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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.
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.
You realize that it's the lycra they're advertising, not the chicks, right?
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?
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!
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
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.
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.
Look, I am finishing my Ph.D in Civil Engineering, hopefully this year (I am a woman, Brazilian and had a baby during the Ph.D program).
I have never felt any problems with what you call "gatekeepers". There are plenty of incentives and opportunities for women in sciences, you just have to show your work.
Yes, there is probably a few jerks around, but what you do is tough it up, otherwise you will never make it as a scientist anyway.
And I am sorry, but maybe some women should not be choosing these careers anyway. I believe most of the disparity is because of lack of interest from them, not from any barriers in the system.
So stop whining and get to work, people.
A big piece of the article was pointing out that women in science don't particularly want this, organizations teaching science don't want this, and men in science don't want this. The institutions involved are filling out the paperwork but definitely aren't interested in suddenly making 50% of all science graduates women.
And the article also made the appropriate comparison with the field of psychology, which is now something like 70% female (similar disparities exist in education, particularly primary education).
I am officially gone from
And it isn't just the discrimination from the men in power. I am a woman who have been in typical "male" professions all my life, and in addition to the ridicule, discrimination, and belittling from men, I have often been harassed by women who consider my job/education choices to be inappropriate for a woman.
What we need is to start seeing people as individuals with their own set of interests and abilities instead of grouping people into two gender groups with stereotypical interests and abilities. Then both women and men could get the education and jobs they are interested in and have abilities for, which I think would be much better than channeling everybody into so-called gender-appropriate fields.
If quotas help, I'm all for it. Otherwise not.
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.
Congrats, I'm glad you've had a much more positive experience than many other women have. I can tell stories about people I know personally who have been jerked around in the sciences/engineering due to gender, but neither of our anecdotes is worth much. What is worth a lot is the data, and there are *copious* data on this topic and they point pretty strongly to the conclusion that women (and girls) are being discouraged from pursuing careers in the sciences. I don't have any at my fingertips, but you can pretty easily Google to find some. (That, or I could ask my best friend who reads the studies a lot more than I do.)
Also hear's something to think about: Could quotas actually severely harm women in technology, by making people assume anyone who got hired and was female got the job due to the quota system, thus undermining their hard work?
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
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.
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%?
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