“Few academic scientists know anything about the equity crusade. Most have no idea of its power, its scope, and the threats that they may soon be facing. The business commu­nity and citizens at large are completely in the dark. This is a quiet revolution. Its weapons are government reports that are rarely seen; amendments to federal bills that almost no one reads; small, unnoticed, but dramatically con­sequential changes in the regulations regarding government grants; and congressional hearings attended mostly by true believers.”

Do we really believe this could be a significant roadblock for scientific progress?

Roughly that men abstract away details in order to reach a decision, and women add specifics until it’s complex enough to interest them.

Unfortunately from the perspective of the work-vs-raise-kids question, both activities were among the lowest ranked of all. Work was 2nd from worst, and childcare was 4th from worst. Only commuting was worse. Socializing, eating, exercising, etc. were highly ranked as enjoyable. The discouraging conclusion is that if your choice is to stay home and raise the kids vs work away from home, either way you’re going to be miserable. It appears that childcare is slightly less horrible than working, for these women, but it hardly makes the choice seem an attractive one.

This would suggest that giving women more and better choices could improve overall happiness. This study does not tell us whether men also dislike working as much as women; but it’s possible that at least part of the problem is that working women feel guilty about leaving their kids part of the day, making their time away that much less pleasant. If society were more equal in sharing child-raising burdens then this might help, as working women might feel better if they knew that their husband was taking care of the kids. This is of course speculative. It would help to have data comparing work happiness among working men and working women with various family situations in terms of childcare responsibilities.

The hard sciences are poorly compensated. We should rationally expect women to move first into well-compensated appealing professions before they “choose” to become manual laborers, sewerage workers or physics grad students.

Engineering, computer science, and even math, pay much better than psychology, sociology, literature, nursing, teaching, and women’s studies. Yet men predominate in the former, women in the latter.

An extremely unlikely-sounding state of affairs. I would need to see some pretty good supporting references, rather than a recollection, before taking it seriously.