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MIT Names First Female President
wintermute1000 writes "According to CNN, MIT has just named its first female president. Along with other recent programs' efforts to get more women involved in the MIT community, is this a step in the right direction for the historically gender-biased institution?"
When MIT announces the first robot president, I'll be listening.
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Who cares? It's those who shout for equality who seem to be the first to highlight irrelevant differences; and such people are the first defence used by the prejudiced to block those with true potential.
fry: can't we just be together?
leela: listen - you are a man, I'm a woman. We're just too different.
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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Generally technology field has been boys club and most women around are usually surnamed .jpg.
Women at workplace usually balance the atmosphere towards more positive.
In paper industry, some studies have shown that departments lead by female chiefs, run more efficiently and have less disputes among workers.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
While I do support equal opportunities/emancipation issues, has MIT selected this woman because she is female and very good in her area of expertise, or has MIT selected her because she was the best irrespective of gender?
Don't get me wrong here - if she is the BEST for the post, she should get it, but looking at things like the gender quotas like we have had in Germany - these are the wrong way (as they block progressing potentially better male candidates, if the female member quota hasn't been reached yet. This also led to a court case brought on by (IIRC) a civil cervant skipped in a promotion because there was another woman who could take the post - that case went all the way to the highest EU court which ruled that these kinds of quota regulations also are a form of gender discrimination and hence are deemed illegal.
And there are similar things happening - in a Swiss University I saw a notice for a competition about women in academic study courses, with a prize of EUR 10.000 for the best diploma thesis to be handed in by a female student that year. That particular competition notice actually had been put up by the "equal opportunities" advisor of the school... Where's the equal opportunity here?
In the UK, there is a female-only car insurance (Diamond), which will only accept female clientele because their insurance claims would in average be lower (hence allowing female drivers to save money, while indirectly increasing the insurance cost of males, by removing drivers with "lower claims" from male/female car insurance companies)...
Where's the equal opportunity here?
i really risk getting flamed with this post, but here we go:
i _do_ gratulate her, because i believe she has really earned that position, but:
"...efforts to get more women involved in the MIT community..."
i really hope that this is not the reason she got elected president. you see, i think such positions should be awarded according to ability, _regardless_ of the gender. so "because of" is as wrong as "in spite of".
" a step in the right direction for the historically gender-biased institution?"
not as long as every time a woman is elected this or that, the fact that she is a woman is more stressed in the reports than the fact that she is doing a good job (or what she has achieved).
If you don't learn from history,
then you are an idiot by definition.
--- Vadim Yasinovsky
She is also the first president with a life sciences background which is probably more relevant to the future of MIT than the make up of her chromosomes. I would prefer that the headlines note that MIT found the best president that it could and leave gender out of it.
A list of her recent publications can be read here.
From the page:
The main focus of our work is to bring biochemical and molecular biological techniques to the classical anatomical analysis of mammalian CNS development.
CNS being Central Nervous System, IIRC.
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Remember the "I hate math" Barbie doll? A raging debate ensued, and educators and others were forced to face (and deal with?) the issue of the assumption that not only do girls hate math and science, they are biologically programmed to do so. So the rule was girls are not supposed to like math and science, if they do there's something inherently wrong with them and thus we must ridicule and pressure them into becoming a proper female. And as most of us know how peer pressure can be, girls end up being conditioned to stay away from math and science if they ever want to be cool and have a life.
What was worse for me while growing up, was that I loved science and math. "Well, OK, but that's because you're Chinese" was what I always got back. The implication that I couldn't help myself for that or something. So not only did I get the derogatory labels regarding female geeks rubbed in my face, I got the racism as well.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
Most people don't like math science and engineering.
I know lots of women who could be capable engineers, but chose other paths.
I don't think it really matters how many female engineers we have, as long as the end result is designed right neither should you.
I am getting sick of working with second rate 'quota' people. Particularly with the government they will put someone without the ability or experience to do a job but got the "Minority XXXX" points to land the job.
You end up with
#1 The job not being done right.
#2 Convincing anyone with the stereotype they are right because look, that kind of person can't do the job.
#3 A person who can't do the job getting frustrated. They either hate their job, and discourage others, or they quit. Then you end up having even more trouble recruiting group XXX into this position.
Removing barriers is one thing, silly quota/promotion games are wrong.
More ranting, in public school (I was 13 years old) The girls got to go to 'science day' at the local university to encourage them to go into science. Apparently it was very interesting, with lots of cool stuff.
Of course as a boy, I couldn't go. Welcome to the wonderful sexist world we live in where girls who don't care about science get encouragement, and guys who do care get slapped down.
The belief of the 1960s progenitors of US affirmative action programs (most notably the late Sen. Moynihan) was that a period of #2 would permit #1 to succeed. I believe the last 40 years have proven him rather misguided. I don't know what the solution is - and I doubt there is one - but enforced discrimination isn't it.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
You left out
3: Provide a sound education that encourages wisdom, ethics, and responsibility.
Naturally, if you continue thinking in the same old box, you'll have the same old problems.
Discrimination has no solution. Look at the two alternatives:
You left out option 3:
Don't trust human nature by itself, make some laws to make discrimination illegal, WITHOUT actually enforcing another type of discrimination.
Look at the college application process. It should be illegal to ask about your gender or race on an application.
Fixing discrimination with discrimination is retarded, but making discrimination ilegal is not.
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Let me tell you a true story from here. I call it "Jack and Jill up corporate hill".
Jack is the stereotypical incompetent monkey. He's a marketer who noticed that he could get more money if he switched to being a "programmer". Unfortunately his only IT skill is marketting himself to clueless PHBs. (I've worked with him before. He's the guy I mentioned that spent hours trying all combinations of *, & and nothing on every variable in C++, because he never could understand pointers.)
But the bosses _love_ Jack. Jack speaks their language. Jack may not be able to code shit, or anything else, but he knows how to say exactly what the bosses want to hear.
Jack also loves making compliments like "Hey, it's rare to see a chick with brains." (Said verbatim to a competent female employee who's programmed in assembly before. _Way_ more competent than him in any case.) He actually thinks it's a compliment, and not the sexist idiocy that it really is.
Jill, for better or worse, did finish a CS college. No, she's not a genius, but I'd say at least more competent than half the monkeys hired in that department just because they were cheap.
Jack has been on a sort of a personal Jihad against Jill for more than a year. He'd hunt every single mistake in her code and run show it to everyone else, or humiliate her in front of other employees.
He came to me a few times with such "proofs" that Jill writes bad code. Invariably Jill's code was right, and it just showed that Jack didn't understand even the _basics_ of Java. The language he's paid to program in these days. E.g., he didn't know that String constants are internalized.
I called him an idiot to his face on those occasions, and explained to him why Jill's code works and is OK. (Hey, I never said I was a diplomat.) He stopped coming to me, and I thought he got over it. I was wrong.
Recently Jack got promoted to team leader. (As I've said, the bosses _love_ him.)
Their team also had grown with two people fresh out of college. Again a male and a female. Let's call them Dick and Jane. Jane was undoubtedly inexperienced. On the other hand, Dick, by everyone else's assessment, bosses _and_ coworkers alike, was a fscking catastrophe.
What does Jack do? Jack recommends that they fire Jane, but keep Dick. The boss's question? "Huh? Why Jane? I thought Dick was the catastrophe."
Jack insists however that they keep Dick, reasoning that it would be bad for the project to fire both, and Dick will probably learn along the way. Takes all his marketting skills, but he gets the boss to aggree.
So Jane packs her bags, and Dick, for all I know, is still blundering to even understand Java, but still in that team.
Now let's get back to Jill. As I've said, at one point I thought Jack had gotten past his unexplicable feud against her. As I should have guessed, he was actually just avoiding me, after I had called him an idiot.
What's Jack doing now, in his team leader position? Finally getting Jill fired.
So it seems to me like you don't even have to try hard to see discrimination in action. You just need an open mind, which is really what's lacking.
CS _is_ a boy's club. Hiring interviews are conducted by prejudiced people. You have prejudiced people as team leaders and co-workers, spewing sexist idiocies without even realizing it. Or being condescending and treating you a priori like a poor retard just because of gender preconceptions. And you have to interact with prejudiced clients and internal PHBs, who need to assert their testosterone supremacy anyway, but doubly so when it comes to women in tech fields.
Seems to me that anyone who's not outright fired, needs a pretty thick skin to stay in CS. A lot prefer to just leave. I've seen people bail out of CS and into other jobs because of this. (E.g., from programming to usability or whatever else, which isn't as supposed to be an exclusive boys' club.)
And the results of this aren't even perceived as the results of blatant discrimination, but used as further "proof" that women aren't fit to use a computer.
It's not even the only discrimination in this field. Age discrimination against males is at least as widespread.
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You know when things will really have changed for women? When this isn't news. Look at the summary of this story: It trumpets the fact that a woman has taken a role of great prominence and responsiblity...but doesn't mention her name. As long as women are identified as generic "woman" instead of personalized as the actual women they are as individuals with their own skills and talents, things have not changed as much as they should have.