[irb]

To be clear, by lower status (and I said "lower", not "low", very specifically) I was not saying anything negative about those professions or the people who work in them. I was only referring to their status within society at the moment, in that they are not accorded great power or influence, or feted in the same way as e.g. tech entrepreneurs, doctors, or lawyers are. I think that nursing and teaching should be much higher status jobs than they currently are and I think their importance is undervalued, which frequently tends to be the case for professions dominated by women.

You mention college professor as a high status position, which I think supports the point I was making, as whilst the majority of school teachers are women, the majority of professors are men.

As to people gravitating towards careers that interest them, I think that is begging the question a bit, as it avoids considering why people gravitate towards the positions that they do. Are women more likely to go into nursing than into tech because of some intrinsic preference, or because nursing is much more frequently presented as an appropriate career path for them than tech, and they can currently see a lot more women doing that than applying to YC or whatever? I would suspect the latter.

[jki275]

Depends on the field. Many fields have more women as professors than men -- just anecdotally in my (admittedly small sample size) family more women have been professors than men.

Nursing, to me, is a relatively high status field that offers a good salary and a great deal of flexibility.

Maybe in the 50's we were telling women they could only be nurses or teachers, but that's really not been an issue for a lot of years. There are plenty of women entrepreneurs, and I know plenty of women engineers -- I've worked with them and for them, and they've worked for me over the years. While this doesn't fit the new narrative, I haven't seen anybody telling women they can't be engineers or whatever else they want to be for a long time now.