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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

I'm very surprised to see feminists studying the 'Roissy' [1] theory of female career choices.

In short, the theory is that women are extremely intolerant of low status men and try to avoid working in fields where they are prevalent, and particularly in fields where they are respected. It actually has a reasonable amount of predictive power, certainly more than the sexism theory.

I'll be blown away, however, if we actually follow the theory to it's logical conclusion...

[1] Roissy in DC is an extremely sexist, but insightful blogger. He didn't state this theory, but I've heard it described as the 'Roissy' theory since it follows his line of thinking.

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How the hell did this well-understood sociological phenomena get called 'Roissy' theory? It doesn't just apply to women: it applies to everyone and has more to do with culture than gender.

I'm only discussing conjecture because I don't have any sociological studies to back me up. </forewarning>

In general, yes, it does apply to all humans as a culture. I've seen men brush other lower status men away as I've seen women do. However, I can say, women tend to fill that category much more than men do.

I think it has more to do with the instinct to mate, than anything else. Women desire to project their masculine self onto a male figure that can most closely match the features of that masculinity. The masculine self having been created by the father figure, most women will seek out men that can fulfill those needs.

Hence why women generally date men older, with more social status, and more financial resources and freedom than they. There are obvious exceptions, so please consider those when reading this.

> Women desire to project their masculine self onto a male figure that can most closely match the features of that masculinity.

Oh, they do?

That theory is not the one explored in the studies described. The theory was that the women perceived the environment to be unwelcoming.

They found that women are turned off by an environment which suggests “nerdy, techie, stay up late coding, energy drinks, no social life.… They don't frequently take showers.”

...if she had asked them to describe any other group, like black people or women, they would have refused to answer. “But describe computer science majors? No problem!” she says with a laugh

The article is caged in PC language, but it's describing nothing but intolerance of a certain group of people.

You'll note that the theory of the unwelcoming environment is easy to debunk; if true, then law and medicine should also have very few women (they were historically unwelcoming to women). Yet somehow, those fields (full of high status men) are now about 50% women.

You're conflating physical and social environments. This article is dealing with the physical environments. The difference is important, because (apparently) an unwelcoming social environment can be overcome, but an unwelcoming physical environment means women don't even try.

Law and medicine also have large monetary and status incentives. I can imagine walking into certain kinds of offices and feeling like I would not want to work there. I do not consider that intolerance.

Good point; a complementary theory would be that women wish to obtain high status for themselves, and the perception that CS is low status turns them off. I don't see how we could distinguish between your theory and the 'Roissy theory', so it is equally valid.

As for intolerance, I'm not sure how we could consider your unwillingness to tolerate certain kinds of offices as anything other than intolerance.

Scratch off women and just say: "some people wish to obtain high status for themselves." Some people aren't as concerned with status - it's not that they don't care, but they're not willing to put up with as much crap to gain it. (Doctors and lawyers certainly put up with a lot of crap for their perceived status.) If we further assume there is an occupation with middle status, but has nontrivial social barriers to a certain group, then there's not much incentive for that group to break in when there are plenty of other occupations with the same status.

The differences between what I said and what you said: mine could apply to any group, not just women, and I'm assuming that only a smaller subset of most people are willing to pursue high social status despite the extra burdens; most people are fine with middle status.

Also, intolerance of an environment is different than intolerance of a group of people.

The article suggests that women are turned off by the perception of low status to a greater extent than men.

Regarding middle status jobs, there are plenty of formerly male-dominated middle status jobs which women have successfully broken into, e.g. advertising (c.f. Mad Men).

Any explanation of why women do not enter math/phys/CS must come up with something that distinguishes math/phys/CS from those other fields. Being a "middle status job" doesn't do it, nor does initial unfriendliness. I'd suggest that one possible explanation is that "geeky" pursuits are actually lower status than most comparable office jobs, and more women than men are turned off by low status.

I guess we'll just have to disagree; I saw no indications of status in the article. All I saw were perceptions of the environment.

Given the careers where women dominate (nursing, teaching, publishing, lawyering), I wouldn't believe any claims that women choose their careers based on their potenetial high status. Except maybe for lawyering. But I would bet that many more women lawyers are in social or environmental causes than not.

On the other hand, the idea of being repulsed by hanging out with low-status men… as a woman, that resonates with me.

The best thing that's happened for my happiness with programming is the arising of more well-rounded, socially skilled developers, who started off as music professors or linguists, like the ones I found when I switched to Ruby.

Unwelcoming is kind of funny. I wonder how welcoming would they consider the working conditions on an oil rig, or in a coal mine?

Which is a good point. You very rarely see articles lamenting the lack of women in mining, or drilling, or trash collection.

Point of clarification: what does status mean here? If it's identically equated to having a lifestyle that involves obsession with Star Wars, not following proper hygiene, and being messy, then your theory is empirically isomorphic to the article's theory.

Say you expand a little further and say that really low status means social impairment. People who are socially impaired tend to be socially unpleasant. If a woman suspects that this person is a man, that makes the gap even wider and more of a turn off. Then it's not really wrong at all for women to think that way.

The way you have it framed makes "social status" seem like a random construct, a congenital handicap. And women who dislike these people are just "intolerant" of them.

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