Apologies, I was unclear: I was talking about numbers of students in college (my cites are in Spanish and I can’t find them, I should’a bookmarked them…). Factors that lead to choosing a major and factors that lead to actually being employed in a field or another are different; also, many fields of employment which have lots of STEM graduates do not have a corresponding field of study. For example, my own current employment field of Business Management Consulting has Physics, Math and Enginering graduates up the wazoo, but it’s not itself considered a STEM field and it doesn’t correspond to any particular diplomas; despite its name, we get more Economists than Business School graduates.
Take into account that some of those STEM fields weren’t even open to women within our own lifetimes. The oldest female Chemical Engineers were part of the group that started college in 1980; graduation dates 1989 and 1990. I started college in what was back then the country’s only ChemE school in 1986, and my incoming group of 120 had 61 women to 59 men (the previous year had been 59:61); my school has stayed on the “random variations around 50%” since. There aren’t any women over 56 working in ChemE because there are no female ChemEs over 56: other engineering fields were slower to gear up, mainly for the same reason we got so many female students so quickly (family pressure from parents who didn’t think “engineering” was feminine but were happy enough with their daughters going into something “chemical”).
Our old Ingenierías Superiores were 5 ‘grades’ of course and labwork, which you had to pass in their entirety, followed by a research or design project which was supposed to take two years. You could not start your project until you’d cleaned up all coursework. At 9 years, we were actually the fastest engineering school in the country (per a newspaper article published the second year I was in college).
Men are, in general, physically stronger and mentally more curious than women. I don’t understand why this is controversial.
Whether we like it or not, we are living in a man’s world. I don’t know if that can or will, for the next 10,000 generations, change.
The best advice I can give for women who are determined to flip the script is to make new and grow economies that favor your advantages over men. Otherwise, you’re just playing inside a game that you’ll never “win”, or just accept that yeah, men and woman may be different from each other.
Once upon a time men doubted that women could even do jobs like doctor, scientist, engineer etc.
Now everyone accepts that was nonsense, but still some people like to say “Look – there are still *more *men doing this or that job”, or more prominent men or whatever. But of course there is. Equality of opportunity does not mean that overnight both genders are going to have equal results.
Given how long society has oppressed women, the rate at which society is moving to equality of results is really remarkable. In the meantime though, I am not sure what “man’s world” means at this point.
Accepting men and women are different is very different from holding a belief that men are better suited to functioning in existing economies. And I am not sure what “game” you are talking about winning.
Nobody’s denying that there are many idiots in the world, both male and female, who believe that they’re stronger (or smarter, or nicer, or whatever) than they actually are. In fact, there are probably many more men than women who get their egos invested in insisting that they’re physically capable of doing something they’re not capable of. That’s a toxic attitude whether it’s a man or a woman exhibiting it.
And of course, nobody’s claiming that there’s anything toxic about the mere fact of anyone, man or woman, having physical strength and using it to help other people.
Well, you’re the one who’s asserting that men lose masculinity as they age and get weaker. So according to your criteria, your wheelchair-bound friend is less of a man than you are because he’s physically weaker, and you are highlighting his lack of masculinity by using your strength to help him.
Personally, I don’t buy that reasoning because I think it’s a toxic attitude. But that’s where your characterization of masculinity ends up.
That’s a classic example of toxic femininity, where women refrain from or shirk doing things that they’re perfectly capable of because they think it will look “unladylike”, or that a man will be humiliated by their doing something he can’t, or that simply because they’re women they ought not to be expected ever to use physical strength.
Toxic femininity and toxic masculinity are two sides of the same coin.
As confirmed by Nava’s subsequent post, the numbers are not in fact in conflict, because you were mistakenly comflating employment with enrollment. Just as I said.
This is completely, totally, utterly untrue. I am amazed that someone would make such a claim when the scientific evidence on this matter has been widely known for decades. Try reading the book Child Alive, Roger Lewin ed. which was written in 1975, summarizing then-current research on infant development. There are multiple chapters on sex differences between male and female babies. To note just a few of the many points that were already known more than 40 years ago about average differences between boys and girls:
[ul]
[li]Girls sit at an earlier age.[/li][li]Girls crawl at an earlier age.[/li][li]Girls walk at an earlier age.[/li][li]Girls talk at an earlier age.[/li][li]Girls do many other intellectual tasks at an earlier age.[/li][li]Girls have lower touch and pain thresholds.[/li][li]Girls have better sense of smell.[/li][li]Girls are better at sound discrimination and localization.[/li][li]Boys have superior visual and spacial abilities.[/li][li]Boys are more active and energetic.[/li][li]Girls are more person-oriented; boys are more thing-oriented.[/li][li]Girls are more aware of subtle differences in emotional and social situations.[/li][li]Boys are more exploratory.[/li][li]Boys are more aggressive, physically and verbally.[/li][li]Boys are more competitive and assertive.[/li][li]The sexes differ in toy preferences.[/li][li]Boys are more vulnerable to a large variety and physical and mental disorders.[/li][li]Boys have greater phenotypic variety across a huge number of a characteristics.[/li][/ul]
All of this is true before the third birthday, and much of it before the first. Do you think this is a very narrow list?
I would note that the authors of these essays are well aware of the nature vs. nurture debate. They completely reject the idea that “sex differences are the result of society’s attempt to perpetuate sex stereotypes”. Among the evidence:
[ul]
[li]Most of the sex differences listed above are evidence among the young of other primate species. Therefore they can’t be the result of human social constructs.[/li][li]As noted, these sex differences manifest early. The research does not support your claim that “Kids being treated differently starts from birth”. Parental treatment of boy and girls is quite similar in the first year.[/li][li]All the traits listed above hold true across all human societies, past and present, that have even been studied.[/li][li]Boys with certain conditions exposing them to high levels of female hormones exhibit behaviors shifted from the male norm towards the female norm. [/li][/ul]
Given all these facts, how can anyone say “kids behaving differently doesn’t start until age 3-4 except for a very narrow list of things”. Can you name any research scientist who’s studied the matter and would agree with that statement?
Do people accept that there are traits and characteristics that can be considered “masculine” and “feminine”? Or is the desire to make everyone into androgynous carbon blobs?
Certainly even within the same trait, once can display masculine or feminine versions. For example, football player Eli Manning and Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman are both considered strong and athletic. But one is definitely masculine and the other definitely feminine.
I don’t know. When I was growing up, having to go to the hospital for life-saving surgery was pretty “homo”.
I don’t know that it’s a simple coin with two faces. For example, women are actively discouraged to take physical risks from as soon as they can crawl. There’s a famous study of teachers on a playground, all of whom insist they treat boys and girls the same, who are all astonished when video footage shows them, universally, “rescuing” girls and encouraging boys. There’s a hell of a lot of learned helplessness in women. If every single time you tried to fix a tire or open a jar a guy shoved you aside and did it for you, it isn’t that surprising that you never experience what it is like to push through to success with problems like that.
When I think of “toxic masculinity”, I don’t think opening pickle jars our of an old fashioned sense of chivalry. I think of frat guys getting drunk and “rapey” or the managing partner at the office acting inappropriately.
Wrong, read the sites. We were both using numbers of enrollment. She just has no factual basis for her claims since enrollment numbers clearly come nowhere near 50 percent.
I was also looking at enrollment and those were the numbers i cited.
If your school actually has those enrollment numbers, it is apparently the exception to the rule. As nationally none of the mentioned fields nor STEM fields as a whole have anywhere near 50 percent female enrollment.
I guess your particular school needs to share what they are doing to get such numbers because throughout the rest of your country and mine there are a multitude of programs trying to increase female enrollment in STEM fields with little success.
Or for a little more positive spin…
See table 2 pg105
This one does show about a 40percent enrollment back in 1998 in sciences and math but still down around 20 some percent for engineering( this includes medical fields like nursing and hygiene which I think broadens the numbers over the other sainz study and the mind the gap study)
But shows a 10 percent drop by ten years later and shows numbers roughly equal to the US enrollment rates;
I did find one source saying biomedical is dominated by women in Spain. So it’s possible some of these sources are parsing biomedical ( an experimental science) outside of STEM in their data in order to make the numbers look even more dire…
In any case it doesn’t seem that Spanish culture differs enough to change female enrollment in these fields by any significant amount compared to the rest of the developed world despite overall enrollment in Spain being female dominated.
If it’s mostly cultural as it’s claimed then the culture of all developed nation’s shares enough of the same traits to give rise to similar enrollment numbers everywhere.