What is Reddit's opinion of Talking About Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave The Sciences?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

>Or do men and women have different priorities and goals? You're assuming it's completely cultural, and more importantly that somehow culture obviates agency.

Of course culture doesn't obviate agency, but people don't make choices in a vacuum. The choices anyone makes are definitely influenced by their parents, friends and the people around them. If a man was thinking of becoming a pediatrician and none of his male colleagues were and everyone asked him if he was a pervert to want to look at kids all day, he may reconsider his decision. That's obviously exaggerated, but the point stands; in any given endeavor we all receive tons of feedback and reactions from the people around us. If our actions go against the prevailing cultural ideas, that feedback is negative. Perhaps you and others you know are immune to such reactions, but a lot of people are influenced by what people think of them and this is a strong mechanism for how society reinforces the pre-existing roles we take.

It's also possible you live in an egalitarian paradise, and don't see these problems. If so, fantastic, please let me know where. Where I am, I cannot count the number of times women are interrupted, underestimated or even assumed to be secretaries simply because of their gender. For people in these situations, we still need to do a lot of work to make things better.

>Further, resumes are solely qualifications. It says nothing about negotiations, or the fact that even in the same jobs women typically take more vacation days and work fewer hours. It is not controlling for most everything.

I'd like to see a source for the more vacation days and fewer hours and further would like to see that this resulted in decreased productivity. Regardless, this study does control for everything by showing that even without interacting with a real human being, people (men and women) have unconscious biases that negatively affect women. Maybe it's possible that interacting with people, we could negate these biases, but usually we find the opposite. We encourage women to be unsure and call them bitchy if they are remotely assertive, meanwhile we praise men for doing the opposite.

>I would ask why not consider the fact that before women could control their fertility they were a much bigger hiring risk and men were socially and legally obligated to support women in their lives. This means prioritizing the people who are less of a risk and have more financial obligations.

I think this encompasses the whole "is-ought" fallacy going on here. Yes, we used to force women to be the primary caretakers and didn't allow them to be educated or to work, but does that mean we still should encourage those old ideas? The point is that there is no biological or scientific justification for following ideas and cultural norms that are hundreds of years old. We can and must treat people better. The places that don't will lose talented people to those that do (as we've already seen here where more talented, higher GPA women were leaving scientific fields while mediocre men stayed).