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If I recall, the article didn't mention any East-West differences, it mentioned GDP differences. "The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the Unite
by astine 18y ago
If I recall, the article didn't mention any East-West differences, it mentioned GDP differences.
"The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. In countries with less economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, she writes, the number of women in physics is as high as 30 to 35 percent, versus 5 percent in Canada, Japan, and Germany."
Japan is listed as one of the countries where women don't don't pursue IT carriers. The common trait is economic, not social.
I think that we should deal with people on an individual basis and not a group basis. It does not matter why people choose the careers that they do, what matters is that they are happy where they are. If you find that a bunch of women are unhappy because they didn't choose or were denied a career in IT, then you have a cause. If you find a bunch of women who are unhappy because a bunch of other women didn't choose careers in IT, then you have a bunch of busybodies that don't have my sympathy.
- etal 18y agoYou're right, I missed Japan in the other group. I'm always suspicious of industrialized-vs-developing groupings because the intersection of industrialized and Western is so large. What do the numbers look like in Latin America, for instance? And Russia seems to have a lot of respect for scientists, in particular. Basically, the example countries look cherry-picked, where those researchers lined up the percentages of women in physics by country, then generalized about the high and low ends of the scale, rather than starting with a proper hypothesis and testing it.
- astine 18y agoIt's totally possible that the countries are cherry picked. Still, my own personal experience corroborates the theory. Examining just folks that I know, women seem to be more attuned to social pressures than do men. If this were even partly true of whole species, then it would more than explain the gap. Still, as you said elsewhere, differences within the sexes are by all measures more significant than differences between the sexes. With this being the case, we could have a great deal of difficulty isolating specific differences and yet still have them exist subtly.
- timr 18y agoThe countries weren't cherry-picked for this analysis -- the article says that they were data sets published in Science for different purposes.