Do you know why there are so few women studying engineering, physics, maths and pure sciences?
Do you know why there are so few women working in manual trades, in the automotive industry, as electricians…?
Yes, exactly.
It’s not because we need yet another awareness campaign encouraging women to get involved in fields where women are less represented.
Why is there such an insistence that reality should be so different from what it actually is?
Could it be that we’re living in some permanent adolescent daydream, imagining an ideal world and constantly pouring all our resources into things that go against the way reality actually works?
Let me tell you a short story about yet another “socially conscious” woman getting a reality check.
Well, the other day my cousin came round and told me that he was starting a course in the automotive field. It’s something like an advanced course in motor vehicle mechanics.
I hadn’t seen him for a while and he’d only just started the course, so I asked him how everything was going. After he told me about the dozens of subjects covering engineering, circuits, materials and all sorts of other things I know absolutely nothing about, and make no secret of it, I asked him about his classmates. I said, what’s the atmosphere like? What are your classmates like?
Then another relative jumped in and asked:
“Are there any girls taking the course?”
And my cousin answered:
“Yes, there are two girls. There are two classes, so there’s one girl in each class and the rest are boys.”
And then this relative exclaimed:
“But that can’t be right! How is it possible that there’s only one girl? They should promote this profession and these courses more, so that more girls hear about them and can sign up.”
And at that point I can’t help smiling, because by now, making comments like that is almost like being detached from reality.
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In the time and place we live in, there are no restrictions on what women can study.
And that means women will study, of course, but they’ll study whatever the hell they want.
We’re no longer at that point in history when, if women were allowed to study, they could only go into teacher training or nursing. We’re not even remotely there anymore. Now women can, as I say, in this particular place and at this particular point in history, study whatever the hell they want.
Of course, that isn’t true in other countries and cultures where women’s rights are barely even recognised today, but we’ll leave that subject for another day. I’ll only say that there are more people in denial about that than there are flat-earthers.
As I was saying, when women are free to choose, this means that most of them won’t have the slightest interest in the automotive industry and that, statistically speaking, as we’ve just seen, only two girls out of sixty students will be genuinely interested in it, will want to train in it and will want to work in that industry.
Is there any problem with that?
No.
None.
Just as when I studied psychology, how many men were there in my class?
Roughly the same proportion.
And I could say the same about other degrees such as teacher training, nursing, psychology and social work.
By now, anyone who doesn’t know about the biological differences between men and women simply hasn’t actually taken the time to learn about them and study them. Unfortunately, many people have instead taken what the media say for granted, even though, in the best-case scenario, those messages deliberately try to push against the biological tendencies that drive us and naturally influence women’s choices when they’re free to decide for themselves.
We’ve even seen this in scientific studies, including some of the best-known research carried out in Nordic countries, where very high levels of equality in terms of rights have been achieved and where researchers have again found that, when women are free to choose, they choose careers that are in line with their biological inclinations.
Because biologically, men tend to be more interested in things and activities, while women tend to be more interested in people and contexts.
It’s simply a matter of actually studying the subject, putting uninformed slogans and propaganda aside, and looking at reality for what it is, whether we like it or not, whether it matches the world we would ideally like to live in or not.
Because the further removed you are from reality, from who you are and from how the world actually works, the harder it becomes to understand what’s going on around you and to find your place in it.
If you’re tired of being told that men and women should make the same choices, even when they’re perfectly free to choose for themselves, you might want to subscribe to the Gangatu newsletter. I write about psychology, human behaviour and the inconvenient reality of how people actually work. Especially when that reality refuses to cooperate with what we’d like to believe.
Love,
Noemi
PS. Subscribe to the newsletter above if you’d rather understand how people actually work than pretend reality should be different.
