Ideally, the demographic breakdown should perfectly match the candidate pool. And again, ideally, the candidate pool should perfectly match the general population. Lacking the actual candidate pool numbers, there's actually two assumptions in play:
1. That the candidate pool matches the general population.
2. That the company is discriminating against this candidate pool, leading to skewed demographics.
For some reason, assumption (1) seems to be implicitly trusted, and all blame fall to assumption (2) -- that is, that any deviation from the general population is somehow the fault of the company. I would posit that assumption (1) is typically not true. For instance, we know from studies that the STEM candidate pool for women is smaller than the general population, due to university dropout. It is impossible for every STEM company to have a population distribution of women that matches the general population. Reverse applies to, say, nursing or teaching, which have larger-than-expected numbers of women. (I'll leave it to the reader to make their own conclusions about why we aren't reading about diversity problems in such fields.)
Aren't you forgetting that different people, even different groups of people, have different motivations? E.g. in general, men like cars, gym and climbing; women like jewellery, yoga and dancing. These are all voluntary activities (well, you could argue that things like gym and jewellery are socially motivated), yet different sexes in average choose differently. Why wouldn't it be the same with careers?
Are you assuming that there is some genetic or evolutionary reason for men to like cars? That somehow it is hard-coded into the Y chromosome to like cars?
Or have you considered the possibility that social conditioning can make a large difference in what hobbies and preferences someone ends up having?
There definitely could be an evolutionary reason why men biologically prefer adrenaline, technical subjects and showing off their muscles, whereas women prefer talking, being led and showing off their youth/beauty. After all, despite all the feminist/anti-sexist posturing in our society, no-one bats an eye when someone says that men are more aggressive.
But even if there are first-order biological reasons ("encoded into the Y chromosome"), there could be second-order biological reasons. E.g. women choose when it comes to sex (the underlying biological reason being, men have more time and more chances (more sperm) to make kids, so they can afford to be less picky), so men will put more energy in displaying/becoming a good partner (e.g. by earning more money). I guess it's a similar logic to why murder is immoral - there's no immediate biological reason for it, but the groups where killing in-group members was condoned simply didn't survive.
Historically, most people have been killing each other for resources.
Ultimately, food and water are the most important ones, so there had been historic precedents of cannibalism among groups of people in harsh conditions where resources were very scarce.
> Are you assuming that there is some genetic or evolutionary reason for men to like cars? That somehow it is hard-coded into the Y chromosome to like cars?
There does seem to be some supporting evidence for this theory over social conditioning.
Sex differences in rhesus monkey toy preferences parallel those of children[1]
I hope that's not the case here. My reluctance to give my own conclusions about paper is that I don't have the background to interpret the observations properly.
I didn't want my posting of it to be taken as a statement of a poorly informed opinion one way or another, rather than me feeling pressured by society not to discuss it.
I personally don't have anything objective to contribute to discussion that wouldn't be distracting.
The problem as always is that, every time a field or industry has tried to argue "well, (insert underrepresented group here) just aren't interested in/aren't as good at what we do", no matter how many attempts they make to justify it with weird evolutionary arguments, they usually end up being proven wrong when someone finds a way to remove bias from the entry process of that field or industry.
Seriously, go read about stuff like the blind auditions for orchestras (and applications of the same technique to other fields) and how they blew up any notion of meritocratic processes and gender/racial imbalance being purely due to lack of interest or ability from the groups being excluded.
This is an interesting analogy and there is evidence that it works, as long as you somehow negate the gatekeeper: Biases from interviewers.
Does it still hold when there is no gatekeeper?
I'm not seeing that many minority or women as entrepreneurs. Can you hypothesize why is that?
For example if the oft cited gender pay gap is really as wide as 23%, where are the all female companies with female CEOs exploiting the market inefficiencies?
Except we've heard this exact excuse -- "women just aren't interested in X, men are" -- before, and it's turned out to be wrong. Plenty of other fields people just said "oh, women don't like that/aren't interested"... until concerted effort to break down biases and barriers, and then suddenly "oh, guess they do like and are interested, we'd just been keeping them out all this time".
So any "in a highly convenient coincidence, human sexual dimorphism just happens to prevent women being interested in/good at my field of endeavor" argument should at this point probably carry a presumption of incorrectness (and of same for anyone advancing said argument, if not presumption of outright bias/discrimination) until overwhelming evidence is provided in support.
1. That the candidate pool matches the general population.
2. That the company is discriminating against this candidate pool, leading to skewed demographics.
For some reason, assumption (1) seems to be implicitly trusted, and all blame fall to assumption (2) -- that is, that any deviation from the general population is somehow the fault of the company. I would posit that assumption (1) is typically not true. For instance, we know from studies that the STEM candidate pool for women is smaller than the general population, due to university dropout. It is impossible for every STEM company to have a population distribution of women that matches the general population. Reverse applies to, say, nursing or teaching, which have larger-than-expected numbers of women. (I'll leave it to the reader to make their own conclusions about why we aren't reading about diversity problems in such fields.)