It is only a paradox if one has calcified their thinking about the desires of women _in general_ in a particular way. If one starts from the presumption that men and women are exactly the same (in terms of desires and methods), than it is indeed a paradox. If one retains the traditional perspective, a much disliked but surprisingly defensible position, of the disparate desires of men and women, these results comport well with the presumption. Why you end up where you do is either confusing or predictable based on how you start, particularly in the world of unverified assertion.
> If one retains the traditional perspective, a much disliked but surprisingly defensible position, of the disparate desires of men and women, these results comport well with the presumption.
It's odd though how so often this "traditional" viewpoint is eager to suggest, "These are the preferences of women and their outcomes," when it's suggested women result in a net disadvantage, but is a crisis when men see these outcomes.
An excellent example of this is how a 6-10% wage gap is considered an acceptable outcome of biological differences and choice, but a 10% average difference in primary education among young men is a crisis, with multiple think tanks suggesting society caters too much to young women and that being a young man is "a liability."
This position is so common you can find it represented internationally in both the US and several European nations. It shows up in think tank materials like PraegerU videos and on America's Fox news.
In the context of the paper at hand, it seems particularly poignant how much effort goes to making one case but not the other.
>but a 10% average difference in primary education among young men is a crisis
I don't know how a PragerU video convinced you that this is considered a crisis outside the right-leaning think tanks but I haven't heard a single soul talk about it outside that sphere. It's easy to prop up what a political opponent labels important as something a lot of people care about but I certainly don't see this issue come up in entertainment or the public sphere at all yet the wage gap shows up everywhere.
It was on Fox news not even a week ago, and I've seen UK news segments on this as well.
I am fairly sure some of the audience here is acutely aware of this line of thinking. Note, for example, how many people are assuming I'm talking about the more common complaint of college statistics. I never once mentioned college or university. They think they know the argument I'm presenting even though I used language that in fact didn't present this population at all. The majority of respondents to my post have read into the argument, because they're aware of a variant of it, and have filled in the perceived gaps.
It is a general courtesy to indicate when you have retroactively edited your post.
More to the point, you were responding to a comment that had already introduced the caveat "outside of right wing circles," thereby rendering your observation a bit redundant.
1. I didn't substantially change the content of my post, only expanded on it in an obvious way.
2. "Outside of the political block with control of 2/3 of your government and an unpredictable split on the remaining third" is an absurd restriction to place on me for this conversation. Of course I ignored it. It was a disingenuous attempt to exclude politics from a subthread I had started specifically about government policies.
> An excellent example of this is how a 6-10% wage gap is considered an acceptable outcome of biological differences and choice, but a 10% average difference in primary education among young men is a crisis, with multiple think tanks suggesting society caters too much to young women and that being a young man is "a liability."
That's just so wrong... (1) it's not that 10% wage gap is considered an acceptable outcome, it's that wage gap (as a sexist discrimination) is a bogus concept in itself - obviously people with better/worse education, more/less experience that spend more/less time working are going to be paid more/less - e.g. noone complains about the much greater wage gap between old and young workers; (2) 10% education gap is a problem, just like it was a problem when less women went to school compared to men... and even that's mainly a problem because for a society it's beneficial to have highly-educated people, so it's worth considering the possibility that we're actually doing something "wrong" when it comes to education everyone and that maybe we could be doing something better (especially given that it's generally accepted that there is no difference in intelligence between the sexes).
(1) Young, talented people do this all the time. If your idea of how to dismiss this criticism is to suggest wage gaps themselves are fake and that somehow men are inherently more valuable to the workforce at an intrinsic level, you're going to have to do more than compare it to seniority-based compensation schemes.
(2) Tom, to be crystal clear: I think both dismissals are equally bad things to do. My point is that people, you included by the look of it, will suggest it is natural to see differences when said differences disadvantage women. But if a similarly important disadvantage befalls men, it is "a problem" which implies it must be corrected.
Jordan Peterson said it best: There is no wage gap. There is an earnings gap.
So, nobody is suggesting that wage gaps are fake. They're asserting it as undisputable fact. Find a place where men and women of equal experience, time at work and so on are being paid differently because of their gender and you have an easy lawsuit on your hands. In practice this doesn't happen because such discrimination doesn't happen.
Women nonetheless earn less because of choices they make, like choosing to work in HR instead of software engineering. This is not a crisis.
Re: (2) you seem to be cherry picking. It's been shown that female primary school school teachers are biased towards girls and some researchers have even started suggesting that this is partly responsible for increased female grades over time. Regardless, virtually nobody is claiming the total and absolute dominance of women in primary-age teaching is a crisis or a problem that needs solving. In fact it's trivial to find cases where men appear to be disadvantaged relative to women and there's absolute silence from the media, from politicians, etc.
> Find a place where men and women of equal experience, time at work and so on are being paid differently because of their gender and you have an easy lawsuit on your hands. In practice this doesn't happen because such discrimination doesn't happen.
There are hundreds to thousands of such lawsuits every year. And within a month of California rolling back forced arbitration, more popped up. Including 2 high profile class action lawsuits.
Maybe instead of listening to a man who thinks synonyms are clever life advice, you should research the actual subject. Comments like this suggest you don't have any understanding of the subject at all.
A person who is paid more has many more opportunities in their life should they choose to exercise that power (and in the case of poverty, the lack of money can literally determine your opportunity to live.
So I'm not sure I could possibly agree with your assertion as written.
> An excellent example of this is how a 6-10% wage gap is considered an acceptable outcome of biological differences and choice, but a 10% average difference in primary education among young men is a crisis, with multiple think tanks suggesting society caters too much to young women and that being a young man is "a liability."
You're comparing a difference in wages to a difference in population. The maximum range of a population difference is 100%, e.g. 0% of men go to college and 100% of women, which would be a scandalously large difference. The maximum range of a wage difference is arbitrarily large, e.g. a $200,000 doctor makes 1000% of what a $20,000 fast food worker does and that is not at all unexpected. It isn't even maximally large of the differences that exist in practice -- compare the compensation of Fortune 500 CEOs with part time migrant workers.
Moreover, if you want to see a large difference, what's with the gender balance in the prison population?
> You're comparing a difference in wages to a difference in population.
This is not actually correct (and in fact, I'm not talking about college and these numbers are not correct for college participation!), but even if it were, we can formulate wage problems in terms of populations.
> Moreover, if you want to see a large difference, what's with the gender balance in the prison population?
And it's a popular argument among MRAs, literally headlining much of their materials, that women receive much better treatment in the prison system than men. This is just another example of my argument: it's a problem if there is a bad outcome for men. It's not a problem if there is a bad outcome for women, it's "choice."
> This is not actually correct (and in fact, I'm not talking about college and these numbers are not correct for college participation!), but even if it were, we can formulate wage problems in terms of populations.
But then the numbers are completely different. If you look at something like gender balance at the 20th or 30th percentile income level for full time employees, there are more men at those below-median income levels than women. Then men are underrepresented around the middle, but women are highly underrepresented at the top. The people making millions or hundreds of millions a year bring the male average way up but that does nothing for the bottom 90+% of men who on average are actually making less than the average woman.
> This is just another example of my argument: it's a problem if there is a bad outcome for men. It's not a problem if there is a bad outcome for women, it's "choice."
The argument is that there should be consistency. If it's a problem in one case then it should be a problem in every case. We have laws against employer sex discrimination and a slew of programs to try to help women advance their careers. The wage gap is smaller now than it was 20 years ago, and smaller 20 years ago than it was 40 years ago. What analogous thing is actually being done to keep men out of prison? What progress has been made there?
You're also apparently claiming that going to prison is a choice in the same way that choosing a profession is. There is theoretically a choice whether to commit a crime or not, but in the Three Felonies a Day sense there isn't, and committing a crime is demonstrably not a prerequisite to going to prison anyway.
> But then the numbers are completely different. If you look at something like gender balance at the 20th or 30th percentile income level for full time employees, there are more men at those below-median income levels than women. Then men are underrepresented around the middle, but women are highly underrepresented at the top.
This is an excellent deflection, and it's also a relatively recent phenomenon. A surge in health care worker requirements which involve a lot of traditionally gendered roles has caused this outcome.
If you control for that, this effect is substantially less pronounced.
> The people making millions or hundreds of millions a year bring the male average way up but that does nothing for the bottom 90+% of men who on average are actually making less than the average woman.
And once again, we get to a phrasing of the problem that implies that it's a problem when men are at a disadvantage but inevitable when a woman is at a disadvantage.
> The argument is that there should be consistency. If it's a problem in one case then it should be a problem in every case. We have laws against employer sex discrimination and a slew of programs to try to help women advance their careers. The wage gap is smaller now than it was 20 years ago, and smaller 20 years ago than it was 40 years ago.
And these laws are largely toothless because of forced arbitration and Non-disparage agreements. The month California nullified these, a flood of class action lawsuits against major employers opened up. New York is considering such a law as well. I wonder if other states will have the courage to actually let the law come into play>
> What analogous thing is actually being done to keep men out of prison? What progress has been made there?
This is a common MRA talking point I encounter. I absolutely agree with you that incarceration rates are absurd and dehumanizing. It's a travesty of justice and in many cases a systemic attack on citizen's rights. This does not have any bearing on our current conversation, and we as a society _MUST_ be able to pursue more than one social justice issue at a time.
> You're also apparently claiming that going to prison is a choice in the same way that choosing a profession is.
No, you did that. I claimed it was the same as doing poorly in primary school. To be clear: I think that argument is as absurd as suggesting that it's strictly women's choices that disadvantage them.
I feel as if you are making an apples to oranges comparison (but I don't perceive any ill will so I am responding in good faith and with no intention to politick) in terms of gender pay gap and decreasing male inclusion in higher education.
I am glad you used the more accurate numbers of 7-10% in terms of male/female pay. From my perspective, the innate differences between the sexes explains this gap quite well: men are motivated from a very young age, in addition to their general biological proclivity towards competition, to seek approval through public acts to gain status; women are motivated from a very young age, in addition to their general biological proclivity towards hording value, to seek influence through private acts to gain status. There are plenty of specific examples that run contrary to my assertion, but in general, men seem adapted to the corporate system which would lead one to expect them to dominate therein. Regardless of classical dominance hierarchy, there is massive combined interest actively working to inject as many females as possible into high paying, white collar jobs.
In terms of higher education, the decrease in male participation is a significant problem because male participation in higher education was tenuous at best even before female inclusion began. Though higher education was indeed a "boys club," it was a very small club. Just because it was "all" male does not extend it into being "all male." The moment the gates opened for females, they took over the majority in public universities within a decade. They continue to dominate in education to this day. Metaphor is a dangerous game, but I think one should worry more about bad students getting worse than good students getting more attention.
In my opinion you make a very salient point about the difference in the reaction of people to the two problems. I see them as similar because both endeavours (more females in corporate && more males in education) are fighting both a biological tendency as well as cultural norms, no simple task in a world of consensus, and I don't have to elaborate and how very far away from that we are.
As far as I know it doesn't actually say that. The comparison is between countries, not before and after reforms. The paradox is supposedly that countries with higher equality have higher gender differences. But it isn't really a paradox since correlation isn't causation.
What's curious to me about this stance is no one questions if the measures taken, when coupled to there outcomes, don't suggest failed policies.
"Well we made policies and they didn't do what we expected, therefore women are making choices!" seems to me (with an American bias perhaps) to be a failure in the design or implementation of the policies, rather than immediately blaming women.
I'm surprised how credulously people engage these policies
I agree with your skepticism, but it's important not to fall back on the other end : i.e., "I know there's no difference between men and women therefore the policies are wrong !"
Second, I don't think anyone is blaming women here. Choosing (or being pressured by the environment) to have more 'gendered' (whatever that means) career path is not necessarily a bad thing.
It can become a bad thing if it hinders opportunity, but not before
> I agree with your skepticism, but it's important not to fall back on the other end : i.e., "I know there's no difference between men and women therefore the policies are wrong !"
An awful lot of women have negative things to say about that situation, so maybe I should just quote them?
I don't think I am falling back on the "other side" here. I'm pointing out that the effectiveness of these measures seems quite low according to the data. It's odd to assume that the entire effect is therefore determined uniquely by "women's choice." Is there evidence of that?
It's one thing to say, "Keep an open mind." It's another to hedge off what's at least an equally likely scenario from discussion at all, which with the flood of downvotes I'm getting certainly seems like what's happening to me
"I'm pointing out that the effectiveness of these measures seems quite low according to the data"
No ... the data shows that there is actually more equal opportunity, and yet there is gender divergence.
The objective was never to 'equalize choices or outcomes' in fields - it was to provide access and opportunity, which is happening.
It would be really, really hard to argue against the flood of data points indicating women have considerably greater choice, flexibility and support especially in places like Sweden ... and then to have women doing different things, highlights the apparent paradox.
> No ... the data shows that there is actually more equal opportunity, and yet there is gender divergence.
Actually, it shows that there are more of these "opportunity metrics." But we need to ask how reflective of reality these metrics actually are, don't we? If the metrics are bad, that's also another explanation of this "paradox." If someone says, "equal time for paternity and maternity should cause this outcome", but it didn't... well... then we need to examine every reason why that might be? It could be that the law is counterproductive, that men are choosing not to exercise rights, that women are choosing to exercise their rights differently, or that the measures themselves were not actually effective (either by not addressing root causes, or by not actually being deployed effectively).
I think it's controversial because of the implied assumption that given equality measures, there would be basically equal outcomes ... and that if we don't see that, then for some reason should be skeptical. I don't think we should be. I think we should mostly trust the data.
After my long while on this planet, I'm of the inclination that gender is existential and that only a huge degree of social coercion would lead to some kind of equal outcomes.
In other words, the data I think agrees with many people's intuition, and that the continued quest to fix outcomes is maybe kind of more ideological than not.
As you point out, there are other ways to look at it, and surely we could dig deeper on this ... but we have a number of studies that are pointing towards the same thing.
I think we're probably going to have to accept that the world is gendered, and that this will mean some deviations here and there from a specific kind of aesthetic egalitarian which is neither possible, nor in the case of most people I think even aspirational.
I think most fields that women want to actually break into, they'll be able to do that in sufficient capacity even if it's not 50/50. But I also believe that in 100 years, the vast majority carpenters will still be men, that women will still be choosing to be primary caregivers to children more of then than men, and that we'll probably still be arguing about this.
> It's odd to assume that the entire effect is therefore determined uniquely by "women's choice." Is there evidence of that?
I don't think anyone is claiming choice is the "entire effect" but I do think there is evidence that choice is the overwhelming effect. Let me ask this, do the women you know complain about an under-representation of women working at Discount Tire or in the field of Underwater Welding?
In America, during WWII a large number of women went into these types of occupations because of war time necessity and they showed they could perform the required duties just fine. But after the war most returned to traditional domestic roles. Are you saying that was not, by and large, their choice?
It wasn’t their choice. Most women wanted to keep their jobs after the war and were refused rehire.[1] I would argue that the history of female employment demographics is highly complex and has a multitude of factors, with each factor constituting of many sub-factors. The study in this thread provides an excellent evidence of one behavior, but the amount of heuristics that feed into this behavior is up for massive debate and question, many of which are politically unattractive on both sides, resulting in dissatisfaction of any academic research into any one influencing factor and also any research into a holistic heuristic evaluation... by focusing on this example, you may be over-simplifying the behavior the study is representing.
FWIW, I upvoted your grand-parent comment but downvoted this.
People are trying to have an open discussion here, and I agree that we should keep as open a mind as possible. Part of that precludes the notion of falling back into another ideology, which the parent to this comment is warning about. They are not blaming you of doing it, just warning.
There exists many theories as to why this is happening, we should identify the data we have and determine the most plausible theories based on evidence and research. That's the only rational way forward.
I'm confused. Can you identify where I didn't do that in the comment that you decided to disagree-by-downvoting?
I'm quite tired of being warned of drawing conclusions I did not draw, while taking 10-15 karma point penalties. From my perspective, I'm receiving overwhelming feedback that even questioning these programs at the level of efficacy is unwanted and I should be silenced.
I can't really work out how these votes are actually reflective of a disruptive presence in the conversation, unless the idea is to avoid asking that question in any capacity.
> There exists many theories as to why this is happening, we should identify the data we have and determine the most plausible theories based on evidence and research. That's the only rational way forward.
Then I find your response to be disappointing. If the goal is an open debate, shouldn't we actually question these base assertions that underly and inform the statistical machinery of the study?
At first you asserted: that it's possible that these outcomes could have been a byproduct of a failure to remove barriers to men and women going into workforce's which are majority dominated by their opposite sex.
In fact you asserted that point quite strongly, and the reply was to the effect: "It's possible, but lets not just assume, since many people are already doing that"
At which point you double-down on defending your original position with no data, instead pressuring the commenter to provide you evidence.
You are not being downvoted for having an opinion, you are being downvoted for how you go about having your opinion.