[camelNotation]

It blows my mind that so many people are still unaware of the gender equality paradox. People constantly bring this up, constantly ask that same question, constantly get the same response. Women self-select into certain fields at higher rates than others, men do the exact same thing. Can we move on now? There is no problem to solve.

[krastanov]

Is it not important to understand where these choices come from? Not because we have to enforce any particular distribution of genders, rather because it is useful to understand any differences that exist and whether they are truly personal choices.

[Grustaf]

Surely the reason is obvious, as it pervades all of society. Women are, generally speaking, more interested in people than men are, and men are more interested in things. Yes there is a big overlap, and yes there are plenty of exceptions, but the trend is very clear. And yes it is present from birth, so it can’t be just society.

[UncleMeat]

> Surely the reason is obvious

Most human behavior is not obvious on close inspection. And when what seems "obvious" happens to align with traditional expectations of historically oppressed groups we should be very very skeptical of our personal gut feelings.

[Grustaf]

It’s not just a gut feeling though, there is plenty of scientific evidence. And given our evolutionary history and the fact that women give birth, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that women are more interested in people.

I really don’t see the point in denying this, it certainly doesn’t benefit women. Most women probably wouldn’t like to be men.

[krastanov]

I have somehow missed all that scientific evidence (I am not trying to sound sarcastic). I am generally very sceptical of "evolutionary psychology" and claims that are based on popsci biology that neglect cultural factors. It might turn out that you are right, but there is no evidence yet, definitely not in our "evolutionary history", that women and men are inherently different in the way you described. The fact is, we do not know how much of these differences in choice are cultural and how much is biological. And from my work with students, and from the studies (reproducible studies) I have read, much of it can be easily explained as an "artificial" cultural artefact.

[tth3uoku]

https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fa0017364 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00018...

[camelNotation]

Sure it's important and maybe one day we will understand:

1. Why it happens

2. Whether or not it is positive or negative

3. How to engineer society to work differently

But as it stands now, we don't know any of that and programs that try to force women into STEM fields are just weird. I mean, I am all for programs that help them feel welcome and accepted and uninhibited in STEM careers because some of them do choose to be programmers and such and they should be respected and treated fairly. But programs that look at the gender gap and assume it is a problem that needs to be fixed are just dumb.

[jrs95]

Well the people that profit from this kind of narrative haven't gotten enough corporate influence and money from beating us over the head with it yet so it has to continue.

[ajross]

> There is no problem to solve.

Which is exactly what people said about unrepresented demographics in career XXX, for literally every XXX of the past few centuries in which the representation has since normalized. The example above was medicine, but we can play it with any high-status career you want: law, government, corporate middle management, academics, finance... Back up a hundred years and there were effectively no women (or african americans, pick your demographic) in those careers. Now they're much closer to parity.

And in all those cases, small-c conservatives interested in preserving the status quo trotted out all sorts of arguments just like this. And they were wrong every time.

So tell me again how your cool bit of jargon makes this all go away like magic?

[dang]

Could you please stop prosecuting your points with edgy snark on HN? You've done it an awful lot.

I realize it's frustrating when it feels like you're surrounded by people who are wrong and unfriendly (and believe me I know how that feels), but everyone here needs to stick to the site guidelines no matter how wrong other people are or one feels they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[SuoDuanDao]

The gender equality paradox is the observation that offering men and women more freedom increases the degree to which they self-select. In other words, offering people more freedom of choice increases the under-representation.

The alternative - shaming women who do not go into tech - is unpalatable to most.

[ajross]

The gender equality paradox is like a religion to you people. It's being vastly misapplied here, and the authors of that study (it was one study) would be horrified to see this rhetoric.

Go back and look at the scatter plot. It's a weak, but real correlation. The random deltas between nations are well above the significance of the gender signal. There's good science to be argued about there.

But it's being used here to justify an outrageous outlier. Women aren't just "less interested" in sofware at the scale we see in that study, they're outnumbered by literally a whole order of magnitude. Nothing from that study argues for this kind of effect, nothing at all.

[tth3uoku]

>The gender equality paradox is like a religion to you people. Lumping everyone who mentions it together and othering them does not seem constructive.

>Women aren't just "less interested" in sofware at the scale we see in that study, they're outnumbered by literally a whole order of magnitude.

How can you be sure? Men are on average more interested in working with things, and women are on average more interested in working with people [1]. "...non-biology STEM majors showed lower [people-orientation] and higher [thing-orientation] interests than biology and health majors."[2] Self-efficacy and competence beliefs tend to be a factor that keep women away from tech [3]. The Gender Equality Paradox also mentions competency as a factor.

1. https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fa0017364 2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00018... 3. https://portal.research.lu.se/portal/en/publications/will-i-...

[manfredo]

> But it's being used here to justify an outrageous outlier. Women aren't just "less interested" in sofware at the scale we see in that study, they're outnumbered by literally a whole order of magnitude. Nothing from that study argues for this kind of effect, nothing at all.

This claim doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Tech is not an "outrageous outlier". there are plenty of jobs that are over 95% male and female respectively: https://www.cheatsheet.com/money-career/segregation-work-ame...

Here's a much larger list: https://fourpillarfreedom.com/visualizing-u-s-occupational-e...

Software isn't an outlier. In terms of representation of men, it's just behind "printing press operators" and just ahead of "taxi drivers and chauffeurs". Women are about as overrepresented in "File clerks" and "loan interviewers and clerks".

Software is an "outrageous outlier".

[iagovar]

Ok, so let's have 50 more years of social engineering. What would you do if the trend does not reverse? Would that be enough for you?

[msluyter]

Shouting "gender equality paradox!" doesn't warrant a mic drop. Aside from particular policies in Scandinavian countries that might actually limit women's options[1], the underlying issue is we don't know what a "natural" allocation by gender in STEM might look like. It's not like we can eliminate all societal/cultural barriers in a given population and run an experiment over time to observe how many women self select into STEM in some context free state of nature.

And so, while we might hypothesize that a "natural/biologically driven" allocation be uneven (and I'm willing to grant), we have no idea by how much. Perhaps it's really 95/5, or who knows, perhaps it's 60/40.

The argument that where we're at now is where we should be (and thus why we shouldn't try to eliminate various obstacles to entry) is really just a form of status quo bias. It's the same argument that's been used over the years to justify why women couldn't go to college, be lawyers, etc... etc...

[1] https://capx.co/what-jordan-peterson-gets-wrong-about-the-no...

[mpweiher]

> particular policies in Scandinavian countries

The gender-equality paradox does not just apply to Scandinavian countries, but reproduces pretty much around the world: female participation in engineering etc. is inversely proportional to HDI.

In fact, it even reproduces over time! I think we can all agree that, for example, the US is more egalitarian now than it was in the past. Yet female participation in CS has actually dropped since the 60s or 70s.

> we don't know what a "natural" allocation by gender in STEM might look like

This is both true and, maybe somewhat surprisingly, irrelevant. The reason is that the GEP is not about the absolute levels, but about the sign of the change. To be more precise:

If your hypothesis is that "societal forces/sexism/oppression are the main causes for lack of female representation", then you would expect higher levels of participation in societies that are generally more egalitarian and more free than in societies that are generally less egalitarian or not free, regardless of the absolute levels.

So your theory demands that there is a positive correlation between HDI and STEM participation.

If there were no correlation, that would probably already disprove that hypothesis.

However, it is worse than that, much worse, because the correlation is actually negative. I have to admit that this stunned me, as it apparently stunned the researchers working in the field, because it is such an unexpected and hugely significant result.

And once again, absolute levels are completely irrelevant here, it's just pretty clear that when you remove oppression, you get more gender-segregated workplaces at least when it comes to the empathising/systematising divide.

> The argument that where we're at now is where we should be

Who "should" be deciding where we "should" be? To me, it should be the people who decide what they want to do. If many more women than men now decide to go into veterinary medicine (used to be the other way around), who are we to second-guess them? If many more women than men prefer to go into early childhood education, who is to say that this is "wrong"?

That's the part I really don't understand, quite frankly.

[BearsAreCool]

I think it is misleading to use the lowering rates of women in computer science as proof of anything, especially when you look back to the 60s or 70s. Unlike many scientific fields computer science was much more of a womans field when it started off than it is now, for instance (and I am aware this is quite possibly cherry picking) if you look at images of the bletchely park codebreakers who worked on the origial turing machines to break encryption you'll notice a majority are women. One explanation I found of why this changed in america was the marketting of console video games, up until around the 90s these were not sold as toys and when it came for atari and such to choose between marketting to boys or girls, they chose to sell to boys, leading to connections between boys and computers or electronics.

I don't think this has anything to do with how sexist america is at any time, but rather how the gender roles have changed over a relatively short time period.