Women Not Prioritizing and Other Herasies

Crooked Timber has an interesting graph on the proportional representation of women in various PhD fields, circa 2009. Women dominated in fields like English Lit, psychology, linguistics, sociology and molecular biology, but lagged greatly in the areas of physics, engineering, computer science, economics, and philosophy.

Given the rapid rise of women attending and graduating from universities, it's hard to believe that underrepresentation is reflective of anything other than female inclination. To the extent that the ultimate multiplier for feminist change is in effect--technology--force is rendered moot, leaving all doors open. One could argue that men are not smarter, just more interested in certain things. That level of interest might be part biological, and that level of interest might be conditioning, but parsing the difference if futile.

In a related observation in Mother Jones the author of a piece on the lopsided publishing industry, where books written and reviewed by men dominate, suggests that people must "try harder". Writes Kevin Drum:

I remember a few years ago reading a piece by an op-ed page editor — Gail Collins? — saying that her submissions ran something like 10:1 in favor of men. She wanted to publish more stuff by women, she said, but just didn't have much to choose from. In the case of op-eds, one obvious answer is simply to try harder: solicit pieces from good women and try to improve the balance that way.

This though, is the falsehood. Much of the world can be explained by the implementation of personal choice (lacking other barriers). If people want to be represented in something, they need to show an interest.

Condensing the history of women across time we can argue that 1) women lacked an overriding interest in having voting rights and economic freedom or 2) that men, via testosterone forced women into subjugation, and only the change in the male mind and male expectations freed women to pursue what they wanted to pursue.

It's hard to argue both at the same time. Either men have kept women down on the mat, and eventually decided to let them up for whatever reason (accidentally perhaps via the introduction of technology), or women willingly conformed their lives around the expectations of men, keeping their own interests submerged.

Moving specifically to proportional representation in the working world, where some ridiculously calculated ratio of 50/50 is deemed minimally correct, it seems more likely that personal inclination rather than structural barrier fully explains representation "anomalies." The key is never to then penalize men for their interest or domination of a field, but rather, to allow each sex to dominate whatever they please as their efforts show fruit.

(Some might extend these arguments to affirmative action, though we tend to believe that the forces working against black participation in the work world was force contained, versus a type of voluntary servitude that impeded women).