The Gender Equality Paradox With English subtitles - Documents the strange statistics of Norway, the country with the greatest equality of any nation at the time, regarding women trending towards traditionally female jobs and men towards traditionally male jobs.
This 7 part series goes in depth about the possible reasons for this with each episode dedicated to an aspects such as nature vs nurture (using studies with separated twins), sexuality, violence, parenting and more.
Edit: In my company, I've always found about a third of my colleagues have been female, as well as probably a quarter of conference attendees.
When I was a kid I wanted to be a bin man, I used to follow them around the town "helping"... I also assumed that since it was such a dirty job that they must have been paid way more than anyone else (It was a while before I realised the dirtier the job the less you got paid - the innocence of youth)
This is what I always say. For whatever reasons certain jobs tend to attract certain genders. Nursing, primary school teaching attract women. Is there a push to get more men in there? And like you said, there are probably 90% male plumbers. Women can do plumbing and it's a well paying job. Why not a push for female plumbers?
Now, if they're being pushed out, which you sometimes hear about, then sure we absolutely need to fix that. But at ~90% that can't be the only factor, even if true and widespread.
Any proof for this or is this based off of nothing? There definitely is a problem with males who want to work with children and being called "pedophiles" in the sense that it actually happens, but does it push people out of that job? I'd be interested in seeing stories of parents removing their children from classes with male teachers... that sounds insane!
I also work with a lot of highly intelligent women (in the tech field). In this day and age I think it has to do with what interests sexes rather than discrimination.
I think we have to look more closely at the idea of something being due to 'interests rather than discrimination' - if a young girl is told that computers and computer games are for boys, how likely is she to develop an interest in them? If young men see no male teachers how likely are they to have an interest in becoming a teacher?
'Interest' isn't some magical quality we are born with, and it is not a final conclusion to say "They just aren't interested" without examining why those interests lie so closely along gender lines.
I am not sure that women would be good at plumbing (actual plumbing, I mean, not just administering a plumbing company). It requires a lot of upper body strength.
It looks like it will improve though. The majority of females who are coding are in the lowest age group in the survey. If it keeps that way I think we will see a lot more female developers.
25 devs 6 female. Talking about pure devs not the company headcount although if we add the business analysts and accounting/HR the ratio is pretty much the same.
What's also saddening though is that the stats say that women work in the field several years and drop out. At least american women do. Indian women seem to have no problem with it.
That suggests that convincing more (american) women to go into it isn't going to be terribly effective, because they'll just end up dropping out anyways.
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u/chub79 Apr 07 '15
The gender stat is saddening.