On how culture shapes what is considered meaningful, why this impacts women disproportionately and why pro-abundance movements need to pay attention to this
I would even take this argument one step further. All of the pro-social stuff the government does, health care and food for the poor, foreign aid, public health initiatives etc. is funded by the people who didn't work at NGOs and instead decided to do the work that makes the economy function. Every Canadian taxpayer is a coauthor on the work done by my academic laboratory. Doing high-paying work and paying your taxes should be seen as good for society.
As someone trying to rebuild an internship program in a STEM department that allowed it to die (and not due to the pandemic), I can attest to the contempt that academics communicate to our students about for-profit work. A lot of this is due to the simple fact that most academics have never worked in industry. They went from college to grad school to postdoc to job, a path that absorbs less than 10% of STEM degrees (at the graduate level!). Much less for undergrads.
Assuming that it is true that women, as a population, are more interested in providing direct care than men are, and that men, as a population, are more interested in physical objects and systems, how much of this is a reflection of the WOW worldview (women are wonderful)? Doesn’t it seem odd that working in a school is viewed as higher status and more socially useful than working on a farm? Or working in a hospital as being higher status than working in construction? Or working in law (more than 50% of law school grads in recent years have been women in the US) is higher status than in engineering? I don’t see how you make these kinds of industries higher status outside of paying very high wages, especially if these industries remain disproportionately staffed by men. Because the fact that they are staffed by mean makes them low status. And while I think that it is possible to change the sex ratios of these industries on the margins, if what women value is caregiving and relationships, and caregiving in the context of relationships, as opposed to systems or processes that lead to desired outcomes, I don’t see how you can make a material difference in changing the vibes of things like effective altruism or an abundance agenda, etc.
I think these are all good points that I thought about myself.
It is true that if women are more interested in "care positions", it will be hard to turn Engineering jobs in such jobs.
BUT, and this is an important BUT, Engineering firms do not only need engineers. They also need business development people, people working in admin or policy and so on. Also, we are talking here about the marginal woman who might be choosing between non-profit work and a job in engineering.
Overall, I do not see the harm of helping people internalize the importance of tech and being more pro-market
"BUT, and this is an important BUT, Engineering firms do not only need engineers. They also need business development people, people working in admin or policy and so on.....I know a woman who started as a software developer but switched into sales & sales management, involving software and SaaS products. Another woman who started as an applied mathematician but also became a sales rep and manager for complex products. The pairing of ability to understand complexity with good interpersonal skills can be a very powerful and lucrative one.
I think I am the type of woman described by this post. I'm an introvert with mediocre interpersonal skills and have less than zero interest in care work, but I went into policy research and nonprofit work because I valued working for some social good and found for-profit work highly suspect. I grew up around diplomats, NGO workers, and journalists, and barely knew anyone who worked in the private sector. It was hard for me to imagine a meaningful life that didn't involve actively working for a better world.
As it turned out, I was disillusioned by nonprofit work by my late twenties, got a legal services job to pay off the debt I'd incurred making no money the previous years, then got a quantitative master's and went into tech at 32. I'm content with my current life position, but I'd be in a wildly better one if I'd just gone into tech to start with at 21, and it absolutely was an overly idealistic belief system that kept me from doing so.
n = 1 and I don't know how many others of me are out there, but we do exist.
I think that you are right that a number of women out there are like you. I suspect that biology (in the US at least) provides a counter argument to what I wrote above. In the US biology grads are now majority women, and it isn’t because the actual practice of biology involves building relationships with people (anymore than any job or career does, but less say than law, professional services, etc., after which a certain point most of the position is sales and marketing, not technical work, or especially teaching or medical professions). So how biology got that way may be a useful case study for what other careers and fields could do. I suspect that part of is that many women start studying biology to go into care fields like being a doctor or nurse, and then find that they like it and want to do biology instead of medicine. And having gone into biology, they raised its status among women.
I always had the impression that—at least in Ontario in the early 90s—women went in to biology because it had a reputation for being easier than physics and chemistry and involved less math. Indeed IIRC the provincial curriculum at the time requires everyone to take at least one of a possible six credits of upper year science class, offering two years of each but put the first year of bio at the grade 11 level whereas the first year of physics and chemistry were designated grade 12 due to math prerequisites. (The second year of each was art that time offered at the grade 13 level but called "Ontario Academic Credits", vaguely equivalent in concept to UK A-levels.)
Why it is that girls were much, much less likely to take upper year math classes in highschool is of course a much bigger topic but I think one highly relevant to why women are so badly underrepresented in STEM.
"Or working in law (more than 50% of law school grads in recent years have been women in the US) is higher status than in engineering?" I don't think most people who go into law do so because they think it is a 'care job'..some do, certainly, as public defenders, civil liberties attorneys, etc, but I don't think that's a majority, most people who go into law probably do so because it is traditionally high-status and they think they have the right attributes for it.
Since law is pretty verbal, and women are generally verbally better than men, this probably explains part of the female preference for law over software development or engineering.
"Doesn’t it seem odd that working in a school is viewed as higher status and more socially useful than working on a farm? Or working in a hospital as being higher status than working in construction? Or working in law (more than 50% of law school grads in recent years have been women in the US) is higher status than in engineering?"
I'm not sure I agree people view law as higher status than engineering. On the first two, I wonder if it reflects the natural warmth people feel towards caregivers. I think fondly of the family daycare woman who took care of my children and the lady who massaged my grandmother's hands during her last visit to the hospital. I like the guy who fixed the deck on my condo but I don't feel the same way about him, to say nothing of the people I will never meet who built my condo or who grew the wheat for my breakfast this morning.
I think it's status vs social value. Law has status--lawyers become senators and presidents--but is seen as being evil. Engineering is mediocre in both (the contributions of engineers to society are rather underplayed).
Status and social value are often in opposition, probably reflecting the low esteem our leaders are held in. I can't imagine medieval peasants were all that fond of the nobility either.
Good post. To take a specific example: Surveys show that women are far less-supportive of nuclear power generation than are men. Suppose you were in charge of public relations for the nuclear industry in (the country of your choice), with the assignment to try & shift opinion in the direction of pro-nuclear-power...especially, given the survey results, female opinion. How would you go about it?
As a first cut...if I were running such a program in the US, some of the things I'd do would be:
--focus on successful French use of nuclear power, with lots of nice bucolic pictures and emphasis on safety records
--talk about some specific plant that has operated safely for decades and show how it has served multiple generations of the same family
--profile selected women who are in the nuclear industry or about to be in that industry, such newly-graduated nuclear engineer and recent Miss America Grace Stanke
--visuals to show the minimal land footprint of nuclear versus that of wind/solar
--visuals (tbd) to show the important of continuous, dispatchable power versus intermittency.
I have a fairly close friend in nuclear engineering.
She's really depressed because the industry is obsessed with maintaining profits at the expense of safety, and this is every place she's worked at. She's looking for an exit but neither her nor I can think of a good exit career for her (she's not that personable).
I think the issue was they were pushing the regulations in order to maximize profits and she was concerned it was going to lead to an accident at some point. I don't want to give too much detail for fear of 'outing' her and causing a job loss (especially as there are relatively few women in that field.)
Has she considered that she is being paranoid? If I were running a modern nuclear plant I would certainly push the regulations as far as I possibly could because they regulations are targeting an absurd level of safety.
I would be skeptical about such a campaign because predicting the future is difficult and in energy production, higher-cost options are useful only for niche use. Influencing public opinion takes a long time and you need to pick winners or it’s useless.
Current trends seem to be in favor of further cost reductions and scale increases in solar and battery technology. It’s a trend well under way and there’s little reason to think it won’t continue.
But I’d guess the most favorable niche for nuclear will be countries in the far north due to lack of sunlight for months during the winter. Batteries can probably solve daily cycles but yearly seems unlikely.
Meanwhile, there are other dark horse candidates like geothermal.
Who can say for sure? Maybe better to promote energy production in general?
Less controversial problem: market-ish ideas are on the decline on both the left and right. On the left, we're seeing a harder move on the left, towards more socialism and criticism of capitalism as a whole rather than just wanting to expand the welfare state. On the right, we're seeing a move away from laissez-faire toward right-wing populism that values protectionism and regulation of things viewed as immoral such as pornography. I don't think either side is going to be particularly pro-progress, though I suppose you might get some of the people into 'fully automated luxury space communism' into technical progress--if the machines do all the work the workers don't have to. Communism hasn't been good for progress historically, though.
More controversial problem: I agree if you diminish the moral opprobrium attached to making money, it may cause more women to enter more remunerative fields and decrease the gap that way. However, you're ignoring the other side of the equation. *Why* do men pursue fields that earn more? Why do they work longer hours, neglect family, hobbies, and health, and frankly engage in a self-destructive manner to pursue money?
*Because women are attracted to men with money*. Even in situations where women have the ability to earn their own incomes, they then pursue men with even *more*, leading to many of the dating problems you've probably heard of. It's still rational for men to pursue the almighty dollar at all costs, because it's one of the few ways to stand out in a brutal dating market that never goes out of style. And the many men who can't...will go for video games and pr0n, because they've got nothing to offer.
Yes I agree with these observations and I don't know if you'll ever have pay parity. Probably not. But that being said, I think it's still useful to have women not be misguided by the veneer of social benefit when none exists
By admitting that you've placed yourself firmly on the right half of social discourse.
Unfortunately this country is so terribly polarized your only choices are anti-progress MAGA or anti-male wokery...and the UK gets a lot of the USA's cultural spillover because of the lack of a language barrier. It's actually kind of depressing to see you import our own cultural pathologies into a country with a completely different history. I also think (for reasons outlined elsewhere) pro-market opinions are going to have an uphill battle here for a while--not sure about the UK, I would guess Brexit and the EU are likely to be bigger problems.
(BTW, reading Romanian history, I can totally understand why your first priority would be defending the market. I've talked to people from Venezuela, Cuba, and Russia, and they are NOT fans of socialism.)
"On the right, we're seeing a move away from laissez-faire toward right-wing populism that values protectionism and regulation of things viewed as immoral such as pornography"...I don't think protectionism, in the context of international trade, is at all contrary to laissez-faire within a domestic economy. International trade is almost always strongly affected by the government of the trading partner, through incentives, regulation, and tax policy.
"Regulation of things viewed as immoral such as pornography"...I'm sure there are some that would like general prohibitions on pornography, but much more common on the Right, I think, is concern about some rather pornographic books being included in school curricula and libraries for kids as young as 4th grade. Those on the Left that indignantly object to any restrictions on this seem often to be the same people who demanded that Mark Twain's books (for example) be removed from the schools.
I think your thesis is correct in that women's assent to pro-market reform is necessary, and a key obstacle currently, but I don't think the pathway to get there runs through getting women into STEM. Because from the perspective of the individual actor, state support is always more lucrative than competition. The highest paying industries, and the companies best poised to innovate, are almost certainly going to have significant regulatory capture, subsidies, etc. in their favor. For the system as a whole, these interventions hold innovation back, of course. But individual actors don't maximize returns to the system. They maximize returns to themselves.
Furthermore, absent government intervention, intellectual pursuits do not deliver significant financial reward. Once new technologies are discovered, they soon become available to anyone, absent patent protections. The people that get paid are the ones that solve the manufacturing, logistics, and marketing puzzles. So intellectuals who want financial reward for their smarts will always prefer large governments. Depending on the educated class to deliver pro market reforms will not work.
I think what's more important is to get more women into small business. Bakeries, gyms, real estate, landscaping, and other pursuits that can start small. Even more important than those is getting women to open up private academies and/or medical practices, since education and healthcare are already highly attractive to women. Doing that requires undermining public education, and addressing the regulations that have been pushing consolidation among hospital systems, and things like licensure (e.g. allowing nurses to act as primary care professionals without a MD). Women who encounter first hand the BS of government interventions, and the rewards of ownership (for those that survive the market) will be more likely to support pro-market reform from the outside, rather than those women already in crony-capitalist firms "coming to Jesus" from the inside.
Honestly, anything that makes women more appreciative of private enterprise is good. There are many options of working with people within private for profit companies
I really like some of the points you made here about women being more drawn to pro-social work over higher salaries; this totally tracks with my motivation for choosing the type of work that I went into. I would say though, that a lot of the same problems you highlighted in your essay about weird nerds leaving academia also exist in the corporate STEM world. I ironically completely left the workforce after my last job in vaccine clinical trials at a private company backed by venture capital after some time working at a non-profit and before that, dropping out of my PhD program. Power games among those who are managers (especially the ones who come straight out of business school and aren’t promoted from within the same profession of the people they manage) abound there too, and it can be hard to learn how to navigate those games if you’re just a nerd who wants to focus on her work.
But many young women may be surprised to learn that these types of games exist in non-profits too, so maybe at the end of the day if you’re going to be forced to play them you might want to consider being paid more!
I would agree the private sector has status games and pays better. However, they're *different* status games, and some young women may be better at virtue-signaling and destroying the reputations of rivals for insufficient wokeness, rather than beer-bingeing and taking credit for the contributions of rivals.
As a weird nerd man, my strategy has been to avoid having a family and save over half my income, piling the extra dough into an S&P 500 index fund (and increasingly bonds).
I hope to spend my last two or three decades as a very irascible blogger. You can probably think of better things to do with your declining years.
very true! whenever I speak to my friends who are driven by a good cause, every time it gets me extremely sad when the conversation slides into anti-capitalist blah blah
Problem is, the capitalists screwed up in the 90s and 2000s. They deregulated housing and finance and made a financial crash. And the techie capitalists made lots of social media products, like Facebook and Tinder, that everyone uses but everyone hates.
> When I was university student I worked at an organisation that was trying to encourage young girls to go into STEM by teaching how to program robots. Perhaps we should have emphasised the social impact of the job instead of the typical approach with boys which basically boils down to "look at this sick shit."
But, what social impact does robotics have? The argument would have to be very higher order, something like: yes it creates unemployment in the short term, but in the long term technological progress yields wealth and wealth yields good living standards and good living standards are "pro social". But that argument can be used for literally any job.
Being able to use surgical doctors from the cheapest parts of the world would reduce employment in the places where these women live.
How common are exoskeletons? I've never seen a video of them in use, has it moved beyond sci-fi? I've seen videos of warehouse robots, but they do the movement of things themselves and people aren't allowed near them, as their strength makes them dangerous. Almost every deployment of robots has them be following programmed tasks and reducing the employment of manual labor.
Which is fine! That has value too. It's just hard to spin this as "pro-social" when everyone knows that robots mostly reduce the need for manual labor. That doesn't mean robots are bad. It means the definition of pro-social being used is bad (incomplete).
Probably not the cheapest parts of the world. If the current medical tourism industry is an indication, the gains will probably go to upper middle income countries, i.e. Thailand, South India, Turkey, Mexico etc.
Some great stuff here Ruxandra, lots to think about.
Motherhood: Obviously this is an event that exclusivley directly affects mothers, so it defies logic to leave it out of gender-gap explanations. Thank you for making it okay to talk about. Evidence in favor of this can be found in pay gap narrowing as fertility falls. I had never thought about that until your essay, but no, our economy is not going to make having a baby, worth one's while, unless that one has achieved a particularly high status. Thus, fewer babies from those working to achieve that status seems...fair enough!
Meaningful work: There is a talking Heads song, 'Found a Job,' about a young couple making art for a living. It has the line "if your work isn't what you love, then something isn't right." This seems to be the ethos of many well educated people younger than me, and perhaps you are correct that this skews female. For me, I hate to cheapen honest work by framing it as being 'just for money.' Someone has to take out the trash for society to thrive, and for a long time, the (mostly) men who did that were well compensated. Now, the burgeoning knowledge economy dictates that these men are not actually valuable, because they have low price replacement value in the labor market. Perversely, physical labor jobs like those that mostly men do are going down in value, and helping to narrow the gender gap, and that might not be optimal. There are those that 'live to work'--that is, have jobs that give meaning to their lives and/or contribute to society--and those that 'work to live,' meaning they will trade their skills and labors for money so they can enjoy a robust life. I do not look down on either camp until I see them being ideological about it.
Sexism can still be in play in the 'values' jobs hypothesis: when you have a robust applicant pool of ideological true-believers in your vacancy, then you have a negotiating advantage. If the cohort is strongly tilted female, then more so.
A final note on zero-sum thinking. I see this cast about from a lot of intelligent people as a way to put down a hypothesis they disagree with. Assuming the ridiculed notion is, in fact, of the zero-sum type does not make the notion less true, or less valid. There are many things that work on a zero-sum level, like natural resources, or pretty much anything of a finite number. But that's just me not believing in a free lunch.
People have been pointing out the true causes of the wage gap since at least the 1980s if not earlier. There's never been any shift in the discussion around it because feminist movements just refuse to accept or engage with the evidence, they act as if those counter-arguments don't exist. Why would anything change now? One or two academics doesn't portend a shift of anything, there have always been such people. Wage gap being evidence of discrimination is a core ideological pillar of feminism, they will never give it up.
I don't get the comment about men needing applause and validation more than women. Is that comparison specifically to the sorts of men who work in NGOs?
Her work is about factors in the wage gap that aren't discrimination. People have been pointing out such factors ever since the claim was first made. Feminists never cared before, why would they now?
well, her work is being profiled in mainstream publications and has won the Nobel Prize. It's certainly received mainstream penetrance and just because some feminists don't like it, it does not take away from the fact that it's much more talked about than it used to be
I don't know if the shift described by Ruxandra is real, but there are a lot of potential reasons why it could happen now. Virtually every big culture shift has started as a bunch of ideas held by a small number of academics decades prior. Your argument, if generalized, seems to be that such culture shifts can never happen, since they always have precursors that didn't immediately cause the culture shift. I don't think that's what you mean, but I have trouble figuring out a more charitable interpretation.
I don't think every big culture shift starts that way, although some do. The argument wokeness did is compelling, but for example the "third way" centrism popular in the 90s with Clinton and Blair didn't have any obvious roots in academia. If anything, the opposite.
But the problem in this case is that it's been decades of people both in and out of the academy pointing out that the wage gap argument is a myth, all to no effect. It's not like it started small then began snowballing as people were exposed to it and agreed with it. It's fine to argue that this time is different, but then you'd want to show something that is definitely different. I'm not convinced someone winning a Nobel Prize means anything, although maybe in vibes-and-credentials-obsessed circles it does. I don't think (classical?) feminism is like that though.
There was classical liberal feminism, but it got most of what it wanted in the 1970s and fell out of favor for more socialist or misandric radical varieties. You're a gal who wants to claw your way to the top and still get married, you can do that now. (Though you might have to settle for a husband who makes less money than you.)
In the US, middle class woman's first large-scale foray into labor was via temporary employment - either to help with the war effort, or as "Kelly Girls" with no labor protection and lower than usual compensation. Even today a large portion of the lower-level Pharma workforce that Ruxandra mentions are long-term permatemps. Most of them women. With fewer benefits and lower compensation than regular employees, and no path to move up (as they are not technically "employees").
From the first-person accounts I have read, sexist attitudes toward women were still happening into the 80s from old-school male CEOs who expected their professional female employees to "fill in" for the secretary as needed. And that's not even mentioning genuine misogyny or sexual harassment that has disproportionately driven women away from better remunerated jobs.
It takes a long time for these attitudes to change, and as has been seen with various lawsuits over the years, it's still ongoing and hard to fight against. Classical and second wave feminism still has a long slog to go.
It's very dependent on where you are, I think. A lot of academic places women are actually better off (for example, there are unofficial quotas for them and they can meet partners at work without being fired for harassment), and are changing the culture in ways Ruxandra's actually alluded to elsewhere. Wall Street may be another story. Probably we are seeing the feminization of some previously high-status fields just as the excess men go places like Silicon Valley.
An illuminating essay on 'gender issues' in the job market. But....
One of the ways in which those of us trying to puncture the vanities of fashionable 'progressive' groupthink tie our hands is by always politely speaking of it as "civically-minded and well-intentioned".
In this way we help to perpetuate its vanities. Fashionable groupthink is always (more than anything else) just plain old groupthink. A false sense of civic-mindedness and well-intentionedness is just part of the bogus self-serving package.
This is brilliant article written superbly. And I agree we should cultivate a culture that recognizes the social benefit in things like STEM, finance, entrepreneurship, etc. But at the end of the day if women do have certain inherent biases that attracts them to certain types of careers more than men then isn't it inevitable that there will always be gender wage gap a thing even centrist women and men find hard to admit.
Both sides are attacking it though. On the left you have more socialism, on the right a turn to right-wing populism. Pro-market ideologies aren't going to have a second chance until either socialism (more likely social democracy in the USA) or right-wing populism gets in and makes a mess.
You also have to consider what caused free-market ideology to fall in the first place--the disastrous financial deregulation that led to the 2008 financial/housing crash. Before that you had the 1929 crash from speculation that led to the New Deal. These things move in cycles, and we seem to be moving into an 'anti-market phase of the cycle'.
I always expected to work full time while raising a family. My mother and HER mother were both primary wage-earners for their (two-parent) families, even though I’m old enough that we called my father a “househusband” during the years he didn’t have an outside job. Then my daughter, and her serious medical issues, entered the picture. Even with a steady tech industry job and a husband who had been a full time grad student for more than 10 years, it turned out I was a mom first. That was when, and how, I learned why 90% of children with major health problems have their mothers as primary caregiver. When my daughter needed me, I simply didn’t care about anything else. Whereas my [ex-]husband finally got off his ass, finished his degree, and got a job. Now makes way more than I ever did. (Stops to contemplate what would happen to a woman who spent that many years out of the workforce.)
I am out on indefinite (permanent?) disability now, but before that upended my career I was starting to get serious about this question: how much does the HEALTHCARE SYSTEM depend on UNCOMPENSATED women’s labor to function? This is stuff that doesn’t even enter into the wage gap, right? Family members, volunteers, and staff working when they aren’t on the clock - not always but almost always women - do a significant share of the work in medical settings and almost everything that happens in the home setting.
Do you think it would have been possible for your husband to help more? Or do you think you would have wanted to be the primary caregiver to your sick daughter regardless?
Both! Although it was instinctive - literal actual instinct - for me to focus on her and him to focus on income, we just weren’t very good at pulling as a team. Things got better when we split up.
1. This was great. I love how you're writing about economics and feminism. 2. I just added the bit from Evans to a recent post of mine. So thank you! Relevant bit: Let’s start with some evidence that suggests that status is more important to men than to women, on average. Most of the studies I found concerned men’s and women’s career goals and priorities. One example is a 2015 survey that asked men and women to list their life goals. Men were more likely than women to prioritize goals that involved accruing status, power, and promotions at work. Another study, from 2023, looked at what men and women prioritize when choosing a job. Men were more likely than women to value career progression. In that study, as in many others, women showed a much stronger preference for part-time work. In a 2013 Pew report, women were more likely than men to say that having a job that helps society is extremely important to them (24% vs. 19%). GOAT Alice Evans recently wrote about a 2024 paper that found women were 8.2 percentage points more likely than men to say they value meaning in a job and are more likely to want work that is altruistic in nature (via this post by Ruxandra Teslo). Post link: https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/how-status-anxiety-fuels-misogyny
I would even take this argument one step further. All of the pro-social stuff the government does, health care and food for the poor, foreign aid, public health initiatives etc. is funded by the people who didn't work at NGOs and instead decided to do the work that makes the economy function. Every Canadian taxpayer is a coauthor on the work done by my academic laboratory. Doing high-paying work and paying your taxes should be seen as good for society.
I think I'm pretty skeptical that this an important argument on the current margin.
As someone trying to rebuild an internship program in a STEM department that allowed it to die (and not due to the pandemic), I can attest to the contempt that academics communicate to our students about for-profit work. A lot of this is due to the simple fact that most academics have never worked in industry. They went from college to grad school to postdoc to job, a path that absorbs less than 10% of STEM degrees (at the graduate level!). Much less for undergrads.
https://www.phdsource.com/blog/phds-by-the-numbers-important-stats-for-current-and-job-seeking-phds
Our profs hold a massive sampling bias, magnified by the fact that most of them come from only a few institutions.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03006-x
my experience with academia, too
Assuming that it is true that women, as a population, are more interested in providing direct care than men are, and that men, as a population, are more interested in physical objects and systems, how much of this is a reflection of the WOW worldview (women are wonderful)? Doesn’t it seem odd that working in a school is viewed as higher status and more socially useful than working on a farm? Or working in a hospital as being higher status than working in construction? Or working in law (more than 50% of law school grads in recent years have been women in the US) is higher status than in engineering? I don’t see how you make these kinds of industries higher status outside of paying very high wages, especially if these industries remain disproportionately staffed by men. Because the fact that they are staffed by mean makes them low status. And while I think that it is possible to change the sex ratios of these industries on the margins, if what women value is caregiving and relationships, and caregiving in the context of relationships, as opposed to systems or processes that lead to desired outcomes, I don’t see how you can make a material difference in changing the vibes of things like effective altruism or an abundance agenda, etc.
I think these are all good points that I thought about myself.
It is true that if women are more interested in "care positions", it will be hard to turn Engineering jobs in such jobs.
BUT, and this is an important BUT, Engineering firms do not only need engineers. They also need business development people, people working in admin or policy and so on. Also, we are talking here about the marginal woman who might be choosing between non-profit work and a job in engineering.
Overall, I do not see the harm of helping people internalize the importance of tech and being more pro-market
"BUT, and this is an important BUT, Engineering firms do not only need engineers. They also need business development people, people working in admin or policy and so on.....I know a woman who started as a software developer but switched into sales & sales management, involving software and SaaS products. Another woman who started as an applied mathematician but also became a sales rep and manager for complex products. The pairing of ability to understand complexity with good interpersonal skills can be a very powerful and lucrative one.
Yep, that's what I have in mind
I think I am the type of woman described by this post. I'm an introvert with mediocre interpersonal skills and have less than zero interest in care work, but I went into policy research and nonprofit work because I valued working for some social good and found for-profit work highly suspect. I grew up around diplomats, NGO workers, and journalists, and barely knew anyone who worked in the private sector. It was hard for me to imagine a meaningful life that didn't involve actively working for a better world.
As it turned out, I was disillusioned by nonprofit work by my late twenties, got a legal services job to pay off the debt I'd incurred making no money the previous years, then got a quantitative master's and went into tech at 32. I'm content with my current life position, but I'd be in a wildly better one if I'd just gone into tech to start with at 21, and it absolutely was an overly idealistic belief system that kept me from doing so.
n = 1 and I don't know how many others of me are out there, but we do exist.
wow, this is very nice anecdotal evidence!
I think that you are right that a number of women out there are like you. I suspect that biology (in the US at least) provides a counter argument to what I wrote above. In the US biology grads are now majority women, and it isn’t because the actual practice of biology involves building relationships with people (anymore than any job or career does, but less say than law, professional services, etc., after which a certain point most of the position is sales and marketing, not technical work, or especially teaching or medical professions). So how biology got that way may be a useful case study for what other careers and fields could do. I suspect that part of is that many women start studying biology to go into care fields like being a doctor or nurse, and then find that they like it and want to do biology instead of medicine. And having gone into biology, they raised its status among women.
I always had the impression that—at least in Ontario in the early 90s—women went in to biology because it had a reputation for being easier than physics and chemistry and involved less math. Indeed IIRC the provincial curriculum at the time requires everyone to take at least one of a possible six credits of upper year science class, offering two years of each but put the first year of bio at the grade 11 level whereas the first year of physics and chemistry were designated grade 12 due to math prerequisites. (The second year of each was art that time offered at the grade 13 level but called "Ontario Academic Credits", vaguely equivalent in concept to UK A-levels.)
Why it is that girls were much, much less likely to take upper year math classes in highschool is of course a much bigger topic but I think one highly relevant to why women are so badly underrepresented in STEM.
"Or working in law (more than 50% of law school grads in recent years have been women in the US) is higher status than in engineering?" I don't think most people who go into law do so because they think it is a 'care job'..some do, certainly, as public defenders, civil liberties attorneys, etc, but I don't think that's a majority, most people who go into law probably do so because it is traditionally high-status and they think they have the right attributes for it.
Since law is pretty verbal, and women are generally verbally better than men, this probably explains part of the female preference for law over software development or engineering.
Yes
"Doesn’t it seem odd that working in a school is viewed as higher status and more socially useful than working on a farm? Or working in a hospital as being higher status than working in construction? Or working in law (more than 50% of law school grads in recent years have been women in the US) is higher status than in engineering?"
I'm not sure I agree people view law as higher status than engineering. On the first two, I wonder if it reflects the natural warmth people feel towards caregivers. I think fondly of the family daycare woman who took care of my children and the lady who massaged my grandmother's hands during her last visit to the hospital. I like the guy who fixed the deck on my condo but I don't feel the same way about him, to say nothing of the people I will never meet who built my condo or who grew the wheat for my breakfast this morning.
I think it's status vs social value. Law has status--lawyers become senators and presidents--but is seen as being evil. Engineering is mediocre in both (the contributions of engineers to society are rather underplayed).
Status and social value are often in opposition, probably reflecting the low esteem our leaders are held in. I can't imagine medieval peasants were all that fond of the nobility either.
Good post. To take a specific example: Surveys show that women are far less-supportive of nuclear power generation than are men. Suppose you were in charge of public relations for the nuclear industry in (the country of your choice), with the assignment to try & shift opinion in the direction of pro-nuclear-power...especially, given the survey results, female opinion. How would you go about it?
Honestly, focus a lot on why it is the pro green pro environment position. Green activism has long refused to paint nuclear in this light.
Emphasize its safety.
As a first cut...if I were running such a program in the US, some of the things I'd do would be:
--focus on successful French use of nuclear power, with lots of nice bucolic pictures and emphasis on safety records
--talk about some specific plant that has operated safely for decades and show how it has served multiple generations of the same family
--profile selected women who are in the nuclear industry or about to be in that industry, such newly-graduated nuclear engineer and recent Miss America Grace Stanke
--visuals to show the minimal land footprint of nuclear versus that of wind/solar
--visuals (tbd) to show the important of continuous, dispatchable power versus intermittency.
Yes, agreed.
I also applaud the recruitment of women to promote nuclear, I think it's smart idea
I have a fairly close friend in nuclear engineering.
She's really depressed because the industry is obsessed with maintaining profits at the expense of safety, and this is every place she's worked at. She's looking for an exit but neither her nor I can think of a good exit career for her (she's not that personable).
What does she mean by at the expense of safety? Aren't nuclear reactors quite safe at the end of the day?
I think the issue was they were pushing the regulations in order to maximize profits and she was concerned it was going to lead to an accident at some point. I don't want to give too much detail for fear of 'outing' her and causing a job loss (especially as there are relatively few women in that field.)
I see. The end result seems pretty safe to me tho
Has she considered that she is being paranoid? If I were running a modern nuclear plant I would certainly push the regulations as far as I possibly could because they regulations are targeting an absurd level of safety.
Was gonna say this! Nuclear plants are super safe as they currently are
The motivation in nuclear is points, profits and bonuses. As a result accidents happen. Nuclear enrichment creates the worst poisons ever created.
Which accidents are you referring to?
I would be skeptical about such a campaign because predicting the future is difficult and in energy production, higher-cost options are useful only for niche use. Influencing public opinion takes a long time and you need to pick winners or it’s useless.
Current trends seem to be in favor of further cost reductions and scale increases in solar and battery technology. It’s a trend well under way and there’s little reason to think it won’t continue.
But I’d guess the most favorable niche for nuclear will be countries in the far north due to lack of sunlight for months during the winter. Batteries can probably solve daily cycles but yearly seems unlikely.
Meanwhile, there are other dark horse candidates like geothermal.
Who can say for sure? Maybe better to promote energy production in general?
Tell white women nuclear power will save black and brown people. And cats.
Done.
Their holy trinity
Less controversial problem: market-ish ideas are on the decline on both the left and right. On the left, we're seeing a harder move on the left, towards more socialism and criticism of capitalism as a whole rather than just wanting to expand the welfare state. On the right, we're seeing a move away from laissez-faire toward right-wing populism that values protectionism and regulation of things viewed as immoral such as pornography. I don't think either side is going to be particularly pro-progress, though I suppose you might get some of the people into 'fully automated luxury space communism' into technical progress--if the machines do all the work the workers don't have to. Communism hasn't been good for progress historically, though.
More controversial problem: I agree if you diminish the moral opprobrium attached to making money, it may cause more women to enter more remunerative fields and decrease the gap that way. However, you're ignoring the other side of the equation. *Why* do men pursue fields that earn more? Why do they work longer hours, neglect family, hobbies, and health, and frankly engage in a self-destructive manner to pursue money?
*Because women are attracted to men with money*. Even in situations where women have the ability to earn their own incomes, they then pursue men with even *more*, leading to many of the dating problems you've probably heard of. It's still rational for men to pursue the almighty dollar at all costs, because it's one of the few ways to stand out in a brutal dating market that never goes out of style. And the many men who can't...will go for video games and pr0n, because they've got nothing to offer.
Yes I agree with these observations and I don't know if you'll ever have pay parity. Probably not. But that being said, I think it's still useful to have women not be misguided by the veneer of social benefit when none exists
By admitting that you've placed yourself firmly on the right half of social discourse.
Unfortunately this country is so terribly polarized your only choices are anti-progress MAGA or anti-male wokery...and the UK gets a lot of the USA's cultural spillover because of the lack of a language barrier. It's actually kind of depressing to see you import our own cultural pathologies into a country with a completely different history. I also think (for reasons outlined elsewhere) pro-market opinions are going to have an uphill battle here for a while--not sure about the UK, I would guess Brexit and the EU are likely to be bigger problems.
(BTW, reading Romanian history, I can totally understand why your first priority would be defending the market. I've talked to people from Venezuela, Cuba, and Russia, and they are NOT fans of socialism.)
"On the right, we're seeing a move away from laissez-faire toward right-wing populism that values protectionism and regulation of things viewed as immoral such as pornography"...I don't think protectionism, in the context of international trade, is at all contrary to laissez-faire within a domestic economy. International trade is almost always strongly affected by the government of the trading partner, through incentives, regulation, and tax policy.
"Regulation of things viewed as immoral such as pornography"...I'm sure there are some that would like general prohibitions on pornography, but much more common on the Right, I think, is concern about some rather pornographic books being included in school curricula and libraries for kids as young as 4th grade. Those on the Left that indignantly object to any restrictions on this seem often to be the same people who demanded that Mark Twain's books (for example) be removed from the schools.
I think your thesis is correct in that women's assent to pro-market reform is necessary, and a key obstacle currently, but I don't think the pathway to get there runs through getting women into STEM. Because from the perspective of the individual actor, state support is always more lucrative than competition. The highest paying industries, and the companies best poised to innovate, are almost certainly going to have significant regulatory capture, subsidies, etc. in their favor. For the system as a whole, these interventions hold innovation back, of course. But individual actors don't maximize returns to the system. They maximize returns to themselves.
Furthermore, absent government intervention, intellectual pursuits do not deliver significant financial reward. Once new technologies are discovered, they soon become available to anyone, absent patent protections. The people that get paid are the ones that solve the manufacturing, logistics, and marketing puzzles. So intellectuals who want financial reward for their smarts will always prefer large governments. Depending on the educated class to deliver pro market reforms will not work.
I think what's more important is to get more women into small business. Bakeries, gyms, real estate, landscaping, and other pursuits that can start small. Even more important than those is getting women to open up private academies and/or medical practices, since education and healthcare are already highly attractive to women. Doing that requires undermining public education, and addressing the regulations that have been pushing consolidation among hospital systems, and things like licensure (e.g. allowing nurses to act as primary care professionals without a MD). Women who encounter first hand the BS of government interventions, and the rewards of ownership (for those that survive the market) will be more likely to support pro-market reform from the outside, rather than those women already in crony-capitalist firms "coming to Jesus" from the inside.
This is a good point, yes.
I think maybe I overemphasised STEM.
Honestly, anything that makes women more appreciative of private enterprise is good. There are many options of working with people within private for profit companies
I really like some of the points you made here about women being more drawn to pro-social work over higher salaries; this totally tracks with my motivation for choosing the type of work that I went into. I would say though, that a lot of the same problems you highlighted in your essay about weird nerds leaving academia also exist in the corporate STEM world. I ironically completely left the workforce after my last job in vaccine clinical trials at a private company backed by venture capital after some time working at a non-profit and before that, dropping out of my PhD program. Power games among those who are managers (especially the ones who come straight out of business school and aren’t promoted from within the same profession of the people they manage) abound there too, and it can be hard to learn how to navigate those games if you’re just a nerd who wants to focus on her work.
But many young women may be surprised to learn that these types of games exist in non-profits too, so maybe at the end of the day if you’re going to be forced to play them you might want to consider being paid more!
Yep, good points
I would agree the private sector has status games and pays better. However, they're *different* status games, and some young women may be better at virtue-signaling and destroying the reputations of rivals for insufficient wokeness, rather than beer-bingeing and taking credit for the contributions of rivals.
As a weird nerd man, my strategy has been to avoid having a family and save over half my income, piling the extra dough into an S&P 500 index fund (and increasingly bonds).
I hope to spend my last two or three decades as a very irascible blogger. You can probably think of better things to do with your declining years.
very true! whenever I speak to my friends who are driven by a good cause, every time it gets me extremely sad when the conversation slides into anti-capitalist blah blah
Problem is, the capitalists screwed up in the 90s and 2000s. They deregulated housing and finance and made a financial crash. And the techie capitalists made lots of social media products, like Facebook and Tinder, that everyone uses but everyone hates.
This is from my comment on Alice's post.
> When I was university student I worked at an organisation that was trying to encourage young girls to go into STEM by teaching how to program robots. Perhaps we should have emphasised the social impact of the job instead of the typical approach with boys which basically boils down to "look at this sick shit."
But, what social impact does robotics have? The argument would have to be very higher order, something like: yes it creates unemployment in the short term, but in the long term technological progress yields wealth and wealth yields good living standards and good living standards are "pro social". But that argument can be used for literally any job.
Telesurgeries can lead to a globalisation and partial automation of surgeries increasing quality and reduce prices for medical services.
Exoskeletons can reduce injury and back pain for many blue collar professions.
Neither of these applications would lead to greater unemployment even in the most pessimistic case.
Being able to use surgical doctors from the cheapest parts of the world would reduce employment in the places where these women live.
How common are exoskeletons? I've never seen a video of them in use, has it moved beyond sci-fi? I've seen videos of warehouse robots, but they do the movement of things themselves and people aren't allowed near them, as their strength makes them dangerous. Almost every deployment of robots has them be following programmed tasks and reducing the employment of manual labor.
Which is fine! That has value too. It's just hard to spin this as "pro-social" when everyone knows that robots mostly reduce the need for manual labor. That doesn't mean robots are bad. It means the definition of pro-social being used is bad (incomplete).
Probably not the cheapest parts of the world. If the current medical tourism industry is an indication, the gains will probably go to upper middle income countries, i.e. Thailand, South India, Turkey, Mexico etc.
Some great stuff here Ruxandra, lots to think about.
Motherhood: Obviously this is an event that exclusivley directly affects mothers, so it defies logic to leave it out of gender-gap explanations. Thank you for making it okay to talk about. Evidence in favor of this can be found in pay gap narrowing as fertility falls. I had never thought about that until your essay, but no, our economy is not going to make having a baby, worth one's while, unless that one has achieved a particularly high status. Thus, fewer babies from those working to achieve that status seems...fair enough!
Meaningful work: There is a talking Heads song, 'Found a Job,' about a young couple making art for a living. It has the line "if your work isn't what you love, then something isn't right." This seems to be the ethos of many well educated people younger than me, and perhaps you are correct that this skews female. For me, I hate to cheapen honest work by framing it as being 'just for money.' Someone has to take out the trash for society to thrive, and for a long time, the (mostly) men who did that were well compensated. Now, the burgeoning knowledge economy dictates that these men are not actually valuable, because they have low price replacement value in the labor market. Perversely, physical labor jobs like those that mostly men do are going down in value, and helping to narrow the gender gap, and that might not be optimal. There are those that 'live to work'--that is, have jobs that give meaning to their lives and/or contribute to society--and those that 'work to live,' meaning they will trade their skills and labors for money so they can enjoy a robust life. I do not look down on either camp until I see them being ideological about it.
Sexism can still be in play in the 'values' jobs hypothesis: when you have a robust applicant pool of ideological true-believers in your vacancy, then you have a negotiating advantage. If the cohort is strongly tilted female, then more so.
A final note on zero-sum thinking. I see this cast about from a lot of intelligent people as a way to put down a hypothesis they disagree with. Assuming the ridiculed notion is, in fact, of the zero-sum type does not make the notion less true, or less valid. There are many things that work on a zero-sum level, like natural resources, or pretty much anything of a finite number. But that's just me not believing in a free lunch.
Mass immigration of mostly males is what the intersectional feminists want even if they increase the level of rape and sexual assault
People have been pointing out the true causes of the wage gap since at least the 1980s if not earlier. There's never been any shift in the discussion around it because feminist movements just refuse to accept or engage with the evidence, they act as if those counter-arguments don't exist. Why would anything change now? One or two academics doesn't portend a shift of anything, there have always been such people. Wage gap being evidence of discrimination is a core ideological pillar of feminism, they will never give it up.
I don't get the comment about men needing applause and validation more than women. Is that comparison specifically to the sorts of men who work in NGOs?
I think someone winning the Nobel Prize is more than just "an academic"
Her work is about factors in the wage gap that aren't discrimination. People have been pointing out such factors ever since the claim was first made. Feminists never cared before, why would they now?
well, her work is being profiled in mainstream publications and has won the Nobel Prize. It's certainly received mainstream penetrance and just because some feminists don't like it, it does not take away from the fact that it's much more talked about than it used to be
I don't know if the shift described by Ruxandra is real, but there are a lot of potential reasons why it could happen now. Virtually every big culture shift has started as a bunch of ideas held by a small number of academics decades prior. Your argument, if generalized, seems to be that such culture shifts can never happen, since they always have precursors that didn't immediately cause the culture shift. I don't think that's what you mean, but I have trouble figuring out a more charitable interpretation.
I don't think every big culture shift starts that way, although some do. The argument wokeness did is compelling, but for example the "third way" centrism popular in the 90s with Clinton and Blair didn't have any obvious roots in academia. If anything, the opposite.
But the problem in this case is that it's been decades of people both in and out of the academy pointing out that the wage gap argument is a myth, all to no effect. It's not like it started small then began snowballing as people were exposed to it and agreed with it. It's fine to argue that this time is different, but then you'd want to show something that is definitely different. I'm not convinced someone winning a Nobel Prize means anything, although maybe in vibes-and-credentials-obsessed circles it does. I don't think (classical?) feminism is like that though.
There was classical liberal feminism, but it got most of what it wanted in the 1970s and fell out of favor for more socialist or misandric radical varieties. You're a gal who wants to claw your way to the top and still get married, you can do that now. (Though you might have to settle for a husband who makes less money than you.)
In the US, middle class woman's first large-scale foray into labor was via temporary employment - either to help with the war effort, or as "Kelly Girls" with no labor protection and lower than usual compensation. Even today a large portion of the lower-level Pharma workforce that Ruxandra mentions are long-term permatemps. Most of them women. With fewer benefits and lower compensation than regular employees, and no path to move up (as they are not technically "employees").
From the first-person accounts I have read, sexist attitudes toward women were still happening into the 80s from old-school male CEOs who expected their professional female employees to "fill in" for the secretary as needed. And that's not even mentioning genuine misogyny or sexual harassment that has disproportionately driven women away from better remunerated jobs.
It takes a long time for these attitudes to change, and as has been seen with various lawsuits over the years, it's still ongoing and hard to fight against. Classical and second wave feminism still has a long slog to go.
It's very dependent on where you are, I think. A lot of academic places women are actually better off (for example, there are unofficial quotas for them and they can meet partners at work without being fired for harassment), and are changing the culture in ways Ruxandra's actually alluded to elsewhere. Wall Street may be another story. Probably we are seeing the feminization of some previously high-status fields just as the excess men go places like Silicon Valley.
An illuminating essay on 'gender issues' in the job market. But....
One of the ways in which those of us trying to puncture the vanities of fashionable 'progressive' groupthink tie our hands is by always politely speaking of it as "civically-minded and well-intentioned".
In this way we help to perpetuate its vanities. Fashionable groupthink is always (more than anything else) just plain old groupthink. A false sense of civic-mindedness and well-intentionedness is just part of the bogus self-serving package.
I used those adjectives semi ironically tbf
This is brilliant article written superbly. And I agree we should cultivate a culture that recognizes the social benefit in things like STEM, finance, entrepreneurship, etc. But at the end of the day if women do have certain inherent biases that attracts them to certain types of careers more than men then isn't it inevitable that there will always be gender wage gap a thing even centrist women and men find hard to admit.
sure, but you can influence that ratio I think through what you cultivate as "societally beneficial" imo
I agree 100%. Especially in current political climate when economic liberalism is finally decoupling from the Right wing politics.
Both sides are attacking it though. On the left you have more socialism, on the right a turn to right-wing populism. Pro-market ideologies aren't going to have a second chance until either socialism (more likely social democracy in the USA) or right-wing populism gets in and makes a mess.
You also have to consider what caused free-market ideology to fall in the first place--the disastrous financial deregulation that led to the 2008 financial/housing crash. Before that you had the 1929 crash from speculation that led to the New Deal. These things move in cycles, and we seem to be moving into an 'anti-market phase of the cycle'.
If men, on average, didn't demand more money for their labor, the male dominated jobs would be paid less too.
Love this 🥰🥰🥰
I always expected to work full time while raising a family. My mother and HER mother were both primary wage-earners for their (two-parent) families, even though I’m old enough that we called my father a “househusband” during the years he didn’t have an outside job. Then my daughter, and her serious medical issues, entered the picture. Even with a steady tech industry job and a husband who had been a full time grad student for more than 10 years, it turned out I was a mom first. That was when, and how, I learned why 90% of children with major health problems have their mothers as primary caregiver. When my daughter needed me, I simply didn’t care about anything else. Whereas my [ex-]husband finally got off his ass, finished his degree, and got a job. Now makes way more than I ever did. (Stops to contemplate what would happen to a woman who spent that many years out of the workforce.)
I am out on indefinite (permanent?) disability now, but before that upended my career I was starting to get serious about this question: how much does the HEALTHCARE SYSTEM depend on UNCOMPENSATED women’s labor to function? This is stuff that doesn’t even enter into the wage gap, right? Family members, volunteers, and staff working when they aren’t on the clock - not always but almost always women - do a significant share of the work in medical settings and almost everything that happens in the home setting.
Do you think it would have been possible for your husband to help more? Or do you think you would have wanted to be the primary caregiver to your sick daughter regardless?
And I'm sorry to hear about this :(
Both! Although it was instinctive - literal actual instinct - for me to focus on her and him to focus on income, we just weren’t very good at pulling as a team. Things got better when we split up.
1. This was great. I love how you're writing about economics and feminism. 2. I just added the bit from Evans to a recent post of mine. So thank you! Relevant bit: Let’s start with some evidence that suggests that status is more important to men than to women, on average. Most of the studies I found concerned men’s and women’s career goals and priorities. One example is a 2015 survey that asked men and women to list their life goals. Men were more likely than women to prioritize goals that involved accruing status, power, and promotions at work. Another study, from 2023, looked at what men and women prioritize when choosing a job. Men were more likely than women to value career progression. In that study, as in many others, women showed a much stronger preference for part-time work. In a 2013 Pew report, women were more likely than men to say that having a job that helps society is extremely important to them (24% vs. 19%). GOAT Alice Evans recently wrote about a 2024 paper that found women were 8.2 percentage points more likely than men to say they value meaning in a job and are more likely to want work that is altruistic in nature (via this post by Ruxandra Teslo). Post link: https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/how-status-anxiety-fuels-misogyny
Thank you!