Hair styling, cooking and fashion: Why do the best tend to be men?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Over in this thread (I think I'm going to cry. Whining, rage, and advice inside. (Hair related) - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board) the question came up of why the best hair stylists for women tend to be men. It reminded me of the assertion I’ve often heard that the best chefs and fashion designers also tend to be men.

First, is this generally true? It’s possible that it’s often repeated but simply wrong.
If it is true, what factors go into this counterintuitive result?
Just to make it clear, we are talking about trends and not making any categorical statements about 100% of men or women.

My own take on it is that, contrary to what we usually experience, the fact that Group A has a higher average than Group B does not mean that those at the top will disproportionately be part of Group A. For example, it is generally acknowledged that women are, on average, better at using words than men. Yet the winners of the World Scrabble Championship have all been men according to this: World Scrabble Championship - Wikipedia

As MOL in the other thread pointed out, men are more likely to come to traditionally feminine interests with less internalized restrictions about how it should be done. Not being bound by How Others Do It is the first step to being better than others.

Men are less risk-averse and sometimes even risk-seeking which means they tend to be responsible for the worst but also the best. Even mistakes can be a boon if you learn from them.

Men are more likely to be on the autism spectrum (Autism | Psychology Today). This can be a hinderance because there’s less monkey-see-monkey-do learning but it can greatly help when systemizing and systemizing can greatly help excel. To put it in different terms: Linear woman, quadratic man.

Relatedly, men are more likely to say to themselves: “Alright, I will buckle down, figure the fuck out of this and become great at it” than women. I did that when I was 12 after getting a bad mark in ESL.

As HoD said, men are more likely to go into those fields because they’re good at them and require excellence of themselves (a kind of internalized up or out system) whereas many women just fall into it as one step above being a waitress.

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Couldn’t you also make the assertion that men are better police officers, CEOs, firefighters, welders, construction labourers, commercial pilots, and sea captains?

Men, in general, have more time to commit to a career than women, in general. Statistically I would expect this to mean that a larger percentage of males would be at the top of various professions.

That’s my take on it anyway. There are obviously lots of career women, but many, many more career men.

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All of the above, plus, historically, you’d have to have a real passion to follow a career path that’s likely to get you beat up in high school. While passion and skill are not always connected, I think that it does make it more likely that you’d excel, rather than being merely okay. The merely okay or ambivalent aren’t going to put up with the crap their sophomoric friends are going to give them, and will find something else to do.

No idea if this is changing as gender roles in vocations are loosening.

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Women create life. Men can’t. Men are forced to create in other ways.

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As far as hair styling and fashion go, I think there’s also the thought "Well, if this is what guys really like…

As cooks, it seems like men get to do it as a creative treat while women get the shit jobs; providing everyday meals everyday plus ALL the clean up.

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According to a male chef men are eagerly measuring their penises in different competitions while their female colleagues concentrate on making good food.

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Don’t men have better spatial awareness/thinking than women? That lends itself to picturing a clothing design or hairstyle, or developing the concept of a recipe i.e. how ingredients tend to work together.

Also, men are more programmed to want to maninupate their physical environment.

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My experience working in a creative field (design & advertising) is that, at college level, there are an equal number of men and women, but once we get into the workplace, women drop off the radar, even though women have been some of the most creative designers I have ever worked with.

I firmly believe that, in addition to things like having children, women lack confidence in their abilities. Working in a creative field, like those listed in the OP, requires buckets of confidence to stand up and say ‘look at what I’ve done. Isn’t it great?’.

Being successful in a creative field isn’t just about being creative, it’s about having the ego to carry it off and compete with other creatives. I have known many men who are ok designers with bags of confidence, who get on well in their careers as a result, and many women who drift out of the business or become project managers because they aren’t comfortable with laying their creative soul on the line on a daily basis.

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I was remembering reading that argument somewhere. I think it might have been the second edition of Dr. Spock (published around 1954 iirc).