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> The whole point is that the way society systematically undervalues women-dominated professions is sexism at work. What? Can you explain how that is possible?

• Others 9y ago
  The problem is gender roles. Women are taught by society to think that, as women, they should go into certain careers. These careers, like teaching, tend to be lower paid than the careers men are encouraged to go into.
  • darawk 9y ago
    Now that is an explanation I can get behind. I think that there is a degree to which society socializes women to prefer lower paid jobs. That I think is absolutely legitimate. But the idea that sexism causes us to value those jobs less is, I think, absurd.
    • haikuginger 9y ago
      https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over-a-male-dominated-field-the-pay-drops.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over...
      • hackinthebochs 9y ago
        That's such a silly article. There are so many confounding factors as to make any attempt at determining causation specious. Women's employment rate grew massively over that time period. This means that jobs requiring no specialized skills would receive an influx of job seekers. If we assume the employment rate of men stayed the same over that period, we would expect all jobs that require no specialized skills or physical demands would reduce in wages as the demand for those jobs increased. As far as computer programming goes, it literally was a clerical job early on. Wages rose as the job started requiring more specialized skills (which apparently women couldn't or didn't want to get).
        • Noos 9y ago
          i think one forgotten issue is the part-time economy. I know in retail just as the work shifted to part time on demand hours, women's participation increased because it's easier for women to work part time than men.
      • darawk 9y ago
        In other news, economists discover that supply and demand balance to create price! When the supply of a thing goes up but the demand doesn't, the price goes down.
  • rarec 9y ago
    >The problem is gender roles. Men are taught by society to think that, as men, they should go into certain careers. These careers, like software development, tend to be higher paid than the careers women are encouraged to go into. Kinda works both ways as an argument. If they were so concerned about pay, they can try and negotiate for more. Men are taught/encouraged to do this more from a young age. If you want to be paid more, you gotta haggle, you can't just accept the price on the sticker.
  • klipt 9y ago
    Men are pressured to be breadwinners, so they are more likely to pick careers based on pay. Women are not pressured to be breadwinners, so they're more likely to pick careers that sound fulfilling and satisfying, but are less lucrative. Media likes to focus on the pay gap, but has anyone investigated the fulfillment and satisfaction gap? I wouldn't be surprised if overall men are less fulfilled and satisfied by their jobs.
    • rarec 9y ago
      Men are typically raised from a young age that you do defines your worth. Women are typically raised with the idea that they have value in and of themselves. There are pros and cons to both sides of encouragement.
      • twobyfour 9y ago
        Too many women are raised to believe not that they have value in and of themselves but that their value is in their reproductive potential.
        • AjithAntony 9y ago
          I'd say both men and women at some level value themselves in their attractiveness to the opposite sex. Women feel value by being attractive to men. And Men feel value by being attractive to women. Men are attracted to women who display youth and beauty as a proxy for reproductive value, and women are attracted to wealth and status as a proxy for support.
          • twobyfour 9y ago
            Sure, but women are taught (mostly subconsciously but in some ways explicitly) that their primary value as human beings is in physical attractiveness when young, in their fertility in their 20s, and in their ability to nurture when older. We teach men that their value is in their accomplishments, which is a) more empowering; b) more under their control; and c) more conducive to independence and pursuit of self-realization (in career or in other aspects of life), positions of power, and yes, powerful and high-paid careers.
  • merb 9y ago
    actually that even starts in the early life. with barbie or special lego's just for women. p.s.: my niche loves my old lego's more than the girlish ones.
  • michaelbuddy 9y ago
    "taught by society" feel free to source that in a way that can be proven. The assertion is just pseudo intellectual excuse making. Society is NOT telling women to NOT be sanitation workers. Society is not telling women not to work on offshore oil rigs. Society is not telling women not to be surgeons but to in fact be veterinarians. Society and "gender role" excuses don't hold up to reality. Time to accept that the women you know, or imagine you know make their choices, largely based on their own interests. You're welcome to try to convince women to become sanitation workers rather than paralegal interns in climate controlled offices. Good luck on that.
    • davidcbc 9y ago
      I don't see how you can possibly claim that society doesn't discourage women from pursuing "manly" careers. By the same token men are discouraged from pursuing "feminine" careers. If a man says they are going to work on an offshore oil rig they are much less likely to get societal push back than a woman because it is seen as a normal thing for a man to do but not a woman. If a woman is an elementary school teacher it is considered completely normal, whereas men are often looked down upon for doing so. The same happens with male nurses. How can you read all the stories about sexual harassment in our industry and not think women are being discouraged from pursuing careers in tech?
      • MartinCron 9y ago
        It's not just our industry, ever hear the horror stories of women breaking into other male dominated fields like policing? The idea that there aren't multiple forces, often brutal ones, nudging men and women into particular fields is just preposterous.
      • michaelbuddy 9y ago
        You're just saying words, you've got no examples of where rubber meets the road. Just that "men are looked down upon for being elementary school teachers" What? Where? And female oil rig workers get "societal pushback" Again just words. Where? How? You've got nothing here so far. I mean if you want to talk about cultural influence there's way more news articles celebrating women doing various things, celebrating women entrepreneurs, women soldiers, women and minority events and special recognition or conferences. Read all the stories about sexual harassment? Anecdotally I've seen just as much sexual language coming from women in IT as men in terms of workers. Project mgrs, network admins, probably a few more. And those instances were miniscule and didn't make up anywhere near a day to day problem for people. I have seen instances where a guy who was being a dick treated women poorly. He got a talking to and cut that out. I've seen women take their day out on men and women and never got any kind of talking to. It's really funny you're pointing to some sort of dysfunction and not demonstrating or sourcing anything but "all those stories"
  • twa19999 9y ago
    It is not taught by society, it is genetics. In such traditional, Catholic society as Poland women often choose the same careers as men: IT specialists, managers, business owners. In a progressive such as Norway they much more often choose careers such as nurse or teacher. The reason behind this is economics: in Norway teacher or nurse salary guarantees pretty decent standard of living. In Poland these are very low pay jobs. So, women when given a choice will choose traditional women professions because that's their nature. In fact I think women are more hurt by the opposite: the feminist movement that teaches them that they should want the same things men want. And the one thing that is virtually guaranteed to make women happy, that is having a child is discouraged as being "relict of patriarchal oppression" or something like that.
  • prostoalex 9y ago
    In some countries. China, India, Romania, Ukraine and a few others seem to have no shortage of women going into STEM.
  • Consultant32452 9y ago
    Women seek men with resources to reproduce with. Men tend to only care about youth/fertility. It's not like men can start reproducing with women who are no longer fertile, so they can't possibly lower the bar any further. Since women don't have social pressure to gather resources in order to reproduce, men are going to dominate in higher paying professions. This is similar to the same argument Christopher Hitchens famously made in his Vanity Fair article about why women aren't funny. It's not that women can't be funny, obviously many are. It's that they don't need to be funny to get laid. https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/01/hitchens200701 https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/01/hitchens200701 If you want to resolve this problem you need to either ask women to lower the bar and not seek men with resources or ask men to raise the bar and demand that women not only be youthful/fertile, but also have resources. Good luck.
  • Noos 9y ago
    or it could be these careers speak more to women's aspirations than others. If an important goal for a woman is to have a family and children, working at higher paid jobs that require tremendous hours and travel are not going to be attractive. If the same is for men, likewise...the family man who turns down traveling or relocating, and can't work massive overtime will see his prospects decline too. A lot of the problem with gender roles is many feminists have internalized male actions as the norm and female actions as inferior...so they see women as underpaid over as having the flexibility to raise a family
• johnfn 9y ago
  > As far as I know, people value things according to what value they obtain from them. That's not true. Very easy counterexample: negotiation. Women are generally less inclined to negotiate then men, causing them to earn lower salaries. Does that mean that people value jobs performed by men who negotiate more than jobs performed by women who don't? Of course not - it has nothing to do with the value-add at all.
  • darawk 9y ago
    That's not sexism, though. That's women negotiating less.
    • mrkurt 9y ago
      It's not individual sexism, but it _is_ systematic sexism. Women generally don't handle negotiating the same as men. But negotiation skills aren't relevant to most jobs. So if that's a factor in how people get paid, it's _systematically_ sexist.
      • darawk 9y ago
        I disagree. Women have the same opportunity to negotiate that men do. The fact that they choose to negotiate less is on them.
        • mrkurt 9y ago
          Do you agree that negotiation skills don't matter for most jobs? And do you agree that people should be compensated based on the value they bring to a job? Because sexism or no, I think it's a tremendous problem when people get ahead for completely tangential reasons to their job performance and skills.
          • hnnsj 9y ago
            How is it sexism is sex is not a factor?
• burkaman 9y ago
  What do you think causes such extreme gender disparities in positions like CEO, or board of directors?
  • darawk 9y ago
    I don't know. There are many possible explanations. One is sexism. Another is that women are less likely to negotiate. Another is that maybe women tend to be CEOs of companies that are less valuable, or that rely less on the expertise of their CEO.
    • cannonedhamster 9y ago
      Women are less likely to negotiate because of the societal views of women who are shrewd negotiators. The societal pressure on women to be passive is immense. Just look at women in politics for numerous examples. That's what's sexist about it. There are different expectations of people based solely on gender, and that further divides into race with black women at the bottom of that pool. You need only listen to the experiences of women founders in Silicon Valley to realize your comment really doesn't match up with what really happens. Women, especially in the tech sector, are treated like personal sex objects of some VCs. There is not a single situation you listed above that cannot be attributed to similarity bias or cultural bias against, both completely unintentional.
    • burkaman 9y ago
      Ok, so why are they less likely to negotiate, why are they more likely to ascend at less valuable companies, etc. The whole point of talking about the wage gap is figuring out why it exists. And inevitably, there are only two possible ends to this investigation. Either there are inherent biological differences that cause women to be less effective and valuable in our economy, or some societal manifestation of sexism is causing these differences. As far as I can tell there is no other possible answer.
      • darawk 9y ago
        Yep, that's correct. And it's almost certainly a mixture of the two. I'm not saying there isn't sexism involved, i'm just saying that it's more likely to be on the side of socializing young girls into choosing less remunerative professions.
• chickenfries 9y ago
  > As far as I know, people value things according to what value they obtain from them. There is no way for that to be 'sexist'. I challenge you to question if either of these assumptions hold in all cases or just in an idealized world where everyone is a "rational consumer."
  • darawk 9y ago
    No, certainly it doesn't happen in all cases. But the idea that there is a systematic bias against female-dominated professions is just silly.
• kazinator 9y ago
  Sexism is present in those forces which guide girls and women toward those under-valued positions. > I'd grant you that teachers are underpaid, but that isn't sexism Sure; however a statement like "teaching is work befitting a woman" would be sexism.
  • darawk 9y ago
    Absolutely agree. It is sexist to socialize girls into specific professions. It is sexist to say "x is work befitting a woman". But women-dominated professions being paid less is not sexist.
• JimboOmega 9y ago
  Well, imagine a scenario where women are initially not in the labor force. But they want to work, same as anyone Then, one day, society changes. "You can work, but you can only be a nurse, teacher, or secretary". You don't think there'd be a supply glut driving down wages in those areas? Suppressing them over a long period as women gradually enter the labor force there? And by the same token, that society that says you can't be an engineer or a CEO because you are a woman - that severely punishes those women who do seek those jobs - you don't think women would respond to that? That even if they could produce more economic value, the societal pressure can override the capitalist tendencies of organizations and individuals to maximize wealth?
  • lr4444lr 9y ago
    Are you insinuating that women - today - are forced into that narrow set of professions if they want to work?
    • johnchristopher 9y ago
      Why the emphase on `forced` and `today` ?
      • lr4444lr 9y ago
        Because it would make sense 50 or more years ago, when women were openly shut out from other professions. That's not to say the after-effects of those outmoded cultural traditions aren't having an impact, but to claim that this accounts entirely or even majorly for the professional disparity in female representation demands evidence.
    • UncleMeat 9y ago
      Certainly that was the case in the past, and cultural inertia is real. This allows inequities and biases to persist over time. So although women are not forced to choose teaching, for example, there are more teaching role models who are women and culture nudges women towards that career. This causes the persistent inequity in career pay that was caused in part by the original influx of women into the field when explicit sexism was rampant.
• lloydde 9y ago
  "People are paid according to the value they produce" grossly simplifies compensation. If we must generalize compensation: people are paid the lowest amount they will accept. Supply and demand and value are central to the equation, but large variability in compensation among near identical profiles in the US and Canadian software sectors is an indicator that the individual isn't good at knowing their value.
• usefulcat 9y ago
  "They're not underpaid because they're women, they're underpaid because they're being paid by a bureaucracy." That's a theory. The relevant question is, what evidence exists to support or refute that theory?
  • darawk 9y ago
    The fact that male teachers are equally underpaid, pretty clearly.
• UncleMeat 9y ago
  Pay and prestige of educators has diminished as it has become more female dominated. This is a pattern seen across many industries when they shift from male dominated to female dominated. This suggests that there is a relationship between gender distributions in a job and its prestige and value given by society. Not all jobs have direct "money in, money out" relations that you can use to judge value. This opens the door for all sorts of cultural bias that affects how people decide how much a particular job is "worth".
  • ZoeZoeBee 9y ago
    Women have been the majority of teachers in the US for over a hundred years
  • ashark 9y ago
    Has prestige also dropped for doctors and lawyers? They're not professions dominated by women AFAIK, but women've become quite well represented in them since the ~mid 80s, so one might expect to see this effect there. I know job prospects aren't as hot for lawyers as they once were[1], but it's still one of very few professions that I'd expect to reliably make someone's parents' eyebrows go up and an "oh!" issue from their mouth on hearing their kid's dating one, ya know? So the prestige is still there, unless I've missed something. And doctors are doctors, so certainly in that category, too. I really doubt "software developer" automatically gains one anywhere near as much social capital, in general company and without further favorable details/context. [1] as you correctly wrote, "Not all jobs have direct 'money in, money out' relations that you can use to judge value."
• ordu 9y ago
  > As far as I know, people value things according to what value they obtain from them. Yes. But I think you miss one point. People are not rational beings (even trained ones are not), and "value they obtained" is a result of some psychological process which is not strictly rational. And if people estimate value obtained from employee by sex of that employee, it would be not surprising at all. > To call that sexist is just completely inconsistent with any reasonable conception of economics to my understanding. Conception of economics is a theory. Reality is something different, theory is just simplified description of reality. Theory is much more formal, more simple and more understandable. Theory exists only in human mind as some entity of informational nature, while reality... well, reality is just a reality. Theory offers us laws that works in most cases. Or more precise, that laws works while axioms postulated by theory are fulfilled. But reality just works, it does not follow our laws and rules, it just works somehow. No absolute truth exists. Every one axiom sometimes is not true. In a case when axioms are not true, theory becomes unreliable. If you think to rely on laws of some theory, then first you should check whether all relevant axioms are fullfilled in your case. People use word "economics" and mean either theory or reality depending on context. This leads to confusion and inability to see the difference. Train youself to separate theory and reality on every occasion, try every time to use different words for theory and reality and you'll become immune to such mistakes. As I undestand such a theory as economics, "people value things according to what value they obtain from them" itself is axiom. Here you see some case where axiom is false: its just a matter of fact. So reality and theory are different here substantially. You should choose some other theory to deal with such situation.
  • darawk 9y ago
    > Yes. But I think you miss one point. People are not rational beings (even trained ones are not), and "value they obtained" is a result of some psychological process which is not strictly rational. And if people estimate value obtained from employee by sex of that employee, it would be not surprising at all. I agree in part. I agree wholeheartedly that the rational actor model is (at best) incomplete. We are not rational beings making perfect value judgments moment to moment. I further admit it is possible that, in individual interactions, the gender of the employee/agent we are interacting with may be a factor in price considerations. However, ultimately prices are set by supply and demand. What the OP is positing, is that demand is suppressed by sexism. What would this mean? Some female-dominated professions are: Nursing, teaching, and social work [1]. Now think about what would have to be true in order for the OP's point to be correct. People would have to systematically demand less nursing, teaching, and social work in order to achieve the result they were implying. Do you think that is plausible? When thinking about intra-profession discrimination, I would have no problem attributing that to sexism. That is, if you said to me that female teachers are systematically paid less than their male counterparts, i'd be all for labelling that sexism. But that's not what's being posited here. What's being posited is that because certain professions are dominated by women, people consume them less. People want less of them. But what is a profession's role in the world if not to generate its own demand? If people aren't demanding your services, you find a new profession. In other words, if demand for the services women choose to provide is so elastic that it can be depressed by sexism, then maybe they ought to find better services to provide. Services that are important enough that the demand for them is non-negotiable, and can never be suppressed by sexist preferences. 1. http://www.businessinsider.com/pink-collar-jobs-dominated-by-women-2015-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/pink-collar-jobs-dominated-by...