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Notes -
Throwing more fuel on the bonfire of "women: what is the matter with them?"
On the one hand, this should hearten those who like to leave comments regarding feminism with "why aren't they fighting for the right to work in coal mines?" (disregarding that there was a history of women working in coal mines, this was considered terrible, and it was made illegal for women to work down mines).
On the other hand, it will dishearten those who think the solution to the TFR problem is "just encourage girls to get married and start having babies straight out of high school, don't go to college, don't be career-focused".
Right now, the way most economies in the developed world work, if you want a reasonable standard of living, you need two people working full-time jobs (and as good salaries in those jobs as you can get). Want a mortgage for a house so you finally can have those two kids? Both of you better be working your little behinds off or the banks won't even look at the application form (and I fill in financial details on said application forms for our staff who are applying for mortgages, so I can speak on this).
Want a good enough career to get those salaries? Better go to college and get qualifications, as this newspaper columnist says in his article about his teenage son having a work experience placement:
And that last is the important part: for a decent job, you need qualifications. For qualifications, you need college. If college, no early marriages and child-bearing. And the current economic structure is, as I said, both of you better be working or forget it.
So all the neat solutions about 'get women back into the home' aren't that neat or practical when it comes down to it. I'd love for women to be free to be homemakers, wives and mothers instead of "the only value in your life is work, and the only valuable work is paid work, so get a job outside the home". But it takes two to tango, and it's not all down to "if only women weren't so uppity, problem solved!" Businesses are pushing to get more women into work. Maybe the promised AI future will mean "robots do all the jobs, AI makes the economy so productive nobody has to work, UBI means you can stay at home and have three babies and raise them yourself".
Or maybe not, and it will be "if you're not working some kind of job, you are on the breadline, and if you want a good job in the increasingly AI-dominated economy, you better have super skills and super qualifications, so more college, more everything, personal life? who needs that?".
That's a rather bold claim to be made by a CEO in the construction sector.
Right now we do have a shortage of workers in that sector. When the boom collapsed with the demise of the Celtic Tiger, a lot of the Eastern European workers went home, and the native Irish workers had no jobs so went abroad to look for work. So there's a shortage of skilled workers to take up any slack to expand the industry, hence the "we need a bigger pool to draw apprentices from" messaging.
I've seen women start in the trades. Bosses discriminate, but not enough to actually stop them.
Heterosexual women invariably need fewer, more predictable hours and get stuck in particular niches. Lesbians might make it though.
The other issue is more generalized: it's easier to bear discrimination if there's some kind of minimum, critical mass of "people like you" alongside. Thus exceptionally asymmetric professions tend to stay that way without some effort simply due to self-selection after an attempt to break into the career, even if you don't have heavy pre-selection pressure.
The liberals aren't wrong about how this load is real. Not insurmountable, but like in aggregate real, and also personally noticeable. My soon-to-be-aunt, for example, works as one of just something like 4 women in an office of 50 male engineers in a very specific niche industry (she is office staff and part HR, yes). But she's got frustration. For example, pointing out some serious design (and also UX) issues with their terrible looking, outdated website. Ignored and belittled, sadly, despite putting some effort into a strong proposal. These weren't like, 'matter of taste/branding' changes they were 'universal design principle' type things, too. And yeah, over time that's the kind of thing that makes people quit even if it's not like, a dealbreaker by itself. However, having one or two other women in the room for a decision too does seem to be a big tipping-point difference anecdotally in terms of limiting discrimination.
Interestingly enough if you run the math, it's quite helpful to avoid auto-self-segregation if you insist on even basic diversity quotas. And I think segregation is bad for society. It's probably bad for business too, but I think there's a few quite large caveats involved.
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