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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.
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.
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.
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
50% women; 50% men?
8 hours? I want to work where you work! Seriously, at least in the US, the insanely long hours, total lack of respect, and having to watch as the idiot "manager" gets tons of money while the scientist/engineer, while not doing bad, isn't making nearly as much despite doing all the work is probably a bigger turn off for women(and many men for that matter) than almost anything else.
Monstar L
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!
What's this 8 hours a day thing ?
How many of us are available for call any time day or night. Where's my work:home balance.
How about fixing that ?
The truth is, that without my wife bearing the brunt of raising the kids, I would not be able to do the job I do as a married man with children. It would be impossible.
Nullius in verba
So where do I go to demand that there are equal numbers of male and female babysitters, maids, nurses, and elementary school teachers? And can someone remind me what the ratio of men to women in congress is?
In short: stupid idea. If women don't *want* to be scientists and engineers, fix it in schools by encouraging them to try it and doing your best to encourage the removal of the societal bias against it. Allowing minorities and women who are *less* qualified then white males to get jobs just to fulfill a quota is one thing that *will* reduce the quality of our science and engineering.
If you want to remove bias in hiring scientists and engineers, at require that the person who makes the decision to grant interviews not see any information that could identify a person's sex or race, including the name. Then, if you must, require that the interviewer match the interviewee in sex and race and if the interviewer isn't given the authority to decide who gets hired, again remove any identifying information from the report before it goes to the person who does make the decision.
That's a nice, scientific way to reduce (not eliminate... women and minorities can still be biased against other women and minorities) bias without hurting the final product. I mean, what would you do in the proposed bill if you only got 10 female and 90 male applications to fill 30 spots? Pick women off the street and try to make them do someone else's job?
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
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
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.
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
[insert witty comment about an institution that must "meat" a quota]
Really though, that is exactly the problem. The people mandating these quotas are assuming that there is an overwhelming number of talented women who are not getting into schools because of a (yet unproven) bias. The reality? Most women just have less interest in certain fields, just like most men have less interest in certain fields. Case-in-point:
My school's electrical engineering program has had a long-running goal: double female enrollment. This recently had to be changed to "increase female enrollment" because my graduating year has zero women (this includes computer engineering, which is considered a semi-separate department). It's not that the female applicants were discriminated against; in fact, there have been no allegations of discrimination of any type in the department, and we have faculty of all races and genders (and one member who had a sex-change operation a few years ago). There just aren't many female applicants. In fact, the policy for meeting that goal was to increase advertising to female high school seniors, including deliberately skewing the ratio of pictures of male engineers to females (which required us to get pictures from other departments).
If there was a quota for female enrollment, we wouldn't even have an EE department. It is one thing to be politically correct, and I certainly wouldn't go around claiming that women are inherently inferior to men (I would have nothing to base such a claim on anyway, since I have no points of comparison). It is quite another to demand that the statistics be changed through legislation.
Palm trees and 8
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
A big piece of the article was pointing out that women in science don't particularly want this, organizations teaching science don't want this, and men in science don't want this. The institutions involved are filling out the paperwork but definitely aren't interested in suddenly making 50% of all science graduates women.
And the article also made the appropriate comparison with the field of psychology, which is now something like 70% female (similar disparities exist in education, particularly primary education).
I am officially gone from
And it isn't just the discrimination from the men in power. I am a woman who have been in typical "male" professions all my life, and in addition to the ridicule, discrimination, and belittling from men, I have often been harassed by women who consider my job/education choices to be inappropriate for a woman.
What we need is to start seeing people as individuals with their own set of interests and abilities instead of grouping people into two gender groups with stereotypical interests and abilities. Then both women and men could get the education and jobs they are interested in and have abilities for, which I think would be much better than channeling everybody into so-called gender-appropriate fields.
If quotas help, I'm all for it. Otherwise not.
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.
I am not so sure that male gatekeepers are the problem. I went through the physics track and into academia and the glass ceiling was never an issue. What was a problem was the assumption that the woman would give up her career in favour of her husbands. The two-body problem is a serious problem in academia and research. Most institutions simply will not hire couples unless if both of them are at the top of their field. The usual situation that I have seen is that a woman sacrifices her career because her husband/boyfriend got a good post-doc position from a place that offered her little better than a TA-ship. His career goes somewhere because he can devote 100% of his time to research, but her's goes nowhere because she is unfunded and needs to devote much of her time to teaching. When it is time to apply for a second post-doc, or a jr faculty position, he is in a much better position. Not because of sexism, just because he had the opportunity to concentrate on his research. I have seen this work in reverse, but the tendency is for a woman to sacrifice her career for her partner's. Quota's will not help this much. What is needed is a recognition that institutions need to change their hiring practices.
My findings are that why yes, we hired much much much fewer women than men. Is it because we were sexist? No. Is it because they were all underqualified, or even less qualified? No.
The cold-hard fact was that only about 10% of the applicants were women. Interestingly enough, (or maybe not), most of these were not native U.S. citizens, but mostly Chinese or Indian women who had come to study in the U.S.
While I am being a "racist" - I might throw in that we never, in our existance as a company, have ever hired a black person.
Was it because they were underqualified, etc. etc. etc.? Again, no.
In my entire career, I have only ever interviewed a single black applicant for an engineering position. (BTW - We actually made this person a good offer, which they accepted, but their existing employer countered it and we lost them.)
My point is that there are less "women and minorities" hired into these positions becasue there are far far far less candidates - not because of any discrimination.
Does discrimination exist in the world? Sure, it does - but to be honest, in the competitive nature of the companies I've been at - and the difficulty in hiring good candidates - I don't think anyone would care if the candidate was a green transsexual with three eyes - if they were a solid candidate - they'd be hired on those grounds.
I've also worked for "Women Owned" companies. This is something that the feds have set up - If your company is at least 51% "woman owned or run" (or minority owned and run) - then you get preferential treatment in dealing with the Feds, and contractors that do business with the Feds. (Like they have to do business with a certain quota of these companies). In my experience, these all have been a smoke-and-mirrors game - Whitey giving his ol' lady a business card that says "CEO" on it, to try and drum up some more business, etc. etc. etc.
Certain people are drawn to certain professions - and that's an individual decision, and there probably is some biological basis in the Men vs. Women thing. Like people have pointed out, should we mandate quotas that H.R. people and Flight Attendents be a certain percent male too?
Now as the "Minorities" go - let's cut to the chase. By "Miniories", we're only talking about certian "Minorities". We're talking about blacks, hispanics, eskimos, Native Americans - and I'm sure some others - but we are NOT talking about Indians, Chinese, or Australians for that matter.
If Congress really wanted to even-out the playing field - they'd be investing money into inner-city schools - like a mile a way from them in DC - which are literally falling apart - and more like prisons than schools. Turn these into places that foster excitement in learning, science and engineering, and are an oasis inside these inner-city slum areas - and you'll see those kids go off to college and become candidates.
Short of doing that - nothing else will ever work. You can give them a billion dollars in college grant money - but if their schools are gang, crime and filth ridden places where they just get locked-up for a few hours a day - then no quota system on the place of the planet will ever balance that out.
Congrats, I'm glad you've had a much more positive experience than many other women have. I can tell stories about people I know personally who have been jerked around in the sciences/engineering due to gender, but neither of our anecdotes is worth much. What is worth a lot is the data, and there are *copious* data on this topic and they point pretty strongly to the conclusion that women (and girls) are being discouraged from pursuing careers in the sciences. I don't have any at my fingertips, but you can pretty easily Google to find some. (That, or I could ask my best friend who reads the studies a lot more than I do.)
Then why not introduce a female quota in the gatekeepers? Let's see how that works out. It could be a way to decide this particular chicken-egg-problem. If the female-to-male ratio goes up by that measure, it could be because suppression was indeed significant; if the ratio stays the same, it could be because there really is no significant interest from females to begin with.
If you just introduce a quota for female professorships or whatever, the symptoms have been treated without treating the underlying cause or even finding out whether or not there is a (undesirable and amendable) cause such as sexism to begin with.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
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?
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
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! --
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.
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%?
That has been my experience. Not at my current job, but every other job I have every had. Part the problem gender quotas is that the people in favor of them don't seem to be able to do simple math. They like to count the number of women, and the number of men in the country, and use that as a basis for the number of people that could go into the field. What they fail to account for is that PEOPLE are lazy. Most people, if given the opportunity, would take a steady stream of cash that comes with no work over working their ass off. Not all people, but most. Those that would keep working would be less likely to take difficult jobs than easy ones.
In our culture, women do not HAVE to work. There are plenty of men that will happily work two jobs to pay their way as long as they are putting out. This is not a slight against women. It is just a recognition that being a housewife/girlfriend/date or whatever you want to call it, is a job opportunity that is available to most women, and very few men. Given that many PEOPLE who have that opportunity will take it, you will find that the number of women who either get full income through dating/marriage or take less difficult jobs because they can supplement their income via dating/marriage is pretty darn high. In fact, the 'housewife' field is so weighted in women's favor that many people don't even believe that a man can have the job. It is not uncommon for people to see a wife without a job as a housewife, but a husband without a job as a bum. So, right off the bat, you can take half of the women out of the job pool, as they get to retire before they even get started.
Then take the fact that kids see this. Kids know that we live in a society where women who don't work are housewives, and men who don't work are bums. This leads to girls growing up thinking about how rich and handsome her husband will be, and boy growing up thinking about how expensive of a car he can get for picking up girls and in turn, how much money he can make. Does this apply to all kids? Obviously not. But it does apply to the majority of them. This training from a young age of boys to look to making lots of money and working hard, and training girls to exploit those boys. So, as they grow older, you will find more girls who have not invested in learning the things necessary to go into the sciences.
Finally, take the fact that everybody is trying to get what few women are left so that they don't look like they discriminate. This leads to women being able to ride the glass elevator to positions that they could not get if they were men. Would men ride the glass elevator if they could? Sure. Taking the best job you can get is not gender specific, but just like being a housewife, it is an opportunity that is just not presented to men as often as women. Now, if you are the best employer, you might be able to beef up ratio, but the women available just are not there in the numbers for everyone to have very many of them working for them. Plus, every time a woman takes a ride on the glass elevator, it leaves an even bigger gap in the hiring pool for the next level down, who in turn have to lower their standards, and thus create an even bigger gap below them. I figure that this is why the women I have met in tech fields who are higher up on the chain, have been more qualified for the jobs they have than those in the middle and lower levels. The farther down the chain you go, the bigger the disparity between available men and women for the job.
This is why their plan will fail. If Congress wants equal numbers of women in the hard sciences and engineering, they will have to start at the bottom and get more women to pay their own way. They will have to either make being given money/goods for being a housewife/girlfriend/date very unattractive, or figure out a way to convince women that they should start supporting men so that men can be the housewives/boyfriend/date that gets paid for.
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.
The less qualified are pushed ahead of the more qualified, just because of gender. How is this not the brazen form of discrimination?
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
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.
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.
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.