Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

For that Germany doesn't really focus on innovation in technology. They tend to like to outsource development to eastern Europe. (That's depressed salaries) Any good developer in Germany is going to silicon valley instead.

> But I don't think it holds up in all cases (50% of chemist bachelor degrees are female (https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/membership/acs/welcom...) and chemistry really isn't a "people" oriented discipline IMHO).

The article I linked also discusses similar trends in mathematics, ie. ~50% of math bachelors are also for women. Of course, what you can do with a bachelors in math is become a teacher, which is why the number of women doing grad and post doc math work falls to roughly similar levels as computer science.

There is no comparable horizontal skill transfer for a computer science degree into teaching, so there's less enticement from the beginning, and so less engagement. No doubt some women actually continue with math post docs because they actually find it more interesting than expected, and they change their minds about using the math degree for something else.

As for chem, besides teaching-oriented goals as with math, a lot of chem is closely related to life sciences, pharmacology and other disciplines which typically do show high enrollment among women.

The things-vs-people effect seems quite strong. I agree that it may not account for all of the differences, and this would need to be quantified to be sure, but it does seem to account for the many of them. Certainly much better than the oppression hypothesis, so why is the latter still the prevailing narrative?

> IMHO, the marketing / image part of this is always worth challenging.

Agreed. I think this should apply to all fields, like male nursing, pro dancing and flight attendants, whose stereotypes are typically highly feminized.

But we shouldn't then be up in arms if people still openly and naturally choose to segregate by gender, as seems to be the trend across all nations with high gender equality.

But what if the under-representation is due to women not being as interested in the field?

> For example, according to Glassdoor, a software dev in Chicago has an average salary of about 82k compared to about 120k for a nurse practitioner.

Becoming a Nurse Practitioner requires, at a minimum, a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, followed by licensure as an RN, followed by a Master's in a NP specialty, followed by certification as an NP. Practically, it requires more because most NP programs require practice as an RN in the specialty for at least 1-2 years prior to admission. Its a very small, elite subset of nursing.

Further, Glassdoor estimates are something like a real-time estimate of what the current values of a nonrepresentative measure would be; they really should be marked "for entertainment use only". Per BLS data, the median salary of the 1,930 NPs in the Chicago-Naperville-Arlington Heights Metropolitan Division is $101,930, about on par with the far more numerous software developers (Software Developers, Applications: 20,570 jobs, $99,430 median salary; Software Developers, Systems Software, 9,930 jobs $103,620.) [0] The Glassdoor numbers you give are way high for NPs and way low for devs.

Contrary to your suggestion of massive geographical distortion in median salary due to concentration of tech jobs in high-cost locations, this elite level of nursing is paid generally similar to software developers nationally, as well. (Nurse Practitioners, 150,230 jobs, $104,610 median salary; Software Developers, Applications, 794,000 jobs, $104,300 median salary; Software Developers, System Software, 409,820 jobs, $110,590 median salary.) [1] (Yes, these national numbers are a little different than those from the Occupational Outlook Handbook, also from BLS, that I posted upthread: the OOH is a high-level publication updated more recently, which also uses slightly different categorizations; so here I've used the national data that corresponds directly to the geographic specific data.)

[0] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_16974.htm

[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm

Yes there are "diversity" hires, that is, people who are hired not based on their technical skill, but based on the desire of management to have more women/POC on the team. There are often financial incentives (bonuses) ties to improving diversity numbers, so there will of course be skepticism when a female junior dev gets promoted to senior dev, then manager in a two years. I've been on hiring committees where the team gave a candidate a low score on technical ability and said "we don't want this person" and because of some desired biological trait they posses, they were hired anyway.

That being said, I've seen it with males as well, but it has been more of the one guy on the team gets his MBA/college buddy hired kind of thing. In both cases, employees would be rightfully skeptical because of outside influences in the hiring/promotion process that are trying to purposefully achieve some end goal.

My wife, who formerly worked as a software dev, hated this aspect of the industry because there were so many women-in-tech groups that were trying to help (a.k.a. coddle) her achieve something she could easily achieve on her own by her own technical acumen. In similar vain, I've gotten jobs because of who I know more than what I know before (in my case it was because I'm a submarine vet and the hiring manager was also a former submariner), and yeah, it does undermine the sense of accomplishment that comes with doing something on your own.