DoubtingThomas wrote:EAllusion wrote:Who is "we?" Why? One, medicine can be stereotyped as a "nurturing" profession, which may create an atmosphere more conducive to female participation given that is generally gender-coded as a feminine thing.
That is for nursing.
Yes, a long time ago there was a stereotype of nursing as a women's profession and medical doctors as a man's profession in the same way that cooks were women, but chefs are men. That has to do attitudes about professionalism, leadership and mastery. As you've picked up, that has largely gone away in the medical field in the past two generations or so. This is different than how gender stereotypes can impact people's attitudes. It happens to be the case, by its very nature, that medicine is easily stereotyped as a field that takes care of people and women tend to be stereotyped as more "nurturing." This can potentially explain why you'd see that particular STEM career reverse gender disparities quicker than, say, statistics professors.
Given that the type of explanation you are showing affinity for merely states that women
are more nurturing and therefore choose nurturing professions when given the freedom to pick, this should be an easy thing for you to get.
In the past almost all medical doctors were male, now we see a big increase in female doctors. What happened to the discrimination? Why is there no such rise in STEM?
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1) There has been a rise in STEM. I think you mean "comparable rise."
2) I don't think you carefully read what I was saying there.
Yes according to another researcher. But that is obviously not the case. In Mexico there is a lot of discrimination in STEM and even sexual harassment is normal. It is just mad and horrible. But in Mexico there is a greater percentage of women in STEM than in feminist countries. That explanation is not consistent with many countries.
You've confused two things here. They are not talking about the amount of discrimination in the field in this case. What they are talking about is how different societies stereotype gender. Perhaps you think gender stereotypes are culturally universal, but they are not. It turns out that in societies where there is less economic opportunity, those same societies (on average) were less likely to have gone through as intense of a period where STEM was treated as a specifically male thing as compared to other career paths. This, in turn, may influence career paths in societies where there is greater freedom to make economic choices. This is conceptually distinct from the amount of discrimination women face. An example given was Maryam Mirzakhani. She is the only female Field's medal winner. She came from Iran. They claim that Iran,
despite the more severe gender discrimination, did not experience a period where math specifically was heavily stereotyped as a male thing.
When I was a child, there was a brief controversy over a barbie doll with some prerecorded phrases that included something like, "Math class is tough!" You might recall that a few years later the Simpon's made a parody episode based on that controversy. What got people in a tizzy was the potential to influence impressionable young girls by reinforcing the stereotype that math is for more than boys than girls. The idea here is this gender stereotyping may influence what women choose to do.
Interestingly, when that Barbie was made, boys did significantly better than girls (and men than women) at math. At the time, it was not uncommon to hear people argue that this is because men are inherently better at math and this will always be the case. I spent my entire elementary, middle school, and high school education in the most advanced math classes. There was usually just 1 or 2 girls in my classes and I recall as if it were yesterday people involved having the attitude that this is the natural order of things. But then young girls started doing better than boys at math. So the argument shifted to the idea that yeah, girls might be able to do
simple things like arithmetic as well or better, but higher level math involving mathematical abstraction? The male brain is more conducive to that. Then that too reversed. Teen females caught up to, and eventually passed their male counterparts. AP calculus classes? Women do better than men now. The gender gap reversal essentially rippled up the ranks of mathematical achievement with each step of the way having people argue that what male advantage remained was due to their biological advantage in the subject. Now, when women and men enter college, women on average outperform men in math in the US and the majority of economically developed societies. Go figure. My experience of gender gaps in math classes is a relic of the past. People who thought male-dominated math classes was a function of the order of nature should be embarrassed.
It's interesting to know why this happened. But it's a different story than whether math professions were, at the same time, being coded as something more male-oriented. You've taken this confounding explanation for what you are seeking to understand, applied seemingly zero thought, and went "Nah" to it based on nothing. I don't know if this is how you imagine science works, but it isn't.
What you said previously makes more sense, "Maybe there's a high discriminatory atmosphere in those fields compared to others, even in relatively gender equal societies, and this pushes women into fields where this is not as present. Perhaps in less gender equal societies, there isn't as sharp of a contrast because even more fields have such atmosphere, so the lucrative nature of the field and lowered economic opportunity causes them to be less adverse to it.".
It makes more sense, but it is still doubtful.
How did you determine this was an unlikely explanation?
