> countries that have the free-est social expectations(e.g. Scandinavian countries) have the most diverse differences between men and women. From my personal experience going to a university in the UK and studying CS, I could count maybe 3-5 women out of a cohort of 350+ students. I don't think you can accuse the UK of actively discouraging women from joining these fields, quite the opposite. So why don't they choose these high paying fields in such progressive countries such as UK?
Well, there are two options: either this is right and there is a vast gulf between the workings of the male and female mind, or these countries are not as free of social expectations as they like to think they are. Not sure how the UK and Northern Europe compare, but a (female) friend who left Romania for Germany was shocked at how large the social pressure on women to give up working after having a child are. She has had multiple colleagues directly and indirectly pushing her into feeling like a bad mother for holding a full-time job while having a child at home.
In my own university days in the CS department, there was a marked difference between the number of men and women, but nowhere near what you're saying: it was more like 10 women for every 20 men, maybe a little less. I've had several female professors, including the head of the Polytechnic institute and the head of the CS department. In my job today, I am on a team of 4 men and 3 women (all programmers), working on a project with a female project lead, and probably overall 30 men and 6 women in Dev, and 50 men and 14 women if you include QA (who also do Python-based automated testing). This is on a project deep in the world of computer networking, not some soft field. And the team is about half in Romania, half in India - not exactly countries known for their courageous tearing down of social norms.
So again, I'm very skeptical of claims that a society where a major professions are overwhelmingly dominated by either men or women is "(one of) the most free societies in the world in terms of choice". It's possible, but I think it's far more likely that the studies claiming this were simply wrong, given the outcomes. Especially since I doubt nurses are significantly better viewed in Northern Europe in terms of job prestige and intellectual rigor than in other places.
> But surely the social consensus that engineers are more prestigious than nurses is on the society and not on Peterson.
Well, if he's saying that women are more fit to be nurses and men are more fit to be engineers, than I feel justified in saying that he's implying women are less suited than men for intellectual labor (not necessarily dumber, but at least less likely to enjoy it). That may not be his intention (though I believe it may well be), but he also doesn't go out of his way to disclaim it.
> So why don't they choose these high paying fields in such progressive countries such as UK?
My strong belief is that it's a problem of education and social pressures. Even in Romania (to be clear, I keep bringing it up because it's the country where I have the most experience), where women do choose these fields in much bigger numbers for whatever reasons, there are deep biases against women's ability in this field. Female colleagues were more likely to be a professor's target for ridicule, or simply receive lower grades on exams for the same mistakes. They would be less likely to be given as positive examples, and less likely to be encouraged towards this field.
> I find it refreshing to see somebody who makes mistakes in the search of answers, but admits they were wrong and perhaps corrects themselves
Yes, that is a quality I also appreciate in people and in Jordan Peterson in particular. I have also seen him change his opinion on the right to deny service to gay people during an interview (he was for this right initially on grounds of freedom of religion essentially, but then when presented with the fact that the same arguments were often used to deny black people service 50 years ago, he took a moment, thought about it, and admitted that his previous position was wrong and that people shouldn't be denied service based on their sexuality). I truly appreciate this, and it is quite a rare thing to see.
> but you can compare two individuals with different IQs from similar socio-economic backgrounds and statistically IQ is a very good predictor of success.
Yes, agreed - that's why I'm not necessarily against the idea that IQ is meaningful at least to some extent. I do think however that the moment you start comparing IQ results across populations, biases quickly creep in and it gets much harder to tell if the difference is caused by a difference in the underlying IQ or in the test itself. Even if comparing between two similar-income American (non-recent immigrants) families in the same city in America, one with black skin and the other with white skin, there is some SMALL chance that there are inherent biases, either internal or in the test, that may affect the validity of results. And from what I've read, many such comparisons are far, far from this close. Some famous books on the topic, such as "The Bell Curve", include horribly, obviously biased studies, such as comparing the IQs of white and black kids as measured by apartheid South Africa!