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by msluyter
2651 days ago
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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... |
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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.