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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

47 points·andsoitis··7 comments

Claudia Goldin won the 2023 Nobel for showing how women choosing flexibility in their work is the main driver of pay disparities, so much so that men suffer the financial penalties too when they choose flexibility.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2023/pre...

On top of that, women are underrepresented at the highest levels of most fields

Even with a truly even playing field, this will persist. The curve is simply flatter for men. Short of genetic reengineering, there will always be more men at the very highest and very lowest potentials. For example, males make up 60.8% of homeless people and 68.5% of CEOs.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/962171/share-homeless-pe....

https://www.zippia.com/chief-executive-officer-jobs/demograp...

For further reading this is called the Variability hypothesis, that male ability has higher variance (but not necessarily a higher mean) than female ability: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis

(Not making a judgment as to whether I believe this is true or not)

Did le wik rename this from Greater Male Variability hypothesis when I wasn't looking?!

Check the article's revision history; it's public. It was simply called "variability hypothesis" from the article's creation in 2007, and in September 2018 the additional name was added.

I would be willing to bet that both those percentages used to be higher, and have roughly correlated with each other over time, as well.

Interesting, but paywall.

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