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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.'"
Law, psychology, education, journalism, etc. are dominated by women. Should we expect to see male quotas there?
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.
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The only way to achieve true equality between genders is to treat them the same.
How about putting those in positions who have earned them, regardless of age, sex or race, instead of mandating a certain ratio. If anything, the mandated ratio will foster more discrimination because of the perceived view that they "didn't earn it".
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
Since the interest isn't equal, this could conceivably deny young men education in science simply because there weren't enough women to match. Oh well, not like much of our lawmakers care about science education anyway...
Why is this so terrible to admit? It's obvious to everyone, yet all these PC jerks want to deny it.
Trouble is, you are confusing the end result with the root cause.
What these "PC jerks" believe is that women and men are socially conditioned to have different interests -- in other words, it just ain't natural. The concern is that the social conditioning is detrimental. That stereotypical "women's interests" are less valued and thus less rewarding than stereotypical "men's interests."
Agreed. There are fewer women in science and technology not because they lack the ability, but because they lack the interest. This is not a bad thing, but too often it gets interpreted as an issue of perceived inferiority.
Quotas are never a good idea. They spawn resentment from those being left out and imply that those in need of a quota wouldn't be good enough to get in without it. Equality is giving everyone a fair and equal opportunity. Besides, this does nothing to fix the fundamental problem: there are fewer women because they are less interested. If the government wants to start a program to get more women into science and engineering fields, it should be aimed at young kids. Get elementary, middle and high school girls excited about going into these fields and the numbers will grow.
-- Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. -- Albert Einstein
50% women; 50% men?
So? That still means they have different interests. If the reason for that is that women are encouraged to be interested in non-scientific fields, fine, you can address that issue all you want. Forcing women into science if they are not interested, or keeping men out because of a need to meet quotas for female enrollment, doesn't suddenly cause women to be interested in those fields.
Honestly, why is that so hard to admit?
Palm trees and 8
Quotas are just discrimination by another name. Requiring employers to hire based on any criteria other than an applicant's qualifications is a terrible thing to do to anyone already in that profession, especially the members of whatever group is getting the preferential treatment. Any woman employed in the sciences will suddenly come under suspicion as to wether she can actually do the work, or just got the job because of the quota.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Many organizations that try to encourage women to enter the physical sciences and engineering tend to generate a lot of extra work for women who are already in those fields. They expect these women to drop what they're doing and sit on committees, speak to high school crowds, participate in a disproportionate number of peer reviews for other women (to keep panel sex ratios "fair"), etc.. The list goes on.
These women, having "made it" themselves, often don't feel that sexual discrimination is still a significant issue in their field. However, they still feel pressured to participate lest they be labeled "anti-feminist". I wouldn't be surprised if some women who have had success in the physical sciences have, when possible, fled to a less male-dominated field just to lighten their workloads.
While it's certainly a good thing to ensure that there is a level playing field in male dominated fields, some of these organizations really ought to back off and let women in science and engineering concentrate on their work instead of wasting their time and holding them back with nonsense. Make no mistake, if you saddle a woman with 20+ hours/week of extra duties just because she's a woman, you're no better than the "evil oppressing misogynists" you think you're fighting.
I say we put quotas on Congress, first; talk about your "boys clubs"...
Why don't they get their own house in order?
-- Terry
Undoubtedly the late stages of pregnancy and the early stages of Motherhood are challenging, but we are talking about a few months.
I don't think that motherhood alone is a serious barrier to getting a PhD.
The challenges of getting good childcare, and having sufficiently supportive male partners - now we're talking...
Oh - but implementing social programs would cost money - but enforcing quotas is "free"
Nullius in verba
That stereotypical "women's interests" are less valued and thus less rewarding than stereotypical "men's interests."
Personally I always thought of it as the other way around. Culture didn't force women to have less valuable interests, but rather it took interests that women already had and devalued them socially. So now you have a bunch of people running around and freaking out trying to force all of society into a "superior" masculine role.
In a male dominated society, of course you'd expect a widespread belief that male interests and are superior and therefore "more rewarding" and "valuable". So as you see, these gender quotas are just symptoms of a very deep rooted form of misogyny that is so pervasive that even women buy into it.
I can't speak for the engineers, but I think a reasonable case could be made that scientific careers are indeed poorly accessible for women. Because they are, generally speaking, not very family friendly: The standard assumption is that young scientists are willing to work long and irregular hours for modest pay and put up with a long series of short-term funding and temporary contracts. Scientific careers are high-effort, high-risk, and even many men feel that this kind of work culture is not very compatible with family life and responsible behaviour towards their children, and abandon academic research for industry jobs.
However, instituting quota for women seems to be very much the wrong answer, and one that is likely to be treated with some contempt by female scientists. However, call me a cynic, I doubt Congress really cares about that. Female scientists are not a large voting block. And the lawyers who dominate the political professions are, in the depths of their soul, probably not convinced that science really matters that much. (Well, certainly not as much as lawyering.) Defining quota seems a typically lawyerly answer to me.
Besides, in the case of the USA, the country doesn't just have a shortage of female scientists but plainly a shortage of scientists, albeit one that is much alleviated by immigration. The real answer is in making scientific careers more attractive. The reason why Congress is not considering this is not difficult to figure out: It would cost money, if only a modest amount, and any results would only be visible after they have left office.
for a start, no one is proposing women should be kept out of these jobs. what they are in fact proposing is that sexual discrimination against men is ok. if it's a cultural "weakness" in america that causes women to avoid science, then spend money getting them interested in highschool and even earlier. don't deny anyone based on gender, it's wrong no matter what spin you try put on it.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
If universities are forced to ensure that the gender of athletes is proportional to the rates of enrollment, regardless of actual interest, then I don't see why they shouldn't have Men's Studies programs to mirror Women's Studies, regardless of actual interest.
This is because feminism was never actually about equality, but improving the social status of women. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself - I don't see why the NAACP should take it upon itself to stick up for Latinos, for example. Whereas the goal of feminism is gender equality, but is really only about improving things for women.
Take the suffragist movement, for example. It was started at a convention in 1848, finally succeeding on a national scale with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Know what else happened in that time? The Civil War and World War I. Note that suffragists didn't demand the right to be drafted with the right to vote. Ditto that for WWII, the Korean War, and Vietnam. Hmm.
Today, breast cancer research receives far more money than prostate cancer research, even though prostate cancer kills about as many men as breast cancer kills women. Many states have an Office of Women's Health, but only New Hampshire has an Office of Men's Health - and it had to start without any funding.
Men are far and away the #1 victim of assaults and murders and make up at least 40% of domestic violence victims, yet Congress passes a Violence Against Women Act.
But back to school - yes, the vast majority of PhD's are men - but men also round out the bottom of the scale with the most mental disabilities. And if these people were really concerned about equity, they'd be doing something about the 60/40 female/male disparity in overall enrollment.
Which isn't to say that women haven't gotten a raw deal, the point is that men have too. Feminism needs to go away, and be replaced with straight up egalitarianism.
And spare me this silly "society makes the genders different" nonsense. There are innate differences between the sexes! Go to a fourth grader's birthday party and see. The boys are raising hell and the girls are sitting around talking. Give a little boy a doll, he burns it or rips off the head. Give a little girl a firetruck, she names it and puts it to bed.
Why do think that anecdotal behavior of children who exist in the current system of social conditioning somehow proves that social conditioning does not exist? When in a large group together, all the boys do one thing and all the girls do another thing, sure seems like a strong argument for the existence of social conditioning - that girl who wants to run around and raise hell is shamed into behaving like a good little girl and that boy who wants tuck his firetruck into bed is laughed at.
If what you claimed were true, then there would be few to no scientific studies showing otherwise. At best you've got large minority of studies that show there are innate differences in a minority of areas, but math and science are rarely the areas.
Here's how the genius program worked with regard to university places to study medicine in the UK...
University recruitment was non gender biased. It was simply a case of less women had the grades in hard sciences and the interest to apply than men did.
The universities got quotas.
With admissions largely based on grades, the only way to get the number of women up was to lower the requirements for women. Typically an A average for men became a B average for women.
Except then they had less able female students failing out of their courses at a much higher rate than more able men.
So they lowered the grade requirements through the whole course. If 90% was an A for a male student, 80% was good enough for a female to get an A.
Universities achieved their directive of educating as many females as males.
And then no one wanted to hire female doctors because they knew an "A" was much easier for women to achieve and thus they were less likely to be as well qualified as a male with a slightly lower grade.
This ended up screwing the bright female doctors. The ones who could get that same A grade entry, who kept getting 90%+, now had the same "A" that was considered worthless as the ones who got in on Bs and kept making 80%. Thus the bright female doctors got tarred by the same denial based system.
If you want to fix a problem, you have to fix it from the ground up. Don't ever lower entry and passing requirements for any subset. If you're finding out a subset don't apply as much and don't do as well, figure out what the root of that is and fix it.
Don't let women slack their way through science degrees and give them a meaningless certificate. Find out why science doesn't appeal to girls much earlier in their academic lives and challenge that.
Don't give half price admission to universities to someone because of their skin color. Look at what the roots of that skin color not getting to university really are. If a disproportionate number are failing because they're disproportionately coming from lower income areas and schools in those areas don't turn them out at the same levels as schools in good areas... address those schools. If the root cause goes deeper, look deeper. If their community doesn't value education, look at how to change that perception, rather than making a blanket racial based change way down the line.
As an aside, why do these programs always seem to only go one way? No one suggests nursing should have quotas to force the schools to lower entry requirements for males... it's accepted that more men aren't interested for reasons that kick in far earlier in life. Yet, if women aren't interested in a science degree... that's something that has to be forced on schools.
If you're really stupid enough to slap a quota based bandaid on a problem, rather than addressing underlying causes, at least be consistent enough to apply it to all course types. That's at least more consistent than just picking one minority (though, technically, there are slightly more women than men) that you feel is underserved and making the situation even more discriminatory, just in new ways.
The less qualified are pushed ahead of the more qualified, just because of gender. How is this not the brazen form of discrimination?