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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?
Now they will actually see some girls.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
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.
The Title 9 information that arrives at my house is full of hot chicks in Lycra.
Hopefully this new bill won't mean that they'll instead be pictured in poorly chosen "business casual" dress with polyester ties.
Nullius in verba
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?
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.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
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...
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.
Quotas for men as hair-dressers?
Why cant some people accept that men and women are different and have different strengths and preferences.
Complete bullshit if you ask me. The only thing that everybody is supposed to have are equal CHANCES, but quotas just dont work.
We must force women to enter careers in hard sciences and engineering.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
This being the modern, alternate-lifestyle tolerating, 'don't judge anyone' time we live in....will undeniable evidence be required to prove one is female? Will applications need to drop trow (or lift skirt) to allow the scientific community to prove the theory that one is actually a woman?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Male librarians are few and far between. We need a quota system to ensure males get their fair share of the librarians pie. Of course, if you ARE a male librarian already, the ratio is about 10:1, female to male, and under certain circumstances, such as when you are particularly interested in female company, that could be considered a very good thing, so you might not appreciate the competition. Hmm, I'm gonna have to think about this. P.S. I'm a male librarian. My sig proves it.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
As a woman who was in science for a couple of decades, I can tell you that quotas may be bad, but, like democracy, they're better than anything else we've got.
The overwhelming majority of the gatekeepers are male, and too many of them have their heads too far up their asses to recognize merit in any female.
It's not the quality of the female scientists that is the problem. It's unconscious and pervasive bigotry on the part of the guys who hand out jobs and money. Nothing but quotas will ever force a change.
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.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
All the girls I know studying in scientific-type fields (inorganic chemistry, mathematics, etc.) all want to become professors and teachers when they finish. They all seem to insist it's what they want to do.
Most women like different clothes, movies, tv shows, face/bodily-hairiness of mates, soft drinks (diet? ick), and literature than most men. Could it be that 95% of all women possibly have different preferences in how they want to spend 8 hours of their day working than men? Perish the thought. Besides, scientists can be so creepy! Ew.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Yes, we knew science was sport. A violent one at times.
And here next to this engineering schematic we have OMG PONIES! SNAPS FOR THE Pinkprints! (Yeah I know... its miscogynstic of me but dang... how ELSE do you calibrate science to a "women's level of interest")
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.
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
So what if an institution cant meat their quota? âoeNO, you cannot hire any more Einsteins until you find at least one more Marie Curie, or else we will cut your grant!â
50% women; 50% men?
Next they'll want to pass a constitutional amendment saying that 50% of spouses be female.
Congress should lead by example (since they're paid from taxes) and regulate that ~50% of all legislators be female.
Followed soon by presidents, Supreme Court Justices, diplomats, inmates, and folks on welfare.
Then, maybe we can get special legislation forcing gender and racial quotas for friends on Facebook.
Almost all schools have a female majority.
Not upper level science and engineering though.
20 or so years ago we had a decent % (about 30%) women in my engineering program at the start of freshman year.
What we didn't know at the time was that there were more freshman then sophomores, juniors, seniors, grad students and professors combined. The engineering school wasn't so much selective on acceptance as it was selective on graduation.
By the time we all got seats in class (about two weeks) we were down to about 20% women.
By the time our advisers learned our names (having completed the weed out classes; those being the calculus and physics sequences) we were down to our graduation level of below 10%.
It was sad.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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."
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.
We need quotas that force supermodels to date software engineers! We demand equal time!
If we are going to make the quotas for women in male dominated sciences, how about we apply equality quotas to all fields, male or female dominated? I worked as a health professional for 4 years in a female dominated field before returning to school for my Comp Sci Degree. In my graduating class of 40 I was one of 3 males to graduate, and the only one to work in the field at all. The other two gave up and left the field after not being able to be hired. (although I did have some good weekends in that educational program) So where are the male equity incentives for things like nursing, lab techs, elementary school teachers, etc? All I saw were restrictions banning me from performing certain procedures on female patients (no equivilant the other way around), sexual harrassment because as a sole male in a department you are supposed to be man enough to take it, and so on. In my degree program I saw all the summer jobs go the female students even though they had much lower marks than me and no experience, and even had one "chesty" classmate that always managed to get extensions (pun intended) on pretty much every assignment or project in our mutual classes. Funny how a geeky Comp Sci prof will predictably react to a good view of cleavage.
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?
Um... haven't we had a bunch of articles on Slashdot about how the U.S. is *underproducing* science and engineering students?
It would be one thing if we had way too many and, for the available jobs, men were being unfairly selected over women. But when you have a general shortage how can you possibly increase the % women except for diminishing the quantity of men? Are they just going to fire people with Y chromosomes and leave their positions unfilled?
What I want to know is why it is apparently so abhorrent that women are going into fields like teaching, physical therapy, etc. instead of physics. Hero-complex aside, most people would much rather have these kinds of jobs than spend all day reading research papers and crunching numbers.
And it's not like the "progressive" universities aren't already jumping over themselves to hire women professors anytime they can.
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
Having worked for two women in the physical sciences -- my undergraduate and PhD advisors, whom were both physical chemistry professors -- I would have to agree that this is a problem and that trying to fix it from the top is problematic. The gender inequality does exist because of vestigial sociological pressures and attitudes. However, lowering the bar for academic positions, for example, could have very detrimental effects on the quality of research and education in a post-secondary institution.
I think the problem has to be attacked from the bottom-up instead of the top-down. Have programs that encourage science/engineering in high-school and undergrad. As an example from my grad school years, the Women in Science group would host weekends full of experiments and activities for young, budding women scientists.
not a gender equality issue. Title IX and Affirmative Action are the greatest communist subplots that have ever been heralded into law here in the USA. I mean, I'm all for equal opportunity for all humans, but seriously, when you start mandating quotas, you are getting out of hand. Just as American dominance in sports began a slow decline when the youth of Title IX entered the age of competition, so will American science further decline if quotas are enabled to prevent the best and the brightest, regardless of genitalia, race, or creed. And no, I'm not some crazy flag waving nut-job here, I believe that a better America will also lead to a better world, and Title IX is doing all it can to lower the common denominator.
--- He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. ---
Success is a zero-sum game.
Women can only be successful in any given field if accompanied by an equal loss upon the account of Men.
Quotas ensure that those who would normally be held back by lack of things like ambition, interest, or ability can still participate. Albeit, at the expense of those who don't lack.
If we have to screw over white males to hookup everyone who isn't a white male, so be it. It's "progressive"!
--The Liberals.
Where is the push for sex quotas in space? Where is the push for the space-based study of elderly people with dentures giving oral sex in microgravity?!?
Spacecorps Directives be damned!
Sure, we should not be putting up barriers to girls, but we should not paint engineering pink to attract more girls. Here in New Zealand there has been a slow shift in medicine from males to females. New Zealand now graduates more female medical doctors than male.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Title IX exists to the ensure the equality of opportunity for both sexes. From what I saw in engineering school women were given equal opportunity as men and things like scholarships, internships were not limited by gender. In some disciplines like Electrical Engineering, it was a matter of choice that large numbers of women did not pursue that career.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Not only conceivable, but almost certain, since that's exactly what Title IX did to men's college sports.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
It is downright obvious you cant have one quota for every group that could be discriminated against, so what makes discrimination against women more serious than discrimination against old people, or black for that matter ? The only somewhat serious argument I have heard in response is that women is a larger fraction of society which is exactly why it is MORE important to deal with discrimination against minorities like transsexuals, the blind or buddists. The law exists to protect people who are too few, too weak too disorganised or otherwise uncapable of defending themselves. To argue that it is more important to protect women from discrimination because there is more of them is the exact opposite of this. It gives benefit to the many while ignoring the discrimination of the few. To introduce quotas for women while not doing so for other minorities is very bad from an ethical point of view, and this in combination with the fact that it isn't practical to have quotas for all minorities, is strong evidence that quotas just isn't the right way to do things.
Command and control politicians who use government to control us and our lives.
There will be revolution if the banks fail because the Congress was instrumental in giving cheap loans to minorities.
Lets not forget those ridiculously low interest rates by Bernanke.
Jesus.
Where are you Ron Paul?
We could have the government just hand out our tasks at birth. They could then give out our training based on the need of our task. We might call it something...I don't know communism sounds good. Then we can have a decades long standoff with the capitalist pigs and then collapse under the weight of our leaders' selfishness.
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.
When I read Robot Magazine, I am thrilled to see girls in the some of the competition team pictures. I just wish some of the kits and projects were a little more aesthetically pleasing (no, they don't have to be pink), that there was less emphasis on combat bots and more on other types of applications and tasks..... and more evidence of women as sponsors and team advisors.
It doesn't matter who goes to grad school in the "hard" sciences, if the people teaching kids science at the elementary school level are not pushing all students to study science by their own example of passion for these fields, we'll never get more women in these fields at the top levels.
If there are more males than females pursuing a given career path, there are bound to be disproportionately more males than females succeeding in pursuing that career path. (Note that the reverse is also true.)
This would be false if and only if the group less inclined to pursue the career path were actually significantly better suited to the career path.
You see, if both groups follow the same curve for quality, the group that is larger is going to have more people who are at the high quality end of the curve (and at the low quality end of the curve, though this is irrelevant). Thus you get a disproportionate success rate on top of their already larger numbers.
Trying to force ratio changes at the stage of hiring can only lead to reduced numbers of good people or reduced pay (and maybe both). I'm all for encouraging fair opportunities, but the work has to be done years before the job hunt begins.
Title IX makes sense when it is applied to sports, since women need to have separate teams from men due to our physical differences. We needed to make sure that women teams had equally funding as the men teams. But I don't understand this proposal as it relates to the differences in sexes. If there are 20 women becoming scientist and 80 men becoming scientist in a freshman class, they all go to the same classes, have the same teachers, the same lab equipment, etc. What exactly is title IX going to do to make the incoming freshman class a 50/50 split?
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."?
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.
I know a couple who endowed a scholarship at their alma mater. They intended it to help promote women in computer science. But because of Title IX the scholarship can't have a gender-based requirement, so it's awarded to someone "whose presence promotes diversity".
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."--Feynman
Having recently finished a college program for software development - the ratios are pretty bad. The instructors were all so damned happy to have so many females in my program. We had about 30% female students, which was the best ratio in years. IIRC, there was already a committee devoted to bringing in new females.
Being a female, all this 'rah rah' business was pretty awkward, but it's a lot better than mandatory quotas. At least I know I got in and through on my own merit.
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.
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.
That's the most ridiculous thing that I've heard. According to new research, girls are doing as well in school as boys at science and math, but still do better at reading, history, etc.
Women are also better at personal relationships. Thus the lack of women in science may be due to their comparative advantages in the humanities.
have a read...
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
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
Mod parent up, please. The funny thing about title IX is it mentions that opportunities must be given to all people interested.(I paraphrased) However, it isn't enforced that way. If women have no interest, then men do without.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
there are discrepancies today in many professions that have to do with shallow perception of the promoters in the promotion process, rather than actual pure ability being the sole determinant (a true meritocracy)
whether severe or minor, the discrepancies are due to real historical reverse quotas: outright rejection of candiates based on sex or race, oftentimes with actual legal backing. while not continuing in legality, this process continues to this day in subtle prejudices, some of which might not even be immediately apparent to the individual with a prejudice due to unexamined thoughts and faulty lines of logic. it also continues to this day simply because it takes awhile for pure meritocracy to be reflected in actual career achievement
it takes awhile to reverse the damage, for history to fade away. if sexism and racism is abolished today, it will take decades for reality to catch up. why not speed up the process and prevent backsliding?
therefore, it is perfectly acceptable to set forth legal quotas with the aim of reversing a bad status quo, or speeding up the reversing of the status quo where otherwise change might be too slow
now people react to such laws as if the laws were:
1. permanent, that they will never be reversed. of course they will be reversed someday when equilibrium between ability and accomplishment is close to ideal, when all stratums of society have equal parts men and women, black and white (and all races)
2. the absolute truth. a law is not a reflection of truth. a law is social instrument for change: to fight crime, to advance justice, to promote social cohesion, law and order, and overall harmony
as if the statement of law is the determinant of truth, that minorities or women need help in order to succeed. of course laws are not the truth of the matter. society needs help in reversing historical status quos that are still with us today. a law is simply an instrument to do that, not a statement of permanent inadequacy. no one should take that as a take home message. if they do, they simply don't understand exactly the funciton of law in society
and yet you see so many people here, in their comments, even in this thread, starting with the assumption that if it is written in law, it is a statement of belief. no!
law: more women should fill the posts of chemist
truth: women are equal to men in doing good chemistry
law!=truth
so why do people read the law above and think "women are not equal to men in doing chemistry"
it's not a statement of fact or reality, the law is an instrument for change away from an injust historical legacy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
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.
Sheesh, I tell my wife all the time...
One more time Alice and I'll send you straight to the moon!.... Straight to the moon!!!
Nevermind her name is Susan, she still gets the joke.
She rocks.
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
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.)
Are we talking quantity or quality? Number of different positions?
Excuse me... I'm being told they mean "gender-based" quotas; Never mind.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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?
that's what it is anyway. We already have an AA law....and we all know how well that works *sarcasm*
Equal rights:
Man: has to earn his job, being better then all other applicants (woman and men the same)
Woman: only has to be the best woman in the list to get the job.
This isn't equal rights, at best its equal numbers, and pissing on the rights of men to actually get the job when they are the best candidate, EVEN when all other employed are male, and EVEN when going up against a female candidate.
But they again the US is fucking up everything anyways, in a cuple of years, only hermaphrodites will be allowed to run for precidency.
We need X number of women in congress at all times! They can even sync their cycles and then we could have a good reason to watch cspan. (rabid mob of congresswomen attack capitol hill, more news at ten anybody?) Congress allows stuff like FISA without the blink of an eye, why is anyone /. suprised, or for that matter, why would you think congress even really cares. Viva la revolution! /end crazy talk (got bit by a congresswomen)
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
Women are less interested than men in sports as a general rule. A lot of schools have to beg women to join teams just to try to get "equity." Of course most Americans believe in equality of opportunity, not outcome, the latter smacking of Marx.
Just as female fashion models make a lot more than their male counterparts, college (and pro) sports are gender driven. Nobody is suggesting that there be affirmative action for male models.
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.
Men and women are different, deal with that inconvenient truth. Different DOES NOT MEAN unequal.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Quotas do not help with discrimination. They only perpetuate this myth that women need a quota to get ahead. It is detrimental to the women who actually have earned the degree with the current system. Go ahead and do the quota - you are only going to screw yourselves.
Then stop slashing research funding.
Seriously, right now we reject 7 out of 8 K01 and a similar number of R01 grant applications at NIH and NIA.
Which means they leave hard science and tell their friends and younger female relatives not to bother.
You can't raise a kid without funding for your research.
Period.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
From Advice from the Counterculture by Dennis Prager:
I was told when I was in your place, in college, in the heyday of certain ideas in the late â60s, that âoestudies showâ that boys and girls are not inherently different, they differ only because parents give boys guns and give girls dolls. So the dummies who believed that âoestudies showâ that boys and girls are essentially the same decided to raise their boys with dolls and their girls with trucks. And what happened? The boys broke the dollsâ(TM) arms, and the girls cuddled the trucks.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
When I was in college, my engineering school class had a 10:1 ratio - pretty average for quite a few years prior. but my freshman year we got a new, female dean - who believed that there should be more women engineers and insisted on quotas. Next year, the freshman class was 1:1 - unheard of before. Guess what, the next year after that, the same class was close to 8:1 and by graduation it was back to 10:1 - all those women dropped out because they weren't really interested enough in the subjects and were not willing to put in the insane amount of work required. Mind you, this was a very competitive school (top 3 in US) and all of the students of both genders had the grades to be there - it was the lack of interest that led to high dropout rate.
Now in a less competitive school I imagine there will be more people staying in and while the number of women engineers will rise, the overall quality of those uninterested engineers will plummet and this will become a liability to the real female engineers.
If you really want to change that ratio - you can't just do quotas. You have to start in kindergarten and change the entire culture from then on. You got to make people WANT to do it, not just push them into the field.
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
This is slightly off-topic, since I'm arguing about aviation rather than science. However, aviation is another environment that tends to be rather conservative and that traditionally has been dominated by men.
Anyway...my flight instructor when I was working on my commercial pilot's license was a talented young lady named Rebecca -- good pilot, sharp lady and a pretty decent instructor. I ran into her a few years after I earned my commercial ticket, and she was no longer instructing, but was instead a corporate pilot. At one point in our conversation, the topic of sexism in the cockpit came up. Her response -- "Definitely not. In fact, if you are a woman you probably have an advantage trying to get a flying job right now, since employers are bending over backwards to recruit women into aviation." I was kind of surprised by this since, like I said, the aviation community tends to be slow to accept change.
What I've seen and experienced in aviation does not necessarily hold true for science, but since human nature tends to be pretty constant, I'd be pretty surprised to learn that it was all that much different.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
SCOTUS pretty much banned quotas to combat racial discrimination back in the 1990s. I don't see how such a law or administrative rule could successfully be applied to combat gender discrimination. Plus there's no point: more women than men graduate from college, so any discrimination taking place will probably work itself out pretty quickly. And as top poster mentioned, women dominate other fields. If we try to enforce Title IX quotas this way, it'll cost everyone more than it gains.
A better approach would probably be to ensure that funding of male-dominated and female dominated fields give parity on a per capita basis by gender. So funding for hard sciences and social sciences/liberal arts would have to balance in such a way that totals granted to female scientists and male scientists balance "in the large" across multiple disciplines and within a particular discipline. After all, in athletics, Title IX doesn't require the football program to recruit women, they require women's sports programs to receive an equal share of the pie from the athletic department. In the case of research grants, if there is a pattern of discrimination by the federal or state agencies making the grants, that wouldn't be resolved by Title IX regulations anyway.
This scheme would probably have some similar side effects to Title IX in athletics, where football and basketball tend to subsidize other sports. Some capital-intensive fields with fewer practical applications like particle physics would lose proportionally. Other fields like biotech or electronics might generate enough revenue that could be used to subsidize other programs.
We are the 198 proof..
Just ask any parent.
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?
It is not anecdotal. Ask any parent for God's sake, or any day care worker. Men and women have genetic and hormonal differences. Have you never even met a woman before? How can you even argue this?
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
It is also a strong argument for explaining to you the difference between correlation and causation.
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.
Surely you have no kids and do not work around them. Put your slide rule and feminist studies book away, and go take a day care worker to lunch and ask her what she (yes, she, since they rarely let men work at such places - so much for men conditioning these stereotypes!) has to say about innate differences. Then you'll see what it's like to be laughed at.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
I work in a physics department. Women are definitely a minority. However, I am not in favor of quotas to correct this imbalance. I'm not in favor of quotas period. I was generally in favor of title IX because I didn't enjoy getting the crappy leftover equipment from the men's ice hockey team. I remember a teammate who was given a football helmet and ended up getting a puck to the face because the bars across it were too widely spaced. I've been in science for a while now and have definitely experienced such fun things as sexual harassment, discrimination based on being female and all sorts of fun. This ranged from the classic, "Are you planning on getting pregnant and dropping out of science" to the unwelcome heavy hand on my knee and more. I do not think that quotas are the answer to these problems. I'm not sure what the answer to these problems is. Perhaps time will solve them.
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.
But then this doesn't solve anything. If that's the case then it has to be solved at a young age. Something like this only works when there's equal interest, but discrimination against one group.
(no pun intended)
Let't see if this idea will fly by setting quotas right here. Sir, yes, you over there in the back, you can deflate her now; she doesn't count. Let's start this over again, shall we? And put away those cameras!
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Wait, being "discouraged" and being discriminated against based on sex are two different things. The former can be attenuated by raising strong youth which, I submit, is important in that if you can't buck up and get yourself into the position, you're going to do a disservice to your field by showing the same lack of guts in furthering your conclusions in the face of detractors. The latter is illegal in the US, despite being difficult to prove.
As the lady a few up mentioned, there's a whole lot more of a problem with people not strong enough to be doing hard work being given the position on a silver platter without having to prove themselves than there is with outright discrimination. Want an example? Congress. 'Nuff said.
you're also a fucking idiot, like most gay people.
Well, no, that's just you being stupid. The grandparent is a self-described liberal, so he probably has all sorts of incorrect opinions, but most of what he stated in his post is not unreasonable.
By the way, there's plenty of valid reasons to post anonymously. Abject cowardice isn't one of them. Hey, the gay liberal was braver than you!
Okay, so we have gender equality in science. You've raised racial equality. What about sexual orientation too?
The way I see it, we now need the industry's population to be enforced to:
12.5% - Gay, white, male
12.5% - Gay, white, female
12.5% - Gay, non-white, male
12.5% - Gay, non-white, female
12.5% - Straight, white, male
12.5% - Straight, white, female
12.5% - Straight, non-white, male
12.5% - Straight, non-white, female
But what if we get age equality in there too? Do we now need 6.25% segments with old and young of gay/straight, black/white, male/female? What about transgendered people? Do they get a slice of the pie? I'd also want to include people from the US versus not from the US. Oh, and don't forget people with Down's Syndrome.
At this rate, there'd only be one guy sitting in the computer science department with 99 vacancies going. The problem is, legally they can't discriminate when posting job vacancies, so how will the quota be filled? Who will find that gay Chinese hermaphrodite needed to fill a 1%?
Clearly engineers aren't reproducing as quickly as they would like, at this rate we will be out of baby engineers by 2010!
Solution: Send more women!
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
Students should be immatriculated on the background of their merits, not their gender. IF there is discrimination going on, then it's a matter of firing the bastards responsible for it, not deny a genius his/her chance at being his/her best because a chauvinist of the opposite gender didn't make the cut.
Ffs...give me a week as god-king of humanity and I'll fix the world for everyone.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
Does that mean we should hire more white people to offset the number of Indians and Asians brought in by H1B Visas? :)
I get the feeling that the congresscritters responsible for BS bills like this don't know much about PhD programs, much less those in the hard sciences or engineering. Nothing like a 5-to-7-year trial run to convince women* to run for the hills rather than shackle themselves to the rat race that is modern faculty life...
Quotas aren't even a quick fix for a system as broken as academe. I don't think there is one, personally.
(*The PhD experience should, in theory, demoralize men and women similarly, but I do think there's something to the idea that women are under far more societal pressure than men to find and maintain a suitable work-family balance -- erring on the side of family, always -- with or without children in the picture.)
its just "Natural Selection" that these institutes are tampering with, I think "Darwinian Insights into Sex and Gender" clearly show that evolution and Biology have an impact on how society is divided. Science is no different.
They do this in the Army as well, it's bullshit. On the obstacle course women don't even have to climb the walls, they can simply run around them, because they are women. Also, a large percentage of women are unable to throw grenades far enough so they do not hurt themselves! Oh well, I guess the enemy will be easier on them since they are women. It doesn't just stop at women, it's also anti-white, if you are white, tough luck, you don't get any help. What's that? You are black? Oh in that case welcome to this university, it doesn't matter that your scores are less than the white candidates, because, hell, you are black! Do you see this type of bullshit in other countries? Nope. The west has this shit shoved down their throats and all we do is sit and take it. I am sure if a large percentage of whites decided to live in China and create their own societies, not learn the traditions/culture, speak in English and basically refuse to assimilate there would be genocide.
Women aren't excluded from hard sciences (chemistry, math, physics, comp sci) now becasue they aren't limited enrollment. If a woman has the marks, and lets face it, the marks requirement isn't high, they can get in.
Engineering is a different challenge since they're inherently limited enrollment. Forcing the programmes to take women probably wouldn't dramatically reduce the overall quality of graduates but it would push out a lot of competent interested people, enough of whom are already left out by limited enrollment.
Just my experience here at 3 different institutions (as a student, staff and grad student, lecturer/TA) women in hard sciences tend to be top of the class, or non existent. Where men seem content to be average engineers or scientists women seem to feel if they aren't the best they shouldn't be there. Though in truth at every opportunity programs bend over backwards to attract women students and staff. Admittedly all the women I've seen have to deal with a horde of drooling classmates who can't (and generally don't want) non geek women.
Just posting to undo a poor mod on my part, but while I'm here...
I'm an honours student in physical sciences (Chem/Physics etc) and I would say that the gender ratio is equal if not slightly female tipped at my university in terms of women. that said, it's an Australian university, so we don't have affirmative action or anything like that.
Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home!
As a physics professor, I'm confronted with this problem every day. And in my opinion, trying to take action at the undergrad level is closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.
By the time they reach college, most young women have already been pushed away from a career in the sciences, and those that stick with it in their undergrad years find a depressing lack of female peers and mentors which leads to further attrition.
If you want to change the number of young women in science, you need to do it in K-12 teaching, and *especially* during junior high, when an interest in science turns a girl into a pariah.
If only it was as easy as fixing the schools, it would have been done already.
Why do you assume that the causality must be in one direction but not the other? Culture doesn't work that way. The devaluation of certain social roles because they're played by women, and the devaluation of women because they play those roles, mutually support each other as a vicious circle.
Um, misogyny? WTF?
Again, the problem is that you're thinking linearly. Because you believe that which specific interests women have is logically prior to whether society devalues these interests, you are now arguing that we should focus on correcting the devaluation of women's interests, and not in getting women to play traditionally male roles. If the causality goes both ways, however, we should be doing both things.
Are you adequate?
The less qualified are pushed ahead of the more qualified, just because of gender. How is this not the brazen form of discrimination?
Ah, the old "women/blacks/Irish aren't strong/smart enough" argument? Of course women are strong enough, they're just facing MORE discrimination. For the umpteenth time, this HAS BEEN SHOWN IN STUDIES. Your collective opinions are worthless if they fly in the face of the data.
America was built on equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. That is an impossible naive marxist/socialist and dangerous dream.
How about we judge people based on merit, not sex or race? Let's do science, not treehouse politics.
You know, I don't know what's worse, the fact that Congress has single-digit approval ratings, or that they obviously don't care because they are wasting their time and our money on this twaddle. You know, everyone is down on President Bush, but it's these idiots, sellouts and whores who have allowed him to do all the things he's done, and have promised to fix the problems and only made them worse.
These days, the best you can literally hope for is when they get involved they don't make things worse... and that almost never happens.
If it weren't for unintended consequences, Congress would be of no consequence at all.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Not if you count years of experience, which women tend to have fewer of because they tend to leave the workforce to... raise kids! The whole "women are underpaid" line is to my understanding a total lark. If they really were systematically underpaid, some enterprising woman would start up a company filled with all those women, and kick the crap out of everyone else because she would have a cost advantage. One of the great virtues of competitive markets is that they don't treat gender/racial/any bias kindly.
For further reading I suggest the Jackie Robinson years for the Dodgers. Notice how well the Dodgers played when they stopped being a bunch of racists? QED
Relax I just want some peanuts.
What studies? The ones where women report being more harassed and opressed than men? These self-reporting data cannot be trusted since women tend to be overly sensitive to that sort of thing, and are actively looking for social conflict.
Women are in fact much more sensitive to social conflicts given their brain peculiarities, including differences in dopaminergic innervation, larger size of speech and social centers (up to twice the number of cells of males, which means some women can basically read your mind just by looking at your face), hormonal effects, depression prevalence (x5 times the rate of males), and so on.
I agree that as a woman you probably FEEL you get more discrimination because that's what your brain is wired up to detect, but objectively that doesn't have to be the case.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Would any Slashdotters care to actually see that data before modding up to +5? Or are claims the data exists somewhere now sufficient?
Relax I just want some peanuts.
The argument isn't that women aren't strong enough it's that they aren't encouraged to use that strength to get into the sciences, seesh. Its worth noting that women successfully entered and became the majority in a fair amount of male dominated fields when sexism was far more pervasive. So why aren't women repeating history? Could it be as a whole it's thought the sciences aren't worth breaking into? So how to increase desire? I'd think quotas would create a generation of male scientists who'd default to looking at their female colleagues as unworthy. Even if this evens up the field is it worth several generations thinking there's objective proof women can't do science because otherwise why would they need government help? I personally rather focus solely on encouraging females to desire the sciences so that they can handle whatever sexism remains in the field, and lessen any male prejudices by showing an increasing amount of equally competent women.
Good question. Here's a quick Google search: http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=debra+rolison+women+science&btnG=Search
(The only advantage I have over you is that I know someone who is publicly giving talks on the subject. You can also search for Elaine Seymour, a researcher in this field. Still, you *can* do a search yourself. Try it, it's fun!)
The problem with that is that women *do* desire to do science. They're just being put into position all the way through their education where they're being told that they don't belong.
Even the ones who do get PhDs generally don't get faculty positions. There have been studies where they've sent identical applications with obviously male and female names to job searches. The only differences were the names. The applications with male names were preferred around 2 to 1. I'll bet you that almost no one on those committees thought that they were discriminating, either.
Note that something like while something like 35% of Chemistry PhDs in this country are going to women, only about 10% of faculty are women. The interested women are out there, but they're not being allowed into the faculty ranks. Many of them are leaving entirely.
I'm at one of the schools mentioned in the article (Wisconsin), in a field overwhelmed with men - Electrical and Computer Engineering. The undergraduate EE side is around 11-12% female, while the Computer Engineering side is around 6-7%. Of the 16 faculty in the computer area, 2 are female, though both were hired in the last 10 years. The whole department has 6 female faculty, out of 49 total; either way, that's about 12% female. The women are all well-qualified for their positions, and the percentages seem reasonable (compared to undergrads, at least - the department doesn't publish the gender ratios of graduate students).
That's not to say that it doesn't need attention - it wasn't too long ago that there weren't ANY women in our College of Engineering. And I'm aware of at least one egregious case of sexual discrimination between faculty that happened a number of years ago, and was ignored by others in the department. Instead of trying to artificially create equality by any quota, people need to be educated. Look for discrimination and harassment against ANYBODY: male, female, black, white, Inuit... For hiring decisions, a quick independent verification should be able to show that the person hired for the job was at least on par with the other candidates in terms of hard qualifications. Make it easy to report trouble, and make sure they are taken seriously (but not abused). It's not a simple fix, but it's not a simple problem either.
Out of curiosity what are your sources for these numbers? The data will be most enlightening.
I don't have the time to vet the claims of this article, but it seems that the 'statistics' of claimed discrimination are BS..
http://www.american.com/archive/2008/march-april-magazine-contents/why-can2019t-a-woman-be-more-like-a-man
Linking to a Debra Rolison search isn't nearly enough. She's an advocate and a very good scientist, but she doesn't actually study gender disparity. Post the data. The studies I've heard about have been discredited due to things like "the data getting lost" and adjectives like "possible" turning into "actual" due to some mistake. The data is far less than "copious" that girls are being singled out and discouraged from being physicists.
I would love to have more women working with me (I'm also a physicist). How are quotas going to do that, when we can't recruit women into advanced physics degrees when outreach in middle school, extra funding and administrative support hasn't done it? Really, what do we do? Force them? Hire a biologist and call her a physicist? Your suggestion elsewhere of forced retirements is good, if cold and heartless. Maybe we could go further and just fire every other male professor? Would that really change the culture, or just piss people off and encourage the awful idea that women need some help if they're to compete with men in physics.
The people who know what they're talking about know that the culture of physics has to change. It's not just something easy like "stop being mean to girls."
The schooling is long, you don't get paid well at all, and you have to compete for any scraps of money that may be available. The fight for funding is such that there is enormous pressure to get rid of any student/postdoc/junior faculty who may not make it. Why would anyone want to do this? We can't get enough qualified people from the US to fill open positions. So it's useful for potential immigrants. The rest of us would do it for free if we had to.
As a male, I've had professors tell me I didn't belong in physics, didn't belong in grad school and that I was expected to work 13 out of every 14 days (but only get paid for 20 hours a week). I had one professor tell me I was going to fail his class, and then he gave me an A when I didn't wilt. Most of my classmates didn't fare so well and quit under the pressure. Of the 20 people who started with me in my degree program, 4 have or will get a PhD from the program (true to the statistics, the survivors are 25% women). That's the kind of thing that needs to stop, but it shouldn't stop just for women. You've been through this! Did you feel bad for only the women who were sent crying from the department offices?
We need what biology had a decade ago to get to equality: a good reason to do this. Biology did that by doubling the available funding over the course of 10 years. If departments aren't breaking the budget to keep one more student, there will be less pressure to force out anyone who doesn't desperately want to do physics. That means less abuse, less intense competition and a culture which may not be toxic to women. (It also means a crisis when the funding stops going up, which you see in biology today, but which hasn't hurt gender equality.) Double the funding and put in the quotas, but my guess is you wouldn't need the quotas.
Time is really the only answer. And while its not politicaly correct for a man to complain about sexism, I don't know if you've ever heard of how it is for male elementary teachers in certain areas? Same thing you're describing, but in reverse (and switch sexual harassment for just plain ol bitching harassment).
The issue isn't fundamentaly with women in science, or anything... its just an issue with our society and predefined roles. When parents stop (only) giving the little girl her barbies and the little boy his kid chemistry kit, things will change.
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.
It's a very dark ride.
"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."
So how about we make special scholarships for women who show aptitude in the hard sciences, but want to pursue a different interests? Essentially, we say we'll give them money to become an engineer even though they've decided they want to be a biologist, just so there will be a higher percentage of female engineers. Is it that big of a problem? Not really. What matters more is that we have skilled people working in these fields, regardless of what their gender is.
If they really want to have more women who are interested in the hard sciences, they should start getting women more interested at a younger age. e.g., send them to space camp instead of cheerleader camp.
Yes, I am in the US. And I am doing my Ph.D here.
.. What happens is that usually academic environments are somewhat more enlighten than the average, everywhere.
About your Brazilian friends, I don't know who they are but I think you are completely misguided in your comments. Matriarchal-female society? You are on something, aren't you?
No, my friend, Brazilian men are just as "machos"
But my point is not that there is no discrimination. (And I think a system of quotas would only makes matters worse) My point is that you deal with it and move on...
a good chunk of the activism and money goes towards woman now.
"You see, women are weak, and need the help. Men should be able to take care of themselves."
I really think that this belief lies at the heart of it. It's not spoken; it's probably not even consciously thought. But I am sure that these modern endeavors to "help women" (or girls) really owe a lot of their success to the gender roles that these policies' implementers probably like to think think they're subverting.
It doesn't, really. But since someone pointed out that women are more likely to leave their careers because of husbands and babies, I though it was worth it to mention that one can finish a Ph.D and mantain a family (like lots and lots of others before me).
My baby did delay my Dissertation a little, but it was my choice, I will live with that. It is not easy, but life is not easy. I don't see how blaming other people for our problems would help with anything.
You mean like the fact that he's probably not a liberal at all, but a progressive social liberal?
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.
Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
Equality, as far as I'm concerned, means equal pay for equal jobs.
I disagree. The above criteria is what's used to say that since person X and person Y have the same job description or category they should make the same money. In fact, it should be the value of the work a given person does to his/her employer that determine pay.
If I have two employees working a factory line, and one weighs 250 pounds and can move the 20 pound stacks of paper 50% faster than the one who ways 120 pounds, am I "discriminating" if I pay the 250 pounder more? According to facile "equal pay for equal work" analyses, I am.
This is Mrs. Carnivore here - well actually, not, I kept my name, but you get the point :) My husband pointed this article out to me and thought I could comment. I'm about one week away from getting my Ph.D. in a hard-science field and you know what, I'm all for some kind of quota. Sorry to say it, but science is still a boys club. Do you know where most of the best science ideas develop? At a conference, in the hotel bar, following a long day of talks, over a round of drinks and a cigar, either before or after the dirty jokes and futbol/football discussions. I happen to be an occassional cigar smoker, love my scotch, and appreciate the finer points of most sports - I have survived OK. However, for as much experience and respect as I've earned from being "one of the boys", I know that if a male scientist in my subfield comes along, he could easily become the new go-to "guy" for my area of expertise and his name (not mine) will be on the papers. I also know that younger (usually cocky) male scientists in my group will go to other male scientists with their questions even though I am more expert. The point is, unless I fight to place myself "in the loop" I find myself standing on the outside of major science discussions and projects. I don't think it's malicious - it's just easier for gusy to go to their "drinking buddies". Not to mention that some men in science are just walking disasters when it comes to interacting with the opposite sex to begin with.
I think it is true that once you make it in the field, MOST male scientists would never give a thought to your gender. The problem is getting the foot in the door. And at the end of the day when Dr. Joe Blow sitting on a faculty selection committee interviews Dr. XY and sees himself, 25 years younger and then interviews Dr. XX and sees a slightly different animal, who do you think he'll hire? Faculty members are long term investments; if both candidates are of equal competence, Dr. Joe Blow's job is to hire the one HE FEELS is the MOST LIKELY to succeed - ADVANTAGE Dr. XY. If Dr. Joe is forced to overrule this very real and subconcious bias toward what he sees as a "sure" bet, we might finally see some change. Otherwise, its turtles all the way down (i.e. more of the same).
Will some male scientists bash their female colleagues over the head with quotas if we institute them? Sure. And you know what, they are the SAME ONES that don't think we belong in science NOW. Most male scientists will judge as they always have - by the quality of the results, quantity of refereed papers, and general sharpness. And honestly, there are plenty of corrupt and incompentent male scientists - no matter what, you end up with a few duds. I'd rather have more gender balance and risk a few female counterparts to the male idiots that are already around (and who by the way ARE found out and generally ignored) then continue to exclude ~ 50% of the brain power available in our population. And honestly, at least in my field, with so many few jobs and so many qualified people, my guess is that you could easily find several very competent women to fill the spots.
They can't change any kind of diversity with legislation. This is fucking communism. People are different, any attempt to make them the same have failed and will fail.
Such 'well-meaning' government should mind it's own business, and step out the way. Or be stepped out.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Oh, more women in SCIENCE. Got it.
For the record I'm in Australia. I did a BSc. with majors in Physics and Chemistry. M:F in Physics = 20:1, M:F in Chemistry about 1:1. But Organic/Environmental Chemistry subjects = 35:65, Physical Chemistry 70:30! Even within the field of Chemistry that is considered (apparently) acceptable equally to men and women there is a disparity of interest.
As physical scientists we never consider that we have too many artificially interested men because we need more physical scientists total.
I think increasingly parents see shaping the interests of their sons and daughters as the way to ensure that they maintain their identity as men and women respectively in a gender-equal society. This is having an increasingly negative effect on boys, since women have (rightly) diversified in the last half century; parents see the only way of ensuring their sons' masculinity as pushing them into increasing a narrower selection of masculine jobs. This in turn skews the numbers in those fields so that it looks as if fewer women are involved.
That is an effect we need to consider more than we do. But the positive approach of having science appeal more to girls is also valid.
So why do we care? How about because working in an environment that is heavily populated by one particular gender is not healthy socially (as should be obvious to any casual reader of comments on /.). This is especially true in fields that are populated by those that love the subject rather than for reasons of economy, because your self-esteem is greatly affected if you feel the thing you love isn't understood/appreciated by one gender. If it's your gender who doesn't appreciate what you do, that's bad for making friends/your position in your peer group. If it's the opposite gender that doesn't appreciate what you do that's bad for... well I think it's obvious... like I said your self-esteem.
I agree with one respondent who said we needed to fix the problem at the source. Well, how do we do that? We need to expose both genders to as broad as possible a variety of activities from as early an age as possible. And be encouraging about it! Also, we need to fix the portrayal of stereotypes in popular media. Advertising is increasingly being shown to be a major contributor of the obesity crisis. Junk-food companies marketing to children are having significant success. When you have 30s to market your product, you don't have time to break down gender stereotypes. In fact using them makes it easier to find your target demographic - but think of the harm this is doing! Next bunch of ads, see how many examples there are of men/women in non-traditional areas. So, of course kids see this and it doesn't register with them that this portrayal is biased, it becomes part of their perception of the world. To fix that particular problem is going to require some complex regulatory oversight of advertising.
We also need real-life role models, this is where quotas actually can have some positive effect, however I agree with the majority of respondents that have raised concerns about other negative effect quotas can have. Scholarships for the best and brightest are more positive. Perhaps just hi-lighting the achievements some women have made would be helpful.
As an interesting aside let's talk about Marie Curie. She's the only scientist to ever win 2 Nobel prizes, she was a hero during War time driving an ambulance to get X-ray technology to the front. She overcame great obstacles to even attend school, and having read her biography I can tell you she was a wonderful, interesting character. So then why is there no big budget movie about her life? I reckon it's because Hollywood (and the film industry generally) don't know what to do with this non-traditional woman, they can't deal with a woman who shunned glamour! (Marie actually insisted that if her family were going to buy her a wedding dress, then it had to be something she could wear in the lab. She sulked the entire shopping trip and eventually ended up with a navy blue dress t
Conservation of angular momentum makes the world go round.
I should have added ...and not with some tacky quota system.
Conservation of angular momentum makes the world go round.
I know at least at the schools I have been to the easiest(and cheapest) way to become Title IX complaint is to simply cut teams. Because you see in Title IX math 0/0 does in fact exist and it equals pass.
I have a better idea, instead of setting quotas on the number of a certain gender we let in. Why don't we set quotas on the number of smart people we let in.
It's time to enter the future of coed showers.
Discrimination is discrimination, whether it is 'positive' or not, and I think is it mostly harmful. You can't force a change in people's attitudes by passing a law; it just reinforces tensions and creates resentment. However, I think this whole idea misses the actual point by about a mile - surely, if women are not interested in hard science (assuming that it is actually a problem), the thing to do is to work on making them interested? Find out what is the problem with science's image in relation to women; science has a rather nerdy image, and women are probably less likely to be nerds than men (boys are >4 times as likely to be affected by autism spectrum disorders), so for that reason alone it is much less likely to attract women. Perhaps more women would choose "hard science" if there was more emphasis on cooperation and social aspects?
.
Sources, please.
I'll believe that when we see the first precedent of such a law being reversed. Otherwise, I'm afraid we'll only see them removed from the books about the time the "War on Terror" ends.
I support Title IX it brought down the level of testosterone on campuses. Before that a lot of universities had like 2000+ men on athletic scholarships and maybe 200 women; now on many campuses women are even with men and the disfranchised men with only athletic scholarships go out of state. What title IX did was allow more women in the field of not only athletics but nutrition, physical education and rehabilitation to actually open up to them. It has changed many campuses from unruly abandons of cretins and worse into places where you can take pilates and yoga without fear of some random smelly guy coming from the free weight room pointing and calling you a fag.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
It is perfectly reasonable why women are so protected. They are the best supporters of modern capitalism. The perfect consumers. On the other hand, a man will do everything for a woman. Otherwise there would be no need for cars,money and fame. I feel so used.... :)
Are you trying to say that grants for research in hard science have a comparable cost to research in social sciences, even egads liberal arts?
Good christ, that's brilliant. Let's fund the philosophy department as heavily as the physics department.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
probably not a liberal at all, but a progressive social liberal?
You mean, like a boiled egg is not an egg at all, but a boiled egg?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Hey, at last a worthwile reply.
First, congrats for your degree. During my PhD studies I met a Brazilian lady who was finishing her PhD in Computer Science.
The way I see it is that as someone else put it before, it *is* a cultural issue. At least in countries like USA and in less extent in UK and Western Europe.
In the University where I did my PhD (in the UK) there were plenty of ladies doing theirs, however the majority were from eastern countries.
As you said, the disparity may well be because of the lack of interest from them. However, this lack of interest has a root, which is related to the education their parents and society gave to them.
You might be an example of that yourself, but I will bring forward my girlfriend's case. The has a Mater deg. in Advanced Manufacturing. The main reason why she came to be interested in Engineering is that her father worked in the Electricity company in Mexico (CFE), and sometimes took her there to show her about his work (of course, related to engineering).
I think the main problem is cultural because, the "usual" thing for parents is to show their boys those "boys" things, while they engourage girls to stay in "girl" things. At least, that seems to be the issue in some western countries.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I'm going to respond to this the way I always have.
Let's hire people (or admit them to college) based on their ability, not some arbitrary definition. If women want to apply for the engineering program, great. Most of the male engineering students I've known would have loved to have more women in their classes. "But the problem is that women are being discouraged from these majors," I hear you cry. Tough. That's a societal problem, not a legal one. As more strong-minded women decide to defy convention, it will become acceptable. "But the application office! They reject people based on sex/color/prejudice-of-the-year!" Ok, I actually have a solution to that one.
Let's make college admissions truly blind, in the scientific sense. As each application comes in, an intern tapes a numbered piece of paper over the name section, then scans it and sends it electronically to the admission board. Because we're doing blind admissions, we can leave out the piece on race/gender/religion/geographic location: all that matters are the SAT/test-of-the-month results and any essays the applicant may have included. Proof that the intern has been sending information that shouldn't be included (race, sex, etc) is grounds for immediate firing of everyone in the admissions office.
Hurrah. Now the admission office can't discriminate based on sex, color, religion, or any of these other things we keep complaining about. Can we go on to a new problem, now?
You're making the assumption that these 'female interests' (whatever those are) really are of equal worth to 'male interests' (again, whatever you define those to be). I don't buy that for a minute. Let's take a very stereotypical female interest - child care. Do you believe that is as valuable a skill on the free market as something like the skill of a plumber or a welder? If you said yes, then you are wrong. It is much easier to find someone to baby sit than it is to find someone who is qualified to do the work of a skilled trades person. This has nothing to do with any "very deep rooted form of misogyny", either. It's just a result of the simple fact that the value of a skill is related both to the demand for that skill and the supply of people who can provide it.
The differences in pay for 'women's work' and 'men's work' can be much more easily and simply explained in terms of economics than it can with convoluted and paranoid appeals to 'misogyny' and 'patriarchy'. The 'women's work' people like you so often speak of pays less than 'men's work' - not because we devalue it because such work is typically done by women - but because it's easier to find and replace people for such jobs. It's just that simple. Please leave your paranoid conspiracy theories behind and take a course in basic economics. We've got enough problems in this world without uninformed people dreaming up new ones based on nothing more than their own misunderstanding of how the free market works.
I can't speak to the science fields, but my wife is an engineer, and she often complains that she should have went into teaching. Why? Because engineering companies are largely crusty, male driven organizations that are detrimental to raising a family. She could easily work 75% of the time from home, but engineering managers want there little money making machines where they can find them. Working extra is the norm, not the exception. Engineering managers need to make the workplace more family friendly, that is what will attract female engineers. My idea: require overtime pay for work done away from home. When management is forced to pay overtime, they all of a sudden learn how to do there job and schedule properly.
What you'll get is what I understand has happened in law schools. Higher numbers of "insert favo(u)red group here" admitted who then fail to complete because they are non-competitive in that environment. You may be able to mandate equality of opportunity but equality of outcome? Not so much...
I happen to be a divorced dad raising my daughter by myself, and like you, my ex doesn't pay a dime of her court ordered child-support. (Well, she did send me about $200 once, when she took a Christmas holiday job at a retail store.)
So yeah, it *is* a lot of work raising a kid by yourself, and I know all about it. Still, I manage to work a full-time job AND have my own business on the side too. I have to get help from my family to watch my kid while I'm working (when she's not in school, anyway). But I certainly never felt like my situation "entitled" me to free govt. benefits. Certainly, not to free education (without even a requirement of maintaining a specific GPA), or free car repair to ensure I can attend.
Govt. run "assistance" programs do more harm than good, DESPITE people's attempts to defend them by illustrating the good they do.
It's still a FACT that if a parent can't financially handle raising a kid, he or she can legally put the kid up for adoption. Plenty of people who DO have the financial ability are begging for kids to adopt. If things are so bad off for an individual that they can't pay to keep a roof over their head or keep food on their table without govt. handing it to them? Then I'm sorry... but they really don't have their OWN life together enough to do a good job raising a kid.
This could truly be the death of America, as it will kill the Sciences in the USA, by draining the money out of them or completely killing the departments at public universities.
Also see Fred On Everythig, Unfinding Brains
http://www.fredoneverything.net/GAO.shtml
I am a woman working on a PhD in robotics (EE). I think that this will never work, as by the time you reach college level, there are simply more men interested in science. I think that it is a societal issue, but it starts much younger, perhaps middle school. When I was in the public school system I was strongly discouraged by many teachers from entering a math field. Likewise, many smart women I know did well in math classes up until high school, when they mysteriously lost interest, or it "got hard", or something. I don't really buy that women are naturally uninterested, I think that pressure to conform starts to hit hard around that age. On the other hand, since I've been in college, and especially grad school, my problems have been minimal. Not only am I female, but tattooed, pierced, and openly gay. No one cares. As far as the people in my research group are concerned, I'm qualified, and that's that. There are sexist jerks working in science, but I think they are a shrinking minority. There is also of course the problem of "mommy-tracking" But the biggest problem is still lack of female applicants. Title IX cannot fix that, just screw with our funding and cast doubt on the women who made it here on our own.
Here is the problem with qoatas....
Here in Los Angeles the police department (LAPD) has the goal to hire more woman officers. I think they want either 45% or 50%. The problem is the totally lopsided number of make vs. female applicants. It's like 10 to 1 more men apply for the job. So, what they do is test everyone. They hire EVERY female that makes a passing score and then they hire the top scoring males turning most of them away. So technically every person is "qualified" because they passed the test but on average the men all got near 100% score and the females on average did much worse some barely passed. In fact few females can pass the test at all. It includes such tasks as climbing over a 6 foot wall.
Now later what we hear is that the men get promotions faster. Why is that? Well ALL the men had very high scores, they turn away all but the best men and take any woman can pass. What this tells us is that the test really DOES measure how well you will perform on the job. So those scoring higher get the promotions
The fair way to handle this is to get more female applicants but that is really hard. Not many little girls want to be cops.
You have the same problem with engineers. You have to really want to be one or you just will not do well neither in school or on the job later.. If you don't like designing machines you won't be good at it.
It can work without quotas. For example I work for our campany's CEO is an African American Woman. We don't use quotas. The thing that will work best is to broaden to pool. We have to make millions of 12 year old minority girls WANT to grow up to be chemists, engineers, physicists and so on. And it has to start at that age, middle school of before. High school is to late.
Back to the LAPD quota problem. If the numbers of male and female applicants were equal then I'm sure the test scores would be equal because then they could turn down low scoring (but still passing) women that they are currently forced to hire.
My main problem with these things is they work on the principle that equality will not ever be reached. Working based on percentage is better than some options, but it is still flawed, especially if women have no desire to enter these fields! At my college we have something called the Women's Leadership Center. Whenever I do anything to work on my career they point me over there, and I am repeatedly offended. I understand where they're coming from, but I do not need special classes or a leadership councellor to be able to get a job anywhere and I am appaled whenever someone implies that I do because I am female. All it really does is give extra leadership advice to the women while the men have to rely on the career center alone. This gives women the advantage, and while this may be nessessary even today to offset other hindrances (though I am very sceptical about that) there will come a day when it is not. When that day comes I highly doubt that this center will close down, because if it does then someone will accuse the school of being sexist. So all this does in the long run is ensure that women get an unfair advantage. This is all speculation of course, but I find it a likely senario. Just as an aside, the Women's Leadership Center also has the biggest on campus laundromat inside (because it is the closest building to the apartment buildings). I have always loved that subtle little humor. And if you care to know I am a woman going into Geology.
"Working extra is the norm, not the exception."
If you work over 40 hours a week you are eligible for overtime if you are not exempt. It is irrelevant if you are salaried. Of course, it this is typical in her field, she may not be exempt.
And why did she go into engineering if she didn't want to work long hours? It isn't exactly a secret that it happens regularly.
"She could easily work 75% of the time from home, but engineering managers want there little money making machines where they can find them."
Then tell her to find a better company with good management. Being a woman engineer should make it pretty easy to find another job. It will be more difficult to find one with good management....
For unknown reasons, intercourse orgasms release four times more prolactin than masturbatory orgasms
Rewind a little bit...
The release of prolactin is linked to the feeling of sexual satisfaction
I guess another study will have to funded to crack this baffling enigma.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
towards legislating Western Civilization into mediocrity proceeds relatively unhindered it seems.
Out of curiosity, could you go into more detail about these genius females you encounter in your field? What are their physical and personality characteristics and what field are they working in? What work have they produced that were impressive enough for you to label them as 'genius'?
I agree such skilled females are rare, so rare that I am always interested in hearing about it from anyone who claims to have known or observed some.
This issue is the giant elephant in the room that most seem comfortable pretending is not there, as if by some kind of virtue of participating in the scientific method and being 'objective' that social genetics and pressures are rendered neutral.
So you're really, _really_ a female? Well, there is a simple test for this as a matter of fact! What is your first instinct when I say "woman, make me a sam'ich"?
(If you think you would kick me in the balls and tell all your friends I have a small penis, then you pass. That's assuming my 'ex counts as a representative data set.)
What about the incidents of women who, after having to work damn hard and remain twice as professional every moment for fear of being labeled "the woman", start seeing other women as cut-throat competition for a very small set of positions in a mans world? It's easy to see how this sort of thought would result in biased appraisals by an interviewer.
It's rather discriminatory to think that only people of different sex/race/etc. can be biased against each other.
"Govt. run "assistance" programs do more harm than good, DESPITE people's attempts to defend them by illustrating the good they do."
Perhaps that's the case in the US although looking at the trans continental railways I doubt it, it's just easy to stereotype people who are getting something your not when it's coming out of the public purse.
I posted somewhere else about how I received support to do a BSc as a mature age student in Australia. The assistance is merit based (ie:you still have have to pass educational criteria to gain entry, I had to do a HS maths course to get in since I dropped out of high school). I repayed 1/4 of that assistance through a tax levy that is part of the system and have also paid an estimated $750K in income tax since completing the degree in 1991. That's more than twice the tax I would have paid had I remained working shifts in a factory. While studying I had two kids at school, a non-drunk wife working part-time and a job driving cabs.
After the divorce I didn't get a cent from the wife or the government and neither did my kids, the degree had improved my standard of living past the point where I NEEDED any. And since you also survived the single dad thing I am assuming we are in similar income brackets, meaning both of us had the EXISTING financial ability to look after our kids alone. None of that means you or I work any harder than a single mum at collage or one working for minimum wage as a waitress. True there is no way to tell what individual people will or won't contribute to society in the future but if there never given a chance then it's a certainty they won't contribute much. I also belive that the vast majority of people on welfare want to get off it and the overwhelming evidence says the best way to do that is to get an eductaion and some skills.
"But I certainly never felt like my situation "entitled" me to free govt. benefits."
Free, entitled? For fuck's sake you could build a whole school with what I have paid in tax over the last 35yrs.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"The following are some of the committee's key findings that underscore its call to action:
> Studies have not found any significant biological differences between men and women in performing science and mathematics that can account for the lower representation of women in academic faculty and leadership positions in S&T fields.
> Compared with men, women faculty members are generally paid less and promoted more slowly, receive fewer honors, and hold fewer leadership positions. These discrepancies do not appear to be based on productivity, the significance of their work, or any other performance measures, the report says.
> Measures of success underlying performance-evaluation systems are often arbitrary and frequently applied in ways that place women at a disadvantage. "Assertiveness," for example, may be viewed as a socially unacceptable trait for women but suitable for men. Also, structural constraints and expectations built into academic institutions assume that faculty members have substantial support from their spouses. Anyone lacking the career and family support traditionally provided by a "wife" is at a serious disadvantage in academe, evidence shows. Today about 90 percent of the spouses of women science and engineering faculty are employed full time. For the spouses of male faculty, it is nearly half. "
...can we begin to cut out that kind of crap, PLEASE?
Sheesh, it is a simple fact that women are different from men. No, it's not Politically Correct. Yes, a lot of PC-fans are going to weep and shout and whine.
Doesn't change a simple fact of the Real World: typically, men are more interested in science than women. Typically means: statistic majority. Obviously there are some women veeery interested in science.
But, please, turn off this PC nonsense. Have a look at the book "The Bell Curve" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve). Quite excellent, and demonstrates clearly some more stuff that the PC-people are going to find horrific...
PS: Yes, yes, I'm noisy about what I consider idiocies. But something very similar to this happened in South Africa, which turned into an environment with a very high amout of racism (favourising black people). And is thus falling apart, most good people leaving, and it's a real shame for such a very beautiful country. Simply doesn't make sense to say "80% population is black, thus 80% of your workers must be black" and similar stuff.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
I am a HS Senior going through the college admissions process. The schools that have the best M/F ratio are the most selective ones, the ones with the most choice of applicants. (For example, MIT is 47-53, and RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) is more like 70-30). The most helpful thing for a student looking at an engineering major is to be female. All a quota would do for undergraduate education is to dilute the students for less prestigious schools.