Because women in general aren't very interested in that? Men aren't very interested in hairstyling, either. There are more women educators and social workers, and such. It's no surprise, given that men and women are different in a lot of respects.
No, this is a cop out and
not backed by research. Barriers to entry into the trades is on both sides of Employment. Girls get less encouragement into Trade Jobs, most that do enter are older having first tried out the "Female" jobs and not liked them. They get less education in the basics at school, either not getting the chances to study those courses (usually the result of an all girls' school education) or are discouraged from taking the courses.
That results in about 1 in 10 applicants for Apprenticeships being female. But by the time that they complete they are less than 1 in 50. 80% of female Trade Apprentices drop out and the reasons that they give when surveyed are not because of lack of interest. They are highly interested in the work, but not the environments.
It's surprisingly simple things that can create a hostile environment. Imagine that for your job you need to wear safety gear, but none of it fits. Your boots are too big and the wrong shape for your feet. Safety googles are too large and hard to use and keep in place. Your helmet is too big and moves about on your head. Your overalls are the wrong shape for your body, being tight and rubbing in some places and completely loose in others. Beyond that you can't get changed or shower in your workplace, even though there is a high change of getting dirty on the job. There is often no toilet for you either on the jobsite, you need to either use a chemical toilet that smells and requires that you lower your clothing into the muck on the floor or that you head over to other nearby businesses that might let you use theirs. Even in your workplace, you have to walk across the entire site to the admin wing for the toilets there. How long would you put up with this sort of thing to keep your job, even if you liked it? These are the kind of things that female trades people have to put up with on a daily basis.
Specifically for girls? I wasn't aware that carpentry classes were men-only. Well, actually, they're not. Anyone can get in. How does AA change that?
How many Girls' Schools offer shop? Here it is extreme recent that such courses were offered to them.
How will forcing more women into the industry help with that? The men who engage in this sort of behaviour have to be prosecuted. Again, that has nothing to do with AA.
Men tend to actually behave better when multiple women are about. In Australia they have a term "Ducks on the pond" to refer to there being multiple women on a jobsite and to improve behaviours. With more women in the professions it becomes less of a man's club and bad behaviours start to cease.
As to prosecution. Most women effected don't complain because they fear for their jobs and ability to continue to work in a tight knit community. Many small to medium businesses have no policies on behaviour nor rules on how to deal with it even if complaints are made, and finally, sexual harassment in the workplace is not a criminal offence, so how would you prosecute it?
That's also part of the social change I talked about: changing attitudes towards women and minorities will be the most important aspect, but it takes a long time.
Social change does need to occur, but doing nothing won't cause it to happen because people who have no requirement to do so will never change. Social Change comes because people force society to change. People forced the abolition of slavery. People forced the gaining of voting franchise for blacks and woman. People forced the end of segregation. People forced the ending of homosexuality being illegal. People forced the Right of Marriage Equality.
Without these things having been forced through, sometimes with force of arms and sometimes with the power of the courts, none of these things would have happened in our societies.
Have you considered the possibility that they simply become uninterested during the course of the class? You're saying that "not interested" is not true but how would you know? When you ask women in general why they don't go in STEM, what's the answer? Same for men, I'd think: not good in those fields, or not interested.
Again you go for the cop out. And interesting that you bring up STEM... Funny thing, women outnumber men as Graduates in Chemistry and Biology, they clearly can understand and like science, so perhaps it's something else...
This is an interesting read.
It is popular to characterize the gender gap in tech in terms of a pipeline problem: not enough girls studying math and science. However, there are several indications that this may no longer be the case, at least not to the extent that it once was. High school girls and boys participate about equally in STEM electives. Elite institutions like Stanford and Berkeley now report that about 50% of their introductory computer science students are women. Yet just last year, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that men are employed in STEM occupations at about twice the rate of women with the same qualifications.
Almost everyone I spoke with said that they had enjoyed the work itself. Most mothers added that they would have happily returned to their jobs a few months after giving birth, but their companies didn’t offer maternity leave and they needed to quit in order to have their kids. Some women felt that their work environments were discriminatory, but most reported something milder: the simple discomfort of not fitting in in an otherwise homogenous setting. It may not sound like a big deal if you’re used to being in the majority, but it was enough to drive many qualified engineers to quit.
That's why we have _laws_ against discrimination, and if what you're telling me is correct, they need to be enforced.
How? Even if women complain, trying to prove that it was discrimination beyond a reasonable is a or even the balance of odds if it's a civil trial, which is far more likely as Discrimination is a civil issue, not a criminal one, is extremely hard unless those doing it leave a paper trail or admit it.
And imagine for a second that you are a poor black man. You decide to go to university and have to work hard to pay for it while you study. After a very difficult number of years you graduate and then apply for a job somewhere rather prestigious. You go to the interview, things go well, and you are later hired. Yay! Only some months later you learn that you got the job over some white over-achiever because you're black. How insulting would it be to learn that, no, it's not because you were more desirable than your competitors?
The trouble is that your story is a strawman. If we take our poor black man who works hard and is hired, then the reality even under AA is that he was hired on merit, unless you are going to go with the theory that no blacks can be as good at the job and have the grades and abilities to do a prestigious job than whites. AA isn't a stance that you have to hire people that aren't suitable to the job, but rather it means that employers that either blocked employing minorities or refused to consider employing them, now need to get out of that headspace and allow those hirings. Once they stop looking at race or gender, the numbers will be there naturally. Unless of course you are suggesting that minorities can't be as good as white men.
