The whole debate somewhat misses Celeste's main argument. It is annoying nit-picking, really, and bespeaks deficiencies in reading comprehension and ability to distinguish the important from the trivial.
Celeste claims that 60-40 is a tipping point.* Changes are gradual and small before that tipping point is reached. She says that 60-40 has now finally been reached, so in the next five or ten years we should see much more dramatic rates of change than we have seen over the last 40 years. That is the thesis of her essay. The other contributions may have been useful if they had shown gross error in her assumptions, but as you explain here, they did not. Not even minor error, really.
We need to revisit this in '29 or '30 to see whether Celeste was right or not in her main claim.
* More precisely, I suppose, she claims that somewhere in the neighbourhood of 60 F - 40 M there is a tipping point at which male participation collapses. The exact point may vary depending on the nature of the occupation.
Yes, this needs to be revisited. But if I can collect the data, we may be able to see the effect in majors that passed this tipping point. For example, did teaching go slowly toward women but then quickly at some point? If Celeste is correct, we should see this over the past 20 years.
I do think she has a point, but we should add that education at the k-12 level has become unfriendly toward males. Less recess, more sitting, less accepting of "male behavior" (rough housing, crude jokes, etc.), which may also be partly due to K-12 teachers becoming more female.
One thing Celeste misses (I think I'd have to go back and check), and that is a mechanism. Why would or should this 60-40 tipping point happen. As I've been thinking about it, the work atmosphere may be an explanation. Male behavior (the wise remarks, the putdowns, the crude jokes) gets shut down once there are enough females around, and this environment is no longer fun for males. The construction site is more fun than the office. Nailing a work belt to the ceiling as a joke works for males, less so once there are enough females around. This is not to knock female culture; it is just different, and given the choice, men would rather be able to joke around and crudely at times.
Yes, she did not provide good warrants for her claim - that's a much better rejoinder to Celeste than Drum's, Cowen's and Smith's nit-picking about whether the slope of a line is flat or slightly up. A mechanism is most certainly needed.
I agree with your other points. School and similar institutions treat boys as defective girls these days. No wonder they're checking out.
John Carter of "Postcards from Barsoom" identifies a mechanism:-
Men gain status (especially in the mating war) through competitions with other men. Once an occupation is coded female in the eyes of society at large, there is nothing for men in participating. They do not gain any status from excelling against women, and they risk humiliation if they do not excel. Therefore they withdraw and seek other arenas of competition, arenas which are male-coded.
It seems like this could be testable. What is happening with Law, for example? I remember reading some time ago that Law is becoming majority female. Is it generally expected that lawyers will be female now? How is that perception changing? And what is happening to male participation?
Real Estate sales is another candidate for analysis. In Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), it's a male occupation. Now? Perhaps not so much. Contrast with car sales.
I can see how this mechanism would produce a non-linear response, a tipping point, and also how it could appear at different ratios of female:male participation. That would be due to differing delays between the changing of sex ratios and society's perceptions.
Can't this be explained by the IQ distributions of men and women? Although men and women have similar mean IQs, the male distribution have fatter tails while female median IQ is higher.
If you need diligent people of average and slightly above average IQs, they would be majority women. This demographic can do most college degrees like teaching, nursing and library sciences.
But the highest IQ college degrees like physicists are still dominated by males.
I'm not sure IQ explains this. To my knowledge male and female IQ have the same mean and median, but that male IQs have a greater standard deviation or fatter tails as you say. Given how hard it isn't to get into college, there are about the same amount of males and females with enough cognitive ability to get into college.
I do think that the general difference of males liking things and females liking people has an impact. Once college became more acceptable for women, they would tend to flood the more people-oriented fields such as teaching, nursing, etc. At some point, this may well push men out. Biology isn't entirely explained by this.
The extremes of IQ, for example, physics, is still better explained by things vs. people, at least at the undergraduate level. The fat tails may come into play at the graduate level, but some sorting already happened before that.
The whole debate somewhat misses Celeste's main argument. It is annoying nit-picking, really, and bespeaks deficiencies in reading comprehension and ability to distinguish the important from the trivial.
Celeste claims that 60-40 is a tipping point.* Changes are gradual and small before that tipping point is reached. She says that 60-40 has now finally been reached, so in the next five or ten years we should see much more dramatic rates of change than we have seen over the last 40 years. That is the thesis of her essay. The other contributions may have been useful if they had shown gross error in her assumptions, but as you explain here, they did not. Not even minor error, really.
We need to revisit this in '29 or '30 to see whether Celeste was right or not in her main claim.
* More precisely, I suppose, she claims that somewhere in the neighbourhood of 60 F - 40 M there is a tipping point at which male participation collapses. The exact point may vary depending on the nature of the occupation.
Yes, this needs to be revisited. But if I can collect the data, we may be able to see the effect in majors that passed this tipping point. For example, did teaching go slowly toward women but then quickly at some point? If Celeste is correct, we should see this over the past 20 years.
I do think she has a point, but we should add that education at the k-12 level has become unfriendly toward males. Less recess, more sitting, less accepting of "male behavior" (rough housing, crude jokes, etc.), which may also be partly due to K-12 teachers becoming more female.
One thing Celeste misses (I think I'd have to go back and check), and that is a mechanism. Why would or should this 60-40 tipping point happen. As I've been thinking about it, the work atmosphere may be an explanation. Male behavior (the wise remarks, the putdowns, the crude jokes) gets shut down once there are enough females around, and this environment is no longer fun for males. The construction site is more fun than the office. Nailing a work belt to the ceiling as a joke works for males, less so once there are enough females around. This is not to knock female culture; it is just different, and given the choice, men would rather be able to joke around and crudely at times.
Yes, she did not provide good warrants for her claim - that's a much better rejoinder to Celeste than Drum's, Cowen's and Smith's nit-picking about whether the slope of a line is flat or slightly up. A mechanism is most certainly needed.
I agree with your other points. School and similar institutions treat boys as defective girls these days. No wonder they're checking out.
John Carter of "Postcards from Barsoom" identifies a mechanism:-
Men gain status (especially in the mating war) through competitions with other men. Once an occupation is coded female in the eyes of society at large, there is nothing for men in participating. They do not gain any status from excelling against women, and they risk humiliation if they do not excel. Therefore they withdraw and seek other arenas of competition, arenas which are male-coded.
It seems like this could be testable. What is happening with Law, for example? I remember reading some time ago that Law is becoming majority female. Is it generally expected that lawyers will be female now? How is that perception changing? And what is happening to male participation?
Real Estate sales is another candidate for analysis. In Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), it's a male occupation. Now? Perhaps not so much. Contrast with car sales.
I can see how this mechanism would produce a non-linear response, a tipping point, and also how it could appear at different ratios of female:male participation. That would be due to differing delays between the changing of sex ratios and society's perceptions.
Can't this be explained by the IQ distributions of men and women? Although men and women have similar mean IQs, the male distribution have fatter tails while female median IQ is higher.
If you need diligent people of average and slightly above average IQs, they would be majority women. This demographic can do most college degrees like teaching, nursing and library sciences.
But the highest IQ college degrees like physicists are still dominated by males.
I'm not sure IQ explains this. To my knowledge male and female IQ have the same mean and median, but that male IQs have a greater standard deviation or fatter tails as you say. Given how hard it isn't to get into college, there are about the same amount of males and females with enough cognitive ability to get into college.
I do think that the general difference of males liking things and females liking people has an impact. Once college became more acceptable for women, they would tend to flood the more people-oriented fields such as teaching, nursing, etc. At some point, this may well push men out. Biology isn't entirely explained by this.
The extremes of IQ, for example, physics, is still better explained by things vs. people, at least at the undergraduate level. The fat tails may come into play at the graduate level, but some sorting already happened before that.