Are men more accepting of high risk, low QOL careers? You don't see many women on oil rigs or driving long-haul trucks, either, even though it can be quite lucrative relative to the skill level required.
Software jobs have little in the way of on the job training, "up or out" career progression/compensation, unstable employers, long hours/crunch times/getting called at night, management pressure and constantly changing goals, frequent skills turnover, age discrimination, abstract work without a concrete purpose, etc. etc.
Let's say someone with the mental acuity to become a Pediatrician can also become a reasonably decent Software Developer for some FANG. The expected value of the Pediatrician's annual earnings is $150k a year and the Software Developer's is $250k, but with much higher variance and personal stress.
Is it irrational to pick Med School instead? Maybe the question we should be asking is why men are stupid enough to flock to tech or other workaholic fields (big law, investment banking) in the first place.
> Are men more accepting of high risk, low QOL careers?
This question has been studied and the answer is yes: men on average show greater interest in high-risk behaviors, and high-risk, demanding careers than women. Here is one study on risk-taking:
> Title: Gender Differences in Risk Taking: A Meta-Analysis
> Abstract: The authors conducted a meta-analysis of 150 studies in which the risk-taking tendencies of male and female participants were compared[]. Results showed that the average effects for 14 out of 16 types of risk taking were significantly larger than 0 (indicating greater risk taking in male participants) and that nearly half of the effects were greater than .20. However, certain topics (e.g., intellectual risk taking and physical skills) produced larger gender differences than others (e.g., smoking). In addition, the authors found that (a) there were significant shifts in the size of the gender gap between successive age levels, and (b) the gender gap seems to be growing smaller over time.
It's also been studied how this difference in risk-taking between men and women affects occupational preferences. For brevity I won't quote it here, but see "Gender differences in financial risk aversion and career choices are affected by testosterone". http://www.pnas.org/content/106/36/15268.full
See also "Women, careers, and work-life
preferences". In this publication, Catherine Hakim explores women's work-life preferences in the context of demanding jobs. She notes that some jobs are highly demanding (such as requiring long or irregular work hours, at short notice, or lots of travel) and observes these jobs are inconsistent with the work-life balance desires of women more so than men, explaining why there are fewer women working in these jobs than men:
> The majority of working women seek a large
degree of work-life balance (Hakim, 2005), certainly more than men do. Women are more likely to ask for shorter work hours than to ask for higher pay or promotion (Babcock & Laschever, 2003).
Software jobs have little in the way of on the job training, "up or out" career progression/compensation, unstable employers, long hours/crunch times/getting called at night, management pressure and constantly changing goals, frequent skills turnover, age discrimination, abstract work without a concrete purpose, etc. etc.
Let's say someone with the mental acuity to become a Pediatrician can also become a reasonably decent Software Developer for some FANG. The expected value of the Pediatrician's annual earnings is $150k a year and the Software Developer's is $250k, but with much higher variance and personal stress.
Is it irrational to pick Med School instead? Maybe the question we should be asking is why men are stupid enough to flock to tech or other workaholic fields (big law, investment banking) in the first place.