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[Reelya]

That might fix the wage gap, but worsen the actual financial situation of those families. e.g. real families make a decision that one person is going to work more, and the other will go part-time and take care of the kids more. They make these decisions based on what's best for their family overall. By forcing each family to exactly take parental leave 50/50, then clearly in any specific case, your forcing families to make less optimal financial decisions than they would have, if you didn't meddle. There's a very low chance that this will actually benefit any real people, even if it 'fixes' the wage gap stats.

e.g. right now most families decide that one partner will go 100% for their career, while the other will tank their career, so they have free labor for the child-raising. By forcing 'equal leave' your saying "well why don't you both fuck your careers, but only half way?" The competition isn't the spouse, it's the people who never had kids and keep gunning their careers at 110% capacity. Forcing fathers to take leave, when they as a family didn't decide that was a good choice isn't going to somehow fix things.

[MorleyDev]

And more often than not the decision is made for the male to work because the male already earns more, and the male already earns more because men are paid more because men take less maternity leave because men are paid more so the women take the longer maternity leave because...

Insert speech about needing to break the wheel etc etc here

[Reelya]

A big part of that is that men and women don't make choices to go into the same careers. Men are much more willing to bet everything on careers which aren't 'family friendly'. Try taking maternity leave on an oil rig.

Trade-offs are a big thing here that are often overlooked. Women choose careers which are conduicive to taking leave. Those are non-monetary benefits. Non-monetary benefits are always a trade-off with monetary benefits. If, for example, your company says it'll pay for free massages and saunas for everyone, that's not free, it's ultimately coming out of your paycheck. The same with flexi-time, paid leave, a childcare creche, etc. Those are benefits which are costs to the company, which ultimately are paid for by the employees as lower wages. Any non-financial perk is always a trade-off with the hard currency in your pocket. Think about a job such as sysadmin where the company is allowed to call you in at 3am in the morning, because something broke and must be fixed ASAP. Not many women are going to do that job, and you can bet they pay high $$$$ for the shit the employee must put up with. Jobs where you need to keep 'upskilling' even in your spare time, or are on call all the time, those are the ones that don't have a lot of women in them and pay a lot of base $$$$.

A good example here is that they've consistently found that self-employed female doctors make much less than self-employed male doctors. They just don't choose to work as many hours. And that's in self-employed practice, so there is no "employer". That's all about choice. In fact, pretty much every self-employed sector of the economy, or free-lance, contractors, entrepreneurs, specialists, etc, have a far higher "gender pay gap" than any sort of wage-based earnings. So it's kinda hard to see how the whole thing is caused by "employer bias" at a fundamental level.

[MorleyDev]

Personally I'm not arguing employer bias, I'm arguing societal bias. Huge difference

Society is inherently biased in the way which women and men are socialised which produces the above scenarios, and that's what ultimately needs to be addressed and what the end-goal is to fix. Things like affirmative action is a tool in that belt, a method of applying pressure on certain areas to be more conducive to change and a way of applying a bandage to the biases whilst we work on removing them from the wider system.

(Although things like work-from-home and flexitime can actually result in greater efficiency in some industries, so there's an independent argument for them anyway depending on the field)

[Reelya]

I'm not sure that "societal" bias is the one size fits all explanation for all that, either. The underlying assumption there is that equal outcomes is the default expectation, but society's "bias" gets in the way.

That underlying assumption has little empirical evidence, and it's rather a large and implausible claim to make without strong empirical evidence to back it up: we have many measures that show thing X and thing Y have different outcomes, and many ways in which thing X and thing Y measurably differ. you say they're exactly the same and all our perceptions / measurements are just faulty. That's a big claim. Two things which act and seem different can be different in many possible ways, they can turn out to be exactly the same in only one way.

In fact, look at the most equal and prosperous societies, they don't in fact show a reduction in the gender-divide in industries, they in fact show an increase in the divide. more freedom of choice does not in fact lead to a reduction of gender-correlated choices, rather the opposite.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/

We could then say "sure, but those gender equal societies still have gender-roles, so the fact that the trend is opposite of our proposed model is just a blip, and the 'true' unfettered data just needs us to double-down on <stuff that's clearly not working like our theory says it should>" and by that point, you more or less are operating on the principle of religious faith in the idea rather than testable hypothesis with predictions.

Most proposals that would plausibly reduce the gender divide almost all involve stripping people of choices - e.g mandatory parental leave for fathers. And forcing people to pick once choice rather than have options might increase "equality" but will invariably lower actual quality of life, since if you're forced to always pick one option, you either get the same choice as you wanted, or a worse choice than you wanted. being forced to pick a certain choice is almost never going to give people a better choice than what they wanted otherwise.

[MorleyDev]

A valid reading of that data is that greater choice is allowing for the inherent societal 'pressures' to manifest itself

It makes an decent amount of sense that, when given the economic and social freedom to pursue what path they want, the ones who were given dolls and toy cooking sets as children would wind up down different career and lifestyle paths as adults than the ones who mostly got toy race cars, robots and dinosaurs. Boys are more likely to get more negatively chastised if they find their way into their mum's makeup kit. Not as many fathers even think to pick up a ball and play kick about with their daughters compared to with their sons.

I probably wouldn't be a programmer if my father didn't introduce me to video games at a young age, and most of the female programmers I know were similarly introduced to the field by similar means. But it was simply less likely for parents to buy a young girl a games console compared to a boy.  (Wow I mistyped that originally as "I wouldn't be a computer if my father didn't introduce me to programmers" xD)

These are the kinds of things I speak of when I say "societal pressures".

Ideally you'd want a test society in which gender-oriented pressures from family and society-at-large don't exist in the first place to see what such a societies career/gender balance would look like. But since we can't just lock 200 babies in a white room and come back 30 years later to see what it looks like (damn ethics board) it's tricky to extrapolate much from the white noise imposed by a few hundred thousand years of human history* forming current society. Though you could probably maybe make a reasonable inference if there was a flipped society to use for comparison, where men were socialised as caregivers and women as providers.

Failing that, something I don't think I've seen, and I can see how it'd be damn hard to do rigorously, is a wide-reaching attempt to trace the childhood upbringing of children and correlate that with career-paths (well, to try and disprove the idea that there's a correlation. null hypothesis and all that). Since gender is still a great influence on upbringing, that could be a very interesting study. Are STEM students in more likely to be introduced by parents/carers/peers to related/introductory areas? If so, does that correlation hold regardless of gender?

We really need more people taking the STEM topics. So if we can find more ways to sneak the interest about that kind of thing into the heads of young children of all genders, that'd be great

(As an aside, I'm all for the elimination of gender-based societal pressures, regardless of it's impact on gender/career ratios xD)

(* Yes, I know you'd more likely than not get 200 mostly feral people. The human brain needs socialisation to develop. I don't actually think we should do this.).

[feelotraveller]

https://github.com/1995parham/github-do-not-ban-us
Fuckin' dis-augs...

It's a tricky one for GitHub.

Absolutely, and they are trying to cope as best they can.  I was not meaning to be critical of them on this issue. More it was a comment about (in your words):

This does highlight another way in which current business laws and politicians still really don't know how to deal with this whole "global interconnected network" thing, since it just makes everything worse for everyone on all sides.

Particulary in the context of the previous post about the prosthetic arm, I was hoping none of those Iranian (or Cuban, or Syrian, or Crimean, or North Korean, or...) developers - or more precisely people interacting with Github from those locations - were providing important software for it.  (Personally I know that I use harfbuzz, an Iranian based project, though only for text shaping.) 

Insert a bunch of colloquialisms about the left hand no knowing what the right is doing, or cutting off the arm [sic] to spite the face.

Of course I'm glad the revamped news of the gender politics of modern society has taken control of the thread. 

[Reelya]

A valid reading of that data is that greater choice is allowing for the inherent societal 'pressures' to manifest itself

Hmm, not really, because it's actually the gender-equality metrics themselves that correlate highly with lack of women in STEM. see the graph, copied from the article:



It's not just "choice" in general. Places with very high metrics on gender equality have really low rates of female graduates from STEM. Take Finland as a prime example. They have an excellent public school system which is definitely a world-beater in science education. They're #5 in the world on the PISA score for science literacy.
http://factsmaps.com/pisa-worldwide-ranking-average-score-of-math-science-reading/
Yet, have almost the lowest number of female STEM graduates anywhere. Girls in Finland are definitely exposed to world-beating science and maths education, and Finland has a very high level of commitment to gender-neutral outcomes. It's just that as soon as free choice comes into it, the opposite to expectations occurs.

To claim that this is just a manifestation of "the patriarchy" or equivalent is confirmation bias: you'd see it as proof of the nefarious effect of The Patriarchy whether the graph went up, or went down, which shows the analysis is an unfalsifiable, religious-type claim, since it's impervious to new data.

You end up contorting your logic into places like "places with high levels of gender equality have societal effects preventing women from pursuing male-type careers" which seems ... pretty unlikely as a model. This purely hypothetical base-line society where women and men have exactly the same career preferences, due to high levels of gender equality is expressly at odds with observable data, so maybe we should assume it's implausible that it's the only "true" underlying reality.

[McTraveller]

I'm in the camp of wondering  why homogeneous distribution is considered the gold standard of "equality" in the first place - from a scientific standpoint at least. 

Why is the assumption that interests and preferences being equal across an entire population is a desirable societal characteristic?  That is - if you had zero "social bias" for things like career interest, would the distribution of careers be homogeneous?  Or put another way - does homogeneous distribution of careers (or wage, or whatever) really indicate equality?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I mean we are a species with sexual dimorphism; there will never be 100% gender equality across the board.  I know that generally equality is in terms of social stigma though, not biology, which is why this is spoilered.

[wierd]

One has to question why society thinks that STEM fields are deserving of higher pay than soft-skills based careers that are mentally taxing (like nursing.)  Becoming a full RN or BSN requires a pretty hefty chunk of change too you know. It's not unskilled labor.


The issue is that wages are artificially depressed by hospitals and facilities that are profit driven, and abuse the staff's willingness to "Make shit happen with less", because they actually give a shit about the people being cared for.  There are numerous reasons for this downward pressure to assure profitability, with spiraling costs of healthcare due to obscene costs for certified equipment, and prohibitive drug prices, being among them. (EG, hospitals have to cut expenses whenever and wherever possible, since drug makers and pals gouge on their prices. Seriously, check out how much a certified pulse-oximeter costs(note, they try to give you a "bargain" with the lowest costing unit being about 40$, "Their price," with normal retail prices never below 50$.), compared to a non-certified one. (which is often around 20$.)  The difference? All the bureaucracy to assure that the meter works within specified parameters. Oh-- and those certified ones? Yeah, you have to regularly have them checked and calibrated, so it's not like they are magic or anything. (In fact, even "Blessed" ones have alarming error rates, when subjected to structured testing.) Requiring standards for calibration would allow any old meter to be properly calibrated, and blessed, or detected as irredeemably out of tolerance and junked. You might have noticed that some of the very same models are in the "certified" category, AND ALSO in the 'not certified' category. Exact same unit, Same parts, same assembly line. Vastly different price.) 

(and no, I did not intend to make a rant about pulse oximeters. I was just pointing them out as an example of overpriced medical equipment that REALLY should not cost so much.)

When the certification process literally doubles the price on a piece of hardware, (OR MORE!!), there is a problem, and who do you think ends up having to sort out the bills?  Hospitals can only charge so much you know.
There needs to be a re-alignment about how society treats medicine, and caregivers, in general.  Socializing medicine, coupled with "livable wage" laws that the government is not exempt from, would go a long way to fixing this trend you are citing Reelya.

[MorleyDev]

My point was that the inability to remove cultural factors acts an example of a huuuge hidden variable which makes drawing any causation from a presented correlation inherently problematic. A direct causation should result in a much prettier graph, but you get dramatic outliers like both Chile and Finland/Norway. The interesting thing to analyse is:
a) Why would it start very scatter-shot, but trend towards becoming less so as you go to the right? Is that just because of the number of countries on the left vs right?
b) Can you identify clusters, and what other shared factors do those clusters have? Then, do those factors also at all correlate?

My instinct is still that if you could somehow eliminate all gender-based socialisation and construct a 'blank' culture without even the idea of gender then it'd be a smaller gap than 80/20. But like I said, there are way too many hidden variables in any available data to actually make a judgement on that.

I also just realised we somehow segued into whether or not you'd get equal gender distribution, but that wasn't even the original topic.

The original topic was that algorithm seeming to automatically mark down women as a worse hire. That's unrelated to gender distribution in the fields, and more about whether those who pursue that career path in the first place are on equal footing in terms of skill and capacity to perform the job. If you see an ~80/20 male/female split in applicants, why do you not get an ~80/20 split in hires?

Gender-equal distribution doesn't really matter there if you can remove the incentives for the male to be the primary worker (things like the cycle of "men are paid more because women stop working when they have a kid because men are paid more because"), then the goal becomes more about providing enough equity that factors like employees with or without children can remain competitive with each other.

Physical variance drawn from biology may manifest at scale, but is largely a useless metric for understanding individuals. The ethical problems mostly arise when we start pigeonholing or restricting individuals career/lifestyle paths based on their gender or sex.

–-----
As for why STEM is seen as more desirable: Capitalism is based on the pursuit of economic growth. STEM fields are the most likely to generate efficiency savings for existing industries and to lead to the creation of new industries. Both efficiency increases and industry creation drive greater economic growth than a gradual population increase alone provides, ergo more STEM is more desirable.

[Trekkin]

One has to question why society thinks that STEM fields are deserving of higher pay than soft-skills based careers that are mentally taxing (like nursing.)  Becoming a full RN or BSN requires a pretty hefty chunk of change too you know. It's not unskilled labor.

Well, it's difficult to say that "STEM fields" as a whole pay more than "soft skills careers" without a more specific benchmark; you can identify careers in both where the pay scales differently with experience. STEM generally has more official credentials involved, too; I can go be an artist or an author with no formal training at all and earn very little money, but if I want to be an engineer there's a 4-year degree involved at minimum, which raises the floor.

So if you could define your terms a little more, maybe with respect to specific positions, it might help deconvolve that scaling.

That said, I am not sure you can draw a comparison between notional STEM training costs and RN training. STEM PhD students are generally salaried, for example, with tuition paid by the mentor's lab; sure we end up paying for ourselves with grants, but it's not like we get the tuition paid to us first. When you factor in undergraduate scholarships, the total cost to the student of a STEM education is sometimes negative.

[Reelya]

Also, i think this hand-wave of 'society values ABC career more than XYZ career' a little questionable as a general construct.

It's not like e.g. you're a dude so everyone showers you in money and free blowjobs. Everyone works hard to pay everyone else the very least that they can get away with and still get the service they expect. If your profession is underpaid, that's because there's an excess of labor supply in that industry, not because 'society' puts a 'value' on your labor. Look at, for example the godawful low pay of video game developers, a very male-dominated industry, but low pay because there are a lot of people who want to do it. It's not underpaid because society doesn't 'value' the labor of game developers, it's underpaid because every man and his dog wants to code the next Call of Duty. Simiarly, you want teachers or nurses to get paid more? reduce the supply of teach / nurse training. That's what the AMA does to keep the wages of doctors up.

[scourge728]

I always assumed that was at least in part because people wanted to do it, so were willing to accept low pay to do so

[Reelya]

I always assumed that was at least in part because people wanted to do it, so were willing to accept low pay to do so

Supply still dictates that. What willingness to accept lower pay does is increase the number of applicants at any possible price-point, which has the same effect as just increasing the size of the applicant pool would. in either case, the average wage then drops (which may increase demand if demand is elastic) until supply equals demand.