[scarejunba]

How does that one square with the fact that the median income for women is lower than the median income for men while the median income for all groups correlates positively with intelligence?

Seems like that kills the hypothesis that women are making better career decisions across the board optimizing for pay.

[Retric]

Pay is not the only issue when choosing a job. Job Stability, stress and work life balance are also huge factors rational actors should consider.

Science does not simply pay poorly, the job also sucks.

[Konnstann]

So does nursing, but it is heavily female-dominated.

[Retric]

“Registered nurses (RNs) made a median salary of $68,450 in 2016.” That’s not really bad pay considering you can get an associate degree which only takes 2 years, and you make above median US wages.

Being a scientist requires vastly more education, and long periods of low pay. I actually know a programmer that switched to nursing and he seems reasonably content.

[dnautics]

The reason why science sucks goes beyond pay. It's the repeated failure, long-ass hours (I once worked for 150 days straight, pulling >100 hour weeks), only to find out that in the end playing politics was more important than doing a good job at the work.

[slededit]

A life tip: Always 50/50. Talent is great, politics helps you direct it to where it will maximize impact. If nobody thinks what your working on is important you may be an unrecognized genius, but its also perfectly possible you are on the wrong track.

If you can't convince anyone what your doing is important it should make you stop and reconsider your efforts.

[dnautics]

I'm in a position where I succeed by not playing politics. Since i'm not playing politics (which others in the company are doing), i am spending my time doing development work. I am now building a team, and my only concern is to deliver results on time. My CEO thinks I'm competent and has expressed interest in helping fund me a startup, when the time comes. I'm not going to say that I didn't strategize the a politics "meta game" (picking a place to work where I would be visible, choosing to work on projects where I can have an impact) but the amount of time or effort I am spending on it is vanishingly small.

In any case my point about science is that playing politics is MORE important than delivering quality results. In my lab as a grad student, there was a grad student who delivered extremely sketchy data and then won the grad student of the year award and now he's a tenured professor at a top 50 US research institute.