How does this apply to other countries where women are higher in STEM and tech than men? For example, in Iran more than 60% of STEM students are female.
I am not particularly knowledgeable about that, so I don't have much to offer here. I'll take a stab, but I don't have anything to cite, and my opinions aren't well informed -
For various reasons I don't want to go into on this thread, Iran is not a society that I think should be looked up to and emulated. It frequently gets cited as an example of highly misogynistic culture, and as far as I know has plenty of laws / official practices that codify inequality of women in a way that many other developed countries (e.g., the United States, countries in the EU, etc) don't. I'm happy to be corrected on this as I really don't know all that much about Iran, but I strongly suspect the people decrying the google essay as being sexist would agree that Iran is not a good role model for egalitarian society. Regardless, from what little I do know, if the structure of Iranian society/culture is what it takes to get high representation of women in STEM, is that really worth it?
I have one more thing to add - I found this video to be thought provoking:
(I've linked to a specific time where the material is particularly relevant, but the whole thing is worth a watch)
To summarize, that video makes the observation that less wealthy, less egalitarian countries have higher rates of women in typically male professions. Conversely, very rich and egalitarian countries have a lower amount of women in them. The explanation for this phenomenon that is proposed in the video (if I remember right, I watched this years ago) is that when factors like wages, status, family expectations, etc are given less and less importance, and people are therefore relatively more free to choose professions based on desire rather than need, women tend to avoid jobs within STEM fields. To be clear, that's merely one interpretation of the data (although it sounds plausible to me), there are likely other valid ones.
Oh I was definitely not saying Iran should be a role model for the rest of the world. I'm saying examples exist that prove the negation of the "biological" argument.
Which brings doubt into, if we're raising boys and girls without considering gender norms would boys really outnumber girls in tech?
I would not go so far as to say they "prove" the negation of the biological argument, when there is so much evidence that points the other direction, and a practically infinte number of confounding variables are involved if all you're doing is pointing at a couple of countries like Iran and saying "look at that". So I don't actually think it brings doubt into anything.
Personally, I think it's very likely that if a large number of men and a large number of women were each given exactly equal opportunity to pursue whatever career they wished, more men would pursue tech than women. I haven't seen any data that contradicts this belief, but if I did I'd like to think I would change my mind. Of course, I have no idea what range we should expect the proportions to fall into. 51/49? 60/40? 90/10? Obviously this also means that I have no idea if the gender representation we see in tech currently accurately represents the population of people who would be interested in it, given the opportunity. But I think the weight of the evidence that we should expect more men than women in tech is much higher than the weight to the contrary. Not knowing the exact numbers simply means that we should focus our efforts on making sure everybody has equal opportunity to pursue whichever career interests them the most, as opposed to trying to reach some arbitrary numerical threshold. As long as all people are free to make their own choices, we shouldn't be concerned how the distributions turn out.
> How does this apply to other countries where women are higher in STEM and tech than men? For example, in Iran more than 60% of STEM students are female.
That's because in iran, the government sets the "standards for women's and men's study". Women are FORCED to take these classes.
Also, iranian women outnumber men in STEM within iran because iranian families with money send their male children overseas to study.
The numbers are even more skewed for UAE, Kuwait, etc. There, the women are like 80% of the local university populations because the wealthy arabs send their sons to study abroad in US, UK, Canada, Australia, etc.
There are political scientists/psychologists who say that the lack is choice is why women in iran and middle east are so well represented in STEM. In the west, females have lots of choices and they have a say in what they study. The government/fathers can't tell women you have to study this or that. That's not the case in iran. If iran ever opened up and liberalized, the thinking is that a large portion of the women will choose non-STEM fields, just like they do in the West.
In short, why do they study stem? They study STEM subjects for the same reason they wear burqas. They have no choice.
