Men are pressured to be breadwinners, so they are more likely to pick careers based on pay.

Women are not pressured to be breadwinners, so they're more likely to pick careers that sound fulfilling and satisfying, but are less lucrative.

Media likes to focus on the pay gap, but has anyone investigated the fulfillment and satisfaction gap? I wouldn't be surprised if overall men are less fulfilled and satisfied by their jobs.

Men are typically raised from a young age that you do defines your worth. Women are typically raised with the idea that they have value in and of themselves. There are pros and cons to both sides of encouragement.

Too many women are raised to believe not that they have value in and of themselves but that their value is in their reproductive potential.

I'd say both men and women at some level value themselves in their attractiveness to the opposite sex. Women feel value by being attractive to men. And Men feel value by being attractive to women. Men are attracted to women who display youth and beauty as a proxy for reproductive value, and women are attracted to wealth and status as a proxy for support.

Sure, but women are taught (mostly subconsciously but in some ways explicitly) that their primary value as human beings is in physical attractiveness when young, in their fertility in their 20s, and in their ability to nurture when older.

We teach men that their value is in their accomplishments, which is a) more empowering; b) more under their control; and c) more conducive to independence and pursuit of self-realization (in career or in other aspects of life), positions of power, and yes, powerful and high-paid careers.

Men are not valued for their accomplishments, they are valued for their resources and ability to gain more resources. No where in any data that I have seen, for example dating, can we see that people who travel or achieve personal accomplishments are out competing people with wealth.

For example, let say we take two groups of men in the age of 30. Those in group A have traveled and accomplished a bunch of personal goals, but are at this point jobbing at minimum wage jobs. Those in group B stayed put and studied and work hard to position themselves at high earning jobs. Which group is rewarded highest by society? My bet if they did such study would be group B with a very clear margin.

Men are being taught that their primary value as human is to chase wealth. This causes men take more risk, die at a earlier age, and have a smaller social network to take care of them at old age. Regardless of gender, neither men or women live a life of roses, and being valued for physical attractiveness rather than wealth has benefits and drawbacks.

The difference is that it is generally easier to swap money for fulfillment and satisfaction than the other way around.

Most men may agree with you because they're socialized to think that way. Most women may not.

I think you're misunderstanding me.

If I have a high income, I have many options to swap that for fulfillment and satisfaction. I can buy stuff, I can go on interesting vacations, I can have expensive hobbies, I can donate to charities, and I can partake in a large number of experiences that are only available to those who can afford it. And finally, I can give it all up and pursue a life of simpler pleasures. Those are all options I have.

If I have a low income, I might still feel satisfied and fulfilled, but that could change. What options do I then have?

Women seek men with resources to reproduce with. Men tend to only care about youth/fertility. It's not like men can start reproducing with women who are no longer fertile, so they can't possibly lower the bar any further. Since women don't have social pressure to gather resources in order to reproduce, men are going to dominate in higher paying professions. This is similar to the same argument Christopher Hitchens famously made in his Vanity Fair article about why women aren't funny. It's not that women can't be funny, obviously many are. It's that they don't need to be funny to get laid.

https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/01/hitchens200701

If you want to resolve this problem you need to either ask women to lower the bar and not seek men with resources or ask men to raise the bar and demand that women not only be youthful/fertile, but also have resources. Good luck.

Now that is an explanation I can get behind. I think that there is a degree to which society socializes women to prefer lower paid jobs. That I think is absolutely legitimate. But the idea that sexism causes us to value those jobs less is, I think, absurd.

That's such a silly article. There are so many confounding factors as to make any attempt at determining causation specious. Women's employment rate grew massively over that time period. This means that jobs requiring no specialized skills would receive an influx of job seekers. If we assume the employment rate of men stayed the same over that period, we would expect all jobs that require no specialized skills or physical demands would reduce in wages as the demand for those jobs increased. As far as computer programming goes, it literally was a clerical job early on. Wages rose as the job started requiring more specialized skills (which apparently women couldn't or didn't want to get).

i think one forgotten issue is the part-time economy. I know in retail just as the work shifted to part time on demand hours, women's participation increased because it's easier for women to work part time than men.

In other news, economists discover that supply and demand balance to create price! When the supply of a thing goes up but the demand doesn't, the price goes down.

>The problem is gender roles. Men are taught by society to think that, as men, they should go into certain careers. These careers, like software development, tend to be higher paid than the careers women are encouraged to go into.

Kinda works both ways as an argument. If they were so concerned about pay, they can try and negotiate for more. Men are taught/encouraged to do this more from a young age. If you want to be paid more, you gotta haggle, you can't just accept the price on the sticker.

or it could be these careers speak more to women's aspirations than others. If an important goal for a woman is to have a family and children, working at higher paid jobs that require tremendous hours and travel are not going to be attractive. If the same is for men, likewise...the family man who turns down traveling or relocating, and can't work massive overtime will see his prospects decline too.

A lot of the problem with gender roles is many feminists have internalized male actions as the norm and female actions as inferior...so they see women as underpaid over as having the flexibility to raise a family

In some countries. China, India, Romania, Ukraine and a few others seem to have no shortage of women going into STEM.

actually that even starts in the early life. with barbie or special lego's just for women.

p.s.: my niche loves my old lego's more than the girlish ones.

"taught by society"

feel free to source that in a way that can be proven. The assertion is just pseudo intellectual excuse making. Society is NOT telling women to NOT be sanitation workers. Society is not telling women not to work on offshore oil rigs. Society is not telling women not to be surgeons but to in fact be veterinarians. Society and "gender role" excuses don't hold up to reality. Time to accept that the women you know, or imagine you know make their choices, largely based on their own interests.

You're welcome to try to convince women to become sanitation workers rather than paralegal interns in climate controlled offices. Good luck on that.

I don't see how you can possibly claim that society doesn't discourage women from pursuing "manly" careers. By the same token men are discouraged from pursuing "feminine" careers.

If a man says they are going to work on an offshore oil rig they are much less likely to get societal push back than a woman because it is seen as a normal thing for a man to do but not a woman.

If a woman is an elementary school teacher it is considered completely normal, whereas men are often looked down upon for doing so. The same happens with male nurses.

How can you read all the stories about sexual harassment in our industry and not think women are being discouraged from pursuing careers in tech?

You're just saying words, you've got no examples of where rubber meets the road. Just that "men are looked down upon for being elementary school teachers" What? Where? And female oil rig workers get "societal pushback" Again just words. Where? How? You've got nothing here so far.

I mean if you want to talk about cultural influence there's way more news articles celebrating women doing various things, celebrating women entrepreneurs, women soldiers, women and minority events and special recognition or conferences.

Read all the stories about sexual harassment? Anecdotally I've seen just as much sexual language coming from women in IT as men in terms of workers. Project mgrs, network admins, probably a few more. And those instances were miniscule and didn't make up anywhere near a day to day problem for people.

I have seen instances where a guy who was being a dick treated women poorly. He got a talking to and cut that out. I've seen women take their day out on men and women and never got any kind of talking to. It's really funny you're pointing to some sort of dysfunction and not demonstrating or sourcing anything but "all those stories"

It's not just our industry, ever hear the horror stories of women breaking into other male dominated fields like policing?

The idea that there aren't multiple forces, often brutal ones, nudging men and women into particular fields is just preposterous.