The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Compare that to virtually any other skilled job (with a 2+ yr degree), like medicine, logistics, accounting, law, civil service. Even the competitive world of sales has better culture and incentive structure.
1. Somehow, men and women end up expressing slightly different cultures.
2. People like being around other people who are similar, because it's easier to predict them.
3. Women avoid men-dominated fields and men avoid woman-dominated fields, regardless of any other reasons or motivations.
The advantage of this model is that it explains the article without invoking any kind of predetminism. (It doesn't even matter what the gender-cultures are, only that they are different!) It also suggests a solution: figure out how to integrate male and female cultures.
Their brains are different, which make their personalities different. As such they form different cultures.
If we got the integration, then maybe "the only male teacher" would be like "the only Welsh teacher," and the problem would just go away.
People in the 1st world have the luxury of deciding not to enter an industry that treats them horribly.
Most of these issues are solved in Europe (3 months paid maternity leave, healtcare for everybody, social wellfare given when having childs, same salary grids at least for government jobs), and still we have to deal will all that parity crusade.
And the real issue I see with results of studies such as the one linked is that the trend will only intensifies with the following logic: if the current measures to improve the gender ratio are ineffectives, more extreme ones will be taken. But being ineffectives themselves (because based on a wrong axiomatic) they will only feed the negative feedback loops and call for more extreme policies, until something breaks.
> Across all countries, 24 percent of girls had science as their best subject, 25 percent of girls’ strength was math, and 51 percent excelled in reading. For boys, the percentages were 38 for science, 42 for math, and 20 for reading.
> The gap in reading “is related at least in part to girls’ advantages in basic language abilities and a generally greater interest in reading; they read more and thus practice more,” Geary told me.
I'm a little startled by this skew in reading.
But on the other hand, it's not terribly surprising. As much of a gender gap as there is in technology, there's an even greater one in primary language arts education. I'm not sure how to put this delicately, but if there is a lack of female role-models in STEM, there are a corresponding lack of role models for boys in language arts. And the curriculum of books read, from all I remember, naturally skewed heavily towards more feminine characters and subjects, particularly in elementary school years. It was a real slog to grind through yet another award-winning vaguely historical young adult novel in reading groups in the classroom; I was lucky enough to have a father and uncles that would feed me their pulps and thrillers on the side to foster a voracious reading habit, but almost all my male peers had little exposure to reading outside school, and almost universally were turned off from it.
The gap in reading “is related at least in part to girls’ advantages in basic language abilities and a generally greater interest in reading; they read more and thus practice more,” Geary told me.
How is this not a sexist statement? It is clearly a sexist statement if you substitute boys for girls and any other ability for reading.