Across all cultures (perhaps across all of history), women are more risk averse.
In fact, feminist activists didn't push to get more women into tech until tech was a higher paying, lower risk endeavor.
Only then did it become scandalous that young women were choosing different career paths (but interestingly, the fact that young women are earning more than young men and graduating from college in far greater rates than young men isn't scandalous).
I think this is misleading. Men and women face different risks, and heterodox strategies are not indicative of very much. First, you need to be careful how you infer "risk taking" from "not taking the same bets", because the actual riks taken is a portfolio riks calculation which is blind. Second, you don't have any data to infer anyrthing about the quality of the risk taking they are in fact taking; that is in terms of actual/realize and even provability weighted expected returns. To give one crass example, a women could take a strategy of legal ownership of "high risk realized assets" through marriage. This is a "high-risk strategy", but it is also empirically true that many rich men are married.[1] Of course, the odds of success in this strategy are also not evenly distributed amongst women as a group, either. Another person could look at that and say that marriage to a rich person is a "risk avoidance" strategy...and again, this may or may not be true. Because wealth and genetic fitness need not correlate, and so your frame of reference on the purpose of strategy quickly turns into quite a bit more complex calculation.
[1] Marriage as a legal contract has a financial value; a derivative, with contingent claims on of the underlying (asset) value of couple's cumulative/aggregate incomes.
You and your complexifyin' aren't welcome around here, friend! All that nuance just makes our arguments much harder to make. You'd best take it elsewhere.
You've obviously made a serious study of this and that's why you have such justifiably strong opinions on the matter. Can you do 10 minutes of googling next time and share more? Or maybe 20?! Think of how informed you'd be after 20 minutes!
> If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe.
There's plenty of room between "justify everything from first principles" and "perform an ad hoc 5-minute search of the web for research that confirms what I already believe." I'd also say, the closer one is to the former, the more justified one is in feeling certain about their beliefs.
> It's pretty difficult to have a serious conversation if you have to fully define and prove every single piece of content in a comment.
That's good, because nobody here is advocating that!
> Common sense is getting to be pretty rare around here.
Well, as they say, "Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach eighteen."
What's "common sense," here? That women are more risk-averse? I disagree, at the very least until one defines "risk" and "risk-averse" very precisely. My "common sense" tells me otherwise. Shucks. Ain't that the problem with "common sense?"
I think part of the reason these discussions never get anywhere is because of blatant dishonesty in discussions. You actually think there is no "feminist activist" movement?
I don't, and I never made that claim because it's insane. I object to the idea that "feminist activists" "didn't push to get more women into tech until tech was a higher paying, lower risk endeavor."
There's a claim "women are more risk averse", and another claim "feminist activists exist", both of which are feasibly true, that do not lead to general conclusion that "feminist activists did not push to get more women into tech until it was a higher paying, lower risk endeavor". Which is a broad, unsupported argument, for which the data directly contradicts:
"And who are these "feminist activist" strawmen(straw-women?) you have set up?"
I took that to mean (generally) that the idea that there is such a thing as a legitimate feminist activist is nonsense - that in reality any reference to one is as part of a straw man argument. Not what you were saying?
What I meant was that he was characterizing all feminist activists as wanting or doing X (X being unsupported, anyways), which seems to me to be an unfair generalization and an easy to knock down, stereotypical villain.
I should have clarified in the original post, apologies.
In fact, feminist activists didn't push to get more women into tech until tech was a higher paying, lower risk endeavor.
Only then did it become scandalous that young women were choosing different career paths (but interestingly, the fact that young women are earning more than young men and graduating from college in far greater rates than young men isn't scandalous).