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No. Women are just not interested in certain fields. How do I know? Has anyone here ever been in a chess club? I was -and it's 95% male. And it's not like chess it the road to money and success so an evil patriarchy is keeping women out. Women are just not that interested in chess.
That's not what I remember. The people into computers and gaming were all men. I remember some teachers asking some women why they weren't into it and one girl said she was afraid the computer would attacker her or something.
If women are in the right environment, they will absolutely be interested. Who have you been meeting? My sister and her two closest high school friends all went into male dominated fields. My sister works for big tech in Silicon Valley, one friend is an aerospace engineer for a company that provides contract services for NASA, and the third is a pilot for a major airline. Many of the early programmers/computer engineers were women.
When I was growing up in the ‘80s and we had a Nintendo, my parents would make me use my birthday/Christmas money to buy games, but they would both be up there all the time playing games. We would have Sunday game time before dinner well into the early ‘00s, and my mom (who is 73 now) would also play.
Women tend to like games like The Sims and Animal Crossing. I have one friend who didn’t have a Switch and when we got sheltered in place, she bought all of The Sims. What we don’t like is games with obviously gendered characters where the women are wearing ultra revealing clothing, or that the default choice is always a man. Would you want to play a game if your only choice to play someone who represented your gender was someone in wildly revealing clothing while all the women got to wear modest, practical clothing? Or if your only choice was to play a woman? My understanding is that Animal Crossing doesn’t even have gender anymore, which is appropriate. You can just choose how you look and that’s enough.
If women are in the right environment, they will absolutely be interested. Who have you been meeting? My sister and her two closest high school friends all went into male dominated fields. My sister works for big tech in Silicon Valley, one friend is an aerospace engineer for a company that provides contract services for NASA, and the third is a pilot for a major airline. Many of the early programmers/computer engineers were women.
So, you think that since a minority of women are engineers, that proves that it can be 50/50 given the right environment?
No. Women are just not interested in certain fields. How do I know? Has anyone here ever been in a chess club? I was -and it's 95% male. And it's not like chess it the road to money and success so an evil patriarchy is keeping women out. Women are just not that interested in chess.
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Is that really true, though? If you were a woman or a girl interested in chess, and you walked into a chess club where no one looked like you, would you feel welcome or discouraged? Would you feel like you belonged there, or would it be that you'd have to fight the existing culture to make a place for yourself? If you're part of the dominant culture, it's really easy to dismiss the hardships and prejudices that someone not of that culture would have to face.
So, you think that since a minority of women are engineers, that proves that it can be 50/50 given the right environment?
Do SAT Math scores bear this out?
What does an SAT math score have to do with a person’s ability to be an engineer or work in STEM? More women are now entering medicine, which is STEM based. That is a situation where most women go to the doctor in their lifetimes and realize that it would be good to be treated by other women or at least have the option to see more female doctors. It is getting close in dentistry too. I’ve had all male dentists until my current dentist, who is a younger female. I don’t think anyone would say that women weren’t interested in healthcare, since women were already working there as nurses.
The first coders were women- so what changed? Again, it is not a matter of lack of aptitude. If women didn’t have aptitude, they wouldn’t have been the first people to do it. Something changed in the environment to make it switch to all men. Women do a lot of cooking in the home, yet most professional chefs are men. It is not that men are better at cooking, is it?
From my own experience working for many years in a very dirty, dangerous, male-dominated job that required 12-14 hour work days, I can say that there were only a few females and they didn't work in the dirty areas. They stayed in the lab and office. One of them got married and had children and it was obvious that she wasn't willing to work the long hours.
I agree with the astute observation about peer pressures too. My female friends never asked me questions about my work. If I brought it up, they looked at me like I was a freak. Dating was difficult; men didn't want to date someone who worked in such a place. One man told me, "I cannot take you home to meet my mother if you work there." It was routinely assumed that I was gay because I had a "man's" job (not true).
From my own experience working for many years in a very dirty, dangerous, male-dominated job that required 12-14 hour work days, I can say that there were only a few females and they didn't work in the dirty areas. They stayed in the lab and office. One of them got married and had children and it was obvious that she wasn't willing to work the long hours.
I agree with the astute observation about peer pressures too. My female friends never asked me questions about my work. If I brought it up, they looked at me like I was a freak. Dating was difficult; men didn't want to date someone who worked in such a place. One man told me, "I cannot take you home to meet my mother if you work there." It was routinely assumed that I was gay because I had a "man's" job (not true).
What in the world are you talking about? Not all men like "dirty jobs" either - look at how many work in office settings....oh, like some women do!
Some women take time away from work because it is very hard to have a family and NOT do that. There's a lot of men out there, ESPECIALLY millennials who won't work more than 40 hours a week - MEN, even! Stop acting like men and women are SO different from each other - there's a lot of overlap in degree of ambition for work versus time for leisure/family.
And I don't know how many people associate dirty "man's work" as being gay - you must have some unusual friends - if anything, the STEREOTYPE (again, not accurate) is that gay men would run from that type of work.
Exceptions to the rule exist, but that doesn't mean generalizations are false and/or "sexist".
Overall, women and men DO have different interests, and there's reasons for that that aren't rooted in "patriarchy". Biology is one reason.
In saying that, in no way shape or form am I saying there aren't exceptions, there's plenty. But it is not as if it's 50/50 or anywhere near 50/50. Women have been able to get basically any job they've wanted to get now for going on 100 years. If some industries are more male/female dominated in 2020, that tells you this is sheer preference.
And even for these white collar "tech" jobs, particularly computer science.... I've taken many of these classes in my lifetime.... the classes are always 80%+ males. Again, there are zero barriers in place preventing women from taking these classes, some take them, but most do not. And this is even noting that affirmative action has been a thing for decades now, yet these fields are still male dominated. What else can possibly be done to prove this isn't sexism, but mere (likely biological) choice?
Maybe if so many women weren't voluntarily siphoned off to other careers, e.g. kindergarten teachers are over 90% female, then there would be more of them in the video game industry. File this under "not my monkeys, not my circus."
Of course today in society more than ever it's all important for it to be inclusive to women no matter what it is, do you think it's necessarily sexist if a certain industry is "male dominated"?
For example, and nerdy sure, but take the video game industry; from the beginning it has been mostly marketed to boys/men, in while before there had been talk about it, it wasn't really until the 2010s that it suddenly became a major issue started by Anita Sarkeesian, a huge feminist that brought the "issue" up. That got $158,922 to make videos about it. She made lots of issues, but in particular she brought up "Since the beginning, video games have been made by men, for men." Really, is that a bad thing? As one that grew up on the OG NES going to lots of friends houses the girls really never really cared at trying to play video games near as much as the boys, heck, even as an adult the only video games I could ever get any of my girlfriends to play were puzzle genre.
Do you think that they have always been marketed to guys a big example of sexism, or do you think they were smart and wasn't sexist?
"Our company welcome women. We have the following openings:
- manually move concrete blocks
- carry heavy furniture and appliances to 3rd floor in apartment complexes when there is no elevator
- dig wells by hand when no machine can get to the spot
- install granite countertops (200lbs each), bathtubs (400lbs each), stairs and alike" (c)
"Our company welcome women. We have the following openings:
- manually move concrete blocks
- carry heavy furniture and appliances to 3rd floor in apartment complexes when there is no elevator
- dig wells by hand when no machine can get to the spot
- install granite countertops (200lbs each), bathtubs (400lbs each), stairs and alike" (c)
Exactly. Not sure that 90-lb. super-fit firefighting woman could carry a 250 lb. guy out of a burning building.
When I worked in construction, it was much harder for me than the big guys.
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