How is it possible that girls perform better academically (in 2015) yet are under represented in the top tier of jobs? Either women have no interest in money, academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs, or discrimination is more prevalent then you’d think. I suppose all three could be true.
Having Babies. Really, being a mother is what skews most stats about women on money issues.
There has been policymaking about this in a bunch of european countries, and if they are released from financial constrains (handouts, public housing, whatever) they seem to double down on it.
Let's face it, working, for most people, is something you do out of necessity. Why do we really expect women to have a similar behaviour of men about work, when they have a socially aceptable and now economical venue to avoid it.
There's probably a small percentage of men that find their work interesting. Even smaller for all their work life.
Edit: Please, yeah, I know that raising children is work, pardon my lightly written comment.
> Why do we really expect women to have a similar behaviour of men about work, when they have a socially aceptable and now economical venue to avoid it.
Baby raising is quite important work. I would argue that raising the next generation of workers, taxpayer, customers and pension fund contributors is the most important work of all.
You're completely missing the point of the person's comment...
The top comment is asking why girl's perform better, and yet and under-represented in top tier jobs. The comment you replied to responds that they think it's because of having child and choosing not to go back to work.
At no point are they taking a stance on whether or not raising a child is as important as working a job...
I think YOU'RE missing the point. Childcare is still considered a less important and honorable occupation than pretty much everything else you can do. If you're "just" a parent, you're not considered qualified for really anything else.
That means most men won't do it, because they'll lose status. Meanwhile women will always place lower importance on status than on childcare, and so they will do childcare because no one is available to do it for them.
The disparity won't ever disappear until it's just as valid and socially supported for a man to stay home and raise children, as for a woman.
You're making a straw man argument about the importance of work that wasn't in the original commenter's post at all. Seems like you are bringing bias or an agenda into your comment.
Sure, but that's something most humans naturally want to do, even if they have no financial incentive. Most people don't like having to go to the office 8 hours a day, and very few probably would if money wasn't in the equation.
> Sure, but that's something most humans naturally want to do,
I don't know that is true of most men. Have children? Sure. Raise them? Not so sure. I once read that men wanting to have more children is inversely proportional to the amount of work the mother expects them to contribute.
Men and women contribute to child rearing in different ways.
Women tend to be more nurturing so their role is disproportionately more important during a child's earlier formative years. They also tend to have a stronger orientation toward domestic affairs. Men, on the other hand, tend to be more strongly oriented toward the public sphere. The home is the focal point. Thus women are at the center of the action, as it were, when it comes to the amount of time they spend with children, while men tend to be more strongly motivated to take care of affairs for the sake of their families outside of the home. The home is also associated with greater safety and comfort, which is something women tend to prefer (we also see this reflected in occupational preferences), while the public sphere contains more risk and discomfort, something men prefer to face esp. when the reward is sufficiently high (this is also reflected in occupational preferences; men tend to prefer taking on more dangerous and higher stress jobs and longer hours in exchange for more pay).
I have used the word "tend" for a reason. These are not two sealed off magisteria. Proportion is probably good way to frame things, though to a point. So men also participate in child rearing, esp. where discipline is concerned (the complement of maternal nurturing is the need for paternal authority which serves the child later in other ways like the ability to relate to authority elsewhere in a healthy way). Women also operate in the public sphere and often also work. Conditions and circumstances can also constrain how male and female roles are expressed.
I think their point can be expressed in another way: in the earlier formative years when, as you say, a mother's role is more important, do you think a father would want to have more children if he's expected to be as suited to the mother's role as what a mother is?
If you took a bunch of women that weren't expected to be the primary caregiver, and gave them the same variety of expected hours per day spent on children, I would expect to see a similar correlation.
Which is exactly why many women drop out of the work force to do this important work, and many men would, too, if it was more socially acceptable for them?
When your "customers" or "boss" are people you love vs. a boss or corporation that is more prone to be an asshole than not, and the work of having kids has genetically encoded feel good chemicals while many find work a pure slog, it's not surprising if given the choice people would chose to be mothers vs. workers for a while.
It's not a formal debate, but I think it's rude to misinterpret someone in this way. It's not even a tangential point, because it's not actually connected - it's parallel.
And sure, people do that all the time. People do all sorts of things. It doesn't mean they are communicating effectively, getting any kind of point across or coming to any conclusion at all.
I could start into semantics too, for example saying that people don't bring up tangential points because tangents aren't points they are lines. It wouldn't be a good idea, because it wouldn't further the discussion at all. That's basically what I see happened here.
Pointing out unintended implications of what someone said isn't misinterpreting them. It's connected to the claim parenting is a socially acceptable way for women to avoid work. Their point was clear. The verbal meanings of tangent and point don't disrespect geometry.
That comment seems to be based on a misunderstanding of what "framing" means. Framing pertains to different ways of expressing the same facts, for example the glass is half empty vs. the glas is half full. Whether you consider work to require being hired and paid for it by an employer or understand it in a broader sense as including any activity that is important for society is not a matter of framing. These are fundamentally different concepts of work that also have different extensions.
I think you're being deliberately obtuse and uncharitable to the argument being presented. Any reasonable and charitable reading clearly interprets it as talking about "job for pay" rather than saying "childcare is not work".
..Just have to say that these are terrible reasons to have children.
You produce a small version of yourself and you are emotionally satisfied that something you did will mean something in the end. If you get to raise the child yourself then you get to perpetuate your mental life as well.
Still selfish reasons, but at least much better than producing... laborers.
No one disagrees. We literally have a day to celebrate that and societies for millennia have cherished that. Many wars have been fought in essence so the mothers of their group would have better conditions to be a mother in as it gives their offspring the best chance to thrive.
Most everyone loves their mom more than anything else.
Frankly, I would make the stronger point: it's more important than your job (raising children can be difficult, to be sure, but it's not quite "work" in the sense that work by and large tends to be servile while raising children is a higher end for which work is done). The reason people work is overwhelmingly so that they can support their children and their families.
In the United States in the last 30 years, the percentage of women working in computing fields has decreased significantly. In that same time period, births per women has decreased and the age of first-time mothers has increased.
>Having Babies. Really, being a mother is what skews most stats about women on money issues.
There has been policymaking about this in a bunch of european countries, and if they are released from financial constrains (handouts, public housing, whatever) they seem to double down on it.
Curious as to what you mean by 'doubling down on it'?
You're not wrong in your statement that having kids kills the career of many women. The question is, why? The drive to reproduce is probably our second strongest in the human species, right after survival. Why, then, is it not easier to have kids and a career? It's about as universal a value as we have. Why is it not more supported? Why don't we have any guaranteed child leave in the US? Why don't we have universal daycare / preK?
I say all this as a guy who doesn't even want kids, but I do think it would be better for society if there was more support for parents, even if I paid more taxes to pay for it.
How about increasing the tax credit that goes to all parent, regardless of they choose to do childcare? Maybe for some parents that would be enough that one parent could quit their job and finally have the joy of spending more of their time with their own kid. I don't see why we should subsidize institutional childcare over other forms of caring for the very young.
I'm mostly with you on this, but there's a larger percentage of guys than you think. If you worked in corporate America long enough, especially in tech, you've encountered lots of guys that clearly enjoy being at work more than home.
People are complicated. I had a comment along the same lines as yours, but now that I talk about it, I'm not sure what I'd do. It's a total tossup. Moot point because I don't feel like I can leave the workforce, but it's not so clear.
I do think you brought up a good point though. It's kind of a forbidden dark point, but still one worth considering. What if it really is better to have less money, and not have to deal with any of this work stuff?
Before women were allowed to work the few women that did pursue higher education were basically expected to marry immediately after graduation. There was absolutely zero expectation that you would work a job relevant to your education because you were supposed to be a housewife who is busy with her kids. The biological aspect is probably the biggest driving force.
I'm sorry but why are you so sure they're trying to avoid work? From my experience most women would love to have careers and be financially independent and successful. But babies indeed make it a lot harder -- both from a time/energy perspective and from a discrimination perspective.
In Canada and the US, the state will take children away from parents in poverty rather than hand out money. But then it gets really weird; they then place the children in foster homes, which get significant handouts.
Yeah, probably most? IDK, I don't have the stats at hand, but in plenty of places you're alone agains't what it comes to you, no matter your gender.
The personal and societal reasoning about parenthood changes, but they still do have babies, despite being on their own. For many people, children is their retirement plan.
Anyway, it's not the same to have a nice monthly stipend than a small cheque far in between. Spain, for example, is considerably worse financially-wise for raising a kid than countries more up north. Not only because the country job market is shit (which is important even if you don't work, because your partner has to bring money home), but because the state really doesn't do much about it.
Now imagine living in a place where there isn't really a functional state to look for.
It's not avoiding work, but it is making a choice to pursue one type of work (child rearing) over another (market labor in shitty, unfulfilling, but well-paid jobs). That's a choice women have substantially more ability to make than men.
Some replies might be missing the point that it may well be reasonable to pay people raising children. OP implies it's a handout. I would argue it's an unpaid service to society and those of you relying on a crop of well-educated non-criminals to be your employees and peers are freeloading.
I don't think that the parent comment meant that raising children isn't work. It absolutely is, and an extremely massive one too. What they most likely meant by "avoiding work" is "avoiding a paycheck job".
Even if this were true it still wouldn't explain the difference. This could only be the explanation of two conditions are met:
1. Your cited article is correct.
2. The jobs that are "top tier" indeed require this "top tier" level intelligence. This second point would require some pretty extraordinary evidence to prove. Women have representation (only filtering among women under 40) in jobs that require "high intelligence" yet the discrepancy persists.
> What is behind this discrimination? One possibility is that teachers mark up students who are polite, eager and stay out of fights, all attributes that are more common among girls. In some countries, academic points can even be docked for bad behaviour. Another is that women, who make up eight out of ten primary-school teachers and nearly seven in ten lower-secondary teachers, favour their own sex, just as male bosses have been shown to favour male underlings. In a few places sexism is enshrined in law: Singapore still canes boys, while sparing girls the rod.
I think the answer lies in the fact that in countries like Tunisia for example, women represent over 60% of people working in STEM. Why? Because STEM jobs are the highest paying jobs. So from my perspective, the lack of women in STEM in the U.S. is not an issue but a symptom of a strong economy, as in you don't have to decipher someone's spaghetti code for a living, you can pay the bills doing other things that you are more passionate about.
Indeed. The number of women in STEM fields is also low in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries compared to in-development ones. And, nobody in his/her right mind will accuse the Scandinavian countries of being patriarchal sexists societies.
There are couple more explanations which haven't been mentioned:
1. Time lag. Girls have only been exceeding boys' academic success for 20-30 years; in most fields the top tier of jobs is filled by people in their 50s and 60s, who were educated at a time when girls were underperforming academically. This hypothesis is supported by statistics showing that among childfree adults aged 20-39, women significantly out-earn men.
2. Grading bias. To the extent that success in the workforce correlates with academic success, one would expect it to correlate primarily with the extent of skills and knowledge acquired rather than with the grades received; it may be that girls' academic success does not reflect particularly greater academic skills. This hypothesis is supported by studies comparing coursework to exams; girls vastly outperform on homework but only very slightly on exams.
Performing well academically usually means that the student is good at at completing assignments in a way that aligns with the teachers grading rubric. I think boys have a certain contempt for that for a variety of reasons (at least mine do) so they focus their attention on how to work around the system, which probably yields an advantage later in the workplace.
Because teacher on previous lesson tried to teach the class e.g about using derivatives to find extremas, and now he's testing whether you managed to learn it.
his job is mainly to teach you stuff.
Of course there are also tests where you can use anything you want as long as it is formally correct e.g leaving school exams, end of semester exams and many more...
It's not the greatest approach but I guess it scales?
I see the role of a teacher as someone who helps you learn, rather than someone who only teaches you things.
If a student finds a particular method or approach easier to comprehend, shouldn't the teacher adapt to that rather than forcing you to use the "correct" method?
If a teacher is dogmatic in their approach, I would call that poor teaching.
>If a student finds a particular method or approach easier to comprehend, shouldn't the teacher adapt to that rather than forcing you to use the "correct" method?
your school leaving exams or next school will probably not care
and they will test whatever they want, so why take a risk?
you can be challenged by a task which is doable in both methods, but "recommened" approach needs 3min in order to get this done,
meanwhile your's solution needs 15min. I mean here that standarized tests aren't some kind of trickery, they just tend to test how many various approaches do you know.
___________
also how many times can it be done? (deciding that it's ok to use other/easier method instead of "state of art" solution) once? twice? thrice? very often?
Someone commented that it's about "babies" and that's so incredibly right. But I think it's more benign than it may sound.
We're seeing this right now in my family as we have a young child. Both my wife and I are in demanding STEM fields (me in tech and she in medicine.) My wife is seeing an opportunity to cut back on her hours/pressure so she can spend more time with the baby. She's not "forced" to do it (plenty of women w. kids do her current job) but that's where her heart is leading her and we're lucky to be able to make this tradeoff.
I do think think this is a pretty universal thing. In two income families, if one parent wants to step back to do more family stuff, it's much more likely to the the woman who wants to do that. Similarly if one parent is much more naturally inclined to go conquer the work world, it's the father.
There are plenty of cases where that goes the other way but I think that is way less common. To be clear, it's not about the work place being hostile to women, it's not about "I wear the pants around here so you stay home w the babies" - it's about where our natural interests lie and how we act on them when we have a choice. Which to me sounds fine even if the outcome of it can be read as systemic imbalance.
How is it possible that girls perform better academically (in 2015) yet are under represented in the top tier of jobs?
I'd argue mostly for 1) and 2).
Here is my model:
1. Men have higher variance on any skill, even if men and women have the same average level, men will outnumber women at the highest and lowest levels by 2 or 3 to 1.
2. The median girl is much more likely to do her busy work because her teacher tells her to. Boys are more likely to do some bit of work only because they see some advantage to themselves. Boys are more likely to do unassigned work if they see some sort of long-term advantage to it (eg, learning programming on the side). The boy of 40th percentile aptitude, who knows he will never have a job doing math, isn't going to try that hard at his math homework. But that same boy might tinker with his car on the side and become a great mechanic.
When we reach the real world, males are finally doing work that has a pay-off, not just busy work. So they actually start trying hard, as compared to schoolwork where the median girl does more homework than the median boy.
The median girl works harder than the median boy at busywork. But when we reach the real world, the top man in a given career path is working just as hard as the top woman, and because of higher male variance, there are more men of top abilities that get the top positions.
On top of that, in my experience, women do make different choices with career paths. Men do seem to seek career paths that pay well, women often want to go into "non-profits" and areas with a "social mission." It's interesting how we moved toward an expectation that women work instead of staying home -- but we taught girls that the purpose of work is "self-actualization", while more men still have the expectation that they are to find a job that can support a family. (These are gross generalizations, and broad trends I have observed, obviously, many exceptions exist).
And as others pointed out, many women, correctly IMO, would much rather stay home with their babies or take a "mommy track" job than take a high-powered career path.
A great deal of teaching is built around the idea of students sitting still in one place for a long period of time, listening intently and working quietly. Boys seem to have a lot more difficulty with this (on average) than girls do.
That's one example but there are plenty of others.
yes I would agree that boys have trouble with this, as that's what the featured article effectively states. however, saying that the methods themselves somehow are predisposed to benefit women is one that I'd like to see research on.
You're stating that there exists teaching methods that somehow benefit women, and not men as a function of their gender. That's an extraordinary claim and requires evidence. You can't assert your claim is true and look at the article to justify the original claim that you're asserting to begin with.
Sorry, what? I gave an example of a teaching method which creates difficulties for boys relative to girls. You agreed boys have trouble with it. What is left to discuss?
Boys having trouble with a teaching method does not mean said teaching method is inherently discriminatory towards boys nor does it mean that its favorable towards girls. Do you not understand? I'm sorry if I'm not being clear. Nothing you have said has illustrated things being somehow favorable to girls.
One group of individual doing better at something does not mean the thing is favorable towards the group.
The article is about girls outperforming relative to boys. In that context anything which penalises boys benefits girls, by definition. This is basic logic. I'm not sure what else can be said here, so let's leave it at that.
This is just my gumption, but I don’t think kids are blind to gender growing up. I’m curious if the attentiveness of boys would change if they had more frequent male teachers in earlier grades.
In many subfields of biology, women have achieved numerical parity at all levels (IE, there are roughly 50% women in entry and leadership positions). It seems like some highly quantitative fields which have traditionally been male-dominated (CS, physics) may very well be practicing some sort of entry discrimination. It's unclear what the full set of contributing factors are.
This is often forgotten. In aggregate, for every woman persuaded to become a bricklayer instead of a kindergarten teacher, a man must be persuaded to do the reverse. This is just never going to happen across all industries.
I think the training environment at the undergraduate level is still toxic for women. I graduated 4 years ago, and while I wasn't in the CS program I had a female friend who was and she often lamented how isolating that program could be. This was a huge program at a huge school (50k undergrad), yet she was often one of only a few women in the program, and as she progressed she became even more of a minority as others switched majors. Of course there were hardly any women professors or role models as well.
Engineering is a field that selects for a certain personality, not all the time, but I think everyone here knows at least a couple classmates like this who are pretty arrogant, stubborn, self validating, the type to argue with the TA over their wrong homework answer for half the class, and never one to admit shortcomings. It's also a major that encourages regular group projects, where you might be stuck with personalities like this, or legitimately total creeps with questionable hygiene (I've seen all of this even outside CSE in my program). I think we all remember a few creeps from the undergrad days, too. Frankly, many of these men, especially in that age between 18-22 when you are basically a high schooler in maturity and might never had a female friend before due to social awkwardness, are overtly misogynistic, maybe without even knowing it just by cracking dumb jokes for cheap laughs among their male friends.
In majors with more representation among women, you are less likely to be saddled with these personalities (or even have to do massively weighted capstone group projects), and more likely to have camaraderie among people in the same boat as you, and are more likely to see through the major without switching to another one.
I didn't mean to imply that at all, although it does seem like the first reasonable target: all job categories, except for ones that require people to be a specific gender for some reason, should have participation roughly proportional to the proportion of that gender (or other attribute) in society.
I'm not certain that's the right goal, but what I said above was working a model where 50% women participation seemed like the expected amount.
Would you consider kindergarten teaching to require a specific gender? Or carpentry? If not, please explain how you are going to persuade a huge number of women who wanted to be kindergarten teachers to instead become carpenters, while also persuading an equal number of men to do the reverse. That is what your target requires (across many occupations). It will never happen.
I'm not trying to push people into roles they don't want (I think I've made clear that the approach I described is a simple one to start at, not a good policy). My model in this case (which doesn't really map to reality) is "gender preference for roles is unbiased uniform random".
I don't really think job preferences are that strongly encoded in gender, I think far more men could be kindergarten teachers and more women carpenters, although men who try to become teachers face a huge amount of extra work because people don't trust men with kids as much.
Funnily proponent of the theory 'make everything 50%'
tendd to think of an individuals free will as the most feeble thing that can be broken oh so easily by almost anything.
I don't know if they actually perceive this, but, the fact that some people can automatically assume bias without deeper investigation when their whole fight is, trying to fight preconceived notions, its sort of ironic.
Sure, study WHY certain fields are underrepresented and try to fix systematic problems. But if your blind go to answer is, 'certain group of people are to blame' - just maybe you're exibiting behaviors that you are try to reduce in others and it may not lead to real solutions..
that is one of the reasons I said my approach was a good start.
It's unclear, in a truly equal opportunity society, what the gender preference breakdowns for specific job roles would be. A simple first order approximation is "no preference".
I agree! I think trying to apply a high level value will result in more discrimination, however. i.e, if we see X group of society under/overrepresented by Y%, we do not have enough understanding to draw any meaningful conclusions from this. Large enough discrepancies should be investigated as possibly a canary for discrimination, but in some cases there may not be any (NFL lineman will likely always be men).
I think the correct answer is to evaluate people as individuals on their merits. However, this is expensive (in many ways) and still flawed. My view is that we are much close to coming up with a "fair interview" than we are with understanding the massive amounts of complexity explaining discrepancies in human populations.
> A simple first order approximation is "no preference".
That's a reasonable first-order approximation, but it seems not to be reflected in the data, which show that as societies become more equal, gender disparities in field choice increase.
> all job categories, except for ones that require people to be a specific gender for some reason, should have participation roughly proportional to the proportion of that gender (or other attribute) in society.
> It seems like some highly quantitative fields which have traditionally been male-dominated (CS, physics) may very well be practicing some sort of entry discrimination
Maybe I misread, but I interpreted this follow up statement as "50% is correct, here's why (CS, physics) may not be at this level".
About 20% of people in CS are women. Ordinary male variability, difference in median aptitude, and employer selectivity could explain some of the disparity. But 20% is extraordinary. And people rationalized the disparity in biology the same ways people rationalize the disparity in CS.
Maybe linguistics vs. philosophy is a good example. They are not too different from each other and I've studied both of them. My impression has always been that male vs. female linguistics professors were roughly 50:50, whereas at least in the past there were way more male than female philosophy professors. It seems to be getting better now in philosophy, though.
However, I could be totally wrong about this, as I've never bothered to check the figures.
I don’t know how true this is, but one thing I’ve seen referenced a few times is that students perform better under teachers of their gender, especially at younger ages. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine the same applies for employee performance in the workplace.
If that were true, given that K-12 teachers are overwhelmingly female, then you would expect females to do better in school. Conversely I believe managerial jobs skew male, which you would expect to benefit the performance of males in such workplaces.
Again I don’t have a study handy so I’m not sure how empirical that is, it may just be conjecture.
There's also the major factor of children. Women get a lot of scolding from society if they prioritize their career over children. Men generally aren't shamed to such a degree, and workaholic dads are even lauded as being "diligent bread winners."
Also, for many moms, working late in the office isn't even an option. They have to leave the office before day care closes. Or, in the case of women who can't afford day care, they have to take inferior job offers with inferior hours to work around their kids' school and care schedule. These things can make it extremely hard to be viewed as "managerial material" and rack up promotions. (Of course, dads face these issues too, and single dads have it especially hard. But it's statistically more likely to impact moms.)
Also, men just aren't as concerned over how much their significant other makes. Women, on the other hand, tend to more heavily judge the worthiness of a date on their career and income. So there's more incentive for men to chase after high paying, high power careers.
Another reason people don't often take into account is that men have an extra incentive for earning more money as their worth as a person is judged more upon what they make than it is for a woman (women have other things they are judged more upon). So each dollar, beyond the utility of having an extra dollar, also makes them 'more of a man' to use a phrase that tries to condense all of complexities of society's judgements down into 10 letters. Many of the explanations commonly given, like men being willing to take on more dangerous jobs, can be partly explained by their judgment as a person (and as a parent) being derived from what they make to a stronger extent than for a woman.
>women have no interest in money
Just to clarify, there is a difference between no interest and less interest, and also a difference between interest in money and interest in the status associated with a certain level of salary/income beyond what comes just from the money earned.
My graduating class was remarked on through multiple schools as an exceptionally smart class. We had lots of very bright boys and girls. Maybe our class was unusual in other ways so this isn't part of a broader trend or tendency, but practically all the smart girls did all their homework and maintained a 3.5GPA or higher (most more like 3.8+), while probably half or more of the smart boys skipped lots of it and pulled Cs and Bs (with the occasional A in classes that had little homework). Meanwhile, those same boys who skipped much of their homework scored in the top percentile or two when it came time for ACTs and SATs and achieved excellent marks on annual state testing (not that the latter matters whatsoever for students), were often in gifted programs or active on "smart kid" extracurriculars, et c.
So those boys "did poorly in school" (which, to be sure, wasn't a great thing for e.g. college admissions above high-tier state schools) but that didn't give the full picture.
I would agree with this. However Ive seen very assertive women take advantage of that as much as men or even more, and where I work its probably <10% of my co workers of either sex take active roles in “managing” their career as opposed to just showing up and hoping their work gets noticed, or just coasting and enjoying the paycheck they have (while still grumbling about fading benefits, of course)
Now consider the fact that there is a limit on the top grade and much more more at the bottom of the grading scale. If you assume the variability hypothesis is true, it seems inevitable that the average for girls would be higher.
Many of the above are true. Especially, academic skill is one of the most overrated abilities out there. You're better off with zero skill or being actively harmful, if you know how to play the game and have the right face (I don't mean literally, though sometimes that too. Do you say the right things and have the correct manners?)
I'd add that most men really don't have the opportunity to be a homemaker. So most men don't even have the option of ruining their career to take care of kids. It might be seen as "okay" for men to be stay at home dads, but I know all it's going to do is be devastating for my social status.
It's actually interesting to talk about because technically these things are true for women too, but we have a whole industry and philosophy around motherhood; it's seen as a more important role than fatherhood. I'm a guy that doesn't really care about money and it hasn't occurred to me to try being a full time father. It might be the better fit for me, but I don't see that as even an option. I'd be worried that I'd be judged as unuseful and unattractive, discarded, and left without any compensation (alimony, child support, ect.) or say in anything.
We need to be doing way more to soften the blow of parenthood for anyone. I also think we need some kind of way of honoring fatherhood, as we've done for motherhood, or to do so in a non-gendered way. It's not just about women not taking jobs that result in less pay, it's men refusing to take jobs (parenthood) that are harmful to their career, because their career is all they have.
I'd like to see data on academic performance in specialties. Most well-paying first world countries employ specialists (eg, doctors, programmers, lawyers, accountants, etc). Recall Simpson's paradox in statistics, where a general distribution doesn't have to apply to the individual sub-sets.
FTA:
> Women who go to university are more likely than their male peers to graduate, and typically get better grades. But men and women tend to study different subjects, with many women choosing courses in education, health, arts and the humanities, whereas men take up computing, engineering and the exact sciences. In mathematics women are drawing level; in the life sciences, social sciences, business and law they have moved ahead.
This paragraph seems to support the idea of my above musing.
> academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs
I highly doubt that there is no correlation, but I doubt that education is the sole factor. Girls performance over boys is a slight, but significant, edge, but since success likely draws from a handful of other factors, a few of them having a counter slight, but significant edge, might be enough to swing the other direction.
No interest in money is an extreme position to take. Small differences in interest can lead to big differences in outcome. There is also some time lag with this data, studies have shown boys doing worse academically over time (relative to girls) so the age group in 2015 is largely in school, university, or just entering the workforce. Women in their 20's already outperform men in their 20's in earnings and we don't yet know if that trend is going to carry on into later years given new ability gaps. It hasn't carried on historically due to a wide variety of reasons including the adverse affects of maternity leave on careers but we haven't seen an academic gap of this magnitude between the genders either before so that may be changing. It's also worth noting that a lot of top earning careers are looking at a slice of top performers academically, and the distribution of academic performance for males tends to be higher variance so even with a lower average we may see similar numbers of top performers in both genders.
I guess it also has to do with the fact that this is a relatively recent change. Probably we'll see the effects of this in future generations of industry demographics, for now though the research and statistics are pretty clear in that women are underrepresented in STEM across the board; but this is something changing rapidly, especially in tech.
Top tier jobs need to use top tier statistics. The top 10% of male test-takers and top 6% of female test-takers score at least 700 on the math SAT. Over twice as many boys as girls get 800 on the math SAT. The ratio gets even higher beyond that. This is despite the systemic bias in the school system against boys.
Isn't this the standard bimodal distribution we expect? Boys make up the majority of CEOs but they also make up the vast majority of criminals. Median girls are smarter than median boys, but the distribution is less wide on a population level.
The first is from a table of percentiles published by the College Board, I remembered that statistic off-hand, I think you find it by googling, or on their website. The second is something you can find somewhere, I know I've seen the raw data at some point. Some googling will at least find articles referring to that ratio, like this one: https://economics.mit.edu/files/7598
Interestingly enough, that has a graph of the AMC math contest breakdown by sex. Check out page 7 (page number 115). When you start getting in the upper percentiles there I think that culture might magnify the male/female ratio a bit (this is based on personal experience), but at least in my high school the center mass of the scores up to 100+ or so was filled out by teachers just signing up a bunch of good students with no particular involvement in mathematical extracurriculars.
Tournament theory - top tier jobs (particularly executive ones) are a competition where rank-ordering contestants is relatively easy, but quantifying performance is hard. So one solution is to give the winner a big prize, the losers a smaller consolation prize, and if you ignore risk-aversion this is as economically efficient in terms of incentives as paying for piece-work.
The problem is that people are risk adverse, and have varying levels of commitment towards continuing to winning the tournament. This variation has a gender skew, too, which IMO does a lot to explain much of gender disparity in multiple fields. FWIW I count software development in here, as tournament theory explains both developer wages, the number of unqualified applicants, and the gender disparity.
Women have different incentives. Having a career is not really necessary and the reasons to have one are different.
Us men need to compete with each other to be the best providers. Women just need to pick one of us, and then their goal is to retain that man in their lives. Having a career does not factor much into that. Especially having a high stress career would maybe even hurt such goals.
Some men and some women get so caught up spinning the hamster wheel, that they loose track of why they are spinning the wheel in the first place. But most of us in general are aware of the reasons.
Lags in real time systems. To get into high paying jobs in most fields requires a 20-30 year apprenticeship.
So if by 2015 girls are performing better academically, then the expected time to see this in society would be 2035 or so. Just as with universal education, it starts to be available from the early 20th century, but it's not until post-war that large numbers of men from previously uneducated families start making it into the skilled workforce.
Our limited view at any given point is just a snapshot on eternity.
>academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs
This is a big part of it. Let's look at what "academic skills" means specifically in the US:
- you perform well on standardized tests
- you perform well on rubric-graded essays
- you do all of your homework, and you get As on every assignment
this leads to:
- you get into a good university
- you (presumably) perform adequately or well at said university
Every student who performs well academically has a similar path to this point, but then there's divergency.
Tech is the only top tier job where your educational pedigree is not going to hold you back throughout your entire career. It's not going to hurt to have a degree from a top school, but it won't cripple your opportunities, unlike finance, law, and medicine.
Based on how top tier tech companies hire for engineering positions that aren't internships, it seems that they do not see a link between academic performance and engineering competency.
I agree with the approach taken by said companies. Thus (imo) for tech, it is fully expected for there to be no correlation between academic performance and representation in the top tier of jobs, because tech is the most meritocratic top tier industry. It's obviously not perfect, but it's leagues ahead of the other big industries.
Few years ago at a meeting (carbon emission reduction association) it was asked for the people in the room to send proposals / ideas on a google forms. After 5 minute the guy in charge of the meeting started to cough saying 'ok we found a few things we could do but we have a problem because there is not a single lady in the list'.
We were all newcomers, all unknown to each others, the tone was as chill as any meetup I've attended (no male dominated topic, no a-priori tribes or groups to scare new people from joining). My only idea so far is that women and men have different instincts on how to come forward with their ideas/desires.
Academic grades measure skills that are only applicable at entry level jobs that are about following simple known rules. I knew many female students in school and college that got top marks on every subject, and yet they were mediocre in real life and never achieved much 10 years after graduation. I think that's precisely because their patience to follow silly rules didn't help them to compete in the world where there are no rules. On the other hand, I also knew many guys from the same classes who absolutely sucked at every subject except one or two where they shined and they have made impressive careers.
I decided to underrepresent myself in the top tier of jobs because I do not want to live a life of a workaholic. You won't get into the top tier by doing 40 hours of work weekly.
Perhaps women have better work/life balance on average.
Or, people pursue their passions as young people without much regard for what a professional career would look like.
I fiddled with programming and computers as a young teen because I found it interesting, not because I thought I could eventually make money with it. My good friend wrote fantasy stories all the time, because that was her interest.
20 years later, I can retire whenever I want because of the choices I made as a nerdy 13 year old, whereas my friend is getting paid $40k/yr editing a small newspaper.
I think Jordan Peterson is correct on that one: the real question isn't why women don't go after those kinds of jobs, but why anybody is willing to work so hard and to give up so much for incomes that allow a marginally better life (e.g going from 40k a year to 100k a year is a huge improvement, going from 200k to 300k?).
Also, for women anyway, the kind of work it takes to get to the top effectively means they aren't going to be having babies. A man aged 45 can marry a women aged 30 and become a dad - women who marry younger men aren't more likely to have kids because of it and at 45 it is unlikely for a woman to have kids at all.
A lot of literature seems to focus around the gap being mostly that girls
- Behave better (lower energy and "disruptive behavior" in school)
- Are better at following instructions
These two traits, while rewarded in the school system, are not really relevant at the top tier of jobs. There's no instructions to follow when you are building the next Google: nobody did it before you.
There are other familial factors that are often at play. For example, many choose to delay their careers in lieu of raising children. Not all women make this decision, but a sizable number do.
That said, there is likely no single cause for the disparity, there are likely many factors at play at the same time.
This shouldn't be a controversial take. It is Occam's razor
after all.
We know that before the tech industry became popular and a way to make good money, women displayed little to no interest in being associated with programming "nerds" which were predominantly men to the extent that men over-represented the group of socially outcast nerds. This was mostly an American phenomenon, and other countries did not share this social hierarchy, hence the data on girls performing better academically outside of the US.
> women displayed little to no interest in being associated with programming "nerds" which were predominantly men to the extent that men over-represented the group of socially outcast nerds
When did this change? I either missed it or this was always an exaggeration in media.
I think attitudes changed a lot in the late 90s/early 00s.
The Internet suddenly became a big thing, PCs massively growing in popularity, and the image of gaming was changing, becoming a less nerdy pastime with the arrival of the Playstation.
Not really sure if it encouraged a more diverse set of youngsters to develop a serious interest in computing though, as by then we'd already got to the point where 'learning to use a computer' now meant Word+Excel rather than BASIC or LOGO
I'm not denying it's true, but I have little patience for this argument because we can't actually do anything about it. Injustice today? Yes, we should absolutely stop that where ever we find it, but what am I supposed to do today about the fact that women could not vote in 1920? Words are cheap, actions matter. I'd much rather focus on current discrimination than dig up injustices from the past.
This is the right answer, certainly a larger factor than anything else being discussed here. In the US, women were only granted the right to vote a century ago, and a time when it was considered improper for well-to-do women to work is within the memory of many living Americans.
I doubt it's "expectations of being a good mother". Countries with the most liberal attitudes toward gender have some of the most extreme occupational gender disparities and vice versa.
I don't think those are what the parent was referring to as 'top tier'. Those pay well, but in both cases they are highly paid because of risk and life disruption (having to spend extended time away from home on rigs). It's my understanding that men are naturally less risk-averse, so the gender differences there seem natural to me.
I'm betting they meant CEO positions, board positions, and high ranking corporate officers.
Meaning on average, most women list towards them. There are large differences between genders in terms of career motivations, interests etc. Proven in many studies repeatedly.
> There are large differences between genders in terms of career motivations, interests etc.
I think this would be the case for the hypothetical “party if you're a man, standing outside in the rain if you're a woman” job, too. How do you know you're describing something about the people you're measuring, as opposed to the people around them?
>Because women naturally list towards jobs that pay less,
Couldn't one then also argue that jobs women list towards get paid less? E.g. instead of asking why women gravitate to those jobs that are paid less, ask why the jobs women gravitate towards are paid less.
The fact that daycare workers (a job dominated 97% by females) earn $35k a year while carpenters, welders, and electricians (jobs dominated 98% by males) earn $80k is not a fact that I think is attributable to bigoted sexism.
I don't know if this is a good faith question, but the big obvious reason you've omitted is that women frequently drop out of the work force (or shift to part-time work) because they want to be directly involved in raising their children.
In part, because salary has to do with agreeableness and many cultures have stupid expectations for women such as them expected to be more agreeable.
Also, the likelihood of career advancement is lower for people perceived as being more neurotic, and many cultures have stereotypes consisting of women being more neurotic than men.
