[jernfrost]

I am highly sceptical to this study. Does anyone have a list of what they measured as differences and how they did it?

The reason I am a sceptic is because as a Scandinavian I notice easily how much more macho men are in less gender equal societies and how much more feminine the women are.

I don’t think it is an accident that the world’s top female boxer is Norwegian rather than say Italian.

I do there is something to the equality paradox but I suspect it is more complex than this research suggests.

60% of published papers in life sciences turns out to be rubbish. So statistically speaking one should have a natural scepticism to any bold claims.

[daenz]

>The reason I am a sceptic is because as a Scandinavian I notice easily how much more macho men are in less gender equal societies and how much more feminine the women are.

Don't take this the wrong way, but you're making an argument against a study that ranged over 80,000 individuals and 76 countries by using your own personal anecdotes of people you've met. Can we agree that the study takes into account far more people and controls for far more variables than what you've personally experienced?

[jernfrost]

I did not say it was wrong, merely that I was sceptical which is a good attitude in science. I am trying to understand how they did the study. Does not matter how many people took the study if the study is flawed: are the metrics they use sensible to measure gender differences e.g.

I don’t think it is wrong to use anecdotes as a rough estimate to decide whether you accept the study at face value or not.

If I told you 50% of Americans are illiterate based on a study of 90 000 people you would be sceptical of that claim based on your own experiences which run counter to this claim.

[koonsolo]

> The reason I am a sceptic is because as a Scandinavian I notice easily how much more macho men are in less gender equal societies and how much more feminine the women are.

I think it depends on what you're looking at. It is indeed true what you say. But if you look at % of women in tech, less gender equal societies will have relative more female programmers.

This is from my own experience as a Belgian married to a Slovakian, and working in tech with externals in Ukraine and other countries.

It is true that middle and eastern Europe have a more traditional gender division, and I found this article that shows my point: http://blog.honeypot.io/women-in-tech-germany/. Netherlands has the least % of women in tech, but I can tell you they don't have a traditional gender role division (just as in Belgium).

So to get back to your first point, I think feminine women don't necessarily avoid working in tech, while more emancipated women do. It seems counter intuitive, but it definitely points in that direction.

[jernfrost]

I don’t necessarily reject that possibility. But I feel it does not capture the full extent of differences or similarities between genders. Can you really say genders are more similar because they have more similar jobs?

Also I would caution agains making conclusions from Eastern European countries. Communism was very much into gender equality in some regards. Very high percentage of communist women worked.

You see this in communist guriellia which often have a lot of women. The Kurdish women’s fighters were a result of various socialist ideologies which is quite feminist.

I just don’t think this issue can be represented on one axis alone. There are more similarities son some axis and less on others it seems in more gender equal places.

Gender equality itself isn’t a number on a single axis either.

[koonsolo]

> But I feel it does not capture the full extent of differences or similarities between genders.

The article indeed puts it into a really broad sense, and I agree that it should then look at it from more than 1 angle.

My experience with eastern Europe is that they are more traditional in their gender roles. Women get to stay at home with their kids for 3 years, and they actually prefer it that way. They also expect the man to do all the manly stuff. Quite different from what you see in Belgium and our neighboring countries.

[gettalo]

>I don’t think it is an accident that the world’s top female boxer is Norwegian rather than say Italian.

It's probably an accident. Two weeks ago an italian girl won a boxing gold medal in the youth olympics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_at_the_2018_Summer_Yout...

[jernfrost]

Not likely an accident when it fits a pattern of high sports achievement in several areas for Norwegian women.

How many high achieving female athletes are there from say muslim countries?

[frgewut]

> I don’t think it is an accident that the world’s top female boxer is Norwegian rather than say Italian.

You mean the Colombia born Cecilia Brækhus?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Br%C3%A6khus

[jernfrost]

Which is irrelevant given that she was adopted and raised in Norway. Anyway she is just one example of Norwegian women punching above their weight. For a number of years Norwegian women were the best soccer players in the world. There are many other sports examples.

[thinkingemote]

Interesting observations, but it might be be both true that both genders are more free to spread out the other side, and that the majority are more likely to not be. So with more freedom there is greater social mobility and also less pressure to move. I've not read the paper fully. I wonder if they provide this information as to the scope.

I think if we think of a graph. In less equal places the peak of the graphs occur closer to each other and are narrower. In more equal places the peaks of the graphs occur further from each other but are wider.

http://i.imgur.com/dSq5f0v.png for example

[jtl]

Interesting, most of the data shows the opposite effect to what you may be implying:

http://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-girl...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/scandinavian-gender-e...

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Countless more articles if you google

[jernfrost]

I did not suggest the gender paradox does not exist. What I am saying is that I am not 100% convinced it is caused by genders being more different in more gender equal societies. I think it is perfectly possible for women to be more feminine and interested in an engineering degree than a less feminine women.

Secondly correlation is not causation. It is a classical mistake and most of these articles make zero attempt at explaining possible causes of the correlation by say third factors.

One example is about gender equality or welfare states being the blame for Nordic countries having fewer female CEOs than e.g. the US.

But if you actually look more in depth at both societies and the people involved one can see a lot of other possible explanations. Nordic countries have low levels of economic inequality. That manifests itself in many ways: there are few people doing low skilled menial tasks, such as carrying suitcases, doing garden work, nannies etc. It also means Nordic CEOs make considerably less money than American ones.

You notice that female American CEOs tend to have large houses and lots of help they can pay for, such as home deliveries, nannies/babysitters etc. That tends not to be available to Nordic CEOs. Not only are there very few people doing such assistive jobs. It is also frowned upon in the culture. It is expected that parents spend a lot of time with their children.

E.g. pre-schools don't stay up very late.

A final factor which cannot be discounted is that the world is more globalized today. When I grew up in the 80s in Norway, boys and girls were in a lot of ways more similar. But from the early 80s American pop-media poured in. It focused on far more traditional gender roles than what Nordic countries had done: Lots of pink princess stuff for girls and macho militaristic stuff for boys. I've seen how girls have become more feminine under this influence.

The other influence is the end of a more socialist society where one tried to even out gender differences more. As Nordic countries became more capitalist, one could also see stores pushing clothes, toys etc which a stronger gender difference, because they knew that would sell more. I think this helped amplify differences.

Maybe it does not matter, but I am trying to make the point that when it comes to social science, the interactions and influences can be very complex. Separating cause and effect can be very difficult. Doing this study in a multitude of countries do not actually represent separate independent tests IMHO. E.g. Norwegian gender roles cannot be cleanly separated from American concepts of gender roles, due to the out-sized influence of American mass media.

Many of these studies do not consider the fact that you have to consider the whole female population. Often they compare only the working populations, but since most women work in Nordic countries while few do in developing countries, it skews the results. Lots of women in Nordic countries are paid caregivers in pre-schools and retirement homes. These women are not paid to do the same in developing countries and thus don't show up on the labour statistics.

[tralarpa]

> 60% of published papers in life sciences turns out to be rubbish

Research in life science:

- Very difficult to conduct repeatable experiments of sufficient size

- Lot of pressure because of lack of funding (e.g. hard to get money through projects with industry like engineers)

- Done by people with problems with logical thinking

- Done by people who apply methods (data analysis, statistics,...) without understanding them

The perfect combination...

I welcome all downvotes.

[Majestic121]

> - Very difficult to conduct repeatable experiments of sufficient size

Fair point

> - Lot of pressure because of lack of funding (e.g. hard to get money through projects with industry like engineers)

Fair point

> - Done by people with problems with logical thinking

What ?

> - Done by people who apply methods (data analysis, statistics,...) without understanding them

What ?

> I welcome all downvotes.

Asking for downvotes is the best way to make your message looks like it's coming from an edgy teenager. If you actually want to make your message go through, I would recommend refraining from doing so, even if you think/know you're going against the crowd.

[tralarpa]

I don't say those people are stupid. But if you look at the publications it's very obvious that they are not trained in the same way as other scientists. The jumping to conclusions, the application of methods without knowing their constraints, the lack of imagination when exploiting a problem (i.e. asking questions like "Are there other theories that could explain our results").

I have been in several situations where those people were explaining to me one of their research problems (in a friendly chat) and then I ask a question ("What about...?") that appears logical to me and they stare at me and reply "Why didn't you tell us you are working in this field, too?".

> If you actually want to make your message go through

What message? Go through what/where?

[cm2187]

I'd add:

- Done by people who more often than not are politically militant on topics that are politically charged.

[tralarpa]

I don't think it's really their fault. There are not many funding sources and those few that exist are usually coming from big players (companies, governments, etc.), so you are basically forced to pick a side if you want to do research.

It's not like a researcher in engineering or computer science who can start a small collaboration with a local company and solve some optimization problem for them and publish a paper on it.

[cm2187]

Yeah but I think most people are equally cautious than when looking at research funded by tobacco companies. I don't really trust researchers who have an agenda.