> why do we constantly talk about getting more women in to tech but not men in to healthcare?
Who is we? HN? If so, the answer to that is obvious.
Your comparison needs more nuance, in my view. If health care had 100 people, 80 nurses (70% of which are women) and 20 doctors (10% of which are women) then you'd have a breakdown like the following:
Women: 56 nurses, 2 doctors
Men: 24 nurses, 18 doctors
If you said the median doctor has a salary of 200K and a nurse 65k, men are paid 5160K and women are paid 4040K. In other words men are paid 56% of the total healthcare salary despite only representing 42% of the workforce. So despite the majority of health care professionals being women, men are still overrepresented in terms of salary, and in a way, influence. This example obviously uses fake numbers, but is the crux of the problem.
Money allocation is more accurate than job allocation imo. Moreover, if you were to total men's salaries/wealth and compare it to women's wealth it would be overwhelming in favor of men. Discussions surrounding specific job types and their gender allocation are irrelevant and a distraction. If men and women represented the same amount of total wealth in the US I think these discussions would be more meaningful, but the disparity in wealth is reflected influence and consequently opportunity. So, yeah, more men will be reflected with higher percentages of the higher income opportunities. This is reflected in the BLS data:
Employees vs. Managers
Nurses vs. Doctors
Teachers vs. School Administrators
Business owners
etc. etc.
The issue has never been that men have more of the jobs. The issue is that men have all of the money. That's why people are talking about tech, and say, not education. The job discussion (particularly within tech) is just a way to attempt to solve a tiny aspect of the problem.