5 ms·

Seems like it's mostly driven by changes to the composition of the job market. 50 years ago many more good paying jobs required a degree of physical labor that

Seems like it's mostly driven by changes to the composition of the job market. 50 years ago many more good paying jobs required a degree of physical labor that heavily favored men. The economy today has shifted from manufacturing to the service sector, which favors cooperation and communication. Women, even a hundred years ago, have always been more pro-social than men. They tend to have more friends, talk to their friends and family more often, know and ask more about the personal lives of the people around them. This far predates modernity, and has probably been true going all the way back to the neolithic era. The only difference is that in an age where email jobs have replaced the factory floor, the economic premium to these skills has gone way up.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
Yet women are barely present in high-paying STEM fields, despite hundreds of incentives, while STEM jobs typically pay well and are relatively safe options career-wise. Furthermore, we see the differences in income primarily in the 20-30 bracket, where most would get their first job. Despite the whole "cooperation and communication" argument, most individuals aren't going to be in such a position for quite a few years, where the income differences are. During those times, most individuals are stuck doing grunt work. Call me crazy, but things don't add up here.
- dcolkitt 4y ago
  STEM is a pretty small subset of total employment, only about 5% of Americans. And it's not like most of the jobs pay astoundingly high. By contrast healthcare is more than 3X the size of STEM, and when looking at new entrants is just as skewed towards women as STEM is to men. When you step outside STEM and healthcare, and look at high-paying jobs that actually employ at scale, you see that most of them heavily favor "soft skills". Attorneys, real estate agents, middle management, marketing, sales, speech pathology, graphic design. All of them are much more about working with people than working with things.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    Most of them heavily favor "soft skills" a few years in. You're not getting into middle management right off the bat without being given a priority lane (read: network / family favor). Graphic design is years of grunt work and pays shoddily. Marketing and sales aren't remotely about "cooperation and communication" as much as you claim they are. The only things remaining are speech pathology, attorneys and real estate agents, for which I have no anecdotal experience nor knowledge, and can only infer real estate agents behave similarly to sales. Ultimately the point still stands. "Cooperation and communication" are not the super valued soft skills you claim they are in the initial years, which is about the only period women outperform men in earnings. Afterwards, women are left behind in the dust as a whole. It's blatantly obvious there's more going on here than "women are better in the post-modern labor market".

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

Yet women are barely present in high-paying STEM fields, despite hundreds of incentives, while STEM jobs typically pay well and are relatively safe options career-wise. Furthermore, we see the differences in income primarily in the 20-30 bracket, where most would get their first job. Despite the whole "cooperation and communication" argument, most individuals aren't going to be in such a position for quite a few years, where the income differences are. During those times, most individuals are stuck doing grunt work. Call me crazy, but things don't add up here.

dcolkitt 4y ago
STEM is a pretty small subset of total employment, only about 5% of Americans. And it's not like most of the jobs pay astoundingly high. By contrast healthcare is more than 3X the size of STEM, and when looking at new entrants is just as skewed towards women as STEM is to men. When you step outside STEM and healthcare, and look at high-paying jobs that actually employ at scale, you see that most of them heavily favor "soft skills". Attorneys, real estate agents, middle management, marketing, sales, speech pathology, graphic design. All of them are much more about working with people than working with things.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  Most of them heavily favor "soft skills" a few years in. You're not getting into middle management right off the bat without being given a priority lane (read: network / family favor). Graphic design is years of grunt work and pays shoddily. Marketing and sales aren't remotely about "cooperation and communication" as much as you claim they are. The only things remaining are speech pathology, attorneys and real estate agents, for which I have no anecdotal experience nor knowledge, and can only infer real estate agents behave similarly to sales. Ultimately the point still stands. "Cooperation and communication" are not the super valued soft skills you claim they are in the initial years, which is about the only period women outperform men in earnings. Afterwards, women are left behind in the dust as a whole. It's blatantly obvious there's more going on here than "women are better in the post-modern labor market".