America's most gender-differentiated jobs

boing
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This is circular reasoning: there might be a biological basis in sex-based aptitude differences to explain why there are so many male auto-mechanics, the fact that there are so many male auto-mechanics is evidence for a biological basis for sex-based aptitude differences.

That’s not a valid argument, and no, it’s not evidence for sex-based aptitude differences.

Genuine evidence for sex-based aptitude differences might include, for example, a wide body of psychological research that consistently demonstrates sex-based differences in spatial reasoning aptitudes after correction for social and economic factors. Such a body of research does not, to my knowledge, exist. Feel free to point it out if you’re aware of it.

In contrast, there is a wide body of psychological research that consistently demonstrates that “learning styles” (i.e. the premise that some people are better suited to learning new information and performing tasks that are visual, while some are better suited to verbal) is complete bullshit.

HAHAHAHAHAHA oh wait you’re serious.

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That’s not a point I ever made about FedEx, so I assume you have some other evidence to back it up? I don’t know it to be true or false, aside from knowing certain positions had certain risks (at unknown injury rates). I’m pretty sure it is true in some well known stereotyped instances (military, meat packing) but don’t know enough to apply it to my case.

I said, the people who left the job were new employees who decided the job was to exhausting, or got injured. I never mentioned anybody being “crippled” (a term you previously used, but I did not). I did mention that the most common injury was dehydration (which I will now clarify resulting in heat exhaustion), which afaik has no long term effects.

I think from this you can see why I feel you put words in my mouth on multiple instances, not saw a “different use” of my own words. That’s not humor, and using humor along side it ads up to a gish gallop I’d rather not engage with.

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One huge reason for there being more male auto mechanics is that until very recently, girls were not allowed to take vocational auto shop, auto body, welding, or wood shop in high school. They were only allowed to take vocational cosmetology, home economics, and secretarial. Cultural conditioning again.

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108

The ability to wage violence en masse by the state is part of the origin of law. But perhaps we are chicken/egging the conversation here. I am well aware of Marxist thought on the matter, perhaps my bent here is that the individual is responsible at the lowest level, versus spontaneous emergence from group actions. The Hammurabis and “holy text” writers versus some cabal organizing institutions out of whole cloth; perhaps there is some evolution there after centuries of habits, but the emergence of the condition was my focus. I would point out though that violence does tend to be a male tendency in our species and others.

I concur. And I understand now a bit of the vehemence I am seeing regarding biology used as an excuse for inequity. That’s not my point. My point is biology is a factor, sometimes a major one, sometimes a minor one, in gender differentiation. Inequity in all flavors should be the target, not explanations that can help understand observations of gender differences.

You have, perhaps I should have clarified, some of the comments in this thread that made me sign up for Boingboing’s boards after years of reading contained the notion that it was Sexist to provide any other rationale for the observations about gender differences in career. Labelling people or ideas as evil struck me as lashing out, not your particular replies, my apologies for implying your comments were lashing.

I guess, it strikes me like the climate deniers in some ways, people cherry picking rationales and data to suit their predetermined agendas. Not you in particular. Another poster said they identified as female, and that struck me, because if you have a self identified woman who was born with male genitalia, was it culture/choice/environment that made them that way, or were they born that way? Certain activist thought discounts biology exclusively for one agenda, then gives it dominance in the support of another. From the same activists! Can you sense the frustration I have with that? I guess to go back to your point, it is a nuanced issue.

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Strength, spatial ability and verbal ability are about the only real differences in human sexual dimorphism that apply to career options, compared to differences like fat percentages/height/red blood cell count, etc. We are both about as intelligent, varying on age/development only. And while the human brain is plastic enough to make up for specific tasks, the optimum option for an individual would be getting the best compensation for the easiest task.

Nice one. If the labor market wasn’t somewhat efficient, we would be finding massive amounts of people intelligent enough to be doctors working at Starbucks(they like to think they are, sometimes) and baristas performing surgery. Now, labor has massive problems, but selection of capable people isn’t one of them.

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The actions of individuals at the lowest level are not meaningful with out the support of social order.

It’s not a factor. It’s been used to rationalize the subjugation of women, but it was never the cause.

Gender differences are entirely socially constructed.

It is sexist.

Ideas that are incorrect and employed in service of inequity should not be allowed to flourish.

It strikes me rather the same way when men claim that biology is responsible for gender inequality, as if actual men had no interest, investment, or participation in creating the structures that to this day hold women down.

You’ve missed the point here.

Anyone who is seen as female, or even behaves in ways that are socially coded as female is subject to the social impositions and devaluing of the feminine.

It’s the reason for wage deflation when women enter certain professions. It’s why violence and sexual harassment against women is considered to be less important than men’s careers.

Transgendered people, even some who frequent these boards have written quite a bit about the way they are treated based on whether they appear male or female.

Not at all.

The fact that human sexuality and sexual identity exist on a spectrum as opposed to two clearly deliniated outcomes only further bolsters the fact that gender and the way that we view the sexes are indeed a social constructs.

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111

And those have been proven to be culturally driven.

We are equally intelligent when given the same opportunties, not “about as”.

Plasticity does not “make up” for anything. It is the way that brains adapt given the experience and information they are exposed to.

Women have not been allowed the same education, opportunities and freedom in the western world until relatively recently.

That assumes that far more information is known and taken into account when hiring than actually is. The different abilties that you keep pointing to vary from one individual to another. Making assumptions about an applicant’s skills based on their gender simply doesn’t do that.

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112

This, the prior judgement of any individual human, based upon culture or science, or especially bullshit like ideology, before that human demonstrates a level of skill, is the essence of the evils of Sexism, or Racism, for that matter. Giving people the chance and freedom to learn or do what they will to the best of their ability is the essence of equality for me. But perhaps my verbal abilities are insufficient to express this properly. There is a lot we cannot see eye to eye, at all, especially the genetic lotto we are all born into.
But I hope your fight for a better world goes well.

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I can’t agree with that because it obscures the very real violence and oppression that are ongoing and intrinsic elements of racism and sexism.

The easiest way to do that is to stop measuring small differences and start seeing each other as part of the same humanity with all of the same basic needs and potential.

It gets easier when we spend time empathizing with and listening to people who are experiencing whatever it is we’re looking at.

Thank you.

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114

Well. Putting aside the fact that two articles on Wikipedia do not constitute “a wide body of psychological research that consistently demonstrates” anything at all, that’s not what those Wikipedia articles actually say.

Others have done a better job that I could have done in dismantling and rebutting the specifics of your recent posts, so I’ll take a step back. As near as I can discern, your argument runs like this:

  • Premise: There exists real, quantified, biological sex-based differences in aptitudes for “spatial ability”.
  • Premise: Higher aptitude in “spatial ability” makes you a better automotive mechanic.
  • Premise: The labour market automagically sorts everyone into jobs they are most suited for, so that every job is populated by those best suited for it.
  • Conclusion: the fact that 98% of automechanics are male is explained entirely by biology and economics, and has nothing to do with sexism.

It’s possible that I’m misreading what you’re trying to suggest, so maybe you are trying to offer justifications that I haven’t discerned, so please fill in the gaps if I’m missing something; but it’s clear to me that you are trying to convince everybody here that “woah woah woah maybe it’s not just sexism” is a reasonable response to the data. It should be clear to you that you not convincing anybody, and there’s good reason for that.

That first premise is garbage, Wikipedia notwithstanding. Some research finds that men are better at “spatial ability”, but other research finds that men are better at mental rotation while women are better at spatial memory, or finds that those differences go away when controlled for cultural conditioning, or they can be diminished with a very short training exercise, or even just by telling women that their gender is known to be better at the task they are about to perform. There is no research that suggests that these differences, even if they are real, are based in nature rather than nurture. Even if these differences are real, they are tiny, so that even the most extreme interpretation of the most cherry-picked data would still demand the conclusion that 40% of women are better than 40% of men at spatial reasoning tasks.

The second premise has zero justification, no data to support it, and it defies common sense. Automotive engineering and repair involves myriad skills and a wide range of highly detailed knowledge, not just the ability to see a gear whizzing in your head in the right spot.

The third premise is laughable. Exhibits A through double-Z: Donald Trump is president.

None of your premises is true, and your conclusion doesn’t follow from them. There is no possible interpretation of psychology, biology, or economics that can even begin to explain or justify 98% male domination of automotive mechanics. Rampant and systemic sexism and misogyny explains it simply and immediately. It’s overwhelmingly the simpler explanation, it’s overwhelmingly the more plausible explanation, it’s the explanation with the overwhelmingly greater amount of supporting evidence.

If that’s true, how can you be on this thread suggesting that a world where 98% of automechancs are men is anything but an obvious and grotesque inequity? How can you claim to value equity and yet act as an apologist for its systematic denial?

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115

You say you’re aware of it, but you don’t understand it. Marxian analysis is not concerned with finding cabals and investigating historical conspiracies. It’s about how large systems operate and by what process they came to be. The explanations are complex. It is also concerned with why people think what they think and how that process operates, i.e. ideology, e.g. your relentless defense of female inequality as biological.

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You are taking an off the cuff example and attempting to throw a formal analysis at it, breaking it down in a fashion and frame of your choice, with some rather unsupported claims yourself. So let me step back, as well. It would be even more disturbing that such rampant prejudice and a repressive culture that is SO pervasive and perverse, that 98% of men in an industry are actively suppressing the entry of women; that it is outright paranoia. The converse would be that 98% of women are suppressing the entry of men into secretarial roles, too. But no, this gets explained away by prejudice in society with men being shamed for taking “unmanly” roles. So many preconceived unstated value judgments on the “worth” or “prestige” of whole segments of our population I can’t begin to count. A human who is a mechanic is worth no more or less than a human who is a doctor or secretary.

I am saying, (and I really should have picked the slowball physical strength/construction laborer or aggression/police officer example), my point is, that biology is A factor, not THE factor, in many of the observations we see in the above chart. Other factors do include cultural factors, to varying degrees dependent on the situation. The accusations of sexism and apologist I do understand better after reading the many posts in this thread, but I also see the same sort of fundamentalist ideologies, the right/wrong mentalities in many replies. It is complex, which is why I believe the focus should be on individual bad behaviour by any bad actors in these industries. Fight situations, with the courts and educational access, not vague bogeymen with rhetorical devices.

Because if, if thousands of years of recorded culture are the sole determinant of these situations, the most disturbing conclusion I see with that is that true change is impossible for humanity. Which would truly suck.

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Not understanding and not agreeing are separate matters. I find the average Marxist as dogmatic as the average Randroid. And if you think I am defending inequality, you are missing my point. Though I do think that there are ideologies out there that have whole prepackaged responses in place for a battle I accidentally stepped into the middle of. Equating any alternative to those ideologies is met with name calling, apparently.

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Dude, surely you’re aware that until around 1920 in America, the land of the free,

Married women were legally dead in the eyes of the law

Women were not allowed to vote

Women had to submit to laws when they had no voice in their formation

Married women had no property rights

Husbands had legal power over and responsibility for their wives to the extent that they could imprison or beat them with impunity

Divorce and child custody laws favored men, giving no rights to women

Women had to pay property taxes although they had no representation in the levying of these taxes

Most occupations were closed to women and when women did work they were paid only a fraction of what men earned

Women were not allowed to enter professions such as medicine or law

Women had no means to gain an education since no college or university would accept women students

With only a few exceptions, women were not allowed to participate in the affairs of the church

Women were robbed of their self-confidence and self-respect, and were made totally dependent on men?

[Elizabeth Cady Stanton]

It took 72 years of activism for women to finally gain the vote, and contraception was still considered to be obscene as of 1965. Discrimination and misogyny was alive and well during the last century and into the present.

There are people with public platforms in the present saying that the right to vote should be revoked from women.

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And men voted the 19th amendment into place. Guh, everybody who argues a situation is not your enemy. That’s why some cultural explanation for the extremes noted in the gender differentiated job would be so disturbing, you still have asshats pushing agendas like:

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And they freed the slaves too. Oh thank you, thank you white men!

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Uh, not without considerable pushback. It took 72 years.

Thousands of years of being denied autonomy, education and participation if society don’t just dissapear overnight.

Do you actually that those ideas and beliefs about women have been abandoned?

It is that disturbing.

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No; I just doubt the majority of the population hold those views and beliefs, or that the influence of culture is the entirety of the situation. Are 98% of girls not given legos or access to information about engines anymore? If I believed 98% of mechanics were misogynists, I would never get in a car. That gender roles are cultural, sure. That the physical secondary characteristics people happen to be born with play no part in their careers? Nope.

And if the last century or so of less oppression is just a blip compared to the dominance of repression history, and that it is only a matter of time before ISIS or dear god, Baptists, take over and put everyone not like them “in their place”? Yeah, scary.

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Sorry, no. Not paranoia.
It IS culture. It IS disturbing.

I don’t have studies to cite, only my own and my friends anecdotal information. It was impossible to be female and take vocational training for traditionally male occupations until the 1980s and 1990s, when it became just terribly difficult, not impossible.

No, it’s not 98% anymore, but it is still large. Toy stores, both physical and online, have different departments for girls and boys.
There’s a reason we need outreach programs for STEM subjects targeting middle school girls. The culture has already given them subtle and obvious signs that boys are better at math and science, and girls are better at nurturing. Until we can let our children decide what they like, and help them develop skills despite the gender associations, we’ll have mostly boys in the “hard” subjects, and mostly girls in the “clean up after everybody” roles.

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