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Comment by patrickg_zill | Hacker News Reader

template for article:

"Why Are There Still So Few Women in [high paying or high status job]"

note: there are no articles asking why there are so few women in a dangerous and/or underpaid or low-status occupation. Such as commercial fishing, oil and gas fieldwork, "ice road trucking" etc.

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Nor are there articles asking why men aren't nurses, waitresses or receptionists.

see my comments on low status occupations.

there's a good reason for that. in a good and high paying field an absence of anyone (women or POC) is worth considering.

In underpaid and low status occupations, it's obvious. I don't see how you can ask that question.

Shaming language doesn't work on me. I'm shameless )))

People say that elementary school teachers are important, but there is no pressure to have more men in that occupation... why?

Because patriarchal cultures feminize low-status occupations. Remember: once upon a time, most secretaries were male because "Secretary to the CEO of X" actually meant, basically, apprentice being groomed for succession of the CEO of X. When it got made into a low-status clerical position, all of a sudden nothing but females were hired for secretarial positions.

People say that elementary school teachers are important, but when it comes to actually committing their own resources to raising the status and resource-base of elementary school teachers, no-one gives a damn.

yes. no one with a phd is interested in teaching k-12, for example. hell, no one with a phd is really interested in teaching, most of the high-status seekers seek to be pure researchers. something approching 70% of teaching even at universities in the usa is done by non-tenured staff. Faux science would say that avoiding science is an evolutionary response to optimize mate selection. etc.

Not true. My HS has at least one PhD teaching science courses there. Anecdotal, yeah, but so is "no one"...

There's idiomatic phrase/s in english. For example, the exception proves the rule. Not everybody is a somebody. etc. So the purpose of the phrase is not merely (self) evidentiary, but rhethorical. As I am sure you have surmised.

I'm a graduate student in CS myself, and I'd be perfectly happy to earn a salary at a job consisting primarily of teaching. That leaves much more freedom for me to practice hobbies and do research, compared to competing in today's field of full-time researchers for jobs and grants.

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