> In the year 1850, women were locked out of almost every major field, with a few exceptions like nursing and teaching. The average man of the day would have been equally confident that women were unfit for law, unfit for medicine, unfit for mathematics, unfit for linguistics, unfit for engineering, unfit for journalism, unfit for psychology, and unfit for biology. He would have had various sexist justifications – women shouldn’t be in law because it’s too competitive and high-pressure; women shouldn’t be in medicine because they’re fragile and will faint at the sight of blood; et cetera.
> As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female.
(...)
> What is “object vs. people” distinction? Meta-analyses have shown a very large (d = 1.18) difference in healthy men and women in this domain. It’s traditionally summarized as “men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people”. I would flesh out “things” to include both physical objects like machines as well as complex abstract systems; I’d also add in another finding from those same studies that men are more risk-taking and like danger. And I would flesh out “people” to include communities, talking, helping, children, and animals.
> So this theory predicts that men will be more likely to choose jobs with objects, machines, systems, and danger; women will be more likely to choose jobs with people, talking, helping, children, and animals.
> Somebody armed with this theory could pretty well pretty well predict that women would be interested in going into medicine and law, since both of them involve people, talking, and helping. They would predict that women would dominate veterinary medicine (animals, helping), psychology (people, talking, helping, sometimes children), and education (people, children, helping). Of all the hard sciences, they might expect women to prefer biology (animals). And they might expect men to do best in engineering (objects, machines, abstract systems, sometimes danger) and computer science (machines, abstract systems).
> I mentioned that about 50% of medical students were female, but this masks a lot of variation. There are wide differences in doctor gender by medical specialty.
> A privilege-based theory fails – there’s not much of a tendency for women to be restricted to less prestigious and lower-paying fields – Ob/Gyn (mostly female) is extremely lucrative, and internal medicine (mostly male) is pretty low-paying for a medical job.
> But the people/thing theory above does extremely well! Pediatrics is babies/children, Psychiatry is people/talking (and of course women are disproportionately child psychiatrists), OB/GYN is babies (though admittedly this probably owes a lot to patients being more comfortable with female gynecologists) and family medicine is people/talking/babies/children.
> Meanwhile, Radiology is machines and no patient contact, Anaesthesiology is also machines and no patient contact, Emergency Medicine is danger, and Surgery is machines, danger, and no patient contact.
(...)
> Women are around 20% of CS majors, physics majors, engineering majors, etc – but almost half of math majors! This should be shocking. Aren’t we constantly told that women are bombarded with stereotypes about math being for men?
> I was totally confused by this for a while until a commenter directed me to the data on what people actually do with math degrees. The answer is mostly: they become math teachers. They work in elementary schools and high schools, with people.
> Then all those future math teachers leave for the schools after undergrad, and so math grad school ends up with pretty much the same male-tilted gender balance as CS, physics, and engineering grad school.
> This seems to me like the clearest proof that women being underrepresented in CS/physics/etc is just about different interests. It’s not that they can’t do the work – all those future math teachers do just as well in their math majors as everyone else. (...) It’s just that women are more interested in some jobs, and men are more interested in others. Figure out a way to make math people-oriented, and women flock to it.
Boosting "women in STEM" through preferential admissions, and then their preferential employment to increase diversity also pushes men out of occupations they prefer. Doing the same symmetrically to women would be "fair", but that just increases dissatisfaction.
We've seen so many occupations become "devalued" once it becomes dominated by women (e.g., secretaries, pharmacists). Are there any examples where status and compensation in female-dominated occupations have risen? Maybe that would help reduce the stigma and encourage more men to go there.
> What is “object vs. people” distinction? Meta-analyses have shown a very large (d = 1.18) difference in healthy men and women in this domain. It’s traditionally summarized as “men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people”. I would flesh out “things” to include both physical objects like machines as well as complex abstract systems; I’d also add in another finding from those same studies that men are more risk-taking and like danger. And I would flesh out “people” to include communities, talking, helping, children, and animals.
> So this theory predicts that men will be more likely to choose jobs with objects, machines, systems, and danger; women will be more likely to choose jobs with people, talking, helping, children, and animals.
> Somebody armed with this theory could pretty well pretty well predict that women would be interested in going into medicine and law, since both of them involve people, talking, and helping. They would predict that women would dominate veterinary medicine (animals, helping), psychology (people, talking, helping, sometimes children), and education (people, children, helping). Of all the hard sciences, they might expect women to prefer biology (animals). And they might expect men to do best in engineering (objects, machines, abstract systems, sometimes danger) and computer science (machines, abstract systems).
> I mentioned that about 50% of medical students were female, but this masks a lot of variation. There are wide differences in doctor gender by medical specialty.
> A privilege-based theory fails – there’s not much of a tendency for women to be restricted to less prestigious and lower-paying fields – Ob/Gyn (85% female) is extremely lucrative, and internal medicine (54% male) is pretty low-paying for a medical job.
> But the people/things theory above does extremely well! Pediatrics (75% female) is babies/children, Psychiatry (57% female) is people/talking (and of course women are disproportionately child psychiatrists), OB/GYN is babies (though admittedly this probably owes a lot to patients being more comfortable with female gynecologists) and family medicine (58% female) is people/talking/babies/children.
> Meanwhile, Radiology (72% male) is machines and no patient contact, Anaesthesiology (63% male) is also machines and no patient contact, Emergency Medicine (62% male) is danger, and Surgery (59%) is machines, danger, and no patient contact.
"I’m not saying we need to aim for perfect gender parity in these occupations. But it is reasonable to aim for a closer match between users and providers."
I suppose I shouldn't be ungrateful at the recognition that things like this are capable of being problems, but at the same time I have to sincerely doubt that your position on STEM is the same. That is, I sincerely doubt you (being a feminist) are of the opinion that STEM should NOT have at least perfect gender parity. I would love being corrected.
Of the 60+ students in my 3 Bio 111 lab sections, many of whom are either pre-Nursing or Kinesiology majors, 5 are men. That's first year, first semester, when no one has flunked out.
I love your work. Let me segue from your reply to a comment in your last post. I’m a middle aged black queer male who has been a nurse for almost thirty years. Previously I was in computer science.
My best friends mother was a nurse and devout Catholic. I was working for McDonnell Douglas, then the manufacturer of the worlds greatest combat airplanes. She said I should give up helping warmongers and come help people. I listened.
At the time men made up about 4% of nurses. I bet most were queer. Today it’s over 10%, mainly for the money. In fact, I hate to say, the salaries have risen initially because of the entrance of men.
We are doing well in dispelling stereotypes despite the fact that sometimes, when I walk in a room I am mistaken for a doctor. Men care. And queer men are excelling greater than our straight brothers. Why?
I LOVE that you were so influenced by your friend's mother to stop helping warmongers and shift to a career of nurturing people, Kevin!! THANK YOU!!! You just made my whole day, sir!
Seems like you have touched on some fundamental issues about who and why people are in the careers they are.
It’s good to see Social Work included among the fields where we need more men. Like police, social workers often apply subjective — and biased — criteria to their decision-making and case-handling. Social workers have huge influence on fatherhood, families, family dissolution, family reunification, child custody, kinship placements for children who must be removed from abusive homes and other life-altering situations. One divorced father has called them “feminist plainclothes police.” In fact, the Council on Social Work Education, the main accrediting body for schools of social work, offers an annual Feminist Manuscript Award. (Imagine if the accreditors of Library Science schools were to offer a Republican Manuscript Award.) Jonathan Haidt reminds us of the need for viewpoint diversity, sorely lacking in social work. To make matters even worse than the demographic numbers would indicate, at least one study (Rudman and Goodwin, 2004) found that women exhibit 4.5 times as much in-group bias as do men. The Sisterhood, as we have heard, is powerful.
Maybe looking at STEM for women and HEAL for men... as mirror images is a 'false equivalency' taking us down a road that doesn't serve us or the real issues? Never heard of Richard Reeves till his interesting interview with Krystal and Saagar on Breaking Points today. So, while this is a topic of frequent discussion between hubs and me, I have a lot to learn on this subject.
Could you share the source for the 7% of jobs in STEM and 23% in HEAL sector?
We might be able to decrease the differences *a little*. But in the end, they are driven by preference differences, rooted in biology. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/
> In the year 1850, women were locked out of almost every major field, with a few exceptions like nursing and teaching. The average man of the day would have been equally confident that women were unfit for law, unfit for medicine, unfit for mathematics, unfit for linguistics, unfit for engineering, unfit for journalism, unfit for psychology, and unfit for biology. He would have had various sexist justifications – women shouldn’t be in law because it’s too competitive and high-pressure; women shouldn’t be in medicine because they’re fragile and will faint at the sight of blood; et cetera.
> As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female.
(...)
> What is “object vs. people” distinction? Meta-analyses have shown a very large (d = 1.18) difference in healthy men and women in this domain. It’s traditionally summarized as “men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people”. I would flesh out “things” to include both physical objects like machines as well as complex abstract systems; I’d also add in another finding from those same studies that men are more risk-taking and like danger. And I would flesh out “people” to include communities, talking, helping, children, and animals.
> So this theory predicts that men will be more likely to choose jobs with objects, machines, systems, and danger; women will be more likely to choose jobs with people, talking, helping, children, and animals.
> Somebody armed with this theory could pretty well pretty well predict that women would be interested in going into medicine and law, since both of them involve people, talking, and helping. They would predict that women would dominate veterinary medicine (animals, helping), psychology (people, talking, helping, sometimes children), and education (people, children, helping). Of all the hard sciences, they might expect women to prefer biology (animals). And they might expect men to do best in engineering (objects, machines, abstract systems, sometimes danger) and computer science (machines, abstract systems).
> I mentioned that about 50% of medical students were female, but this masks a lot of variation. There are wide differences in doctor gender by medical specialty.
> A privilege-based theory fails – there’s not much of a tendency for women to be restricted to less prestigious and lower-paying fields – Ob/Gyn (mostly female) is extremely lucrative, and internal medicine (mostly male) is pretty low-paying for a medical job.
> But the people/thing theory above does extremely well! Pediatrics is babies/children, Psychiatry is people/talking (and of course women are disproportionately child psychiatrists), OB/GYN is babies (though admittedly this probably owes a lot to patients being more comfortable with female gynecologists) and family medicine is people/talking/babies/children.
> Meanwhile, Radiology is machines and no patient contact, Anaesthesiology is also machines and no patient contact, Emergency Medicine is danger, and Surgery is machines, danger, and no patient contact.
(...)
> Women are around 20% of CS majors, physics majors, engineering majors, etc – but almost half of math majors! This should be shocking. Aren’t we constantly told that women are bombarded with stereotypes about math being for men?
> I was totally confused by this for a while until a commenter directed me to the data on what people actually do with math degrees. The answer is mostly: they become math teachers. They work in elementary schools and high schools, with people.
> Then all those future math teachers leave for the schools after undergrad, and so math grad school ends up with pretty much the same male-tilted gender balance as CS, physics, and engineering grad school.
> This seems to me like the clearest proof that women being underrepresented in CS/physics/etc is just about different interests. It’s not that they can’t do the work – all those future math teachers do just as well in their math majors as everyone else. (...) It’s just that women are more interested in some jobs, and men are more interested in others. Figure out a way to make math people-oriented, and women flock to it.
Boosting "women in STEM" through preferential admissions, and then their preferential employment to increase diversity also pushes men out of occupations they prefer. Doing the same symmetrically to women would be "fair", but that just increases dissatisfaction.
I totally agree with you on why we should put more effort into this shift. I just wonder if even if you lead a horse to water, you may not be able to make it drink. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/upshot/why-men-dont-want-the-jobs-done-mostly-by-women.html
We've seen so many occupations become "devalued" once it becomes dominated by women (e.g., secretaries, pharmacists). Are there any examples where status and compensation in female-dominated occupations have risen? Maybe that would help reduce the stigma and encourage more men to go there.
It's not because it's “devalued”. It's because there are genuine preference differences between genders. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/
> What is “object vs. people” distinction? Meta-analyses have shown a very large (d = 1.18) difference in healthy men and women in this domain. It’s traditionally summarized as “men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people”. I would flesh out “things” to include both physical objects like machines as well as complex abstract systems; I’d also add in another finding from those same studies that men are more risk-taking and like danger. And I would flesh out “people” to include communities, talking, helping, children, and animals.
> So this theory predicts that men will be more likely to choose jobs with objects, machines, systems, and danger; women will be more likely to choose jobs with people, talking, helping, children, and animals.
> Somebody armed with this theory could pretty well pretty well predict that women would be interested in going into medicine and law, since both of them involve people, talking, and helping. They would predict that women would dominate veterinary medicine (animals, helping), psychology (people, talking, helping, sometimes children), and education (people, children, helping). Of all the hard sciences, they might expect women to prefer biology (animals). And they might expect men to do best in engineering (objects, machines, abstract systems, sometimes danger) and computer science (machines, abstract systems).
> I mentioned that about 50% of medical students were female, but this masks a lot of variation. There are wide differences in doctor gender by medical specialty.
> A privilege-based theory fails – there’s not much of a tendency for women to be restricted to less prestigious and lower-paying fields – Ob/Gyn (85% female) is extremely lucrative, and internal medicine (54% male) is pretty low-paying for a medical job.
> But the people/things theory above does extremely well! Pediatrics (75% female) is babies/children, Psychiatry (57% female) is people/talking (and of course women are disproportionately child psychiatrists), OB/GYN is babies (though admittedly this probably owes a lot to patients being more comfortable with female gynecologists) and family medicine (58% female) is people/talking/babies/children.
> Meanwhile, Radiology (72% male) is machines and no patient contact, Anaesthesiology (63% male) is also machines and no patient contact, Emergency Medicine (62% male) is danger, and Surgery (59%) is machines, danger, and no patient contact.
"I’m not saying we need to aim for perfect gender parity in these occupations. But it is reasonable to aim for a closer match between users and providers."
I suppose I shouldn't be ungrateful at the recognition that things like this are capable of being problems, but at the same time I have to sincerely doubt that your position on STEM is the same. That is, I sincerely doubt you (being a feminist) are of the opinion that STEM should NOT have at least perfect gender parity. I would love being corrected.
Of the 60+ students in my 3 Bio 111 lab sections, many of whom are either pre-Nursing or Kinesiology majors, 5 are men. That's first year, first semester, when no one has flunked out.
I love your work. Let me segue from your reply to a comment in your last post. I’m a middle aged black queer male who has been a nurse for almost thirty years. Previously I was in computer science.
My best friends mother was a nurse and devout Catholic. I was working for McDonnell Douglas, then the manufacturer of the worlds greatest combat airplanes. She said I should give up helping warmongers and come help people. I listened.
At the time men made up about 4% of nurses. I bet most were queer. Today it’s over 10%, mainly for the money. In fact, I hate to say, the salaries have risen initially because of the entrance of men.
We are doing well in dispelling stereotypes despite the fact that sometimes, when I walk in a room I am mistaken for a doctor. Men care. And queer men are excelling greater than our straight brothers. Why?
I LOVE that you were so influenced by your friend's mother to stop helping warmongers and shift to a career of nurturing people, Kevin!! THANK YOU!!! You just made my whole day, sir!
Seems like you have touched on some fundamental issues about who and why people are in the careers they are.
It’s good to see Social Work included among the fields where we need more men. Like police, social workers often apply subjective — and biased — criteria to their decision-making and case-handling. Social workers have huge influence on fatherhood, families, family dissolution, family reunification, child custody, kinship placements for children who must be removed from abusive homes and other life-altering situations. One divorced father has called them “feminist plainclothes police.” In fact, the Council on Social Work Education, the main accrediting body for schools of social work, offers an annual Feminist Manuscript Award. (Imagine if the accreditors of Library Science schools were to offer a Republican Manuscript Award.) Jonathan Haidt reminds us of the need for viewpoint diversity, sorely lacking in social work. To make matters even worse than the demographic numbers would indicate, at least one study (Rudman and Goodwin, 2004) found that women exhibit 4.5 times as much in-group bias as do men. The Sisterhood, as we have heard, is powerful.
Maybe looking at STEM for women and HEAL for men... as mirror images is a 'false equivalency' taking us down a road that doesn't serve us or the real issues? Never heard of Richard Reeves till his interesting interview with Krystal and Saagar on Breaking Points today. So, while this is a topic of frequent discussion between hubs and me, I have a lot to learn on this subject.