The problem that I have, personally, is that women are getting something like half of the STEM degrees, and maybe 20% of the STEM jobs, and the conclusion people usually draw is:
Women don't like STEM, are ill-suited to it due to physical and emotional weakness, and would rather have babies, which is their natural inclination.
Why not
Some women don't like STEM
As opposed to what women in STEM will tell you, which is:
The discrimination was so intense that I decided to leave, because I was being sexually harassed to the point where I didn't feel safe coming to work and my skills were being undervalued and there was zero probability of being promoted when guys kept being credited for my work, so I decided to go into a different field despite years and years and years of professional training, because it was just that bad.
That's what some women will tell you, unless your hospitals and research centres are exclusively populated by plagiarist homosexual serial rapist misogynists. I was raised by my Mother to pursue my life goals without blaming others for my failures, as the old Jewish proverb goes the poor dancer blames the musician's poor rhythm, but this is not even that this is just a lack of interest. My Mother also worked in STEM, in Britain, whilst learning to speak English, at a time where shit like homosexuality was illegal by state law, without any educational qualifications (even on a lower level, let alone higher level) - through sheer dedication towards working STEM not only was not made redundant in the mass firings, but was made indispensable and shot through the ranks to the point where she was managing clinical trials as a manager, commanding doctors and researchers. She even faced sexual harassment once and one of the big deals was this doctor was so old and so respected they couldn't be removed, least of all by (back then) a junior nurse; and with the benefit of history she realized that he'd done that to other junior nurses too who faced very much the same problem. Nevertheless did not stop her, because STEM was what she wanted to do. You can't treat half the world's population as a single mind, a single life, facing the same problems and with the same motivations and desires, when not even identical twins are identical. In today's world where law courts are transparent and internet activism harsher and grants and scholarships exist for women entering STEM that exist to them for being women, what conclusion is there to draw but interest? Consider as well today where women on average outperform men in lower education, in turn dictating that more women should make up higher education ruling out affirmative action's effect on ethnic minority men, and they do - in subjects that are not STEM. Why do men on average perform poorer in lower education examinations but make up most of STEM? Well then you start talking about sexual dimorphism and biology and all that but it is part of human nature to ascend beyond natural limitations, so I do not give the most weight to this point anymore, at least beyond explaining the initial failed performance rates. End of the day it's interest and ability, but even with ability with enough interest a biomed student can become a doctor where they could not immediately become a doc. Women perform better in lower education on average and with those better qualifications to go onto higher education choose to go into other academic fields where they are overrepresented. They choose~
There could be a cultural thing, since men can't rear children they have to immediately get a job, get STEM or give up (most notably in the UK suicide became the leading cause of death amongst men and has stayed that way since the financial crash of 08), this mindset very much is do or die - point being I still remember trying to convince many of my friends from trying to become doctors since their pay was shit, their work hours and the amount of work had to be put in was life-consuming and the chance of them being able to be a parent was very low, becoming a doctor was not an occupation for them, it was a lifestyle choice and their interest in it disregarded any attempts by friends or doctors to dissuade them from following their path :
D
I mean seriously, in order to get an engineering scholarship in the UK you either have to be a woman or enroll in the armed forces
There are problems to tackle but trying to make everyone the same and have everything exactly proportional or else have it be a sign of immorality is odd thinking to me, because we are not the same. Sameness is not the same as equality, and equality of opportunity is very much not the same as state-managed proportionality
A man would never leave a job just because he's not going to be promoted and the work environment is toxic, and he could have a better career somewhere else. Right?
But if a woman stays under those career-damaging conditions, then she's making yet another one of those bad decisions women make where they don't take risks, they stick with what's familiar, and so on.
Wrong
If you're stuck in a dead-end job with a shit work environment and you could have a better career somewhere else you're either doing it as a lifestyle choice, or are out of options and can't risk losing an economic certainty now than risk getting a better job but failing and ending up unemployed. I mean, if you managed to secure a better career before leaving that would be more manageable. It also depends how big the career change is... Oh, and how important doing what you want vs getting money is. This is a pretty general human thing, not wanting to be stuck doing stuff you don't like. It's also a pretty general human thing to have anxieties about career changes, into lesser paid jobs that are more fulfilling vs higher paid jobs that are tedious but offer far more security in tough times, especially if you've spent too long in a dead-end job with little in the way of transferable skills. Then it is like doom upon you, even when things are not as bad as they seem.
I think people think about the pay gap and they're thinking about blue-collar discrimination vs. pink-collar discrimination, but what folks are usually talking about is discrimination within white-collar fields. At any given point, assume you're talking about upper-middle-class white people.
You shouldn't, especially in urban environments where white-collar fields are dominated by southern and eastern asians in addition to semitic and arabic folk
Something to remember is that factory workers used to be overwhelmingly female (or children, or disabled men), and that was before any kind of safety standards appeared. Computer programmers used to be overwhelmingly female.
Notably because they could be paid much less
The thing about gender pay gaps is that if women and children can be paid to do the same job as men for less, they are
Hence Industrial sweat shops, born in England and made in China
There's a pattern. First they say "women are unusually suited to these really shitty jobs because they are docile and we wouldn't want to have to hire a man for this terrible work. We'll give them a little extra money here or there to help them support their families." "Programming is as easy as setting your oven!" Then once women start making serious bank and developing their expertise, men come in, push the women out by explaining why women were unsuited to that profession and men ought to be the only ones working it, and the profession becomes male-dominated. Because now it's a profession, not just a shitty job. Now it's valuable.
This doesn't always happen. But it is a real thing that really happens.
No it really isn't. Workers found their cottage industries could not compete with mass assembly from factories and were being run out of business, and running alongside the green revolution family sizes exploded. Factory owners needed workers, but they didn't need especially strong workers in any capacity and having experienced workers was impossible as the technology was new. With lots of children and lots of workers whose only asset was their labour, labour was cheap. Most was done by children but of the women they could be paid as low as a quarter of their husbands, so whilst their husbands could find no legal labour their wives and children worked the factories and mines in order to stay afloat. Poisonous fumes, harsh labour conditions, unsafe labour conditions, all contributing to maiming, disease and death - running alongside automation making much of the need for mass labour obsolete and public outcry amongst the upper class led to laws being passed forbidding the employment of children and women, leaving all the fun times in coal mines for men. Then the Great War starts about a hundred years later and there's a shortage of men, they don't put the children back to work and the women don't end up in the coal mines but they do get back into the factories and after the war ends it becomes illegal to exclude women from jobs because of their gender. But then with the war ending also comes home the returning soldiers taking their jobs back up, up until WWII kills them again. Then the cycle repeats but stops because we didn't have WWIII in the end.
Most recently, this happened with computer science. Programmers used to be something like 80% female and 20% male in the 80s. Now it's the other way around. I don't have the statistics exactly right in my head, but you can look them up online and read the story. It's all over the place.
I looked up compsci majors and at their high-mark it was 36-7%
Also, there is that general expectation that women will just work for free out of the goodness of their heart, which I have experienced personally in jobs where I had more than 10 years of experience, and needed to volunteer anyway because it would open up job interviews later. And in dudes who within the first couple hours of meeting me asked me to tutor them through The Calculus for free (so they wouldn't have to pay about 10k to get a real professional to teach them). And so on, and so forth. That's the fundamental problem with pink-collar work. "Women are naturally disposed to this kind of labor, so we need not pay them for it because they will do it whether we pay them or not, especially because we will bully the snot out of them if they don't do it for free."
That's called being scammed
You get this a lot in financial consulting where someone calls you up for a drink and sits there saying not much, to prompt you to say as much and give as much of your expertise away for free
It's very scummy
Saying "women and men are generally suited for different types of work" is one thing, and I really don't feel able to argue that point. I've been declared an "honorary man" so many times that I would feel very weird arguing about it, because I seem to be positioned as an exception to the rule somehow.
But the root belief that women being naturally better at nurturing and men naturally better at physical work therefore implying that
1. Female labor is intrinsically intuitive and unskilled
2. But male labor is cognitive and professional
3. Yet male rationality is equally intrinsic to them
4. Hence women cannot attain the same achievements, and are not worth teaching as you would a man
5. So feminine labor is intrinsically inferior
6. Thus women should not be paid equally or considered for promotion
No, it implies natural talents
STEM skills are not in my natural talents, so I do not pursue it
Soldiery are not in my natural talents, so I do not pursue it
Kitchenry are not in my natural talents, so I do not pursue it
And I'm talking limitations in brain, broken finger bones and stuff like that, playing to your strengths and not to your weaknesses is very fun when your strengths align with what you want to do
Actually comes direct from the Victorian era's point of view on gender as intrinsic and immutable, in which women are soft little doves given to transports of the imagination and flights of fancy, who must have a little baby of her own in accordance with her Womanly Purpose, fragile and emotional as she is. Women are Animal, Men are Rational. Therefore everything women do is intrinsically, unchangeably Animal, and everything that men do is intrinsically, unchangeably rational. We don't pay animals for being animals, do we? Then why the fuck should we pay women for being animals?
The Victorian era's point of view on gender comes from who the era was named after, Queen Victoria. The societal ideal of woman was not the weak, passive animal of Romantic fiction, she was a busy, able and upright figure who drew strength from her moral superiority and industriousness. This is why when the Great War broke out the greatest enforcer sending men to the frontlines were women calling them cowards and giving them white feathers to show for it, it got so bad that civil servants and even soldiers on home leave started getting harassed; theirs was the place of Sparta, where everyone had a role to play and had to play it. Things only change once more with automation, just as automation made child labour obsolete it made the tenuous domestic labour obsolete.
This is not the sexism that we have historically had. This is not the perception of women that we have historically had. This is not even the perception of women in other cultures with strict gender roles fairly in alignment with our own, like, say, China.
China's perception is not in alignment with our own and it's very complex, also varying in accordance with racial culture. There's a difference for example in the ones that practiced foot binding and the ones that lived so poorly they couldn't afford to have their women not working on the rice fields, with those differences having morphed in their own developmental paths to this day
This is, unfortunately, partially the inheritance of the Western Enlightenment era (I am looking at you, Descartes, and your mind/body thing) and of the cult of Pythagoras, which decided that men are women but, like, with souls and brains. Fortunately this point of view upheld the prevailing perception that men could and should fuck young men, but not men of the same age, because treating a man of the same social status like you would treat a woman (i.e. as a semen depository) would be demeaning of his status as a man.
Historical homophobia! It was different from modern homophobia!
This of course led to Nietzsche's argument that women exist solely in order to give birth to men and were otherwise essentially lower animals, because Nietzsche follows every point of view held in western culture to its greatest possible extent.
Philosophers of yesterday, today's are of Freud and Marx and de Beauvoir
(Cuz you know, in the modern era... for any given pink-collar job, you're proooooobably better off hiring a gay dude. Because they're better at "being women" than women.
I find this problematic
For a historical argument in a different context, male kabuki actors who portrayed female roles were partially found acceptable because they could teach women how to be feminine more than another woman could. Men were better at everything, including femininity. Source: Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan)
I find this problematic
Well, often they have done X Y or Z, but it is shuffled under the rug as "it doesn't count," so nobody told you (like how Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper and Hedy Lamarr don't count and Emmy Noethur doesn't exist and Sophie Germain was just Gauss's Protege and Sonya Kabalevskaya is just plain overrated, and most of these women probably had men engineering their results anyway. Forget that Newton's papers were littered with arguments about "exterminating X's" and his notation fucking sucked, he had a nervous breakdown after college and went home to mother, and he wasted most of his life doing his "real research" on Aryanism, inherited a lot of wisdom from the Middle East (so are his results engineered by Arabs, who deserve the credit?), and finally became a hanging judge at the national mint); and sometimes there just wasn't the opportunity, and people assume that women aren't worth wasting the opportunity on, so they continue to not furnish the opportunities and we never get to find out whether women are capable of something or not.
And he was a sore winner
And sometimes women do things in different ways than men, and we decide that that means that they didn't Really Do the Thing, and it Wasn't Very Good After All, because it's female writing or female art or female whatever, and it's about the Feminine Condition rather than the Human Condition, which is what the thing is when men do it.
And it's not good unless women do it exactly the same as men (Jane Austen in the company of Homer? Never!), (toy problems? all mathematics must be muscular and seminal!) but it's also not good if women do it exactly the same way as men, because then it's derivative. An inferior copy. It's Adam's Rib, but we wanted the full Adam.
A women speaking about the female experience is pandering, is special interest. A man speaking about the male experience speaks to the quintessential, to the intrinsic, to the human condition. This is because we have already decided that to be human rather than animal is to be rational, and to be male rather than female is also to be rational. Therefore to be male is to be human; to be female is to be animal.
So male genius is masculine greatness, and feminine genius is an unhappy accident contrary to one's true purpose of populating the earth with more men.
Joan of Arc was just one woman, but she was a fourteen-year-old wearing full plate who successfully drove the English out of New Orleans after 100 years of occupation, and I think that that's a reasonable emotional argument that some women can do a man's job when the stars align.
I am no longer an Angry Feminist because I have realized that this viewpoint is so fucking entrenched that it's borderline impossible to just think your way out of (for me, too). But, it really does seem that people think this way. And if you do think that way deep down, I'm not going to tell you to stop thinking that way because hell, it kind of feels right, but I'd like you to consider what I've said and see if anything new seems right in light of the evidence I've brought up.
And yeah, I've just sketched an argument because TBH I'm going to go study geometry in a few minutes and I'd rather do that, and this is all an argument about income inequality that I've been writing for an hour or so that may be off-topic for this thread now. So fill in the holes, dudes; I didn't mean to say that this was all somehow ironclad. Just, here's a thing to think about. Maybe you agree. Maybe you don't.
Men and women don't think in hive minds so easily defined and strawwomand
WE ARE COCKLIFTING SWARM
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