This is a well-studied area, and the preferences are clearly biological.
Boys “thing-orientation” and girls preference for “faces and dolls” show up in, for example, (a) neonatal human babies, (b) young rhesus monkeys and (c) chimpanzees babies. Also seen in a bunch of other studies.
For the people who are disturbed because this doesn’t match your world-view; remember that this is two bell curves with different medians. There is significant overlap at the individual level, but also large differences in tails, which explain the reality we see around us (some occupations dominated by women or men respectively).
For this to be biological and not cultural we would need to see evidence that this happens before baby/infant primates are old enough to observe their parents performing similar behaviors, or when raised in isolation. The only citation here that matches that is the first one, and even then the experimenter was a part of the experiment and not blinded to infant sex, so there is a major possible source of bias there, and more recent papers appear to contradict this effect [1]. Rather than cite one-off studies from the 2000s this is a situation where a meta-analysis or review would be ideal, but I don't see one in a quick search. If you are aware of one that would be helpful to better understand this claim.
I cited the 2000 study because it was the first one doing this type of experiment at a very early age (the babies were 36 hours! old).
No, that's wrong, it was properly blinded:
The videotapes were coded by two judges who were blind to the infant’s sex, to calculate the number of seconds
the infants looked at each stimulus. A second observer (independent of the first pair and also blind
to the infants’ sex) was trained to use the same coding technique for 20 randomly selected
infants to establish reliability.
If you want more, here is another one on newborn macaques:
I'm not convinced. The fact that young male monkeys choose firetrucks over dolls rather strongly indicates that the study is bogus and there is some (unconscious) influence from the experimenter. How can monkeys instinctively know what a fire truck is? The explanation about females preferring faces is just a post-hoc rationalisation.
To what degree does a monkey know what a fire truck is, compared to a child? Yes the child might even understand that it's a vehicle, but as far as being a toy is concerned, it's a block with wheels, as long as the monkey is not pretending firefighters come and go from the fire truck (which children also don't do, unless it explicitly included small figurines, functional doors etc) I really don't see the problem.
But surely if there is a clear difference in the data, we should be looking for an explanation, right? Of course it's possible for experimental methods to be flawed, but as the results from multiple studies pile up, that becomes less and less plausible as an explanation.
Because one is a verifiable unusual and complex object (things) and another is seen as another of the same or similar species, activating the temporal lobe more (people).
You don't have to comprehend or understand a firetruck to see it is a very different environmental object to another being.
Roughly 60% of accountants are women. What is the biological argument for that?
65% of realtors are women, but in commercial real estate it's only 35% women. Is that biologically driven? Seems like it's just socially harder for women to break into commercial real estate compared to residential real estate.
While I am sure there are some biologically driven preferences between men and women, I think it's absurd to assert that these choices are "clearly biological" and that people who disagree just "don't like that it doesn't match their world view".
Can you seriously claim with a straight face that accounting more nurturing/social/"faces and dolls" than software engineering? I think the social dynamics are just more welcoming of women in accounting than software engineering at this point in time.
Realtor and accountant (the majority that are personal/small business accountants, not big 4/corporate) are both jobs you can do part time and out of your home and are very people focused.
It doesn't seem like a convincing argument to define accounting as a "people focused profession" now that it's a women-majority profession. If it was majority male, I think it would be used as an example of how "men like numbers".
I could argue that software engineering can be quite people focused, easily done from home, and in some cases part-time.
70% of chefs are men. Are men biologically predisposed to belong in the kitchen? I think a more likely explanation is that women couldn't get financing to open their own restaurants. It wasn't until 1974 that the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed. And it wasn't until 1988 that the Women's Business Ownership Act allowed women to get a business loan without a male co-signer.
What is a more likely explanation for the fact that 70% percent of chefs are men: a) men are biologically disposed to working in a kitchen, or b) until pretty recently women couldn't get financing to open restaurants on their own, so they didn't become chefs.
Firstly, this difference is based on statistical extremes. Women and men are more the same than they are different, from a temperament perspective. Agreeableness is the big five dimension that stands out the most here. Men are more likely to be disagreeable, women agreeable. Disagreeable people are more likely to be into "things" vs people. Agreeable is the opposite. In more egalitarian nations, where women are given more equal opportunities, they are actually MORE likely to follow careers that follow this temperamental observation. You can look to western europe, and then the Scandinavian countries as an example of progressively more egalitarian society.
> 65% of realtors are women, but in commercial real estate it's only 35% women.
The cynical answer is that attractive women with large breasts influence the decisions of men making largely consumerist purchases (let's be honest, beyond 2000 sq ft with basic functional materials and appliances, it's a purely status purchase), whereas when buying a commercial property you have to worry about your fiduciary duty to your shareholders and are much more focused on the ROI of the deal.
Actually, on average, women tend to make more decisions regarding major household decisions [0]. But hey, feel free to decide the only way a woman could possibly undertake a job is because of tits.
What makes an occupation people-oriented vs things-oriented? Is a software developer who makes a dating app doing one or the other? What about the designer?
Is being a doctor one or the other? You need to be able to say difficult things to people, and a lot of doctors will tell you they're doing it to help people. But doing surgery is presumably technical in nature.
Is there an acknowledged way these categories are determined?
Sure, the grey zones might be hard to pick out but it does seem like there are some clear extremes. "Locomotive engineers and operators" is 92% male yet "Registered nurses" is 87% female. If you look at all the male-dominant and female-dominant occupations, there does seem to be some sort of pattern which (for lack of more precise terminology) seems to be well-described as "people-oriented" and "thing-oriented".
Go through the list, look at the entries which are either <20% female or >80% female, and tell me if you don't see the same pattern:
Software development is playing with legos for a living, except with a billion pieces and the ability to make your own pieces, with infinite floor space. It’s “thing-oriented” and only grey if you start mingling in the secondary designers, managers, and such external requirements. But it’s fundamentally “thing oriented” like nursing is fundamentally “people oriented” despite the variety of equipment and tools a nurse must be familiar with to do their job.
Look at the chart. "Computer and mathematical occupations" is male majority, but not male-dominated like say train drivers or mechanical engineers. Some subfields (web and interface designers, notably) are pretty balanced.
We study diseases by (first) looking at people who have severe forms. Ie it would be tough to come up with an understanding of autism just by studying the brains of people who are "a little aspy". If you can figure out what causes the gender segregation of train drivers / pediatricians, maybe you can apply that knowledge to relatively-mildly-imbalanced tech fields.
I'm still not convinced, the amount of "social pressure" from day 0 (or even before) for a kid is just shocking (starting with: I won't buy a pink doll to my newborn baby boy).
Obviously with animals is different, but there might also be other things at play that we are not aware.
Happy to be wrong, but I think there are so many layers to make a call at this point that sure, there might be an influence, but society is probably what affects this the most.
Though it does seem obvious, it's pretty dangerous to go looking for patterns in the data. More scientific to define the criteria before knowing the results so you can have a hypothesis to test, not just an observation to make.
The danger is that you will come to a conclusion that is objectively wrong.
P-hacking is a known issue in many scientific fields. So is drawing conclusions from over collection of data without repetition of the study... As the number of data points you collect approaches infinity, the chance of finding at least one meaningful-seeming correlation approaches 100% because having an unlimited number of data points to bash against each other makes you more likely to observe an improbable correlation.
No, looking at the data is observation or analysis by definition...whether or not you make a prediction about it. Experimentation is when you make a hypothesis first (after observation) and then test it. Looking at data is not a test--it's either observation or analysis.
What makes an occupation people-oriented vs things-oriented?...
Is being a doctor one or the other?
I speant most of the last 18 months in and out of the hospital, and I noticed that doctors are more things oriented, and nurse practitioners are more people oriented. Even though they do the same job.
I want the nurse practitioner when I'm feeling awful, I want the doctor to explain their thought process in technical detail. Even if it's over my head.
And to be clear, I didn't read the article, but I had doctors and nurse practitioners of different sexes.
> What makes an occupation people-oriented vs things-oriented? … Is being a doctor one or the other?
Depends on the specialty. Scott Alexander once observed:
> A look at percent female physicians by subspecialty is instructive. The specialty with the most women is pediatrics, followed by child psychiatry, followed by obstetrics, followed by – you get the picture. The specialties with the least women are the various surgeries – the ones where your patient is immobilized, anaesthetized, opened up, and turned into a not-quite-color-coded collection of tubes and wires to poke and prod at – the ones that bear more than a passing resemblance to engineering.
Source: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/ —please note that the bulk of the piece is not strongly focused on this particular issue and is not a very representative context for this point. Scott restated the same point in a better context later on in https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge..., but left out the “not-quite-color-coded collection of tubes and wires” bit which makes the point significantly less punchy and quotable.
…
For the record, there’s a similar pattern in veterinary medicine. The majority of vets who treat pets are women, but livestock veterinarians are predominantly men. IOW, whether or not animals are treated more like people or things correlates to a significant disparity in the predominant sex of the veterinarian treating them.
>"Is a software developer who makes a dating app doing one or the other? What about the designer?"
I'd look at this from a... step back.
"Software Developer" is all you need to know.
For example a Mechanical Engineer designing a product on a CAD-- Product A is a machine interface Product B is a car seat for young children. One could argue Product B is more people-oriented. But that's irrelevant. We're talking about the occupation, not the product. The occupation is making things primarily on a computer in this case.
Software Developer --> Spends XX% of time working with Things (computer) and XX% of time working with People
vs
<other occupation> --> Spends XX% of time working with Things (<occupation-pertinent inanimate object(s)>) and XX% of time working with People
...And sure, there are different types of Software Engineers ("SWE")-- Some SWEs are heads down programming 80% of time w/ 20% of meetings (for example). Solutions Engineers ("SE") are the reverse-- 20/80. The latter is more social. But to become a SE is dependent on SWE skills, therefore I consider it a variant of the primary category of SWE, whose main focus is working on a computer. Not working face-to-face with a human to participate with them in some social activity (such as sales, nursing, management, or a job with a lot of meetings).
It's my impression that the more you want money for things or your family, the more you'll succeed in software engineering, because it can be awfully dismal and you almost never see the human impact your drudgery serves. I don't really care about things much compared to any of my previous colleagues, and as such there's no amount of money that can compel me to do a programming job I've learned to hate.
do not this depends on how to teach kids? we can let spmeone concern people become doctor, we can let someone like find and resolve problem become doctor, too.
This occurred to many people some time ago and subsequently it's been shown that while this is surely a factor in some instances it is not true in the main. Biological differences probabilistically motivate preferences.
From TFA: "the people vs things dimension is a continuous scale, but in our analyses we only used categories that are predominantly one or the other. All things-oriented jobs have a clear technical component, ranging from locomotive engine driver to astronomer and all people-oriented jobs have a clear component of providing help to individuals."
It also identified "face to face interactions" as a requirement for being people-oriented. So dating app developer is clearly not included.
I remember seeing a study using PISA data (I think...) that found an interesting difference between boys and girls, which could explain much about career choices.
Boys who scored very high in STEM tended to have that as the only area where they were at the top. In other areas they might be good but usually not outstanding like they were in STEM.
Girls who scored very high in STEM tended were much more likely to have at least one other area in which they also scored very high.
People have a tendency to choose an occupation that fits with something they are good at. If the aforementioned study is correct, we'd expect to see boys who are good at STEM subjects to be more likely to go into a STEM career than girls who are good at STEM subjects, because for the girls it is more likely that they also have a non-STEM subject that they are as good or better in than their STEM subjects.
I might be projecting some after seeing how a close relative was pushed into STEM. She didn’t really want to do it, but she was given scholarships just because she was a female, and provided with extra “stuff” to succeed. She was mostly into horses and riding, so she did that on the side. Eventually she left STEM behind, but if she’d been in this mentioned study, she’d have shown at least two high-knowledge areas.
That would only cause a demographic difference if STEM was more likely to the boy's one area they scored highly at compared to girls.
If the only difference was that girls were good at more subjects, but the distribution of subjects both genders were good at was equally distributed across subjects, there would be no net effect.
You seem knowledgeable on the subject. Have there been any studies that have been peer reviewed, and replicated, that have come to roughly the same conclusions? Or is this preprint the first time the subject has been studied?
Not an expert, but I believe this is a widely studied area with a large body of literature. I say this because I've seen articles with similar conclusions going back decades. You can probably find many by searching Google Scholar For Occupational sex differences or selection
“ We found that the latter correlations are mostly due to an increase in boys’ aspirations to enter things-oriented blue-collar careers and a decrease in boys' aspirations to enter people-oriented careers in countries with greater women's empowerment. In contrast, the percentages of girls aspiring to things-oriented jobs or people-oriented jobs did not systematically vary with national-levels of girls' and women's empowerment.”
The supposed paradoxical increase of this effect with increasing wealth has been replicated fairly often with the only real opposition I’ve noticed being that sociocultural incentives dominate.
That is, if you aren’t going to starve, the most important thing is what other people think. The closer to starving you get the less important that becomes.
Anyway, that’s the hypothesis explaining the difference. What research out there explores that hypothesis? Otherwise, this seems like just more of the same revealing that there are differences in participation.
>That is, if you aren’t going to starve, the most important thing is what other people think.
IMO that hypothesis is politically biased. It implies that men/women in wealthier societies are trying harder to conform to gender norms. Blames societal norms for the difference.
The simpler and less dehumanizing alternative is that people in wealthier countries are more free to live life however they want. There are less constraints.
Occam's razor is great, but it's probably not a reasonable assumption to make on a system as fundamentally complicated as human behavior.
How would we control for the possibility that as wealth increases, the dominant effect in a person's life isn't social status (which could be enhanced by gender-norm conformity)?
Well, then, that’s on me for misrepresenting it. Let’s try again.
You can see desire to comply with gender norms as a constant X and starvation risk Y as a variable. Appropriately scale each and measure X-Y. That can go positive or negative depending on Y without X varying at all.
I want to eliminate this explanation as significantly causative. Where would I find evidence for that?
You're still making the assumption that the thing competing with starvation is compliance with gender norms (or to be more general, social norms).
As a thought experiment, consider being trapped on a desert island where the only thing edible were termites. My starvation risk is high, so I will eat the termites. Eventually I get back to civilization and my starvation risk is much lower, and I no longer choose to eat termites. Is this because A) the social norms which dictate that I shouldn't eat termites are now more important to me, or B) I prefer other foods to termites?
It is perfectly reasonable that under differing circumstances the weights we will give different factors in decision making vary, but that does not on its own tell us what those factors actually are.
Your example hits the nail on the head, because there are cultures in the world where people would prefer termites to, say, Pop-Tarts if they were more habituated at a young age to eating termites. We are extremely social creatures, and socialization happens starting from infancy.
So the issue is that without more information, we actually can't tell whether our hypothetical desert island survivor has gone off the termites upon returning to (euro-centric) civilization because they actually don't much care for them or because you can't order them at any of the fine dining establishments in town.
I mean, hell, without invoking a desert island... I know people in the United States who swear by the taste of squirrel meat and you generally won't find them eating it at the restaurants in cities.
And why would a culture habituate to eating termites instead of pop-tarts? Because the pop-tarts are unavailable, or perhaps less nutritious, or perhaps any one of a zillion other reasons. Socialization is a how, not a why.
Squirrel is surprisingly delicious. That said squirrels are impractical to farm, and thus there would be no way to maintain a consistent supply of squirrel meat in a restaurant in a typical city. Thus squirrel is generally unavailable as an option at restaurants, and thus nobody orders it, as it would be dumb to order what they don't have. There is a similar issue with muskrat, which I prefer to squirrel, despite the total absence of any social norms dictating one to be superior to the other.
Getting back to the topic at hand, there is no explanative power to saying women choose a career option because they've been socialized to pursue that career option. They just as easily could have been socialized to pursue something else. For example 73% of US cashiers are women while only 35% of US counter clerks are women. "Because society" simply doesn't answer the question why.
We can find a why for something like that in history. But note that by your definitions, this experiment is probing how, not why. Its suggested explanatory mechanism of "women in countries with higher incomes are freer to pursue their innate interests" is a how. The paper didn't control for the alternate explanation "people in countries with higher incomes, having their core survival needs more often satisfied, pursue social acceptance via adherence to cultural norms more aggressively."
The study authors draw a conclusion that wealth allows people to choose work that more reflects their intrinsic interest. To my mind, that's a claim at least as worthy of skepticism as the claim that wealthy people choose social-status-enhancing work (which differs based on gender due to cultural norms).
Are studies like these corrected for the culture the kids are raised in, the effect of things like parental leave on career choices or timing, introvert vs. extrovert, team or self oriented, economic status, history of education in the family, …. Whole lot of cultural issues weigh in here and they don’t cleanly partition by country.
And you can probably make the argument that the existence and length of parental leave is culturally driven as well. Somebody has to take care of the kids and if a couple lacks the money to farm it out somebody’s career takes a hit.
I don't think a real snapshot is less valuable than a result of hand waving over a real snapshot. Maybe we don't need to correct the data but going forward with life while taking this as reference.
> Things-oriented occupations are those that involve extensive work with machines, such as computer programming, repairing machines (e.g., cars), or tailoring
Most computer programming jobs have very little to do with machines as such. Code in high-level languages works mostly with abstract representations of business requirements, and the fact that it's executed on machines is incidental. And if abstract concepts count as "things," then you've stretched an already ridiculously broad category to the point of uselessness. You might as well say "I repair cars for people, so my job is actually about people."
I am a woman, and one of the things I find appealing about programming is the very immateriality of it. It's distinctly unlike something like "repairing machines." You don't have to get dirty, or crawl under anything, or climb a ladder, or carry heavy stuff around. I can see how women might be less interested in "things" when it comes to all that, but not computer programming.
It's pretty clear that these dichotomy is over-generalized to the point that you can build whatever narrative you want. Also, why is it that it only seems to apply when the people-related jobs are low-status? Politicians and executives are mostly men and mostly deal with people. Food-preparation workers deal with things and are about equally men and women, except for head chefs, who are mostly men.
> Here's an model explaining the "Gender Equality Paradox" that doesn't rely on the crutch of assuming different preferences. Women pay some fixed cost for being in the labor market, in general. Perhaps due to discrimination, perhaps to something else. As such less likely to pursue a costly STEM education in college. However, they become more likely to pursue a STEM education as the returns increase. Women respond to incentives. The bigger the non-service sector of the economy, the more income there is to gain from a STEM education. As it gets higher (which tends to be the case in less developed countries) more women enter STEM programs. In developed countries the STEM premium is lower (Someone in a service job like a lawyer or accountant will do just fine).
This fits the data we have available, doesn't require that we assume our conclusion (we just assume women respond to incentives), and is able to help explain other phemonena. It's got a lot of features we want in a good model!
- Matt Darling
Edit: It seems like he assumes some "fixed cost" in order to counter the finding that women are less likely to pursue STEM education.
If you start with a motivated bias against any given hypothesis, in a social science field where the empirical evidence is sort of messy, you can always rationalize away the evidence supporting that hypothesis.
This is sort of a double whammy since not only are the social sciences messy enough that it’s easier to get away with that sort of thing, but they always have been chock full of hypotheses that lots of people have motivated biases against.
It's really frustrating to watch this play out. There should be a disclaimer in the social sciences with these sorts of studies.
Disclaimer: "I believe that nurture, rather than nature, plays a larger role, generally speaking, in the development of an individual's occupational aspirations", or vice versa.
"women will pursue STEM careers if they paid sufficiently more than other jobs, but when the pay is the same they choose service jobs" is not really any different from saying "women prefer service jobs"
Anything that influences a decision can be reframed as a cost or incentive, but without actually identifying the cost nothing is being explained.
> As such less likely to pursue a costly STEM education in college. However, they become more likely to pursue a STEM education as the returns increase.
Is Matt Darling aware that in most European countries university education is (financially speaking) free or extremely low cost? And said cost is about the same no matter what you study?
Edit to make it more clear: As far as I know crushing student debt is an US and UK thing. Not continental Europe. I have no idea how things go outside US/Europe though.
(As a possible example, the only European countries with higher percentages of tertiary education than the US in the 25-34 age group are Norway, Ireland, Luxembourg, Lithuania, and Russia. I suppose that only 28% of Germans are interested in tertiary education, as opposed to 49% in Norway and Ireland. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...)
I think the more "developing" or "relatively recenylu developed" nations who have university infastructure are more likely to go with the more European "paid to be a student if you can pass the gatekeeping exams".
It has less to do with any ideology and more a combination of mathematics and pragmatism. Namely an insufficient number of people who could afford even free college from the opportunity cost of not working full time.
Even if the economy advanced enough that they could technically go to a more American model.
This is meant to be broad brush "first principles reasoning" and includes many disparate nations and situations. Some may also have a sufficient percentage from traditionally priveledged strata who could afford it. Often families who were traditional bureaucratic, military, or priestly occupations.
> the more European "paid to be a student if you can pass the gatekeeping exams".
I don't think it goes up to "paid to be a student" most of the time. If you're not lucky enough to have local universities on your chosen subject you still have to pay for (possibly cheap student) lodging. Said gatekeeping exams may also be an extra cost if you need to pay someone to prepare for them.
However, the financial burden overall is much smaller.
I’m not sure he assuming some “fixed cost” so much as pointing out (or at least arguing) that such a model explains the data as well the “just so” conclusion. Additionally, he is suggesting that such a model, in which agents respond to incentives rather than just have “true” preferences is stronger.
I think this is just a redefinition into a bucket term. Social factors such as stigma, difficulty in child-rearing, and workplace discrimination can all be included in such a fixed cost or incentive model
The argument is that when presented with few attractive alternatives, they simply overcome these hurdles.
Nice theory, but this assumes that the relative return from a STEM education is higher in less developed countries. Any other tests of that hypothesis?
> A subset of participants (N=473,260) answered the question "What kind of job do you expect to have when you are about 30 years old?", which we call "occupational aspiration" in this study.
Not unless you're aiming at something you're 100% certain you can achieve, or delusional. I knew a person in high school who aspired to go to Stanford for her undergraduate education. She didn't succeed, and to be quite honest her expectation of doing so was moored in fantasy, not reality.
Any number of kids who want to play professional sports or succeed as entertainers are aspirational without necessarily expecting they'll make it. The ones who do expect that kind of success are often let down and become part of the 90-odd percent of SAG card holders who wait tables, paint houses, and do all kinds of things other than acting to pay the bills — or never even make it to Hollywood.
Conversely, someone in a farming family might say that in 30 years they will be farming, which is likely aspiration = expectation.
I think it's too early to tell right now if there's some type of things-interest/people-interest split among the genders. We're still so close to the time when women weren't allowed to have checking accounts, that the cultural inertia hasn't had time to wear off yet. I am very suspicious of researchers who claim to have the answer right now.
> As expected, the percentages of
students aspiring to sex-typical occupations were higher in countries with higher levels
of women's empowerment, r(68)=.350, p=.003. The percentages of students aspiring to sex-atypical occupations ranged from 7%[6.2%-7.8%] in Lithuania to 23%[21.2%-
24.3%] in Lebanon (international median of 12%). This variation correlated negatively
with women's empowerment, r(68)=-.500, p<.001.
I do not like weighing into these sorts of things too much because I think people tend to find whatever they are looking for. All it really shows is that gender preferenes are formed before adolescence. Whether that innate or learned is not clear.
Can anyone track down the list of `sex-typical occupations` ?
The thickest thread I've found is a reference to a PISA 2018 dataset.
> We investigated sex differences in 473,260 adolescents’ aspirations to work in thingsoriented (e.g., mechanic), people-oriented (e.g., nurse), and STEM (e.g., mathematician) careers across 80 countries and economic regions using the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
Human beings are a very genetically homogenous species, far more so than most.
Suppose you take a member of an ethnic group and compare them to two other randomly selected individuals, one from their ethnic group and one from a different ethnic group. The chances their genetic differences will be greater with one rather than the other is very close to 50/50. Ethnicity makes only a very tiny difference, the vast, vast majority of the differences between individuals have nothing to do with it.
This just in: men and women are biologically different (at the statistical, population level). Shouldn’t affect individual level policy. But any metric of equal outcome is misguided.
“Despite the long-term and widespread study of the sex differences in interest in people-oriented as compared to things-oriented occupations, there is no consensus on the sources of these differences.”
We just ended up with a rather perverse definition of equal outcome. What you may intuitively want to do as a society is maximize everyone's happiness. Which is hard to quantify, so you go and try to eliminate things that typically make people unhappy. Being denied the things you want because of the factors you don't control is surely a big depression maker. Not "go study better and you'll pass the exam", but "fuck off, I don't like your face", pardon my French.
So how did we solve it? We made a faceless inappealable uncriticizable statistics-driven system designed to tell the majority of people to shut up and cull their ambition.
And you know how we ended up here? Every society has a certain amount of people with ambition to power. They want to tell others what to do. They want to make decisions affecting others. That's fine, that's human psychology. That's why the previous generations started companies, studied hard disciplines, took risks, and found their place in the society with the perfect effort/power balance just for them. Except, this doesn't work anymore with the "economies of scale" where there's a bunch of CEOs and investors, but everyone else is a replaceable drone.
So there's an incredible power vacuum in the Western society. People are desperate for roles in life that will give them meaning and power - ability to make decisions affecting other people. The corporations have PR departments and centrally owned media companies that steer this force clear of colliding with their financial interests. So, it effectively turned into a cold civil war. Want to change something in the society? Go get a 5-figure loan on a social justice degree, and then exercise your power by telling majority of the people to hate themselves, and enjoy no retaliation.
Kinda like every war. On both sides of a conflict there are regular people with friends, children, families, hobbies. But they are too busy demonizing the other side, and eager to be foot soldiers in someone else's game. Someone whos mansion is located far from the front line and whos kids will sit at the board of a munitions manufacturer, rather than in a trench on a battlefield. I don't know how we're gonna get out of this mess.
That's kind of the opposite of the conclusion of the article. Now, the conclusions of the article (cultural, social and political differences have a huge impact on what what men and women do) may be incorrect, and you may be more correct, but it's a little incongruent to say (I'm paraphrasing here) "Biological differences explain the differences in career outcomes between men and women."
Outside of some very specific situations (aka muscle mass dependent jobs like carrying heavy loads on your back) I'm not aware of any scientific evidence that supports a biological cause of career outcome divergence in women vs men, but if you have some literature or other information I'm always willing to admit that I'm wrong in light of new information.
On the other hand, there is an ocean of scientific data that cultural, social and political conditions have a huge impact on what jobs men and women do.
EDIT: there is actually one argument for biological differences explaining divergent outcomes that I find convincing: for the vast majority of human history, the state's monopoly on the use of violence has been either nonexistent or far weaker as compared to today. Men have had an advantage on the use of violence due to average muscle mass and bone density being higher than women. Technology (firearms, surveillance, etc) has made this disparity of power in capacity for violence less and less relevant.
"men in highly developed world regions were less neurotic, less extraverted, less conscientious and less agreeable compared to men in less developed world regions"
If these personality traits are influenced by what country you are born it, would it not support the the non-biological argument?
The real answer is probably the most boring: it's both. I wish this wasn't such a controversial topic and research could be done freely on this, but researching biological differences between genders / races / etc. is quite taboo in some western universities now.
Seems like more research is still needed, but it’s not hard to imagine policy makers or regulators developing quotas and mandates around tech companies hiring women. If women are indeed statistically less interested in working as engineers, governments shouldn’t, for example, require companies match hiring of women to the proportion of their population (not that anyone is actually considering this).
I think that is a very difficult conclusion to draw. There are a lot of factors in there that are impossible to control. We can't really isolate cultural and historical trends. Yes, we can measure a difference that significantly correlates with sex, but it is a bit naive to draw causal conclusions.
But I still agree that equal outcome metrics are misguided. It is too lazy of a metric and statistics will mess it up very quickly with such things as Simpson's or Berkson's paradoxes. These are far too easy to fall prone to. Besides that, the question seems to be more about if the reason for these differences are due to biology or society (rather, which one is more significant), not that the differences don't exist (i.e. causal). But coming up with good metrics to determine what is going on is difficult. I do not think a metric should become a target though, and we have to be more careful in nuanced in our approach.
My brother and I are also biologically different. It says nothing about expected outcomes that we are distinct. When you say that an expectation of equal outcome is misguided, you're sneaking in a conclusion about the nature of those biological differences.
If the biological difference were a large facial birthmark that caused people to treat us differently (although we're otherwise identical twins), would you accept a statistically equal outcome between groups of people with and without facial birthmarks as a sign of a lack of discrimination against people with facial birthmarks?
You can only make claims at a population level. So if you picked 1000 women at random and a 1000 men at random you would probably find more women have a preference for x and more men have a preference for y.
I don't know what x and y are but if being passionate about either led to higher paying career choices you'd see a difference in average wage between the groups. At the population level.
Generally it has to do with scale. If you make something that 200,000 people buy and your marginal cost is low you're going to make a lot of money. If you work in elderly care you can only provide care for a handful of people you won't make much.
My hypothesis is that the nature of sexual selective pressures is what is more likely to create differences between the groups. This wouldn't really apply in the birthmark case (unless it was some sort of secondary sexual characteristic).
Either way, society should allow for equal opportunity even if there are differences in average interest between groups since the variation within a group is larger anyway. It just means not seeing the same outcome doesn't necessarily mean something has gone wrong.
I believe you are making a conclusion that neither the article nor science in general makes. The differences in preference are exhibited, but whether they have a biological root (and what outcomes we should target) do not have strong evidence.
Male and females constitute the largest difference you could have in a species. This preprint affirms what all previous work in this space has found; if you try to minimise the cultural/enviromental differences between men and women, you maximise their biological differences.
"These sex differences were larger in countries with a higher level of women's empowerment."
"We explain this counter-intuitive finding through the indirect effect of wealth. Women's empowerment is associated with relatively high levels of national wealth and this wealth allows more students to aspire to occupations they are intrinsically interested in"
Though I think the preprint's reasoning about the influence of wealth is just bad. Especially if you try to reason that wealth and better education is causing alot of women to become nurses instead of doctors.
Horse riding is a fun example of your observation. Its above 30 to 1 women versus male riders. Untill you enter the higher level of competitions, then its the reverse.
I've done horse riding, its unique and fun but definitely not for me.
Even without getting hung up on the "biological" qualifier, that's groundbreaking news to some people, you know. The people who insist that not having 50% females in any occupation is them being underrepresented because they're repressed and discriminated against. (Never heard that female dominated occupations are discriminatory though, I wonder why)
Then this translates into laws, policies and scholarships that effectively discriminate against men.
Don't know what you mean by "individual level" policy but a lot of policy needs to change.
There's a very very very obvious dollar value attached to these policies. By discouraging the workforce from having families and kids (let alone single-income households) you effectively eliminate their main long-term expenses and reduce the pressure on the wages. You then start substituting the declining population with immigrants from countries with lower standard of living, and you've hit the jackpot. Your profits go up, your stock goes up, your salary expenses stay the same.
This wouldn't fly 60 years ago when the economy was much more decentralized. There was no single large entity (or related group of entities) that would benefit from such policies. If you run a small business and personally know every employee, you wouldn't think of such a thing. This bodes well in the current model where every child-free worker is an extra $50K lifetime value for their employer, translating into 5 extra cents per share.
We already asked you to stop posting flamewar comments, and this is an extreme case, so I've banned this account. You've also been using HN primarily for ideological battle and that's not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
Boys “thing-orientation” and girls preference for “faces and dolls” show up in, for example, (a) neonatal human babies, (b) young rhesus monkeys and (c) chimpanzees babies. Also seen in a bunch of other studies.
For the people who are disturbed because this doesn’t match your world-view; remember that this is two bell curves with different medians. There is significant overlap at the individual level, but also large differences in tails, which explain the reality we see around us (some occupations dominated by women or men respectively).
https://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/12/female-chimps...