But there's affirmative action for men in nursing, teaching, social studies, and similar female-dominated departments. There are active campaigns to recruit more male nurses - and male teachers are more likely to be promoted.
I also know first-hand that vocational ballet schools recruit equal numbers of boys and girls, so they can teach partnering - despite the fact they probably get 30 female applicants for every male applicant!
Of course, a male might find it unfair that the pro-male affirmative action is only applied in areas like ballet and nursing which they're not interested in - but that's the whole point of affirmative action.
And if you find it unfair that the pro-male affirmative action for female-dominated jobs only provides low-paid, low-status jobs - then feminists are very much in agreement with you about the unfairness of the situation :)
This is an interesting point, how much of the salary is determined by presumably impartial market forces, and how much of it is just status and social signalling.
We know status and social signalling play a significant role, otherwise behavioural economics and marketing wouldn't exist.
We also know that the diffrence between salaries of rank and file staff and C-suit executives have increased 15x in the past 20 years, without any corresponding increase in productivity
There is good reason to believe that if you could magically shove high-status men into nursing; nursing salaries would go up. But it's hard to see how it would happen unless we'd have equivalent of the draft for low status jobs.
Seems like evidence against the claim that status plays a significant role in setting salaries, unless their status has also increased massively in that time.
What is this inherent quality of high status for men?
Generally, status follows the possible utility one can provide for another, whether it be from being able to earn a lot of money, or having connections, having characteristics associated with positive stereotypes, or some other in demand quality.
Higher pay will increase status for whoever gets it, whether it be men or women or majority or minority. But the status follows the utility (or money in this case), not the other way around.
Drug dealing and Escort / prostitution provide significant income and poor status. Aristocracy had high status and sometimes little income.
They are not one and the same
All else equal, if you shoved high status men into nursing they would only serve to increase the supply of workers, thereby reducing bargaining power and thus incomes would be more likely to fall.
High status men become high status because they find places to go where supply is extremely constrained (naturally or artificially). When you are one of few people able to do something that is desired then status and income follow.
The CEO gets there by first being one of a very select number of people who has built trust with the board. The board certainly isn't handing the keys to the kingdom of a multi-billion dollar operation to any random Joe off the street for obvious reasons. When the supply is nearly non-existent and the demand is nearly insatiable, price goes to the moon and so too does status much the same way.
If we assume that:
Whatever merit based metrics the school uses to determine admission are predictive of eventual performance
and that men are admitted with lower performance on these metrics than some women
Then removing the affirmative action should result in the school graduating nurses who perform better, right? Why wouldn't we want that?
Because it's possible to have multiple goals at the same time. Reality is a co-optimization problem.
The points that you have made above are why there are still many more female nurses -- it's not like they will accept every single man, there's simply a lower threshold than there is for women.
I think a lot of the arguments about whether AA makes sense at all should really be reframed as discussions about how much AA makes sense. How do goals like diversity, inclusion, and minimizing inequality weigh against other objectives like rewarding merit and maximizing productivity outcomes? Surely the balance-point is not zero, but it's conceivably much closer to zero than today's policies would imply.
And one thing to consider is that people don't choose colleges just based on academics, they also choose them based on social environments, and as such universities have an incentive to try to create amicable social environments to attract the best students.
Case in point: I decided not to go to a good engineering school because it was more than 80% male and in a small town. The social environment was desperately bro-ish. I backpedaled and went to a liberal arts college primarily because of vastly superior social environment.
I dont think many people have such a privilege
My parents had only saved enough for me to go to a state school, which got me through one semester at a private college, and the rest were student loans, and working often multiple part-time jobs (and full-time in the summer).
> Whatever merit based metrics the school uses to determine admission are predictive of eventual performance
This seems a questionable assumption.
I think those machines/tools are called "orderlies."[0]
[0] https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/what-is-a...
There may well be benefits to diversity that are not easily quantified at the individual level.
The classic example of the development team that created a computer vision system that didn't work well at all with certain skin tones but they were unaware of this until feeling it live at a conference comes to mind. They didn't have anyone on their dev teams or QA teams with that skin tone.
There are numerous studies showing that diverse teams come up with better solutions. Diversity pays dividends at the group level, and assessments that only consider things at the individual level may miss that
There are also numerous studies that show diversity has either no effect or even negative effects on various measures of group performance - the academic literature on this issue is a total mixed bag. Here's how the OECD's [1] summary of the literature on diversity and firm performance:
> "Contrary to the often assumed, direct positive impact of diversity on business performance, research shows that at the firm level, the business case for diversity is not particularly strong. However, while the impact of diversity might be small, there is a strong economic argument against discrimination and non-inclusion based on the sizeable cost associated with it. Finally, the chapter notes ethical reasons for fostering a just and equitable labour market alongside the economic argument for diversity."
The literature also suggests the effects of diversity on group performance, whether positive, neutral or negative, are situation specific, depend on your measure of 'performance', and your definition of 'diversity'. Again, from the OECD:
> "A number of studies make a difference between ‘highly job-related diversity’, such as educational background, job position or function in the company, and diversity aspects that are ‘less job-related’, e.g. gender, ethnicity or age. Measurement of team performance includes multiple indicators, such as efficiency, creativity, innovation and productivity. Findings are somewhat mixed, but impacts of gender, ethnicity or age diversity are found to be either very small or insignificant. Some meta-analyses find no significant impact of gender composition, ethnicity or age on team performance (Horwitz and Horwitz, 2007[19]; Schneid et al., 2016[20]), while others find negative, but very small impacts (Bell et al., 2011[21]; Joshi and Roh, 2009[22])3. Most studies do, however, find a positive relationship between team performance and having teams with different professional backgrounds and other task-related characteristics (Bell et al., 2011[21]; Horwitz and Horwitz, 2007[23]; Joshi and Roh, 2009[22]). Overall, these findings from meta-analyses seem to suggest that team diversity in terms of gender, ethnicity or age do not matter much for team performance. However, there is some evidence that demonstrates the importance of situational settings by examining under what specific conditions diversity dynamics may unfold and how."
[1] https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/5f8c1531-en/index.html?i...
The same is true of many minorities.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-e...
A policy change that women are actually more likely to support than men. If it's a naked display of power, it's power of a group that's actually slightly overrepresented towards women.
1. https://www.vox.com/2019/5/20/18629644/abortion-gender-gap-p...
Multiple studies found White woman are the biggest benefactors of affirmative action.