Differences in preferences between men and women cannot be explained by discrimination and stereotypes alone. Non-social biological factors also play a significant role.
The EU recently adopted a directive to tackle the gender pay gap by introducing new bureaucratic obligations for employers. Similarly, the EU is pushing on other issues in the fight for gender equality, for example in the area of the low proportion of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects, which reaches 33%. Consequently, women make up the same proportion (33%) of employees in technical sectors.
Based on these and other differences in the status, proportion, and pay of men and women in the labor market, EK argues that there is the potential to increase GDP per capita in the EU by 6 to 9% by 2050. For Slovakia, this potential is expected to be as high as 20%. Let us leave aside the absurdly high figure for the moment. However, it certainly acts as a great temptation that will motivate the Commission to come up with new directives. The agenda of the low proportion of women in STEM fields is based on the assumption that there are serious institutional and cultural barriers in society that prevent women from choosing this career path.
However, this is contradicted by much of the economic, psychological, evolutionary, and neuroscience research. Evidence from these disciplines suggests that gender differences in interest in STEM fields are largely shaped by factors other than discrimination or stereotyping.
Interests, Preferences And Priorities
Although there has certainly been discrimination against women in certain fields and sectors in the past, even in the Western world, today’s data and studies reject this interpretation. A recent meta-study looked at research over the past 44 years on discrimination against women in employment in typically male-dominated occupations. Its results suggest that it has declined significantly over the last few decades until it has virtually disappeared. But what remains, according to the research, among academics and laypeople as well, are stereotypes about alleged employers’ stereotypes of women. Both groups still overestimate the impact of discrimination in the labor market compared to the reality.
A critic might respond that the negative impact of discrimination against women starts earlier. Even before they begin to choose careers. In this area, the main and most robust psychological finding is the disparity in interests, career preferences, and life priorities between men and women. Differences in their interests have been confirmed repeatedly and basically in every country in the world ever since the topic started to be studied. Men are more interested in things (objects, machines, abstract systems) and women in people (relationships, feelings, caring).
This is one of the most robust findings in the psychological sciences and one that is universally applicable to all cultures in the world. And this difference is quite significant. If you pick a random man or woman, there is a 75% chance that he or she will be more object-oriented (men) or people-oriented (women).
This difference in interests also shapes differences in professional preferences. Men are attracted by professions that are somehow connected to things and women towards professions that are connected to people. Research has also found differences in life priorities. Men place more importance on careers whereas women more on work-life balance.
Paradox of Egalitarian Societies
Here again, a critic might point out that even these universal and long-standing differences in interests are themselves the result of cultural and socialization factors. In the past, this has certainly been the case. Indeed, in the first half of the 20th century, before the waves of feminist movements, there were both institutional and cultural barriers that kept women out of parts of the economy and education, thus limiting their potential. Without a doubt, there was a space for equalization and such an equalization process really took place in much of the world.
Universities have opened up to women and today they are more successful than men. They represent the majority of university students. Women have also become career-successful in many prestigious fields and sectors that were previously dominated by men. The proportion of women in these fields has increased dramatically over the last 50 years.
However, this again mainly works for fields that are more focused on living beings (medicine, law, veterinary medicine) rather than those focused on things (IT, engineering, mathematics). This difference is traceable and the same basically in every single country in the world, regardless of its culture and history. Such is the robustness of these results that is absolutely unprecedented in the psychological sciences.
This is a difficult phenomenon to explain for those who see discrimination and culture as the cause of the low proportion of women in STEM fields. Why should women be able to match and even surpass men in some fields and not in others? All over the world, in the same type of sectors.
Today we can see that women are successful in some fields that were also an exclusively male domain in the past. This suggests that the source of the problem will not so much be that women do not want to enter some specific fields, but rather that they do not want to enter these to the same extent as men.
The second phenomenon that is difficult to explain from the point of view of the critics is the fact that in more egalitarian, wealthier, and freer countries (e.g. Northern Europe) the gender differences are wider and not only in the choice of fields but also in other psychological characteristics and even in physiological ones (height, weight, blood pressure, etc.). If discrimination and culture are the cause of the lower choice of technical fields for women, then women should have made up a larger proportion in these countries than in countries that are not so gender egalitarian. However, we do not observe this.
Culture vs. Biology
These historical and geographical developments suggest that differences in preferences between men and women cannot be explained by discrimination and stereotypes alone, but that non-social, biological factors also play a significant role. There is a growing number of studies claiming that this is indeed the case.
Firstly, I would like to mention research concentrating on very young children who are a few days or weeks old and so could not yet have been affected by societal norms. In this research, boys paid more attention to “things” than girls, while girls in turn paid more attention to faces. Similar results have been revealed among primates.
Another line of evidence comes from hormonal research, where it is shown that women exposed to higher levels of testosterone during prenatal development are more object-oriented, more inclined to typically male occupations and to build careers.
This research raises the question of why, from an evolutionary perspective, are men more interested in things and women are more interested in people. It is probably a psychological adaptation to the division of labor – women have historically been more occupied by looking after the children and men have hunted and defended territory, using more tools in the process. This stereotypical view of the division of labor between the sexes was recently challenged by research that attracted a lot of media attention attempting to show that women routinely hunted just like men. This research has received a great amount of criticism in anthropological circles for its many errors and shortcomings.
Another set of evidence that biology plays a non-negligible role in the lower proportion of women in STEM fields is the research on differences in brains resulting in differences in various cognitive abilities. The research shows that women are better at language, emotion, and empathy, whereas men are better at spatial perception (object rotation), mechanical thinking, and systems building. Although these differences are relatively small (e.g. compared to differences in preferences), they may explain part of the difference in the proportion of men and women when it comes to technical professions.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is important to reiterate the phenomenon from the wealthy countries of Northern Europe, where the genders have the greatest equality, and yet there are greater differences between them and fewer women choose careers in STEM fields there.
This shows that if politicians and bureaucrats are not careful, they can easily find themselves fighting not against discrimination and injustice, but against the preferences of women themselves. They will fight against the positive symptoms of high gender equality.
The result of such confusion of the fruits of freedom and equality (greater disparity) with coercion and discrimination could result in the adoption of public policies that at best waste resources and at worst directly bring unintended negative consequences.
Here I am talking about policies that further overburden entrepreneurs with bureaucracies that assume a “presumption of guilt”. Or perhaps the outright introduction of mandatory quotas and preferential selection of women, which completely undermine market relations (free choice of employees and employers) and trust in the workplace (weren’t my colleagues favored because of their gender?).
That is not to say that there are not also good measures and policies, for example popularizing successful female role models who have succeeded in STEM fields and presenting them to young girls. But equally, there is no reason not to do that when it comes to boys. The aim should be to present everyone with a wide range of options so that they can make the best choices according to their interests and priorities.
Another measure is to create workplaces that are friendly for mothers with children and make it easier to combine a demanding career in STEM sectors with motherhood, for instance allowing hybrid work-from-home, flexible hours, and providing on-site childcare. And these are things that many employers are already doing themselves because it makes them more competitive in the marketplace.
The article was originally published in Slovak by INESS.
Continue exploring:
Untold Stories: Women’s Rights and Changing Society in India [PODCAST]
