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Much has been written about the underrepresentation of women in STEM and managerial roles. The defence of gender quotas would be that no quota means quota for white men. That the issue isn’t whether women and girls are talented enough, but that they’re simply overlooked. So women don’t get on the short list for promotion because the people who promote someone promote those who are most similar to them, closer to them (usually white and male), that they’re most used to male bosses. With quotas, they have to check their lists more consciously for competence and not what they're used to.
The counterpoint could be that none of these hypotheses explain the underrepresentation of women in STEM, but depending on which are true, they call for dramatically different solutions. If the underrepresentation of women in STEM and managerial roles is entirely attributable to social norms and stereotypes which push young girls away from them at a young age, resulting in the female pool of talent being smaller than the male - then gender quotas and zero-tolerance sexual harassment policies in STEM companies will do absolutely nothing to address the issue (they're not quotas on society after all).
And what of in gender unequal societies? Should nations in West/South/South-East Asia and Africa pursue these quotas until they "achieve equality"? Many women, even engineering graduates, from these countries do not participate for long in the workforce before they marry off. Combined with the severe lack of jobs, female LPR in India is actually decreasing. Would more quotas in education and the workforce reverse this trend, or are we missing the forest for the trees (that is, the lack of formal jobs)?
I think the interesting nuance comes to considering the possibility of both of these things being true:
Social reinforcement is a real effect, significant enough to be worth counteracting, and disproportionately hurts women.
The upper end of the merit distribution naturally skews male, due to biological differences alone.
In such a world, which I have strong reason to believe we occupy, the meritocratic solution would be to enforce male/female quotas that are tuned to counteract 1 without negating 2. In other words, we want to find the correct ratio p of men:women that cancels out the evaporative cooling of women in tech but without lowering the resulting quality of tech workers as a result. (In other words, we want a policy that correctly identifies and counteracts any time a more skilled woman is usurped by a less skilled man because of gender bias in hiring/exposure, but without ever hiring a less skilled woman to replace a more skilled man just to fulfill a ratio)
The combination of my two assumptions leads to a correct ratio that's somewhere in between 0.5 and 1.0. For example, say that 90% of tech workers are currently male, then perhaps a '20% women in tech' quota would be net beneficial for overall merit. I think we would arrive somewhere fruitful if the discussion was about where on this scale that figure lies. But this is a discussion that can't happen, because insinuating p>0.5 is extremely taboo in the blue tribe, while insinuating that quotas could be beneficial at all is taboo in the red tribe.
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The idea that “no quota means quota for white men” was probably somewhat true some time in the past. It’s not now, and hasn’t been for at least a couple decades. STEM university programs and major STEM employers have been vocally promoting a commitment to train and hire more women at least since I was in college 20 years ago, and I didn’t get the impression that it was a new thing then.
Throughout my career in engineering so far, the proportion of women in my cohort has remained pretty stable, dating at least back to “number of girls really interested in math and science” in high school (there were perhaps more girls with sufficient aptitude in math and science to be decent engineers - but most of them had other academic talents and interests and parlayed those into careers in medicine or law or whatever). My engineering college was about 30% female (despite actively promoting STEM majors to women and having many programs and scholarships to encourage them) - my major somewhat less, maybe 20%. My company was hiring about 25% women in engineering roles, again despite loud HR diversity declarations, by all indications sincere, promoting hiring women. I’ve been involved in recruiting - we do everything legally permissible (that is, almost everything short of literally hiring based on sex) to hire more women and underrepresented minorities. The numbers have been trending upward over my career, but not particularly fast. My company has a female CEO, but certainly the upper levels of management are male-skewed. But then, those ranks probably reflect the cohort of people who started their careers 25-30 years ago.
From the inside of the pipeline, it sure looks like a pipeline problem. A formative experience of mine was a young woman in my freshman engineering class group project that was in engineering college on a full ride scholarship for women in engineering. She was pretty clearly high IQ, but had zero interest in the nuts and bolts of engineering and basically no special aptitude for the skills unique to engineering. She transferred out to the business school after a year, abandoning her scholarship. Seems to be doing very well now.
Extreme example, but I think indicative of the problem: at the margins, there simply is not a significant pool of talented, interested women who want engineering careers but are driven away by sexism. The marginal female engineer is instead a young woman who was basically bribed into the field by a scholarship, targeted program, or just the promise of a lucrative career. The median female engineer looks a lot like the median male engineer of the same cohort, a math-smart nerd who likes tinkering with things, and these women have been joining the industry for a long time already.
There are almost certainly some pockets of genuine sexism in the industry (likely true of all industries). For the most part I think these are in some of the more toxic start up (or born from start up) cultures, which get massively outsized coverage in media (and even there I suspect the coverage is exaggerated). The large majority of us are employed in big corporations, universities, and government agencies where good corporate HR flacks and middle managers have been fighting over every good female job candidate for decades.
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I think Dr. Peterson posits that women are too agreeable and that they can be exploited
https://youtube.com/watch?v=5WXo1aFb8MY
Men are probably more inclined to ask for promotions . Under-representation of women in STEM is a separate issue from promotion. I don't think social norms are to blame for under-representation. Who is telling women to not study STEM? It's the opposite. Culture , school, society is obsessed with the idea of having more women in STEM. I think male vs. female aptitude or personality differences may be of better explanatory power.
I think women are substantially less agreeable and less exploitable in at least one important way - they seem less tolerant of toxic “grind” work cultures where 60 hour work weeks are the starting bid and “work life balance” is for pussies, where “passion for your work” and vague promises of probably worthless equity are meant to make up for mediocre base pay.
This makes them less prominent at the sort of companies that make splashy headlines - but I think the women are better off for this.
This is like the argument that affirmative action is good because minorities are often poor and haven't gotten a chance to show their true talent if you look at their school records. If that's why you really want it, you should implement programs that directly help the poor. Doing it this way is obviously insincere.
If we think that 60 hour work weeks are bad, we should require employers not to have 60 hour work weeks, rather than require employers to hire more women on the grounds that women oppose 60 hour work weeks more.
I don’t think I’m arguing what you think I’m arguing.
I don’t believe that raw sexism is at fault for the gender gap, and I am very far from convinced that the gap needs fixing at all. I’m certainly not in favor of mandating either gender quotas OR banning 60 hour work weeks.
Basically, I’m saying that women are less likely to accept shitty working conditions (or more diplomatically, “value promotion/pay at the expense of work balance less”). And I’m not sure they are wrong to do so.
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If you haven't read it, Scott's Contra Grant on exaggerated differences is a fascinating an enlightening read.
Short version: it's primarily different interests and options.
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