And Men obviously care about being doctors and lawyers more than women, too, of course for the same reasons.

60 years ago >90% of lawyers and doctors were Men and because the desire to be a doctor or a lawyer is mostly dictated by a person's gender those statistics haven't changed at all!

> And Men obviously care about being doctors and lawyers more than women, too, of course for the same reasons.

... Yes? At least in countries such as US, where these people in those professions can make large amounts of money. In my country (Poland), up to very recently, doctors were poorly paid and thus large number of doctors were women.

The Last Psychiatrist: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-respecting_w...

>I don't want to be cynical, but boy oh boy is it hard not to observe that at the very moment in our history when we have the most women in the Senate, Congress is perceived to be pathetic, bickering, easily manipulated and powerless, and I'll risk the blowback and say that those are all stereotypes of women. Easy, HuffPo, I know it's not causal, I am saying the reverse: that if some field keeps the trappings of power but loses actual power, women enter it in droves and men abandon it like the Roanoke Colony. Again we must ask the question: if power seeking men aren't running for Senate, where did they go? Meanwhile all the lobbyists and Wall Street bankers are men, isn't that odd?

> And men care about both money and technical things much more than women

Stop this. These arguments are not only making massive assumptions but they are historically and factually wrong.

In the history of computing and computer science women formed a large chunk of computer science graduates and programmers. This decline started in 1984 when the culture and advertising shifted to market computers and such as being for boys. They were the pioneers of the computer science world and in an era where things were incredibly technical without the resources we take for granted.

Both facts that, on average, women are less interested in things (and more interested in people) and also women, on average, are less interested in money, have a solid backing in research. They're not factually wrong.

The field of software business changed rapidly in the 80s. It shifted from a fairly boring and low-paying thing, into an unpleasant and high-pressure field where fortunes were made, even for regular employees (the stock options lottery). Salaries also went way up. It was only natural that men became much more interested in it at that point, and women's interest waned (they're far less inclined to kill themselves in a pointless job to get that $500k salary).

That's also not true regarding the history of the software field. The explosion in engineer salaries is relatively recent. It was only post-2000s when it became a very lucrative field for engineers and by that point the percentage of women developers had dropped off. This was due to both companies shifting hiring strategies to focus specifically on hiring men as well a shift in advertising for home computers and deriding women.

Can you point me to your sources on companies shifting hiring strategies to focus specifically on hiring men? It's the first time I'm hearing about this.

In the '60s the common way programmers were interviewed were through aptitude tests. The standard at the time was the IBM Programmer Aptitude Test, but in the 70s and 80s that shifted to a new personality profile that inherently favored men [1] [2] [3] by Cannon and Perry. This became the new institutional standard and was used to determine who was a 'viable' programmer or not. This is where the traditional 'programmers are anti-social and hate people' thing came from and took root. In turn, advertising became male-focused, men were given more opportunity to become programmers and that's how the industry shifted. There's a bunch of very blatant advertising in the late-70s and early-80s that shows how this shifted.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/sc/how-bias-pushed-the-compu...

[2] https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/born-it-how-image...

[3] https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans-job-...

Interesting. If that was truly the case and was widespread in the 80s, it died with the eighties, as in the late nineties companies came back to truly meritorous hiring that doesn't care about personality (i.e. whiteboarding/leetcoding people to death, or doing weird pseudo-IQ question such as "how many gas stations are there in Manhattan"). Why couldn't women come back in then? The argument that they couldn't, because the field was stereotypically dominated by men by then is not convincing, because the reverse wasn't true (i.e. men moved into women dominated IT in the 80s without a problem, against the field stereotypes that it's for women).

It's because the stereotype changed, like I said. The new gold standard had the average programmer be 'male, nerdy, antisocial' and that was reflected by the rise of home computing being an almost exclusively young boy thing. The stereotype shifted in the 80s to computing being an activity for men, rates of women whom were computer science majors plummeted and it hasn't quite recovered. It hasn't quite died out because people still perpetuate the stereotype that the 1960s research study created.

You can see here in the chart that women were nearing 40% of all computer science majors in the mid-80s, followed by a sharp drop-off into below 20% today [1]. There's about a 15ish year lag period for changes in hiring, perception and stereotypes to catch up as people graduate, join the work force and cycle out.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

>they are historically and factually wrong

No, the money part is pretty accurate historically. Almost every field with high income historically attracted far more men than women once it became public knowledge. Job status and money are very disproportionately more important to men.

Which is why doctors and lawyers, two of the historically most highly paid and high status jobs, now graduate more women than men.

Or wait a second, I guess it isn't public knowledge doctors make a lot of money.

This is overly hostile and I don't really want to engage with it because of that.

To answer the question as coldly as I can:

1) Women are graduating from nearly all University programmes more than men.[0]

2) The role of Doctor is not as highly paid or prestigious as it used to be, at least in Europe.[1]

[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/08/whats-behin...

[1]: https://www.paragona.com/healthcare-jobseekers/where-would-y... ; cites a 70k average where a project manager will make an average of 99k: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/stockholm-project-manager...

Your prior is that women don't like technical things even though time and time again when women are given opportunities in various fields they excel. But I guess this time it's different!

I'm sorry that you consider it hostile to be exposed to the obvious truth that your incredibly self-motivated (you are a man after all) beliefs are the problem.

Actually it seems that the evidence is against you.

In the most unequal societies (Russia[0], India[1]) the tech industry is much closer to gender parity than in the west.

Sweden has gone further than any other nation on earth to be equitable across gendered lines yet remains extremely unequal in the actual working model. (In my former employer 14% of applicants were women, yet they constitute 20% of employed staff due to excessive D&I initiatives).

I should be self interested, we’re talking about competition for work. It would be death to roll over. Jobs are absolutely zero sum-

However my argument is backed by statistics, so I think you need to face the reality in front of you.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39579321

[1]: https://go.451research.com/women-in-tech-india-employment-tr...

This is not the gotcha you think it is.

Sibling already pointed some things out. Specifically for doctors, go ahead and look up what specializations men go into primarily and what specializations women go into primarily. The only high paying one I noticed being particularly female-dominated is dermatology, and it's not that much of a difference. The male-dominated specialties tend to have far more high earning specializations, and the ratios are far more skewed too.

As for lawyers, I can't speak except for the fact lawyers work more akin to salesmen and make a lot of money based on performance, and once again, historically speaking, men have always dominated on anything performance-based. Law is an exception, and it's an extremely poor one at that.

As for both, both medicine / biomedical sciences and law pale in comparison to every other field known to both pay well and do so with high security still being largely in favor of men, whereas fields with low pays and low security tend to be dominated by women. Most STEM fields women dominate aren't known for paying well compared to the ones men dominate. Comparing those fields to social sciences is a no-brainer. All of this still excludes entrepreneurship and high-paying blue collar work still being dominated by men.

None of this exempts the fact historically, women have never chased money through career nearly as much as men, and have always placed far higher value on a man's status than vice versa. There are cultural reasons why this has changed, and none of those reasons are necessarily pointing towards improvements. We can open this entire can of worms if you so desire, but it will go far too off-topic for this.

It has not occurred to you that the historical data shows evidence of bias instead of evidence of choice and that's fascinating.

Oh please, do yourself a favor and perform a very simple litmus test. Ask how many men are willing to date homeless women and vice versa.

What's fascinating is how people are trying to avoid talking about the obvious motivator for men not present in women, and how the slow death of that motivator is affecting things.

Take a look in the mirror before trying to subtly call someone ignorant, would you?

You are very convinced your 80s stand-up comedy stereotypes are accurate and it's deeply funny.

I'm trying to see the charitable way of interpreting this but all I can see is an intent to emotionally wound someone else. there's absolutely nothing in what you just said that can be considered constructive.

the parent was at least trying to make a reasoned point, even if you don't agree with him.

This is Hacker News not Prime Ministers Questions. We're here for intellectual curiosity, some measure of vulnerability and open discussion.

Calling people bigoted or old fashioned isn't swaying anyone, if anything it will push people away because as soon as someone says "they've got a point there" and there's backlash instead of a rebuttal: you've lost another person.

I suggested the parent consider the data shows bias instead of choice and the parent responded with an obviously outdated and generalized stereotype.

There was not reason in the parent's point, and I believe such arguments have no right to be treated as serious.

Men behavior is at least partially shaped by dating dynamics. Women tend to prefer partners with higher social and economic status than themselves. Men care less. Search term hypergamy

edit: typo

Guess women are just easily manipulated by the evil Big Computer Science Lobbyists.