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The Push For Quotas For Women In Science
mlimber writes "The NYTimes has a story about how Congress has quietly begun to press for an equal number of women in the hard sciences and engineering under Title IX, which is best known for mandating numerical equality for boys' and girls' sports for institutions that accept federal funding. The problem is, the article says, it is not merely that women face discrimination from male colleagues, though that is often true, or that they are discouraged from pursuing these fields. Rather, women with aptitude in these areas often simply have other interests and so pursue their education and careers in other fields like law, education, or biology. Opponents of this plan, including many women in scientific fields, say implementing sex-based quotas will actually be detrimental because it will communicate that the women can't compete on even terms with men and will be 'devastating' to the quality of science 'if every male-dominated field has to be calibrated to women's level of interest.'"
There was an interesting article about this in the economist - it seems girls are catching up with boys (and have caught up in some countries) in math, but they are still ahead in language. So it makes sense for them to follow careers where they have more of an advantage - law etc.
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Most universities everywhere have more women than men. In Canada I believe every university has a higher number of women than men.
Not only conceivable, but almost certain, since that's exactly what Title IX did to men's college sports.
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Why is there not so strong a push to get more male nurses and primary school teachers?
With the economy the way it is and the fact that nursing salaries are going up, many men are entering the field and have been for a while. My wife is a nurse and she says she's seeing more and more male nurses these days.
As far a teachers go, you'll see more men when people stop treating men who want to teach like perverts who want easy access to their little snowflakes. I tried and, let's put it this way, it's easier to get a top secret clearance.
How will Congress punish institutions? By eliminating funding, of course! That will help to attract more people and maintain top-notch institutions.
The cynical S.O.B. in me wants to suggest that hokum places like the Creation Science museum should hire a bunch of girls and apply for NSF funding, just to accelerate the process. As soon as science-by-politics crashes, we can rebuild a new system on the ashes. Or just move to Europe.
God, this is stupid. Quotas and Quality are antithetical.
"does Title IX block men from sports so they can fill those same slots with whatever women they can come up with?"
To some degree it does. If a school has a disproportionate number of men's sports then it's not uncommon for them to eliminate those programs to get the numbers in line with IX requirements. The men's swim team was disbanded at my alma mater for this reason.
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I am not so sure that male gatekeepers are the problem. I went through the physics track and into academia and the glass ceiling was never an issue. What was a problem was the assumption that the woman would give up her career in favour of her husbands. The two-body problem is a serious problem in academia and research. Most institutions simply will not hire couples unless if both of them are at the top of their field. The usual situation that I have seen is that a woman sacrifices her career because her husband/boyfriend got a good post-doc position from a place that offered her little better than a TA-ship. His career goes somewhere because he can devote 100% of his time to research, but her's goes nowhere because she is unfunded and needs to devote much of her time to teaching. When it is time to apply for a second post-doc, or a jr faculty position, he is in a much better position. Not because of sexism, just because he had the opportunity to concentrate on his research. I have seen this work in reverse, but the tendency is for a woman to sacrifice her career for her partner's. Quota's will not help this much. What is needed is a recognition that institutions need to change their hiring practices.
So, if we are going to open the professions to everyone, then we have to deal with the genuine childhood and adolescent issues that exist in many schools. One of these is a balance of male and female in primary education. But a bigger issue is the kind of anecdotal assumptions that litter every discussion, even here on /. where we are supposable educated and logical. In reality much of it has not to do with ability, but social expectations. For example, a girl can go through a pre-engineering program in high school and go to college or get a well paying job right of out school, and, if she likes, open a consultancy a few years later. This does not happen because social exceptions, her peer group, requires her to take cosmetology, or the like, which is seldom rigorous enough to prepare for college classes. Nothing wrong with that. It is her choice, but it seems like the choice is often made on false assumptions. Likewise a guy may blow off all the science classes and graduate with a bad GPA because he just figures he will work construction. Again, nothing wrong with that, except, again that is might be made under false assumptions.
In both these cases what is happening is that kids are closing the doors to future opportunities at a very young age, perhaps 12. In my experience it is much easier to go to college, give up, and become a cosmetologist, that it is to not take college prep classes, work in as a cosmetologist, and then go back to college and become, for instance, a cosmologist. Likewise, during these boom times we think the construction jobs are never going to end. But they will, and how hard is going to be to learn at 30 what should have been learned at 15. Might it have been easier for the guy to, for instance, become a nurse at 22, and start earning nurses salary immediately? We see the same thing with athletes of both genders. The expected average salary of athlete, integrated over all candidates over the average earning lifetime, is likely no more than 15K a year, not much better than minimum wage. Yet the social pressures push kids to these dead end professions.
So, outside of rampant capitalism, why do we care. Because by saying that equality is important, we, in some small way negate the social pressures so that boy might get his science scores high enough so that he may become a nurse, if he can compete with the women. This of course is why so many people are adamantly opposed to such quotas. Because if that girl does get her act together in high school, and completes all her coursework through college, then she will get that engineering job, and the less qualified man will not. And many see that as unfair. It is much easier to funnel most of the talented motivated girls to teaching and nursing, so that we have these protected highly paid occupations like engineering where incompetent men, many who, from my experience, cannot even put a fuse in correctly, can make enough money to fulfill the societal necessary role as head of the household, i.e. wear the pants.
And if you didn't catch my little side remark there, teaching and nursing requires some kick butt above average education, especially nursing, which is why they get paid the bucks.
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This is not insightful, it only brushes the surface.
Requiring employers to hire based on any criteria other than an applicant's qualifications is a terrible thing
And if you look at the statistics, you will find that in science, for equivalent jobs, women need more publications than men. So, since people aren't hiring based on qualifications, your entire point is moot.
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So they object because a) It will make it seem that women need a leg up, and b) they'll have to dumb down science to give women a leg up. I don't particularly believe the second, but if it is true, that would mean the first is just an accurate appraisal of reality.
Did changing standards 'devastate' firefighting, policing or the Army?
As far as the US Army goes, women work in non-combat positions, so if there were an equal mixture of men to women, it could arguably be devastating to combat effectiveness. So that's not really a valid argument. Women aren't treated the same as men in the army.
Poster's assessment on the other scientific fields is likely to be equally worthless.
Well, my specific experience is in chemistry. There ARE quite a few disciplines in chemistry where the points mpoulton raises are valid, and that's what I'm talking about. Just about any synthetic work involves exposure to teratogens. Ethidium bromide used in running agarose gels is a teratogen, as are most radiolabeling agents. Dioxins are teratogens, as are a whole lot of other things. Also, as a guy, if something messes up my gametes (sperm), my body will create new ones, but if a woman's gametes (ova) are harmed, that's permanent.
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I (a white male, age 29) am working in a female-dominated (5:1 female:male) company for the past two years.
In my college days, I worked at a front desk at a college dormitory. I was outnumbered 15:1; 15 women, and me the only guy.
I would describe both working environments as "excellent", and the exact polar opposite of "hell". (In fact, if a company wanted to steal me away from my current job, they'd need to double my salary -- no joke.)
Your mileage may vary, but I suggest working in a few female dominated environments to see if you like it.
While not quotas per se, as a male it is possible to be a subject to affirmative action. The lack of male elementary school teachers is of such grave concern to some people that it is a natural consequence. It is a grave concern because about 1 in 5 elementary school teachers are male, and there are worries that the lack of male role models is disengaging young boys from the education system. That being said, inspite of action through school boards and professional bodies, men often fail to find work at the lower grades. Parents and principals keep them out.
That being said, it is the exception rather than the rule and I have seen feminists argue agressively against it because men have much better opportunities in society and don't deserve a hand up in the parts of society that they have been forced out of due to active discrimination. I wonder if they realise that more qualified men in education means more space for qualified women in other fields.
I am not personally in this field, but my girlfriend chose neuroscience as her undergraduate major. Race hasn't come up very much, but sexual differences in the brain come up all the time, and no paper can ever contain the phrase, "Men are better at xyz than women." It must always be in very specific, very "scientific" language: Sexual differences have been shown to have an affect on the subjects' ability to perform the given task under the tested conditions. If the conclusion is that "men are better," it is usually phrased, "The average performance of male subjects was x while the average performance of female subjects was y." In my field (electrical engineering), we can be a bit more relaxed when we state our findings: Silicon transistors have faster switching speeds than germanium transistors.
It isn't very PC, but there is no question that a woman's brain is biologically different from a man's brain. Women's brains do respond differently to certain stimuli than men's, and the only open question is why. Feminists outside of the scientific community have embraced the hypothesis that the differences are a result of different areas of the brain being stimulated during the childhood years, because it fits in very nicely with their ideas on women. Within the community, nobody has really been able to figure out whether or not a Y chromosome affects the brain, beyond those sections that are specifically male.
By extension, I can only imagine that race, which is an even more sensitive issue, must always be stated with even more rigorous language, and that open questions are immediately answered by people with preconceived notions on the subject.
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Looking at the most recent American Chemical Society salary survey (yes, I am a chem nerd), I found that of the chemists hired right after undergrad, 70% are women. I'm not sure how that happened but it did:
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/acsnews/86/8609acsnews1.html
and click on the tables tab.
You don't need nurses to do those jobs. That's why they used to have people called "orderlies". They were just big guys called in to move patients or dead bodies around, who had no special medical training besides the very basics.
Then, a couple decades ago, all the hospitals decided they could "save money" by firing all the orderlies, and having the nurses move patients instead.
Maybe if the hospitals tried hiring orderlies again, they wouldn't need to worry about how much their nurses can lift.
Actually there is a bias now, against young men. The numbers show young men are doing more poorly in general in grade school than woman. They are trending to go to college less and are more likely to have problems in school. Yet a good chunk of the activism and money goes towards woman now.
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just as soon as Congress changes the law to require both men and women to register with Selective Service. To this day, only men are required by law to register. Dual nationals, some non-citizens, conscientious objectors and even disabled men are all required to register, so I don't see why women shouldn't be as well.
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Because on average they are, just like on average guys have greater upper body strength. Get over it.
What I don't understand is why these PC'ers aren't pushing for quotas in college admissions? Women make up a larger percentage of coeds than do men.
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It's not that there are few women in construction, it's that they only go into it for a free ride. I work in New Haven CT primarily, I'm a carpenter and yale owns like half of New Haven and is ALWAYS running like 20 jobs at the same time, and I've met about a dozen or so women on the various jobs I've been on in 2 years. Every single one of them only have their job to meet a quota. The quotas are as follows; Females, Minorities, and New Haven Residents. Atleast 75% or so of the women were Black residents of New Haven. I've met one woman, who was white, that actually was interested and had a good work ethic and everything, but she just couldn't keep up with any of us men.