While other professions are making up ground, cybersecurity still lags behind in female representation, thanks to a lack of respect and inclusion.
While other professions are making up ground, cybersecurity still lags behind in female representation, thanks to a lack of respect and inclusion.
Generally speaking, men and women do different things due to social pressures and gender roles, it’s not like you’re biologically inclined to buy $100 flashlights.
There are many, many systemic reasons that there are fewer women in our fields, and it’s vastly more complex than “women aren’t interested in it”
Be better.
I don’t believe that is the only reason, some, sure, maybe. Having kids (one boy and one girl) and them growing up without any gender roles, and certainly no social pressures has shown me how drastic boys and girls are in interests. I think a lot of it is biology.
Lol, no social pressures?
We know that pink is considered a colour for girls. We know that historically it was a colour for boys. You can interpret that as no biological preference, only social.
My son still expressed that pink is for girls, not boys. We don’t assign gender roles or colours to a gender. It comes from media, friends, daycare, school etc. Social pressure is not just what you do. Sure, there are differences in interests between genders. There are also variations between kids.
You have a set of 2 and are immediately writing off their differences as gender based, based on biology. If you had 2 girls or 2 boys with varying interests, would it also be biology?
There is no normal interests for either gender. Just more or less common. And much of that is societal pressures, not biological. Do you think stone age women cared about high heel shoes?
My son likes pink, no one has told him that’s a girl color. It’s not 100% all the time girls will like x and boys will like y. I guarentee if you isolated girls and boys from the rest of society from birth, the boys will be wrestling each other and the girls will be doing more nurturing type activities. Are there exceptions, yes.
I completely agree. However, its a spectrum on both sides, not a binary is the point. It just skews more for each gender. They are not exceptions, they just fall differently on the spectrum.
Nurturing like teaching, chef and doctor? Those are all traditional male roles.
Lots of behavior is learned. Lots is instinctive. Puppy’s learn by play fighting. Cats learn by play hunting. Pupoys don’t instinctively pee lifting a leg. They learn it from other dogs, yet we see it as innate behaviour. How much is nurturing and wrestling innate vs learned? Its impossible to isolate from society, so we can only speculate and study the degree to which it applies, with broad accuracy.
As it happens my other son attends the same daycare and pink is his favoyrite colour.
There may be a trend for certain biological influences to make it more likely for someone to enjoy something, however what people enjoy is absolutely, socially influenced. Even if you are raising your children without gender roles when you interact with them… Do they consume any amount of media? Do they leave the house? Do they go to school? I ask this because interacting with the world influences what we know about and what we know about and our experiences influence what we find interest in. If a boy has only ever seen Barbie played with by girls, and all the kids at school say barbie is “for girls”, and the TV shows barbie and pink stuff being used by girls, then he may not even want to ask to play with it, even if a parent is providing it as an option.
Examples tangentially related to this article:
Programming used to be a job “for women”. It was clerical work that very often went uncredited, and yet now, the field is (nearly) entirely male dominated, even if less than 10 years ago. It’s commonly thought that a big reason for the shift is PC’s and consoles in the 80’s and 90’s being primarily marketed to men and boys.
Teaching was a man’s career in the early 1800’s… By the late 1800’s it was around 60% women, and not it’s nearly 75% female.
If our career interests were biologically determined (an insane statement if you ask me) then we would never see demographic shifts like this.
Edit: I make a lot of typos
And I would argue that the teaching thing was because education was considered a “man’s role” now there is no stereotype and women flock more to that profession. I used to play with cabbage patch dolls as a kid, my sister grew up and switched to barbie and my little pony. I had no interest. It wasn’t because a show told me I shouldn’t like it it’s because I had zero interest. It’s almost like you’re making the argument that homosexuality is learned behavior and not ingrained biology… no, if you are gay you are gay and you know it. It’s not because someone “groomed” you to be gay. Programming used to be a secretarial job, so yes the gender norms of the time would have leaned more heavily towards women. It’s not necessarily because they wanted to code (it looked wayyy different back then). Now there are wonderful women coders, welders, plumbers, you name it. That’s just not the biological norm. My wife hates math, hates that kind of stuff. but she has her masters in education because she loves nurturing and teaching. Are there guys like her, sure. I love teaching too. it’s just not my passion.
I’m not saying career interests are biology driven, but that life interests are. Take the difference between male and female brains for example. Females have more empathy then males. Males have more of an ability to tune everything else out but a single thing while females cannot. Which if you believe in the hunter / gatherer theory makes sense. Males were out hunting and being hyper focused on the kill while the females were protecting the young and needed to pay attention to everything all at once.
Men and Women should 100% be equal, but they certainly are not the same, interests or otherwise.
that’s not what I was saying at all.