In fact, that seems to be the problem: no amount of discrimination against men resolves that women simply are choosing careers in a different distribution to what men do, but the only policy lever that can really be utilized is discrimination at various stages of education or employment.
This has left people aiming for a fantasy, and using increasingly aggressive discrimination to try and carry it out, biology be damned.
Why is that, though?
Are women not encouraged to pursue technology careers? Or are they being encouraged to chose other careers instead?
Are they driven away from it by a toxic work place culture?
Or just the perception of tech as having toxic workplace cultures?
Are women moving into roles with more flexibility because they are expected to take on more domestic duties?
Or my hunch... Do women just feel less comfortable entering an industry with such an unbalanced gender ratio to begin with, and it becomes a self perpetuating cycle?
You say Biology be damned, but I don't think it's settled that biology is the main factor here.
And I'm not saying it is or it isn't. I'm saying we don't know.
I used to work at school. Not for a long time, but enough to make some observations. One of them: school kids are passionate. If they're interested in something, no amount of persuasion, toxicity or whatever else will distract them.
What I don’t understand is why so many people insist that this must be the explanation, as if the current state of things is definitely a level playing field (or biased toward women) and the fact that there are so many more men in the field must therefore be due to something innate.
We’re only a few decades out from a time when women couldn’t open a bank account without their husband’s permission, and when raping a woman was perfectly legal as long as you were married to her. I think we should give it a little more time and effort before we declare that everything is now fair and any remaining discrepancies must be biological.
Or, like another commented suggested, maybe something about STEM appeals to men disproportionately.
If I had to guess, it's probably a combination of multiple factors. STEM isn't for everyone. But at a young age, more men are encouraged to pursue it. The high salary of tech jobs might attract men more than women, if men face more pressure to make a lot of money. Now you have a male dominated industry. And that starts to self perpetuate. Young boys see role models and women don't. Women outnumbered in male dominated workplaces become subject to more harassment. STEM starts to become a "man" thing, and less women feel like pursuing the career, especially when there are so many other occupations that seem more interesting. I think that's a plausible explanation for how we got to where we are today.
But nobody knows for sure. My point is, biology shouldn't be the default answer whenever we see gender gaps.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
Quote:
The upshot of this research is neither especially feminist nor especially sad: It’s not that gender equality discourages girls from pursuing science. It’s that it allows them not to if they’re not interested.
To answer that I would compare it to a field like finance, where people are well paid and over worked. I think the money comes first, then the men, and with them the bro culture. So my hunch is that men will disproportionately do anything for a dollar. And no-one notices because they are busy wondering where the women are.
This this is a minority, that stance does not generalize to people on the left in general.
Because historically the trends of CS grads proves this is a false statement [1] so I'm curious where this statement comes from.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
Biology is not "preventing" women, it's directing their inclination. Women have a ton of opportunities, and it's just as likely that as CS blew up they decided they didn't want to and didn't need to take on the long hours and relative social isolation that professional engineering entails.
And making biological arguments without any sort of citation or statistical inference is illinformed. You haven't explained what exactly caused the trend reversal in the 80s other than an incredibly strained appeal to biology, which also mischaracterizes software engineering as a whole. Professional engineering is hardly a socially isolated career.
Women’s interest in comp sci has experienced two booms and is otherwise somewhat stable.
