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Swedish study finds discrimination against men in female-dominated occupations

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Re: Swedish study finds discrimination against men in female-dominated occupations

#201

Post by teachrdan »

logicalmonster wrote: post #179
ryanmarsh wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not been able to wrap my head around this issue. What is the thinking behind the desire to even sex ratios in various profession? Why are some professions receiving more attention than others when it comes to evening sex ratios. Is a perfect world when every construction site, hospital, and dreary programming job (lets be honest most of them aren't fun) has an even mix of the sexes? What is the benefit? Can some…

> Why are some professions receiving more attention than others when it comes to evening sex ratios. I think some people in the technology field unfortunately take everything at face value and are not really thinking about the various power plays in motion when it comes to persuasion and influence. I would point out that some people stand to make money and gain power off of promoting these views, and of course some e…

There's certainly a movement to recruit women into the trades: carpentry, electrical work, etc.

Re: Swedish study finds discrimination against men in female-dominated occupations

#202

Post by PeterHolzwarth »

hajile wrote: post #188
PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women attempt suicide two to four times more often than men. (However, men tend to use more violent, and effective, methods of suicide, so succeed more frequently than women.)

Are you suggesting that women are too incompetent to kill themselves? The less sexist explanation is that women generally use suicide attempts as a way of asking for help while men generally use suicide attempts as a way of escape. Stated in those terms, both groups are very competent at achieving the end goal.

Easy, tiger - you may want to consider switching to decaf.

Each component of what I stated in response to the comment above is accurate, and an appropriate explanation of the implied assumption in it that suicide lies more commonly with men than women (a common misconception arising from what I explain).

Re: Swedish study finds discrimination against men in female-dominated occupations

#203

Post by throwaway894345 »

teachrdan wrote: post #201
logicalmonster wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are some professions receiving more attention than others when it comes to evening sex ratios. I think some people in the technology field unfortunately take everything at face value and are not really thinking about the various power plays in motion when it comes to persuasion and influence. I would point out that some people stand to make money and gain power off of promoting these views, and of course some e…

There's certainly a movement to recruit women into the trades: carpentry, electrical work, etc.

Presumably the idea is that this "movement" needs a comparable level of investment and energy as the movement to get women into tech, etc.

Re: Swedish study finds discrimination against men in female-dominated occupations

#204

Post by throwaway894345 »

MadeThisToReply wrote: post #168
ryanmarsh wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not been able to wrap my head around this issue. What is the thinking behind the desire to even sex ratios in various profession? Why are some professions receiving more attention than others when it comes to evening sex ratios. Is a perfect world when every construction site, hospital, and dreary programming job (lets be honest most of them aren't fun) has an even mix of the sexes? What is the benefit? Can some…

It all starts with the dubious (to say the least) premise that men and women are exactly the same. Both sexes on average want the same things, like the same things, are interested in the same things, and have the same priorities and proclivities. Therefore, in a just world, we'd see an exact 50/50 ratio of men and women in every possible occupation, because there are no differences between men and women, therefore th…

> Because biology plays no role in human psychology; we're the only species in the animal kingdom to come into this world with no pre-programming and absolutely everything that we do is the result of cultural conditioning.

I suspect when these people finally cede on biological differences between the genders, they will just argue that these biological differences themselves are a product of our sinful and fallen world. Don't underestimate the incredible portability of these folks' goalposts.

Re: Swedish study finds discrimination against men in female-dominated occupations

#205

Post by flavius29663 »

Loughla wrote: post #106
guerrilla wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about stealing but is it not the case that most sex offenders are men? That seems like an actual risk wherase the accusations at play in racism are just made up.

Most sex offenders are men, does not mean most men are sex offenders. Nor does it mean that most men who want to go into childcare are sex offenders. You're inferring results from faulty logic.

but it does mean that there's a higher chance that a stranger male is a sex offender than a stranger female.

Re: Swedish study finds discrimination against men in female-dominated occupations

#206

Post by _0w8t »

adolph wrote: post #149

I have a developing conjecture that in order to address the perceived problem of higher male per capita in certain occupations, attracting males into occupations with higher female ratios is as important as incentivizing female participation in high-male occupations. I'm no mathematician but I see it in terms of system numbers: Given a set of occupations with different sex ratios, to change the ratio of any specific…

There is an observation that men typically like to work with things while women with people all other things being equal. There are speculations that it depends on hormonal balance during pregnancy, but what ever the reason it exists. So by that software development naturally is dominated by men (code is the thing) while professions like veterinary (that pays higher in US than programming) is dominated by women (as most time is spent talking to pets owners).

Note the average here does not translate into an ability to predict performance of a particular person based on biological sex as the variation is too high for that, but statistically the effect is rather significant.

So I suspect if a profession require a lot of social interactions, the observed discrimination is simple reflection that men may perform worse on average in those professions.

Re: Swedish study finds discrimination against men in female-dominated occupations

#207

Post by Ginden »

guerrilla wrote: post #184
Ginden wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know about stealing but is it not the case that most sex offenders are men? That seems like an actual risk wherase the accusations at play in racism are just made up. This conclusion seems to be quite controversial, because race is correlated with certain crimes in terms of "actual risk". It's likely because of social factors (because eg. black immigrants to US aren't significantly more likely to commit cri…

This is an insightful point. > Personally I would argue that both race-crime and gender-crime statistics are largely or completely due to social factors. I think this is probably right too, but which social factors are you thinking about when it comes to sex offenses?

I think sex offenses are strongly related to "toxic masculinity" mindset (though, I don't like that name).

Re: Swedish study finds discrimination against men in female-dominated occupations

#208

Post by throwaway894345 »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #189
tuesdayrain wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Can someone explain this in logical, non-political, terms. Probably not, because it's ultimately a political phenomenon. In left-leaning circles it's popular to deny that there can be significant statistical differences between demographics for any reason other than discrimination. Based on that logic they view all unequal gender ratios as problems that need to be solved.

This is does not quite fit the general "left-leaning" belief that I have heard. I would rephrase it as "it's popular to deny that there's an underlying preference at play when jobs which used to be female dominated, like programming, became male dominated shortly after they became lucrative." Bringing it back to the subject of the article, this entire discussion is really about tribalism. Humans tend to look favorabl…

I've heard a lot of people argue that women and men would have identical preferences, and their different preferences are entirely attributable to differences in socialization from a young age.

As for the "jobs became male dominated when they became lucrative" observation, it seems like very weak evidence for discrimination. If I were a betting man, I would guess that as the field became lucrative, the number of jobs in the field rapidly outpaced the supply of qualified women (how many women were literate in math or programming in a time when it wasn't common for women to go to college at all).

Moreover, women achieved parity with men in fields like medicine and law in the 80s and 90s when discrimination and harassment were pervasive, explicit, and severe by today's standards. What's going on in tech today that only 20% of our workforce is female despite many, considerable advantages:

* Explicit sexual discrimination and harassment have been illegal and taboo for decades

* The overwhelming majority of US tech jobs have been concentrated in the most ideologically progressive counties for decades (one would expect lower levels of harassment and discrimination in these places)

* Every sizable tech company has a dedicated DEI department and quarterly DEI seminars

* Most tech companies have diversity hiring and retention targets

And not only that, but there appears to be a pronounced inverse correlation between gender equality in a society and the careers that women select into. In other words, the societies in which women are the most free are often the societies that have the least even gender/job distributions and vice versa.

All of this is to say that your perception of "left leaning beliefs" is hardly better than the parent's.

Re: Swedish study finds discrimination against men in female-dominated occupations

#209

Post by wrp »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #156
adolph wrote: post #149

I have a developing conjecture that in order to address the perceived problem of higher male per capita in certain occupations, attracting males into occupations with higher female ratios is as important as incentivizing female participation in high-male occupations. I'm no mathematician but I see it in terms of system numbers: Given a set of occupations with different sex ratios, to change the ratio of any specific…

I've not been able to wrap my head around this issue. What is the thinking behind the desire to even sex ratios in various profession? Why are some professions receiving more attention than others when it comes to evening sex ratios. Is a perfect world when every construction site, hospital, and dreary programming job (lets be honest most of them aren't fun) has an even mix of the sexes? What is the benefit? Can some…

I think it is a matter of perceived status. Whenever I see complaint about lack of diversity in some field, it is something that is not only white-male dominated but also high status relative to similar endeavors. People who want to increase representation in higher status areas are trying to improve the perceived status of their cultural group. A type that I encounter is persons of some demographic who want to see greater presence of their kind in areas like the sciences or classical music, but who themselves have no interest in those things. For them, it is not at all about labor economics.

Re: Swedish study finds discrimination against men in female-dominated occupations

#210

Post by eckesicle »

karaterobot wrote: post #83
eckesicle wrote: post #64

Upon reading the headline I immediately wondered if childcare and cleaning were in the set of the female dominated careers. My hypothesis is that men are considered much much riskier hires for certain roles. The reason I thought of these two roles in particular is because socially I've often heard expressed worries that men in daycare are more likely to be sex offenders, and for cleaning I've often come across the se…

Well, sure. Put another way: discrimination is highest in professions where a group is discriminated against the most, and ignoring the strongest sources makes the overall effect weaker. Not big surprises. Do we want to do that though?

The study says nothing about the underlying reasons for that discrimination though. The point of discounting those two roles in my post was to test my personal hypothesis of the underlying cause based on the data at hand - not to trivialise the findings of the authors.
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