Now that the pendulum has swung to the other side with female doctors outnumbering male doctors in NHS. There are questions being raised if this "too many female doctors" phenomenon is contributing to doctor shortage faced by NHS [1].
Of course, the actual solution to that is to build a society and culture in which men take as much of a role in raising their children - and yes, that means making sacrifices re their work - as women do. Otherwise, we're still clinging onto the old concept of the man being the breadwinner and the woman looking after the children, just in a new age where it's not economically possible to raise children on one wage alone, and that's bound to cause issues as we see in that article.
> Of course, the actual solution to that is to build a society and culture in which men take as much of a role in raising their children - and yes, that means making sacrifices re their work - as women do.
A major problem with this is that the only way women were historically able to dedicate their time to their families is by being prohibited from doing other work. As soon as you're allowed to work, working becomes a competitive advantage which means you have to do it. Jane works and Jane and her husband are bidding on the same house as you so now you have to work too.
In theory a solution might be to legally mandate a 20 hour work week and prohibit overtime so that both spouses will have time to work at home, but we all know that is not going to happen. Specialization is too great an advantage. Doctors work 80 hour weeks because it takes a long time to become a doctor and that schooling has to be amortized over many work-hours. If med school was 20 hours instead of 80 it would take 32 years instead of 8.
So the only functioning system is to have one working parent and one stay at home parent. We would have to somehow ensure that half of each is of each sex.
Historically this functioned by society treating fathers and mothers differently. If we want to treat them the same then how does the employer know which one should be prevented from working so they can stay at home without sacrificing a competitive advantage for their family?
There is also the related problem of how to convince men to spend less time on their careers if women continue to prefer men with higher incomes.
Of course, the actual solution to that is to build a society and culture in which men take as much of a role in raising their children
The Nordic countries have been pushing hard to move things in that direction. For example, in 2013 in Sweden, 25% of the parental leave days reimbursed were taken by men.
The thinking is that if both men and women end up taking as much parental leave after a birth, it evens out the "will this person suddenly disappear because a kid came into the picture" hiring equation.
It's important to remember that any form of incentivized or compulsory family leave will just shift the discrimination to people who are less likely to have kids.
While I'm between the ages of 25-45 I really don't to have to put "is single" or "has had a vasectomy" on my resume to avoid scaring off employers that can't afford to lose an employee for months.
In theory, it's supposed to balance out as women take on jobs that they wouldn't otherwise as a result of being able to share their childcaring duties. In practice, there's obviously all sorts of inefficiencies in the market to deal with - two people working part time might very well not net the same amount as one working full time and the other even less time. There's a number of issues to be solved, but that doesn't mean we should throw our hands up and say it's too hard.
Doesn't this assume that wages are determined by society desire to pay men rather than men desire to get paid?
So long dating success has a extremely strong correlation to pay grade for men, how will the incentive to seek higher pay grade going to go down? By changing culture to have men do a bigger role in raising kids, I don't see how we can predict any change in the aspects women has that correlates with success in dating. We would need the gender specific incentives for higher wages to change in order to achieve that.
> To explain the discrepancy, the researchers point to past studies that have shown female physicians are more likely to provide preventive care and psychosocial counseling. Female doctors are also more likely to adhere to clinical guidelines.
It doesn't seem like it'd be too difficult to teach men the importance of these things, though it might be a systemic thing (i.e. boys and girls getting taught different things about interacting with others from an early age, leading to different ways of thinking later in life). I'd like to know why men are less likely to do these things - an assumption that it's something intrinsic to male biology would be a huge leap.
1. The Problem With Female Doctors http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/12/27/the-probl...