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Douglas_Knight comments on Open Thread, May 25 - May 31, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: Gondolinian 25 May 2015 12:00AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 26 May 2015 12:01:38PM 2 points [-]

This old comment says business is a notoriously all-male province in what I suppose is the United States. This does not match my experience in Europe. If under business we mean being employed by a corporation, generally speaking here sales and logistics and tech are male, marketing, HR, finance and support and testing are female. This is of course a broad generalization. Sales is closer to having gender balance than logistics or tech. HR and marketing are strongly female because they are understood as a "human" field, organizing trade shows or interviewing candidates, where social skills matter. Sales is a bit more male because beside all these, it is a "brave", "boasting" field. Finance is notoriously female on the level of accountants, a male accountant is almost unusual, although higher level finance decision makers are more often men. Logistics is very male, if we mean under logistics big trucks, heavy crates and ugly warehouses. In corporate lingo "go ask the boys" invariably means descending into the scary and un-officelike world of the warehouse :) Tech/engineering mainly male but a lot of female testers, because female testers understand the mentality of users better and can simulate user behavior that more Mr.Spocky male engineers would never think an actual human user would try to do with their product. I have often seen arguments of the "But that is illogical, why would a user try that!" "Because they are not engineers!" type. About supporting users, it is fairly obvious which gender has more patience to calm down enraged users on the phone. This is my experience about business.

Maybe it means entrepreneurship, not corporate employment... but here too my experience is that it depends on what is sold. Teaching is so much female that a random small language school company here (that mainly trains people to be eligible for an office job by learning intermediate English) will be typically led by a woman. My mom did something similar and also ran a fast food booth ("cookery"). My dad was into construction.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 27 May 2015 09:57:41PM 0 points [-]

"Business" means entrepreneurship. But that does not mean small companies, nor are all employees of companies entrepreneurs.