Or rather, another (better) way to ask the question, is "Why are the obsessive, power-hungry, workaholics who hold these positions, primarily men?" Rather than "Why do men do better than women?
Look, I’m pretty much an obsessive workaholic myself (getting better now that we’ve got kids) and I was making about 5x of what my wife was making when I met her. She’s got a 4 year degree from a nice private university and I went to state university.
She is absolutely every bit as smart and hard working as I am, but she never wanted a career in an office.
In our first few years together I helped her with her resume, suggested all the work she was doing would absolutely qualify her for making at least twice as much as she was making and she just didn’t want to play the game. She wanted to be a mom, and didn’t even want to play the game until motherhood showed up.
If she did what I do every day (at now almost 20x what she was making when I met her) she’d jump out a window.
Conversely I wouldn’t take double the pay I’m making to stay home with the kids, I love ‘em, but jeez- I don’t know how my wife does it.
She would definitely not consider herself doing better if we swapped places. And I think that’s the key. Man or woman, some people just don’t have the same goals, and running a company and making lots of money don’t necessarily play any part in what they aspire to do.
What does "genetically wired" mean?
In the article it spoke of woman being better at school work and it says woman are more conscientious than men in school work. Conscientiousness is another big 5 personality trait and women do score slightly higher on average than men in this trait they score 51.5 on average while men score 49.5 on average. They score higher on the orderliness part of conscientiousness while men score higher in the industriousness part. Women outscore men in orderliness 54.5 to 45.5 and men slightly outscore woman in industriousness 51.5 to 49.5.
The article also says that woman are more anxious about their school work. In my opinion this is probably due to the fact that woman score higher on neuroticism than men. Neuroticism just means you’re more prone to negative emotions such as fear and anxiety.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
As for the legitimacy of the Big 5 from what I've heard the big 5 personality test is one of the better ways to determine personality in psychology. Wikipedia seems to say this about the big 5s acceptance in Psychology [0].
> In a 1980 symposium in Honolulu, four prominent researchers, Lewis Goldberg, Naomi Takemoto-Chock, Andrew Comrey, and John M. Digman, reviewed the available personality instruments of the day.[1] This event was followed by widespread acceptance of the five-factor model among personality researchers during the 1980s.[2]
As far as putting personality solely due to being a matter of Sex I am not saying that. I'm not saying all men or women are like this just on average this is the way their personalities are. I feel these differences on average might explain a lot of the things brought up in the article. As an example of not every man and woman having the same personality traits even though I am male I score much higher than the average woman on agreeableness. This just means I need to be more careful when negotiating salary or being taken advantage of, which trust me in at least subtle ways that may not even be on purpose from the perpetrator I get taken advantage of because of my personality all the time. Higher agreeableness isn't all bad for those who have it, because there are disadvantages to low agreeableness too. People low in agreeableness are more likely to commit crimes. It stated on my understandmyself.com report that low agreeableness is one of the major reasons there are more men behind bars (as opposed to women), because they are more likely to commit these crimes. Here's a clip from a research paper about the big 5 traits and crime if you don't believe that personalities could explain that difference [3]:
> Big Five and criminal behaviour
> Within the criminological literatures, studies have shown that certain traits are highly associated with a wide range of criminal behaviours. For example, Wiebe noted that among the “Big Five” components of trait personality, agreeableness and conscientiousness have been found to be predictive of adult criminal behaviour. Earlier, John et al. found that delinquents aged 12-13 years old who had engaged in burglary, drug dealing, and strong arming behaviour scored lower on Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness and obtained higher scores on Extraversion than non-delinquents. Heaven found neuroticism in addition to agreeableness and conscientiousness to be predictive of delinquent behaviour.
Wikipedia's page on Personality [4] seems to think highly enough about the Big 5 personality traits to feature it on its page. Notice you won't find mention of Meyer's Briggs (which has personality types encoded as INFJ, ESTP, etc.) at all on that page even though Meyer's Briggs seems to be a popular test among non-psychologists I've heard it is not very popular for psychologists.
To quote wiki's Personality page on the Big 5 personality test [4]:
> Personality is often broken into statistically-identified factors called the Big Five, which are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (or emotional stability). These components are generally stable over time, and about half of the variance appears to be attributable to a person's genetics rather than the effects of one's environment.[5][6]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Re...
[1]:Goldberg LR (May 1980). Some ruminations about the structure of individual differences: Developing a common lexicon for the major characteristics of human personality. Symposium presentation at the meeting of the Western Psychological Association (Report). Honolulu, HI.
[2]: Saville & Holdsworth Ltd. (1984). Occupational Personality Questionnaires manual. Esher, Surrey: Saville & Holdsworth Ltd.
[3]: http://www.aseanjournalofpsychiatry.org/index.php/aseanjourn...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality
[5]: Lucas & Baird 2004, pp. 473-485
[6]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263324524_Genetic_a...
Also, what are "behavioural traits"? Is picking one's nose a "behavioual trait", for example? Is that associated with one's chromosomes?
>>How are chromosomes associated with behaviour?
The same way they're associated with physiological traits. Personality traits are not all learned. There is a large genetic effect on behaviour. There is plenty of scientific evidence for this.
>>Is picking one's nose a "behavioual trait", for example?
How am I supposed to know that? Why would any researcher conduct a study to uncover that?
The top positions are dominated by obsessive workaholics. In my opinion women are genetically wired to focus more on family. Long hours and business travel heavily cut into caring for family. I'm not making a value judgement, just an observation. While I do believe there is gender discrimination at work: people tend to hire clones of themselves, there are biological factors also.