Car mechanics aren't all women, even though women's hands fit much better into all those tiny spaces in the dashboard and engine bay? Sexism
Nurses aren't overwhelmingly male, despite the fact that a significant part of the job is wrangling patients, who overwhelmingly skew obese? Sexism
I chose them as two things that don't often get cited as evidence of sexism (though mechanic isn't so dirty a job, and isn't dangerous at all. I have more personal awareness if mechanics, so that's what I chose.)
What makes you think it isn’t?
Go ahead, do your study. You'd probably find that most hospitals have a slight preference for male nurses as they're trying to increase their diversity for all the practical benefits it brings. (Yes, diversity has a lot of practical benefits. Having people with a lot of different backgrounds around significantly improves the odds of having someone around who can successfully interact with a person no one else can.)
So if hospitals, theoretically, have a slight preference for male nurses in hiring right now... Why are they so uncommon? Because there are fewer candidates.
Hiring isn't "the problem". No one thing is "the problem". There's no bad guy to blame. No evil cabal. You don't need to get upset every time someone points out a systemic bias.
You aren't being accused of anything. You aren't the bad guy. But it would be nice if you acknowledged things are a bit out of whack, and helped to reduce the skew in the next generation. You don't need to fix it. It's enough to occasionally point out things could be better.
>You aren't being accused of anything. You aren't the bad guy. But it would be nice if you acknowledged things are a bit out of whack, and helped to reduce the skew in the next generation. You don't need to fix it. It's enough to occasionally point out things could be better.
But who are you to say that the way a thing is done by everyone, everywhere, is out of whack? Perhaps you (and I) just don't have full knowledge of all motives and incentives?
This whole discussion misappropriates the term 'sexism' to make it meaningless just like racism has become a meaningless term.
Also, did you know that language changes? It's not a set of rules set down in a book somewhere. (Even French, much to their dismay.) Sexism may have meant only individual men demeaning women once, but it turns out it's a good word to describe all forms of bias based on sex or gender. So use of the term expanded. This isn't misappropriation, this is how language works.
The set of all relevant characteristics to evaluate 'potential' is either infinite or approximates infinite on the scale of human lifetimes and capabilities, not least of all because 'potential' is also the evaluation of that infinite list of characteristics across an infinite list of possible uses of one's time within some moral framework that must be used to determine which is the optimal solution. The practical implication is that 'statistical alignment with potential' is a fantasy, and anyone who indulges it will spend all their time trying to figure out how to amass and analyze the relevant information (and no time accomplishing anything else), which we can hopefully acknowledge is not the best use of potential.
>Also, did you know that language changes?
Please, don't be snide.
>It's not a set of rules set down in a book somewhere. (Even French, much to their dismay.) Sexism may have meant only individual men demeaning women once, but it turns out it's a good word to describe all forms of bias based on sex or gender. So use of the term expanded. This isn't misappropriation, this is how language works.
It's a good word to describe forms of bias because its prior meaning gets people's attention, because it is a word that means something that needs to be fixed. The extent of 'systemic sexism' far outpaces 'sexism', meaning that the first use will necessarily eclipse the second, eventually taking away the shock value and, in the meantime, it removes the significance of what was once an unambiguous and damning word. It is a loss of linguistic clarity for political expedience.
This is illegal hiring bias. It doesn't matter if a company thinks it'll perform better, it's against the law. If a company finds that male salespeople make more sales, are they justified in turning away women?
People have free will, life circumnstances seperate to corporate goals and a nature.
You can track a bias towards food and water that starts from birth and runs through all of society. We don't explain the lack of people in deserts as systemic waterism. Why do we see women working voluntarily with women in some roles as sexism when it has happened since the beginning of time?
The systematic worldview breaks down when it hits the nature of people. We aren't all pawns in a corporate game 24:7, so there are many reasons for people to work they way they do. One would hope they are freely choosing their work roles and not living their lives according to the dictats of gender equality statistics.
However, a lot of people seem to think that describing reality is an insult to them, so I have to explain further - this is a result of systemic sexism starting at early childhood. It starts with what toys children are given to play with. It continues via socialization in schools. It's propagated via every surprised face when a woman shows up to learn about technology. No individual person involved in the process might have any malice at all. It's the result of entire systems of behavior, no individual part of which can be described as "the problem". You might call it systemic sexism.
You don't have to be able to explain the entire method of operation to see the result. Is there a statistical difference in outcomes between groups that isn't explained by a difference between the groups? Then there's a systemic bias at work.