Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Why is this so terrible to admit? It's obvious to everyone, yet all these PC jerks want to deny it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Why do we want women in sciences and engineering?
Why is there not so strong a push to get more male nurses and primary school teachers? Or even publishing?
Is it because these are seen as female professions and therefore less worthy?
In Malaysia (a Muslim country), most public universities have more female students than male students. In my Biotechnology Faculty, the ratio of women to men is like 3:1 as in the other science faculties. In fact, my university has been jokingly renamed the Women's University of Malaysia. About the only bastion of male majority left is engineering, and even then the numbers are almost equal.
As a woman looking to go into a science/engineering field I have to say that this is just a stupid idea. To be honest a quota would have the chance of making me NOT want to go into the field because I would have to deal with people thinking that I couldn't have gotten in if there had been no quota to fill. And yes I really am a woman. I really am.
Guys can have a child while doing research, but it is much more difficult for women. Pregnancy can mean that you have to stop doing certain types of research or it may just interfere with your ability to be competitive in your field. Putting off childbearing until after getting a PhD and postdoc will put most women firmly into their thirties when they have children, at which time birth defects and complications become more prevalent.
Some professors don't like women in their labs for this very reason. By the time a woman has completed her research, if she has had a child in that time frame, someone else may have already published it.
Science is competitive, and women are often at a disadvantage.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
What's this 8 hours a day thing ?
How many of us are available for call any time day or night. Where's my work:home balance.
How about fixing that ?
The truth is, that without my wife bearing the brunt of raising the kids, I would not be able to do the job I do as a married man with children. It would be impossible.
Nullius in verba
So where do I go to demand that there are equal numbers of male and female babysitters, maids, nurses, and elementary school teachers? And can someone remind me what the ratio of men to women in congress is?
In short: stupid idea. If women don't *want* to be scientists and engineers, fix it in schools by encouraging them to try it and doing your best to encourage the removal of the societal bias against it. Allowing minorities and women who are *less* qualified then white males to get jobs just to fulfill a quota is one thing that *will* reduce the quality of our science and engineering.
If you want to remove bias in hiring scientists and engineers, at require that the person who makes the decision to grant interviews not see any information that could identify a person's sex or race, including the name. Then, if you must, require that the interviewer match the interviewee in sex and race and if the interviewer isn't given the authority to decide who gets hired, again remove any identifying information from the report before it goes to the person who does make the decision.
That's a nice, scientific way to reduce (not eliminate... women and minorities can still be biased against other women and minorities) bias without hurting the final product. I mean, what would you do in the proposed bill if you only got 10 female and 90 male applications to fill 30 spots? Pick women off the street and try to make them do someone else's job?
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
Ever notice that men tend to pursue money and jobs that will make them money so that they can attract women?
[insert witty comment about an institution that must "meat" a quota]
Really though, that is exactly the problem. The people mandating these quotas are assuming that there is an overwhelming number of talented women who are not getting into schools because of a (yet unproven) bias. The reality? Most women just have less interest in certain fields, just like most men have less interest in certain fields. Case-in-point:
My school's electrical engineering program has had a long-running goal: double female enrollment. This recently had to be changed to "increase female enrollment" because my graduating year has zero women (this includes computer engineering, which is considered a semi-separate department). It's not that the female applicants were discriminated against; in fact, there have been no allegations of discrimination of any type in the department, and we have faculty of all races and genders (and one member who had a sex-change operation a few years ago). There just aren't many female applicants. In fact, the policy for meeting that goal was to increase advertising to female high school seniors, including deliberately skewing the ratio of pictures of male engineers to females (which required us to get pictures from other departments).
If there was a quota for female enrollment, we wouldn't even have an EE department. It is one thing to be politically correct, and I certainly wouldn't go around claiming that women are inherently inferior to men (I would have nothing to base such a claim on anyway, since I have no points of comparison). It is quite another to demand that the statistics be changed through legislation.
Palm trees and 8
Yes they did.
Females are put into positions where they cannot do their physical part routinely. However, to bring it up would be the end to your career.
STFU unless you've had to carry a female's rucksack for her. Every military school i've been to that allowed females has shown me what a liability they can be.
I've been on several search committees at a state university for faculty positions in a chemistry department. We are actively _trying_ to get women faculty, but last time around I don't think we even got one female applicant...certainly not a domestic (USA) female applicant.
In the search prior to that, we had one qualified female applicant. We offered her the position, and she turned it down. We moved to the next most qualified candidate, who was male.
I have no idea how we'd handle a quota. Just pick someone off the street and say to her "okay, you're a chemistry professor. We need to keep our federal funding."?
Look, I am finishing my Ph.D in Civil Engineering, hopefully this year (I am a woman, Brazilian and had a baby during the Ph.D program).
I have never felt any problems with what you call "gatekeepers". There are plenty of incentives and opportunities for women in sciences, you just have to show your work.
Yes, there is probably a few jerks around, but what you do is tough it up, otherwise you will never make it as a scientist anyway.
And I am sorry, but maybe some women should not be choosing these careers anyway. I believe most of the disparity is because of lack of interest from them, not from any barriers in the system.
So stop whining and get to work, people.
A big piece of the article was pointing out that women in science don't particularly want this, organizations teaching science don't want this, and men in science don't want this. The institutions involved are filling out the paperwork but definitely aren't interested in suddenly making 50% of all science graduates women.
And the article also made the appropriate comparison with the field of psychology, which is now something like 70% female (similar disparities exist in education, particularly primary education).
I am officially gone from
And it isn't just the discrimination from the men in power. I am a woman who have been in typical "male" professions all my life, and in addition to the ridicule, discrimination, and belittling from men, I have often been harassed by women who consider my job/education choices to be inappropriate for a woman.
What we need is to start seeing people as individuals with their own set of interests and abilities instead of grouping people into two gender groups with stereotypical interests and abilities. Then both women and men could get the education and jobs they are interested in and have abilities for, which I think would be much better than channeling everybody into so-called gender-appropriate fields.
If quotas help, I'm all for it. Otherwise not.
My findings are that why yes, we hired much much much fewer women than men. Is it because we were sexist? No. Is it because they were all underqualified, or even less qualified? No.
The cold-hard fact was that only about 10% of the applicants were women. Interestingly enough, (or maybe not), most of these were not native U.S. citizens, but mostly Chinese or Indian women who had come to study in the U.S.
While I am being a "racist" - I might throw in that we never, in our existance as a company, have ever hired a black person.
Was it because they were underqualified, etc. etc. etc.? Again, no.
In my entire career, I have only ever interviewed a single black applicant for an engineering position. (BTW - We actually made this person a good offer, which they accepted, but their existing employer countered it and we lost them.)
My point is that there are less "women and minorities" hired into these positions becasue there are far far far less candidates - not because of any discrimination.
Does discrimination exist in the world? Sure, it does - but to be honest, in the competitive nature of the companies I've been at - and the difficulty in hiring good candidates - I don't think anyone would care if the candidate was a green transsexual with three eyes - if they were a solid candidate - they'd be hired on those grounds.
I've also worked for "Women Owned" companies. This is something that the feds have set up - If your company is at least 51% "woman owned or run" (or minority owned and run) - then you get preferential treatment in dealing with the Feds, and contractors that do business with the Feds. (Like they have to do business with a certain quota of these companies). In my experience, these all have been a smoke-and-mirrors game - Whitey giving his ol' lady a business card that says "CEO" on it, to try and drum up some more business, etc. etc. etc.
Certain people are drawn to certain professions - and that's an individual decision, and there probably is some biological basis in the Men vs. Women thing. Like people have pointed out, should we mandate quotas that H.R. people and Flight Attendents be a certain percent male too?
Now as the "Minorities" go - let's cut to the chase. By "Miniories", we're only talking about certian "Minorities". We're talking about blacks, hispanics, eskimos, Native Americans - and I'm sure some others - but we are NOT talking about Indians, Chinese, or Australians for that matter.
If Congress really wanted to even-out the playing field - they'd be investing money into inner-city schools - like a mile a way from them in DC - which are literally falling apart - and more like prisons than schools. Turn these into places that foster excitement in learning, science and engineering, and are an oasis inside these inner-city slum areas - and you'll see those kids go off to college and become candidates.
Short of doing that - nothing else will ever work. You can give them a billion dollars in college grant money - but if their schools are gang, crime and filth ridden places where they just get locked-up for a few hours a day - then no quota system on the place of the planet will ever balance that out.
Congrats, I'm glad you've had a much more positive experience than many other women have. I can tell stories about people I know personally who have been jerked around in the sciences/engineering due to gender, but neither of our anecdotes is worth much. What is worth a lot is the data, and there are *copious* data on this topic and they point pretty strongly to the conclusion that women (and girls) are being discouraged from pursuing careers in the sciences. I don't have any at my fingertips, but you can pretty easily Google to find some. (That, or I could ask my best friend who reads the studies a lot more than I do.)
Also hear's something to think about: Could quotas actually severely harm women in technology, by making people assume anyone who got hired and was female got the job due to the quota system, thus undermining their hard work?
Psst - if you're a guy and you feel like talking after sex, you're either not doing it right, or not long enough (but I repeat myself).
http://scienceline.org/2006/09/25/ask-wenner-sex/
Some do, though... it's very wierd.
When I was in college, we had one girl in the class who was, objectively speaking, gorgeous. She had a spectacular body, amazing face, and she always dressed to show everything off. She would lean wayyy over when she was talking to guys, and she knew exactly what she was making us see. However, she would get SO MAD if she actually caught you looking at her, and she'd wrap her coat around her in a huff and get all pissed that she was being "treated as an object".
She was extremely smart, and she got very good grades in a very hard course.
I think she was just trying to confuse everyone around her, because I still don't know what the hell she was doing. I understand that she continued this behavior right on out of college and into the workplace.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
New physicians and lawyers are now predominantly women. Not only are these fields lucrative, but there's a lot of people practicing in them (that is, there are far more openings than for physicists or mathematicians).
I know in the state of Maine, being the liberal hole it is.... it PAYS (it meaning we) for single mothers(see harlots) to go to college. They pay NOTHING, receive a stipend to live on, food stamps, rent, utilities paid, and oh yeah, if they have an issue with their car the state will pickup the bill. Oh did I mention the state also pays for daycare?
Oh, I also forgot, they don't need to pass. One of my friends was dating one of these single mother system users... she skipped class, dumped her kid at daycare and spent the day having sex with him. What a gem she was.
Now in a state like Maine (highest taxes in the country) it takes a LOT of effort and cash(since white men don't qualify for anything in aide if their parents make 30g's a year) for men to get through college to begin with.
In the state of Maine one out of three people is on some form of state assistance. Oh course most men don't qualify(need kids or an injury). So to me it seems that the MEN are being crushed by the system and are being forced to pay for these irresponsible women(who some got pregnant I'm sure).
It's like communism, the state takes from the working and dumps all of their income into the lazy.
SO yeah, more women in Maine are in college and more women graduate with degrees. Not all of them are bad, some girls just made a mistake and are capitalizing on the system, BUT the system is FORCING men out of school because they just can't afford it(since they're the only ones who pay).
The causes of the apparent pay gap are discussed here.
We are all just people.
I just read a particularly devastating critique of the quota system/gender pay differences in Thomas Sowell's latest book. His point (backed with copious evidence) was that the differences in outcomes is almost entirely explained by the differences in interest. Some careers require so much dedication that a few years away (raising kids for example) or shorter work weeks severely impacts your competitiveness. Folks who want to have a life outside of work tend to avoid these careers; why shouldn't we let individuals make that decision for themselves?
This is true. As someone who is currently working to change my sex, I have first hand experience.
I have to say, however, that I like both astrophysics and stuffed animals. So such things aren't mutually exclusive.
Quotas are stupid. Take your daughters to a planetarium.
MIT did a very careful study of pay and resource equity internally among faculty and discovered that they had a very measurable bias.
They then acknowledged it publicly and made a serious effort to correct it.
Then why don't you also tell that to all the people who say they are Italian-American, Irish-American, and Asian-American. No one ever seems to have a problem with those terms.
You just haven't been listening:
... The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. ... There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphenated_American
Former President Theodore Roosevelt in speaking to the NY Chapter of the Knights of Columbus at Carnegie Hall on Colubmus day 1915, asserted that,[3]
"There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/