sorting 3973

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Less work? Better pay?

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So you agree with Andrew Swallow that women get to make the choices about which jobs are men's work and which are women's work, and if only biology allowed ....

Huh. Well, maybe it's true, and anyone who says otherwise (that men have any control over what's "men's work" and "women's work") is suffering from "PCitis" and deluded about how things actually work.

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Noooo .... Well, your personal experience trumps mine, since IIRC by the time I tried applying for credit things had changed.

Most of the women I know who call themselves "feminists" are not like what you describe. They may not be a representative sample, in this regard or any other, but they're not like what you describe.

Sure. Doesn't this all apply to both men and women?

Anyway, I'm thinking about stories like the one about Sandra Day O'Connor graduating from law school near the top of her clbutt and having a lot more trouble than her male clbuttmates getting hired as a lawyer. I suppose it's possible that some-most-all of these well-publicized stories of what sounds like outright discrimination are distortions, and really the women just weren't trying hard enough, or they got the job and then didn't try, or something. I'll even go along with "some", but am skeptical about "all" or "most".

I've come across what sounds to me like reasonably good evidence of gender discrimination -- e.g., studies showing that the same resume will be rated higher if it has a male name than a female name. No, I'm not going to try to track them down; it might be interesting (though time-consuming) for me, but I'm dubious about being able to come up with anything that would convince you in the amount of time I'm willing to spend.

And were they getting paid as much as men doing the same work? Or maybe there weren't any cases in which there were men and women doing the same job, so one could compare?

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How do you conclude that from what I wrote?

Same table -- which you don't seem to find very convincing, but it's what I have, so I'll stick with it -- says that 31% of "computer and information science managers" are women. There's really no way to know how many of those people are former techies promoted to management and how many are generic management types, but if the theory is "there are lots of women in computing, they're just all in management jobs" -- hm, seems not to be so.

Could be. Obviously there are also some males who do like being bosses, or women CEOs would be more common.

I've also known some men who actively sought management-type jobs because they wanted to "make stuff" on a larger scale -- it wasn't so much that they wanted to manage people as that they wanted to have an influence beyond what they thought a single individual could achieve. I'm not sure I've ever heard a woman say that, but then I don't know that I've talked to many women in management jobs.

Of course it would match!

Well, maybe I misunderstood the point you were trying to make earlier. I thought you were thinking that the "physicians and surgeons" category included people who had MDs but who weren't actually working as physicians, such as your hypothetical hospital administrator.

Okay, maybe all along you were saying that women are seem to be "underrepresented" in technical occupations because more of them are promoted to management jobs.

That table I hardly want to mention again says that 71% of "medical and health services" managers are female. "Aha!"? Not really. As noted above, we don't have any information about how many of these are MDs who've moved into management jobs.

These days (maybe it was always so) there seem to be very few unbiased sources of information, period. I guess this means all we can do is base our opinions on as wide a sample of anecdotal

Percentages of accepted applicants versus percentage of graduates would probably tell you something interesting. I'm not sure comparing either number to current employment statistics would tell you much, since those include people who are a long way, timewise, from school. Seems to me that what would be really meaningful is something that tracked a given population over time ("longitudinal studies"?).

And while it would probably be interesting to continue this process of me trying to find meaningful and relevant statistics and you pointing out where I'm going awry .... nah, it's starting to feel like a time sink. Maybe later.

-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.