You can let women choose or you can impose your wishes on them - an ideological quandry

Years ago I did a lot of research into why there were differences in the representation of men and women at the highest levels of achievement whether measured in terms of hierarchical positions, awards, recognition, etc.  Pretty consistently, in every field of endeavor, at the highest levels of performance, women were only 15-30% of the population.  Intriguingly, the numbers were always lowest in gender egalitarian countries such as in Scandinavia.

In academia, the explanation for the gap has always been that there is active discrimination, whether conscious or unconscious, against women in terms of recruitment, selection, promotion, and recognition.  Over the decades these explanations have increasingly fallen by the wayside.

For example, there is nowhere in the Uber model for discrimination against women and yet men earn more than women even when adjusting for hours worked.  Why?  All the most robust and comprehensive research indicates that bias is a vanishingly small part of the causes for the differences and that the gaps were almost entirely driven by women's choices.  These results show up even in environments where there is absolutely no possibility of discrimination.  

This is another nail in the discrimination coffin.  From What’s Keeping Women From Management Roles? by Arianne Cohen.  The subheading is A meta-analysis of six decades of studies shows that women aspire to leadership roles less often than men do.  It is entirely consistent with my earlier research.

Sheppard, Netchaeva, and collaborator Tatiana Balushkina recently published a meta-analysis on women’s workplace aspirations. The seven-year project traced the interests and ambitions of 138,000 men and women across 174 studies dating back to the 1960s, aggregating the data to analyze the gender gap and slicing it into categories such as age, industry, and time. They cast a wide net, tracking down published and unpublished papers, which was pivotal given that researchers tend to abandon unpopular or unsurprising data, especially around hot-button issues such as gender. (This is known in academia as the file drawer problem.)

“The results confirmed our suspicions that women are not as interested,” Netchaeva says. The meta-analysis concluded that among the last three generations of workers, men have consistently displayed higher aspirations for leadership than women, even more so in male-dominated industries, and that the gender gap in aspirations didn’t meaningfully shrink over time. Again and again, high schoolers imagined themselves in leadership roles, but a shift emerged among college students, with women seeing themselves as leaders less often, a trend that continued in adulthood.

Their numbers show that on average, after the first promotion from entry level jobs, there will be 1.1 men for every 1 woman. And that seemingly small difference compounds at each level of an organizational hierarchy. The researchers ran a statistical simulation, showing what happens when women step back from leadership at that rate at every level. The result: By the time you reach the C-suite, you’ve got 2.13 men in leadership positions for every woman—a gap caused by female disinterest alone, without accounting for real-world factors such as discrimination.

The 10% difference in interest, amplified over time is analogous to the mechanism behind disparate neighborhoods.  Despite it being illegal to discriminate against buyers and sellers based on race for both agents and for mortgage issuers, America's neighborhoods are as disparate as ever.  Not just in terms of race but in terms of class and religion and education attainment, etc.  People want to live with people of comparable backgrounds and which aspect of their identity is most important varies.

Researchers a decade or two ago, modeling buyers, found that there needed only a 1-2% preference for living with near someone of a similar race for completely randomized neighborhoods to re-segregate in as little as a decade or two.  Quicker in areas where there was a lot of relocation churn.

No one planned for neighborhoods to separate.  It only took a very marginal preference for it to happen on its own.  The result, as Scottish Age of Enlightenment philosopher Adam Ferguson observed, "of human action, but not the execution of any human design."

Note above that the ratio of 2.13 men to 1 woman is 32%.  Very close to my range of 15-30%.

The barriers that are presumed to exist within the enterprise are not real.  The barriers to equal representation are due to differences in women's choices.  

For an old fashioned feminist, that is fine.  As long as there are no barriers when women make their choices and they have equal opportunity, then fine.

For the more modern, authoritarian feminists who want to impose a reality of equal representation despite what women themselves want, there is a big problem.

The findings suggest that setting quotas for women in leadership may be shortsighted, and that corporations’ standard approaches to promote women and remove structural barriers may never result in full parity. 

Intriguingly, the researchers fall back on proposed solutions which were tried and tested back in the 1980s and 1990s.  Tested and shown not to work.

Netchaeva suggests that managers seek to discover what’s unattractive to individual women about specific jobs—a task that’s best done one-on-one, as concerns may vary among women. Then managers should consider whether and how they might increase women’s interest in those positions. For example, demanding roles that take time away from family could be adjusted to narrow responsibilities and add flexibility, and companies could hire support staff. Mentors with whom a woman can feel comfortable openly discussing family issues can also be helpful, Sheppard says.

But again, note, the authoritarian goal of imposing equal outcomes now begins to focus on getting women to make different choices than they would otherwise choose.  And once you begin demanding chops into narrower, less demanding jobs, then you are no longer rewarding achievement.  You are rewarding time serving drudgery.  

And there is a nice hint at class blindness to the researchers.  They want high class women to be able to grasp the brass ring more often by giving them more support staff.  But if you are fair and give additional support staff to the male candidates as well as to the female managerial candidates, you don't actually fix the productivity difference.  If you blatantly discriminate against men by giving female managers more resources, you create a class discrimination exposure.

What is the sex of most corporate support staff?  Women.  The researchers proposed solution is to improve the rewards for women managers by giving them more women support staff to do the drudge work.  I think a lot more people are angered about unconscious classism than unconscious sexism (though they aren't exclusive of one another.  

In the end, the report is that researchers have confirmed that there are differences in outcome based on differences in choices and differences in levels of motivation.  And they have no proposed solutions that don't involved coercion to get women to make different choices on a sustained basis to land in jobs which are highly stressful, highly risky, and highly rewarding.