14 ms·

Women like working with people, men like working with things, all over the world

195 points by barry-cotter 4y ago

sposeray 4y ago
[dead]
_trampeltier 4y ago
Recently I (male) was thinking about to change my work to something, I have to work more with people. The problem is mostly, it is very very bad paid.
- saagarjha 4y ago
  Can't speak to gender disparities but as a software engineer as I have progressed in my career I have both been paid more and spent much more time working with people.
  - _trampeltier 4y ago
    It has some truth for me too. But then mostly the "with people" in tech comes because you are in a leading position. I tryed, but I'm not good at leading a team.
ahmetnoid 4y ago
Still the problem here is we don't _really_ know whether this is genetic or shaped by our upbringing even when it comes to the most egalitarian societies. I'd like to see the same study done on the little left hunter-gatherers bands.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jwrallie 4y ago
  This is something really difficult to know, specially because genetic differences can shape behaviors that can be natural selected creating a reinforced loop that reflexes on culture and upbringing.
  - ahmetnoid 4y ago
    Very good point. But I'd like to get an accurate answer from science in general, I don't see why more effort shouldn't be put into finding the reason behind what's discussed here. culture and upbringing is a mix of biological tendencies and imposed constructs, and I'd like to know which is which.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  Why is that a problem, and if it was due to upbringing then why that would be a problem? > I'd like to see the same study done on the little left hunter-gatherers bands. I don't see what that would prove. Men being biologically better suited for many types of primitive hunting, and women having the responsibility of pregnancy and nursing infants, would have a massive influence on the culture and structure of those societies.
  - defrost 4y ago
    So .. you've had no actual experience of living with hunter gathers then? The women do a lot of work digging ants [1], digging lizards, trawling through sands for cockles [2] (and leaving massive midden piles in their wake over centuries), and retire to a life of painting and laughing at the quaint notions of the clueless. Many such cultures share childcare across a wide network of extended kinship [3], both male and female - everybody works to bring food, tools, and culture to the group. [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-16/honey-ant-hunters-and-aboriginal-culture-keepers-head-bush/7514170 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-16/honey-ant-hunters-and... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegillarca_granosa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegillarca_granosa [3] https://aifs.gov.au/resources/policy-and-practice-papers/strengths-australian-aboriginal-cultural-practices-family-life https://aifs.gov.au/resources/policy-and-practice-papers/str...
    - throwawaylinux 4y ago
      > So .. you've had no actual experience of living with hunter gathers then? This is not an argument. > The women do a lot of work digging ants [1], digging lizards, trawling through sands for cockles [2] (and leaving massive midden piles in their wake over centuries), and retire to a life of painting and laughing at the quaint notions of the clueless. Great. > Many such cultures share childcare across a wide network of extended kinship [3], both male and female - everybody works to bring food, tools, and culture to the group. And yet despite having nary a biology degree among them, even they will tell you that men can not gestate or nurse a child. And that men are biologically more suited to some types of primitive hunting.
- azaras 4y ago
  The reason is genetically. There is not difference between more feminist countries and the less ones.
- LouisSayers 4y ago
  I'm sure there must be studies done on apes that would clarify that exact question.
  - mpweiher 4y ago
    There are. And they confirm, so the difference also exists in apes.
  - obscurette 4y ago
    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gender-toys-children-toy-preferences-hormones_n_1827727 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gender-toys-children-toy-pref...
- wskinner 4y ago
  We do know that gender differences in a variety of psychological traits are more pronounced in more egalitarian societies. See e.g. https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-women-equality-preferences-20181018-story.html https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-women-e...
  - aWidebrant 4y ago
    The study in the topic seems to contradict this, although the summary is a bit confusing: "Considering gender inequality, the authors report that “in countries of higher gender inequality, women’s stronger preference for working with people versus things compared to men was smaller.” However, this effect disappeared when cultural dimensions were taken into account. "Instead, it was those countries with greater uncertainty avoidance that had larger differences in interests in people/things between men and women. Uncertainty avoidance refers to the degree to which a culture teaches its members to feel unpleasant in situations that are new, not previously known, surprising, or generally just different from usual."
    - FeepingCreature 4y ago
      So do egalitarian countries have high uncertainty avoidance?
- gnull 4y ago
  I don't know if it's really important to know for practice. Who care where it comes from if the effect is there and you have to live with it? It's not that effect being caused by upbringing makes it somehow unimportant, or unworthy of being there.
  - ahmetnoid 4y ago
    because if it's biological then you have to live with it (till you get scalable affordable bioengineering) whereas if it's social imprinting then you don't "have to live with it", for that it's going against our biological encoding. Your comment suggest that we should not question upbringing which I disagree with.
    - gnull 4y ago
      Knowing a concrete cultural mechanism that is causing this could possibly open the way to engineering it (or close it completely, depending on what mechanism that is). But would just knowing "it's culture" help? I don't think (personal opinion) we're particularly good at predictably engineering culture. Look at Sweden, it's been trying really hard and dumping lots of money into gender equality, but there's still very few women in tech. The fraction of women among Iran's CS graduates is greater than Sweden's. And, ironically, plenty of those Iranian women (I'm saying this offhand) go to do PhD in Sweden, to bring up the "gender balance" of CS departments that Sweden is so concerned about. I'm really unsure whether society is easier to engineer than biology.
- squokko 4y ago
  Not sure you'd learn the most from the hunter-gatherers, who have the narrowest leeway in their survival and must have everyone doing exactly what they're best suited at. A fat rich society with more money than they can spend, like Norway or Qatar or Brunei, is likely more instructive.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    A hunter gatherer society would be the exact opposite of highly specialised ("doing what you're best at"). It has little margin for loss of function, so a poor performer is better and more likely to survive then losing the performance of the function entirely.
    - nullsense 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure what they meant was "if you need to go and hunt and kill your food, then the physically stronger members of the group have to go and do that, and that means someone has to stay and look after the kids and the members of the group who can produce food for the infants likely fit that bill"
- kqr 4y ago
  But this specific thing we do have a strong indication of! But a few hours after birth, infant boys spend a longer time looking at mechanical objects than faces, and vice versa. This is thought to be before any social imprinting has had time to develop. It's funny that you write this comment in this specific thread, because as far as I know, it's literally the only gender difference we've observed truly since birth. (Besides some physical ones like which reproductive organs are in place, obviously.)
- willhinsa 4y ago
  No. Why do female chimpanzees prefer to play with human dolls more than male chimpanzees if it's not a DEEP GENETIC DRIVE?
  - ahmetnoid 4y ago
    I don't understand what does this has to do with anything? how does that fit in things vs people? a doll is a thing after all? I'm not saying there's no deep genetic drive at all.
  - unknownsky 4y ago
    Female chimpanzees prefer to play with objects and use them as tools more than male chimpanzees overall. Most often, female chimps are observed using them as play weapons.[1] On one single occasion, some female chimps were observed carrying some logs and "slapping" them. This was interpreted as playing with dolls and then it was all over the news that female chimps play with dolls.[2] Humans aren't the only primates with culture. Chimp behaviour varies significantly according to the culture they are in, just like human behaviour does. [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6387611.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6387611.stm [2]https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(10)01449-1 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(10)...
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      Tangentially, I think I read somewhere once that there's more genetic variance between two random chimps from two chimp tribes in the same forest than between two random humans from opposite sides of the planet.
- realjhol 4y ago
  Guess what: we're a sexually dimorphic species. The view that every group of people you care to select is "equal" (whatever that means) is manifestly false.
- meindnoch 4y ago
  Genetic, epigenetic, memetic. Why does it matter?
sourcecodeplz 4y ago
Interesting read. Guess I've always noticed how HR deps. are mostly women, ie. Reality is though, in many situations there is not much of a choice. You gotta eat and will take whatever job is available. I personally have had jobs where I've been going in with pleasure and others when I would have rather stayed home.
- harshreality 4y ago
  You can try to take whatever job is available, but if you're a typical "people person" you're less likely to have developed the skills to get hired in most technical jobs, and if you're a more technically-oriented person you're less likely to have developed the people skills to get hired in jobs where those are important. Almost anyone can develop either, but when they don't, through whatever combination of chance and default temperament.... very few employers will give someone a chance at crossing that divide without some prior indication the prospective employee will be decent at it, because chances are they won't be.
- ajuc 4y ago
  > in many situations there is not much of a choice. The problem with this explanation is - the more choice women have - the BIGGER the difference. In countries where life is hard - women are more likely to work in STEM than in countries where you can live a good life working anywhere (or not at all).
tareqak 4y ago
Previously posted just over two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33948741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33948741
irrational 4y ago
I've never heard it called "working with things", but it is true for me. I love working with things. I dislike working with people so much that I have actively refused efforts to move me into lead and management type roles.
afpx 4y ago
I like working with people. But, working with things pays more.
- deleted 4y ago
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- AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
  On the other hand, all the C-suite works with people.
baron816 4y ago
Please keep in mind that if really true, it is not a binary thing. It’s a distribution. There are going to be plenty of women who are more interested in things than the median man, and there are plenty of men who are more interested in people than the median woman.
- Laaas 4y ago
  Wish people would keep this in mind for everything.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- causi 4y ago
  There are going to be plenty of women who are more interested in things than the median man Probably. Distributions don't necessarily have a huge amount of overlap. For example, upper body strength is also a distribution but the overlap is so small that 95% of men have stronger arms than 95% of women. With something as general as aptitude for things vs people the overlap is probably much greater than that but not certain without more data.
  - kqr 4y ago
    You're not strictly contradicting GP. "5 % of women" is still "plenty of women".
    - causi 4y ago
      95/95 does not mean 5% of women are stronger than the median man. The group of women stronger than the median man is tiny fractions of a percent. https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-51a4b98a4975f1bc2e68c2c0dc1b5730-lq https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-51a4b98a4975f1bc2e68c... https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c76c62e97e58fe9a64a83dad92a02e89-lq https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c76c62e97e58fe9a64a83...
symlinkk 4y ago
[flagged]
epicureanideal 4y ago
Does this mean James Damore was right? Or is there something wrong with this research?
- rowanG077 4y ago
  James Damore based his white paper on research exactly like this. It's not like this is now suddenly falling out of the sky.
- gnull 4y ago
  You don't need confirmations like that to say he was right. He was right, and we know that because his arguments were (relatively) well-built, so they are really worth considering.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    Define "well-built". His choice of wording is poor, and it's clear in most cases he assumes he's "right" - rather than posing a question and linking to supporting evidence for why he "might be right". The way to start a good conversation isn't Authoritarian: "You're wrong, and I'm right. Now let me lecture you why." It's Seneca style: "here's some things I noticed that are weird and don't add up, let's discuss, and - please - correct me if I'm wrong." The memo could've maybe led to good discussion if he avoided prescriptions at the end - which he wasn't qualified to make - and withheld opinion. Among other things, his table of right/left is highly subjective and controversial and adds almost nothing to the discussion beside asking for trouble... If you're aware that certain things are sacred, you should be aware that you need to navigate opposition to the narrative very carefully...
    - FeepingCreature 4y ago
      (Is this the standard for internal memos at Google, such that people routinely get fired for missing it?)
    - gnull 4y ago
      > His choice of wording is poor, and it's clear in most cases he assumes he's "right" - rather than posing a question and linking to supporting evidence for why he "might be right". There's also some effort required on the reader's part here. You should dig through some bad phrasing and for each statement that the writer makes, ask yourself, "what's the strongest interpretation of this that can be backed up?" A good reader tries to get the most out of it, and not discard it because of the form (how would Seneca read it?). The way I read his statement is that woke agenda does not deserve so much trust, and there's plenty of reasons to question Google's official view on gender-equality; that having an opposing view is a valid position, which makes you neither a foil-hat-flat-earth psycho, nor a misogynist, nor a bad person. There's enough uncertainly in this question to make both opinions valid, and allow people to pick the one they like. And for woke people, this statement is enough of a reason to "cancel" someone. Thinking that he insists on his view being the only right one is a bit of a strawman argument. I say "a bit" because I admit that he chose a rather provoking manner to make his statement, but I still say "strawman" because you could easily read it differently. I assume he did it because his opponents also do that, and it may have been an emotional choice to some extent. And, as I said, if we've established that there's enough uncertainty in this question to make it a matter of preference (for now, until the science gives us a definitive answer), it's ok to advertise the choice you prefer in an emotional and provoking manner — which I think is also one of the goals of the memo. To summarize, I think there's some good things to extract from there if you put in effort. And for a non-expert, he did ok of a job writing it. > asking for trouble... It doesn't justify what they did to him, I don't understand why you'd even mention this. "She wore a short skirt, so she asked for harassment" — literally the same victim-blaming technique.
terminal_d 4y ago
I think a better distinction than "people vs things" is "interconnect vs push/pull".
deleted 4y ago
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guerrilla 4y ago
> Instead, it was those countries with greater uncertainty avoidance that had larger differences in interests in people/things between men and women. Uncertainty avoidance refers to the degree to which a culture teaches its members to feel unpleasant in situations that are new, not previously known, surprising, or generally just different from usual. I wouldn't mind seeing a ranking of countries by uncertainty avoidance. That sounds interesting enough itself.
- vlabakje90 4y ago
  A ranking of countries by uncertainty avoidance is part of Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede%27s_cultural_dimensions_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede%27s_cultural_dimens...). There is a website where you can easily compare countries (https://www.hofstede-insights.com/ https://www.hofstede-insights.com/).
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    Thanks... This seems pretty counterintuitive though. Sweden: 29 United States: 49 Switzerland: 58 Thailand: 65 Italy: 75 Portugal: 99 > The extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations and have created beliefs and institutions that try to avoid these is reflected in the score on Uncertainty Avoidance. My experience is that those numbers pretty much rank in reverse when it comes to actual risk taking. It seems weird to me that this metric as described would not correlate to that. Swedes and the Swiss are pretty (extremely) risk averse compared to all Italians and Portuguese I've ever met and observed... And Thailand ranks above Sweden? That's nonsensical... > Countries exhibiting high Uncertainty Avoidance maintain rigid codes of belief and behaviour and are intolerant of unorthodox behaviour and ideas. In these cultures there is an emotional need for rules (even if the rules never seem to work) time is money, people have an inner urge to be busy and work hard, precision and punctuality are the norm, innovation may be resisted, security is an important element in individual motivation. Decisions are taken after careful analysis of all available information. I feel like whoever made this up hasn't been to any of these countries.
catears 4y ago
The definition of working with people vs. working with things doesn't seem obvious to me. As a software engineer I am working a lot with my computer. Therefore I must be working with things! But... I am just as much working with my soft skills. Scrum retros, talking to stakeholders, discussions on design with fellow engineers, testing with end-users. Some days I don't spend even a minute working with "things". I don't think the distinction of working with people vs working with things is clear enough to say wheter my job means I am doing the one or the other. So how could the participants in the study do the same? I'm assuming there are lots of occupations in this grey zone and even situations where in one company the same occupation is considered working with people while in another company it would be considered working with things. I can see multiple issues the study runs into which would be interesting to see how/if it answers. A) Does it measure peoples perception of wheter they work with people or thing? B) Do the authors make their own interpretation of which occupations lands in which category? How do they then eliminate their own biases in what working with that occupation means? C) Did the authors observe the participants and make a judgement call based on their day-to-day activity? This would likely be the most accurate, but I can't imagine they did this because of the sheer cost of such an experiment.
- ajuc 4y ago
  It's one of these "I know it when I see it" things. I don't think a definition is necessary, but if you need one - how about: When you're working how often are you thinking about other person's state of mind vs a state of some inanimate (or abstract) object? Ultimately almost all the jobs are done in groups, including stuff like coal mining. But people aren't your focus there.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kqr 4y ago
  A bricklayer works with things. Daycare staff work with people. These are very clear-cut. Then there are a lot of points along that continuum -- nurses and HR reps work mostly with people. Economists a little of both. Software engineers and carpenters mostly with things. We may not agree on a complete ordering but we will get reasonably close to each other, I suppose.
ajuc 4y ago
“women tended to be more interested in working with ideas (versus data) than men in all but two countries (the Philippines and Poland),” In Poland accounting is traditionally a female occupation. I know 0 male accountants and like 20 female ones.
- Kiro 4y ago
  Same in Sweden.
- torginus 4y ago
  Maybe general misanthropy in these countries supersedes the inbuilt bias :)
willhinsa 4y ago
news at 11
givemeethekeys 4y ago
The more of these male vs female preferences articles I see, the less I find myself caring.
- tgv 4y ago
  I think that's ok. We should care about the well-being of people (and nature), not about the way they actually live their life. If someone wants to work in health care or education, or rather in carpentry or nuclear physics let them. The alternative is some kind of politically motivated utilitarianism. And certainly don't pay too much attention of these studies. People treat them as gospel, but they aren't. They're more like the yellow press.
  - samdunham 4y ago
    They really shouldn't require much thought in the end. Don't artificially keep people out of a particular profession. Don't artificially force people into a particular profession. Let people have the opportunity to do the job they want to do and call it a day.
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  Good. The sooner everyone stops caring, the sooner we can all think clearly enough about it to get the truth.
- tbrownaw 4y ago
  I wouldn't think it should matter for most people day-to-day. It's relevant to understanding society-level metrics and knowing what sensible alert settings for them are, but must people don't work with those very much (maybe if you're the sort to evaluate politicians yourself during election season, rather than just voting party line, or if something comes up on a referendum?).
castrul 4y ago
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austin-cheney 4y ago
The article speaks in very broad terms but there are precise preferential differences by sex. More than just working with things males tend to prefer working with tools more than building new things. Yes there are many males that are creative and only prefer creating original works, but not most. When it comes to working with things females, unlike males, tend to prefer the ideas of things, theory, more than the implementation or practical application, which may speak to planning. There was a recently published study that females across the world score higher in cognitive (learned) empathy than males. The same study found no distinction by sex in innate (natural) empathy. None of this should come as a surprise. For decades we have known that females score higher in agreeability and males score higher in assertiveness. As such females will tend to position themselves into interests of lower social friction and higher direct engagement than males. Males will tend to position their interests into areas of greater critical reasoning at sacrifice to social engagement than will females. Yet despite that most males remain fully unwilling to distance their interests from those that are perceived as higher value by their group dynamics.
- tgv 4y ago
  The same study also asks about ideas, but the preference for that is almost too small to be of any meaning. See the abstract (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-022-01318-w https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-022-01318-w).
byrnedo 4y ago
I hope people don't jump to the conclusion that they like what they like because of their gender. It could be equally attributed to what they're working with. As in, you like what you know. I've never worked in a people heavy environment, so I couldn't say I like working in one.
unknownsky 4y ago
> gender differences appear to be greater in societies with greater gender equality and in which people have greater economic resources I don't think this is a paradox at all. Discouraging 50% of the workforce talent pool is a wasteful luxury that only countries with abundant resources can afford. I experienced this first hand when I moved to Sweden. I had never been made to feel like a freak for being a programmer until I moved to Sweden. I had never experienced being constantly excluded, discouraged and pushed away from technical activities in order to "rescue" me from things I'm being told me I'm not interested in. I have a legal right to parental leave and I can get an IUD for free, so it's considered a paradox that there are so few female programmers in such an equal country. I don't see how there is a paradox.
- AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
  > I had never been made to feel like a freak for being a programmer until I moved to Sweden. Are you saying that Sweden is a sexist society? Do you mind me asking where have you been before?
  - unknownsky 4y ago
    I have lived in a handful of different countries. I'm criticizing the idea that it's so simple to say one country is more sexist or more equal than another because there are so many metrics you can use to measure equality. Sweden beats a lot of countries when it comes to a strongly protected right to parental leave for both men and women. But Sweden is behind many other countries when it comes to stereotypes and assumptions about what jobs men or women should be doing. So it's meaningless to make a blanket statement that one country is more equal than another.
    - ShredKazoo 4y ago
      This Swedish website actually claims that tech is a problem area for Sweden: https://sweden.se/life/equality/gender-equality https://sweden.se/life/equality/gender-equality There's a link to this report: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5501a836e4b0472e6124f984/t/5ef325ab518cd32c6b5589ff/1592993207371/TECH_DUDES_2020_WEB.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5501a836e4b0472e6124f... "Every third woman who responded to the survey, sent out by Allbright to employees at the tech companies, reports that she has been discriminated against"
verisimi 4y ago
[flagged]
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  At <0.1% of the population, I don't believe people whose gender does not align with their sex are able to skew the distribution s.t. there is statistical significance.
- meindnoch 4y ago
  The two match like 99% of the time, so it wouldn’t have changed the conclusions at large.
  - Izkata 4y ago
    The "Yes, but" part has me thinking it was supposed to be sarcasm... but not really sure anymore.
  - verisimi 4y ago
    That's a big assumption citizen!
toofy 4y ago
i find it interesting that the study minimizes the “working with people” aspects of executive roles. working with people may be the most important piece of an executive yet they ignore the “working with people” aspects and try to shoehorn it into a data driven role. seems like an absurd and arbitrary category definition.
niceghost 4y ago
wtf those “preferences” are a result of history - societies raised women to take care (take care of their family and house chores) while men went out in the wild to play, study and work. - women had to be “empathetic” because understanding one’s mood was vital to their survival throughout history: in times where it was “ok” and even expected that women were beaten up to make them more docile or whatever. - women were “granted permission” to certain work roles based on the time that happened. assistant roles were the most common, like secretaries (they even had a “bad reputation” because of the affairs with their executives, but it was really common an executive, a man, have a secretary as a gift). and think about how childhood education usually have more female teachers and higher education is a land of men. or nurses vs medical doctors.
- yung_steezy 4y ago
  I have to disagree that it can all be explained by societal conditioning. They tried to sample every society they could in this study to see if societal factors could explain the preference but could not see a societal effect. While you might be able to claim that every society around the world is fundamentally sexist to explain the difference in preferences, I think in that case you would have to be able to explain why every distributed society came to be arranged in a similar way.
  - unknownsky 4y ago
    If cultures universally share a characteristic, that does not prove that the characteristic is a hard-wired drive. That thinking has been used to make several arguments. Cultures all around the world have made pyramids, so pyramids must have a deep spiritual meaning that all humans are tuned into. Or all these cultures were working with heavy objects and gravity and they all independently discovered that a pyramid is the easiest large structure to build. Seafaring cultures all around the world have myths about mermaids, so mermaids must be real. Or people spending lots of time at sea looking at sea-life are likely to start imagining them fusing with humans. Cultures all around the world have sun gods, so a sun god must be real and we all sensed it. Or everyone around the world looked up at the sky and saw the same thing. Cultures all around the world have gender stereotypes, so they must be hard-wired. Or women everywhere are getting pregnant while men aren't, so societies shaped themselves around that fact in similar ways.
deleted 4y ago
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yung_steezy 4y ago
I think this is a worthwhile study but also think we place too much emphasis on personality types. My wife studied primary (elementary) school teaching for 4 years and then was a teacher for over 6 years. After she became tired of the profession she was able to self-teach web dev for 9 months using Udemy and now has been working as a software developer for roughly a year now. Nominally a study like this might have put her into the caring profession box a few years ago but she is professionally ambidextrous, and likely other people surveyed will be too.
golemiprague 4y ago
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_0w8t 4y ago
My experience matched the article assertion. I worked in a financial company in Norway as a consultant for few years on IT project. In a division with over 20 people only 2 were women with one of them being an immigrant from a not-so-rich country. My boss even complained few times that the upper management put pressure on him to do something about it, but he simply cannot find suitable women. Then at the management level things were more even. Like 30 % were women. Then there was a few programmers and system administrators from India working on outsourced projects . Like 50% were women. Yet anything related to management position in Indian company was exclusively for men. That was including minor management roles like a team lead even when everybody else on the team was woman.
psyfi 4y ago
There is nothing wrong about having male dominated roles and female dominated roles, pushing equity down everyone's throat only profits corporation exploiting the less fortuned. It is well known in healthcare that women are better nurses and males are better surgeons, in general.
jdthedisciple 4y ago
Relevant talk: "Autism and the male brain" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PjE_yaJjXE8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PjE_yaJjXE8 Very enlightening imom
esarbe 4y ago
So, they have linked different sexual reproductive strategies to differences in behavior. That cannot be that surprising, right? Different sexual reproductive strategies almost necessitate differences in behavior in general, if the strategies are different enough, which they most certainly are for any kind of mammal or bird. Given the many examples of wildly different behaviors between the sexes in other species - bower birds as an example - any lack of specific behavioral differences would be surprising. It's also no surprising that this sex differences (I don't think these are gender differences; these are the differences that shape gender) are more prevalent in societies with greater economic prosperity; it allows the individuals to follow their own generic preferences, unburdened by economic pressure.

195 points by barry-cotter 4y ago

[dead]

Recently I (male) was thinking about to change my work to something, I have to work more with people. The problem is mostly, it is very very bad paid.

saagarjha 4y ago
Can't speak to gender disparities but as a software engineer as I have progressed in my career I have both been paid more and spent much more time working with people.
- _trampeltier 4y ago
  It has some truth for me too. But then mostly the "with people" in tech comes because you are in a leading position. I tryed, but I'm not good at leading a team.

ahmetnoid 4y ago

Still the problem here is we don't _really_ know whether this is genetic or shaped by our upbringing even when it comes to the most egalitarian societies. I'd like to see the same study done on the little left hunter-gatherers bands.

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jwrallie 4y ago
This is something really difficult to know, specially because genetic differences can shape behaviors that can be natural selected creating a reinforced loop that reflexes on culture and upbringing.
- ahmetnoid 4y ago
  Very good point. But I'd like to get an accurate answer from science in general, I don't see why more effort shouldn't be put into finding the reason behind what's discussed here. culture and upbringing is a mix of biological tendencies and imposed constructs, and I'd like to know which is which.
throwawaylinux 4y ago
Why is that a problem, and if it was due to upbringing then why that would be a problem? > I'd like to see the same study done on the little left hunter-gatherers bands. I don't see what that would prove. Men being biologically better suited for many types of primitive hunting, and women having the responsibility of pregnancy and nursing infants, would have a massive influence on the culture and structure of those societies.
- defrost 4y ago
  So .. you've had no actual experience of living with hunter gathers then? The women do a lot of work digging ants [1], digging lizards, trawling through sands for cockles [2] (and leaving massive midden piles in their wake over centuries), and retire to a life of painting and laughing at the quaint notions of the clueless. Many such cultures share childcare across a wide network of extended kinship [3], both male and female - everybody works to bring food, tools, and culture to the group. [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-16/honey-ant-hunters-and-aboriginal-culture-keepers-head-bush/7514170 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-16/honey-ant-hunters-and... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegillarca_granosa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegillarca_granosa [3] https://aifs.gov.au/resources/policy-and-practice-papers/strengths-australian-aboriginal-cultural-practices-family-life https://aifs.gov.au/resources/policy-and-practice-papers/str...
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    > So .. you've had no actual experience of living with hunter gathers then? This is not an argument. > The women do a lot of work digging ants [1], digging lizards, trawling through sands for cockles [2] (and leaving massive midden piles in their wake over centuries), and retire to a life of painting and laughing at the quaint notions of the clueless. Great. > Many such cultures share childcare across a wide network of extended kinship [3], both male and female - everybody works to bring food, tools, and culture to the group. And yet despite having nary a biology degree among them, even they will tell you that men can not gestate or nurse a child. And that men are biologically more suited to some types of primitive hunting.
azaras 4y ago
The reason is genetically. There is not difference between more feminist countries and the less ones.
LouisSayers 4y ago
I'm sure there must be studies done on apes that would clarify that exact question.
- mpweiher 4y ago
  There are. And they confirm, so the difference also exists in apes.
- obscurette 4y ago
  https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gender-toys-children-toy-preferences-hormones_n_1827727 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gender-toys-children-toy-pref...
wskinner 4y ago
We do know that gender differences in a variety of psychological traits are more pronounced in more egalitarian societies. See e.g. https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-women-equality-preferences-20181018-story.html https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-women-e...
- aWidebrant 4y ago
  The study in the topic seems to contradict this, although the summary is a bit confusing: "Considering gender inequality, the authors report that “in countries of higher gender inequality, women’s stronger preference for working with people versus things compared to men was smaller.” However, this effect disappeared when cultural dimensions were taken into account. "Instead, it was those countries with greater uncertainty avoidance that had larger differences in interests in people/things between men and women. Uncertainty avoidance refers to the degree to which a culture teaches its members to feel unpleasant in situations that are new, not previously known, surprising, or generally just different from usual."
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    So do egalitarian countries have high uncertainty avoidance?
gnull 4y ago
I don't know if it's really important to know for practice. Who care where it comes from if the effect is there and you have to live with it? It's not that effect being caused by upbringing makes it somehow unimportant, or unworthy of being there.
- ahmetnoid 4y ago
  because if it's biological then you have to live with it (till you get scalable affordable bioengineering) whereas if it's social imprinting then you don't "have to live with it", for that it's going against our biological encoding. Your comment suggest that we should not question upbringing which I disagree with.
  - gnull 4y ago
    Knowing a concrete cultural mechanism that is causing this could possibly open the way to engineering it (or close it completely, depending on what mechanism that is). But would just knowing "it's culture" help? I don't think (personal opinion) we're particularly good at predictably engineering culture. Look at Sweden, it's been trying really hard and dumping lots of money into gender equality, but there's still very few women in tech. The fraction of women among Iran's CS graduates is greater than Sweden's. And, ironically, plenty of those Iranian women (I'm saying this offhand) go to do PhD in Sweden, to bring up the "gender balance" of CS departments that Sweden is so concerned about. I'm really unsure whether society is easier to engineer than biology.
squokko 4y ago
Not sure you'd learn the most from the hunter-gatherers, who have the narrowest leeway in their survival and must have everyone doing exactly what they're best suited at. A fat rich society with more money than they can spend, like Norway or Qatar or Brunei, is likely more instructive.
- XorNot 4y ago
  A hunter gatherer society would be the exact opposite of highly specialised ("doing what you're best at"). It has little margin for loss of function, so a poor performer is better and more likely to survive then losing the performance of the function entirely.
  - nullsense 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure what they meant was "if you need to go and hunt and kill your food, then the physically stronger members of the group have to go and do that, and that means someone has to stay and look after the kids and the members of the group who can produce food for the infants likely fit that bill"
kqr 4y ago
But this specific thing we do have a strong indication of! But a few hours after birth, infant boys spend a longer time looking at mechanical objects than faces, and vice versa. This is thought to be before any social imprinting has had time to develop. It's funny that you write this comment in this specific thread, because as far as I know, it's literally the only gender difference we've observed truly since birth. (Besides some physical ones like which reproductive organs are in place, obviously.)
willhinsa 4y ago
No. Why do female chimpanzees prefer to play with human dolls more than male chimpanzees if it's not a DEEP GENETIC DRIVE?
- ahmetnoid 4y ago
  I don't understand what does this has to do with anything? how does that fit in things vs people? a doll is a thing after all? I'm not saying there's no deep genetic drive at all.
- unknownsky 4y ago
  Female chimpanzees prefer to play with objects and use them as tools more than male chimpanzees overall. Most often, female chimps are observed using them as play weapons.[1] On one single occasion, some female chimps were observed carrying some logs and "slapping" them. This was interpreted as playing with dolls and then it was all over the news that female chimps play with dolls.[2] Humans aren't the only primates with culture. Chimp behaviour varies significantly according to the culture they are in, just like human behaviour does. [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6387611.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6387611.stm [2]https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(10)01449-1 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(10)...
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    Tangentially, I think I read somewhere once that there's more genetic variance between two random chimps from two chimp tribes in the same forest than between two random humans from opposite sides of the planet.
realjhol 4y ago
Guess what: we're a sexually dimorphic species. The view that every group of people you care to select is "equal" (whatever that means) is manifestly false.
meindnoch 4y ago
Genetic, epigenetic, memetic. Why does it matter?

sourcecodeplz 4y ago

Interesting read. Guess I've always noticed how HR deps. are mostly women, ie. Reality is though, in many situations there is not much of a choice. You gotta eat and will take whatever job is available. I personally have had jobs where I've been going in with pleasure and others when I would have rather stayed home.

harshreality 4y ago
You can try to take whatever job is available, but if you're a typical "people person" you're less likely to have developed the skills to get hired in most technical jobs, and if you're a more technically-oriented person you're less likely to have developed the people skills to get hired in jobs where those are important. Almost anyone can develop either, but when they don't, through whatever combination of chance and default temperament.... very few employers will give someone a chance at crossing that divide without some prior indication the prospective employee will be decent at it, because chances are they won't be.
ajuc 4y ago
> in many situations there is not much of a choice. The problem with this explanation is - the more choice women have - the BIGGER the difference. In countries where life is hard - women are more likely to work in STEM than in countries where you can live a good life working anywhere (or not at all).

tareqak 4y ago

Previously posted just over two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33948741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33948741

irrational 4y ago

I've never heard it called "working with things", but it is true for me. I love working with things. I dislike working with people so much that I have actively refused efforts to move me into lead and management type roles.

afpx 4y ago

I like working with people. But, working with things pays more.

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AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
On the other hand, all the C-suite works with people.

baron816 4y ago

Please keep in mind that if really true, it is not a binary thing. It’s a distribution. There are going to be plenty of women who are more interested in things than the median man, and there are plenty of men who are more interested in people than the median woman.

Laaas 4y ago
Wish people would keep this in mind for everything.
- deleted 4y ago
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causi 4y ago
There are going to be plenty of women who are more interested in things than the median man Probably. Distributions don't necessarily have a huge amount of overlap. For example, upper body strength is also a distribution but the overlap is so small that 95% of men have stronger arms than 95% of women. With something as general as aptitude for things vs people the overlap is probably much greater than that but not certain without more data.
- kqr 4y ago
  You're not strictly contradicting GP. "5 % of women" is still "plenty of women".
  - causi 4y ago
    95/95 does not mean 5% of women are stronger than the median man. The group of women stronger than the median man is tiny fractions of a percent. https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-51a4b98a4975f1bc2e68c2c0dc1b5730-lq https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-51a4b98a4975f1bc2e68c... https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c76c62e97e58fe9a64a83dad92a02e89-lq https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c76c62e97e58fe9a64a83...

symlinkk 4y ago

[flagged]

epicureanideal 4y ago

Does this mean James Damore was right? Or is there something wrong with this research?

rowanG077 4y ago
James Damore based his white paper on research exactly like this. It's not like this is now suddenly falling out of the sky.
gnull 4y ago
You don't need confirmations like that to say he was right. He was right, and we know that because his arguments were (relatively) well-built, so they are really worth considering.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Define "well-built". His choice of wording is poor, and it's clear in most cases he assumes he's "right" - rather than posing a question and linking to supporting evidence for why he "might be right". The way to start a good conversation isn't Authoritarian: "You're wrong, and I'm right. Now let me lecture you why." It's Seneca style: "here's some things I noticed that are weird and don't add up, let's discuss, and - please - correct me if I'm wrong." The memo could've maybe led to good discussion if he avoided prescriptions at the end - which he wasn't qualified to make - and withheld opinion. Among other things, his table of right/left is highly subjective and controversial and adds almost nothing to the discussion beside asking for trouble... If you're aware that certain things are sacred, you should be aware that you need to navigate opposition to the narrative very carefully...
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    (Is this the standard for internal memos at Google, such that people routinely get fired for missing it?)
  - gnull 4y ago
    > His choice of wording is poor, and it's clear in most cases he assumes he's "right" - rather than posing a question and linking to supporting evidence for why he "might be right". There's also some effort required on the reader's part here. You should dig through some bad phrasing and for each statement that the writer makes, ask yourself, "what's the strongest interpretation of this that can be backed up?" A good reader tries to get the most out of it, and not discard it because of the form (how would Seneca read it?). The way I read his statement is that woke agenda does not deserve so much trust, and there's plenty of reasons to question Google's official view on gender-equality; that having an opposing view is a valid position, which makes you neither a foil-hat-flat-earth psycho, nor a misogynist, nor a bad person. There's enough uncertainly in this question to make both opinions valid, and allow people to pick the one they like. And for woke people, this statement is enough of a reason to "cancel" someone. Thinking that he insists on his view being the only right one is a bit of a strawman argument. I say "a bit" because I admit that he chose a rather provoking manner to make his statement, but I still say "strawman" because you could easily read it differently. I assume he did it because his opponents also do that, and it may have been an emotional choice to some extent. And, as I said, if we've established that there's enough uncertainty in this question to make it a matter of preference (for now, until the science gives us a definitive answer), it's ok to advertise the choice you prefer in an emotional and provoking manner — which I think is also one of the goals of the memo. To summarize, I think there's some good things to extract from there if you put in effort. And for a non-expert, he did ok of a job writing it. > asking for trouble... It doesn't justify what they did to him, I don't understand why you'd even mention this. "She wore a short skirt, so she asked for harassment" — literally the same victim-blaming technique.

terminal_d 4y ago

I think a better distinction than "people vs things" is "interconnect vs push/pull".

deleted 4y ago

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guerrilla 4y ago

> Instead, it was those countries with greater uncertainty avoidance that had larger differences in interests in people/things between men and women. Uncertainty avoidance refers to the degree to which a culture teaches its members to feel unpleasant in situations that are new, not previously known, surprising, or generally just different from usual. I wouldn't mind seeing a ranking of countries by uncertainty avoidance. That sounds interesting enough itself.

vlabakje90 4y ago
A ranking of countries by uncertainty avoidance is part of Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede%27s_cultural_dimensions_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede%27s_cultural_dimens...). There is a website where you can easily compare countries (https://www.hofstede-insights.com/ https://www.hofstede-insights.com/).
- guerrilla 4y ago
  Thanks... This seems pretty counterintuitive though. Sweden: 29 United States: 49 Switzerland: 58 Thailand: 65 Italy: 75 Portugal: 99 > The extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations and have created beliefs and institutions that try to avoid these is reflected in the score on Uncertainty Avoidance. My experience is that those numbers pretty much rank in reverse when it comes to actual risk taking. It seems weird to me that this metric as described would not correlate to that. Swedes and the Swiss are pretty (extremely) risk averse compared to all Italians and Portuguese I've ever met and observed... And Thailand ranks above Sweden? That's nonsensical... > Countries exhibiting high Uncertainty Avoidance maintain rigid codes of belief and behaviour and are intolerant of unorthodox behaviour and ideas. In these cultures there is an emotional need for rules (even if the rules never seem to work) time is money, people have an inner urge to be busy and work hard, precision and punctuality are the norm, innovation may be resisted, security is an important element in individual motivation. Decisions are taken after careful analysis of all available information. I feel like whoever made this up hasn't been to any of these countries.

catears 4y ago

The definition of working with people vs. working with things doesn't seem obvious to me. As a software engineer I am working a lot with my computer. Therefore I must be working with things! But... I am just as much working with my soft skills. Scrum retros, talking to stakeholders, discussions on design with fellow engineers, testing with end-users. Some days I don't spend even a minute working with "things". I don't think the distinction of working with people vs working with things is clear enough to say wheter my job means I am doing the one or the other. So how could the participants in the study do the same? I'm assuming there are lots of occupations in this grey zone and even situations where in one company the same occupation is considered working with people while in another company it would be considered working with things. I can see multiple issues the study runs into which would be interesting to see how/if it answers. A) Does it measure peoples perception of wheter they work with people or thing? B) Do the authors make their own interpretation of which occupations lands in which category? How do they then eliminate their own biases in what working with that occupation means? C) Did the authors observe the participants and make a judgement call based on their day-to-day activity? This would likely be the most accurate, but I can't imagine they did this because of the sheer cost of such an experiment.

ajuc 4y ago
It's one of these "I know it when I see it" things. I don't think a definition is necessary, but if you need one - how about: When you're working how often are you thinking about other person's state of mind vs a state of some inanimate (or abstract) object? Ultimately almost all the jobs are done in groups, including stuff like coal mining. But people aren't your focus there.
deleted 4y ago
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kqr 4y ago
A bricklayer works with things. Daycare staff work with people. These are very clear-cut. Then there are a lot of points along that continuum -- nurses and HR reps work mostly with people. Economists a little of both. Software engineers and carpenters mostly with things. We may not agree on a complete ordering but we will get reasonably close to each other, I suppose.

ajuc 4y ago

“women tended to be more interested in working with ideas (versus data) than men in all but two countries (the Philippines and Poland),” In Poland accounting is traditionally a female occupation. I know 0 male accountants and like 20 female ones.

Kiro 4y ago
Same in Sweden.
torginus 4y ago
Maybe general misanthropy in these countries supersedes the inbuilt bias :)

willhinsa 4y ago

news at 11

givemeethekeys 4y ago

The more of these male vs female preferences articles I see, the less I find myself caring.

tgv 4y ago
I think that's ok. We should care about the well-being of people (and nature), not about the way they actually live their life. If someone wants to work in health care or education, or rather in carpentry or nuclear physics let them. The alternative is some kind of politically motivated utilitarianism. And certainly don't pay too much attention of these studies. People treat them as gospel, but they aren't. They're more like the yellow press.
- samdunham 4y ago
  They really shouldn't require much thought in the end. Don't artificially keep people out of a particular profession. Don't artificially force people into a particular profession. Let people have the opportunity to do the job they want to do and call it a day.
andrewflnr 4y ago
Good. The sooner everyone stops caring, the sooner we can all think clearly enough about it to get the truth.
tbrownaw 4y ago
I wouldn't think it should matter for most people day-to-day. It's relevant to understanding society-level metrics and knowing what sensible alert settings for them are, but must people don't work with those very much (maybe if you're the sort to evaluate politicians yourself during election season, rather than just voting party line, or if something comes up on a referendum?).

castrul 4y ago

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austin-cheney 4y ago

The article speaks in very broad terms but there are precise preferential differences by sex. More than just working with things males tend to prefer working with tools more than building new things. Yes there are many males that are creative and only prefer creating original works, but not most. When it comes to working with things females, unlike males, tend to prefer the ideas of things, theory, more than the implementation or practical application, which may speak to planning. There was a recently published study that females across the world score higher in cognitive (learned) empathy than males. The same study found no distinction by sex in innate (natural) empathy. None of this should come as a surprise. For decades we have known that females score higher in agreeability and males score higher in assertiveness. As such females will tend to position themselves into interests of lower social friction and higher direct engagement than males. Males will tend to position their interests into areas of greater critical reasoning at sacrifice to social engagement than will females. Yet despite that most males remain fully unwilling to distance their interests from those that are perceived as higher value by their group dynamics.

tgv 4y ago
The same study also asks about ideas, but the preference for that is almost too small to be of any meaning. See the abstract (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-022-01318-w https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-022-01318-w).

byrnedo 4y ago

I hope people don't jump to the conclusion that they like what they like because of their gender. It could be equally attributed to what they're working with. As in, you like what you know. I've never worked in a people heavy environment, so I couldn't say I like working in one.

unknownsky 4y ago

> gender differences appear to be greater in societies with greater gender equality and in which people have greater economic resources I don't think this is a paradox at all. Discouraging 50% of the workforce talent pool is a wasteful luxury that only countries with abundant resources can afford. I experienced this first hand when I moved to Sweden. I had never been made to feel like a freak for being a programmer until I moved to Sweden. I had never experienced being constantly excluded, discouraged and pushed away from technical activities in order to "rescue" me from things I'm being told me I'm not interested in. I have a legal right to parental leave and I can get an IUD for free, so it's considered a paradox that there are so few female programmers in such an equal country. I don't see how there is a paradox.

AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
> I had never been made to feel like a freak for being a programmer until I moved to Sweden. Are you saying that Sweden is a sexist society? Do you mind me asking where have you been before?
- unknownsky 4y ago
  I have lived in a handful of different countries. I'm criticizing the idea that it's so simple to say one country is more sexist or more equal than another because there are so many metrics you can use to measure equality. Sweden beats a lot of countries when it comes to a strongly protected right to parental leave for both men and women. But Sweden is behind many other countries when it comes to stereotypes and assumptions about what jobs men or women should be doing. So it's meaningless to make a blanket statement that one country is more equal than another.
  - ShredKazoo 4y ago
    This Swedish website actually claims that tech is a problem area for Sweden: https://sweden.se/life/equality/gender-equality https://sweden.se/life/equality/gender-equality There's a link to this report: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5501a836e4b0472e6124f984/t/5ef325ab518cd32c6b5589ff/1592993207371/TECH_DUDES_2020_WEB.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5501a836e4b0472e6124f... "Every third woman who responded to the survey, sent out by Allbright to employees at the tech companies, reports that she has been discriminated against"

verisimi 4y ago

[flagged]

PartiallyTyped 4y ago
At <0.1% of the population, I don't believe people whose gender does not align with their sex are able to skew the distribution s.t. there is statistical significance.
meindnoch 4y ago
The two match like 99% of the time, so it wouldn’t have changed the conclusions at large.
- Izkata 4y ago
  The "Yes, but" part has me thinking it was supposed to be sarcasm... but not really sure anymore.
- verisimi 4y ago
  That's a big assumption citizen!

toofy 4y ago

i find it interesting that the study minimizes the “working with people” aspects of executive roles. working with people may be the most important piece of an executive yet they ignore the “working with people” aspects and try to shoehorn it into a data driven role. seems like an absurd and arbitrary category definition.

niceghost 4y ago

wtf those “preferences” are a result of history - societies raised women to take care (take care of their family and house chores) while men went out in the wild to play, study and work. - women had to be “empathetic” because understanding one’s mood was vital to their survival throughout history: in times where it was “ok” and even expected that women were beaten up to make them more docile or whatever. - women were “granted permission” to certain work roles based on the time that happened. assistant roles were the most common, like secretaries (they even had a “bad reputation” because of the affairs with their executives, but it was really common an executive, a man, have a secretary as a gift). and think about how childhood education usually have more female teachers and higher education is a land of men. or nurses vs medical doctors.

yung_steezy 4y ago
I have to disagree that it can all be explained by societal conditioning. They tried to sample every society they could in this study to see if societal factors could explain the preference but could not see a societal effect. While you might be able to claim that every society around the world is fundamentally sexist to explain the difference in preferences, I think in that case you would have to be able to explain why every distributed society came to be arranged in a similar way.
- unknownsky 4y ago
  If cultures universally share a characteristic, that does not prove that the characteristic is a hard-wired drive. That thinking has been used to make several arguments. Cultures all around the world have made pyramids, so pyramids must have a deep spiritual meaning that all humans are tuned into. Or all these cultures were working with heavy objects and gravity and they all independently discovered that a pyramid is the easiest large structure to build. Seafaring cultures all around the world have myths about mermaids, so mermaids must be real. Or people spending lots of time at sea looking at sea-life are likely to start imagining them fusing with humans. Cultures all around the world have sun gods, so a sun god must be real and we all sensed it. Or everyone around the world looked up at the sky and saw the same thing. Cultures all around the world have gender stereotypes, so they must be hard-wired. Or women everywhere are getting pregnant while men aren't, so societies shaped themselves around that fact in similar ways.

deleted 4y ago

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yung_steezy 4y ago

I think this is a worthwhile study but also think we place too much emphasis on personality types. My wife studied primary (elementary) school teaching for 4 years and then was a teacher for over 6 years. After she became tired of the profession she was able to self-teach web dev for 9 months using Udemy and now has been working as a software developer for roughly a year now. Nominally a study like this might have put her into the caring profession box a few years ago but she is professionally ambidextrous, and likely other people surveyed will be too.

golemiprague 4y ago

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_0w8t 4y ago

My experience matched the article assertion. I worked in a financial company in Norway as a consultant for few years on IT project. In a division with over 20 people only 2 were women with one of them being an immigrant from a not-so-rich country. My boss even complained few times that the upper management put pressure on him to do something about it, but he simply cannot find suitable women. Then at the management level things were more even. Like 30 % were women. Then there was a few programmers and system administrators from India working on outsourced projects . Like 50% were women. Yet anything related to management position in Indian company was exclusively for men. That was including minor management roles like a team lead even when everybody else on the team was woman.

psyfi 4y ago

There is nothing wrong about having male dominated roles and female dominated roles, pushing equity down everyone's throat only profits corporation exploiting the less fortuned. It is well known in healthcare that women are better nurses and males are better surgeons, in general.

jdthedisciple 4y ago

Relevant talk: "Autism and the male brain" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PjE_yaJjXE8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PjE_yaJjXE8 Very enlightening imom

esarbe 4y ago

So, they have linked different sexual reproductive strategies to differences in behavior. That cannot be that surprising, right? Different sexual reproductive strategies almost necessitate differences in behavior in general, if the strategies are different enough, which they most certainly are for any kind of mammal or bird. Given the many examples of wildly different behaviors between the sexes in other species - bower birds as an example - any lack of specific behavioral differences would be surprising. It's also no surprising that this sex differences (I don't think these are gender differences; these are the differences that shape gender) are more prevalent in societies with greater economic prosperity; it allows the individuals to follow their own generic preferences, unburdened by economic pressure.