Specious Liberal Arguments

Women, Science and Gender Bias

By J. Wesley ⋅ June 4, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

One aspect of the Equality Industry that gets insufficient attention is its inherent authoritarianism. First of all, because society can only be leveled through a massive application of force and repression. But secondly, because it imposes “targets” to be met regardless of the actual wishes of those subjected to the equality regime.

Elaine McCardle has written an excellent column on women and math-intensive work which points out that CHOICE, that buzziest of feminist buzzwords, may be the root cause of differences between male and female career tracks. The McCardle article just adds empirical evidence to support what anyone not blinded by ideology already knew — free people make rational choices about their own lives and they value different things.

Feminists have lamented the “underrepresentation” of women in technology and science jobs for ages (weirdly, no one is concerned that, like, 99.9999999999999% of all psychology and education majors aren’t men, by I digress.)

McCardle references a recent study published in the Journal of Economic Psychology which found that 2/3rds of gender imbalance in IT jobs was the result of personal choice. Another study of 2,000 “math precocious” students followed their career tracks:

Math-precocious men were much more likely to go into engineering or physical sciences than women. Math-precocious women, by contrast, were more likely to go into careers in medicine, biological sciences, humanities, and social sciences. Both sexes scored high on the math SAT, and the data showed the women weren’t discouraged from certain career paths.

The comparative section which included data from multiple countries was the most telling:

“The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. In countries with less economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, she writes, the number of women in physics is as high as 30 to 35 percent, versus 5 percent in Canada, Japan, and Germany.”

“‘It’s the opposite of what we’d expect,’ says Pinker. ‘You’d think the more family-friendly policies, and richer the economy, the more women should behave like men, but it’s the opposite. I think with economic opportunity comes choices, comes freedom.’”