10 ms·

This study is consistent with another internal study that I read about. Essentially, working conditions, bosses, crazy hours, generally unreasonable expectation

This study is consistent with another internal study that I read about. Essentially, working conditions, bosses, crazy hours, generally unreasonable expectations, and lack of appreciation all combine to make an unpleasant work environment. In that other study they also made the point that men felt exactly the same way about their job - but more women had the freedom to take action and leave the job. So this isn't just about women in the workplace. It is about how corporations are allowed to create jobs without any consideration for their employees - we are simply resources to exploit so that they can get rich.

TaylorAlexander 9y ago
Perhaps tangential but related is the notion of wholly worker owned businesses - if jobs suck, why do we not leave the top-down run businesses to form cooperatives where we collectively define our own roles? On deeper analysis the worker-owned business concept seems like it would improve things a lot for men and women ("people") alike. But I genuinely wonder why this isn't already more common. Is it an entrenchment thing? Is it really that the elite have so much power us wage-slaves are still scratching our way up from the bottom? Are worker self-directed businesses truly not viable? --- Like I said, a tangent. But this article notes that both sexes ("people") don't like working and this does seem to match my lived experience. I always wonder why we don't do more to change that...
- Mediterraneo10 9y ago
  > Why do we not leave the top-down run businesses to form cooperatives where we collectively define our own roles? Founding a business requires considerable access to capital. Investors are less likely to invest in an unusual coop structure than in a bog-standard company. Workers may have to pool their own resources to found the company, which means that they are risking their own financial assets.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    > Founding a business requires considerable access to capital. Not necessarily, especially not with software.
    - dilemma 9y ago
      Especially in software. See how much Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Google have raised.
    - jack9 9y ago
      Can you give an example (business -> success in software) without outside capital investment? Most of the time the sequence is software -> success -> business, and the event chain is exceedingly rare.
      - WalterBright 9y ago
        My own companies (Zortech, Digital Mars). Id Software. I believe Microsoft borrowed $5,000 (outside investment, but it's not remotely "considerable").
        Mediterraneo10 9y ago
        Saying “my own companies” only proves my point. You are risking your own personal assets only, while a coop structure would involve risk for everyone. Furthermore, you are founding a small business that you hope to eventually grow in some direction. That is very different from a whole set of workers founding a business where they wish to continue doing the same work they were doing before, only on a coop basis.
        coldtea 9y ago
        >You are risking your own personal assets only, while a coop structure would involve risk for everyone. That would actual make risks smaller, as the investment and risk is spread across more people. >Furthermore, you are founding a small business that you hope to eventually grow in some direction. That is very different from a whole set of workers founding a business where they wish to continue doing the same work they were doing before, only on a coop basis. That's both not accurate (in the first part) and a shifting of goal-posts. Who said Walter founded a business to try whatever and "eventually grow in some direction"? He had specific things in mind for the business to do, and pursued those. Second, and inversely, who said people doing co-ops are against pivoting and trying stuff? That they "wish to continue doing the same work they were doing before" is a new, arbitrary, constraint. Heck, people could start co-ops a) without having worked before, b) with people from different backgrounds, where the "same work they did before" doesn't apply, c) with people wishing to do something different than what they were doing before, not just with a different organizational model (e.g. build software of type X instead of working on mindless features upper management demands).
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  > Are worker self-directed businesses truly not viable? I think that's it. There's nothing stopping us from making such corps. I'm sure it must have been tried multiple times in history. The fact that no successful company like this exists probably means the concept is unviable. As to why, that's anyone's guess. Maybe any org without a single-minded purpose is doomed to fail. Maybe if our arms and legs had a say in what we do, we wouldn't survive. Maybe that's the reason millions of years of evolution has turned out a body with a single organ controlling everything else.
  - nickpsecurity 9y ago
    It seems to work when it starts as a benevolent dictator taking care of employees. I like examples with razor-thin margins since they show the rest could probably pull it off: https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2013/07/24/the-wal-mart-slayer-how-publixs-people-first-culture-is-winning-the-grocer-war/#7bc14dd25880 https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2013/07/24/the-wal... It's more a right mix between worker's ideas and worker-approved management, though, instead of purely worker-directed. Same happened with Ricardo Semler's company that was even more radical.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    Communes exist, and people start them regularly. Unfortunately, they tend to be unstable and disintegrate. The most famous one is probably San Francisco's "Summer of Love" in 1967. It lasted just a few months.
    - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
      It's a stretch to describe the Summer of Love, even just in San Fransisco, as a commune. If anything, there were many communes that existed or maybe started in that time.
      - WalterBright 9y ago
        Not a stretch at all. There were organized efforts to provide free food, clothing, shelter, health care, and entertainment. People were encouraged to contribute what they could, or nothing at all, entirely up to them. They thought they were building the perfect society.
- MrTonyD 9y ago
  About 20 years ago I first heard about co-ops, and I thought it was a great idea. So I literally bought every book on the subject that I could find (spent many hundreds) and read all those books. There is a long and rich history of co-ops worldwide. My take away: Most co-ops end up either failing or replicating a power hierarchy - with workers on the losing end. Very few avoid that end, and those that do are those that either exist in markets where they don't have to execute perfectly (such as many successful businesses today) or those that figure out some way to cultivate leaders who make good business decisions (giving them a market advantage, and again letting them operate without exploiting their workers.) In other words, markets still operate as markets, and force business to operate in particular ways unless they can create what are sometimes called "effective monopolies" (based on regions or differentiation or some other advantage). I've become convinced that we need to change the way markets compete if we want any real change.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Agreed. The root of the problem is that exploiting workers can - and usually does - give one a competitive advantage. If we can somehow fix this, the entire problem will solve itself.
    - frubar 9y ago
      Isn't it more of a game theory situation? If your competitors exploit their workers and you don't then you will be too expensive?
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Yes. That's exactly what I meant by referring to competitive advantage.
    - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
      Are you accounting for the benefit to workers of not having (some) authority? Decision-making itself can be extremely stressful! Ceding authority to someone else also relieves you of the associated responsibility and that can and probably does have significant benefits e.g., psychologically, emotionally. Consider a pretty analogous industry – musicians, musical artists, etc. I've noticed that a lot of 'bands' I like are really 'dictatorships' run by a single highly-motivated artist that recruits other musicians to act as 'employees' to realize their, the dictator's, vision. It doesn't seem inherently bad to allow people to be employees. Regardless, it seems impossibly to perfectly negate any advantages (or disadvantages) of "exploiting workers". I think a better vision is to help and encourage everyone to become more 'powerful', e.g. more skilled, wealthier, open to more possibilities. But I also admit I don't have a plan to prevent the already-powerful from becoming more powerful themselves, and at a faster rate than everyone else. I'm still undecided whether that's generally good or bad. Perhaps it's (effectively) undecidable!
- monksy 9y ago
  > o form cooperatives where we collectively define our own roles? This is attempted in organizations that have a flat organization. The problem with that, eventually it forms a hierarchy based on the most agressive and most bullying.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
  We wanted to found a collective of programmers and admins in the 90s, because we all felt cheated by companies for money and didn't like company politics. From around 50 people it slimmed down over a year to 3 during discussions and legal work - and the 3 of us then founded a startup because it showed others were not really interested in a collective idea but 9-5 jobs that brought in consistent money. I don't know what to take away from that. My impression was they would like to work for a collective but not found one perhaps. I was always amazed by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
  - scottLobster 9y ago
    Sounds like a common case of loving the idea of something but not having the will to carry it out. That's most of humanity in my experience. People, even experienced tech professionals are far more likely to bitch about a problem vs actually taking steps to solve it. It's like people who will bitch about how lousy customer service is at company X, but if company X raised the prices on their products by $1-2 to hire full time customer support staff, those same people would take their business elsewhere. So really they don't want better customer support, they just want the genie to grant wishes. 3 out of 50 people actually serious about solving a given problem fits pretty well with my life experience. :P
    - manigandham 9y ago
      > 3 out of 50 people actually serious about solving a given problem That seems high.
- Retra 9y ago
  These things don't happen on accident. Somebody has to take charge, and whoever does is likely to want a disproportionate amount of power and wealth for doing so. And then they just set up a traditional business.
api 9y ago
> men felt exactly the same way about their job - but more women had the freedom to take action and leave the job. Is there a simple explanation of the year award trophy I can nominate you for? Maybe our field just sucks a bit more than we like to admit. Women find it easier to take the family route and possibly make a career change post child rearing, while poor Dilbert with his Y chromosome is stuck with the pointy haired boss. Maybe the gender gap problem is caused by a more universal set of problems that irritate everyone. Of course for women take all the problems of tech and add sexual harassment. Not only does the PHB waste your time and make dumb decisions and force you to implement them but then he comes over and rubs your shoulders and talks about how much fun the swinger lifestyle can be.
- moron4hire 9y ago
  I was probably first exposed to the concept of sexual harassment as a teenager, just before college. Clinton had just diddle an intern. Clarence Thomas was accused of it while he was up for Supreme Court confirmation. I remember a lot of apologia, "he got his signals crossed" or something like that. And that was my impression going forward. The "honest mistake" trope is not sexual harassment. Now that I know more about how the world works, that story was clearly a PR push to de-legitimize the complaints of both the particular people accusing these public figures at the time, and anyone who might try in the future. I very soon had a fast primer on what is real sexual harassment. One coworker at my first job out of college was constantly haranguing another. Overt sexual advances that were always met with "that's just <him>. It's just a joke." It made me uncomfortable just to watch it. I know it made her uncomfortable because she would lock herself in her office and cry at least once a week. I don't know why she confided in me about it. I begged her to file a complaint. She was probably right that it would do more harm than good. I complained to my own boss and got told I was too young to understand. I suppose I was too young to understand, but only because I had not yet reached the point where I rejected any authority figures who told me shit like "you're too young to understand" at 22 years old. The guy did this in the open, during project status meetings. This wasn't Uber or UploadVR or whatever other Silicon Valley brogrammer startup we're going to tsk-tsk "boys will be boys" and never actually do anything about. This was an established engineering firm, with a very strictly worded employee handbook, and an HR director that literally looked the other way. So I don't want to hear anything about it not being systemic. I've personally never found sexual talk of any nature in the office to be comfortable. I've had gay bosses hit on me. I've had straight bosses "jokingly" touch me inappropriately. I've had female bosses make jokes about my love life. Sat by while coworkers traded stories about sexual conquests. Even if the sexual advances are towards someone else, if they make you uncomfortable, it's still sexual harassment. But we've had this trope that it's some sort of attack on lonely men who take a risk on finding love. And I think that active misdirection has not only (obviously) harmed so many women, it's harmed quite a few men, too. Probably most of us, in some way. It's not "getting along with a woman at work and ask her out and she rejects you." It's about creating a hostile work environment. Anyone who can't tell the difference has got a serious problem. You do not have to put up with being made to feel uncomfortable like that at work.
013a 9y ago
This is similar to something Jordan Peterson has argued [1]. In short: Societies which afford economic rights to women have flourished, but women pay a huge price for it. The question shouldn't be "why aren't more women in positions of power", but really "why are there any men who are insane enough to occupy those positions" when social science has already proven that money beyond a certain number doesn't make you happier and the work conditions are absolutely atrocious. Women are much more sane than men, and anyone who argues that we should have more women in power is arguing that women, as a class, should be terminally unhappy. Which isn't to say that the same opportunities shouldn't exist, and in many fields they don't, but be careful when conflating opportunity and outcome. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvUtDdlNGwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvUtDdlNGwY
- jawbone3 9y ago
  Thats funny! By your summary women have poor representation in tech fields because the working conditions are bad, so people should stop trying to get women into the sector because the will get crappy jobs. Let me suggest that a sane person would argue in support of improving working conditions instead of perpetuating suffering, but I guess thats a point of contention in these contexts....
  - peak_body_yo 9y ago
    Perception vs. reality The general perception is that programming is a socially isolating, boring, monotonous job where you stare at a screen all day. People making career choices don't know about the lax environment. So tech completely aligns with what he/she wrote. edit: and your sarcasm is hostile
    - Zarath 9y ago
      This will be an unpopular opinion here but it's true in my experience.
      - yarper 9y ago
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
>But more women had the freedom to take action and leave the job. Sounds about right in my estimation. It fits the pattern of social/economic leftovers from when women weren't expected to be a significant economic contribution to the household. Women are less likely to be the source of the large majority (e.g. 60% or more) of household income for households > 1. Those that are the primary source of income aren't expected by society to do that job. At the statistical level this results in more women quitting because the negative economic and social implications of doing so are less severe (at the statistical level) than for men. Edit: tl;dr women are statistically more likely to be in a position to be more picky about working conditions.
- danharaj 9y ago
  > when women weren't expected to be a significant economic contribution to the household. This is wrong. One, domestic labor is still economic activity. Economy used to refer solely to the activities of maintaining a household. Ironic how it has been transformed so that unpaid labor is not considered economic. Two, proletariat women have always been expected to and have contributed a wage to the household. This is on top of being expected to perform all unpaid domestic labor. The idea of a woman who only works at home was a middle class and upper class phenomenon. A strong impact on how women's work was divided was the advance in technology that vastly reduced the amount of domestic labor required to maintain a household.
emodendroket 9y ago
I think you have to elide a lot of points about problems specific to women to make this the narrative you write. You have to also just take it as a given that women are to do the lion's share of child rearing (since this is, after all, the main reason why long hours are viewed as a women's issue rather than an issue for all workers).
gcp 9y ago
In that other study they also made the point that men felt exactly the same way about their job This rather completely flushes over the issue that the extent of those conditions may not be the same between men and women. I mean, a key finding is "...the engineering workplace culture (as) being non-supportive of women." and there's the whole equal pay for equal work issue.

TaylorAlexander 9y ago

Perhaps tangential but related is the notion of wholly worker owned businesses - if jobs suck, why do we not leave the top-down run businesses to form cooperatives where we collectively define our own roles? On deeper analysis the worker-owned business concept seems like it would improve things a lot for men and women ("people") alike. But I genuinely wonder why this isn't already more common. Is it an entrenchment thing? Is it really that the elite have so much power us wage-slaves are still scratching our way up from the bottom? Are worker self-directed businesses truly not viable? --- Like I said, a tangent. But this article notes that both sexes ("people") don't like working and this does seem to match my lived experience. I always wonder why we don't do more to change that...

Mediterraneo10 9y ago
> Why do we not leave the top-down run businesses to form cooperatives where we collectively define our own roles? Founding a business requires considerable access to capital. Investors are less likely to invest in an unusual coop structure than in a bog-standard company. Workers may have to pool their own resources to found the company, which means that they are risking their own financial assets.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  > Founding a business requires considerable access to capital. Not necessarily, especially not with software.
  - dilemma 9y ago
    Especially in software. See how much Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Google have raised.
  - jack9 9y ago
    Can you give an example (business -> success in software) without outside capital investment? Most of the time the sequence is software -> success -> business, and the event chain is exceedingly rare.
    - WalterBright 9y ago
      My own companies (Zortech, Digital Mars). Id Software. I believe Microsoft borrowed $5,000 (outside investment, but it's not remotely "considerable").
      - Mediterraneo10 9y ago
        Saying “my own companies” only proves my point. You are risking your own personal assets only, while a coop structure would involve risk for everyone. Furthermore, you are founding a small business that you hope to eventually grow in some direction. That is very different from a whole set of workers founding a business where they wish to continue doing the same work they were doing before, only on a coop basis.
        coldtea 9y ago
        >You are risking your own personal assets only, while a coop structure would involve risk for everyone. That would actual make risks smaller, as the investment and risk is spread across more people. >Furthermore, you are founding a small business that you hope to eventually grow in some direction. That is very different from a whole set of workers founding a business where they wish to continue doing the same work they were doing before, only on a coop basis. That's both not accurate (in the first part) and a shifting of goal-posts. Who said Walter founded a business to try whatever and "eventually grow in some direction"? He had specific things in mind for the business to do, and pursued those. Second, and inversely, who said people doing co-ops are against pivoting and trying stuff? That they "wish to continue doing the same work they were doing before" is a new, arbitrary, constraint. Heck, people could start co-ops a) without having worked before, b) with people from different backgrounds, where the "same work they did before" doesn't apply, c) with people wishing to do something different than what they were doing before, not just with a different organizational model (e.g. build software of type X instead of working on mindless features upper management demands).
dingo_bat 9y ago
> Are worker self-directed businesses truly not viable? I think that's it. There's nothing stopping us from making such corps. I'm sure it must have been tried multiple times in history. The fact that no successful company like this exists probably means the concept is unviable. As to why, that's anyone's guess. Maybe any org without a single-minded purpose is doomed to fail. Maybe if our arms and legs had a say in what we do, we wouldn't survive. Maybe that's the reason millions of years of evolution has turned out a body with a single organ controlling everything else.
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  It seems to work when it starts as a benevolent dictator taking care of employees. I like examples with razor-thin margins since they show the rest could probably pull it off: https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2013/07/24/the-wal-mart-slayer-how-publixs-people-first-culture-is-winning-the-grocer-war/#7bc14dd25880 https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2013/07/24/the-wal... It's more a right mix between worker's ideas and worker-approved management, though, instead of purely worker-directed. Same happened with Ricardo Semler's company that was even more radical.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  Communes exist, and people start them regularly. Unfortunately, they tend to be unstable and disintegrate. The most famous one is probably San Francisco's "Summer of Love" in 1967. It lasted just a few months.
  - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
    It's a stretch to describe the Summer of Love, even just in San Fransisco, as a commune. If anything, there were many communes that existed or maybe started in that time.
    - WalterBright 9y ago
      Not a stretch at all. There were organized efforts to provide free food, clothing, shelter, health care, and entertainment. People were encouraged to contribute what they could, or nothing at all, entirely up to them. They thought they were building the perfect society.
MrTonyD 9y ago
About 20 years ago I first heard about co-ops, and I thought it was a great idea. So I literally bought every book on the subject that I could find (spent many hundreds) and read all those books. There is a long and rich history of co-ops worldwide. My take away: Most co-ops end up either failing or replicating a power hierarchy - with workers on the losing end. Very few avoid that end, and those that do are those that either exist in markets where they don't have to execute perfectly (such as many successful businesses today) or those that figure out some way to cultivate leaders who make good business decisions (giving them a market advantage, and again letting them operate without exploiting their workers.) In other words, markets still operate as markets, and force business to operate in particular ways unless they can create what are sometimes called "effective monopolies" (based on regions or differentiation or some other advantage). I've become convinced that we need to change the way markets compete if we want any real change.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Agreed. The root of the problem is that exploiting workers can - and usually does - give one a competitive advantage. If we can somehow fix this, the entire problem will solve itself.
  - frubar 9y ago
    Isn't it more of a game theory situation? If your competitors exploit their workers and you don't then you will be too expensive?
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Yes. That's exactly what I meant by referring to competitive advantage.
  - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
    Are you accounting for the benefit to workers of not having (some) authority? Decision-making itself can be extremely stressful! Ceding authority to someone else also relieves you of the associated responsibility and that can and probably does have significant benefits e.g., psychologically, emotionally. Consider a pretty analogous industry – musicians, musical artists, etc. I've noticed that a lot of 'bands' I like are really 'dictatorships' run by a single highly-motivated artist that recruits other musicians to act as 'employees' to realize their, the dictator's, vision. It doesn't seem inherently bad to allow people to be employees. Regardless, it seems impossibly to perfectly negate any advantages (or disadvantages) of "exploiting workers". I think a better vision is to help and encourage everyone to become more 'powerful', e.g. more skilled, wealthier, open to more possibilities. But I also admit I don't have a plan to prevent the already-powerful from becoming more powerful themselves, and at a faster rate than everyone else. I'm still undecided whether that's generally good or bad. Perhaps it's (effectively) undecidable!
monksy 9y ago
> o form cooperatives where we collectively define our own roles? This is attempted in organizations that have a flat organization. The problem with that, eventually it forms a hierarchy based on the most agressive and most bullying.
_Codemonkeyism 9y ago
We wanted to found a collective of programmers and admins in the 90s, because we all felt cheated by companies for money and didn't like company politics. From around 50 people it slimmed down over a year to 3 during discussions and legal work - and the 3 of us then founded a startup because it showed others were not really interested in a collective idea but 9-5 jobs that brought in consistent money. I don't know what to take away from that. My impression was they would like to work for a collective but not found one perhaps. I was always amazed by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
- scottLobster 9y ago
  Sounds like a common case of loving the idea of something but not having the will to carry it out. That's most of humanity in my experience. People, even experienced tech professionals are far more likely to bitch about a problem vs actually taking steps to solve it. It's like people who will bitch about how lousy customer service is at company X, but if company X raised the prices on their products by $1-2 to hire full time customer support staff, those same people would take their business elsewhere. So really they don't want better customer support, they just want the genie to grant wishes. 3 out of 50 people actually serious about solving a given problem fits pretty well with my life experience. :P
  - manigandham 9y ago
    > 3 out of 50 people actually serious about solving a given problem That seems high.
Retra 9y ago
These things don't happen on accident. Somebody has to take charge, and whoever does is likely to want a disproportionate amount of power and wealth for doing so. And then they just set up a traditional business.

api 9y ago

> men felt exactly the same way about their job - but more women had the freedom to take action and leave the job. Is there a simple explanation of the year award trophy I can nominate you for? Maybe our field just sucks a bit more than we like to admit. Women find it easier to take the family route and possibly make a career change post child rearing, while poor Dilbert with his Y chromosome is stuck with the pointy haired boss. Maybe the gender gap problem is caused by a more universal set of problems that irritate everyone. Of course for women take all the problems of tech and add sexual harassment. Not only does the PHB waste your time and make dumb decisions and force you to implement them but then he comes over and rubs your shoulders and talks about how much fun the swinger lifestyle can be.

moron4hire 9y ago
I was probably first exposed to the concept of sexual harassment as a teenager, just before college. Clinton had just diddle an intern. Clarence Thomas was accused of it while he was up for Supreme Court confirmation. I remember a lot of apologia, "he got his signals crossed" or something like that. And that was my impression going forward. The "honest mistake" trope is not sexual harassment. Now that I know more about how the world works, that story was clearly a PR push to de-legitimize the complaints of both the particular people accusing these public figures at the time, and anyone who might try in the future. I very soon had a fast primer on what is real sexual harassment. One coworker at my first job out of college was constantly haranguing another. Overt sexual advances that were always met with "that's just <him>. It's just a joke." It made me uncomfortable just to watch it. I know it made her uncomfortable because she would lock herself in her office and cry at least once a week. I don't know why she confided in me about it. I begged her to file a complaint. She was probably right that it would do more harm than good. I complained to my own boss and got told I was too young to understand. I suppose I was too young to understand, but only because I had not yet reached the point where I rejected any authority figures who told me shit like "you're too young to understand" at 22 years old. The guy did this in the open, during project status meetings. This wasn't Uber or UploadVR or whatever other Silicon Valley brogrammer startup we're going to tsk-tsk "boys will be boys" and never actually do anything about. This was an established engineering firm, with a very strictly worded employee handbook, and an HR director that literally looked the other way. So I don't want to hear anything about it not being systemic. I've personally never found sexual talk of any nature in the office to be comfortable. I've had gay bosses hit on me. I've had straight bosses "jokingly" touch me inappropriately. I've had female bosses make jokes about my love life. Sat by while coworkers traded stories about sexual conquests. Even if the sexual advances are towards someone else, if they make you uncomfortable, it's still sexual harassment. But we've had this trope that it's some sort of attack on lonely men who take a risk on finding love. And I think that active misdirection has not only (obviously) harmed so many women, it's harmed quite a few men, too. Probably most of us, in some way. It's not "getting along with a woman at work and ask her out and she rejects you." It's about creating a hostile work environment. Anyone who can't tell the difference has got a serious problem. You do not have to put up with being made to feel uncomfortable like that at work.

013a 9y ago

This is similar to something Jordan Peterson has argued [1]. In short: Societies which afford economic rights to women have flourished, but women pay a huge price for it. The question shouldn't be "why aren't more women in positions of power", but really "why are there any men who are insane enough to occupy those positions" when social science has already proven that money beyond a certain number doesn't make you happier and the work conditions are absolutely atrocious. Women are much more sane than men, and anyone who argues that we should have more women in power is arguing that women, as a class, should be terminally unhappy. Which isn't to say that the same opportunities shouldn't exist, and in many fields they don't, but be careful when conflating opportunity and outcome. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvUtDdlNGwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvUtDdlNGwY

jawbone3 9y ago
Thats funny! By your summary women have poor representation in tech fields because the working conditions are bad, so people should stop trying to get women into the sector because the will get crappy jobs. Let me suggest that a sane person would argue in support of improving working conditions instead of perpetuating suffering, but I guess thats a point of contention in these contexts....
- peak_body_yo 9y ago
  Perception vs. reality The general perception is that programming is a socially isolating, boring, monotonous job where you stare at a screen all day. People making career choices don't know about the lax environment. So tech completely aligns with what he/she wrote. edit: and your sarcasm is hostile
  - Zarath 9y ago
    This will be an unpopular opinion here but it's true in my experience.
    - yarper 9y ago

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

>But more women had the freedom to take action and leave the job. Sounds about right in my estimation. It fits the pattern of social/economic leftovers from when women weren't expected to be a significant economic contribution to the household. Women are less likely to be the source of the large majority (e.g. 60% or more) of household income for households > 1. Those that are the primary source of income aren't expected by society to do that job. At the statistical level this results in more women quitting because the negative economic and social implications of doing so are less severe (at the statistical level) than for men. Edit: tl;dr women are statistically more likely to be in a position to be more picky about working conditions.

danharaj 9y ago
> when women weren't expected to be a significant economic contribution to the household. This is wrong. One, domestic labor is still economic activity. Economy used to refer solely to the activities of maintaining a household. Ironic how it has been transformed so that unpaid labor is not considered economic. Two, proletariat women have always been expected to and have contributed a wage to the household. This is on top of being expected to perform all unpaid domestic labor. The idea of a woman who only works at home was a middle class and upper class phenomenon. A strong impact on how women's work was divided was the advance in technology that vastly reduced the amount of domestic labor required to maintain a household.

emodendroket 9y ago

I think you have to elide a lot of points about problems specific to women to make this the narrative you write. You have to also just take it as a given that women are to do the lion's share of child rearing (since this is, after all, the main reason why long hours are viewed as a women's issue rather than an issue for all workers).

gcp 9y ago

In that other study they also made the point that men felt exactly the same way about their job This rather completely flushes over the issue that the extent of those conditions may not be the same between men and women. I mean, a key finding is "...the engineering workplace culture (as) being non-supportive of women." and there's the whole equal pay for equal work issue.