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by SuoDuanDao 2651 days ago
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.
1 comments
ajross 2651 days ago
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.

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tth3uoku 2651 days ago
>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-...

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manfredo 2651 days ago
> 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".

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