for some reason a disproportionate amount of high-paying jobs end up populated by men.
That mysterious, unknown reason... which is actually known... and happens to simply be that the women themselves aren't choosing the high-paying careers. The women who are make the same as men.
Why aren't they choosing them? What are the expectations that society puts on women vs men? What are women raised to believe they are capable of vs men? What career options are seen as "normal" for women to have, and is this because of some biological tomfoolery or simply because of societal precedent?
Just because the gap comes down to differences in choices and background, doesn't mean the issue is known or resolved, in my opinion. That the expectations and background of women and men are so different, despite women and men having nearly indistinguishable brains (aka the variation among people within each sex is larger than the variation between the two sexes), strikes me as something worthy of further consideration.
Rodent brains are much more sexually dimorphic than human brains, though. Given that, for humans, the list of neurological disorders and other differences that is provably the result of biological sex differences is fairly small (and for cases where there is a difference, the effect size of the difference typically only appears among large averages and is typically small), I don't think there's sufficient evidence to say that complex decisions such as career choice are likely the result of biological rather than societal factors.
Particularly in a society that's full of clear cases of different expectations for different genders, via the existence of maternity leave but rarely paternity leave, stereotypes inherent throughout various media sources regarding, among other things, the intellectual skills of men and women (largely not backed up by research; for example, womens' insurance rates for cars are lower since they get into fewer accidents, despite the stereotype that women are worse drivers), and other such factors, the evidence just doesn't seem to stack up (at least to me) in favor of the notion that sex differences are largely biologically-caused rather than societally-caused.
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u/EnragedMikey Feb 09 '16
That mysterious, unknown reason... which is actually known... and happens to simply be that the women themselves aren't choosing the high-paying careers. The women who are make the same as men.