If you are one of those who believe that men are congenitally disposed to prefer working with things and women to prefer working with people, these numbers offer some support for your position.
Some support? If you go to his post, you will find that every single one of the top male occupations involves things, and the top 9 female occupations involve people. This has to be one of the most powerful separations in all of social research.
Pointer from Mark Thoma.
Once we finally push a bunch of women into computer science returns to that skill set will probably decline (reminds me of the adage: short whatever industry HBS grads are going into in droves). At that point I’m sure it will be considered some conspiracy that all these women are working for low wages.
Damore just said this on Twitter:
In the “crying 30 year olds” society, I can imagine Justin Fox saying something like, “If you are one of those people who believe that Santa Claus is a myth, satellite imagery of the arctic showing no sign of elves working or flying reindeer stabled at a workshop anywhere near the North Pole, not to mention the perfect 1-to-1 correspondence between parent-purchased gifts and child-received gifts attributed to Santa, offers some support for your position.”
They missed some occupations that are rapidly flipping to female dominated. Right now, Veterinary Medicine isn’t female-dominated, but it soon will be — the students in the pipeline are 80% women. Curiously, a couple of other well-paid occupations flipping to female could be put in the ‘things-rather-than-people’ category (Accounting, and Pharmacy). But both, of course, are indoor jobs that don’t involve heavy lifting. The same is now true of most Veterinary Medicine. My understanding is the degree used to require both large and small animal training but was split into separate tracks. Men still dominate large animal work, but practitioners are fewer, earnings are much lower and, of course, it’s potentially dangerous outdoor work requiring physical strength.
Yet another factor — the disappearance of independent business owners in these fields. Most vets and pharmacists used to own their own businesses, but increasingly most are employees of large chains:
http://adage.com/article/cmo-interviews/amid-packaged-goods-dreams-service-plays-mars/302570/
This is a change that seems far more attractive to women than men — being a business owner means more status and the potential for greater earnings. Being a W2 employee means greater flexibility and lower risk. One of the big attractions of the building trades for men may be that small, independent owner-operated businesses are still the norm.
Bottom line — I think ‘things vs people’ is too simple. There are other important factors driving men and women into different occupations.
I personally think risk tolerance, which you mention, is the most important of those additional factors.
Accounting is interesting. Yes, woman are starting to dominate. And unlike tech companies, accounting firms are having a hard time finding qualified men. One of my theories is accounting pays well and for women not good at science or math, and not wanting law, it is about the best choice around from a money standpoint. Smart men will more likely go into engineering, and men being better at science/math per Larry Summers, women fall to accounting. Also, with advent of computers doing a lot of the “working with things” stuff involved in accounting, it really has become more of a working with people profession.
Justin Fox linked to an earlier article by Scott Alexander (http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/) that explains that the gender gap in many occupations can be mostly explained by the things/persons preference in men, and he links to the relevant research. Since the research is strong and the difference is large, Alexander is not shy about that this is probably the primary explanation for the gender gap in many occupations.
Stephen Hsu asked the question of the year, “If I worked at Google would this blog post get me fired?”
Not just fired, but placed on the Silicon Valley blacklist. Good luck getting hired anywhere else in the top 20 after that, even if you win some lawsuit.
The trouble is, as Conor Friedersdorf has pointed out, it’s hard to tell, because like almost every other organization in the country, Google doesn’t provide a list of what can and cannot be said or what must and must not be believed.
Instead it relies on a vague and ambiguous set of principles and guidelines in a code of conduct, and they maintain effectively sole discretion to interpret those principles in any way they want to, which shifts every day with prevailing ideological fashions. Any employment contract clause that can only be interpreted by the employer is fundamentally illusory. And case law doesn’t provide any clarification for the ordinary person either. And even if it did, the idea that an ordinary citizen and employee would need to consult a PC-lawyer before he opens his or her mouth is simply incompatible with the essential ingredients of anything even pretending to be a free and open society.
So, like Scott, I have not been impressed with the Libertarians who naively insist private companies must be allowed to do anything they want in this regard. The open market for goods and services must not be allowed to become a hammer to crush the open market for ideas.
“So, like Scott, I have not been impressed with the Libertarians who naively insist private companies must be allowed to do anything they want in this regard. ”
The problem for Damore really isn’t what Google did. Ordinarily a smart guy with his background and experience would easily find another Silicon Valley job. You suspect he won’t, and maybe you’re right. But why? Because of Google’s power? No — Google isn’t going to use its influence to prevent other companies from hiring him. What will make him unemployable — if that happens — is that other companies fear the same kind of twitter outrage mob and media smear campaign that Google caved in to when it fired him (Google had no intention of firing him when the memo was purely internal and there was no outside publicity). So the problem wasn’t the power of Google but rather the greater power of the mob which Google felt unable to resist.
Google, like other big businesses, also justifiably fears the courts, which increasingly employ reasoning similar to the outrage mobs and media smear-mongers. Fear of the courts is a major motivator for the diversity obsession throughout corporate and professional America.
My impression is that fear of “the courts” (and state and federal agencies that launch or back discrimination lawsuits) is secondary to a combination of genuine ideological sympathy with, and also fear of, the mob. If it was just the courts, one wouldn’t see things like Mozilla purging Brendan Eich over making a private campaign contribution. If it was just the courts, companies would feel free to admit, “We are legally obligated to terminate so and so,” without having to conspicuously signal that it’s what they really believe deep in their hearts, which produces negative sentiments and some loss of good will in a good portion of the populace, just as it did in Google’s case.
The fact that a Republican Congress and President could actually do something about those courts and agencies and suits and don’t (and show no signs of doing so) is yet another argument in favor of the cause being the control high status progressive elites have over what is considered respectable public opinion.
I don’t disagree, Handle, but I do think fear of the courts, bureaucrats and progressive politicians play a role – probably a greater role back in the 70s and 80s when this cult took root.
Mr. Damore is no doubt right about Google, but his prospective law suit is unfortunate. A job is not a possession. It is a relationship. An employee who may quit on a whim should be fireable on a whim – no questions asked in either case. That’s not naivete, it’s freedom. And, what Slocum said: If you have a bone to pick, it’s with the mob.
How exactly would Damore take up his issue with the mob? Where is it located? Who can he negotiate with?
Moreover, its hard to believe that Google is really afraid of the mob. When push comes to shove, the mob can’t actually force Google to do anything. It can just give people a hard time, but if you decide to have a backbone about it the mob can’t do anything about it.
In 1776 perhaps if you’ve got an unpopular opinion then oh well just go work on your farm and what are the haters going to do about it. Having an unpopular opinion wasn’t a threat to making a living, because most peoples livings were independent.
In the modern economy if you want to do something more then be a barista you need access to large and powerful institutions. So if the large institutions blacklist you then effectively your doomed to not being able to make a living. And that likely also means doomed to not being able to start and provide for a family (who wants to marry a nobody), so basically your frozen out of living any kind of life worth living. There is no farm you can go back to and earn your own keep and ignore the mob.
The purpose of free speech is so that a marketplace of ideas can be used to advance society. If certain ideas mean “game over” for any kind of life worth living then we no longer have a marketplace of ideas. So all you end up with is ideological purity spirals. It matters little whether the government was involved at any point in that equation, though once the private marketplace of ideas has become narrow enough don’t be surprised when all good thinking people vote to enforce what’s already become the norm.
Moreover, its hard to believe that Google is really afraid of the mob.
They’re afraid of mob protests and boycotts and bad publicity. They’re also afraid of the justice department in the next Democratic administration coming after them with renewed vigor over their male-majority engineering workforce. And, of course, the mob, the media (who intentionally misreported the memo) and Democratic politicians aren’t exactly strangers (being the target of the SJW online mob will increase the probability of being treated badly in the media and also the probability of drawing the ire of federal bureaucrats).
But in any case, Google’s ‘power’ certainly isn’t what may cause Damore difficulty in finding his next job.
If Justin had posted the chart of Jobs Cambodian People Do, it would be top heavy with “Operating Donut Stores”. Or “Fingernail and Toenail Maintenance” on the list of Jobs Vietnamese People Do. There are fascinating stories behind these statistics, and they defy biological, cultural, and sociological explanations.
A classic in that field is Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York (1964) by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It found that the Irish were “overrepresented” in the police, Italians in construction, etc.