Except that's impossible. Don't give up just because of that. Not all things that people believe strongly are actually based in robust data.
Well then we're at an impasse. That's the problem.
If Pamela and I both attempt to intuit the underlying causes of the STEM gap, I'm going to conclude that it is at least partially due to the fact that 80% of single parents are women, and single parents of both genders are almost literally excluded from STEM jobs due to the time constraints wrapped up in them. I conclude this because of my experience as a business owner soon to be single parent, and the fact that in decades working at larger firms I never once saw the sorts of things Pamela is talking about, neither in the presence of women nor behind closed doors with ornery old men. On the flip side, Pamela is going to conclude that (at least most of) the thing is due to sexism because of the giant laundry list of sexist things she's seen, and has spoken about in this thread, and I have no legitimate ground by which I can tell her she didn't experience those things. I'm sure she did experience them, and if I had experienced those things I would absolutely come to the same conclusions she has.
So what's the answer?
The problem with defaulting to lived experience as the foundation of a theory, be it my theory or her theory or anybody else's theory, is that each lived experience is only one data point. The worse thing in the public dialogue, is that human beings are psychologically trapped into binary thinking, so we tend to think that these two theories (or others) are mutually exclusive when they technically aren't. Pamela and I could both be right. The actual question, if framed properly, should be more like this:
What percentage of the STEM gap is attributable to each of the following factors:
[ul]
[li]Sexism against women[/li]
[li]Social Pressures[/li]
[li]Measurable personality trait differences at the population level in terms of interest (the people/things divide)[/li]
[li]The Work Life Balance in STEM jobs is garbage and women often value life over work more than men (we might call this a "corporate culture" issue, and a good case could be made that it's damaging
men)[/li]
[li]Single parenting isn't evenly distributed (work/life balance sub-issue, but it raises the question - would the STEM gap shrink if courts gave custody to men more often?)[/li]
[li]Women are more likely than men to become caregivers to sick or elderly family members (work/life balance sub-issue)[/li]
[li]Technical capability (I only include this because I'd like to mention that this one is proven to be basically 0%, in good, peer reviewed journals - both genders are equally technically capable at the mean)[/li]
[li]Male Variability Hypothesis (only applicable at the tails, and the tails probably don't matter that much unless the discussion is CEOs instead of project managers)[/li]
[/ul]
Some percentage of the STEM gap is probably due to each of those things, some more than others. And some of those things aren't technically "problems" at all.
And some of them flow from social pressures in the opposite direction. For instance, at a statistical level, men and women seek different things in choosing a mate / life partner.
Men tend to skew towards appearance, and women tend to skew towards earning capacity, in their mate preferences. That's solid, peer reviewed science, and it's not a function of culture, because they controlled for that. It shows up in all cultures equally. What that means, is that men at a population level are going to seek a different work/life balance than women, because that's literally part of attracting a mate. And they're doing it because that's literally what women want. So the Social Pressures bullet swings both ways.
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