Ludwig Whitby wrote:Quite the opposite. It is supporting the idea that how genders choose professions is largely due to due to cultural history and gender socialisation (i.e. nurture). It is casting doubt on the idea that how genders choose professions is solely due to due to cultural history and gender socialisation (i.e. nurture).
Alright, if you watched the whole thing, you would know this better than me.
Ludwig Whitby wrote:He starts by praising the Norwegian efforts in gender equality and then states that despite the efforts, there are still some professions where the situation has been unchanged. The question was why? Why are there more female engineers in less gender equal countries? If it's all about nurture, I'd expect to see that Norway has the same number of male and female engineers. Where's the catch?
Why would it be expected? The people in those professions right now are either the very people who grew up in "traditional gender role" era, or their children. Why would Norway be some kind of place where nobody is affected by old gender roles?
I don't know how Finland counts in gender equality, but I know that when I was in school, there was absolutely for example an unwritten rule that girls choose textile crafts and boys choose wood crafts. Not even from teachers, but from us children
ourselves. Where did we get that idea? I didn't feel any special fondness towards textile crafts, but I chose that class because I would have needed a ginormous interest in wood crafts to go against the flow and be the only girl in that class.
And I'm only 30. People older than me will probably only have more interesting examples of how they were subtly guided towards interests/skills/professions.
Ludwig Whitby wrote:I could turn the question around. Why are feminists always dismissing biological gender differences a priori? Even when presented with a case that should at the very least spark some thoughts and questioning of the established theories, they won't consider them?
Because that assumption leads nowhere. It leads to no self-examination, rethinking or change in how we treat girls and boys. Sure, it
could be that there are immutable biological brain differences. Just like it could be that God created the world and just made it look like evolution happened. But what is the
point of thinking like that? Settling on that and never asking "but what if?"
Ludwig Whitby wrote:And finally, my thoughts on the question of the 'Norwegian gender equality paradox': Women in less equal countries have a need to prove themselves to be equal to men, so they choose engineering, one of the toughest and manliest professions, more often than Norwegian girls do. Norwegian girls are secure and already know that they are equal to boys and are quite happy that the society they live in sees them as equal to boys, so they have no such need and are able to choose a profession without the pressure of a socially inflicted inferiority complex. So they simply choose what fits them best.
Could be, yes. But are you willing to just leave it at "engineering just doesn't fit women?" If you had a daughter, would you be willing to just trust that she is naturally not fit for engineering, nor engineering to her?
Ludwig Whitby wrote:Or more personally: My mother is an engineer. She became an engineer, because her father (also an engineer) never saw her as smart enough or able enough and had always preferred my uncle. The whole family and their circle of friends expected my uncle to follow in the footsteps of his father, and as for my mother, well, she can't really be a good engineer, now could she? It took my mother many years to realize that she truly isn't interested in engineering and was only compensating.
Sure, sexism or family unfairnesses shouldn't drive people to professions they don't like. But after this anecdote I would feel for all the women engineers (and soldiers, and construction-related workers, etc) who are actually really interested in what they do, but are now possibly seen as gender imposters or overcompensating due to an inferiority complex. And not to mention the younger girls and women who might walk away with the cultural message that these jobs are so inherently male that them pursuing them is weird and desperate and gender-bending. That it's not normal for them to pursue those professions.
I want a world where it's attitudinally
normal for women to pursue engineering and for men to pursue nursing. They don't have to end up doing it 50-50%, or at all. As long as it's a valid, normal option. It's these un-normalising attitudes that I would want gone. And the attitudes are going nowhere if we label certain things as naturally women's interests or men's interests and just stop thinking about it after that.