WP: Percentage of women in executive-level roles declined from 12.2% to 11.8% in 2023

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Now measure LGBTQIA+ and come back with the findings.

There's a pretty obvious problem here in that changes over time are a lot more likely to be due to changes in disclosure/survey answers than in actual demographic turnover.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

I already know that I’m gonna get jumped by a bunch of red avatars for saying this, but men are just naturally more inclined towards leadership positions, so even in a society where sexism is nonexistent,  >50% of executives will be men. I’m not saying that sexism isn’t holding any women back from becoming executives, I just don’t think it’s the main factor. I’m also not saying that someone should be held back from being promoted to an executive position just because they’re a women. I’m just saying that Generic Male will be a bit more inclined towards leadership positions than Generic Female. Maybe in a post-sexism society, the amount of females in leadership positions would be 35%, maybe 25%, or maybe even 12%. Idk how much more inclined the male mind is towards leadership than the female mind, but I don’t think the ratio would ever naturally be 50/50

I disagree with this pretty strongly but I am curious what "natural" differences you think are at play here?

I ask because of comments like this:

A bit of a tangent, but it's weird to me how the posters who get most offended by the suggestion that Generic Male and Generic Female don't think exactly alike are also the most pro-trans posters.

How a person thinks is very strongly going to be socially conditioned. Most of these things aren't what I would consider "natural" at all.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Risk-taking behavior is actually the exact example I had in mind as most plausibly explaining the difference. But even then, I'm not entirely sure why that would be a particularly favored quality for an executive/leader to have.

I think even with that example (and probably some other small ones) in mind I have a pretty strong prior that it's low on the list of factors at play and that other socially constructed dynamics are much, much more influential here. A pretty obvious one is that professional women pay a penalty for having children (and taking parental leave). Another obvious one is an inertial effect of executive committees being so male-dominant for so long in a way that's very easy to self-perpetuate. These seem much, much more obvious to me as reasons why there are so few women in executive positions than any sort of innate biological differences.

I already know that I’m gonna get jumped by a bunch of red avatars for saying this, but men are just naturally more inclined towards leadership positions, so even in a society where sexism is nonexistent,  >50% of executives will be men. I’m not saying that sexism isn’t holding any women back from becoming executives, I just don’t think it’s the main factor. I’m also not saying that someone should be held back from being promoted to an executive position just because they’re a women. I’m just saying that Generic Male will be a bit more inclined towards leadership positions than Generic Female. Maybe in a post-sexism society, the amount of females in leadership positions would be 35%, maybe 25%, or maybe even 12%. Idk how much more inclined the male mind is towards leadership than the female mind, but I don’t think the ratio would ever naturally be 50/50

I disagree with this pretty strongly but I am curious what "natural" differences you think are at play here?

I ask because of comments like this:

A bit of a tangent, but it's weird to me how the posters who get most offended by the suggestion that Generic Male and Generic Female don't think exactly alike are also the most pro-trans posters.

How a person thinks is very strongly going to be socially conditioned. Most of these things aren't what I would consider "natural" at all.

In prehistoric times, it would have been evolutionarily advantageous for men to be more assertive, confident, and aggressive than women since men are naturally way stronger than women and thus more likely to come back alive from hunting dangerous prey. Basically, it was better off for our species that one of our sexes had the means (raw strength) and the right mindset necessary to be successful in hunting prey. This is the case for many other mammals too.

As I mentioned to Ferguson, this is obviously obsolete in modern society, but evolution hasn't caught up to technology. Since Generic Male is naturally more hardwired towards being assertive, aggressive, and confident than Generic Female is, it's hardly surprising that a majority of executives are men since those are 3 important qualities for an executive to have.

I think even at this there's plenty of evidence that these characteristics, even if there is a biological difference between the sexes, is socially reinforced in a way that exaggerates the differences.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Jumping on the "statistical significance is inappropriate for this analysis" bandwagon to say: even if you were interested in trying to do some sort of inference here, zero change in the annual year-over-year composition in female executives is still probably a bad null expectation. You'd expect that, even if the gender breakdown of executives shouldn't equilibrate at 50-50, it should equilibrate to something more even than 88-12 (or 7-1) just through sampling variation because the underlying population of people who are eligible for promotion into these populations is much closer to 50-50 than it is to 88-12.

In a statistical sense a change of zero may make some sense, but from a statistical-demographic perspective it really shouldn't be. Something strange would still have to be happening to get zero y-o-y change!