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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29777 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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A second issue is when women enter a field it falls in stature. Men flee the field. Biology/Veterinary science are now viewed as female coded and have dropped hard in stature.

This might be mistaking cause and effect (or, more likely, it's a more complicated relationship). Equally plausible is that, when a job becomes less entrepreneurial, more stable, and more bureaucratic, it drops in stature and becomes more appealing to women. E.g. when vets were predominantly male, the job was typically a sole practitioner who traveled from farm to farm, essentially permanently on-call and dealing with inclement weather; messy, rough workspaces; and large, relatively dangerous animals. Nowadays, the job is typically in clinics (increasingly consolidated), with set hours, treating small companionate animals like dogs and cats, with a much heavier layer of accreditation.

The last psychiatrist puts this as pursuing the power or the trappings of power:

I had used all the porn on the internet, so I turn on the TV, and there's a marionette called Diane Sawyer interviewing 20 female Senators, the most in history, applauding and giggling as if cold fusion had finally been discovered. Of course it's a "good thing" that women are Senators in as much as not allowing them to be Senators is the bad thing, but other than that, what does it mean? That women are finally brave enough to run, or America is brave enough to hire them? It's not like the Capitol Building was turning them away, so why is this important? I knew I was being scammed because I was being told this was a historic accomplishment by the ABC Network. The ABC demo is not ever going to be a Senator, I would bet ten bazillion dollars they couldn't even name one of their Senators and a gazillion bazillion dollars they have no real idea what Senators do, so why is this on prime time ABC?

I think the answer is supposed to be, "it's empowering to women", but you should wonder: when more women enter a field, it means less men did, and if the men stopped going there, where did they go? Why did they leave? I assume they aren't home with the kids, right?

I don't want to be cynical, but boy oh boy is it hard not to observe that at the very moment in our history when we have the most women in the Senate, Congress is perceived to be pathetic, bickering, easily manipulated and powerless, and I'll risk the blowback and say that those are all stereotypes of women. Easy, HuffPo, I know it's not causal, I am saying the reverse: that if some field keeps the trappings of power but loses actual power, women enter it in droves and men abandon it like the Roanoke Colony. Again we must ask the question: if power seeking men aren't running for Senate, where did they go? Meanwhile all the lobbyists and Wall Street bankers are men, isn't that odd? "Women aren't as corrupt or money hungry." Yes, that's been my experience with women as well.

This works in reverse, too, take a field traditionally XX-only, like nursing, and, huh, what do you know-- at the time where nursing is more powerful than it has ever been, there are also more XY in it than ever. But who made it more powerful? It wasn't nurses. And if you're playing that game, ask if the reason "sexy nurses" as a fetish dropped out somewhere around the 90s had nothing to do with females finally getting control over their sexualization but exactly the opposite, men came in and unsexualized the joint. "I'm not gay." Easy, Focker, no one was implying anything.

I know to a woman it must feel good, "yay, I'm a Senator!" and I do not minimize the individual accomplishment of a woman becoming a Senator. But for everyone else, what is the significance? One of the Yay-Women senators suggested that the government would benefit from all the makeup because "women's styles tend to be more collaborative," and at the exact same moment she repeated the conventional wisdom's horrendous banality she simultaneously got married to the head of a lobbying firm. That's progress, I guess.

The problem isn't with women in the Senate, but rather its celebration, which these dummies blindly participate in. Is it putting on a face for the American public, the way the first face I see on Goldman Sachs's website is a black woman? Is it cosmetic? She's probably proud, she should be proud, that she made it to GS, but for the rest of blacks and women, what is the significance? It may be regressive to ask this, but it is illuminating: "hey.... why did they let so many of us in?"

This is part of a larger, systemic problem with the way power has shifted not from Group A to Group B, but from ground up to top down, and top down works in a very specific way: it concedes the trappings of power while it retains the actual power.

[...]

I know, I know, women get paid less then men. Sigh. There are a million reasons for this, but the most important is the simplest: some people want to get more money from the job, and some other people want the job to offer them more money, and they are not the same people. Typically the former is men and the latter is women, but the point isn't gender but the mindset: the latter group wants the job to want to pay them more, they don't want to have to have any input in deciding their own reimbursement.

Horse doctors are still heavily male.

I can easily buy that decreased risk appetite and increased internal focus makes jobs more appealing to women, causatively, in fact I think even liberal sociologists would quickly agree, but I'm not quite sure it follows that the profession drops in stature. But not for the two candidate reasons listed.

It's a little bit of an awkward self-reinforcing question, or poorly defined, because in my view what we typically call "status" or "stature" is mostly set by men for men (invoking a sense of ranking, not just goodness or desirability) while women operate their own parallel system of "status": perhaps "respectability" that mostly dovetails but diverges in some key ways, as a system by women for men; and something like "social capital" which more often operates by women for women. The systems often dovetail but are not in fact interchangeable because they prioritize differently (but correlate well because the primary drivers such as exclusivity, intellectual rigor, social function, or most commonly, wealth generation are super similar). You might notice that, for example, how prestigious high-risk jobs are highlight this.

I don't think the difference is huge so that's a valid objection, but I do think it's a very real piece of nuance that pops up particularly in certain fields. I'm not denying/ignoring that surveys seem to find predictive power in feminization of professors and prestige, just that we have to be pretty careful about the words and might be doing that thing where two people think they are talking about the same thing but really aren't. A man and a woman, in different contexts, might both call all of my 3 proposed paradigms above "status"!

I haven't gone digging too deeply, but I'm pretty sure the classic "prestige surveys" do not attempt to disambiguate, like at all. It's a collapsed index. There's a small handful of studies exploring power dynamics and prestige as distinct IIRC, but very little else. I think this is mostly because the money-prestige link is so dominant! Which to my eyes signals that you simply cannot consider them in isolation, and statistically creates a lot of traps all over the place. At any rate, when I skimmed a few studies related to this, quite a few of them seem to admit straight up that prestige alone is very likely a flawed construct with iffy methodological rigor.

But as you say to the broader point, it's still quite open whether broadly speaking, jobs change -> therefore women enter or women enter -> therefore the jobs change. As to whether women enter -> men flee is the right factual framing (are we talking absolute numbers, proportions, changes in training pipelines?) to be honest I don't know what the data suggests there.

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