March 13, 2020

Women are more likely to have male jobs in POOR countries

The stereotype is of course that in poor countries women are made to "know their place" and stick to traditional female jobs.  But the opposite is true.  If we come across a female engineer, her first name is more likely to be Malgorzata (a Polish name) than Mary.  The finding comes from a study of  80,000 individuals in 76 representative country samples so is hard to argue with.  That's a heck of a big research program.

To make the finding vivid, let me introduce you to the gorgeous Carmen Gorska Putynska:



Carmen obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering, specialized in bridges and underground constructions, in 2013 in Poland, at Technological University of Poznan. Then, she was awarded with the “Erasmus Mundus Scholarship” and accepted in the “International Master of Fire Safety Engineering” program.

Cop that!  It sounds like a feminist ideal, does it not?  Yet Poland is still a very traditional society in most ways, with very little acceptance for feminism.

So how come the inversion?  How come it is unequal societies where women take male jobs?  Why do women given easy access to male jobs not take them?

It's only an apparent puzzle.  The key is how rewarding the jobs are.  When females can get good female jobs they choose female jobs.  But when all the good jobs are male-role ones, the more capable women will adapt to male work.  Ms Putynska above is a very clever lady

But we are Left with a paradox:  Do we want women in male-role work?  If so the answer is not to make female access to such work easier but rather to make it harder. It is hard to know what feminists really want but if they want women out of female roles and into male roles -- which they do appear to want -- their policies are going in exactly the wrong direction.

But Leftist policies yielding perverse results are nothing new of course.  They think everything is simple when practically nothing is




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