The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

Re:The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018) by roenxi on Thursday December 12, 2019 @05:03PM (#21777031)

I'd hope if women had thought about the serving example they would have made the same choice out of a sensible respect for setting up the future. A society that keeps their women from dying needless deaths has a reproductive advantage over societies that send them into the meat grinder - the protective society can produce more children after the conflict. From a quick and lazy glance at some statistics [0] losing a young man in 1945 is statistically losing a man, losing a young women is more like statistically losing 6 people (1 now, 5 next generation). The baby boom doesn't work out as well as it did if a big group of women just died off.

Equality of opportunity to die serving a country is all very well, but until men figure out how to operate wombs without women there are practical differences when deciding who is risks probable death. The situation has probably changed now that growing populations no longer looks like an easy win but the calculus goes a bit beyond 'men just didn't like the idea'. Men didn't like the idea because it is an objectively bad idea in an era where population really mattered. The women probably agreed with that one on the whole.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018) by johntiger1 on Thursday December 12, 2019 @07:01PM (#21777878)

Wow, extremely insightful point, and did not realize that! But it makes sense when we consider it from a biological standpoint: men are needed "temporarily" in the reproductive process to put it mildly. Perhaps this explains the slow growth of the soviet union after ww2 (# of women killed serving in the military)?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018) by foldr on Thursday December 12, 2019 @05:13PM (#21777132)

>Men didn't like the idea because it is an objectively bad idea in an era where population really mattered.

This is an argument that's rarely if ever been used against allowing women to serve in the military. I think it's the argument that you'd like people to make rather than an argument that people have actually historically made.

More broadly, if you see women primarily as baby machines, then military service should be the least of your worries when it comes to fertility.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018) by roenxi on Thursday December 12, 2019 @05:45PM (#21777424)

Well it is is pretty obvious to me that in day to day practice women were kept out of the army because (as sibling poster) they are physically worse fighters than men by raw strength. But it is also pretty obvious to me that over the centuries brilliant military planners would have regularly thought about using women on the front lines and then rejected the idea for much better reasons than 'I'm a sexist'. The stereotypes here aren't arbitrary, an unbiased thinker would have reasonably reached the same practices.

And we can't really say for certain that what everybody thought was controlling what happened. What everybody thinks and what actually happens in, eg, banking and finance are completely different. The people in control are not the people talking on the street.

> More broadly, if you see women primarily as baby machines, then military service should be the least of your worries when it comes to fertility.

Call me old fashioned but I'm ruling out the idea that men are the primary baby making engine of humanity.

On your actual point; the fact that there are other things to think about doesn't stop people thinking about this specific thing. The US lost 400,000 servicemen in WWII without really even seeing a foreign invasion; those sort of numbers absolutely should involve someone asking the question 'who can we most and least afford to lose?'. The militaries of the world are not warm and happy-go-lucky organisations. They ask quite unpleasant questions all the time.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018) by foldr on Thursday December 12, 2019 @05:53PM (#21777503)

>Well it is is pretty obvious to me that [...]

I think you are just advancing your own arguments against allowing women to serve in the military here, not actually giving any evidence that these arguments were widely used in opposition to women's military service. That's a tangent.

Incidentally, in the broader context of this thread, this is exactly the kind of fringe content that just might give women the impression that the tech community has a sexism problem.

>Call me old fashioned but I'm ruling out the idea that men are the primary baby making engine of humanity.

I think you misread. I said "if you see women primarily as baby machines", not "if you see women as the primary baby machines".

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018) by zarkov99 on Thursday December 12, 2019 @05:31PM (#21777283)

And of course, obviously, men were better at fighting than women. So the risk/reward was completely off.

[ Parent | on HN ]