Do you really think white men care so much about keeping down other groups of people that they would prioritize it over making more money and having more access to good workers? That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.
The whole point being made is that prejudice/bigotry is not rational. Just look at the phenomenon of redlining. Black home buyers from certain areas were absolutely prevented from acquiring mortgages even though it would have been a source of profit for local banks. There are people out there who won't hire female candidates in technical fields due to the misguided belief that 'women aren't good at math/science'.
You're right, nobody thinks men are smarter than women. And it isn't true.
So, let's think about why we see gender roles in employment. Why are there so few women software engineers? One possible explanation is that women just aren't smart enough. If you don't believe that (and I don't), then you need another explanation. Maybe it's because of sexism. But if you don't want to believe it's sexism (as the OP implied), then what is it? They're not too dumb, and the hiring process isn't sexist, so why? And that's where hands come up empty.
That leads to nonsense like the person on this thread who said women are "wired differently", which presumably makes them less suitable. Which is just a polite way of saying women are too dumb to program, without facing the reality that that's exactly it means.
Except they're not, they're only empty if you haven't done any reading in this field.
> That leads to nonsense like the person on this thread who said women are "wired differently", which presumably makes them less suitable.
That was your supposition, not the only intepretation of those words. In fact, the weight of the evidence seems to support his statement, but similar to Damore, people like you are just fond of attacking reactionary strawman interpretations of the words actually employed.
> Which is just a polite way of saying women are too dumb to program, without facing the reality that that's exactly it means.
No it's not. "Wired differently" can mean many things, only one of which refers to competence.
Maybe anti-male sexism prevalent in the health care and education fields is causing women to prefer those fields.
Fix the sexism in health care/education. Elementary teachers should be 50% men. Nurses should be 50% men. Instead those fields are 90%(!) women! That is a HUGE level of bias and discrimination
Possibility 1: Female-dominated fields discriminate against men.
Possibility 2: Those fields are female-dominated because they can't get into male-dominated fields.
So what do the pay and prestige look like for female fields, vs male fields? Well, take medical. Nurses (low prestige, low pay) are >90% female. Doctors (high prestige, high pay) are about 70% male.
This suggests to me that there's indeed a huge level of bias and discrimination, but not in the way you think.
Possibility 1: Male-dominated fields discriminate against females.
Possibility 2: Those fields are male-dominated because they can't get into female-dominated fields.
Men do not work as teachers because the media has painted men as "sex crazed". Most mothers would be uncomfortable with having a male 4th grade teacher for their daughter.
Many women would be uncomfortable having a male gynecologist or a male nurse helping them deliver their baby.
> Doctors (high prestige, high pay) are about 70% male.
Sorry but this breaks your narrative: 60% of new MDs each year are female. However: female MDs are more likely to quit the profession or go part time in order to raise kids. Again, this might show anti-male discrimination because it is not socially acceptable for male doctors to quit work to stay home with the kids.
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The above suggests to me that there's indeed a huge level of bias and discrimination, but not in the way you think.
You have a number of issues with your narrative. "Quit the profession or go part time in order to raise kids". So what other reasons do women have for quitting the profession, other than because men are too victimized to be stay at home dads?
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edit: fwiw, I googled stats. According to the American Association of Medical Colleges, 2017 was the first year ever that female medical school enrollment was greater than male medical school enrollment. I also went to graduation by year as far back as 2002, and it has always been more men than women. So yeah, your statistics are bullshit. Care to offer a source?
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And mind you, being a stay at home parent is considered a low-prestige, low-pay role. To the extent that it's discouraged for men, that's a result of a sexism that puts men in a dominant role and demeans them for doing "women's work".
The idea that men aren't teachers because the media paints them as sex-crazed is absurd. The gender disproportion of teachers existed long before the media mentioned such things at all. And you offer no evidence whatsoever for the assertion.
> Men do not work as teachers because the media has painted men as "sex crazed". Most mothers would be uncomfortable with having a male 4th grade teacher for their daughter.
> Many women would be uncomfortable having a male gynecologist or a male nurse helping them deliver their baby.
And what is your opinion of the above bit of my previous post (since you avoided that in your answer?)
The way you're ranking occupations has an implicit bias. Let's rank them for work/life balance. Nurses are busy and work long hours, but when the work day is over, they go home until the next shift. Doctors go home, and possibly get paged to come right back.
Is it possible men and women weight values differently when selecting occupations?
There's a presupposition that the natural distribution of intelligence is gender-neutral. Which suggests that the unequal distribution of software engineers by gender has a cause other than intelligence.
So what is the cause, then? Is it biological, or social, or random chance? "Random" doesn't seem likely, especially given how many other professions are male-dominated, and the relative economic and social power of those roles, compared to female-dominated professions.
"Biological", if it doesn't map directly to intelligence, needs another cause - something that can be measured. Do you have a suggestion for this? I don't.
"Social" is the most likely reason, but how is "social" different from "discrimination"? How do you define a social cause for men dominating the industry that can't be readily interpreted as discriminating against women?
is there a reason why you're so intently focused on the metric of intelligence here, as if it's the end-all-be-all of psychological factors?
I work in personality psychology research, so this whole IQ-centric line of reasoning is very dubious to me. There are many other influential phycological factors involved in people's lives that aren't (as far as we know) a direct result of nurture, and when taken together often make a more significant contribution to people's lives than their score in the single dimension of IQ. Learning disabilities and affective/mood disorders are a big example of this, and personality traits are just as impactful in how a person's life unfolds, regardless of intelligence.
It doesn't need to be IQ-based. I'm dubious about any sort of "genetic" argument for why some fields are dominated by men, and others by women. The shift in programming from primarily women to primarily men is evidence for that, imho - if the leanings are genetic, why a change over the course of one or two generations?
>if the leanings are genetic, why a change over the course of one or two generations?
A trait not being the direct result of nurture does not imply it's the result of a traditional long generic process, and this is something that we're only just beginning to scratch the surface of with epigenetics, so it's unlikely that such questions will get definitive answers anytime soon. That being said, the observation that a trait may be determined at birth only suggests that the trait is heritable, but not that it's genetic; those are two separate concepts, and heritability allows for much more variation from generation to generation, such as the case of children of immigrants from poor countries generally being taller than their parents when they're raised in western countries (which is likely due to improved nutrition enabling the full expression of their heritable height).
For example, you could ask the same question about whether the increase in learning disabilities and affective disorders within the past few generations in western societies is also "genetic". The default answer there of course, is that these conditions were only formalized as officially recognized diagnoses recently, and that such traits are only known to be heritable anyway (i.e. there are no definitively known "autism/adhd/etc genes" as of yet), so they're likely caused by the combination of the environment enabling the expression/observation of heritable predispositions. We can then similarly propose a null hypothesis to the male/female divide with the observation that western societies have only recently attempted to become more egalitarian by making various fields more equally attractive than they used to be, along with technological advances creating even more of such equally attractive opportunities, leading to heritable traits expressing themselves more noticeably through choices in the overall job market. In other words, being a professional "gamer" wasn't a viable job option 500yrs ago, but neither was being a professional "camgirl" either (to use two distinct, yet similar and stereotypically gendered "modern" occupations), but being a farmer was, in which case equal male/female distributions among farmers would've been the result of an underlying bottleneck in the pipeline, rather than the lack of one.
To suggest that this issue is either purely "genetic" or purely "social", is severely oversimplifying the matter.
I don't believe there is a heavy bias in favor of female doctors, I believe it is a field still majority male, although becoming almost equal. Nurses were traditionally the only actual healthcare profession open to women so it makes sense they would be overrepresented there.
Male nurses now actually can find they have an advantage in hiring because they often have an easier time with the lifting and physical labor being a nurse often requires.
My point is the comparison between nursing and programming is not strong.
