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[nullBolt]

My girlfriend actually said something interesting to me earlier and that's that no one has ever explained to her satisfactorily why genders need to be balanced in a profession, especially when the vast majority of women aren't interested in said professions. She works in a lab and she says that whilst there is sexism there (she was called a "little girl" by one of the workers, which made her laugh long and hard) it doesn't ever interfere with anything she does and her bosses are disproportionately women.

She's not even interested in what she does, it just ensures job security and a very good wage. She has what I'd, personally, call a male attitude to work.

Because being barred from becoming a dustwoman isn't as negative an effect as being barred from better professions? I'm not sure what your point is.

Well, they're paid very well and have great benefits (much better than a number of STEM fields, actually). But, no, that's a dirty profession that men only do because it feeds them and their families. Not like one of the biggest contributing factors to the gender wage gap is the fact that men are willing to work horrible, dirty jobs for a boost in pay or anything.

You must be easily amused.

By hypocrisy and mental gymnastics? Definitely.

[Sheb]

They don't need to? It's just that a highly skewed ration can be an indicator of gender-specific barriers to entry.

[mainiac]

When faced with a troublesome facts, just discuss the abstract occurrences of such events in general.  Once it's a theoretical concept, you can attribute it to other causes.

"You shot him!"
"Ah yes, murder is a big problem in the US.  Some people say we need gun control.  Others are worried about the individual freedom of gun ownership.  Some say it's a mental health issue.  Some say mental health is a red herring issue.  It's very complicated and there are no easy answers."

[Reelya]

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/male-nurses-are-on-the-rise-filling-a-need-and-making-a-living-042215]]

“Previously, decades of legal barriers kept men out of the field, and nursing schools often refused to admit men,” author Liana Christin Landivar wrote in the 2013 American Community Survey highlight report for men in nursing occupations.

The nursing school exclusion was deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case brought against a state-supported school in 1981.

Kind of explains the situation where there used to be only about 2.5% male nurses. Nursing is around 10% male now, with ~15% of nursing students being male. I'm going to make a prediction now that nursing could quite easily become seen as a "male profession" some time in the future:

- high median salary of $66k would attract men to the degree that high wages attract men to a field
- men who go into nursing are earning more than the women, probably because they're a more selective cohort, but that further incentivizes other men to enter
- great job security, fulfills the masculine idea of being a "provider" better.
- nursing not seen as such an "academic" field as medicine. With girls not encouraged to do nursing these days, there could one day be less stigma for a man than a woman to enter this field (A smart girl might be told she "wasted her life" by doing nursing rather than becoming a doctor).
- rewards workaholism (and men gravitate to jobs with long hours more than women do)
- lower fatality rate than being a police officer or something
- is a job that rewards physical strength (dealing with unruly patients or helping to move obese patients)
- everyone basically agrees that "females are naturally more nurturing therefore make better nurses" is claptrap

So, yeah, at the heart of it I can't see any specifically "female" traits that are more useful in nursing, but being bigger and more muscly and willing to do long hours is definitely a plus.

[Sheb]

When faced with a troublesome facts, just discuss the abstract occurrences of such events in general.  Once it's a theoretical concept, you can attribute it to other causes.

"You shot him!"
"Ah yes, murder is a big problem in the US.  Some people say we need gun control.  Others are worried about the individual freedom of gun ownership.  Some say it's a mental health issue.  Some say mental health is a red herring issue.  It's very complicated and there are no easy answers."

I don't get who you're responding to?

[Reelya]

It's an abstract response to the entire thread I think. You just aren't getting the meta.

[nullBolt]

They don't need to? It's just that a highly skewed ration can be an indicator of gender-specific barriers to entry.

And they can also not be. But no one investigates, just forces quotas instead.

[Frumple]

... kinda' like you, apparently, considering people have been investigating that, in any number of fields, fairly regularly for better than two or three decades now.

[mainiac]

I don't get who you're responding to?

Just a general attitude that tends to come up in threads like this.

[nullBolt]

... kinda' like you, apparently, considering people have been investigating that, in any number of fields, fairly regularly for better than two or three decades now.

If that sort of weird silly pseudoscience is what you call investigation, I highly advise you avoid STEM.

[Sheb]

It is hard to get good science on the effects of quotas, but they've been shown to work in some case. Duflo's work on village chief quotas for women in India is the best study I know of, if you are interested I can send you the .pdf.

Sadly, works of that quality simply isn't possible in most case, so we have to make do with that "weird silly pseudoscience", because you can't put human in a test tubes. Or put in quotas, remove them, see if things changed. Which people have been advocating, both here and IRL.

I think I'm starting to understand what mainiac was driving at.

[Bohandas]

Sadly, works of that quality simply isn't possible in most case, so we have to make do with that "weird silly pseudoscience", because you can't put human in a test tubes.

Well, you can but afterwards you have to move to Argentina.

[nullBolt]

It is hard to get good science on the effects of quotas, but they've been shown to work in some case. Duflo's work on village chief quotas for women in India is the best study I know of, if you are interested I can send you the .pdf.

Sadly, works of that quality simply isn't possible in most case, so we have to make do with that "weird silly pseudoscience", because you can't put human in a test tubes. Or put in quotas, remove them, see if things changed. Which people have been advocating, both here and IRL.

I think I'm starting to understand what mainiac was driving at.

It's just that when I see clear (scientific) evidence that boys are falling behind across the board with no real reaction from the government or any interest groups, I do start to wonder if it's a political issue rather than an actual one. Especially when the wage gap myth is constantly trumpeted by almost every single government I see.

[Reelya]

The English "working class white boy" of those British studies are the exact analogue of the poor African-American boys in the USA. Both are the lowest caste of a stratified economic system (which works differently in the UK than it does in the USA). It seems to be a specific disadvantage that girls in the same economic dire straights are not suffering from.

And it definitely tests the concept of intersectionality of feminism - solidarity and recognizing that different segments of the population also suffer discrimination. Feminist logic here is very linear, in that your oppressions must stack on top of each other and more complex phenomena are just ignored. And there's a pecking-order of discrimination. i.e. gender is always a dominant variable over race to feminism.

So the idea that a black man is less privileged than a white woman, many white feminists aren't going to buy that, because they'll point out that black men are more privileged vs black women, thus changing the topic. The idea that black men are doing significantly worse than even black women, well that doesn't seem to really compute to most feminists, because admitting "well, sometimes being male can be a disadvantage" for anything not purely trivial is like arsenic to a lot of core feminist doctrine, so they're not even going to have the discussion about why that might be true: they won't even acknowledge it to start with, they need to trivialize or victim-blame for all bad things that happen to men, such as the black male incarceration rate.

[wobbly]

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/male-nurses-are-on-the-rise-filling-a-need-and-making-a-living-042215]]

“Previously, decades of legal barriers kept men out of the field, and nursing schools often refused to admit men,” author Liana Christin Landivar wrote in the 2013 American Community Survey highlight report for men in nursing occupations.

The nursing school exclusion was deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case brought against a state-supported school in 1981.

Kind of explains the situation where there used to be only about 2.5% male nurses. Nursing is around 10% male now, with ~15% of nursing students being male. I'm going to make a prediction now that nursing could quite easily become seen as a "male profession" some time in the future:

- high median salary of $66k would attract men to the degree that high wages attract men to a field
- men who go into nursing are earning more than the women, probably because they're a more selective cohort, but that further incentivizes other men to enter
- great job security, fulfills the masculine idea of being a "provider" better.
- nursing not seen as such an "academic" field as medicine. With girls not encouraged to do nursing these days, there could one day be less stigma for a man than a woman to enter this field (A smart girl might be told she "wasted her life" by doing nursing rather than becoming a doctor).
- rewards workaholism (and men gravitate to jobs with long hours more than women do)
- lower fatality rate than being a police officer or something
- is a job that rewards physical strength (dealing with unruly patients or helping to move obese patients)
- everyone basically agrees that "females are naturally more nurturing therefore make better nurses" is claptrap

So, yeah, at the heart of it I can't see any specifically "female" traits that are more useful in nursing, but being bigger and more muscly and willing to do long hours is definitely a plus.

I know quite a few male nurses. Not sure if your link is specifically about how it is in the US, but as far as I can tell you've got pretty much guaranteed work in Australia as a qualified nurse (of either sex) with good pay & the main down-side is the hours (long, night work, sometimes switching between day & night shift). It's actually a big advantage to be a male (or alternatively just strong, fit, heck being a little taller even helps here etc.) in nurse work, particularly aged care. I know quite a few female nurses with damaged backs because an old person has collapsed suddenly on them. People tend to be "heavier" when they lose control of their bodies.