> gender differences appear to be greater in societies with greater gender equality and in which people have greater economic resources
I don't think this is a paradox at all. Discouraging 50% of the workforce talent pool is a wasteful luxury that only countries with abundant resources can afford.
I experienced this first hand when I moved to Sweden. I had never been made to feel like a freak for being a programmer until I moved to Sweden. I had never experienced being constantly excluded, discouraged and pushed away from technical activities in order to "rescue" me from things I'm being told me I'm not interested in.
I have a legal right to parental leave and I can get an IUD for free, so it's considered a paradox that there are so few female programmers in such an equal country. I don't see how there is a paradox.
I do not know how different Norway from Sweden, but among family lawyers in Norway women are like over 75% with quite a few remaining man are immigrants. And a family lawyer can earn more than a programmer. 50 years ago lawyers were almost exclusively male, the same as in IT. Yet in IT it became even worse.
Then look at pilots. As 50 years ago they are almost exclusively man. And this is in a strongly unionized field with a lot of scrutiny so it is much less likely that harassments will be undetected compared with IT.
Sweden is such an interesting paradox: womens’ rights to work in different fields and (mostly) on an equal footing are protected in law, and (in my experience) in practice. And yet in many ways I find it generally the most gender-divided country I’ve experienced, and I’ve even lived in countries that most people would consider very sexist, like the UK and Spain.
There are strong traditions of socializing mostly as a group of women or a group of men, inviting all your girlfriends or male friends for dinner (“tjej/herrmiddag”), meeting friends at certain cafés or restaurants that are almost 100% gendered (this can have a comical effect of being the only male in a café filled with 50 females).
Away from the larger towns there is still a strong macho culture, with cars and hunting being as popular as any redneck county in the States, and with all the usual horror-stories of growing-up gay or a misfit, before moving to Stockholm or Gothenburg.
It’s fascinating to me to read outsider’s perspectives of Sweden, as I shared that impression before coming here.
Otoh it always gladdens my heart to see a female roadworker, digging a hole alongside her male colleagues without it seeming odd or misplaced.
Have you considered the possibility that, when given true freedom and not being pressured into certain roles by society, that men and women strongly gravitate to different fields? It could be that the only reason we see more mixing in other societies is that those societies subtly (or not so subtly) pressure people into taking those roles.
>countries that most people would consider very sexist, like the UK and Spain.
For what it's worth -- I've visited both those countries, and neither struck me as particularly sexist. I just checked a couple gender inequality indices, and it seems like they both do OK globally speaking. E.g. the UN ranks them both as more gender-equal than the US: https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/thematic-composite-indices/... (And the US is ranked much more gender-equal than the world as a whole)
I have helped defend claims brought by coal miners against their employers, and, while I obviously am restrained from giving specifics, a number of the miners were not without skills that would permit them to work in mines, yet they persisted in working in mines.
I have lived in a handful of different countries. I'm criticizing the idea that it's so simple to say one country is more sexist or more equal than another because there are so many metrics you can use to measure equality.
Sweden beats a lot of countries when it comes to a strongly protected right to parental leave for both men and women. But Sweden is behind many other countries when it comes to stereotypes and assumptions about what jobs men or women should be doing.
So it's meaningless to make a blanket statement that one country is more equal than another.
"Every third woman who responded to the survey, sent out by Allbright to employees at the tech companies, reports that she has been discriminated against"
> "Every third woman who responded to the survey, sent out by Allbright to employees at the tech companies, reports that she has been discriminated against"
Which - putting my boring hat on - doesn't mean she was discriminated against.
I'm not sure it's related to your question of "Is there an important sense in which Sweden has more abundant resources than, say, the US?".
The answer is yes, in some cases. Because wealth is distributed so that everyone can afford things like education, healthcare, daycare. If 1 out of a 100 has a superyacht and 99 live on foodstamps that's different in an important sense from if 0 people have a superyacht and everyone gets access to education and food.
You asked for an example about, I handed you one, it seems like you accidentally missed the example in a pursuit to prove the American superiority.
>If 1 out of a 100 has a superyacht and 99 live on foodstamps
In this hypothetical, the median income will be very low.
I'm not trying to be combative, I just try to correct misconceptions when I see them. It seems like some people have the misconception that the US is a place of a few superyachts and mostly foodstamps. That's not really the case.
> It seems like some people have the misconception that the US is a place of a few superyachts and mostly foodstamps. That's not really the case.
It's what i see on the news (not superyachts that much), on the "internet" (Reddit).
I understand reality is different, and that it's also different across states. But the stereotypes come from somewhere/something.
I'm sad that we don't have better workplace equality. We should take after NA in regulating resumes. We're allowed photos, names, gender, well anything we want to put on our resume we can. This could/does cause bias way too early in the selection process for jobs.
It doesn't explain why women, who on average perform better in school choose to pursue a career in Healthcare, which is "the worst" industry to work in over here. When there are so many other industries where they could make a great living with less stress, better schedules and more cash on hand.
> Because wealth is distributed so that everyone can afford things like education, healthcare, daycare. If 1 out of a 100 has a superyacht and 99 live on foodstamps that's different in an important sense from if 0 people have a superyacht and everyone gets access to education and food.
From your username I’m going to assume you can read Swedish, in which case I’ll recommend Andreas Cervanka’s latest book on the redistribution of wealth in Sweden in recent decades, in favor of the richest in society:
These are not apples to apples comparisons though, for the very reasons mentioned upthread.
A median wage of $32K in Sweden might come with near zero expenses for health, education, additional security, daily transport, etc.
A median US wage of $47K might incure additional expenses for health, education, etc.
These are post tax "median disposable income per person" figures - and other countries get a great deal more direct benefit per citizen post tax than the US provides.
If this is after taxes then the numbers are indeed way different. I effectively pay 55% taxes on my income (some is nicely hidden behind an employers tax so that the population doesn't see how much they're actually paying). The employers tax isn't part of your income, but it's part of what companies pay for your time.
Why would a company hire someone only to push them away from their area of expertise? That doesn't make sense to me. The only reason I would expect someone to be pushed away from their main activities is being bad at their job. If you want to be sexist, you can just not hire someone.
Please keep in mind that if really true, it is not a binary thing. It’s a distribution. There are going to be plenty of women who are more interested in things than the median man, and there are plenty of men who are more interested in people than the median woman.
There are going to be plenty of women who are more interested in things than the median man
Probably. Distributions don't necessarily have a huge amount of overlap. For example, upper body strength is also a distribution but the overlap is so small that 95% of men have stronger arms than 95% of women. With something as general as aptitude for things vs people the overlap is probably much greater than that but not certain without more data.
This cannot be the case. More than 5% of the male population is old, weak, and/or disabled that it can't possibly be true that 95% of all men have stronger arms than 95% of women. And if you include children I don't see how this could possibly be true. Unless you mean something else?
And if you include children I don't see how this could possibly be true.
There are female children too.
More than 5% of the male population is old, weak, and/or disabled
There are old, weak, and disabled women as well. Additionally, if you think old men are weak I suspect you have never had to wrestle an eighty year old with dementia out of a bath tub. They are remarkably, irritatingly strong.
I think parent is saying something like "rather than measuring strength by wrestling old men out of bathtubs, we should measure it in a way that doesn't get different results based on how much one cares about not hurting another person."
I agree, of course, but I believe the wrestling comment did not refer to the methodology used in the research.
That an old man with dementia who feel he has to defend himself will use full force while the people who the nurse/caregiver will consciently and inconsciently restrain themselves in order to not break any bones or harm the person they are taking care of.
When talking about populations, this should be implicitly assumed - just like that the experiment took place on Earth and the participants were breathing air. I don't know why this isn't burned into peoples brains with a big flashing neon sign, and why someone inevitably comes up with a counterargument of 'but not all X' when these things are discussed.
However I think the last sentence isn't as true as you make it out to be. I remember seeing statistic couple years back about this very subject and in that data woman had to be in the top 10% of "women who prefer working with things to people" to be as likely to work with things than "men who prefer to work with things to people" and it was pretty much same vice-versa.
I think it's more of a platitude, hidden behind the vagueness of the word plenty. Is plenty 5%? 10%? 20%? 50%? The linked article doesn't provide the data. In the context of e.g. STEM education, 20% isn't plenty.
The definition of working with people vs. working with things doesn't seem obvious to me. As a software engineer I am working a lot with my computer. Therefore I must be working with things! But... I am just as much working with my soft skills. Scrum retros, talking to stakeholders, discussions on design with fellow engineers, testing with end-users. Some days I don't spend even a minute working with "things".
I don't think the distinction of working with people vs working with things is clear enough to say wheter my job means I am doing the one or the other. So how could the participants in the study do the same? I'm assuming there are lots of occupations in this grey zone and even situations where in one company the same occupation is considered working with people while in another company it would be considered working with things.
I can see multiple issues the study runs into which would be interesting to see how/if it answers. A) Does it measure peoples perception of wheter they work with people or thing? B) Do the authors make their own interpretation of which occupations lands in which category? How do they then eliminate their own biases in what working with that occupation means? C) Did the authors observe the participants and make a judgement call based on their day-to-day activity? This would likely be the most accurate, but I can't imagine they did this because of the sheer cost of such an experiment.
I think it’s pretty clear to me. I am much happier to be quietly doing research, writing code, testing, writing documentation, fixing bugs, writing emails, etc. Now stick me in a meeting and I soon become very unhappy. Why? Because I’m really not interested in listening to people complain about stuff unrelated to my tasks or giving updates about random stuff or whatever.
Now I don’t mind socializing with people at work and making a bit of small talk but I have zero interest in the sort of collaborative work that involves daily meetings. I’m far more productive when I can be left alone to focus on the task and it drives me crazy when people constantly interrupt me.
Here I would find some support for the parents point: There is a lot of room for interpretation.
To me, writing an email can be the most intense "working with people" thing, more so than any amount of small talk or doing manual labor with people. The amount of stress that goes into a hard to write email – mostly because it will also be a hard to read email and then also the anticipation of some sort of unpleasant reaction – and the amount of time you have to wallow in that stress, rivals few other social interactions in its intensity.
See, I find writing an email to be a totally straightforward, impersonal task. Like writing code, but in English rather than a programming language. Just the facts, no sugar-coating or other nonsense!
I know the emails they’re talking about. They’re not as simple as writing the facts. Writing an extremely complex technical email in jargon and ways for people who aren’t familiar with any of it - even slightly - and explaining each detail concretely is quite the process.
It’s annoying when I have to write a 6,000 word email that is easily misunderstood because most others barely have an idea of the subject matter but it happens more often than I’d like to say.
Tbh - I find the emails pointless but this is what happens in low trust (dysfunctional) organizations.
It depends on the quality of the meetings. My last job I hated them for all the reasons you said. My current job they are enjoyable and productive. That's because the agenda is a "living" document that anyone can edit during the week, and the meetings stop when we've nothing left to discuss or need to get back to work
That's true. At my last job the meetings basically served as a way for the manager to broadcast stuff that could've just been sent out in an email and then collect updates on what everyone has been working on which also could be done with email. There was almost no back-and-forth to it at all, yet the damn thing took 2 hours per week. A huge waste of time!
A bricklayer works with things. Daycare staff work with people. These are very clear-cut.
Then there are a lot of points along that continuum -- nurses and HR reps work mostly with people. Economists a little of both. Software engineers and carpenters mostly with things.
We may not agree on a complete ordering but we will get reasonably close to each other, I suppose.
Yeah, I guess my point is that the categorization "prefer working with people" vs "prefer working with things" seems very weird. If I was a solo IT-entrepeneur I would likely work a lot with both! It does not even seem to be a scale between working more with things or more with people if you ask me.
And if there is so much grey zone that is open to interpretation, wouldn't that mean the study is rather measuring ones own perception of what they are working with?
Neithey daycare or bricklaying is something people often choose as their profession - ratger more like they end up doing because of a lack of options. Of course women would prefer bricklaying less as they are generally weaker. Daycare is a good luck call for getting hired as a man in the first place.
You cannot not work with people, only the degree varies. And as soon as you are part of a larger organisation, and / or working on complex things, you work woth people as much as you work with things. Including brick layers.
Nurses work with people more than things? Im not sure how much face time a nurse gets in a day but Ive talked to a few and its a lot of paperwork… do accountants work with things?
Are you serious? Nurses are not secretaries. They work with people. Just because they have to fill forms, it doesn't give away the fact that their primary job is to tend/care people, help in operations, etc... mostly interacting with people.
An accountant can stay deep down in quicken for days, and it is ok. Just because they interact occasionally with an client, doesn't make them a people's job.
On the other hand, most Sales job are all about people.
I've spent at 10 days a few years ago working in a medical team in an hospital assisting nurses. They have a lot of workflow stuff to follow but that doesn't mean they chose this job for this reason and they mostly hate it. And they are still running left and right for patients all day. Plus their desktop is usually not hidden in an office but in a counter at the center of the service where they multitask between doing the paperwork and talking to patients/visitors/other members of the medical or technical teams
>As a software engineer I am working a lot with my computer. Therefore I must be working with things! But... I am just as much working with my soft skills. Scrum retros, talking to stakeholders, discussions on design with fellow engineers, testing with end-users. Some days I don't spend even a minute working with "things".
Yes but did you join the profession for the Scrum meetings or for the programming?
software is an industry that supports both types of workers, and you probably can pick out amongst your working group which ones are the people who prefer things vs people. your job may ask you to do soft work, but that doesn’t mean you prefer it
I know some of my friends who would never like to work with people through things (like computers or the Internet). They prefer to have a real office or retail with actual persons around them and don't like working in solitude physically (and a co-working does not cut it for them).
This is a comment only an engineer could come up with. It's not a "grey zone" ffs. You compare talking to people in order to do your job with teaching a class of pubescent kids or wiping old people's asses. Those are not even remotely comparable.
I've never heard it called "working with things", but it is true for me. I love working with things. I dislike working with people so much that I have actively refused efforts to move me into lead and management type roles.
There is nothing wrong about having male dominated roles and female dominated roles, pushing equity down everyone's throat only profits corporation exploiting the less fortuned.
It is well known in healthcare that women are better nurses and males are better surgeons, in general.
> Instead, it was those countries with greater uncertainty avoidance that had larger differences in interests in people/things between men and women. Uncertainty avoidance refers to the degree to which a culture teaches its members to feel unpleasant in situations that are new, not previously known, surprising, or generally just different from usual.
I wouldn't mind seeing a ranking of countries by uncertainty avoidance. That sounds interesting enough itself.
> The extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations and have created beliefs and institutions that try to avoid these is reflected in the score on Uncertainty Avoidance.
My experience is that those numbers pretty much rank in reverse when it comes to actual risk taking. It seems weird to me that this metric as described would not correlate to that. Swedes and the Swiss are pretty (extremely) risk averse compared to all Italians and Portuguese I've ever met and observed... And Thailand ranks above Sweden? That's nonsensical...
> Countries exhibiting high Uncertainty Avoidance maintain rigid codes of belief and behaviour and are intolerant of unorthodox behaviour and ideas. In these cultures there is an emotional need for rules (even if the rules never seem to work) time is money, people have an inner urge to be busy and work hard, precision and punctuality are the norm, innovation may be resisted, security is an important element in individual motivation. Decisions are taken after careful analysis of all available information.
I feel like whoever made this up hasn't been to any of these countries.
Remember when that hypermasculine Russian military recruiting commercial went viral? They only give Russia 36 on the masculinity index. (US gets 62)
Here's the construct description:
>The Masculinity side of this dimension represents a preference in society for achievement, heroism, assertiveness, and material rewards for success. Society at large is more competitive. Its opposite, Femininity, stands for a preference for cooperation, modesty, caring for the weak and quality of life. Society at large is more consensus-oriented.
>In the business context Masculinity versus Femininity is sometimes also related to as “tough versus tender” cultures.
Austria ranks 79 on masculinity. Japan ranks 95, probably one of the highest.
>The Masculinity side of this dimension represents a preference in society for achievement, heroism, assertiveness, and material rewards for success.
This definitely does not sound like the Japan I live in, almost the opposite in fact. Japanese people are absolutely not known for assertiveness in particular; it's very much the opposite, they're infamous for being passive-aggressive. Heroism is definitely not a thing here. Achievement is so-so: being a reliable company workers and breadwinner is definitely highly valued, but not being a high achiever the way American culture, for instance, would value. Material rewards are valued though, but even here not as much as in America (which only ranks 62 somehow).
>Its opposite, Femininity, stands for a preference for cooperation, modesty, caring for the weak and quality of life. Society at large is more consensus-oriented.
This is absolutely Japan in a nutshell, for the most part, especially the part about being consensus-oriented. Japanese business culture is completely based on this: no decisions ever get made quickly or unilaterally; they require tons of boring meetings to build consensus before something big gets done. Caring for the weak and quality of life isn't as big as some western European nations, at least in terms of government policy, but it's still there, especially with, for instance, respect for elders (there's even a national holiday just for this).
By contrast, America ranking only 62 here seems like a bad joke. American culture is all about achievement, heroism (hello, Marvel movies!), assertiveness (even when you're completely wrong), and certainly material rewards for success. Caring for the weak? Americans hate that: that's why they vote against social programs any time they can. "Quality of life" isn't a concern in America.
If these people got these two countries SO completely and obviously wrong on the masculinity index, I really have no trust in their rankings for anything else.
The page explains that Japan is ranked highly "masculine" because of how competitive the society is.
> What you see is a severe competition between groups. From very young age at kindergartens, children learn to compete on sports day for their groups (traditionally red team against white team).
In corporate Japan, you see that employees are most motivated when they are fighting in a winning team against their competitors. What you also see as an expression of Masculinity in Japan is the drive for excellence and perfection in their material production (monodukuri) and in material services (hotels and restaurants) and presentation (gift wrapping and food presentation) in every aspect of life. Notorious Japanese workaholism is another expression of their Masculinity. It is still hard for women to climb up the corporate ladders in Japan with their Masculine norm of hard and long working hours.
So they explain away why their number is completely opposite of what it should be, given their definition of "masculinity" in a culture. Their explanation is BS: Japan is a very consensus-oriented society, not one based on individual heroism, at all. So one thing must be a lie: either their definition of "masculinity", or their ranking of Japan. They can't be simultaneously true.
Their actual definition says nothing about workaholism, or drive for excellence and perfection. In fact, I don't see how those are "masculine" in the slightest (nor are they "feminine", they're orthogonal issues).
> being a reliable company workers and breadwinner is definitely highly valued, but not being a high achiever the way American culture, for instance, would value
I've always thought academic achievement and money mattered quite a bit in Japan. I've heard the phrase "high achievement, high income, high stature" as a description of the traits desired/expected in Japanese men.
Sure, academic achievement is valued, as is making money (which is valued in every capitalist society). But the definition given is:
"The Masculinity side of this dimension represents a preference in society for achievement, heroism, assertiveness, and material rewards for success."
The type of individualistic, heroic achievement that American culture values isn't valued here. Being a high achiever so you can be a great worker for your company is, and of course women want men who are tall and earn a lot of money, which again seems somewhat universal.
But going back to the definition as given, there are 4 specific things listed here. Two of them are "heroism" and "assertiveness". Neither of these things are cornerstones of Japanese culture at all. Japan is a collectivist society where people are anything but assertive. Yet Japan is ranked 95. This makes no sense to me. These 4 traits together seem to accurately describe American society, yet America is 62. If anything, these numbers are reversed.
Another thing I'll point out: in America, CEOs make tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars a year, orders of magnitude higher than the lowest-paid workers. In Japan, this is not the case at all. Top company executives aren't paid remotely as much as America's highest-paid execs, and the gap between the lowest and highest paid is a fraction as much. (The execs at the biggest companies are paid a lot of course, but not compared to the truly obscene compensation packages American CEOs get.) There's a definite sense of one's duty to the society here that simply does not exist in the US. So yes, "material rewards for success" is valued here, but not the way it is in the US. In the US, people seem to literally worship wealth and wealthy people; here in Japan, rich people are generally not celebrities. So I would say even this factor, "material rewards for success" is not as valued here as in the US.
In summary, Japan's ranking simply does not fit the definition of "masculinity" given, in comparison to other nations, particularly the US.
Can't speak to gender disparities but as a software engineer as I have progressed in my career I have both been paid more and spent much more time working with people.
It has some truth for me too. But then mostly the "with people" in tech comes because you are in a leading position. I tryed, but I'm not good at leading a team.
I worked in a financial company in Norway as a consultant for few years on IT project. In a division with over 20 people only 2 were women with one of them being an immigrant from a not-so-rich country. My boss even complained few times that the upper management put pressure on him to do something about it, but he simply cannot find suitable women.
Then at the management level things were more even. Like 30 % were women.
Then there was a few programmers and system administrators from India working on outsourced projects . Like 50% were women. Yet anything related to management position in Indian company was exclusively for men. That was including minor management roles like a team lead even when everybody else on the team was woman.
I hope people don't jump to the conclusion that they like what they like because of their gender. It could be equally attributed to what they're working with. As in, you like what you know. I've never worked in a people heavy environment, so I couldn't say I like working in one.
The article speaks in very broad terms but there are precise preferential differences by sex.
More than just working with things males tend to prefer working with tools more than building new things. Yes there are many males that are creative and only prefer creating original works, but not most. When it comes to working with things females, unlike males, tend to prefer the ideas of things, theory, more than the implementation or practical application, which may speak to planning.
There was a recently published study that females across the world score higher in cognitive (learned) empathy than males. The same study found no distinction by sex in innate (natural) empathy.
None of this should come as a surprise. For decades we have known that females score higher in agreeability and males score higher in assertiveness. As such females will tend to position themselves into interests of lower social friction and higher direct engagement than males. Males will tend to position their interests into areas of greater critical reasoning at sacrifice to social engagement than will females. Yet despite that most males remain fully unwilling to distance their interests from those that are perceived as higher value by their group dynamics.
So, they have linked different sexual reproductive strategies to differences in behavior.
That cannot be that surprising, right? Different sexual reproductive strategies almost necessitate differences in behavior in general, if the strategies are different enough, which they most certainly are for any kind of mammal or bird.
Given the many examples of wildly different behaviors between the sexes in other species - bower birds as an example - any lack of specific behavioral differences would be surprising.
It's also no surprising that this sex differences (I don't think these are gender differences; these are the differences that shape gender) are more prevalent in societies with greater economic prosperity; it allows the individuals to follow their own generic preferences, unburdened by economic pressure.
You can try to take whatever job is available, but if you're a typical "people person" you're less likely to have developed the skills to get hired in most technical jobs, and if you're a more technically-oriented person you're less likely to have developed the people skills to get hired in jobs where those are important.
Almost anyone can develop either, but when they don't, through whatever combination of chance and default temperament.... very few employers will give someone a chance at crossing that divide without some prior indication the prospective employee will be decent at it, because chances are they won't be.
> in many situations there is not much of a choice.
The problem with this explanation is - the more choice women have - the BIGGER the difference.
In countries where life is hard - women are more likely to work in STEM than in countries where you can live a good life working anywhere (or not at all).
i find it interesting that the study minimizes the “working with people” aspects of executive roles.
working with people may be the most important piece of an executive yet they ignore the “working with people” aspects and try to shoehorn it into a data driven role.
seems like an absurd and arbitrary category definition.
I think this is a worthwhile study but also think we place too much emphasis on personality types.
My wife studied primary (elementary) school teaching for 4 years and then was a teacher for over 6 years. After she became tired of the profession she was able to self-teach web dev for 9 months using Udemy and now has been working as a software developer for roughly a year now.
Nominally a study like this might have put her into the caring profession box a few years ago but she is professionally ambidextrous, and likely other people surveyed will be too.
Recognizing that certain action (e.g. dressing in a certain way or writing an essay about gender difference) would get one in a certain violent-esque trouble.
I would argue that Damore when writing his memo acted out his autism. A neurotypical person would probably understand that within the culture in Google at the time, such a memo would be seen as sacriligeus. An autist is more likely to just say what they believe to be true, with no such filter.
Essentially, it was a direct assault at some of the fundamentals of an entire belief system.
Now let's imagine for a moment that he were completely accurate on the science. If, so, and if his memo were to be taken seriously, it would invalidate the motivation for the DEI narrative, with the following implications:
- Some senior roles would no longer be needed
- People who had been hired or promoted to fulfill DEI goals might be in their position not based on merit, but rather a false belief
- The belief systems of a significant percentage of the staff would be shattered, causing very painful cognitive dissonance, as well as anger (quite possibly enough to make them want to punch him)
All-in-all this would be a disaster especially if he happened to be right. If so, the only way to avoid the negative effects listed above, would be to discredit him and get rid of him.
Of course, if he happened to be mosly wrong on the science, he might still be treated the same way, but I believe, with slightly less passion.
Greta Thunberg is another autist making claims that are seen as radical:
Now, let's again pretend that she's 100% correct. That starting in 2028 we will start to see chain reactions that make much of the planet unlivable within her lifetime.
If she's right, and we admit it, we will all be forced to completely reorganize society. Gasoline fueled cars may have to be banned, and air travel almost completly disbanded. And we should all become vegeterians, and we would need to radically reduce our consumption of all sorts of both industrial and digital products. Also, any housing with high per capita heating requirements might have to be torn down, and people forced to move into much smaller units.
Also, most middle aged or older person would have to accept that they were the ones nearly destroying Earth, until people like Greta came along as saviors. A lot of shame would be in order.
Now especially if this were all 100% accurate, a lot of people would become extremely angry at her, and might want to do a lot more than simply punshing her.
Clearly, her message is not taken very seriously. Politicians are paying lip service to her, but no state is seriously attempting to take the kind of radical action she is demanding. Instead she's seen by many as something of a heroine or perhaps a mascot.
And if anyone actually wants to do something violent against her, THEY are the problem, not her.
As it should be.
But why is Damore treated like the Devil, while Greta was invited to speak in front of the UN?
> He wrote the essay and submitted it to other attendees for feedback but received no response. He then submitted it to another group within Google
which he referred to as “the skeptics”.
Yeah? The people who don't like the opinions that are aligned with his are the same people who bring up all sorts of social justice and political issues to the work place. But only narrative is allowed of course.
Yes, he was very careful in his wording and close to 100% correct.
What the outrage mob did was as follows:
1. Change preference to ability: so "the research suggests that women, on average, prefer to do things other than code" to "women can't code"
2. Change a statistical argument to an essentialist one. So "on average" to "no women"
3. Change the population/sample from the general population to "people who work at Google". So at this point we have gone from "in the general population, there appear to be more men who like the sorts of tasks associated with coding than women who like the same kinds of tasks" to "Women at Google can't code"
4. Get horribly upset about someone claiming that they can't code.
5. Use the demonstrable fact of their being so horribly upset as evidence that he is the one creating a toxic work environment.
6. Voilà, he just has to go.
(7. Also: claim, falsely, that there is no research for what he said)
This multi-level shifting of definitions and wording is a common pattern, so something to watch out for.
Ironically, it was the feminists who created the hostile work environment when they lied about the cause of the sex distribution among tech workers - falsely accusing them of sexism.
They then further created a hostile work environment when Damore explained why their victim narrative was false and ran him out of the company for it.
For these reasons I would never dream of joining Google any more.
You don't need confirmations like that to say he was right. He was right, and we know that because his arguments were (relatively) well-built, so they are really worth considering.
His choice of wording is poor, and it's clear in most cases he assumes he's "right" - rather than posing a question and linking to supporting evidence for why he "might be right".
The way to start a good conversation isn't Authoritarian: "You're wrong, and I'm right. Now let me lecture you why."
It's Seneca style: "here's some things I noticed that are weird and don't add up, let's discuss, and - please - correct me if I'm wrong."
The memo could've maybe led to good discussion if he avoided prescriptions at the end - which he wasn't qualified to make - and withheld opinion. Among other things, his table of right/left is highly subjective and controversial and adds almost nothing to the discussion beside asking for trouble...
If you're aware that certain things are sacred, you should be aware that you need to navigate opposition to the narrative very carefully...
> His choice of wording is poor, and it's clear in most cases he assumes he's "right" - rather than posing a question and linking to supporting evidence for why he "might be right".
Are people not allowed to think they are correct? That’s clearly a bad-faith accusation. Just look at your comment, it directly contradicts your own imaginary standards of discourse.
> His choice of wording is poor, and it's clear in most cases he assumes he's "right" - rather than posing a question and linking to supporting evidence for why he "might be right".
There's also some effort required on the reader's part here. You should dig through some bad phrasing and for each statement that the writer makes, ask yourself, "what's the strongest interpretation of this that can be backed up?" A good reader tries to get the most out of it, and not discard it because of the form (how would Seneca read it?).
The way I read his statement is that woke agenda does not deserve so much trust, and there's plenty of reasons to question Google's official view on gender-equality; that having an opposing view is a valid position, which makes you neither a foil-hat-flat-earth psycho, nor a misogynist, nor a bad person. There's enough uncertainly in this question to make both opinions valid, and allow people to pick the one they like. And for woke people, this statement is enough of a reason to "cancel" someone.
Thinking that he insists on his view being the only right one is a bit of a strawman argument. I say "a bit" because I admit that he chose a rather provoking manner to make his statement, but I still say "strawman" because you could easily read it differently. I assume he did it because his opponents also do that, and it may have been an emotional choice to some extent. And, as I said, if we've established that there's enough uncertainty in this question to make it a matter of preference (for now, until the science gives us a definitive answer), it's ok to advertise the choice you prefer in an emotional and provoking manner — which I think is also one of the goals of the memo.
To summarize, I think there's some good things to extract from there if you put in effort. And for a non-expert, he did ok of a job writing it.
> asking for trouble...
It doesn't justify what they did to him, I don't understand why you'd even mention this. "She wore a short skirt, so she asked for harassment" — literally the same victim-blaming technique.
Yes, we should. But before we do, people still have to make choices ("should I adopt this gender-equality policy or that one?", "should I teach kids these of those ideas about gender-equality?"), they aren't going to wait for science to catch up. And before we have a definitive answer, we admit we don't have it, and let people make their own bids in those choices. And also discuss choices, and also question them.
Google was already discussing the topic a great deal, no? I got the impression Damore's manifesto was written in response to all of Google's gender initiatives.
I think that's ok. We should care about the well-being of people (and nature), not about the way they actually live their life. If someone wants to work in health care or education, or rather in carpentry or nuclear physics let them. The alternative is some kind of politically motivated utilitarianism.
And certainly don't pay too much attention of these studies. People treat them as gospel, but they aren't. They're more like the yellow press.
They really shouldn't require much thought in the end. Don't artificially keep people out of a particular profession. Don't artificially force people into a particular profession. Let people have the opportunity to do the job they want to do and call it a day.
I wouldn't think it should matter for most people day-to-day.
It's relevant to understanding society-level metrics and knowing what sensible alert settings for them are, but must people don't work with those very much (maybe if you're the sort to evaluate politicians yourself during election season, rather than just voting party line, or if something comes up on a referendum?).
At <0.1% of the population, I don't believe people whose gender does not align with their sex are able to skew the distribution s.t. there is statistical significance.
- societies raised women to take care (take care of their family and house chores) while men went out in the wild to play, study and work.
- women had to be “empathetic” because understanding one’s mood was vital to their survival throughout history: in times where it was “ok” and even expected that women were beaten up to make them more docile or whatever.
- women were “granted permission” to certain work roles based on the time that happened. assistant roles were the most common, like secretaries (they even had a “bad reputation” because of the affairs with their executives, but it was really common an executive, a man, have a secretary as a gift). and think about how childhood education usually have more female teachers and higher education is a land of men. or nurses vs medical doctors.
I don't think anything you're saying contradicts the article? I don't see anything in the article claiming that the preferences aren't a result of history? So I don't see what merits the "wtf".
In any case, "a result of history" doesn't seem very useful or specific as an explanation. If we're talking about the history of our entire species, then perhaps a more specific explanation is "a result of our evolutionary history". For example, you say "societies raised women to take care" -- maybe as a result of this, women who liked to "take care" were the women who passed on their genes, and therefore modern women have genes that cause them to like "taking care", on average. That could explain this result.
If you're referring to recent history, you'd have to explain why the preference difference seems to hold all across the world, given that different countries have different recent histories. You'd also have to explain the mechanism by which recent history (e.g. past decades where being a secretary was a top female career) is exerting such a large influence on the present.
I have to disagree that it can all be explained by societal conditioning. They tried to sample every society they could in this study to see if societal factors could explain the preference but could not see a societal effect. While you might be able to claim that every society around the world is fundamentally sexist to explain the difference in preferences, I think in that case you would have to be able to explain why every distributed society came to be arranged in a similar way.
The reason can be even that blatantly simple as only females can be pregnant, and until 100 years ago, they were pregnant for 5-10 years in their life. This, obviously, doesn’t mean that it’s beneficial in any sense in the current world, or that this should be the case inherently.
If cultures universally share a characteristic, that does not prove that the characteristic is a hard-wired drive. That thinking has been used to make several arguments.
Cultures all around the world have made pyramids, so pyramids must have a deep spiritual meaning that all humans are tuned into. Or all these cultures were working with heavy objects and gravity and they all independently discovered that a pyramid is the easiest large structure to build.
Seafaring cultures all around the world have myths about mermaids, so mermaids must be real. Or people spending lots of time at sea looking at sea-life are likely to start imagining them fusing with humans.
Cultures all around the world have sun gods, so a sun god must be real and we all sensed it. Or everyone around the world looked up at the sky and saw the same thing.
Cultures all around the world have gender stereotypes, so they must be hard-wired. Or women everywhere are getting pregnant while men aren't, so societies shaped themselves around that fact in similar ways.
You don't make any argument here? Your next line could have been:
Cultures all around the world treat women and men differently so what a woman and a man do must be caused by society. Or all those things are mostly hard wired and people make decisions because of this.
Just because people's observations for things have been wrong doesn't mean that all explanations are wrong. That's a bit ridiculous.
Sure, for the millions of years that make up human history, men went out into the wild to play with their weapons, wars and animals while women had to stay and vacuum the cave just like the male finch condemns his female finch to stay with the eggs under threat of domestic violence, so he can go play with the owls and cats.
Still the problem here is we don't _really_ know whether this is genetic or shaped by our upbringing even when it comes to the most egalitarian societies. I'd like to see the same study done on the little left hunter-gatherers bands.
The study in the topic seems to contradict this, although the summary is a bit confusing:
"Considering gender inequality, the authors report that “in countries of higher gender inequality, women’s stronger preference for working with people versus things compared to men was smaller.” However, this effect disappeared when cultural dimensions were taken into account.
"Instead, it was those countries with greater uncertainty avoidance that had larger differences in interests in people/things between men and women. Uncertainty avoidance refers to the degree to which a culture teaches its members to feel unpleasant in situations that are new, not previously known, surprising, or generally just different from usual."
But this specific thing we do have a strong indication of! But a few hours after birth, infant boys spend a longer time looking at mechanical objects than faces, and vice versa. This is thought to be before any social imprinting has had time to develop.
It's funny that you write this comment in this specific thread, because as far as I know, it's literally the only gender difference we've observed truly since birth. (Besides some physical ones like which reproductive organs are in place, obviously.)
because if it's biological then you have to live with it (till you get scalable affordable bioengineering) whereas if it's social imprinting then you don't "have to live with it", for that it's going against our biological encoding. Your comment suggest that we should not question upbringing which I disagree with.
Knowing a concrete cultural mechanism that is causing this could possibly open the way to engineering it (or close it completely, depending on what mechanism that is). But would just knowing "it's culture" help? I don't think (personal opinion) we're particularly good at predictably engineering culture.
Look at Sweden, it's been trying really hard and dumping lots of money into gender equality, but there's still very few women in tech. The fraction of women among Iran's CS graduates is greater than Sweden's. And, ironically, plenty of those Iranian women (I'm saying this offhand) go to do PhD in Sweden, to bring up the "gender balance" of CS departments that Sweden is so concerned about.
I'm really unsure whether society is easier to engineer than biology.
This is something really difficult to know, specially because genetic differences can shape behaviors that can be natural selected creating a reinforced loop that reflexes on culture and upbringing.
Very good point. But I'd like to get an accurate answer from science in general, I don't see why more effort shouldn't be put into finding the reason behind what's discussed here. culture and upbringing is a mix of biological tendencies and imposed constructs, and I'd like to know which is which.
Not sure you'd learn the most from the hunter-gatherers, who have the narrowest leeway in their survival and must have everyone doing exactly what they're best suited at. A fat rich society with more money than they can spend, like Norway or Qatar or Brunei, is likely more instructive.
A hunter gatherer society would be the exact opposite of highly specialised ("doing what you're best at").
It has little margin for loss of function, so a poor performer is better and more likely to survive then losing the performance of the function entirely.
I'm pretty sure what they meant was "if you need to go and hunt and kill your food, then the physically stronger members of the group have to go and do that, and that means someone has to stay and look after the kids and the members of the group who can produce food for the infants likely fit that bill"
Why is that a problem, and if it was due to upbringing then why that would be a problem?
> I'd like to see the same study done on the little left hunter-gatherers bands.
I don't see what that would prove. Men being biologically better suited for many types of primitive hunting, and women having the responsibility of pregnancy and nursing infants, would have a massive influence on the culture and structure of those societies.
So .. you've had no actual experience of living with hunter gathers then?
The women do a lot of work digging ants [1], digging lizards, trawling through sands for cockles [2] (and leaving massive midden piles in their wake over centuries), and retire to a life of painting and laughing at the quaint notions of the clueless.
Many such cultures share childcare across a wide network of extended kinship [3], both male and female - everybody works to bring food, tools, and culture to the group.
> So .. you've had no actual experience of living with hunter gathers then?
This is not an argument.
> The women do a lot of work digging ants [1], digging lizards, trawling through sands for cockles [2] (and leaving massive midden piles in their wake over centuries), and retire to a life of painting and laughing at the quaint notions of the clueless.
Great.
> Many such cultures share childcare across a wide network of extended kinship [3], both male and female - everybody works to bring food, tools, and culture to the group.
And yet despite having nary a biology degree among them, even they will tell you that men can not gestate or nurse a child. And that men are biologically more suited to some types of primitive hunting.
Those are just two points out of a long list of actions required in a society. I don't think it really adds that much weight to the argument, even though it is true.
To go back to your other comment:
> Why is that a problem, and if it was due to upbringing then why that would be a problem?
It would be a problem for upbringing as that is something adults have agency over. It's a bias that may not need to exist.
A great example of that is when women were highly represented in computer science as it was initially becoming a field of study, but later got pushed out by boys who'd had technical skills nurtured in them when they were young while the girls did not. Oversimplifying that a little bit, but most of us have experienced it or seen it in action.
Women in STEM is a supply issue that starts with parenting, and continues all the way along the pipeline, with schools, universities and peers all filtering girls out of the pipeline that puts butts in seats in tech roles, even though they're perfectly capable of the roles.
> Those are just two points out of a long list of actions required in a society. I don't think it really adds that much weight to the argument, even though it is true.
I think it does add a lot of weight. Certainly it casts doubt to the idea that you could observe a primitive hunter gatherer society to rule out any kind of cultural bias.
> It would be a problem for upbringing is that is something adults have agency over. It's a bias that may not need to exist.
This is just restating the assumption. Why is that bad? Culture causes an innumerable number of "biases" to exist, not just between different sexes either. Would there be a problem if people living in one state liked country music and in another liked rap? Should such a learned bias be stamped out? How about pizza vs hot dogs?
> A great example of that is when women were highly represented in computer science as it was initially becoming a field of study, but later got pushed out by boys who'd had technical skills nurtured in them when they were young while the girls did not. Oversimplifying that a little bit, but most of us have experienced it or seen it in action.
I've never heard of it before and I'm skeptical it's true, so I don't know how great the example really is. But let's set that aside for a minute and think about it if it was true it's not a case of a learned cultural personal preference by the women, it was that they got "pushed out". That is the problem.
But that's really besides the point here I think. I don't see why you go to a different situation to claim this one is bad. Because we have the actual at hand, which is that women like working with people and men like working with things. I'm asking specifically why that would be bad, not whether there are any aspects of culture and learned behavior that could be bad (certainly there are many examples that can easily be argued are bad, and many others could be argued are good).
> On average women find tech work grindingly boring.
No evidence of that.
> There's no evidence that adults are creating this bias. They are not.
Are you absolutely certain? It's the subject of quite a bit of research.
> Why is it a problem? It isn't. Just let people do what they want with their lives.
Kids don't know what they want to do with their lives, they get lead down various paths by their upbringing. Plenty of people end up in careers they don't like because it's what their parents wanted them to do, regardless of gender.
>> On average women find tech work grindingly boring.
> No evidence of that
Are you for real? Have you ever tried to talk to any women about technology? With occasional exceptions, the response you will get is a face that has completely glazed over.
This is only a problem for people who believe in egalitarian ideology - where every group is supposed to be at all times "equal" in ways that are simply not bourne out in reality.
> Have you ever tried to talk to any women about technology?
All the time - they love technology.
Sue <redacted> runs all the books on the local family farm (which is a large multi million $ enterprise), she pulls in all the GPS logs to a NAS, databases the livestock tags, has bots watching the stock sales.
Robyn runs a super computing facility for the local SKA project (Square kilometre array) after being the Vice C. of the local university, after consolidating the Comp Sci, Math, Engineering Streams overlap into a specialised STEM course.
Danni next door hacks J.Deere software and runs an agronomy consulting group with web prescence.
Joy left running a heavy industry electrical contract company behind after selling it and now runs a GIS consulting group.
I'm guessing it's you and where you are - in this part of the world there are plenty of women into tech.
This is so tedious. I said there were plenty of exceptions. As with many human traits it's a distribution with long tails at the extremities, and plenty of overlap between groups.
This doesn't in any way negate the existence of a mean difference between groups. In the real world innate sex differences are a fact of life.
That's the whole point of the paper attached to this thread.
Egalitarians believe that society would be better off if we made all efforts to flatten these differences out or ignore them. This is an article of faith, that is in no way reflected in the real world.
The interesting part here is that there are plenty of exceptions - and those exceptions tend be clustered in different societies and cultures.
I'm not advocating you change wherever you're at, I'm just delighted that where I am women drive road trains & haul paks, design ships, wire buildings, advance astrophyysics, etc (and, for that matter, so do the men).
It certainly makes your bemoaning "have you tried talking to women about tech?" a non issue hereabouts.
If you're happy with your bit of "the real world" (ie. a subset of the actual real world) then good on you, go forth and enjoy - and perhaps bemoan less.
Of course there are local differences which is why these need to be normalized with a population-wide sample. In that case, sex differences present themselves clearly.
As the article states, surprise surprise, on average compared to men, women are more interested in people than things.
Differences by country and culture - the reason why are the interesting questions.
> these need to be normalized with a population-wide sample.
Need to be?
The US (for example) has a large population ( ~360 mill ) with a poor system of government and an excess of hold over odd little religious groups (and home grown product like Mormons, etc).
Other countries have smaller populations (eg 25 million here), better more responsive system of government with better oversight, better education, better health, etc.
I see no benefit in being blended in with a bloated mass of objectively worse and dragged down to US levels.
How could it be reflected in the real world if we're still encumbered by the status quo? That's like pointing to a lack of EVs and saying see, no EVs, people don't want them. (Talking specifically about women in STEM here)
You have to prove that we're "encumbered" by anything, and that the status quo is not merely the reflection of people's natural preferences, and that it would be better for society to break the status quo.
You can't prove any of these things. They are dogmatic assertions
You wanted evidence, not anecdotes. But if you want anecdotes then yes, I've even worked with a bunch of women in tech. You can't make generalizations based off your own experiences though, obviously I'll bump into women in tech while working in tech. But similarly, if the people you bump into aren't already in tech, then it shouldn't be too surprising that they're not as excited as you are about it. You believe they're not in tech because they are born without the ability to like it, I believe it's because more often than not they're guided away from it during their upbringing.
You can be right that it's common to see and still wrong that it's an innate part of being a woman.
> You can be right that it's common to see and still wrong that it's an innate part of being a woman.
It's not "an innate part of being a woman".
It's an innate part of being human.
Last I checked, around 2% of people go into tech. That means that 98% of all people prefer something else.
Is there something wrong with them that needs explaining? Don't think so.
Is there something wrong with society because these 98% of people enjoy something else more? I don't think so.
Who made the 2% of people who like being in tech the standard? So that any deviation from this standard must be explained by ... evil forces? Genetics?
Is there something wrong with the 2% of people who do enjoy going into tech because 98% of people do not? I don't think so.
Now the genders skew slightly differently, for men it's more like 97% prefer to do something else, and with women it's 99% who prefer to do something else. So what? Let people do what they want to do.
That's the point I am making. My point is not that everyone should be in tech, my point is that there is a disparity and if we assume everyone is equal then there shouldn't be.
> Now the genders skew slightly differently, for men it's more like 97% prefer to do something else, and with women it's 99% who prefer to do something else. So what? Let people do what they want to do.
That is exactly what I want, for people do to what they want, but one group is systemically discouraged from taking on tech even if they want to. I am frankly disappointed that this has to be spelled out, that is surprising for this forum.
>> if we assume everyone is equal then there shouldn't be
>
Incorrect assumption. Everyone is obviously not equal.
I was quoting you. There are some practical differences obviously, but I don't believe any of them should mean women are less inclined to enjoy technical jobs.
> What evidence do you have for this "systematic discouragement"? Of the 98% of people who do not go into tech? How so?
Speak to women who are in tech, ask them what their experience was like. I haven't got any studies for you I'm afraid, it would seem we're debating in experiences so I don't think this will be constructive.
No you were not. I did not write "everyone is equal" anywhere in the post you responded to. In fact, I neither wrote 'everyone' nor 'equal'.
> Speak to women who are in tech, ask them what their experience was like.
Anecdote ≠ data and is not evidence for anything "systematic".
> I haven't got any studies for you I'm afraid
Because there aren't any that show this, because it's not an actual thing.
> we're debating in experiences
I am debating facts, you are debating what appear to be anecdotal experiences and subjective evaluations of those experiences from which you then extrapolate mightily.
If I told you what my experience has been in tech, you probably wouldn't believe me. And if I were to present my personal experience as that of a woman, you would think it proof for the systematic discrimination against women in tech. Except that it isn't, of course, because it all happened to a man.
Anyway, people have studied this empirically, and this is what they found:
"Our early analysis suggests that men and women actually appear to leave engineering at roughly the same rate and endorse the same reasons for leaving."
And of course this is why "just ask <group x>" is not a valid method for ascertaining discriminatory practice. You also have to ask other groups to see if the practices differ based on what group you belong to.
In tech, they don't. In fact, women in tech generally report slightly better treatment than men do (different survey). Tech is a shit show for everyone.
A very well-compensated shit-show, mind you.
(And since men are und greater pressure to earn, they are probably also more likely to tolerate a shit show if the pay is good).
> my point is that there is a disparity and if we assume everyone is equal then there shouldn't be.
Yes but why do you assume that? What if your assumption is wrong, as the above study shows? Then the disparity would be explained simply by the natural proclivities of different groups of people.
> one group is systemically discouraged from taking on tech even if they want to
Again this in another article of faith.
Notice how feminists always use the passive voice: women are "discouraged", not "these specific people are conspiring to discourage women for this specific reason".
It's a motte-and-bailey trick to prevent anyone being able to call out their nonsense claims.
Why does anyone want to discourage women from going into tech? My own daughter shows some interest in these things. Perhaps she will enter the field - or perhaps she'd prefer something else. I don't mind. She should do whatever would make her happy.
It just turns out that women on average are slightly more likely to choose something else than man are.
> Notice how feminists always use the passive voice
Yeah, that one took me a while to figure out, but once you notice it you see how pervasive this trick is.
For me, it was the thing about women doing more housework in relationships. Or rather "women are required to do more housework". But it wasn't actually their partners requiring this. Men generally don't give a crap, and this doesn't really change whether they are in a relationship or not.
"But women are held to a higher standard". Ah, the passive to the rescue! But by who? Again, men don't give a crap. Well, it turns out that it is women holding each other to higher standards, more or less exclusively. But "women are oppressing each other" just doesn't have the same ring to it...
> "these specific people are conspiring to discourage women for this specific reason".
Turns out there actually are people making that claim. Can't find the actual text right now (it was a PhD thesis turned into a book, IIRC), and it claimed that the move to make CS more like engineering was a cabal of men in CS trying to kick the women out.
The mind boggles.
> Why does anyone want to discourage women from going into tech?
Exactly. No one, that's who. And in fact, if you look around, you see tons and tons of encouragement, special events, special courses, special bootcamps etc. A recruiter here in Europe recently told me she has to get approval from US headquarters if she wants to suggest a straight white male for a role (although that was senior executive recruiting, not tech).
Female chimpanzees prefer to play with objects and use them as tools more than male chimpanzees overall. Most often, female chimps are observed using them as play weapons.[1]
On one single occasion, some female chimps were observed carrying some logs and "slapping" them. This was interpreted as playing with dolls and then it was all over the news that female chimps play with dolls.[2]
Humans aren't the only primates with culture. Chimp behaviour varies significantly according to the culture they are in, just like human behaviour does.
Tangentially, I think I read somewhere once that there's more genetic variance between two random chimps from two chimp tribes in the same forest than between two random humans from opposite sides of the planet.
I don't understand what does this has to do with anything? how does that fit in things vs people? a doll is a thing after all? I'm not saying there's no deep genetic drive at all.
I don't think this is a paradox at all. Discouraging 50% of the workforce talent pool is a wasteful luxury that only countries with abundant resources can afford.
I experienced this first hand when I moved to Sweden. I had never been made to feel like a freak for being a programmer until I moved to Sweden. I had never experienced being constantly excluded, discouraged and pushed away from technical activities in order to "rescue" me from things I'm being told me I'm not interested in.
I have a legal right to parental leave and I can get an IUD for free, so it's considered a paradox that there are so few female programmers in such an equal country. I don't see how there is a paradox.