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osewalrus Despite women now making up the majority of college graduates, women still disproportionately go into different, and usually lower paying fields, then men following their college graduation. What is unclear is why. As with all complex systems, it appears to be a significant mix of factors.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-women-professional-inequality-college/
What is missing in this, as usual, is the effort to analyze the incentives for men. Rather than asking why so many women choose to go into fields with higher "job meaning." i.e., women disproportionately enter fields where they believe what they do will make the world a better place or that their jobs have broader societal value. Men do not.
And no one asks what drives men's decisions on this. The problem is that this again assumes male as the default. It is considered a defect that women are more interested in "job meaning" (as well as an open question whether the fields are lower paid because they are women-dominated or whether women are more willing to accept lower pay in exchange for higher job meaning). yet getting more men to apply to traditionally female dominated positions is surely part of addressing any gender imbalance.
Yes, I put the question mark by "choosing" because lots of factors influence the choice. But the idea that men are therefore free to choose anything and women are constrained is not really a good explanation of why supposedly unconstrained men consistently chose different careers. It's not just income maximization, although that seems to be a large driver for men. Some men opt for jobs with greater job meaning. But they do so within a very different set of careers. Frequently it involves taking predominantly male job skill and using them in a non-income maximizing way (e.g., public defender).
More research from this direction would be useful.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-women-professional-inequality-college/
What is missing in this, as usual, is the effort to analyze the incentives for men. Rather than asking why so many women choose to go into fields with higher "job meaning." i.e., women disproportionately enter fields where they believe what they do will make the world a better place or that their jobs have broader societal value. Men do not.
And no one asks what drives men's decisions on this. The problem is that this again assumes male as the default. It is considered a defect that women are more interested in "job meaning" (as well as an open question whether the fields are lower paid because they are women-dominated or whether women are more willing to accept lower pay in exchange for higher job meaning). yet getting more men to apply to traditionally female dominated positions is surely part of addressing any gender imbalance.
Yes, I put the question mark by "choosing" because lots of factors influence the choice. But the idea that men are therefore free to choose anything and women are constrained is not really a good explanation of why supposedly unconstrained men consistently chose different careers. It's not just income maximization, although that seems to be a large driver for men. Some men opt for jobs with greater job meaning. But they do so within a very different set of careers. Frequently it involves taking predominantly male job skill and using them in a non-income maximizing way (e.g., public defender).
More research from this direction would be useful.
