[roenxi]

The study you linked has nothing to do with gender or diversity w.r.t. minorities. It's subject is economic geography.

We can be pretty confident that if 50% of the population are women then 50% of the best candidates for a given job, by natural aptitude, are women. The same logic applies to minorities as well, so we can be confident that any process calibrated to finding the best person for the job is going to turn up a diverse workforce.

However, once policies designed to enforce diversity come in to play, that correlation will be broken and you just have a sexist/racist/whatever hiring system.

[tomp]

> We can be pretty confident that if 50% of the population are women then 50% of the best candidates for a given job, by natural aptitude, are women

You shouldn't be as confident as you're probably wrong. Women have on average better verbal intelligence, and men have on average better spacial intelligence. So we can be confident there are jobs where either men or women are more likely to be best candidates.

[roenxi]

No, I'm right. If you want to pick some super-specialist job that requires top 1% verbal skills then sure you want a woman doing it, but most jobs only require slightly above-average skills which will fall into a roughly 50-50 split.

And even then you can't reasonably claim that most jobs are better performed by spatial or verbal thinking. Both tend to have their moments.

[vixen99]

No, we can't be 'pretty confident'. Sometimes the 'best' don't want to do the job. 90% of nurses are female (in Sweden where gender equality is a top priority).

What would be the motivation to induce or somehow encourage males to take up a career for which they clearly have no particular enthusiasm. I wonder how many males harbour a secret desire to be a nurse but are discouraged by societal norms? Need some amazing evidence for that one.

[belorn]

What motivate a person to work? There is plenty of study that has asked this question and tried to quantify how much it is for money, a feeling of being useful, the social environment, perks, having fun, social status gain, and so on.

Pretty sure more males harbour a secret desire to be a nurse than males that harbour a secret desire to be a garbage man, and yet we see nurses are 90% female and garbage men being 90% male. The question is why.