Talking with her about her long-term career plans, she said she really needed to be involved with ‘organic’ things…which I thought was an interesting comment, perhaps a fairly common feeling among women.

And if, as many families do, transfers due to spousal job changes occur, a science teacher is generally assured the opportunity to find a good job within a fair commuting distance. I did.

I loved the hard sciences; I had to be dragged out of the computer room after a long day of programming. But, when I graduated, I looked at the average hours logged by those in programming, and said, pass. I had three kids by then, and it just wasn’t workable.

To look at them now in the light of Anglo pop culture, and their own exports, one would think they’re just the most patriarchal, and rapiest, patriarchies ever.

Generally, women prefer to deal with people, and men with things. Women tend to go into nursing, teaching, social work etc. and men tend to prefer engineering and tech.

The evidence for this is the Scandinavian countries. They are the most sexually egalitarian cultures on earth. You might argue that they are still “infected with patriarchy” and that female career choice is still culturally influenced, but even so, if career choice is still socially constructed, you would expect the effect to be less in Scandinavia.

In fact, tho opposite is the case. In a culture where kids are taught from Kindergarten that men and women are equal, and there is no stigma attached to a girl wanting to be an engineer, or a boy to be a nurse, the revealed preferences are even more exaggerated towards “traditional” career choices.

In other words, there are even more female nurses and male engineers in the Scandinavian countries than elsewhere. So given a free choice, the biological bias expresses itself more in the more egalitarian environment. Given a free choice with less cultural pressure, the revealed preference matches the biological (on average) inclination.

That said, the words are “on average”. There is no reason why an individual woman wouldn’t want to be, or couldn’t want to be. for example, a military pilot.

In my own career, I knew several, one of whom was head and shoulders, a smarter, better educated, better officer, better leader and better pilot that I could ever aspire to be.

Like I said on another thread. We should judge each person as an INDIVIDUAL. Ignore the race/IQ stuff, and the sex/career preference stuff, and judge everyone on their own merits. There is no reason to judge a military pilot candidate/engineer potential hire, on the basis of their race of sex, just don’t be surprised when the majority of military pilots/engineers continue to be white men.

And yet it’s a hard row to hoe with plenty of people today, and not always those whose career depends on arguing about systemic psychological barriers and other black magic notions. People really absorbed the idea that every gap or failing of promotion or ambition is either arrant discrimination or some sort of psychological manipulation.

Every argument about systemic discrimination, at least in sex, now ultimately finds its material in the form of mysterious subliminal messaging that somehow infects teenage girls and turns them from these paths toward more stereotypical ones.

I don’t understand how a girl who had both aptitude and genuine interest in STEM could be so easily misdirected. If that happens to a boy we all just assume he lost or never had sufficient interest or determination in the first place, or he’d be an engineer now.

If girls are affected differently by the Force, should we not be taking that into account in our gender theories?