The gender equality paradox

[Quackers]

I watched this documentary after it was recommended by a friend.
It explores differences between the sexes besides the reproductive physical ones and asks the question whether these differences are a result of biology, cultural explainations or both. The basic format is the presenter travelling to prominent academics in Norway, the UK and USA and querying them on their research.

A bit of background: It was created by a Norwegian comedian by the name of Harald Ire. A complete layman in the field but he asks some cutting questions. His documentary was a crucial factor in the abolition of the Nordic Gender institute.

The documentary is 38 minutes long and in English subtitles. I recommend watching it.

Anyway, my questions are - to what extent are people influenced by society to conform to gender roles? Can the differences between sexes be put down to biology? Are woman in fact simply programmed to be attracted to the caring professions with a lot of human interactions like medicine and nursing? Likewise, are men in general attracted to how objects and systems work? If we look at the majority of the Western world, many education systems have pushed women into fields dominated by men by encouragement and even financial incentives yet men still dominate these fields. Why don't women want to enter engineering and why do men not wish to enter nursing?

 

[BenitoChavez]

Well in a nutshell, its complicated. Yes woman are being pushed more toward STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) careers, yet there is still a male dominance in those fields. So it seems like nature wins out. Yet there are increasing numbers of females in those fields. I work at a software company and roughly 1/3 of the employees are female. In other companies I've been at, over 1/2 of the employees were female. Those numbers would be unheard of a few decades ago. So it seems like nurture is playing a role.

The other thing that muddies it is that its really only been the last ~30 years that women have been pushed to STEM jobs. I wonder what the ratio of men to women would look like if there wasn't thousands of years (in traditional western societies) where women weren't expected or even discouraged from pursing careers in those fields.

So really what I'm trying to say is I dunno lol

 

[Disgustipated]

Give it time, it will even out a little more in the next 50 years. Some industries will never be equal, and that's okay.

 

[Farm Boy]

If American public education doesn't start figuring out how to teach to boys better than it does now, assuming massive gender discrimination in males' favor doesn't continue to exist broad spectrum in employment, I'd say 50 years from now might look pretty interesting on the numbers.

 

[Borachio]

The point isn't about gender equality, imo, but why it was ever thought necessary to steer one sex, or the other, into various roles in the first place. If any particular individual shows a preference for some profession or other, there's no reason to discourage them simply because of their gender.

It may be that women, for example, naturally predominate in the nurturing professions. This doesn't mean that any man should be discouraged from them. Or that any particular woman should be pushed in that direction.

 

[Disgustipated]

If American public education doesn't start figuring out how to teach to boys better than it does now, assuming massive gender discrimination in males' favor doesn't continue to exist broad spectrum in employment, I'd say 50 years from now might look pretty interesting on the numbers.

I don't really blame the schools (Asian kids are doing good in our schools). I blame the culture (the same reason black kids aren't doing so well). Boys have this culture to avoid being called nerds at all costs, and it will hurt them in the end.

 

[Farm Boy]

I don't know that I'm blaming schools only either. They're just a big part in the equation.

 

[caketastydelish]

I've said this before, and I say it again. I predict in the future women will take more of the 'professional degree' part of the workforce. This means doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, you get the picture.

Meanwhile men are more likely to start up their own business, as it's always been. Women will populate more of the 'middle ground' while men will be at either the top of bottom of the bracket. The vast majority of the top 1% are men, and the vast majority of the homeless are also men. This trend will grow further with time, I think.

The very rich (mostly men) are getting richer, and the very poor are getting poorer.

edit: Another thing I wanted to point out is men's dominance (in pay) for manual labor jobs is somewhat justified because men simply have stronger muscles, but as the world is becoming more and more with technology, I think you'll be seeing less of that.

 

[Farm Boy]

The very poor aren't getting poorer. They already have nothing apart from whatever social nets get cast out. What I think you want are the simply poor rather than very poor. And what they're becoming isn't "poorer," it is "more numerous."

 

[caketastydelish]

Fair enough. More and more poor people, more and more rich people. Less middle class, although any and all middle class growth is surpassingly, mostly made of women.

 

[LamaGT]

Sorry, I don't have time to watch the documentary but something just came to my mind. Was there any point in history in any place in the world where women did "manly" activities? I think that's an important question to answer because if there were no such societies, I think it's a good proof that this kind of preferences are at least somewhat based on physiology.

To be honest though, the whole thing of different preferences equaling sexism is on the edge of overcompensation to me. I'm all for allowing women to be engineers if they choose so, but most really don't. It's a bit like saying that invalids can't be evil - PC at its worst.

 

[Flying Pig]

For quite a long time, being a secretary was a male profession. Factory work tended to be done by women more than men in the 18th and 19th centuries.

 

[BenitoChavez]

Remembering back to my college anthropology class, the genders were roughly equal in terms of the work they did in hunter gather societies. It wasn't until the advent of agriculture that there were significant differences which kept growing over time. It wasn't until roughly the industrial era where women started to take on more professional roles resulting in the relative equality we see post industrial societies today.

 

[Traitorfish]

Sorry, I don't have time to watch the documentary but something just came to my mind. Was there any point in history in any place in the world where women did "manly" activities? I think that's an important question to answer because if there were no such societies, I think it's a good proof that this kind of preferences are at least somewhat based on physiology.

You could certainly make that argument. In some occupations, such as hunting and war, it's beyond argument. But it's not particularly obvious what bearing this has on the modern industrialised world.

 

[Hygro]

Anyway, my questions are

It's cool because those questions you ask are questions we might finally answer in our lifetimes. Curiously if the answer is purely culture, then in a weird relativist way, the answers were always known except when people decided they weren't.

I don't really blame the schools (Asian kids are doing good in our schools). I blame the culture (the same reason black kids aren't doing so well). Boys have this culture to avoid being called nerds at all costs, and it will hurt them in the end.

It's a different topic but I wouldn't casually ascribe "The culture" to racial differences unless you mean "the culture" as the one shared culture that produces all of us. I won't say more since it's OT.

But as to boys and nerds, you know, I've worked with teenagers the last couple of years, it's different. It's hip to be a square, as long as you're a hip square. Being a nerd/geek has been increasingly cool since the 70s depending on location.

But boys in our culture often handle their shame drive differently than girls often handle their shame drive. Obviously conformity is the shared result, but the source of shame is getting harder to identify. I guess not being able to parse nuance is the new nerd. The geeks won, I guess. Girls figured that out after geeks took Wall St from the jocks (and for a couple years also started out body-building jocks as well).

 

[classical_hero]

I know for a fact that women couldn't do my job, since it is a hazardous job and as such their bodies can't metabolise the hazard quite like men can, so it means that mean can be exposed to higher doses of lead and not affect them. But from all the blood tests done, not one of us was even close to getting over the limit for women, let alone for men, but the risk is great. Plus is was a very manual job and heat related job that all the women at my workplace were glad they didn't have to do this job, especially when it was hot in summer, but it had it's advantages in winter. To often we are trying to be equal when men and women are biologically different and have different strengths and weakness. We should be celebrating the things that are different between the two sexes, rather than trying to make everyone 100% equal.

 

[LamaGT]

You could certainly make that argument. In some occupations, such as hunting and war, it's beyond argument. But it's not particularly obvious what bearing this has on the modern industrialised world.

You're right, computers and engineering are very different from hunting and fighting. Still, perhaps on some primitive level we think these are the same? Or at least related to something else only men did.

 

[Traitorfish]

You're right, computers and engineering are very different from hunting and fighting. Still, perhaps on some primitive level we think these are the same? Or at least related to something else only men did.

It's hard to see how.

 

[Hygro]

You're right, computers and engineering are very different from hunting and fighting. Still, perhaps on some primitive level we think these are the same? Or at least related to something else only men did.

It is almost definitely because the people who first did those things or made those things cool happened to in the previous paradigm be the ones who could both access the new stuff and had a position that allowed them to need it to stay on top. Political power leads to wealth power and wealth power leads to being the first kid in the neighborhood to grow up on a computer.

 

[Lillefix]

I know for a fact that women couldn't do my job, since it is a hazardous job and as such their bodies can't metabolise the hazard quite like men can, so it means that mean can be exposed to higher doses of lead and not affect them. But from all the blood tests done, not one of us was even close to getting over the limit for women, let alone for men, but the risk is great.

I don't get it. In the first part you say that women couldn't do your job because the level of lead were too high. In the second part you say that the level of lead in the blood was more than acceptable for both men and women. So to me it sounds like women can do your job.