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The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

theatlantic.com

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Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

#81

Post by telesilla »

K0nserv wrote: post #65
telesilla wrote: post #54

Let's turn the argument on it's head. Statistics say boys are more heavily inclined to have a STEM career. Does this mean they feel they cannot consider a career in other fields like teaching, nursing or other female-dominated fields? As a woman I often wonder, what's so great about STEM aside from the paycheck? It depends on your bosses (or being your own if you are lucky and that way inclined), but I don't think we…

Boys desire for large pay checks could be explained by patriarchal/societal expectations that they must be the main bread winner in a household

Right! I'm really supportive of working towards social change where a person's role in life is no longer defined by their gender.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

#82

Post by hackpert »

koonsolo wrote: post #79
hackpert wrote: post #60

Whenever such studies or analyses come up in the media, I find that people are often eager to jump to causative conclusions on the lines of "oh females must have a natural inclination towards 'softer' fields" or (as in case of this article) "In wealthy nations, they believe that they have the freedom to pursue those alternatives and not worry so much that they pay less." However, even if we ignore the obvious correla…

Ask around in your social circle, both men an women: "Would you like to have a job where you sit all day at the computer?". Then calculate the percentages. That's "natural inclinations" for you.

Sure, you may be right about a percentage disparity, but how do we know that the factors that caused this disparity were not cultural in the first place, instilled by society as they were growing up?

I also think that blanket questions such as "Would you like to have a job where you sit all day at the computer?" would be rather unhelpful because it really depends on the nature of the job. Both theoretical physicists and people working in building security have to sit at the computer all day, but that in no way implies that the nature of the job is similar.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

#83

Post by cm2187 »

platz wrote: post #25
dvt wrote: post #2

Equality of opportunity does not necessarily imply equality of outcome . This isn't a paradox. Why are still people still confused about this? (Actually, people aren't confused about this, but it makes for great clickbait articles and ad revenue because it fans the flames of both sides of the argument.)

Preferences aren't static, and are part of a dynamical system. It needs to be explained why preferences are the way they are. Environment could be changed to address causes of preference

But it is also possible that the biology is affecting our inclinations, temper, or skills. After all modern psychiatry is attempting to look at the brain mechanically or to influence it with drugs. And intuitively, I find it hard to believe that our genes that affect so much of our physical abilities, likelyhood of illness, etc would stop at the brain and our behavior would be completely independent of our nature and purely a function of our environment.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

#84

Post by howlgram »

zerr wrote: post #14

One reason could be - in poor/developing countries STEM is understood as the escape path from the poverty, while in developed countries people seem assured in their future even if they go in humanities or any other non-tech field - thus following their interests/hobbies rather than the need. EDIT: unintentional tl;dr as it seems :)

this would not only explain why less women go into stem, but also why more guys go into it, as it is common for a guy to feel the onus of securing financial safety for his family.

And not gonna lie, even I, a guy, picked STEM partly because I see it as the best escape route from this country, I would have picked something more fun and less demanding otherwise

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

#85

Post by guitarbill »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #17

This, and similar research I'd seen before seems to point to women being equal or better at STEM than men (and also being better at non-STEM stuff), but actively avoiding it as a low-status role when they have better options. Slightly baffling to see this celebrated by men in these careers as some kind of vindication. The data appears to be saying you (we) suck, but that's a win if you think the data was going to sho…

> actively avoiding it as a low-status role when they have better options.

So why don't men avoid it? It's hardly a high-status role for them, either. I hope my kids don't go into tech, regardless of gender.

The most cynical part of me thinks that this "equality" agenda isn't put forward to further humanity, but simply to get more people into the job market and drive wages down. Then I realise I should probably lay off the drugs, or become a lobbyist (or worse).

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

#86

Post by soVeryTired »

If you look closely at their scatter plot, you can see that the UAE, Turkey, Algeria, and Tunisia cluster in the lower right. Without them, the relationship would be considerably weaker. Is there something in particular about Middle Eastern culture that's skewing the results?

I'm not sure I understand the choice of countries in the regression either. Where are India and China, for example?

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

#87

Post by ZeroGravitas »

lliamander wrote: post #35
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #17

This, and similar research I'd seen before seems to point to women being equal or better at STEM than men (and also being better at non-STEM stuff), but actively avoiding it as a low-status role when they have better options. Slightly baffling to see this celebrated by men in these careers as some kind of vindication. The data appears to be saying you (we) suck, but that's a win if you think the data was going to sho…

> Slightly baffling to see this celebrated by men in these careers as some kind of vindication. An amusing and insightful observation. I would say it's baffling until you realize that the alternative is that the whole the gap in female STEM employment continues to be attributed solely to male sexism. It's better to be perceived as stupid than evil. Also, are we all now in agreement that there are likely cognitive dif…

I thought the three alternatives were "women are bad at it", "women don't enjoy it", "women are being actively put off it by the men being even more sexist than the sexism baseline of men in other career options".

If this is claiming they're actually better skilled than the men, then it opens up more space for the comparative sexism option I would have thought?

Just the fact that it contradicts the common wisdom that "women aren't capable of STEM" seems to lend some support to sexism clouding people's objective evaluations.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

#88

Post by rectang »

dvt wrote: post #2

Equality of opportunity does not necessarily imply equality of outcome . This isn't a paradox. Why are still people still confused about this? (Actually, people aren't confused about this, but it makes for great clickbait articles and ad revenue because it fans the flames of both sides of the argument.)

Women get paid less than men for doing the same work, across all industries. Pay them the same and the "confusion" will diminish.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

#89

Post by shostrift »

[deleted] wrote: post #59

[deleted]

I certainly know girls in medicine who struggle to find guys. Some seem to be intimidated by them, especially guys from Asian cultures where they want to have higher status jobs than their wives.

I would add though that in fact neither of two particular girls I know wanted to go into medicine. They were pushed in by their parents. One wanted to work in fashion, the other media.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

#90

Post by nukeop »

ekianjo wrote: post #32
nukeop wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the myth of a theoretical "free" market holds any water and can be applied sensibly to any real world scenario. In the actual free market a giant megacorp would swoop all promising hires and suppress all competition by selling at a loss until nobody else dares to enter the field.

How do you swoop all promising new hires if you have a free market? its not like all of them want to work in the same place and the same culture. Even right now we have tons of startups despite the existence of Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

By nipping competition in the bud and starting company towns. When you're an unregulated monopoly with no danger of anti-trust, lots of things are possible.
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