That reminds me of a phenomenon I think I’ve seen in children (both chronological and mental):
I think all of us, in our early youth, wanted to become friendly or show interest in someone yet we didn’t know how to express it skillfully so we pulled her hair or shoved him. At some point, we got a negative feedback so we paused, pulled back, examined our actions and concluded that maybe hair pulling and shoving weren’t good ways to get someone’s attention and get closer to them. But there was that kid who, when he met with failure after using hair pulling and shoving, concluded that the problem is that he wasn’t pulling and shoving hard enough so he doubled down. And when that failed, he doubled down again. I’ve seen something similar among alcoholics who deal with having a shitty life with drinking and then the drinking makes their lives shittier so they drink more. They double down on digging down.
Is it a case of Dunning-Kruger? Is it because they never learned to pass the marshmallow test? Something else?
People are re-examining those traits and characteristics and finding that they’re not exclusive to one gender.
For your comparison to work, you really should compare a male gymnast to Eli Manning so you’re eliminating the possibility that a female athlete might be considered feminine strictly because she’s female. I’d bet money that Danell Leyva is physically stronger than Eli Manning at his peak. (And I’d have picked someone other than a QB.) Is a football player more apt to be considered “masculine” than a gymnast? If so, why? What qualities are we ascribing to masculinity that aren’t inherent in being male. And what is maleness anyway?
I don’t know where you grew up, but any place where going to the hospital for a life-saving surgery is somehow considered indicative of homosexuality and where homosexuality is viewed as a dread condition must be a pretty terrible place with a high mortality rate, at least for men.
Clearly you didn’t, since my cites break enrollment into different fields. Including one specifically for Telecom engineer which Nava claimed to be female dominated in Spain yet it shows a 26 percent female enrollment rate.
Sounds like a contradiction to me.
Regardless they show currently similar enrollment rates in Spain to the rest of the developed world so back to the original point, if it’s cultural then the elements of culture that cause it are essentially universal.
I would guess that at least a large portion of people would consider football more masculine. For the simple fact that there are no professional female football players but there are probably more female gymnasts than male.
As far as what quaities ascribed to masulinity that aren’t inherent in being male, that answer could be twofold, or more;
One might say none , if it’s masculine it’s generally inherent in males.
At the same time its very dependant on who you ask, every individual is likely to ascribe certain qualities to masculine that others wouldnt.
I suspect the question you’re really asking is what quaities are exclusively male that aren’t part of the actual definition of male.
The answer to that is none, there are no human traits outside reproductive mechanisms that
are 100 percent exclusive to either gender.
Who’s claiming that Nava was “by default correct”? My point, which you keep unsuccessfully trying to contradict, is simply that you haven’t demonstrated that what she said was incorrect:
You’ve repeated a number of reasons why you think Nava’s claim is unlikely, but that’s not the same as demonstrating that it’s incorrect.
Likewise, my pointing that out is not the same as asserting that Nava’s claim is correct, “by default” or otherwise.
I’m not sure why you’re having so much trouble grasping this.
Why was I so sure that this would exactly be what the study was about?
It’s old data. The numbers I was talking about are this year’s.
The data you’re talking about is from 20 years ago. That’s the generation after mine. The current generation are the children of mine; the children of several million women who, after being told that our sex was no limitation, ran into glass walls and doors and ceilings time and again; of fathers who, having the same degree as their wives, were called to interviews to which she was not… We’ve shut our mouths and smiled and bidded our time, and with some inglorious exceptions done our best to not only tell our sons and daughters and nieces and nephews and neighbors and students that their sex was no bar to the power of their minds - we have and will continue to make it true.
Just 40 years ago those same numbers you posted would have had the women in double digits for absolute data; single digits for some of the majors.
Article in Spanishfrom 3 years ago interviewing female engineers from the generation which was in school 40 years ago and from the one Littleman posted about. There are already a number of cultural differences between both generations: for example, the first ones had an engineer in the family; the second ones did not. The changes have continued, and will continue.
Same here - my Geology Uni class was more women than men, always. But women couldn’t be mine geologists (by far the largest employer) in South Africa till the 90s, because they weren’t allowed to work underground.
And btw, I agree that it what I am describing is unlikely. But the Spanish situation has several peculiarities, which boil down to “the effects of 19th century sexism, then of Francoism, and reactions to the last”; making a long story short, women’s rights were pushed down during the 19th century, then started rising back and up to higher-than-before levels, then got pushed down to lower than they had been in the Middle Ages, then we’ve spent the last 40 years doing pull-ups (usually with our own men helping more often than not, even though we still need to work in that too).
A question Littleman asked I’d already answered in my first post, but apparently I wasn’t clear enough:
the main reason my school went from zero to 50:50 so quickly is that it’s Chemical Engineering. Pretty much every female student in my class who wasn’t a legacy had gone through conversations along these lines:
Day X.
Daughter: … Englineering…
Parents: oh no! That’s way too difficult!
Day X+N.
Daughter: … Chemistry…
Parents: oh yeah, you’ve got good grades in that.
Daughter: (And in Physics and Draftsmanship, but let’s not mention those, right?) So, how about Chemical Engineering? I hear the employability is much better!
Parents: huh. Oh. OK!
We refrained from mentioning that there isn’t anything inherently easier about ChemE than, say, Civil or Mech or Electronic. Our parents would have been enormously surprised if we’d pointed out they were being sexist. They weren’t being intentionally sexist, they weren’t intentionally telling us that we could do anything we wanted to “so long as it was feminine enough”. They were the living embodiment of institutional bigotry, in a household and another and another and another… Mine is the generation which shifted from fighting official sexism to the unofficial kind, and we’re conscious of it. Our hope is that our children (whether they’re male, female, other, old local names, inmigrant, rich, poor, whatever) will be more free to choose than we were. We don’t expect or want to see 50:50 in every major of study and field of employment, but we should never forget that there was a time when most nurses were men.
Spain nationally does not have 50/50 stem enrollment, they have 17 percent.
Despite an apprently better attitude towards women in those fields and a much higher University enrollment overall. According to their ministry of education.
If anything this indicates that at least in Spain if you want women enrolled in STEM fields , just act like they can’t do it and they’ll enroll in subjects they aren’t interested in just to prove they can. lol
I was under the impression that a large part of the gap in many STEM fields was due to the object-person dynamic - i.e. that women are typically more interested in people, while men are more interested in things.
Okay, that’s drastically oversimplifying what the terms mean. Take it away, Scott:
(My main issue here is that there’s actually a link to a meta-analysis here, but the sci-hub link is broken for me. I’d really like to read the study and see if it actually holds up in the way it’s implied; I trust Scott not to lie or badly misinterpret papers in his field but I would like to verify it myself.)
So it shouldn’t surprise us that less women are interested in STEM fields, any more than it should surprise us that Ob/Gyns or Vets are overwhelmingly women. This is a pretty big psychological difference that starts in very early childhood and persists throughout life. And as the article points out, there’s a group of women this doesn’t affect: “women with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a condition that gives them a more typically-male hormone balance”.
I don’t think what Littleman is saying is unreasonable. Except that last post, which is in slightly poor taste.
That was mostly joking. I’m sure there is some other reason that as attitudes toward women in STEM fields got better , actual enrollment dropped off dramatically but I honestly couldn’t think of one off the the top of my head.
It doesn’t help the argument that it’s cultural though.
Claim
Telecom engineering is mostly females in Spain.
Fact
Telecom engineering has a female enrollment rate of 26 percent in Spain.
Claim
Majority of stem fields in Spain have roughly equal enrollment.
Facts
Every single cited field has no greater than 27 percent female enrollment
Stem fields as a whole have 17 percent female enrollment.
So yeah not entirely disproven, but you’re gonna have to start inventing fields to have the majority of them show equal enrollment. Since the cites cover the majority of them.
Not sure where you’re having trouble understanding this.
Or why it’s my responsibility to disprove a claim any more thoroughly instead of the claimants responsibility to support it.
My observation of how “masculine” is defined is that it tends to be circular - things or traits are considered masculine because males tend to aspire to these things or traits because the culture they’re in considers the things and traits to be masculine. I would consider your football and gymnast examples to support this theory.
And regarding that “generally inherent in males” business - if one looks at the way these supposedly-inherent traits are laid out, they seem suspiciously aligned with the kind of traits that males consider admirable. Males are stalwart and courageous and independent. Women are indecisive and timid and dependent. Remarkably convenient that males are so inherently awesome and females so inherently worthless, huh? Or alternatively, while males were in a position of social power they marginalized the women and then claimed that all the awesomeness was inherently theirs, and told the women that if they wanted to be proper women they needed to stay in the background and be ‘ladylike’.
…Nah, that can’t be it. Men are just inherently awesome and women are just inherently damsels in distress.
Nobody said it’s your responsibility to disprove somebody else’s claim, or that any claim should be automatically assumed to be true just because you can’t disprove it. But it’s your responsibility to refrain from claiming you’ve disproved somebody else’s claim when you haven’t.