They are solidly in the majority of students in medicine, law, accounting, etc.
We know that before the tech industry became popular and a way to make good money, women displayed little to no interest in being associated with programming "nerds" which were predominantly men to the extent that men over-represented the group of socially outcast nerds. This was mostly an American phenomenon, and other countries did not share this social hierarchy, hence the data on girls performing better academically outside of the US.
When did this change? I either missed it or this was always an exaggeration in media.
The Internet suddenly became a big thing, PCs massively growing in popularity, and the image of gaming was changing, becoming a less nerdy pastime with the arrival of the Playstation.
Not really sure if it encouraged a more diverse set of youngsters to develop a serious interest in computing though, as by then we'd already got to the point where 'learning to use a computer' now meant Word+Excel rather than BASIC or LOGO
Does anyone here think their academic experience was a direct analog for their workforce experience?
Correct. I've yet to impress with my math skills, just saying.
How many deep sea welders are women? Less than 0.1%. How many oil rig workers are women? Less than 1%.
Good deep sea welders earn over $300k.
I'm betting they meant CEO positions, board positions, and high ranking corporate officers.
I think this would be the case for the hypothetical “party if you're a man, standing outside in the rain if you're a woman” job, too. How do you know you're describing something about the people you're measuring, as opposed to the people around them?
Couldn't one then also argue that jobs women list towards get paid less? E.g. instead of asking why women gravitate to those jobs that are paid less, ask why the jobs women gravitate towards are paid less.
Also, the likelihood of career advancement is lower for people perceived as being more neurotic, and many cultures have stereotypes consisting of women being more neurotic than men.