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Many girls decide at around age 12 that a better life strategy is for them to get a husband that will do all the heavy lifting. This obviously worked for thousa

by bitL 9y ago

Many girls decide at around age 12 that a better life strategy is for them to get a husband that will do all the heavy lifting. This obviously worked for thousands of years and is likely a result of evolution and specialization. I always admire when I meet an independent woman that rejected this conditioning but it's very rare :( Maybe there should be a better approach to early-teenage girls to help them to make a different choice that would not render them uncompetitive in STEM fields later? 10,000 hours to achieve mastery or childhood dedication seem to be increasingly more relevant in STEM, similarly to piano/violin virtuosos.

roenxi 9y ago
> likely a result of evolution and specialization Economically speaking, I suspect this is more to do with the superior position of women, as a class, in setting the standards of what an acceptable relationship looks like. If husbands are willing to do heavy lifting, wives would be economically irrational to do their own heavy lifting. I'm pretty suspicious that the deal offered to a housewife comes with better quality of life outcomes than the deal offered to most engineers. I've always assumed it is linked to the relative excess of young men to the number of young women (something like 107:100 or close to [1]). It makes sense to me that the group with most power in establishing a relationship would choose not to be an engineer if they could be, say, mind the house. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio
mantas 9y ago
Independent non-family women lead to less children. Thus society as a whole has motive to lead girls towards this specialization.
- bitL 9y ago
  This could be the culprit - those women, that became independent removed themselves and their traits from genetic pool due to not having children or having fewer of them. That might also explain persistence of religions that emphasize sexual relationships for reproduction only and banning abortions, as it leads to higher probability of carrying on with one's genotype. So what we are observing could be some stochastic optimum in some game theory of natural conditions. A question is if our civilization that could seemingly solve cutthroat problems of the past leading to brutal competition like food scarcity will have completely different, stable stochastic optima. I guess we will see (or generations after us).
  - mantas 9y ago
    Indeed. I wonder wether civilisations after reaching certain step sort of goes into self-destruction mode. Maybe deep down humans feel that they're at evolutionary dead end and decide to off themselves as a society? I could easily see why today's western society (and possibly others as well) may be far from optimal. Yet I'd prefer to try to fix it. What is funniest, people advocating for "progress" etc frequently are those who have no children. Although old good "you're not grown up till you got kids" outlook is looked down nowadays, I can see why it'd make sense. If you don't have kids - you don't have skin in the long game. Nor experience what it's like to play in that mode. I wonder how the world would change if we'd only allow people with kids to vote and/or participate in politics.
jenthoven 9y ago
1. This just begs the question: why are men more ambitious and successful? 2. Clearly, this “decision” that women make when they’re 12 doesn’t effect them in many other fields, including life sciences, law, etc, because they are the majority in those fields.
- bitL 9y ago
  I think that's a bit biased - some men seem to be more ambitious/successful; the environment is brutal to men to compete with each other, often for scraps. There also seems to be way more men at the bottom of the pyramid, homeless ones, losers of evolutionary selection. Maybe we should start talking about them as well? As why many girls make that "decision" at around 12 - they might be smarter and see that they don't have to work that much anymore. Maybe in the past when things like cooking for 10 people family or washing clothes/cleaning were super difficult the partners had to form a team; these days most of this is semi-automated and allows different strategies. Do you really believe that girls aren't making conscious choice to stay away from "weird smelly" engineers in STEM fields that are now popular wrt. $/status but were completely undesirable 20 years ago? Have you grown up completely isolated from young females and couldn't observe what were their choices? Yes, I have seen a lot of men dissing them "just females, can't be good" (I hated it in my idealistic youth), but then later you observe their choices and they aren't doing themselves any favors either, usually picking "safe choices" instead of risky ones needed for success.
  - jenthoven 9y ago
    My comment was in response to your initial point that "“Many girls decide at around age 12 ... to get a husband that will do all the heavy lifting". I don't think it's because they're "smarter" because in the long run it costs them opportunity, power, wealth, etc that people in the workforce acquire over time. There might be an element related to a partnership at home, but as Sandberg points out in Lean In, this should affect women's decisions in their 30s, not their decisions about their college major when they're 18. I'm a female founder who majored in CS and left my PM job at Google to start a company, so I have "observed the choices" of many young females considering engineering. It's not enough to say that "women are just choosing the wrong thing" - we need to find the underlying cause of those choices if we want to shift the demographics.

by bitL 9y ago

roenxi 9y ago

> likely a result of evolution and specialization Economically speaking, I suspect this is more to do with the superior position of women, as a class, in setting the standards of what an acceptable relationship looks like. If husbands are willing to do heavy lifting, wives would be economically irrational to do their own heavy lifting. I'm pretty suspicious that the deal offered to a housewife comes with better quality of life outcomes than the deal offered to most engineers. I've always assumed it is linked to the relative excess of young men to the number of young women (something like 107:100 or close to [1]). It makes sense to me that the group with most power in establishing a relationship would choose not to be an engineer if they could be, say, mind the house. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio

mantas 9y ago

Independent non-family women lead to less children. Thus society as a whole has motive to lead girls towards this specialization.

bitL 9y ago
This could be the culprit - those women, that became independent removed themselves and their traits from genetic pool due to not having children or having fewer of them. That might also explain persistence of religions that emphasize sexual relationships for reproduction only and banning abortions, as it leads to higher probability of carrying on with one's genotype. So what we are observing could be some stochastic optimum in some game theory of natural conditions. A question is if our civilization that could seemingly solve cutthroat problems of the past leading to brutal competition like food scarcity will have completely different, stable stochastic optima. I guess we will see (or generations after us).
- mantas 9y ago
  Indeed. I wonder wether civilisations after reaching certain step sort of goes into self-destruction mode. Maybe deep down humans feel that they're at evolutionary dead end and decide to off themselves as a society? I could easily see why today's western society (and possibly others as well) may be far from optimal. Yet I'd prefer to try to fix it. What is funniest, people advocating for "progress" etc frequently are those who have no children. Although old good "you're not grown up till you got kids" outlook is looked down nowadays, I can see why it'd make sense. If you don't have kids - you don't have skin in the long game. Nor experience what it's like to play in that mode. I wonder how the world would change if we'd only allow people with kids to vote and/or participate in politics.

jenthoven 9y ago

1. This just begs the question: why are men more ambitious and successful? 2. Clearly, this “decision” that women make when they’re 12 doesn’t effect them in many other fields, including life sciences, law, etc, because they are the majority in those fields.

bitL 9y ago
I think that's a bit biased - some men seem to be more ambitious/successful; the environment is brutal to men to compete with each other, often for scraps. There also seems to be way more men at the bottom of the pyramid, homeless ones, losers of evolutionary selection. Maybe we should start talking about them as well? As why many girls make that "decision" at around 12 - they might be smarter and see that they don't have to work that much anymore. Maybe in the past when things like cooking for 10 people family or washing clothes/cleaning were super difficult the partners had to form a team; these days most of this is semi-automated and allows different strategies. Do you really believe that girls aren't making conscious choice to stay away from "weird smelly" engineers in STEM fields that are now popular wrt. $/status but were completely undesirable 20 years ago? Have you grown up completely isolated from young females and couldn't observe what were their choices? Yes, I have seen a lot of men dissing them "just females, can't be good" (I hated it in my idealistic youth), but then later you observe their choices and they aren't doing themselves any favors either, usually picking "safe choices" instead of risky ones needed for success.
- jenthoven 9y ago
  My comment was in response to your initial point that "“Many girls decide at around age 12 ... to get a husband that will do all the heavy lifting". I don't think it's because they're "smarter" because in the long run it costs them opportunity, power, wealth, etc that people in the workforce acquire over time. There might be an element related to a partnership at home, but as Sandberg points out in Lean In, this should affect women's decisions in their 30s, not their decisions about their college major when they're 18. I'm a female founder who majored in CS and left my PM job at Google to start a company, so I have "observed the choices" of many young females considering engineering. It's not enough to say that "women are just choosing the wrong thing" - we need to find the underlying cause of those choices if we want to shift the demographics.