5 ms·

“Smarter” is too blunt a point. Your average young woman is probably more risk-averse than your average young man.

MrZongle2 13y ago
Or perhaps a sizeable number of women simply don't find the idea of starting a business as interesting as other endeavors. Less than 10% of nurses in the United States are male. Why isn't there a hue and cry about this gender imbalance? Is it even a real problem? And guys, what could the nursing industry do to make it more welcoming to you? Anything? Or are you simply not interested in it? Could women in technology be the flip side of that coin, when sexism by bosses and coworkers is eliminated?
- matthewmacleod 13y ago
  Less than 10% of nurses in the United States are male. Why isn't there a hue and cry about this gender imbalance? Is it even a real problem? There is, but you're probably not that exposed to it often by dint of (presumably) not being part of that industry. But if you look into it, there's concern about the lack of male nurses and a concerted effort to improve diversity (the same for other professions with traditionally female-skewed demographics, like teaching).
  - MartinCron 13y ago
    Shame on you, letting facts and reality ruin what some poor guy thought must be a really good argument.
  - thenomad 13y ago
    Really? That's very good news, and I hadn't heard about it at all. Do you have some links to orgs working to get more men into female-skewed professions? I'd be very interested to read them.
    - sanxiyn 13y ago
      Quick Google search turned up http://menteach.org/ http://menteach.org/ for example, founded in 1979 to get more men into teaching. Frankly, organizations working to get more men into teaching or nursing is so easy to find by Google, I think people claiming otherwise should be assumed to have agenda. I am starting to suspect these are intentional trolling.
  - mudil 13y ago
    Diversity, when it comes to sexes, is such a nebulous idea. Here is a comment I left above. What amazes me is that in this whole conversation no one even mentions the differences between men and women, as these differences were shaped by evolutionary forces. In all our attempts to make women and men "equal", not just in this country, but across the world, women and men still go into different professions and do have different interests, and are good in their gender-specific things. There is a reason for that: men and women are different. Surely, there will be women in tech and men in nursing. But the differences are there and they go back hundreds of millions of years, and they've been shaped by real evolutionary forces, and they play out every day in myriads of ways. For all the scorn that Harvard University President Lawrence Summers got in 2005 for bringing out these issues, he was coming from a serious scientifically-based view on differences of sexes. For those who want to understand how evolution shaped women and men, I recommend to start with Dawkins' books (The Greatest Show on Earth, The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene), and then to read "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley, and "The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Geoffrey Miller. And, hey, I am talking to the audience here, since it is mostly composed of men (there is a reason for it): understanding the evolution of sex will make you better at picking up women!
- VladRussian2 13y ago
  >And guys, what could the nursing industry do to make it more welcoming to you? Anything? Or are you simply not interested in it? Nursing would be among the worst professions for me. It requires a lot of simultaneous attention to wide variety of details - the cost of missing something is somebody's pain, injury, life... I can focus really deep on one thing at a time - suited me well in Math before and in programming now - while any situation requiring attention to a several different details in parallel or quick sequence just exhausts me. Related to it is the perfection level required. Take the simplest thing - inserting needle into a vein. Doing it a 1000 times, you need to do it perfectly a 1000 times. In my mentality - it is much more efficient/faster to do something not perfectly, thus getting it right, say, 9 times out of 10 and apply additional effort to correct the 1 out of 10 mistake. The same about following a multi-item checklist (or multi-step procedures) - i immediately filter out "unnecessary/unimportant" items. Obviously, such mentality have no place in nursing :)
derefr 13y ago
I don't know why this isn't a well-established point, taken as an axiom of these discussions. It has been proven that testosterone increases risk-taking. Men, on average, are more willing to take risks--and even more willing, the more testosterone-triggering a situation becomes (e.g. a competition with the possibility of impressing a potential mate will induce higher risk-taking.) It's not so much a fact about "men" in the strict biological sense, either; it's just a fact about testosterone itself. Trans-men take more risks, too, when they're on hormone therapy.

Or perhaps a sizeable number of women simply don't find the idea of starting a business as interesting as other endeavors. Less than 10% of nurses in the United States are male. Why isn't there a hue and cry about this gender imbalance? Is it even a real problem? And guys, what could the nursing industry do to make it more welcoming to you? Anything? Or are you simply not interested in it? Could women in technology be the flip side of that coin, when sexism by bosses and coworkers is eliminated?

matthewmacleod 13y ago
Less than 10% of nurses in the United States are male. Why isn't there a hue and cry about this gender imbalance? Is it even a real problem? There is, but you're probably not that exposed to it often by dint of (presumably) not being part of that industry. But if you look into it, there's concern about the lack of male nurses and a concerted effort to improve diversity (the same for other professions with traditionally female-skewed demographics, like teaching).
- MartinCron 13y ago
  Shame on you, letting facts and reality ruin what some poor guy thought must be a really good argument.
- thenomad 13y ago
  Really? That's very good news, and I hadn't heard about it at all. Do you have some links to orgs working to get more men into female-skewed professions? I'd be very interested to read them.
  - sanxiyn 13y ago
    Quick Google search turned up http://menteach.org/ http://menteach.org/ for example, founded in 1979 to get more men into teaching. Frankly, organizations working to get more men into teaching or nursing is so easy to find by Google, I think people claiming otherwise should be assumed to have agenda. I am starting to suspect these are intentional trolling.
- mudil 13y ago
  Diversity, when it comes to sexes, is such a nebulous idea. Here is a comment I left above. What amazes me is that in this whole conversation no one even mentions the differences between men and women, as these differences were shaped by evolutionary forces. In all our attempts to make women and men "equal", not just in this country, but across the world, women and men still go into different professions and do have different interests, and are good in their gender-specific things. There is a reason for that: men and women are different. Surely, there will be women in tech and men in nursing. But the differences are there and they go back hundreds of millions of years, and they've been shaped by real evolutionary forces, and they play out every day in myriads of ways. For all the scorn that Harvard University President Lawrence Summers got in 2005 for bringing out these issues, he was coming from a serious scientifically-based view on differences of sexes. For those who want to understand how evolution shaped women and men, I recommend to start with Dawkins' books (The Greatest Show on Earth, The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene), and then to read "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley, and "The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Geoffrey Miller. And, hey, I am talking to the audience here, since it is mostly composed of men (there is a reason for it): understanding the evolution of sex will make you better at picking up women!
VladRussian2 13y ago
>And guys, what could the nursing industry do to make it more welcoming to you? Anything? Or are you simply not interested in it? Nursing would be among the worst professions for me. It requires a lot of simultaneous attention to wide variety of details - the cost of missing something is somebody's pain, injury, life... I can focus really deep on one thing at a time - suited me well in Math before and in programming now - while any situation requiring attention to a several different details in parallel or quick sequence just exhausts me. Related to it is the perfection level required. Take the simplest thing - inserting needle into a vein. Doing it a 1000 times, you need to do it perfectly a 1000 times. In my mentality - it is much more efficient/faster to do something not perfectly, thus getting it right, say, 9 times out of 10 and apply additional effort to correct the 1 out of 10 mistake. The same about following a multi-item checklist (or multi-step procedures) - i immediately filter out "unnecessary/unimportant" items. Obviously, such mentality have no place in nursing :)

derefr 13y ago

I don't know why this isn't a well-established point, taken as an axiom of these discussions. It has been proven that testosterone increases risk-taking. Men, on average, are more willing to take risks--and even more willing, the more testosterone-triggering a situation becomes (e.g. a competition with the possibility of impressing a potential mate will induce higher risk-taking.) It's not so much a fact about "men" in the strict biological sense, either; it's just a fact about testosterone itself. Trans-men take more risks, too, when they're on hormone therapy.