"the expressed preference may actually be something they loathe, but don't feel empowered to reject"

But we can ask them, right? We can ask e.g. nurses and computer programmers whether or not they loathe the choice of their profession. If there is e.g. relatively more computer programmers loathing it than nurses then you have an evidence of culturally pushed preference (towards computer programming, in this case), regardless what the gender ratio in those fields is.

"it matters a whole lot for purposes of an individual figuring out how to create a good life for themselves"

I already responded to that, basically I don't think it matters for an individual: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381148

No, you cannot just ask. It's more complicated than that, as Amartya Sen laid out in many publications on his capability theory. People have "adaptive preferences".[1]

For example, if you ask a women in a very poor rural region of India whether she wants to become an engineer, she might value the possibility far less than she would if that career choice was a realistic, valuable option for her in her current situation. Other typical examples would be slaves who prefer to remain slaves because they are not in a position to really imagine life as a free man, women who state that they prefer to wear a Burka, because they have been raised that way, or a peasant in feudal times who would only have very modest aspirations because he could not possibly imagine living the life of a nobleman whose higher rights were given by God.

More generally speaking, the underlying problem is that the so-called "preference satisfaction view" is false.[2: p. 4] That's the idea of classical welfare economics that people prefer what's best for them. As Broome puts it, nobody really believes it, but it forms the basis of many arguments and theorizing.

So you cannot just ask, although surveys can be used as (potentially fallible) indicators.

[1] https://www.iep.utm.edu/sen-cap/#SH1b [2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/ethics-out-of-economics...

Maybe people don't always prefer what's best for them, but I believe that even when they don't, they are the best arbiter of that. In other words, maybe they don't know what's best for them but then neither does anybody else.

I mean, when I talk about asking, you can make education part of the asking the question. I am certainly not against more education, like showing what is it like to be engineer.

I might disagree with women who decide willingly to wear burka, or decide to be slaves, even if they have a different choice, but as long as they make it freely, I have to respect that choice.

Go ahead and respect it! But the question was whether we can look at those expressed preferences and declare that our job is done and employment opportunities are fair. And the answer is absolutely not.

If I understand you correctly there is a short reply to your kind of critique in Section 5 of the first link I gave, under the subsection titled "Illiberalism". It's a viable critique that has been (and still is) discussed extensively, of course.

Interesting. I will have to think about it more, but I can't say I completely agree with Rawls either. I don't agree that economic value of things is completely subjective, either.

It seems to me that these problems should be addressed with education first, rather than by imposing someone else's preference on people (which is my main worry here). Therefore, that some rural Indian women might decide differently is not really transferable to decisions made by well-educated women in western postindustrial societies.

I'm not sure why you think that women saying they don't enjoy their careers in programming means they are being forced into programming. If you want to measure that, ask them that question directly. Most of the women I know who are dissatisfied with their programming careers have that opinion because (for example) they are constantly harassed and HR does nothing about it, or because people working with them regularly assume that they don't have the intellectual capacity for their jobs and treat them like children, not because they don't like the act of programming; with the way you are proposing to measure preferences, there would be no observable difference between those two things.

With the wast majority of the population (using Swedish data) working in industries that is gender segregated, there is plenty of studies asking why student switch program, people switch job, and people switching profession. In that there is an interesting pattern found a rather long time ago, which is that those in minority position has a significant higher ratio of leaving a profession compared to the majority. Equally for both male and female dominated professions.

So I usually look for common explanation for gender segregation that work both for women and men. 87.4% gender segregation for men and 87.6% for women is rather extreme, but it is also quite obvious that either there is a common cause or a massive coincident that both men and women end up working in mostly single gender work places.

I don't think we really disagree here. I am all for asking the question about preferences directly, and respecting the individual preference, whatever it is.

"Learned helplessness" is a thing. If people have been told their entire lives from birth that X is strictly Verboten and they can only answer Y to that question, they may literally be unable to tell you that. They may not really understand it themselves. It may be literally unspeakable and even unthinkable.

Is it a thing, or is it something made up by psychologists and social activists with an agenda?

It would appear to be unfalsifiable. If someone is sure they don't want X, and you're telling them they really do want X it's just that they've learned to be pathetic their whole life and now their entire thought process is inferior to yours, that seems not only like pseudo-science but actually a dangerously extreme belief.

It might well be a thing but I am not sure if I can truly (or should) help somebody who explicitly says that there is no problem and they don't need help. Assuming they are deemed to be legally competent.

I don't know what all else has been said to you here, but I am absolutely not asking you to help such people.

You said you don't understand why other people care so much about sorting out what is biological and what is cultural in origin. A few people (me included) engaged you in discussion to explain why other people might desire to get a better handle on this.

I have no idea why you jump from that to some idea that you personally are being expected to do anything for anyone other than let such research exist so that those who do care and need it can find such info.

I guess it's fine if you decide to help people who don't want the help according to their own preferences, but if you want to make the society at large to help (e.g. through some customs or laws), then I should have a say in it, as a society member.