> that by all accounts have less gender quality
> than the west but have more women science
> graduates. India is double the U.K. on that metric.
How do you conclude "social construct" from that data? When external pressures are greater, gender differences equalize. When external constraints fall away, gender differences are allowed to express themselves. So it is no surprise that self-segregation is pretty much directly and positively correlated to measures of societal progress and gender equality. Just to repeat that: the more egalitarian and progressive the society, the more the genders self-segregate in the workplace.
Here's a quote from a BBC article asking "Why is Russia so good at encouraging women into tech?" The answer is in the article: necessity.
"Most of the girls we talked to from other countries had a slightly playful approach to Stem, whereas in Russia, even the very youngest were extremely focused on the fact that their future employment opportunities were more likely to be rooted in Stem subjects." -- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39579321
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010....
"Most importantly and contra predictions, we showed that economically developed and more gender equal countries have a lower overall level of mathematics anxiety, and yet a larger national sex difference in mathematics anxiety relative to less developed countries."
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
"Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (N = 17,637)."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18179326
"What might be surprising to most people, as we shall see, is the specific pattern of cross-national variation in the gender gap in authority. To cite just one example, in the United States, the probability of a man in the labor force occupying an "upper" or "top" management position is 1.8 times greater than the probability of a woman occupying such a position, whereas in Sweden, the probability for men is 4.2 times greater than for women."
https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/Published%20writing/CC-C9.p...
Your move.
India has massive and pervasive poverty and tech especially is seen as a way out of poverty. Many programmers there earn 5x the average wage.
Comparing that to the UK where programmers are not paid particularly well compared to other professions is disingenuous.
In my whole life I haven't faced a single situation where parents literally force a doll on their daughter instead of a Lego Kit. You are over stating the whole problem.
>>This is entirely parents projecting gender norms onto their kids.
Kids are not bots that you train them. Acceptance into peer groups is a major factor, and most kids gravitate to what friends around them are doing, or they go to friends whose area of interest attracts them.
Also I'm not a great fan of forcing things on kids. People should do what they are interested in, else it creates meaningless pressure and kids are generally slotted and forced to make up to unrealistic expectations from parents.
Here in India, this is a huge problem where every single parent wants their kids to get into STEM. Most don't want to and when they do bad at school and exams, they have to face routine humiliation among social circles and peer groups as losers. Many are driven to suicide. These people will do way better in other walks of life and must be allowed to.
>>The expectation was that an upper class woman would be educated so she could marry well, not for work.
As an Indian where social norms are similar to an extent this is not only ok, but rather even preferable.
If you look at how life unfolds here, there is massive pressure on men to be efficient and provide for their families to the best of their abilities. This not easy, forget about all this empowerment new age talk, in reality most men slog away whole life, working insane hours, doing weekends and working very difficult conditions to make it happen.
This is hard for women to do for many reasons beyond the scope of this discussion. Given this, financial security becomes way more important than making up to virtue signaling from other people. Hence marrying a rich spouse that can provide for life is more important than making careers in our culture.
For most men here, things don't feel like freedom and empowerment. Its a swim through an ocean of hellfire to provide for families.
I would be more than happy to sit at home and be oppressed. And let women have all this empowerment. But deep down everybody knows what the real deal is, which is why no one signs up for something like this.
>>Kids are not bots that you train them. Acceptance into peer groups is a major factor, and most kids gravitate to what friends around them are doing, or they go to friends whose area of interest attracts them.
US female, born in 1977. By the time I reached sentient age, my mother had bought, and encouraged relatives to buy for me, literally dozens of dolls, because she had decided at my birth that I would "collect" dolls. I was never very interested in the dolls and she never "forced" me to play with them, but the expectation was nonetheless clear.
For my slightly younger brother, Transformers and Star Wars figures were bought. I played with his toys and preferred them to my own "girl" toys, but it never occurred to me to ask my parents to buy "boy" toys for me. I think they would have if I had asked, but the environment I (and they) grew up in was such that I (and they) were incapable of conceiving of the possibility.
And of course other girls at my elementary school had grown up in the same environment, so all I learned from my peer group/friends was to be interested in stereotypically girly things.
I agree that "society" is such a vague term as to be almost useless, but it doesn't make sense to assume all this behavior is based on conscious decisions by people truly aware of their own preferences (and the alternatives among which they can select a preference).
Perhaps money is still a better motivator than gender equal society.
The problem is, even if they didn't do that what about parents who grew up thinking that and then project it on their kids? What about TV and other media consumption that shows stereotypical roles?
It's hard to account for and eliminate all types of gender roles because many are more subtle and / or "normal" to most people who grew up with it.
A quick anecdote: my daughter, who loves science and computers, was playing 'house' with her classmates in preschool when several children told her she had to play the role of mommy while they go out and work in this pretend scenario they created. This made my daughter think "I want to be a boy because girls can't have cool jobs". Those kids she was playing with weren't ever told this is how things had to be but they all had stay-at-home moms so they just assumed it was normal and how things are supposed to be. My wife is also a stay-at-home mom which likely helped reinforce it regardless of how much encouragement we both give our daughter.
So everything influences kids. It's hard to control for all of these variables.
Parents claim they've learned nature trumps nurture. They gave girl firetrucks, found her tucking the firetruck to bed. Parents conclude it's the nurturing feminity.
Psych asks "who tucks her to bed every night?". Oops.
At the end of the day, part of being a good adult and parent in 2017 is not just accepting whatever constructs * you feel "society" is shoving down your throat. Think critically to form your own principles and beliefs, and act on them (so long as they are within the bounds law). Obviously this is easier said than done, and also there are probably places on earth where this isn't feasible. But I feel that in most of the developed world it is.
* not you rayiner, I mean you third person (I'm not accusing you of being a bad adult/parent!)
Social construct. Look at Asian countries that by all accounts have less gender quality than the west but have more women science graduates. India is double the U.K. on that metric.
The fact that Sweden has skewed representation doesn't capture what I call the "princesses and fairies" problem. Just because society doesn't explicitly discriminate against women doesn't mean that it's not telling women that they should be interested in princesses and fairies instead of legos. My daughter, four, is the only one of a few girls in the STEM programs I signed her up for at summer camp. This is entirely parents projecting gender norms onto their kids.
My mom grew up in bangladesh in the 1960s. She majored in chemistry as did several of her sisters. The expectation was that an upper class woman would be educated so she could marry well, not for work. But the western gender norm about women being suited for certain professions doesn't exist.