8 ms·

I fully agree with everything here, especially getting rid of stereotypes around nurturing roles. My question is, what happens if many women and men aren't fun

• cortesoft 11y ago
  Your second question is tricky to answer, so I am going to ignore it. :D For your first question, I always think the key is choice and support for people who make choices that are counter to the norm. Sure, it might be that when given a choice free of social pressures, more women might still choose to be the primary caregiver for children than men will. That is fine, and women and men who make that socially traditional choice should be supported and not judged. The key, however, is to make sure we also support and don't judge the people who choose other arrangements for child caregiving. We should not design laws and social conventions that punish those who choose to go against the norm.
  • losteric 11y ago
    Part of my comment was questioning the meaning of support. Are we talking emotional support, and simply being accepting of other's identity? Are we taxing some roles and subsidizing others to normalize economic freedom? What if the market also has inherent preferences that mirror natural preferences? Do we actively recruit youth and try to get them into under-represented roles? What about undesirable roles? I don't know... maybe this is all moot if we're still working through the "simpler" stuff like balancing laws and getting rid of stereotypes.
    • euyyn 11y ago
      In the case of the software industry in the US, the companies themselves have a strong economic incentive to get school girls to choose engineering careers. It'd almost double the pool of hiring candidates. So it's something that the market eventually balances, only maybe not fast enough.
    • Swizec 11y ago
      > simpler stuff like getting rid of stereotypes. That's this part of your comment: "emotional support", "accepting of other's identity", "taxing some roles and subsidizing others", "undesirable roles". Those all come out of stereotypes.
    • viraptor 11y ago
      This is anecdata, but I'll tell you something from my experience. All the way until my studies, I met one girl who was interested in programming (more in general tech, but let's limit this to programming). During 5 years of studies I met the next 4. That's compared to probably ~200 guys. That was only around a decade ago. Nowadays, I see tens of young girls joining local raspberry jams for fun in the UK. My friend's daughters are playing with electrical circuits and installing switch&lamp circuit between beds to chat in Morse code. And none of this comes from pushing for forced equality-in-numbers. This is just kids getting excited about stuff, because nobody is stopping them. I think the stereotypes played a big part for a long time and we'll see a slow rebalancing of candidates' genders. I think (and hope) the situation will be very much different in ~15 years when current kids finish universities. But I don't believe much active support can change anything for near-future graduates.
    • cortesoft 11y ago
      I mean both emotional and legal support. So.. either parent who care gives can get the same leave for that caregiving. Basically, do not write gender specific laws. Write laws based on parenting role, and it can apply to either gender who takes on that role. I don't think we can try to fix the market demand for the various roles, but we can certainly fix the legal discrepancies. The emotional support is impossible to legislate, but I think as a society we should not judge negatively men who decide to be the primary child care provider nor judge women who decide to be the breadwinner (although in most families, both parents need to be both... I am a big proponent of day care)
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• 4bpp 11y ago
  I think that a lot of people approach these sort of issues by constraint propagation from their political axioms - so for instance if they hold that the total work done by all men must be equally valuable to the total work done by all women and there is a set of arguments that together imply this is not the case (such as, for a crude hypothetical setting, "the value of work is proportional to the amount of physical work exerted to perform it" + "men have greater physical strength than women on average" + "men and women exert the same percentage of their strength for the same amount of time while working on average"), they will exercise far greater skepticism than would be warranted by the evidence towards each of those propositions.
  • thesimpsons1022 11y ago
    i agree. and this goes both ways. some people start from the axiom that racism/sexism don't exist and modify their interpretation of the data to match that. "There's no pay difference". others perceive racism/sexism everywhere and only read that the 95 percentile and unweighted pays are different. We can get off the political topic and start with other axioms as well. IE some believe more women need to be involved in tech, while others want less competition in their respective field (lower vs higher salary).
    • 4bpp 11y ago
      > i agree. and this goes both ways. some people start from the axiom that racism/sexism don't exist and modify their interpretation of the data to match that. "There's no pay difference". Yes, of course. Really, for all the talk about convoluted biases clouding people's decision-making, it's pretty telling that most of the time, they don't even manage to get past the basic challenge of actually letting the evidence lead them to a conclusion.
      • AnthonyMouse 11y ago
        A huge part of the problem is the "evidence" is terrible. There are so many degrees of freedom and so much entropy in what you're trying to measure that anyone can easily make the numbers say whatever they want. The answer to "is it society or biology" is both. And it will always be both, because you can't change biology and you can't "balance" society without being able to disentangle biology, and disentangling biology from society would violate both causality and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Even measuring how much of each it is has the same problem. People want to say we just need better evidence. We just need to measure it better or be more diligent or think about it more carefully. But it isn't that. It's that the problem is NP-complete and n is large. It may even be incomputable because some of the necessary information was lost to history and not knowable. Which is why it's a political football. People choose their team and see how far they can run with the ball, because the score isn't based on science or math.
• CobrastanJorji 11y ago
  Ultimately, over the exceptionally long term, as automation removes the need to work, the solution is to move to a leisure-based society in which everyone is given equal stipends and allow optionally working up to, say, 10 hours per week to earn more, thus removing the problem entirely. Although that solution may be roughly on the scale of "ultimately, the great heat death of the universe will make the problem moot."
  • losteric 11y ago
    I don't think that addresses the problem though. What happens when we see gender imbalances in a post-labor society? What if we see basket weaving dominated by women and ham baking dominated by men? Is it free choice? Genetics? Physiological? Cultural? What about the indirect imbalances resulting from the choice of work, like one role creating a reusable tool and one creating a consumable resource?
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• rayiner 11y ago
  That argument ignores cultural evolution, which humans have long used to adapt to changing circumstances much more quickly than biological evolution. Just as we evolved culturally to accommodate the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, we will do the same to accommodate our modern post-physical labor society. And I don't think we live in a "hyper-PC" society in this regard at all. Let's put it this way. People would be more surprised to find out that a woman's husband quit his job to stay home with the kids than to find out that her husband is a different race.
  • jacquesm 11y ago
    > People would be more surprised to find out that a woman's husband quit his job to stay home with the kids than to find out that her husband is a different race. The validity of that statement is highly location dependent.
    • eru 11y ago
      So is any `we live in an <x> society' claim like the one that preceded it.
    • mc32 11y ago
      But the places where that depends are places where PC-ness isn't much of a thing. In Papua new guinea PC isn't on the consciousness of people.
  • shkkmo 11y ago
    I don't see how you think these questions ignore cultural evolution. I think the question can be rephrased as asking "What causes of gender-biased job funneling/preference are acceptable in our hyper-PC society?" 1) Gender-biased job preference due to unequal opportunity: Bad 2) Gender-biased job preference due to unequal societal expectations: Bad 3) Gender-biased job preference due to genetically pre-disposed traits that are influenced by environment/culture: Possibly OK as long as culture has gender-equal expectations and opportunities. 4) Gender-biased job preference due solely to genetically determined traits and inherent job qualities. Ok. (I don't think this exists much as most traits that impact job preference have a significant emergent/environmental components). I think our "hyper-PC" society agrees with me on 1) and 2) and possibly 4). I think most of the disagreement happens around 3). Is 3) ever OK? How do we tell if society if sufficiently equal for 3) to be Ok? My personal stance is that it doesn't make sense to argue that 3) is ok until we have done a much better job of eliminating 1) and 2). edit: layout/typo
• justizin 11y ago
  > Do we try to re-educate the group into following economically valued jobs? For that, you would need to hire teachers, who would have to re-educate themselves out of being teachers, first. ;)
• facepalm 11y ago
  My preference as a father would be to spend as much care-free time with my kids as possible (care-free as in not having to worry about earning money). But I fully accept that my wife has the greater claim to having that time. I was present when my kids were born. Why does everybody swallow the feminist narrative that it is a horrible chore to spend time with children? Note that feminism depends on that evaluation, otherwise a lot of their complaints evaporate. As I said in another comment, if you don't like spending time with children, you could simply opt not to have one. How do feminists explain that people have kids who they then supposedly hate to take care of? (Of course, it has to be socialization, it never occurs to women that they have a choice because the patriarchy has brainwashed them...Sure thing)
  • estefan 11y ago
    My preference as a person would be to spend as much care-free time as possible (care-free as in not having to worry about earning money). FTFY.
    • facepalm 11y ago
      What do you mean? According to urban dictionary, ftyf means "fixed that for you"? How does your statement contradict mine?
      • estefan 11y ago
        Because that's what everyone wants, kids or not.
        • facepalm 11y ago
          Sure, but there is a reason mothers get it and fathers don't. My post was in reply to the assumption that everybody wants to work instead of staying at home with the kids. I know just by staying at home you are not free of all worries. But for the time being, your responsibility is not worrying about earning a livelihood.
• dnautics 11y ago
  The nurturing roles theory is kind of sexist. I think a better theory is as follows. In almost all metrics men show higher variance than women (sometimes that is attributed to because men lack a moderating effect of an extra x chromosome). As a result the "male" skillet is more varied and men seek a wider range of jobs. Another possibility is that socially men are expected to be riskier, and so are more broadly seeking in their choice of occupation. Either way, the net effect is a diminished supply of labor relative to the varied demand. By contrast, women seek jobs that often are chock full of other women, creating an increased supply of labor and lower relative wages. Sometimes I think about how little teachers get paid and wonder why I know so many women going in to that knowing the poor pay in advance.
  • leereeves 11y ago
    It's not "sexist" to acknowledge reality. Men and women (on average) have different hormone levels, and those hormones do effect our emotions and our choices.
    • rosser 11y ago
      But to use those factual physical differences as a way to explain (read: justify) archaic, false beliefs about other differences between men and women? Yeah, that's pretty sexist.
      • leereeves 11y ago
        Which raises a question very similar to the one losteric asked earlier: is the idea that women are more nuturing and more attached to children an archaic, false belief, or a biological fact? I don't know the answer, but merely asking the question as losteric did is not sexist.
    • belorn 11y ago
      Every study on hormones from the last 40 years has shown conclusive evidence that hormone levels within natural occurring levels has very minimal effect on behavior, emotion and life choices. If you want to find differences between gender, look at chromosomes and their effect. The purpose of hormone is to primarily regulate the reproductive system.