Things that are considered normal in society like women not being interested in it and engineering are self reinforcing. I don't know of any studies that indicate they shouldn't be doing those jobs, just that they are more likely not too. This robs women of higher paying stem jobs and society of more people to do those jobs.
>> Things that are considered normal in society like women not being interested in
it and engineering are self reinforcing.
I'm sorry, but I guess can't follow your logic at all. I haven't used the word normal anywhere. To me it seems you find it normal that everyone should be thrilled to become an engineer. Women themself at large find it more normal to choose other professions when they have an option.
>> I don't know of any studies that indicate they shouldn't be doing those jobs
Me neither. Still if they would exist, they would be about women as group and not about what a single woman can do.
>> This robs women of higher paying stem jobs and society of more people to do those jobs.
Believe it or not some people (men or women) care more about what they do then how much money they make doing it.
The idea that society influences women not to go into STEM is not at all clear. It's essentially just assuming that any disparity must be due to social influence. The reality is that larger male participation in STEM is universal across a wide variety of societies. There isn't a single country in the world where women make up more than 55% of STEM workers, while the vast majority of countries have fewer than 30% of women in STEM [1]. When a trend is present across rich and poor societies, conservative and liberal societies, religious and secular societies, it's pretty hard to say social influence is the cause.
Interesting that different society’s have such different levels of female participation in stem. I’d view that as evidence that society heavily influences these gender participation rates.
This is not at all what is described in the article. They don't have different levels of participation in STEM. Nearly every single country in the world has a majority male STEM participation. Most fall within a relatively tight band between 15 and 35%.
Do you have a substantive criticisms of the paper? Or will you just proclaim that it's questionable without any elaboration?
The possible ranges of representation are from 0% to 100%, but almost all fall within a band of 20%. This is a pretty tight band. Proportionality between the lowest and highest isn't that relevant. A range from 10-20% is still a wider band than 1% to 5%, even though the latter has a bigger proportional difference from the lowest to the highest data point.
More importantly, there are zero examples of countries with 85%, 80%, or 75% women in STEM. But there's plenty of examples of countries with men of those levels of representation. If it were culturally or socially determined, we'd should see women's representation in that range among some societies.
Basically, that response just used a different metric for gender equality instead of GGGI and the negative correlation between gender equality and women's representation in STEM was less pronounced using the alternative metric for equality. Also, the response you linked did not account for women's overall higher rate of attending postsecondary education (and they try to argue that this is somehow a good thing). Stoet and Geary normalized for disparate rates of college attendance, which makes it more useful for exploring men's and women's relative interest in STEM.
My point, though, is still reinforced by your linked study. There is no wide variance in gender representation in STEM. Nearly all countries fall within a band 20% wide (figure 1, page 3). Women's lower interest in STEM is indeed universal. The "wide variation" is from 1/5th to 1/3rd of STEM graduates. Not nothing, but by no means enough to suggest that the disparities in STEM are driven by culture to any significant degree.
