Sex Differences in Adolescents’ Occupational Aspirations
psyarxiv.com
psyarxiv.com
Boys “thing-orientation” and girls preference for “faces and dolls” show up in, for example, (a) neonatal human babies, (b) young rhesus monkeys and (c) chimpanzees babies. Also seen in a bunch of other studies.
For the people who are disturbed because this doesn’t match your world-view; remember that this is two bell curves with different medians. There is significant overlap at the individual level, but also large differences in tails, which explain the reality we see around us (some occupations dominated by women or men respectively).
https://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/12/female-chimps...
Human babies don't know what a fire truck is either.
a baby.
You don't have to comprehend or understand a firetruck to see it is a very different environmental object to another being.
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep19669
Or this one, where adding testosterone to rhesus monkeys causes their female offspring to be "masculinized':
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002209651...
Boys raised by single mothers with no male role model do not exhibit unusual female behavior.
The differences between male and female infants are consistent with the well studied effects of sex hormones in adults.
No, that's wrong, it was properly blinded:
The videotapes were coded by two judges who were blind to the infant’s sex, to calculate the number of seconds
the infants looked at each stimulus. A second observer (independent of the first pair and also blind
to the infants’ sex) was trained to use the same coding technique for 20 randomly selected
infants to establish reliability.
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep19669
Or this one, where adding testosterone to rhesus monkeys causes their female offspring to be "masculinized':
65% of realtors are women, but in commercial real estate it's only 35% women. Is that biologically driven? Seems like it's just socially harder for women to break into commercial real estate compared to residential real estate.
While I am sure there are some biologically driven preferences between men and women, I think it's absurd to assert that these choices are "clearly biological" and that people who disagree just "don't like that it doesn't match their world view".
Can you seriously claim with a straight face that accounting more nurturing/social/"faces and dolls" than software engineering? I think the social dynamics are just more welcoming of women in accounting than software engineering at this point in time.
I could argue that software engineering can be quite people focused, easily done from home, and in some cases part-time.
70% of chefs are men. Are men biologically predisposed to belong in the kitchen? I think a more likely explanation is that women couldn't get financing to open their own restaurants. It wasn't until 1974 that the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed. And it wasn't until 1988 that the Women's Business Ownership Act allowed women to get a business loan without a male co-signer.
What is a more likely explanation for the fact that 70% percent of chefs are men: a) men are biologically disposed to working in a kitchen, or b) until pretty recently women couldn't get financing to open restaurants on their own, so they didn't become chefs.
Firstly, this difference is based on statistical extremes. Women and men are more the same than they are different, from a temperament perspective. Agreeableness is the big five dimension that stands out the most here. Men are more likely to be disagreeable, women agreeable. Disagreeable people are more likely to be into "things" vs people. Agreeable is the opposite. In more egalitarian nations, where women are given more equal opportunities, they are actually MORE likely to follow careers that follow this temperamental observation. You can look to western europe, and then the Scandinavian countries as an example of progressively more egalitarian society.
The cynical answer is that attractive women with large breasts influence the decisions of men making largely consumerist purchases (let's be honest, beyond 2000 sq ft with basic functional materials and appliances, it's a purely status purchase), whereas when buying a commercial property you have to worry about your fiduciary duty to your shareholders and are much more focused on the ROI of the deal.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2008/09/25/women-c...
Is being a doctor one or the other? You need to be able to say difficult things to people, and a lot of doctors will tell you they're doing it to help people. But doing surgery is presumably technical in nature.
Is there an acknowledged way these categories are determined?
'doctors'
A quick LinkedIn search for Surgeon shows that about 70% of surgeons in the SFBA are male.
80% of pediatricians are female.
'engineers'
Prior searches showed that 90% of electrical engineers were male.
50% of SQE were female.
Go through the list, look at the entries which are either <20% female or >80% female, and tell me if you don't see the same pattern:
What is dangerous about analysing data?
Or do you mean it's dangerous to form absolute conclusions just on a subset of available data?
P-hacking is a known issue in many scientific fields. So is drawing conclusions from over collection of data without repetition of the study... As the number of data points you collect approaches infinity, the chance of finding at least one meaningful-seeming correlation approaches 100% because having an unlimited number of data points to bash against each other makes you more likely to observe an improbable correlation.
We study diseases by (first) looking at people who have severe forms. Ie it would be tough to come up with an understanding of autism just by studying the brains of people who are "a little aspy". If you can figure out what causes the gender segregation of train drivers / pediatricians, maybe you can apply that knowledge to relatively-mildly-imbalanced tech fields.
Obviously with animals is different, but there might also be other things at play that we are not aware.
Happy to be wrong, but I think there are so many layers to make a call at this point that sure, there might be an influence, but society is probably what affects this the most.
Both are thing oriented because you’re doing work for people as an abstraction, not individual people.
User stories might be based on actual people, but they’re ultimately meant as archetypes.
It also identified "face to face interactions" as a requirement for being people-oriented. So dating app developer is clearly not included.
I speant most of the last 18 months in and out of the hospital, and I noticed that doctors are more things oriented, and nurse practitioners are more people oriented. Even though they do the same job.
I want the nurse practitioner when I'm feeling awful, I want the doctor to explain their thought process in technical detail. Even if it's over my head.
And to be clear, I didn't read the article, but I had doctors and nurse practitioners of different sexes.
Depends on the specialty. Scott Alexander once observed:
> A look at percent female physicians by subspecialty is instructive. The specialty with the most women is pediatrics, followed by child psychiatry, followed by obstetrics, followed by – you get the picture. The specialties with the least women are the various surgeries – the ones where your patient is immobilized, anaesthetized, opened up, and turned into a not-quite-color-coded collection of tubes and wires to poke and prod at – the ones that bear more than a passing resemblance to engineering.
Source: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/ —please note that the bulk of the piece is not strongly focused on this particular issue and is not a very representative context for this point. Scott restated the same point in a better context later on in https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge..., but left out the “not-quite-color-coded collection of tubes and wires” bit which makes the point significantly less punchy and quotable.
…
For the record, there’s a similar pattern in veterinary medicine. The majority of vets who treat pets are women, but livestock veterinarians are predominantly men. IOW, whether or not animals are treated more like people or things correlates to a significant disparity in the predominant sex of the veterinarian treating them.
I'd look at this from a... step back.
"Software Developer" is all you need to know.
For example a Mechanical Engineer designing a product on a CAD-- Product A is a machine interface Product B is a car seat for young children. One could argue Product B is more people-oriented. But that's irrelevant. We're talking about the occupation, not the product. The occupation is making things primarily on a computer in this case.
Software Developer --> Spends XX% of time working with Things (computer) and XX% of time working with People
vs
<other occupation> --> Spends XX% of time working with Things (<occupation-pertinent inanimate object(s)>) and XX% of time working with People
...And sure, there are different types of Software Engineers ("SWE")-- Some SWEs are heads down programming 80% of time w/ 20% of meetings (for example). Solutions Engineers ("SE") are the reverse-- 20/80. The latter is more social. But to become a SE is dependent on SWE skills, therefore I consider it a variant of the primary category of SWE, whose main focus is working on a computer. Not working face-to-face with a human to participate with them in some social activity (such as sales, nursing, management, or a job with a lot of meetings).
Boys who scored very high in STEM tended to have that as the only area where they were at the top. In other areas they might be good but usually not outstanding like they were in STEM.
Girls who scored very high in STEM tended were much more likely to have at least one other area in which they also scored very high.
People have a tendency to choose an occupation that fits with something they are good at. If the aforementioned study is correct, we'd expect to see boys who are good at STEM subjects to be more likely to go into a STEM career than girls who are good at STEM subjects, because for the girls it is more likely that they also have a non-STEM subject that they are as good or better in than their STEM subjects.
If the only difference was that girls were good at more subjects, but the distribution of subjects both genders were good at was equally distributed across subjects, there would be no net effect.
It is.
Even peer review is not a stamp of quality, but it at least signals "some set of folks have broadly reviewed this and consider it well constructed."
Whether it's sociology or fusion or battery tech -- we shouldn't put much value on preprint articles.
That is, if you aren’t going to starve, the most important thing is what other people think. The closer to starving you get the less important that becomes.
Anyway, that’s the hypothesis explaining the difference. What research out there explores that hypothesis? Otherwise, this seems like just more of the same revealing that there are differences in participation.
This seems like too strong of a claim to make without any supporting evidence.
IMO that hypothesis is politically biased. It implies that men/women in wealthier societies are trying harder to conform to gender norms. Blames societal norms for the difference.
The simpler and less dehumanizing alternative is that people in wealthier countries are more free to live life however they want. There are less constraints.
You can see desire to comply with gender norms as a constant X and starvation risk Y as a variable. Appropriately scale each and measure X-Y. That can go positive or negative depending on Y without X varying at all.
I want to eliminate this explanation as significantly causative. Where would I find evidence for that?
As a thought experiment, consider being trapped on a desert island where the only thing edible were termites. My starvation risk is high, so I will eat the termites. Eventually I get back to civilization and my starvation risk is much lower, and I no longer choose to eat termites. Is this because A) the social norms which dictate that I shouldn't eat termites are now more important to me, or B) I prefer other foods to termites?
It is perfectly reasonable that under differing circumstances the weights we will give different factors in decision making vary, but that does not on its own tell us what those factors actually are.
I am constructing a hypothesis and I want it falsified. The fact that it is falsifiable is a feature not a bug.
The possibility of this not being the cause isn’t interesting. That is by construction. I want to see evidence of what is actually the case.
I want to know what the factors are. And by what weight in aggregate. I am not alleging that they have any specific value.
So the issue is that without more information, we actually can't tell whether our hypothetical desert island survivor has gone off the termites upon returning to (euro-centric) civilization because they actually don't much care for them or because you can't order them at any of the fine dining establishments in town.
I mean, hell, without invoking a desert island... I know people in the United States who swear by the taste of squirrel meat and you generally won't find them eating it at the restaurants in cities.
Squirrel is surprisingly delicious. That said squirrels are impractical to farm, and thus there would be no way to maintain a consistent supply of squirrel meat in a restaurant in a typical city. Thus squirrel is generally unavailable as an option at restaurants, and thus nobody orders it, as it would be dumb to order what they don't have. There is a similar issue with muskrat, which I prefer to squirrel, despite the total absence of any social norms dictating one to be superior to the other.
Getting back to the topic at hand, there is no explanative power to saying women choose a career option because they've been socialized to pursue that career option. They just as easily could have been socialized to pursue something else. For example 73% of US cashiers are women while only 35% of US counter clerks are women. "Because society" simply doesn't answer the question why.
Occam's razor is great, but it's probably not a reasonable assumption to make on a system as fundamentally complicated as human behavior.
How would we control for the possibility that as wealth increases, the dominant effect in a person's life isn't social status (which could be enhanced by gender-norm conformity)?
And you can probably make the argument that the existence and length of parental leave is culturally driven as well. Somebody has to take care of the kids and if a couple lacks the money to farm it out somebody’s career takes a hit.
Most computer programming jobs have very little to do with machines as such. Code in high-level languages works mostly with abstract representations of business requirements, and the fact that it's executed on machines is incidental. And if abstract concepts count as "things," then you've stretched an already ridiculously broad category to the point of uselessness. You might as well say "I repair cars for people, so my job is actually about people."
I am a woman, and one of the things I find appealing about programming is the very immateriality of it. It's distinctly unlike something like "repairing machines." You don't have to get dirty, or crawl under anything, or climb a ladder, or carry heavy stuff around. I can see how women might be less interested in "things" when it comes to all that, but not computer programming.
It's pretty clear that these dichotomy is over-generalized to the point that you can build whatever narrative you want. Also, why is it that it only seems to apply when the people-related jobs are low-status? Politicians and executives are mostly men and mostly deal with people. Food-preparation workers deal with things and are about equally men and women, except for head chefs, who are mostly men.
https://mobile.twitter.com/besttrousers/status/1454150695196...
This fits the data we have available, doesn't require that we assume our conclusion (we just assume women respond to incentives), and is able to help explain other phemonena. It's got a lot of features we want in a good model!
- Matt Darling
Edit: It seems like he assumes some "fixed cost" in order to counter the finding that women are less likely to pursue STEM education.
Is there something I am missing?
Is Matt Darling aware that in most European countries university education is (financially speaking) free or extremely low cost? And said cost is about the same no matter what you study?
Edit to make it more clear: As far as I know crushing student debt is an US and UK thing. Not continental Europe. I have no idea how things go outside US/Europe though.
(As a possible example, the only European countries with higher percentages of tertiary education than the US in the 25-34 age group are Norway, Ireland, Luxembourg, Lithuania, and Russia. I suppose that only 28% of Germans are interested in tertiary education, as opposed to 49% in Norway and Ireland. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...)
I'm assuming he's assuming that... :)
In the sentence:
"Women pay some fixed cost for being in the labor market, in general. Perhaps due to discrimination, perhaps to something else"
It seems pretty clear to me he does not mean just financial.
It has less to do with any ideology and more a combination of mathematics and pragmatism. Namely an insufficient number of people who could afford even free college from the opportunity cost of not working full time. Even if the economy advanced enough that they could technically go to a more American model.
This is meant to be broad brush "first principles reasoning" and includes many disparate nations and situations. Some may also have a sufficient percentage from traditionally priveledged strata who could afford it. Often families who were traditional bureaucratic, military, or priestly occupations.
I don't think it goes up to "paid to be a student" most of the time. If you're not lucky enough to have local universities on your chosen subject you still have to pay for (possibly cheap student) lodging. Said gatekeeping exams may also be an extra cost if you need to pay someone to prepare for them.
However, the financial burden overall is much smaller.
Anything that influences a decision can be reframed as a cost or incentive, but without actually identifying the cost nothing is being explained.
The argument is that when presented with few attractive alternatives, they simply overcome these hurdles.
This is sort of a double whammy since not only are the social sciences messy enough that it’s easier to get away with that sort of thing, but they always have been chock full of hypotheses that lots of people have motivated biases against.
Disclaimer: "I believe that nurture, rather than nature, plays a larger role, generally speaking, in the development of an individual's occupational aspirations", or vice versa.
Expectation is aspiration.
Not unless you're aiming at something you're 100% certain you can achieve, or delusional. I knew a person in high school who aspired to go to Stanford for her undergraduate education. She didn't succeed, and to be quite honest her expectation of doing so was moored in fantasy, not reality.
Any number of kids who want to play professional sports or succeed as entertainers are aspirational without necessarily expecting they'll make it. The ones who do expect that kind of success are often let down and become part of the 90-odd percent of SAG card holders who wait tables, paint houses, and do all kinds of things other than acting to pay the bills — or never even make it to Hollywood.
Conversely, someone in a farming family might say that in 30 years they will be farming, which is likely aspiration = expectation.
The study is flawed.
I think it's too early to tell right now if there's some type of things-interest/people-interest split among the genders. We're still so close to the time when women weren't allowed to have checking accounts, that the cultural inertia hasn't had time to wear off yet. I am very suspicious of researchers who claim to have the answer right now.
Better graph:
https://mmsa.org/2017/05/percent-of-bachelor-degrees-women-b...
> As expected, the percentages of students aspiring to sex-typical occupations were higher in countries with higher levels of women's empowerment, r(68)=.350, p=.003. The percentages of students aspiring to sex-atypical occupations ranged from 7%[6.2%-7.8%] in Lithuania to 23%[21.2%- 24.3%] in Lebanon (international median of 12%). This variation correlated negatively with women's empowerment, r(68)=-.500, p<.001.
I do not like weighing into these sorts of things too much because I think people tend to find whatever they are looking for. All it really shows is that gender preferenes are formed before adolescence. Whether that innate or learned is not clear.
The thickest thread I've found is a reference to a PISA 2018 dataset.
> We investigated sex differences in 473,260 adolescents’ aspirations to work in thingsoriented (e.g., mechanic), people-oriented (e.g., nurse), and STEM (e.g., mathematician) careers across 80 countries and economic regions using the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
Unless you also consider nationality innate, it certainly suggests that it is learned.
/s (although I've seen that argument here before)
Suppose you take a member of an ethnic group and compare them to two other randomly selected individuals, one from their ethnic group and one from a different ethnic group. The chances their genetic differences will be greater with one rather than the other is very close to 50/50. Ethnicity makes only a very tiny difference, the vast, vast majority of the differences between individuals have nothing to do with it.
"These sex differences were larger in countries with a higher level of women's empowerment."
"We explain this counter-intuitive finding through the indirect effect of wealth. Women's empowerment is associated with relatively high levels of national wealth and this wealth allows more students to aspire to occupations they are intrinsically interested in"
Though I think the preprint's reasoning about the influence of wealth is just bad. Especially if you try to reason that wealth and better education is causing alot of women to become nurses instead of doctors.
I've done horse riding, its unique and fun but definitely not for me.
There are confounding factors here, though — it's not like the only variable being changed between two countries is a woman's empowerment.
See also, Simpson's paradox.
If the biological difference were a large facial birthmark that caused people to treat us differently (although we're otherwise identical twins), would you accept a statistically equal outcome between groups of people with and without facial birthmarks as a sign of a lack of discrimination against people with facial birthmarks?
Either way, society should allow for equal opportunity even if there are differences in average interest between groups since the variation within a group is larger anyway. It just means not seeing the same outcome doesn't necessarily mean something has gone wrong.
* Women make up 25.2% of "Computer and mathematical occupations" (https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm)
* World-wide, women make up < 9% (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1126823/worldwide-develo...)
* "38% of women who majored in computer science are working in the field compared to 53% of men" (https://www.cio.com/article/3516012/women-in-tech-statistics...)
Somehow, it just doesn't smell like a preference.
I don't know what x and y are but if being passionate about either led to higher paying career choices you'd see a difference in average wage between the groups. At the population level.
Outside of some very specific situations (aka muscle mass dependent jobs like carrying heavy loads on your back) I'm not aware of any scientific evidence that supports a biological cause of career outcome divergence in women vs men, but if you have some literature or other information I'm always willing to admit that I'm wrong in light of new information.
On the other hand, there is an ocean of scientific data that cultural, social and political conditions have a huge impact on what jobs men and women do.
EDIT: there is actually one argument for biological differences explaining divergent outcomes that I find convincing: for the vast majority of human history, the state's monopoly on the use of violence has been either nonexistent or far weaker as compared to today. Men have had an advantage on the use of violence due to average muscle mass and bone density being higher than women. Technology (firearms, surveillance, etc) has made this disparity of power in capacity for violence less and less relevant.
These have been shown to directly affect statistical likelihood of career choice.
"men in highly developed world regions were less neurotic, less extraverted, less conscientious and less agreeable compared to men in less developed world regions"
If these personality traits are influenced by what country you are born it, would it not support the the non-biological argument?
Then this translates into laws, policies and scholarships that effectively discriminate against men.
Don't know what you mean by "individual level" policy but a lot of policy needs to change.
This wouldn't fly 60 years ago when the economy was much more decentralized. There was no single large entity (or related group of entities) that would benefit from such policies. If you run a small business and personally know every employee, you wouldn't think of such a thing. This bodes well in the current model where every child-free worker is an extra $50K lifetime value for their employer, translating into 5 extra cents per share.
So how did we solve it? We made a faceless inappealable uncriticizable statistics-driven system designed to tell the majority of people to shut up and cull their ambition.
And you know how we ended up here? Every society has a certain amount of people with ambition to power. They want to tell others what to do. They want to make decisions affecting others. That's fine, that's human psychology. That's why the previous generations started companies, studied hard disciplines, took risks, and found their place in the society with the perfect effort/power balance just for them. Except, this doesn't work anymore with the "economies of scale" where there's a bunch of CEOs and investors, but everyone else is a replaceable drone.
So there's an incredible power vacuum in the Western society. People are desperate for roles in life that will give them meaning and power - ability to make decisions affecting other people. The corporations have PR departments and centrally owned media companies that steer this force clear of colliding with their financial interests. So, it effectively turned into a cold civil war. Want to change something in the society? Go get a 5-figure loan on a social justice degree, and then exercise your power by telling majority of the people to hate themselves, and enjoy no retaliation.
Kinda like every war. On both sides of a conflict there are regular people with friends, children, families, hobbies. But they are too busy demonizing the other side, and eager to be foot soldiers in someone else's game. Someone whos mansion is located far from the front line and whos kids will sit at the board of a munitions manufacturer, rather than in a trench on a battlefield. I don't know how we're gonna get out of this mess.
But I still agree that equal outcome metrics are misguided. It is too lazy of a metric and statistics will mess it up very quickly with such things as Simpson's or Berkson's paradoxes. These are far too easy to fall prone to. Besides that, the question seems to be more about if the reason for these differences are due to biology or society (rather, which one is more significant), not that the differences don't exist (i.e. causal). But coming up with good metrics to determine what is going on is difficult. I do not think a metric should become a target though, and we have to be more careful in nuanced in our approach.