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Comment by MyHypatia | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

A good observation. They make up 49% in the UK.

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.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2008/09/25/women-c...

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