The actual split is 54% to 46%, which is something that I would not qualified as significant.
It is a difference, but hardly shows that men are disengaged masses.
It is a difference, but hardly shows that men are disengaged masses.
Where did this come from? When did the discussion apparently become about this?
0.00000001% can be significant so long as the sample size be large enough.
It simply means it's unlikely that the numbers are caused by a statistical fluke and expected to show up again in a reproductive attempt.
Of course significant numbers are very often not reproduced, both due to that the publishing industry selects upon creating this result and because the mathematical principles that compute significance are simply abused, both willfully, and due to lack of understanding of the assumptions behind it.
Because honestly; I feel this secondary meaning is a buzzword transferred from the first meaning which actually has meaning, but in the secondary case it's simply used to use an expensive word without understanding it.
Edit: Another example is significant digits. Significant digits is a much older concept than significance in statistics, and maps much better to the original meaning of significance. Basically significant things are things you can't ignore when you do your analysis.
That doesn't answer what I asked: what exactly is the meaning here because I remain unconvinced that it's not simply an empty buzzword inserted that transferred from it's usage of statistics, especially when used in conjunction with percentages.
> Edit: Another example is significant digits. Significant digits is a much older concept than significance in statistics, and maps much better to the original meaning of significance. Basically significant things are things you can't ignore when you do your analysis.
Indeed, and that has a meaning that I understand which is also morphologically transparent, but in this supposed meaning of the word which you've to elaborate upon it is neither morphologically transparent, nor do I actually see any meaning in it and I still feel it's used as a buzzword to simply make use of a fancy word for it's own sake.
As for what it means: "important and deserving of attention; of consequence" (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/significant)
Edit: For the sake of clarity, my comment was tongue-in-cheek as it's the justification I repeatedly see whenever gender imbalance/inequality is mentioned on HN. I think it's patently ridiculous to say that one gender is for some reason more interested in learning than another.
The main reason universities see more women than men is that universities focuses more on subjects women likes than men likes. If universities removed most social science courses you'd see mostly men in higher education.
The reason you see people complain about these things here is that they reverse the complaints about men dominating engineering. It wouldn't be right if people only complained about men dominating engineering, so to even that out people also complain when women dominate other subjects.
You see the same just-so storytelling when it's observed that women achieve more chemistry doctorates than they do physics doctorates. "But women are interested in medical careers". A chemistry PhD is not part of the ordinary path towards getting a medical degree. Or with math: "women are interested in being teachers, so they get math degrees". Not PhD's, they don't.
Your theory that women are held back by bias would require that every developed country coordinated their biases so they map the same by field. That doesn't make sense, there is no way I'll believe that is true unless some really extreme evidence is provided. How else would you explain that the gender ratio for these subjects in Russia is very close to the same as in USA? It isn't like they share culture etc. There are so many fields, why would biology have the most women, then chemistry, then civil, then mechanical etc? It is too much of a coincidence.
All fields were dominated by men 80 years ago and were extremely hostile to women. Since some fields attracted women and others didn't, if that was just random chance then you'd expect different cultures to see women take interest in different fields, but that didn't happen. Instead this evolved similarly all over the world.
So to me your explanation looks extremely weak. You can believe in that, but you wont convince me on this, there is just too much data in my favor. Of course the future could prove me wrong and I am open to that, but I'd argue that the data we have today strongly supports my stance.
Note, I am not saying that we should discourage women who want to enter these fields. That serves absolutely no purpose.
They certainly shared patriarchy which has been around a lot longer than the cold war. You haven't provided much in the way of numbers being 'the same' but the comparison would also be skewed by these countries' significantly different gender ratios, on top of many other factors.
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
This chart represents this. It extracts the "T" from the rest of STEM.
1. Tech in the US is super lucrative and you can't cherry-pick it--women's salaries increase by 77% if they switch to tech here. This is true across the board: in the bottom 13 of your linked Index (sorted by % Difference of Women in Workforce and Women in Tech) women get a 29% salary increase, whereas in the top 13 the increase is 51%. This probably indicates a more parsimonious explanation: despite being more hostile to women, tech in these countries is more lucrative.
2. More broadly though, it doesn't pass a simple smoke test. Just in the top 13, how are Iceland, Ireland, and Canada right next to Romania, Turkey, and Mexico? There's a sincere lack of correlation.
Ideally we would have a Germany-like system that better guides training for these populations and professions to help create a more robust working class.
If the books are about robots and the manual task is taking care of kids you'd draw the opposite conclusion.
Building mechanized and static systems with a specialized subset of tools has been found to be more of interest by men across cultures. Who knows if this is due to natural selection.
You don’t think evolution plays a role in behavior?
Seen as another example of Sexism in Higher Education
Interesting how things change
So it's fascinating that there are issues faced by this population that aren't moving despite everything being aligned to just make them go away and that you have to fight for them like they were minority issues. And what's crazy is that for these issues the population you need to convince that these issues are important are white men!
Specifically for gender representation in nursing and teaching there's three main barriers to have to be broken down to get people to care about them.
1. That the factors that are keeping men out of teaching and nursing are internal -- lack of motivation or ability, rather than external factors like discrimination or access to education.
2. That nursing and teaching are "low status" careers so it doesn't matter if there's a gender gap because nobody is really clamoring to be one.
3. That nursing and teaching are "women's work," which is especially funny since teaching used to be male dominated.
Any evidence for this? To me it seems like people care much more about homeless women even though most homeless are men, they care more about womens suicides even though men kill themselves more, they care more about when women get murdered even though men get murdered more etc.
People care more about white people than black people, yes. People care more about cis than trans, yes. But I have seen no evidence at all that people care more about men than women.
The people who talk about female suicides are the ones who argue that women should go back to traditional home. They are hardly feminists and suicides are not much topic related to women.
Are you just making that up? Have you seen any homeless shelters exclusively serving men? There are plenty for women. Or do you just assume that when people say "homeless" they mean a man since most homeless women have already gotten help and therefore isn't homeless? I haven't seen a single article arguing that we should prioritize male homelessness, but plenty that we should prioritize female homelessness.
This is such a lie, From mental Health, to Domestic Abuse, to Substance abuse, there is almost zero funding, or support for programs targeting men; race not withstanding.
Try opening a Domestic Violence Shelter for men and see what happens, as a man try going to a domestic violence shelter for aid and see what happens
It is "Suck it up and be a man" that is societal response and has been for decades. This is why male suicide is through the roof.
>>Specifically for gender representation in nursing and teaching there's three main barriers
While some of those are true, there is also a societal narrative that men are abusers, that men can not be trusted with children. Be a single dad and take your child to the park and see the looks from others there, in some cases maybe even has the cops called on you...
This extends to teaching and nursing as well. This is related to number 3, but you paint it has a gender norms issue, and while that is some of it, that issue is far more complex then you are leading on.
The thing that makes it hard to write off is that over a large enough population and across time you would expect it to even out. That doesn't mean that year over year there won't natural swings one way or another but the fact that it's always more women says something interesting about higher education that almost surely we'd want to correct. We don't necessarily know what it says without looking but something is making it so that men aren't pursuing, getting excluded from, or having difficulty getting their doctorates.