[tzs]

Why do we test drugs on mice when it is their effect on humans that we actually care about (almost no one actually cares about lowering high blood pressure or addressing erectile dysfunction in mice)?

Answer: because understanding what happens in mice might give us some insight into similar mechanisms in humans, and it is easier to do many tests and experiments on mice.

Same goes for media tastes. Factors that lead to gender difference in media preferences might also lead to gender differences in employment (either by affecting what jobs women seek, or affecting how employers perceive candidates), and it might be easier to gather data on media preferences.

[Retra]

This is from the post I was responding to:

>Would we be hunting for a root cause in social pressure or discrimination if we found women were a much higher chunk of the audience for Twilight and men were a higher percent of Avengers viewers?

What is this question suggesting? Is it saying that media preferences and employment differences are similar in such a way that the fact that we do not investigate media preferences means we should not investigate employment differences?

What you are saying is different: that investigating one will give you information about the other. I don't really disagree with that. I disagree with the implication that employment differences are to be trivialized as 'matters of preference,' and thus not worth investigating.

[crazy1van]

> I disagree with the implication that employment differences are to be trivialized as 'matters of preference,'

I dont think that's trivializing the issue at all. Millions of people in the world with different preferences in all manner of things from movies to professions is hardly trivial. What's trivializing is thinking we can do some studies and find some kind of root cause of what is really an average of millions of personal choices.

[Retra]

I don't even know what you're talking about. People have preferences for a reason. It's not a static property of reality. So what if men don't like Twilight? We could easily rewrite Twilight if we wanted so that they do.

Women don't like STEM? Change STEM so that they do. What do preferences have to do with anything? We don't have to abide by them.

Preferences are not a problem, social inequalities are a problem.

[crazy1van]

> Preferences are not a problem, social inequalities are a problem.

Exactly. Preferences are not a problem. Social inequalities are a problem. However, neither of those are easily directly measurable. So we do indirect measurements on things like gender participation in a given career. When we measure unequal participation in a field, I think we are too quick to attribute it to social inequalities when perhaps it is more personal preference. That's the only point I'm trying to make... My movie preference analogy confused my point. Sorry about that.

[Retra]

EDIT: I have a clearer analogy for you. Imagine that we lived in a world where the US watched lots of action films and Spain watched lots of documentaries. Furthermore, imagine that there was a lot of money and power flowing into the documentary industry, and that the action film industry is relatively dry.

That's a proxy for socioeconomic inequality. Now what you are trying to argue is that Americans just might prefer action films. Ok... great. Americans prefer action films. But why?

So we go out there and we ask Americans how they feel about documentaries:

    "They are boring. We'd prefer not to watch them."

Hypothesis confirmed! So we ask them why the prefer action films:

    "Because they are in English. All the good documentaries are in Spanish."

Ding ding ding! Of course Americans prefer action films! They don't have access to good documentaries! Why would they prefer documentaries when they are all in Spanish?

---

So when you ask why women prefer not to work in STEM, you'll learn something about the cause of the social inequality. Saying it's a "matter of preference" tells you nothing. It just sounds like you're trying to invoke a naturalistic fallacy and stop investigating.

Maybe if you invested more in good English documentaries, they would be quite popular. Maybe the preference would disappear. So it doesn't matter if there's a preference. What matters is why there is a preference.

[darkmighty]

I think you have to challenge your perception professional preference has to be gender-balanced, or else there is something wrong going on.

Men and women are physiologically different. They have an intrinsically different hormonal and social development path. Their movie preference shows this well: you can't possibly think that even in an "ideal" society men and women would prefer exactly the same movies? Why would they prefer the same professions? Surely you've met some nurses and seen why it might be a popular occupation among women?

The "preference" model hints what part of gender unbalance would be present even in an ideal world, and the rest we should address. That's the point you're missing here.