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Sex Differences in Adolescents’ Occupational Aspirations

105 points by Bostonian 5y ago

Bostonian 5y ago
The preprint was cited by Alex Tabarrok in the Marginal Revolution blog: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/10/sex-differences-in-adolescents-occupational-aspirations.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/10/se...
sbelskie 5y ago
“ We found that the latter correlations are mostly due to an increase in boys’ aspirations to enter things-oriented blue-collar careers and a decrease in boys' aspirations to enter people-oriented careers in countries with greater women's empowerment. In contrast, the percentages of girls aspiring to things-oriented jobs or people-oriented jobs did not systematically vary with national-levels of girls' and women's empowerment.”
rubidium 5y ago
This just in: men and women are biologically different (at the statistical, population level). Shouldn’t affect individual level policy. But any metric of equal outcome is misguided.
- ryanwhitney 5y ago
  “Despite the long-term and widespread study of the sex differences in interest in people-oriented as compared to things-oriented occupations, there is no consensus on the sources of these differences.”
- vhgbh87 5y ago
  I believe you are making a conclusion that neither the article nor science in general makes. The differences in preference are exhibited, but whether they have a biological root (and what outcomes we should target) do not have strong evidence.
  - Out_of_Characte 5y ago
    Male and females constitute the largest difference you could have in a species. This preprint affirms what all previous work in this space has found; if you try to minimise the cultural/enviromental differences between men and women, you maximise their biological differences. "These sex differences were larger in countries with a higher level of women's empowerment." "We explain this counter-intuitive finding through the indirect effect of wealth. Women's empowerment is associated with relatively high levels of national wealth and this wealth allows more students to aspire to occupations they are intrinsically interested in" Though I think the preprint's reasoning about the influence of wealth is just bad. Especially if you try to reason that wealth and better education is causing alot of women to become nurses instead of doctors.
    - exporectomy 5y ago
      I suspect a 2nd factor is competitive vs well-defined. CEO for example is people-oriented but 70% male. Maybe because it's also competitive.
      - Out_of_Characte 5y ago
        Horse riding is a fun example of your observation. Its above 30 to 1 women versus male riders. Untill you enter the higher level of competitions, then its the reverse. I've done horse riding, its unique and fun but definitely not for me.
    - tylerhou 5y ago
      > "These sex differences were larger in countries with a higher level of women's empowerment." There are confounding factors here, though — it's not like the only variable being changed between two countries is a woman's empowerment. See also, Simpson's paradox.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  It should be considered in setting or reviewing individual level policy if said policy assumes no difference
- baron816 5y ago
  Seems like more research is still needed, but it’s not hard to imagine policy makers or regulators developing quotas and mandates around tech companies hiring women. If women are indeed statistically less interested in working as engineers, governments shouldn’t, for example, require companies match hiring of women to the proportion of their population (not that anyone is actually considering this).
- pessimizer 5y ago
  My brother and I are also biologically different. It says nothing about expected outcomes that we are distinct. When you say that an expectation of equal outcome is misguided, you're sneaking in a conclusion about the nature of those biological differences. If the biological difference were a large facial birthmark that caused people to treat us differently (although we're otherwise identical twins), would you accept a statistically equal outcome between groups of people with and without facial birthmarks as a sign of a lack of discrimination against people with facial birthmarks?
  - gonehome 5y ago
    My hypothesis is that the nature of sexual selective pressures is what is more likely to create differences between the groups. This wouldn't really apply in the birthmark case (unless it was some sort of secondary sexual characteristic). Either way, society should allow for equal opportunity even if there are differences in average interest between groups since the variation within a group is larger anyway. It just means not seeing the same outcome doesn't necessarily mean something has gone wrong.
    - mcguire 5y ago
      Out of curiosity, what outcome would mean something has gone wrong? 75%? 90%?
      - gonehome 5y ago
        I honestly don’t know. I also recognize it’s a politically fraught question. It could still be true though.
        mcguire 5y ago
        The reason I ask is because... * Women make up 25.2% of "Computer and mathematical occupations" (https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm) * World-wide, women make up < 9% (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1126823/worldwide-developer-gender/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1126823/worldwide-develo...) * "38% of women who majored in computer science are working in the field compared to 53% of men" (https://www.cio.com/article/3516012/women-in-tech-statistics-the-hard-truths-of-an-uphill-battle.html https://www.cio.com/article/3516012/women-in-tech-statistics...) Somehow, it just doesn't smell like a preference.
- xnyan 5y ago
  That's kind of the opposite of the conclusion of the article. Now, the conclusions of the article (cultural, social and political differences have a huge impact on what what men and women do) may be incorrect, and you may be more correct, but it's a little incongruent to say (I'm paraphrasing here) "Biological differences explain the differences in career outcomes between men and women." Outside of some very specific situations (aka muscle mass dependent jobs like carrying heavy loads on your back) I'm not aware of any scientific evidence that supports a biological cause of career outcome divergence in women vs men, but if you have some literature or other information I'm always willing to admit that I'm wrong in light of new information. On the other hand, there is an ocean of scientific data that cultural, social and political conditions have a huge impact on what jobs men and women do. EDIT: there is actually one argument for biological differences explaining divergent outcomes that I find convincing: for the vast majority of human history, the state's monopoly on the use of violence has been either nonexistent or far weaker as compared to today. Men have had an advantage on the use of violence due to average muscle mass and bone density being higher than women. Technology (firearms, surveillance, etc) has made this disparity of power in capacity for violence less and less relevant.
  - artificialLimbs 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Gender_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Ge... These have been shown to directly affect statistical likelihood of career choice.
    - xnyan 5y ago
      From your link: "men in highly developed world regions were less neurotic, less extraverted, less conscientious and less agreeable compared to men in less developed world regions" If these personality traits are influenced by what country you are born it, would it not support the the non-biological argument?
      - clusterfish 5y ago
        The real answer is probably the most boring: it's both. I wish this wasn't such a controversial topic and research could be done freely on this, but researching biological differences between genders / races / etc. is quite taboo in some western universities now.
- clusterfish 5y ago
  Even without getting hung up on the "biological" qualifier, that's groundbreaking news to some people, you know. The people who insist that not having 50% females in any occupation is them being underrepresented because they're repressed and discriminated against. (Never heard that female dominated occupations are discriminatory though, I wonder why) Then this translates into laws, policies and scholarships that effectively discriminate against men. Don't know what you mean by "individual level" policy but a lot of policy needs to change.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    "Don't know what you mean by "individual level" policy but a lot of policy needs to change." The long-standing beliefs, policies, laws, and scholarships that assume a woman in a male-dominated profession is an abomination and represents a loss of a good job to a deserving man.
    - clusterfish 5y ago
      These are either non-individual laws/policies, or personal beliefs/biases, but not both "individual level" and "policies" at the same time.
    - ryan93 5y ago
      link to the law?
      - kbelder 5y ago
        Or the scholarship, for that matter?
  - john_moscow 5y ago
    There's a very very very obvious dollar value attached to these policies. By discouraging the workforce from having families and kids (let alone single-income households) you effectively eliminate their main long-term expenses and reduce the pressure on the wages. You then start substituting the declining population with immigrants from countries with lower standard of living, and you've hit the jackpot. Your profits go up, your stock goes up, your salary expenses stay the same. This wouldn't fly 60 years ago when the economy was much more decentralized. There was no single large entity (or related group of entities) that would benefit from such policies. If you run a small business and personally know every employee, you wouldn't think of such a thing. This bodes well in the current model where every child-free worker is an extra $50K lifetime value for their employer, translating into 5 extra cents per share.
- john_moscow 5y ago
  We just ended up with a rather perverse definition of equal outcome. What you may intuitively want to do as a society is maximize everyone's happiness. Which is hard to quantify, so you go and try to eliminate things that typically make people unhappy. Being denied the things you want because of the factors you don't control is surely a big depression maker. Not "go study better and you'll pass the exam", but "fuck off, I don't like your face", pardon my French. So how did we solve it? We made a faceless inappealable uncriticizable statistics-driven system designed to tell the majority of people to shut up and cull their ambition. And you know how we ended up here? Every society has a certain amount of people with ambition to power. They want to tell others what to do. They want to make decisions affecting others. That's fine, that's human psychology. That's why the previous generations started companies, studied hard disciplines, took risks, and found their place in the society with the perfect effort/power balance just for them. Except, this doesn't work anymore with the "economies of scale" where there's a bunch of CEOs and investors, but everyone else is a replaceable drone. So there's an incredible power vacuum in the Western society. People are desperate for roles in life that will give them meaning and power - ability to make decisions affecting other people. The corporations have PR departments and centrally owned media companies that steer this force clear of colliding with their financial interests. So, it effectively turned into a cold civil war. Want to change something in the society? Go get a 5-figure loan on a social justice degree, and then exercise your power by telling majority of the people to hate themselves, and enjoy no retaliation. Kinda like every war. On both sides of a conflict there are regular people with friends, children, families, hobbies. But they are too busy demonizing the other side, and eager to be foot soldiers in someone else's game. Someone whos mansion is located far from the front line and whos kids will sit at the board of a munitions manufacturer, rather than in a trench on a battlefield. I don't know how we're gonna get out of this mess.
- godelski 5y ago
  I think that is a very difficult conclusion to draw. There are a lot of factors in there that are impossible to control. We can't really isolate cultural and historical trends. Yes, we can measure a difference that significantly correlates with sex, but it is a bit naive to draw causal conclusions. But I still agree that equal outcome metrics are misguided. It is too lazy of a metric and statistics will mess it up very quickly with such things as Simpson's or Berkson's paradoxes. These are far too easy to fall prone to. Besides that, the question seems to be more about if the reason for these differences are due to biology or society (rather, which one is more significant), not that the differences don't exist (i.e. causal). But coming up with good metrics to determine what is going on is difficult. I do not think a metric should become a target though, and we have to be more careful in nuanced in our approach.
renewiltord 5y ago
The supposed paradoxical increase of this effect with increasing wealth has been replicated fairly often with the only real opposition I’ve noticed being that sociocultural incentives dominate. That is, if you aren’t going to starve, the most important thing is what other people think. The closer to starving you get the less important that becomes. Anyway, that’s the hypothesis explaining the difference. What research out there explores that hypothesis? Otherwise, this seems like just more of the same revealing that there are differences in participation.
- noptd 5y ago
  >That is, if you aren’t going to starve, the most important thing is what other people think. This seems like too strong of a claim to make without any supporting evidence.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    The study authors draw a conclusion that wealth allows people to choose work that more reflects their intrinsic interest. To my mind, that's a claim at least as worthy of skepticism as the claim that wealthy people choose social-status-enhancing work (which differs based on gender due to cultural norms).
- snek_case 5y ago
  >That is, if you aren’t going to starve, the most important thing is what other people think. IMO that hypothesis is politically biased. It implies that men/women in wealthier societies are trying harder to conform to gender norms. Blames societal norms for the difference. The simpler and less dehumanizing alternative is that people in wealthier countries are more free to live life however they want. There are less constraints.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    Well, then, that’s on me for misrepresenting it. Let’s try again. You can see desire to comply with gender norms as a constant X and starvation risk Y as a variable. Appropriately scale each and measure X-Y. That can go positive or negative depending on Y without X varying at all. I want to eliminate this explanation as significantly causative. Where would I find evidence for that?
Gunax 5y ago
Results are on page19. > As expected, the percentages of students aspiring to sex-typical occupations were higher in countries with higher levels of women's empowerment, r(68)=.350, p=.003. The percentages of students aspiring to sex-atypical occupations ranged from 7%[6.2%-7.8%] in Lithuania to 23%[21.2%- 24.3%] in Lebanon (international median of 12%). This variation correlated negatively with women's empowerment, r(68)=-.500, p<.001. I do not like weighing into these sorts of things too much because I think people tend to find whatever they are looking for. All it really shows is that gender preferenes are formed before adolescence. Whether that innate or learned is not clear.
- daveevad 5y ago
  Can anyone track down the list of `sex-typical occupations` ? The thickest thread I've found is a reference to a PISA 2018 dataset. > We investigated sex differences in 473,260 adolescents’ aspirations to work in thingsoriented (e.g., mechanic), people-oriented (e.g., nurse), and STEM (e.g., mathematician) careers across 80 countries and economic regions using the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
- pessimizer 5y ago
  > Whether that innate or learned is not clear. Unless you also consider nationality innate, it certainly suggests that it is learned.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    Are you suggesting there are no biological differences between Lebanese and Lithuanians? /s (although I've seen that argument here before)
    - simonh 5y ago
      Human beings are a very genetically homogenous species, far more so than most. Suppose you take a member of an ethnic group and compare them to two other randomly selected individuals, one from their ethnic group and one from a different ethnic group. The chances their genetic differences will be greater with one rather than the other is very close to 50/50. Ethnicity makes only a very tiny difference, the vast, vast majority of the differences between individuals have nothing to do with it.
vhgbh87 5y ago
It's probably not worth putting much stock in a preprint unless you are trained in evaluating this particular type of whitepaper. Even peer review is not a stamp of quality, but it at least signals "some set of folks have broadly reviewed this and consider it well constructed." Whether it's sociology or fusion or battery tech -- we shouldn't put much value on preprint articles.
- cronix 5y ago
  You seem knowledgeable on the subject. Have there been any studies that have been peer reviewed, and replicated, that have come to roughly the same conclusions? Or is this preprint the first time the subject has been studied?
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Not an expert, but I believe this is a widely studied area with a large body of literature. I say this because I've seen articles with similar conclusions going back decades. You can probably find many by searching Google Scholar For Occupational sex differences or selection
- xor99 5y ago
  *any articles
- somedude895 5y ago
  To be fair, in sociology this sort of thing might not make it out of preprint for certain reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
- nottorp 5y ago
  Isn't a preprint a way to make your article available outside Elsevier's paywall these days?
sbelskie 5y ago
Interesting thread by Matt Darling of Niskansen that is pretty critical of the study design and data quality of this and other similar papers. https://mobile.twitter.com/besttrousers/status/1454150695196708865 https://mobile.twitter.com/besttrousers/status/1454150695196...
- crateless 5y ago
  > Here's an model explaining the "Gender Equality Paradox" that doesn't rely on the crutch of assuming different preferences. Women pay some fixed cost for being in the labor market, in general. Perhaps due to discrimination, perhaps to something else. As such less likely to pursue a costly STEM education in college. However, they become more likely to pursue a STEM education as the returns increase. Women respond to incentives. The bigger the non-service sector of the economy, the more income there is to gain from a STEM education. As it gets higher (which tends to be the case in less developed countries) more women enter STEM programs. In developed countries the STEM premium is lower (Someone in a service job like a lawyer or accountant will do just fine). This fits the data we have available, doesn't require that we assume our conclusion (we just assume women respond to incentives), and is able to help explain other phemonena. It's got a lot of features we want in a good model! - Matt Darling Edit: It seems like he assumes some "fixed cost" in order to counter the finding that women are less likely to pursue STEM education. Is there something I am missing?
  - nottorp 5y ago
    > As such less likely to pursue a costly STEM education in college. However, they become more likely to pursue a STEM education as the returns increase. Is Matt Darling aware that in most European countries university education is (financially speaking) free or extremely low cost? And said cost is about the same no matter what you study? Edit to make it more clear: As far as I know crushing student debt is an US and UK thing. Not continental Europe. I have no idea how things go outside US/Europe though.
    - mcguire 5y ago
      Are you assuming that all costs are financial? (As a possible example, the only European countries with higher percentages of tertiary education than the US in the 25-34 age group are Norway, Ireland, Luxembourg, Lithuania, and Russia. I suppose that only 28% of Germans are interested in tertiary education, as opposed to 49% in Norway and Ireland. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_education_attainment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...)
lordnacho 5y ago
What makes an occupation people-oriented vs things-oriented? Is a software developer who makes a dating app doing one or the other? What about the designer? Is being a doctor one or the other? You need to be able to say difficult things to people, and a lot of doctors will tell you they're doing it to help people. But doing surgery is presumably technical in nature. Is there an acknowledged way these categories are determined?
- simonh 5y ago
  This is detailed on page 15 of the paper. They used the ISCO, which is an internationally recognised standard for classifying occupations.
- Alex3917 5y ago
  > Is a software developer who makes a dating app doing one or the other? What about the designer? Both are thing oriented because you’re doing work for people as an abstraction, not individual people. User stories might be based on actual people, but they’re ultimately meant as archetypes.
- brailsafe 5y ago
  It's my impression that the more you want money for things or your family, the more you'll succeed in software engineering, because it can be awfully dismal and you almost never see the human impact your drudgery serves. I don't really care about things much compared to any of my previous colleagues, and as such there's no amount of money that can compel me to do a programming job I've learned to hate.
- 11thEarlOfMar 5y ago
  I think categories need to be more granular. 'doctors' A quick LinkedIn search for Surgeon shows that about 70% of surgeons in the SFBA are male. 80% of pediatricians are female. 'engineers' Prior searches showed that 90% of electrical engineers were male. 50% of SQE were female.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  Sure, the grey zones might be hard to pick out but it does seem like there are some clear extremes. "Locomotive engineers and operators" is 92% male yet "Registered nurses" is 87% female. If you look at all the male-dominant and female-dominant occupations, there does seem to be some sort of pattern which (for lack of more precise terminology) seems to be well-described as "people-oriented" and "thing-oriented". Go through the list, look at the entries which are either <20% female or >80% female, and tell me if you don't see the same pattern: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm
ffggvv 5y ago
NOOOOOO!!!!!!!!! its sexism! they are exactly the same!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7RIWh-Vo0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7RIWh-Vo0Y
exporectomy 5y ago
100 years later, we're rediscovering what we already knew. Common story in social sciences. Coming up next, Jews are smarter than blacks. Oh no, not yet! It's still taboo to even think that! But maybe in a few decades, the overton window will shift and researchers will allow themselves to study that honestly.
- dang 5y ago
  We already asked you to stop posting flamewar comments, and this is an extreme case, so I've banned this account. You've also been using HN primarily for ideological battle and that's not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
fredliu 5y ago
If you ask elementary kids today, a large portion of them would have the same career aspiration: to be a "youtuber".
- john_moscow 5y ago
  Yep, and most of them will end up stocking shelves at Walmart to make living.
- myhf 5y ago
  I hope for their sake that somebody manages to subcategorize some types of "youtuber" as people-oriented and others as things-oriented.
deleted 5y ago
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lostdog 5y ago
I mean you could be sitting around in the '70s making up reasons that women aren't interested in being doctors or lawyers, and boy would you turn out wrong: https://twitter.com/familyunequal/status/1164246285953748993 https://twitter.com/familyunequal/status/1164246285953748993 I think it's too early to tell right now if there's some type of things-interest/people-interest split among the genders. We're still so close to the time when women weren't allowed to have checking accounts, that the cultural inertia hasn't had time to wear off yet. I am very suspicious of researchers who claim to have the answer right now.
- refurb 5y ago
  Do you have a source on that claim that in the 1970’s scientists were arguing “women aren’t interested in being doctors or lawyers”?
  - jgwil2 5y ago
    GP did not make any such claim.
    - refurb 5y ago
      Was it just a straw man then? He just said such views are proven “wrong” so that would suppose someone held those views.
- tomp 5y ago
  This is a misleading graph that cherry-picks the data to support an ideological conclusion. Better graph: https://mmsa.org/2017/05/percent-of-bachelor-degrees-women-by-year/ https://mmsa.org/2017/05/percent-of-bachelor-degrees-women-b...
tzs 5y ago
I remember seeing a study using PISA data (I think...) that found an interesting difference between boys and girls, which could explain much about career choices. Boys who scored very high in STEM tended to have that as the only area where they were at the top. In other areas they might be good but usually not outstanding like they were in STEM. Girls who scored very high in STEM tended were much more likely to have at least one other area in which they also scored very high. People have a tendency to choose an occupation that fits with something they are good at. If the aforementioned study is correct, we'd expect to see boys who are good at STEM subjects to be more likely to go into a STEM career than girls who are good at STEM subjects, because for the girls it is more likely that they also have a non-STEM subject that they are as good or better in than their STEM subjects.
- simonh 5y ago
  That would only cause a demographic difference if STEM was more likely to the boy's one area they scored highly at compared to girls. If the only difference was that girls were good at more subjects, but the distribution of subjects both genders were good at was equally distributed across subjects, there would be no net effect.
  - CheezeIt 5y ago
    > That would only cause a demographic difference if STEM was more likely to the boy's one area they scored highly at compared to girls. It is.
- withinboredom 5y ago
  I might be projecting some after seeing how a close relative was pushed into STEM. She didn’t really want to do it, but she was given scholarships just because she was a female, and provided with extra “stuff” to succeed. She was mostly into horses and riding, so she did that on the side. Eventually she left STEM behind, but if she’d been in this mentioned study, she’d have shown at least two high-knowledge areas.
pgcj_poster 5y ago
> Things-oriented occupations are those that involve extensive work with machines, such as computer programming, repairing machines (e.g., cars), or tailoring Most computer programming jobs have very little to do with machines as such. Code in high-level languages works mostly with abstract representations of business requirements, and the fact that it's executed on machines is incidental. And if abstract concepts count as "things," then you've stretched an already ridiculously broad category to the point of uselessness. You might as well say "I repair cars for people, so my job is actually about people." I am a woman, and one of the things I find appealing about programming is the very immateriality of it. It's distinctly unlike something like "repairing machines." You don't have to get dirty, or crawl under anything, or climb a ladder, or carry heavy stuff around. I can see how women might be less interested in "things" when it comes to all that, but not computer programming. It's pretty clear that these dichotomy is over-generalized to the point that you can build whatever narrative you want. Also, why is it that it only seems to apply when the people-related jobs are low-status? Politicians and executives are mostly men and mostly deal with people. Food-preparation workers deal with things and are about equally men and women, except for head chefs, who are mostly men.
sandstrom 5y ago
This is a well-studied area, and the preferences are clearly biological. Boys “thing-orientation” and girls preference for “faces and dolls” show up in, for example, (a) neonatal human babies, (b) young rhesus monkeys and (c) chimpanzees babies. Also seen in a bunch of other studies. For the people who are disturbed because this doesn’t match your world-view; remember that this is two bell curves with different medians. There is significant overlap at the individual level, but also large differences in tails, which explain the reality we see around us (some occupations dominated by women or men respectively). https://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf https://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/12/female-chimps-treat-sticks-as-dolls/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/12/female-chimps...
- captainmuon 5y ago
  I'm not convinced. The fact that young male monkeys choose firetrucks over dolls rather strongly indicates that the study is bogus and there is some (unconscious) influence from the experimenter. How can monkeys instinctively know what a fire truck is? The explanation about females preferring faces is just a post-hoc rationalisation.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    They don’t know what it is, they know what it is not: a baby.
  - smegcicle 5y ago
    you don't have to know what a firetruck is to know that it looks cool
  - simonh 5y ago
    But surely if there is a clear difference in the data, we should be looking for an explanation, right? Of course it's possible for experimental methods to be flawed, but as the results from multiple studies pile up, that becomes less and less plausible as an explanation.
jleyank 5y ago
Are studies like these corrected for the culture the kids are raised in, the effect of things like parental leave on career choices or timing, introvert vs. extrovert, team or self oriented, economic status, history of education in the family, …. Whole lot of cultural issues weigh in here and they don’t cleanly partition by country. And you can probably make the argument that the existence and length of parental leave is culturally driven as well. Somebody has to take care of the kids and if a couple lacks the money to farm it out somebody’s career takes a hit.
- thriftwy 5y ago
  I don't think a real snapshot is less valuable than a result of hand waving over a real snapshot. Maybe we don't need to correct the data but going forward with life while taking this as reference.
- simonh 5y ago
  As the abstract points out, the results were stronger in countries with higher levels of women's empowerment.
MyHypatia 5y ago
Roughly 60% of accountants are women. What is the biological argument for that? 65% of realtors are women, but in commercial real estate it's only 35% women. Is that biologically driven? Seems like it's just socially harder for women to break into commercial real estate compared to residential real estate. While I am sure there are some biologically driven preferences between men and women, I think it's absurd to assert that these choices are "clearly biological" and that people who disagree just "don't like that it doesn't match their world view". Can you seriously claim with a straight face that accounting more nurturing/social/"faces and dolls" than software engineering? I think the social dynamics are just more welcoming of women in accounting than software engineering at this point in time.
- captainoats 5y ago
  Realtor and accountant (the majority that are personal/small business accountants, not big 4/corporate) are both jobs you can do part time and out of your home and are very people focused.
  - MyHypatia 5y ago
    It doesn't seem like a convincing argument to define accounting as a "people focused profession" now that it's a women-majority profession. If it was majority male, I think it would be used as an example of how "men like numbers". I could argue that software engineering can be quite people focused, easily done from home, and in some cases part-time. 70% of chefs are men. Are men biologically predisposed to belong in the kitchen? I think a more likely explanation is that women couldn't get financing to open their own restaurants. It wasn't until 1974 that the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed. And it wasn't until 1988 that the Women's Business Ownership Act allowed women to get a business loan without a male co-signer. What is a more likely explanation for the fact that 70% percent of chefs are men: a) men are biologically disposed to working in a kitchen, or b) until pretty recently women couldn't get financing to open restaurants on their own, so they didn't become chefs.
- bloqs 5y ago
  A good observation. They make up 49% in the UK. Firstly, this difference is based on statistical extremes. Women and men are more the same than they are different, from a temperament perspective. Agreeableness is the big five dimension that stands out the most here. Men are more likely to be disagreeable, women agreeable. Disagreeable people are more likely to be into "things" vs people. Agreeable is the opposite. In more egalitarian nations, where women are given more equal opportunities, they are actually MORE likely to follow careers that follow this temperamental observation. You can look to western europe, and then the Scandinavian countries as an example of progressively more egalitarian society.
aahortwwy 5y ago
> A subset of participants (N=473,260) answered the question "What kind of job do you expect to have when you are about 30 years old?", which we call "occupational aspiration" in this study. Expectation is aspiration.
- aerostable_slug 5y ago
  > Expectation is aspiration. Not unless you're aiming at something you're 100% certain you can achieve, or delusional. I knew a person in high school who aspired to go to Stanford for her undergraduate education. She didn't succeed, and to be quite honest her expectation of doing so was moored in fantasy, not reality. Any number of kids who want to play professional sports or succeed as entertainers are aspirational without necessarily expecting they'll make it. The ones who do expect that kind of success are often let down and become part of the 90-odd percent of SAG card holders who wait tables, paint houses, and do all kinds of things other than acting to pay the bills — or never even make it to Hollywood. Conversely, someone in a farming family might say that in 30 years they will be farming, which is likely aspiration = expectation.
  - aahortwwy 5y ago
    You made the point more eloquently than I did, thank you. The study is flawed.

105 points by Bostonian 5y ago

The preprint was cited by Alex Tabarrok in the Marginal Revolution blog: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/10/sex-differences-in-adolescents-occupational-aspirations.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/10/se...

sbelskie 5y ago

“ We found that the latter correlations are mostly due to an increase in boys’ aspirations to enter things-oriented blue-collar careers and a decrease in boys' aspirations to enter people-oriented careers in countries with greater women's empowerment. In contrast, the percentages of girls aspiring to things-oriented jobs or people-oriented jobs did not systematically vary with national-levels of girls' and women's empowerment.”

rubidium 5y ago

This just in: men and women are biologically different (at the statistical, population level). Shouldn’t affect individual level policy. But any metric of equal outcome is misguided.

ryanwhitney 5y ago
“Despite the long-term and widespread study of the sex differences in interest in people-oriented as compared to things-oriented occupations, there is no consensus on the sources of these differences.”
vhgbh87 5y ago
I believe you are making a conclusion that neither the article nor science in general makes. The differences in preference are exhibited, but whether they have a biological root (and what outcomes we should target) do not have strong evidence.
- Out_of_Characte 5y ago
  Male and females constitute the largest difference you could have in a species. This preprint affirms what all previous work in this space has found; if you try to minimise the cultural/enviromental differences between men and women, you maximise their biological differences. "These sex differences were larger in countries with a higher level of women's empowerment." "We explain this counter-intuitive finding through the indirect effect of wealth. Women's empowerment is associated with relatively high levels of national wealth and this wealth allows more students to aspire to occupations they are intrinsically interested in" Though I think the preprint's reasoning about the influence of wealth is just bad. Especially if you try to reason that wealth and better education is causing alot of women to become nurses instead of doctors.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    I suspect a 2nd factor is competitive vs well-defined. CEO for example is people-oriented but 70% male. Maybe because it's also competitive.
    - Out_of_Characte 5y ago
      Horse riding is a fun example of your observation. Its above 30 to 1 women versus male riders. Untill you enter the higher level of competitions, then its the reverse. I've done horse riding, its unique and fun but definitely not for me.
  - tylerhou 5y ago
    > "These sex differences were larger in countries with a higher level of women's empowerment." There are confounding factors here, though — it's not like the only variable being changed between two countries is a woman's empowerment. See also, Simpson's paradox.
s1artibartfast 5y ago
It should be considered in setting or reviewing individual level policy if said policy assumes no difference
baron816 5y ago
Seems like more research is still needed, but it’s not hard to imagine policy makers or regulators developing quotas and mandates around tech companies hiring women. If women are indeed statistically less interested in working as engineers, governments shouldn’t, for example, require companies match hiring of women to the proportion of their population (not that anyone is actually considering this).
pessimizer 5y ago
My brother and I are also biologically different. It says nothing about expected outcomes that we are distinct. When you say that an expectation of equal outcome is misguided, you're sneaking in a conclusion about the nature of those biological differences. If the biological difference were a large facial birthmark that caused people to treat us differently (although we're otherwise identical twins), would you accept a statistically equal outcome between groups of people with and without facial birthmarks as a sign of a lack of discrimination against people with facial birthmarks?
- gonehome 5y ago
  My hypothesis is that the nature of sexual selective pressures is what is more likely to create differences between the groups. This wouldn't really apply in the birthmark case (unless it was some sort of secondary sexual characteristic). Either way, society should allow for equal opportunity even if there are differences in average interest between groups since the variation within a group is larger anyway. It just means not seeing the same outcome doesn't necessarily mean something has gone wrong.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    Out of curiosity, what outcome would mean something has gone wrong? 75%? 90%?
    - gonehome 5y ago
      I honestly don’t know. I also recognize it’s a politically fraught question. It could still be true though.
      - mcguire 5y ago
        The reason I ask is because... * Women make up 25.2% of "Computer and mathematical occupations" (https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm) * World-wide, women make up < 9% (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1126823/worldwide-developer-gender/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1126823/worldwide-develo...) * "38% of women who majored in computer science are working in the field compared to 53% of men" (https://www.cio.com/article/3516012/women-in-tech-statistics-the-hard-truths-of-an-uphill-battle.html https://www.cio.com/article/3516012/women-in-tech-statistics...) Somehow, it just doesn't smell like a preference.
xnyan 5y ago
That's kind of the opposite of the conclusion of the article. Now, the conclusions of the article (cultural, social and political differences have a huge impact on what what men and women do) may be incorrect, and you may be more correct, but it's a little incongruent to say (I'm paraphrasing here) "Biological differences explain the differences in career outcomes between men and women." Outside of some very specific situations (aka muscle mass dependent jobs like carrying heavy loads on your back) I'm not aware of any scientific evidence that supports a biological cause of career outcome divergence in women vs men, but if you have some literature or other information I'm always willing to admit that I'm wrong in light of new information. On the other hand, there is an ocean of scientific data that cultural, social and political conditions have a huge impact on what jobs men and women do. EDIT: there is actually one argument for biological differences explaining divergent outcomes that I find convincing: for the vast majority of human history, the state's monopoly on the use of violence has been either nonexistent or far weaker as compared to today. Men have had an advantage on the use of violence due to average muscle mass and bone density being higher than women. Technology (firearms, surveillance, etc) has made this disparity of power in capacity for violence less and less relevant.
- artificialLimbs 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Gender_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Ge... These have been shown to directly affect statistical likelihood of career choice.
  - xnyan 5y ago
    From your link: "men in highly developed world regions were less neurotic, less extraverted, less conscientious and less agreeable compared to men in less developed world regions" If these personality traits are influenced by what country you are born it, would it not support the the non-biological argument?
    - clusterfish 5y ago
      The real answer is probably the most boring: it's both. I wish this wasn't such a controversial topic and research could be done freely on this, but researching biological differences between genders / races / etc. is quite taboo in some western universities now.
clusterfish 5y ago
Even without getting hung up on the "biological" qualifier, that's groundbreaking news to some people, you know. The people who insist that not having 50% females in any occupation is them being underrepresented because they're repressed and discriminated against. (Never heard that female dominated occupations are discriminatory though, I wonder why) Then this translates into laws, policies and scholarships that effectively discriminate against men. Don't know what you mean by "individual level" policy but a lot of policy needs to change.
- mcguire 5y ago
  "Don't know what you mean by "individual level" policy but a lot of policy needs to change." The long-standing beliefs, policies, laws, and scholarships that assume a woman in a male-dominated profession is an abomination and represents a loss of a good job to a deserving man.
  - clusterfish 5y ago
    These are either non-individual laws/policies, or personal beliefs/biases, but not both "individual level" and "policies" at the same time.
  - ryan93 5y ago
    link to the law?
    - kbelder 5y ago
      Or the scholarship, for that matter?
- john_moscow 5y ago
  There's a very very very obvious dollar value attached to these policies. By discouraging the workforce from having families and kids (let alone single-income households) you effectively eliminate their main long-term expenses and reduce the pressure on the wages. You then start substituting the declining population with immigrants from countries with lower standard of living, and you've hit the jackpot. Your profits go up, your stock goes up, your salary expenses stay the same. This wouldn't fly 60 years ago when the economy was much more decentralized. There was no single large entity (or related group of entities) that would benefit from such policies. If you run a small business and personally know every employee, you wouldn't think of such a thing. This bodes well in the current model where every child-free worker is an extra $50K lifetime value for their employer, translating into 5 extra cents per share.
john_moscow 5y ago
We just ended up with a rather perverse definition of equal outcome. What you may intuitively want to do as a society is maximize everyone's happiness. Which is hard to quantify, so you go and try to eliminate things that typically make people unhappy. Being denied the things you want because of the factors you don't control is surely a big depression maker. Not "go study better and you'll pass the exam", but "fuck off, I don't like your face", pardon my French. So how did we solve it? We made a faceless inappealable uncriticizable statistics-driven system designed to tell the majority of people to shut up and cull their ambition. And you know how we ended up here? Every society has a certain amount of people with ambition to power. They want to tell others what to do. They want to make decisions affecting others. That's fine, that's human psychology. That's why the previous generations started companies, studied hard disciplines, took risks, and found their place in the society with the perfect effort/power balance just for them. Except, this doesn't work anymore with the "economies of scale" where there's a bunch of CEOs and investors, but everyone else is a replaceable drone. So there's an incredible power vacuum in the Western society. People are desperate for roles in life that will give them meaning and power - ability to make decisions affecting other people. The corporations have PR departments and centrally owned media companies that steer this force clear of colliding with their financial interests. So, it effectively turned into a cold civil war. Want to change something in the society? Go get a 5-figure loan on a social justice degree, and then exercise your power by telling majority of the people to hate themselves, and enjoy no retaliation. Kinda like every war. On both sides of a conflict there are regular people with friends, children, families, hobbies. But they are too busy demonizing the other side, and eager to be foot soldiers in someone else's game. Someone whos mansion is located far from the front line and whos kids will sit at the board of a munitions manufacturer, rather than in a trench on a battlefield. I don't know how we're gonna get out of this mess.
godelski 5y ago
I think that is a very difficult conclusion to draw. There are a lot of factors in there that are impossible to control. We can't really isolate cultural and historical trends. Yes, we can measure a difference that significantly correlates with sex, but it is a bit naive to draw causal conclusions. But I still agree that equal outcome metrics are misguided. It is too lazy of a metric and statistics will mess it up very quickly with such things as Simpson's or Berkson's paradoxes. These are far too easy to fall prone to. Besides that, the question seems to be more about if the reason for these differences are due to biology or society (rather, which one is more significant), not that the differences don't exist (i.e. causal). But coming up with good metrics to determine what is going on is difficult. I do not think a metric should become a target though, and we have to be more careful in nuanced in our approach.

renewiltord 5y ago

The supposed paradoxical increase of this effect with increasing wealth has been replicated fairly often with the only real opposition I’ve noticed being that sociocultural incentives dominate. That is, if you aren’t going to starve, the most important thing is what other people think. The closer to starving you get the less important that becomes. Anyway, that’s the hypothesis explaining the difference. What research out there explores that hypothesis? Otherwise, this seems like just more of the same revealing that there are differences in participation.

noptd 5y ago
>That is, if you aren’t going to starve, the most important thing is what other people think. This seems like too strong of a claim to make without any supporting evidence.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  The study authors draw a conclusion that wealth allows people to choose work that more reflects their intrinsic interest. To my mind, that's a claim at least as worthy of skepticism as the claim that wealthy people choose social-status-enhancing work (which differs based on gender due to cultural norms).
snek_case 5y ago
>That is, if you aren’t going to starve, the most important thing is what other people think. IMO that hypothesis is politically biased. It implies that men/women in wealthier societies are trying harder to conform to gender norms. Blames societal norms for the difference. The simpler and less dehumanizing alternative is that people in wealthier countries are more free to live life however they want. There are less constraints.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Well, then, that’s on me for misrepresenting it. Let’s try again. You can see desire to comply with gender norms as a constant X and starvation risk Y as a variable. Appropriately scale each and measure X-Y. That can go positive or negative depending on Y without X varying at all. I want to eliminate this explanation as significantly causative. Where would I find evidence for that?

Gunax 5y ago

Results are on page19. > As expected, the percentages of students aspiring to sex-typical occupations were higher in countries with higher levels of women's empowerment, r(68)=.350, p=.003. The percentages of students aspiring to sex-atypical occupations ranged from 7%[6.2%-7.8%] in Lithuania to 23%[21.2%- 24.3%] in Lebanon (international median of 12%). This variation correlated negatively with women's empowerment, r(68)=-.500, p<.001. I do not like weighing into these sorts of things too much because I think people tend to find whatever they are looking for. All it really shows is that gender preferenes are formed before adolescence. Whether that innate or learned is not clear.

daveevad 5y ago
Can anyone track down the list of `sex-typical occupations` ? The thickest thread I've found is a reference to a PISA 2018 dataset. > We investigated sex differences in 473,260 adolescents’ aspirations to work in thingsoriented (e.g., mechanic), people-oriented (e.g., nurse), and STEM (e.g., mathematician) careers across 80 countries and economic regions using the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
pessimizer 5y ago
> Whether that innate or learned is not clear. Unless you also consider nationality innate, it certainly suggests that it is learned.
- mcguire 5y ago
  Are you suggesting there are no biological differences between Lebanese and Lithuanians? /s (although I've seen that argument here before)
  - simonh 5y ago
    Human beings are a very genetically homogenous species, far more so than most. Suppose you take a member of an ethnic group and compare them to two other randomly selected individuals, one from their ethnic group and one from a different ethnic group. The chances their genetic differences will be greater with one rather than the other is very close to 50/50. Ethnicity makes only a very tiny difference, the vast, vast majority of the differences between individuals have nothing to do with it.

vhgbh87 5y ago

It's probably not worth putting much stock in a preprint unless you are trained in evaluating this particular type of whitepaper. Even peer review is not a stamp of quality, but it at least signals "some set of folks have broadly reviewed this and consider it well constructed." Whether it's sociology or fusion or battery tech -- we shouldn't put much value on preprint articles.

cronix 5y ago
You seem knowledgeable on the subject. Have there been any studies that have been peer reviewed, and replicated, that have come to roughly the same conclusions? Or is this preprint the first time the subject has been studied?
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Not an expert, but I believe this is a widely studied area with a large body of literature. I say this because I've seen articles with similar conclusions going back decades. You can probably find many by searching Google Scholar For Occupational sex differences or selection
xor99 5y ago
*any articles
somedude895 5y ago
To be fair, in sociology this sort of thing might not make it out of preprint for certain reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
nottorp 5y ago
Isn't a preprint a way to make your article available outside Elsevier's paywall these days?

sbelskie 5y ago

Interesting thread by Matt Darling of Niskansen that is pretty critical of the study design and data quality of this and other similar papers. https://mobile.twitter.com/besttrousers/status/1454150695196708865 https://mobile.twitter.com/besttrousers/status/1454150695196...

crateless 5y ago
> Here's an model explaining the "Gender Equality Paradox" that doesn't rely on the crutch of assuming different preferences. Women pay some fixed cost for being in the labor market, in general. Perhaps due to discrimination, perhaps to something else. As such less likely to pursue a costly STEM education in college. However, they become more likely to pursue a STEM education as the returns increase. Women respond to incentives. The bigger the non-service sector of the economy, the more income there is to gain from a STEM education. As it gets higher (which tends to be the case in less developed countries) more women enter STEM programs. In developed countries the STEM premium is lower (Someone in a service job like a lawyer or accountant will do just fine). This fits the data we have available, doesn't require that we assume our conclusion (we just assume women respond to incentives), and is able to help explain other phemonena. It's got a lot of features we want in a good model! - Matt Darling Edit: It seems like he assumes some "fixed cost" in order to counter the finding that women are less likely to pursue STEM education. Is there something I am missing?
- nottorp 5y ago
  > As such less likely to pursue a costly STEM education in college. However, they become more likely to pursue a STEM education as the returns increase. Is Matt Darling aware that in most European countries university education is (financially speaking) free or extremely low cost? And said cost is about the same no matter what you study? Edit to make it more clear: As far as I know crushing student debt is an US and UK thing. Not continental Europe. I have no idea how things go outside US/Europe though.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    Are you assuming that all costs are financial? (As a possible example, the only European countries with higher percentages of tertiary education than the US in the 25-34 age group are Norway, Ireland, Luxembourg, Lithuania, and Russia. I suppose that only 28% of Germans are interested in tertiary education, as opposed to 49% in Norway and Ireland. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_education_attainment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...)

lordnacho 5y ago

What makes an occupation people-oriented vs things-oriented? Is a software developer who makes a dating app doing one or the other? What about the designer? Is being a doctor one or the other? You need to be able to say difficult things to people, and a lot of doctors will tell you they're doing it to help people. But doing surgery is presumably technical in nature. Is there an acknowledged way these categories are determined?

simonh 5y ago
This is detailed on page 15 of the paper. They used the ISCO, which is an internationally recognised standard for classifying occupations.
Alex3917 5y ago
> Is a software developer who makes a dating app doing one or the other? What about the designer? Both are thing oriented because you’re doing work for people as an abstraction, not individual people. User stories might be based on actual people, but they’re ultimately meant as archetypes.
brailsafe 5y ago
It's my impression that the more you want money for things or your family, the more you'll succeed in software engineering, because it can be awfully dismal and you almost never see the human impact your drudgery serves. I don't really care about things much compared to any of my previous colleagues, and as such there's no amount of money that can compel me to do a programming job I've learned to hate.
11thEarlOfMar 5y ago
I think categories need to be more granular. 'doctors' A quick LinkedIn search for Surgeon shows that about 70% of surgeons in the SFBA are male. 80% of pediatricians are female. 'engineers' Prior searches showed that 90% of electrical engineers were male. 50% of SQE were female.
stickfigure 5y ago
Sure, the grey zones might be hard to pick out but it does seem like there are some clear extremes. "Locomotive engineers and operators" is 92% male yet "Registered nurses" is 87% female. If you look at all the male-dominant and female-dominant occupations, there does seem to be some sort of pattern which (for lack of more precise terminology) seems to be well-described as "people-oriented" and "thing-oriented". Go through the list, look at the entries which are either <20% female or >80% female, and tell me if you don't see the same pattern: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm

ffggvv 5y ago

NOOOOOO!!!!!!!!! its sexism! they are exactly the same!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7RIWh-Vo0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7RIWh-Vo0Y

exporectomy 5y ago

100 years later, we're rediscovering what we already knew. Common story in social sciences. Coming up next, Jews are smarter than blacks. Oh no, not yet! It's still taboo to even think that! But maybe in a few decades, the overton window will shift and researchers will allow themselves to study that honestly.

dang 5y ago
We already asked you to stop posting flamewar comments, and this is an extreme case, so I've banned this account. You've also been using HN primarily for ideological battle and that's not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

fredliu 5y ago

If you ask elementary kids today, a large portion of them would have the same career aspiration: to be a "youtuber".

john_moscow 5y ago
Yep, and most of them will end up stocking shelves at Walmart to make living.
myhf 5y ago
I hope for their sake that somebody manages to subcategorize some types of "youtuber" as people-oriented and others as things-oriented.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lostdog 5y ago

I mean you could be sitting around in the '70s making up reasons that women aren't interested in being doctors or lawyers, and boy would you turn out wrong: https://twitter.com/familyunequal/status/1164246285953748993 https://twitter.com/familyunequal/status/1164246285953748993 I think it's too early to tell right now if there's some type of things-interest/people-interest split among the genders. We're still so close to the time when women weren't allowed to have checking accounts, that the cultural inertia hasn't had time to wear off yet. I am very suspicious of researchers who claim to have the answer right now.

refurb 5y ago
Do you have a source on that claim that in the 1970’s scientists were arguing “women aren’t interested in being doctors or lawyers”?
- jgwil2 5y ago
  GP did not make any such claim.
  - refurb 5y ago
    Was it just a straw man then? He just said such views are proven “wrong” so that would suppose someone held those views.
tomp 5y ago
This is a misleading graph that cherry-picks the data to support an ideological conclusion. Better graph: https://mmsa.org/2017/05/percent-of-bachelor-degrees-women-by-year/ https://mmsa.org/2017/05/percent-of-bachelor-degrees-women-b...

tzs 5y ago

I remember seeing a study using PISA data (I think...) that found an interesting difference between boys and girls, which could explain much about career choices. Boys who scored very high in STEM tended to have that as the only area where they were at the top. In other areas they might be good but usually not outstanding like they were in STEM. Girls who scored very high in STEM tended were much more likely to have at least one other area in which they also scored very high. People have a tendency to choose an occupation that fits with something they are good at. If the aforementioned study is correct, we'd expect to see boys who are good at STEM subjects to be more likely to go into a STEM career than girls who are good at STEM subjects, because for the girls it is more likely that they also have a non-STEM subject that they are as good or better in than their STEM subjects.

simonh 5y ago
That would only cause a demographic difference if STEM was more likely to the boy's one area they scored highly at compared to girls. If the only difference was that girls were good at more subjects, but the distribution of subjects both genders were good at was equally distributed across subjects, there would be no net effect.
- CheezeIt 5y ago
  > That would only cause a demographic difference if STEM was more likely to the boy's one area they scored highly at compared to girls. It is.
withinboredom 5y ago
I might be projecting some after seeing how a close relative was pushed into STEM. She didn’t really want to do it, but she was given scholarships just because she was a female, and provided with extra “stuff” to succeed. She was mostly into horses and riding, so she did that on the side. Eventually she left STEM behind, but if she’d been in this mentioned study, she’d have shown at least two high-knowledge areas.

pgcj_poster 5y ago

> Things-oriented occupations are those that involve extensive work with machines, such as computer programming, repairing machines (e.g., cars), or tailoring Most computer programming jobs have very little to do with machines as such. Code in high-level languages works mostly with abstract representations of business requirements, and the fact that it's executed on machines is incidental. And if abstract concepts count as "things," then you've stretched an already ridiculously broad category to the point of uselessness. You might as well say "I repair cars for people, so my job is actually about people." I am a woman, and one of the things I find appealing about programming is the very immateriality of it. It's distinctly unlike something like "repairing machines." You don't have to get dirty, or crawl under anything, or climb a ladder, or carry heavy stuff around. I can see how women might be less interested in "things" when it comes to all that, but not computer programming. It's pretty clear that these dichotomy is over-generalized to the point that you can build whatever narrative you want. Also, why is it that it only seems to apply when the people-related jobs are low-status? Politicians and executives are mostly men and mostly deal with people. Food-preparation workers deal with things and are about equally men and women, except for head chefs, who are mostly men.

sandstrom 5y ago

This is a well-studied area, and the preferences are clearly biological. Boys “thing-orientation” and girls preference for “faces and dolls” show up in, for example, (a) neonatal human babies, (b) young rhesus monkeys and (c) chimpanzees babies. Also seen in a bunch of other studies. For the people who are disturbed because this doesn’t match your world-view; remember that this is two bell curves with different medians. There is significant overlap at the individual level, but also large differences in tails, which explain the reality we see around us (some occupations dominated by women or men respectively). https://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf https://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/12/female-chimps-treat-sticks-as-dolls/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/12/female-chimps...

captainmuon 5y ago
I'm not convinced. The fact that young male monkeys choose firetrucks over dolls rather strongly indicates that the study is bogus and there is some (unconscious) influence from the experimenter. How can monkeys instinctively know what a fire truck is? The explanation about females preferring faces is just a post-hoc rationalisation.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  They don’t know what it is, they know what it is not: a baby.
- smegcicle 5y ago
  you don't have to know what a firetruck is to know that it looks cool
- simonh 5y ago
  But surely if there is a clear difference in the data, we should be looking for an explanation, right? Of course it's possible for experimental methods to be flawed, but as the results from multiple studies pile up, that becomes less and less plausible as an explanation.

jleyank 5y ago

Are studies like these corrected for the culture the kids are raised in, the effect of things like parental leave on career choices or timing, introvert vs. extrovert, team or self oriented, economic status, history of education in the family, …. Whole lot of cultural issues weigh in here and they don’t cleanly partition by country. And you can probably make the argument that the existence and length of parental leave is culturally driven as well. Somebody has to take care of the kids and if a couple lacks the money to farm it out somebody’s career takes a hit.

thriftwy 5y ago
I don't think a real snapshot is less valuable than a result of hand waving over a real snapshot. Maybe we don't need to correct the data but going forward with life while taking this as reference.
simonh 5y ago
As the abstract points out, the results were stronger in countries with higher levels of women's empowerment.

MyHypatia 5y ago

Roughly 60% of accountants are women. What is the biological argument for that? 65% of realtors are women, but in commercial real estate it's only 35% women. Is that biologically driven? Seems like it's just socially harder for women to break into commercial real estate compared to residential real estate. While I am sure there are some biologically driven preferences between men and women, I think it's absurd to assert that these choices are "clearly biological" and that people who disagree just "don't like that it doesn't match their world view". Can you seriously claim with a straight face that accounting more nurturing/social/"faces and dolls" than software engineering? I think the social dynamics are just more welcoming of women in accounting than software engineering at this point in time.

captainoats 5y ago
Realtor and accountant (the majority that are personal/small business accountants, not big 4/corporate) are both jobs you can do part time and out of your home and are very people focused.
- MyHypatia 5y ago
  It doesn't seem like a convincing argument to define accounting as a "people focused profession" now that it's a women-majority profession. If it was majority male, I think it would be used as an example of how "men like numbers". I could argue that software engineering can be quite people focused, easily done from home, and in some cases part-time. 70% of chefs are men. Are men biologically predisposed to belong in the kitchen? I think a more likely explanation is that women couldn't get financing to open their own restaurants. It wasn't until 1974 that the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed. And it wasn't until 1988 that the Women's Business Ownership Act allowed women to get a business loan without a male co-signer. What is a more likely explanation for the fact that 70% percent of chefs are men: a) men are biologically disposed to working in a kitchen, or b) until pretty recently women couldn't get financing to open restaurants on their own, so they didn't become chefs.
bloqs 5y ago
A good observation. They make up 49% in the UK. Firstly, this difference is based on statistical extremes. Women and men are more the same than they are different, from a temperament perspective. Agreeableness is the big five dimension that stands out the most here. Men are more likely to be disagreeable, women agreeable. Disagreeable people are more likely to be into "things" vs people. Agreeable is the opposite. In more egalitarian nations, where women are given more equal opportunities, they are actually MORE likely to follow careers that follow this temperamental observation. You can look to western europe, and then the Scandinavian countries as an example of progressively more egalitarian society.

aahortwwy 5y ago

> A subset of participants (N=473,260) answered the question "What kind of job do you expect to have when you are about 30 years old?", which we call "occupational aspiration" in this study. Expectation is aspiration.

aerostable_slug 5y ago
> Expectation is aspiration. Not unless you're aiming at something you're 100% certain you can achieve, or delusional. I knew a person in high school who aspired to go to Stanford for her undergraduate education. She didn't succeed, and to be quite honest her expectation of doing so was moored in fantasy, not reality. Any number of kids who want to play professional sports or succeed as entertainers are aspirational without necessarily expecting they'll make it. The ones who do expect that kind of success are often let down and become part of the 90-odd percent of SAG card holders who wait tables, paint houses, and do all kinds of things other than acting to pay the bills — or never even make it to Hollywood. Conversely, someone in a farming family might say that in 30 years they will be farming, which is likely aspiration = expectation.
- aahortwwy 5y ago
  You made the point more eloquently than I did, thank you. The study is flawed.