The story behind AVMA's push to become more inclusive for women is an interesting one. You can see the results in the profession lookup under "Veterinarians" on the page. The tech community could certainly learn lessons from that campaign, both what to do and what not to do in order to try to balance out gender disparity in tech.
I think the Veterinarian one shows that some of these numbers are seriously lagging. It'd be interesting to see age plots with these. While the industry reached parity in 2010, college admission reached parity in about 1987: https://www.avma.org/News/JAVMANews/PublishingImages/100215g...
That's true of the overall workforce and I don't see it as evidence of lag. I think the effect is caused by a disproportionate number of women who go to college but either don't ever enter the workforce or stop work after a few years. The cause for this is obviously pregnancy/raising children. So even if it was 50% in 1987, maybe 10% of women who studied to become veterinarians chose not to pursue a permanent career because they wanted to have kids either right after or a few years after finishing college.
Don't we need more men in primary and secondary school teaching? I would think so.
That is highly discussed issue in pedagogic cycles - how to get and keep more males. For years. The answer usually ends up "yes, but they would come only if there would be higher social status and salaries for teachers". And no one knows how to achieve that.
It is possible that money is not the only thing to keep males away, I dont recall any studies. Just that is the usual assumption. The fact that male teachers tend to come up as ironical response (nor saying you are doing this) to female-in-tech topic suggest also contributing cultural reason. Non trivial amount of people finds idea of male working with children (except coach for some reason) funny or absurd.
According to the first visual, secretaries are 108% female and carpenters are -10% female. Don't trust this data too much.
Yep, this is a typical example of statistical lying[1] - clearly the data is not represented in such a way that you can get the accurate numbers from the visualisation. I really don't understand why the parent is being downvoted. [1] http://www.infovis-wiki.net/index.php?title=Lie_Factor
I'm not sure that statistical lying entirely fits here. The general shape of the visual hasn't been challenged, just the location of the percentage markings. Of course, this doesn't inspire confidence in the visual as a whole, but seems more likely to be a typo or technical issue than an actual lie ( I can't see a benefit to any argument by having impossible data points on both side of the graph ).
I'm not sure why you think it was obvious, but it definitely wasn't. Not everyone has heard of everything that's "quite famous". I had to look it up, too.
I'm not making a value judgement, just observing that it's extremely well-known in western culture, and obviously not something the commenter came up with themselves.
My mistake in that case. I moved to America about 10 years ago. I still get caught off guard by some of the cultural (especially historical) elements of western culture. I should probably get more educated about this stuff.
There are a variety of possible contributing factors, primarily that it was the era of "women's lib", or in full "women's liberation". IOW, "a woman's place is in the home, preferably barefoot and pregnant" began to go out the window. Along with that was the civil rights era, meaning at the least the idea of equality for all. In summary, the U. S. began, even if just a little bit, to pull its head out of its ass with…
> In summary, the U. S. began, even if just a little bit, to pull its head out of its ass with respect to equality and rights. Please watch your tone. Just that your opinion is different from others and happens to currently match the majority view doesn't mean you should be rude to those with different opinions. There are plenty of people with more nuanced opinions on gender roles that aren't bigoted. edit: To those…
Please watch your tone. Just that your opinion is different from others and happens to currently match the majority view doesn't mean you should be rude to those with different opinions.
Yes, $DEITY forbid that I offend those who thought that black children should not attend school with white children, or those that truly thought a woman's place was in the home and not in the work place. Those that thought women should make the decisions about their bodies, let's not rudely push that agenda on those that differ, because it's really just a matter of opinion. Let's keep a civil tone, just like those that oppose civil rights.
I stand by my statement and its wording, as well as holding the opinion that America has not quite finished with that cranial->anal extraction.
I would love to see the first diagram with circles coloured according to average wage of the respective occupation. I would expect to see more high-income male occupations and vice versa – a correlation that explains most of the gender pay gap.
Your statement reflects a misunderstanding of how the gender pay gap is analyzed. The pay gap is a gap between genders performing the same occupation. Therefore, job position/title is not a confounding factor. Some confounding factors (which are well known and usually accounted for) are length of time at the job, education level and prior experience. There is still a pay gap of ~5c/dollar adjusted. Non adjusted is 20…
While there's a small discrepancy, the "77 cents on the dollar" thing has been spread so much that I think it's important to put into context the real differences. I agree with your statement, but it's also true to say "the gender wage gap [as presented in media/by politicians] is a myth." To me, both sides seem at least slightly deceptive. Saying it's a myth outright makes people forget that there's a real issue, but saying that it exists outright confirms the false notion of a 23% gap for the same work. It's obviously extremely unfair that a man and a woman doing the same exact job in the same exact way are getting different pay. One thing that I started wondering about while reading your comment (as a confounding variable, I guess) is proportions of men/women in every company. Clearly if women were much cheaper to employ, only women would be working many jobs. What I wonder about is whether the discrimination occurs because employers with more women pay less on average. As an example, Google might employ more women than Facebook (their culture may be seen as more friendly to women, for example, or their hiring practices may differ). But at the same time, it's entirely possible that Facebook pays higher on average regardless of gender. So in this situation, women are choosing (or being chosen for) more lower paying jobs in the same industry, and thus being discriminated against indirectly in terms of pay. Clearly this too is an issue, but it changes the ways that this issue can be addressed.
So according to that, software developers are around 20% female. That seems high to me, from my own experiences. Even still, with all the "let's get more women in tech" stuff I read, are there initiatives to get women in the other jobs even further to the left on that graph? (largely physical labor jobs)
>That seems high to me, from my own experiences. It's almost as if your own individual experiences are not indicative of population-level trends at large
Just a friendly reminder as I noticed you're new - patronising, nonproductive comments like this don't go over as well here as they do on reddit.
There are a variety of possible contributing factors, primarily that it was the era of "women's lib", or in full "women's liberation". IOW, "a woman's place is in the home, preferably barefoot and pregnant" began to go out the window. Along with that was the civil rights era, meaning at the least the idea of equality for all. In summary, the U. S. began, even if just a little bit, to pull its head out of its ass with…
> "a woman's place is in the home, preferably barefoot and pregnant" Is this your own quote or something that was used before the women's lib era you reference ?
A common phrase when I was growing up in the U. S., not coincidentally in the 60s and 70s. Usually in the context of something like, "anti-abortion advocates would prefer women all stay barefoot and pregnant", in contrast to women making their own decisions about childbirth, employment, or spousal choice. Others have supplied references to its usage. And thanks for the reminder that what I consider common usage hasn't been "common" for quite some time. :-)
So according to that, software developers are around 20% female. That seems high to me, from my own experiences. Even still, with all the "let's get more women in tech" stuff I read, are there initiatives to get women in the other jobs even further to the left on that graph? (largely physical labor jobs)
> are there initiatives
No, people tend to be only interested in professions that are "hip" enough. Nobody is going to glamorize plumbers (even though they certainly should!).
Programmers and computer operators did, but I can't find it in the page. "Computer" used to be a person crunching numbers using slide rules and mechanical calculators and it was an overwhelmingly female profession. When machines appeared, the operators were predominantly the same personnel that were doing it by hand earlier.
It's listed as "Computer Scientists and Systems Analysts/Network systems Analysts/Web Developers" and their dataset starts in 1970. Their dataset shows it always being a male field - in fact, in 1970, it's even more male than now in their dataset. It shows a rise of women from '70 to '90, and then flat until today. Since the launch of personal computers (the Altair in '71) was supposed to be the catalyst of the chang…
The usual story (as told in Nathan Ensmenger's "The Computer Boys Take Over") has the change earlier than that. He says in the late 1940s to early 1950s lots of women were hired for "coding" positions, which at the time was seen as a a fairly unskilled, clerical work. In the 1950s, the division between high-level "programmers" and route "coders" disappeared, leaving just programmer-coders who did both, and as a result there was quite a few female programmers. Then in the 1960s the computer industry grew dramatically, but at the same time the image of what a programmer was, and what kind of characteristics made you a good programmer, also shifted a lot, and by the end of the 1960s it had become a very male field.
The personal computer revolution is usually mentioned in connection with a different trend. Throughout the 70s the proportion of female computer science majors was steadily climbing, then somewhere around 1984 this trend broke [1]. It's often said that this has something to do with video games becoming popular toys.