[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.