This just in: men and women are biologically different (at the statistical, population level). Shouldn’t affect individual level policy. But any metric of equal outcome is misguided.
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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.
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.