So, Vox has an article where they go in depth about what's behind the wage gap [0], and they ended up reaching an interesting observation about pharmacists:

> The wage gap for pharmacists has shrunk significantly because the profession has changed.

> In the 1970s, pharmacies were primarily independent and self-owned businesses. A single pharmacist might be responsible for keeping his or her shop open. The pharmacy would need to be open typical business hours; the owner would need to be available to do that.

> Now large chains own most pharmacies. And while you might get nostalgic for the mom-and-pop shops, you should know this change has been undeniably good for female pharmacists’ earnings.

> The majority of pharmacists are now women. And their wages have grown faster than those in other professional roles, like lawyers or doctors.

> Bigger pharmacies hired more pharmacists, and customers essentially saw the workers as interchangeable. Most patients don’t care about seeing a particular pharmacist — they just want to make sure they get the right medication.

> This meant it wasn’t important to be around 9 am to 5 pm — a shift from 6 am to 2 pm would do the pharmacy just as much good. And nobody accrued higher hourly wages for working exceptionally long hours.

And speaking of doctors, the article has this to say:

> You see this shift happening elsewhere too. Primary care doctors, for example, have shifted away from running one-person practices to joining larger, multi-doctor offices. In these situations, doctors become more interchangeable: When I go to my medical practice in downtown Washington, DC, I usually just want a doctor who can solve my problem — and I care less about which doctor is doing that.

The short version is that the Walmartization of professions has resulted in them becoming more amenable to women. If you want to correct the imbalance, a lot of programmers who think of themselves as auteurs are going to have to accept moving to a shift work model where individual professionals are interchangeable and might as well be anonymous. Startups are going to have to suck it up and accept that environments where employees are expected to work more than 8 hours per day are actively hostile to anyone responsible for rearing children (another thing the article points out: most child-rearing in the US is performed by women, even when both parents work).

[0] http://www.vox.com/2016/8/1/12108126/gender-wage-gap-explain...

Hum... In my country, pharmacies are still independent and self-owned businesses (it may be by law, so possibly 100%), but the profession has also shifted from a majority of men to almost only women.

So, I have doubts about the reasoning displayed in this article.

Not sure what country you refer to. In Australia though a similar requirement has become somewhat meaningless as the market is controlled by a few massive franchises.

So, what's to keep somebody from uncharitably interpreting those results as "Women do better in industries once the importance and contributions of an individual worker become irrelevant"?

That seems a bit harsh.

But the nature of the jobs hasn't changed. It's no less important for your pharmacist to give you the right medicine. What's changed is individual credit seeking and self promotion has been deemphasized.

I've seen this first hand in the legal industry. Business generation has shifted from getting a call from your golf buddy to formally pitching your team/strategy/rates. Meanwhile, 30% of GCs and new partners are women. Not a coincidence.

The claim was that pharmacists aren't running their own businesses anymore. It's hard to spin that as a win for 'equality' if the profits have been redirected to the executives and shareholders of medium-sized chains and Walmart.

Yeah. The way I read that is "Now that you can't make much money as a pharmacist, it's no longer attractive to men."

> But the nature of the jobs hasn't changed.

I don't know if that's really true. A lot of pharmacist jobs are essentially retail sales roles.

> Startups are going to have to suck it up and accept that environments where employees are expected to work more than 8 hours per day are actively hostile to anyone responsible for rearing children

Or I guess women just won't join startups?

And startups aren't the only places where women work more than 8 hours/day.

Maybe they just don't like CS or STEM fields in general? There's something called the Norwegian Gender Paradox. A Norwegian comedian made a documentary about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask.

There are 7 episodes but here is some of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70

Bascially, Norway is/was the most gender equal country in the world according to some index, yet the gender disparity in jobs is still very high. Apparently, the more advanced and gender equal a country is, the greater the disparity. The host of the documentary goes and finds some real scientists and they agree that biology plays a role.

Are we actually going to do further research even if the result is uncomfortable? If we find that biological differences are pushing girls to play with dolls and boys to play with trucks, are we going to stop pushing women to go into STEM fields?

> Maybe they just don't like CS or STEM fields in general?

Well that's facially not true: women receive more than 40% of the bachelors degrees in physical sciences, mathematics, and biological sciences.

> The host of the documentary goes and finds some real scientists and they agree that biology plays a role.

The issue I have with the biological evidence is the half-assed conclusions people want to draw from them. For example, it's pretty well established that women place a higher value on social connections than men. So that explains it, right? That explains why Silicon Valley, golden land of open offices built on software for advertising and chatting with your friends, has such a hard time attracting women! And that also explains why medicine and accounting, detail oriented left-brain jobs without much of a social component, attract a high percentage of women?

There is also evidence that women place a higher value on concensus and cooperation. That explains why programming, which involves working together to build things, has a much harder time attracting women than law, which involves being the proxy for acrimonious disputes between people.

> The issue I have with the biological evidence is the half-assed conclusions people want to draw from them.

I hope you place just as much skeptism on the research done in social sciences. Watch the documentary, not a single social science researcher in the doco had any evidence what so ever. They simply dismissed the any research that ran counter to their views.

> For example, it's pretty well established that women place a higher value on social connections than men. So that explains it, right? That explains why Silicon Valley, golden land of open offices built on software for advertising and chatting with your friends, has such a hard time attracting women!

That makes little sense. Having an open office is not going to make the people on opposite sides of the office get up and talk to each other if they really don't want to. And why would the act of writing social software be more social than writing other types of software?

> And that also explains why medicine and accounting, detail oriented left-brain jobs without much of a social component, attract a high percentage of women?

I am not a doctor or an accountant. I won't make assumptions about those professions. This may simply be the overlap area between men and women where these professions have things that appeal to both men and women almost equally.

I'm not suggesting individuals stick to their gender roles. If you want to go and do something, go do it. But I am suggesting that using employment numbers as a proxy for equality could be very wrong and encouraging one gender to do one thing or another could be a waste of time.

Remember, in the countries where gender equality is the best, gender sterotypes are still prevailant and the numbers remain stable. At the very least you have to question the idea that gender roles are enforced by society or that our ideas of what an equal society looks like is wrong.

Do women receive more than 40% of degrees in CS (or CS, maths, engineering, physics which I think are the other degrees likely to feed into a programming job)? My estimate is that the figure is more likely to be 5-20%.

Women receive 40-45% of the degrees in math and statistics, but less than 20% of degrees in CS. The percentage of CS degrees degrees awarded to women is down from 30% in the mid 1990s.

There is no rational "biological" explanation for why women would somehow be "biologically" averse to CS while pursuing degrees in a closely related field at much higher numbers. There is no "biological" explanation why women's interest in CS would drop dramatically over just a few decades.

Overall it may be true. But look at the break down. Here's the numbers from 2015.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2015/01/27/wo...