[mhartl]

Although it's easy to become accustomed to it, it's pretty obvious the child care world has some serious issues in diversity. By this I mean that it has some notable differences in proportions of people compared to the general population. One of the most obvious differences is the low proportion of men, which is true all over the world. In the US, where I spend a good chunk of my time, the over-representation of Latinos is also obvious.

One point of view I hear fairly regularly is that these diversity imbalances are natural - because men don't have the aptitude or inclination for child care. The big flaw here is a simple one of evidence. There are (roughly) 50% men in the world, so we should expect the ratio for men in child care to be 50% - unless there's real evidence that some other ratio is natural.

This waste hurts our society, too. We need more and better child care to nurture and support the next generation. By not bringing enough men into the profession, we are handicapping ourselves. How can we say we are hiring the best people when we ignore significant chunks of our population?

[dgabriel]

Your rewrite is completely valid. Were you expecting it to be absurd? It's not. The same interesting questions arise. I'm sure you can come up with reasons why men may choose not to make their living caring for children, even though they'd prefer to do so. Is this not a problem we should attempt to fix?

[bermanoid]

Your rewrite is completely valid. Were you expecting it to be absurd? It's not. The same interesting questions arise.

I think the point is, that when "women in tech" comes up, the default assumption that people (particularly feminists) tend to jump to is that sexism is keeping women out of tech. More specifically, that sexist guys in tech are keeping women out. Even when not stated explicitly, this accusation has been made many, many times, and underlies every discussion about this topic.

But the immediate assumption when it comes to nursing is almost never that women in nursing programs mistreat men. In fact, I've almost never heard that accusation, even though it's considered the null hypothesis when it comes to "women in tech". People are much quicker to look for other explanations, for instance that men are more likely to be bothered by the working conditions, pay, autonomy, etc. than women are.

I'm sure you can come up with reasons why men may choose not to make their living caring for children, even though they'd prefer to do so. Is this not a problem we should attempt to fix?

Absolutely, we should address these problems. First we need to know what they are, though, and I think the discussion about this topic has been much more productive in nursing than it has been in tech, because sexism is not considered the null hypothesis there.

[dgabriel]

I'm about to get on a plane and don't have time to fully rebut, but I assure you the treatment of men in nursing school is a problem taken very seriously. Google "recruiting men in nursing," to see more.

[bermanoid]

I'm afraid I didn't see this response until just now, so it's a bit late, but if you're still following this, I'd love to see some more specific references - I googled "recruiting men in nursing" and I see a ton of stuff about how to try to make nursing seem more appealing to guys, but nothing about accusations that the nursing establishment is hostile to men, certainly nothing similar to what is accused against the tech status-quo on a regular basis.

In particular, most of the links related to nursing seem to be making arguments analogous to the much derided "women aren't interested in tech because the work doesn't appeal to women" theory, arguing that men don't like nursing because the work is not perceived by them as male enough in various ways, not that they have any perceptions of anti-male bias in the nursing community. Quite frankly, I'd reject any such notions, since there is no such general feeling, at least none that I've ever heard, so that's not what's keeping people from walking through the nursing school door in the first place (otherwise, I figure I would have been at least cognizant of such a general perception).

Similarly, I'm skeptical whether tech really has any significant misogynist reputation once we look beyond feminist-in-tech bloggers and male me-too hangers-on - none of the women I know seem to have that impression (though granted, they're from pretty varied and non tech-centric backgrounds), and I certainly have not seen where I've worked.

When I have asked my female friends about their impressions of the computer world, they tend to think that yeah, it's a circle-jerk of forever-alone dorks, but they generally assume that they'd be more welcoming to women and more accepting of them than guys in most fields, not less. When asked why they don't do programming-ish stuff themselves, most have said stuff like "that's for the math geeks", and "I study people, not code" (crank the superiority knob to the max on both of those, btw - when I asked this, I got the definite sense that they thought the subject matter was distinctly below them). Not once have I heard "because I've heard that guys in tech treat women like shit" as an answer, which makes me very suspicious when people point to that as the definitive root cause...

[robobenjie]

In fact, my wife works in Early Childhood education at the Laboratory School at Stanford, and they do think and worry about exactly those kinds of things.