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A Plan On How To Stop Sexism In Science
StartsWithABang writes: If there's nothing else that science has to offer, it's this elegant notion: that anyone, anywhere, at anytime, can investigate and uncover the mysteries and workings of the Universe simply by asking it the right questions in the right ways, listening to its answers, and putting the pieces together for themselves. Anyone can do it. Only, for various and sundry reasons, not everyone gets to do it. Some people don't have the economic ability, some don't have the sustained drive or interest, and some simply can't cut the mustard. But some people — some really, really good people — are driven from their passions for a sad, simple and completely unnecessary fact: that they were treated in unacceptable ways that they refused to just accept. And in a great many cases, that unacceptable treatment came simply because of their gender. Sexism sometimes looks like what you expect, and sometimes not. Here's one opinion on what we can all do about it to create the world we really want: where science really is for everyone.
For gods sake, this again!
Seriously, what is this trash and why is it on slashdot?
And in a great many cases, that unacceptable treatment came simply because of their gender. [...] Here's one opinion on what we can all do about it to create the world we really want
You haven't proven there's a sexism problem, you simply dictated it like some kind of god. Where's the evidence? If it's there, link to it. If not, shut your hole and go find some before you come back.
Enough of this radfem nonsense.
Don't let feminists in?
That feminism is still all about equality of opportunity, and acknowledge that it in fact about equality of outcome, regardless of merit or ability.
Fact of the matter is, most people cannot do science. Yes, that also means most women cannot. That means doing science is for almost nobody. Apparently, some people are pushing for the "skill" and "insight" requirement to be abolished for women. The quagmire that is "gender studies" shows nicely where that will lead.
Also, having been in science for quite a while, I have yet to find the first instance of sexism and none of several female colleagues had any examples for it happening "in science" either or for being held back when doing a PhD. Sure, they all had to do real work and overcome real obstacles, but not in any way different from what male PhD candidates have to do. This whole thing is a transparent move to acquire more power, not to fix any existing problem.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
TSIA. It's meaningless pap.
"I am saying that you have a responsibility to treat every person that comes throughâSâ"âSnot only your work life but your life in generalâSâ"âSwith kindness and respect."
No, REALLY?
A PLAN would be something like: ....because until you extract one of the fundamental drives from our cells (in fact, one might say it is THE drive, as reproduction is the sole reason that there exists a male gender in the first place), men are not going to stop noticing - and reacting - to women.
1) "De-program the mating instinct from humanity"
2) Now watch men treat women more like each other.*
*personally, I believe what women are objecting to is, in a way, men treating them like each other. Obviously, not superficially; but men are competitive as hell, I daresay it's almost instinctive. And the guy who would actively demean or denigrate a woman because of her gender is the same sort of personality that would do the same thing to another man if he's brown, or from Minnesota, or had anything that could be used as such leverage.
Simultaneously, we all can easily trot out examples of women getting special treatment because they're female. Wearing a little lower-cut shirt than they needed to in that tough interview? A little eye contact gets her a free drink? Men will generally stop treating women as sex objects when they - throughout their lives - stop encountering women acting like that.
-Styopa
Easy to stop SJW, look at them instead and ask them questions.
Why is only 5% of Hollywood and TV directors women?
Why do women in Hollywood make significantly less than men for top roles?
Why does Mrs. Clinton pay women on her staff 87 cents for each dollar she pays men?
Why does Obama pay women 78 cents for each dollar he pays men on his staff?
Sexism is far more rampant from the left/SJW crowd. That's because no one is supposed to ask them about it, but go ahead and ask them and watch their complaints disappear because its only being brought up as a political issue and they obviously don't really actually care about the issue.
There is only one way to stop sexism in science. Nerds must be shamed, harshly and often.
Nerd must be shamed:
- for being male;
- for being white;
- for being cisgendered;
- for being american;
- for being educated;
- for being tech saavy;
- for playing video games;
- for playing tabletop games;
- for reading sci-fi;
- for being sighted;
- for having two hands;
- for not getting out enough;
- for getting out enough;
- for having parents;
- for not posting trigger warnings;
- for voting Republican;
- for voting Democrat;
- for voting;
- for not voting;
- etc
Nerds must be shamed for all these and more. Constantly. It is only by breaking the collective morale and free spirit of the Internet generation that we can hope to instill the true sense of camaraderie and globalism that the tech industry needs to grow and profit in the post-digital age. Positive change is only possible through negative reinforcement. You can lead a horse to water, but he must be beaten into drinking it.
Nerds will never become tolerant or accepting on their own. They cannot be saved, and their zealous adherence to outdated concepts of equality, meritocracy, and free speech are holding tech companies back. Shaming is best way of gentling this disgusting race of geeks who currently dominate tech. We must rip open their cozy-caves of childish solice, their fortresses of nerdy solitude, and all their conventions and creative workplaces, and there smear the disinfecting lights of inter-sectionalism, sexual politics, and identity politics all over their protesting bodies, minds, and souls until they have no more energy to resist. Only then will tech be finally free from rape culture.
It's evolution in action. Men who don't "chase skirt" are not as likely to produce offspring, so that group has the tendency to stay small.
This is a good thing!
The more that people get subjected to this social justice nonsense, the more they see it for the junk that it is, and the more they dislike it.
So I'm all for social justice articles all over the place. The harder the social justice crowd pushes their shit on everyday people, the quicker those people will come to resent social justice and those pushing it.
The social justice crowd will cause more harm to themselves and their cause just by being themselves and promoting their idiocy. We should encourage them to do this as swiftly as possible!
Apologies for length but this issue is sorely getting on my nerves.
I realize that the goal of a lot of these campaigns and whatnot is so that we develop gender-blindness so that women can succeed, yada-yada, but when was the last time that the submitters actually asked any women who frequent this site how they feel.
The alarming frequency of how much I hear about how women in tech need to be helped because OMG sexism!!! is really standing on my very last nerve (and this isn't just in tech, it's in a lot of areas...in the past two weeks, on my Facebook feed alone, I saw a semi-famous internet guy shilling the "poverty is sexist" hashtag and coordinating charity because "women are affected more by poverty than men", the church I just quit put out a fact sheet that men were 95% of perpetrators of domestic abuse, and in addition to Hack Reactor's generous need-blind deferment of tuition, they're now offering scholarships to women...all of which I find to be dubious, or at best moderately short-sighted, to say nothing of the fact that anyone who would question the goodness and purity of the intentions behind any of these MUST be an MRA, which is a group I find to be wildly misunderstood anyway). Never mind all the pro-woman people I know who aren't even in tech pushing the wage gap myth.
It's almost like there's a concerted campaign out there to get people tilting at windmills or something.
Okay, I'm not a typical woman, bear in mind - a number of my "guy friends" like to point out I come across as more male than female, sometimes even more they themselves do. But hear me out for a little bit.
The issue as I see it is not that there isn't sexism - there most certainly is, and yes, I've experienced it. The issue is that all of this fear-mongering is wildly and substantially overblown.
I will say it again. YES, there are sexist men out there. YES, not enough people call it out. YES, there is real injustice out there.
BUT:
YES, women can be sexist too, and I find all of these alarmist cries of sexism to be making it all worse, not better. Women become suspicious of men, and start to believe that 10% of M&Ms are poisonous garbage. Suddenly all men are suspect, and what's that called? SEXISM. But either way, there isn't nearly as much sexism or even as many bad-actors as you might think out there, and if you think so, stop watching so much television.
YES, not enough people call it out, but what do you really think people are supposed to do about it? Most people don't want to get caught up in other people's drama, because if they do, they don't know how to handle it. If we all knew how to tackle all the world's problems, we wouldn't HAVE problems.
YES, there is plenty of injustice in the world, but if we keep drawing arbitrary lines, like male vs. female, then what's going to happen is we're always going to look for those dividing lines everywhere. If all you're looking for is faults, eventually that's all you're EVER going to see. More than that, it doesn't help with equality or gender-blindness. It fact, it's counter-productive. It makes one side suspicious of the other. It creates warring factions.
You can have equality - a notion that assumes women are capable of all the things that men are, including handling their own problems - or you can have the notion that women are somehow handicapped and need gentler handling. Pick one. Pick only one. You can't have both. Not yours.
Women, if you want to be respected in tech, show up, do good work, be reliable and dependable, and for the love of Christ, stop pointing out that you're a woman. Far fewer people care that you're a woman than you think, they just want to make sure deadlines are met and profits are made. Making it about sexism doesn't make a conducive working environment and you're not helping ANY other women at all. And if sexism is so pervasive that you can't succeed, leave. Sometimes the best thing you can do is admit that the problem is much bigger than you. There ar
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Posting anon because I'm in a STEM academic field.
First off I don't know what kind of places the author worked at. I saw that kind of behavior when I was a young TA, where the age differences between "teacher" and "student" were very small, but in my professional life I see my fellow professionals acting...well, professionally. I of course may have internal biases and filters that may prevent me from seeing everything like this, but without hard evidence of these scenarios either way, that's all we have.
The author describes several instances of truly inappropriate behavior, but is that really "sexism"? Did the male professors/teachers/authority figures do the things they did to *all* women, or just the ones they found attractive? Did they punish or reward students based only their sex? If not, then I don't think that's sexism.
Flip the situations around: if a woman professor flirted with a male student she found attractive, would that be considered sexism? If a homosexual teacher favored with a student of the same sex, would that be considered sexism? If a student of either sex flirts or checks out or writes cute notes on their homework to a teacher they find attractive, is that sexism?
And don't pretend that the above situations don't happen.
I'm not saying that the instances the author cited shouldn't be considered inappropriate and disrespectful behavior. Far from it; treating your students that way is an abuse of the teacher-student power differential, and should be highly discouraged. But lumping it all into "sexism" dilutes the real problems that women face in STEM and misses a larger opportunity to discuss how to build professional relationships.
What an antithetical beginning to scientific thinking.
The proof thus far of rampart sexism in science is at best contradictory, and especially now, this push seems to have the flavor of if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes fact.
Also, I see no reason why women should be singled out in this regard with a myriad of social injustices that take place. By the HDI, they are a privileged class.
Right now there is a Supreme Court case pending of how affirmative action ends up being discriminatory to Asians, similar in effect to quota systems to keep Jews from higher education.
I caution attempts at social engineering result in greater injustices than those they seek to fight against.
I'm getting really tired of such sexism-rerated blurbs. I'm tired of hearing and reading about some people's ideas about how to force an increase in the number of women in politics, in academia, wherever. I'm tired of these ideas mostly because most of them feel themselves forced, and very often drop over to the other side of overly positive discrimination horse. I'm tired of them, because most of them don't contribute and are worthless, or simply disregard the real world, trying to envision some half-assed gender-neutral utopia. All stupid crap.
:)) And the ones I do know personally always seemed to be really motivated, since they want to show they can do more and better. Which, while is nice, it's really unnecessary, nobody I know would think they are inferior. Also, performance&results are important, gender is not.
I've spent now more than a decade in academia, and I've always had women colleagues, during msc, during phd, after phd. Not many, naturally (fairly typical CS/IT ratios), and even today from the 9 senior (young postdocs and "older" postdocs) in our lab onyl 2 are women - which I think is a fairly average ratio in our field. None of my earlier or current female colleaues/coworkers had such negative experiences as the blog post is about. That doesn't mean others didn't, but sometimes I have the feeling such stories are a bit overreacting and over-generalizing.
Personally, I wouldn't mind to see more women in scientific fields, but I couldn't care less if there weren't any either. I just never thought about such numbers as ratios as being an issue. It certainly never occurred to me - or anyone I've ever spoke about such topics - that women couldn't perform in our field, since I know from experience that they can, furthermore, most women I know - personally or because of their results and publications - in our field are really exceptional in their areas, very many of them are much better than me or some of my colleagues
So, tl;dr, sexism and gender issues: don't care.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
http://www.ashedryden.com/blog...
Meritocracy is the belief that those with merit float to the top - that they should be given more opportunities and be paid higher.
We prize the idea of meritocracy and weigh merit on contribution to OSS. Those who contribute the most, goes the general belief, have the most merit and are deemed the most deserving. Those who contribute less or who don't at all contribute to OSS are judged to be without merit, regardless of the fact that they have less access to opportunity, time, and money to allow them to freely contribute.
As the people who exist within this supposed meritocracy don't exist within a vacuum, we also have to realize how our actions affect others. Meritocracy creates a hierarchy amongst the people within it. Some of those at the top or striving to at least be above other people have been guilty of using their power for bullying, harassment, and sexist/racist/*ist language that they use against others directly and indirectly. This creates an atmosphere where people who would otherwise be deemed meritorious within this system choose not to participate because of a hostile, unrewarding environment.
Yes if you contribute to OSS projects don't you dare think that's merit.
Thank you for your comment. I've been saying much the same thing for - it seems like - forever. But it's one thing coming from a guy (even though my wife is in tech, and agrees with all of this), and entirely another coming from a woman.
"there are sexist men out there"
I would put it even more generally: There are jerks out there. Men and women both. That is, unfortunately, just the way life is...
"You can have equality - a notion that assumes women are capable of all the things that men are, including handling their own problems - or you can have the notion that women are somehow handicapped and need gentler handling. Pick one."
This. Exactly this.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
When I read that story as a kid, it seemed absolutely absurd to me. How could such a society ever even come to be?
Now I understand. God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
How to stop sexism on slashdot articles?
Well, it is a problem every day. That is one of the things about the 'privilege' concept, privilege gives one the luxury of not having to think about or notice something because it does not impact them. Which is why you get such a big backlash of 'I do not want to hear about this' from guys on boards like this, it is not their problem, they can't see it, they do not want to think about it. They really do not want to consider they might be feeding into a problem that hurts people who are not like them.
The professor who’d talk to a student professionally and politely, then stare at her rear end while she walked away.
Oh yes, how terrible. Great think piece, Sir Galahad.
If people looking at your ass makes you uncomfortable, wear clothes that obscure your ass. That's what clothes are for, covering the parts of your body that you don't want others to see.
Why does Mrs. Clinton pay women on her staff 87 cents for each dollar she pays men?
Why does Obama pay women 78 cents for each dollar he pays men on his staff?
Probably because both of those statistics derive from studies using flawed/dishonest methodology?
> Fact of the matter is, most people cannot do science.
Fact is, most people can do science. While few will have the tremendous insights of an Einstein, most people can observe, record, and _verify_ data, and especially note and report details that don't match the models they understand. That data gathering and verification, and that concern for data that does not fit the model, is a vital part of science that almost every human can participate in.
There is a course in men's studies it is called HISTORY.
History is gender neutral. It talks about all things that happen whether women or men were involved. Women's studies specifically studies women in history. Men's studies doesn't exist because there would be outrage.
This is similar to racism. There is Black studies and there is Mexican studies, there is Islam studies, but if there was White studies, there would be outrage.
There are beauty pageants specifically for Blacks and for Latinos, and then there are beauty pageants that must allow everybody. If there was a beauty pageant that only allowed whites, there would be outrage. Same with awards shows.
Racism and feminism are big business. This is why the likes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson continue to promote and incite racism and racial divisionism in this country. If we could get past the "something bad happened to a black guy" and get it down to "something bad happened to a person", then we would be making real progress, but the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons of the world would be out of business.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Abolish women studies/gender studies
Women studies are sexist because there are no men studies and both produce crazy sexist feminazis.
For the rest, act cool.
In my opinion, women studies is school sanctioned hate speech.
Why is it acceptable to teach women to hate men...
You don't build by dividing, you only destroy.
Yes. Take Lifetime TV for example. It seems to exist solely to teach women that all men are rapists, wife beaters, cheaters and murderers. I am not sure if this to try to teach them all to hate men and become lesbians, or whether it is to teach them that since all men are evil, they should settle for the first guy who beats them, or somewhere in between. But whatever they are doing, it is extremely irresponsible and promotes division among genders.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
While few will have the tremendous insights of an Einstein, most people can observe, record, and _verify_ data
Dealing with customer bug reports, it has become very clear to me that most people are terrible observers.
You just responded to a thoughtful, detailed, logical post with a "can't get a girlfriend joke", but you're the one complaining about the tenor of the conversation? How is it even possible to be so shameless?
And oddly enough, I see women as privileged.
Guess how well that plays with them?
Way to display your bias there buddy. People are pointing out that the incessant harping on "this is sexist", "that is sexist", "everything is sexist" being counter-productive and your knee jerk reaction is to call people using a non-derogatory term (SJW), "Douchebags".
The reason why the term SJW is becoming pejorative is precisely due to reactions like yours from people who see no common ground.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Is it possible to find a woman both attractive and intelligent at the same time? I certainly believe so. The author makes it sound like the moment you pay any attention to a woman's physico-social attractiveness, you automatically disregard her academic abilities.
IMHO, it's basically the same thing that happens between any people in a professional setting, with or without sexual compatibility. You get along better with some people than others, and this has an effect on your professional collaborations. We don't simply treat other people as computers or data stores for the professional stuff - is this what the author wants?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
There's a wide plain between Einstein (who was a theoretical scientist anyway and didn't observe, record, and verify data) and a technician whose only role is to observe, record, and verify data. The GP was referring to PhDs in science, whose role involves making models to explain the data that they collect, not just collecting data and applying it to models that somebody else made.
While anybody can observe, record, and verify data (which isn't even remotely true and many people trained in science are terrible at this, let alone determining what data needs to be collected), very few people have the talent, training, and desire to make models that explain the collected data.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Except it's 2015, there's hardly a structural barrier keeping women out of STEM.
In fact girls are overly encouraged to study math and science. Celebrities and the media
tell girls it's cool to study science.
The thing is that college and graduate level science courses are hard, require practically a single-minded dedication to succeed in, and have very little social prestige. And even then there are plenty of women who graduate with hard science degrees (chemistry, physics, math) from 4-year colleges.
But then they go off to work on Wall Street, where the money is, instead of going to graduate schools (for science) or going into a lab.
So enough of the 'it's 1955 all over-again' bullshit!
This Sig does not Exist.
The problem with "we must do something about it" is that it lets the "victim" off the hook. Instead of "victims" sucking it up and giving it back as good as they got it (or worse), we are feeding the victim mentality.
We should be encouraging women to "solve" this rather than "men" or "society at large". That kind of approach is ultimately the only way any real progress occurs. You can't liberate people. They have to take it for themselves.
The real problem isn't "those evil nerds". If anything, it's the same media narrative machine that these journalists are a part of.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Discussions like this always center on the need to make science less 'male' in the sense of getting rid of locker-room humor or, once the academic battleaxes really get going, humor of any kind.
But if women are going to meet us halfway and make the most of their talents in STEM, they too need to make one change..
Stop being afraid of everything!/b
It's getting absurd that lower qualified women get positions in science just because they are of the right gender. Stop discrimination in science.
You want to know how to really contribute to the problem? Tell women that their co-workers, who will be largely male, are a horrible bunch of sexists who will mistreat them based on their gender. If they don't quit right there, teach them that any action those men take is a "microaggression" directed at them as a result of their gender. Teach them that the appropriate response to these "microaggressions" is to be extremely upset and angry, possibly to file a complaint with management or HR. Tell them (and convince HR) that a man defending himself from such a complaint is itself sexism and oppression. This will ensure the women always believe they are being oppressed, that they always feel uncomfortable, and that their male co-workers will never feel comfortable with them and will be apprehensive if they are anywhere around.
Then, once you've done this, blame the toxic environment you've created on male sexism. It's a positive feedback loop.
The term "brogrammer" is kind of a shibboleth; if someone seriously talks about "brogramming" or the "brogramming culture", they're completely disconnected from reality. The whole "brogramming" thing was a hoax, an obvious joke based on the juxtaposition of the opposites of "nerds" and "bros". The press and blogs picked up on it as if it were real (it's still not clear which were in on the joke).
There's no "brogramming culture" where coders with popped collars drink Natty Bo and lift weights in one hand while pounding code in the other. There may be a few fake "brogrammers" out there in a life-imitates-art sort of way, and a few legitimate "bros" who are actually programmers, but "brogramming" was never a thing.
Indeed, that's how I read it. The paper started with an assumption that females are equal to males in producing scientifically correct papers, and therefore any discrepancy between male and female publication acceptance rates must come from discrimination. The reviewer pointed out that if you take an alternative hypothesis, that males are better at this stuff than females, then the conclusion didn't hold. They were begging the question. He went even so far as to explain that if you would take sports as an example, you could provide an absurd conclusion -- females are discriminated against participating in the 100 meters dash. Note, he was not saying that males are better than females at doing science, simply that this is not a foregone conclusion. And that's absolutely politically incorrect. All in all, I think he was pretty stupid to formulate it the way he did, but I don't think this is a slam-dunk to show suppression of females. Quite the opposite.
It manifests differently, but it is sexism all the same. Many of the "defender of women" types really do see women as weaker, inferior. These poor little flowers just can't, CAN'T stand up for themselves. They need guys to help them out so that things can be fair! So don't worry, fair lady, they'll protect you from the evil men... unless of course you disagree with them in which case they'll attack your fiercely for having "internalized misogyny" or some such. After all, you can't be strong enough to have your own opinions!
They don't believe they are sexist, but then people who are sexist/racist/etc rarely believe they are. Make no mistake though, that's what it is. While it might manifest as seemingly good intentions, it is actually a view of gender inferiority. I mean after all, if you truly believe that women are equal to men, just as capable, then you aren't going to think they need special champions. They can, and will, handle it themselves. It is only people who view them as weaker in some way that would think they can't handle themselves. It is pretty insidious.
I think people need to start calling them out on their bullshit. Sexism under the cloak of "equality" or "justice" is little better than sexism in the form of harassment.
Women are paid the same as men and have been since the 1970s. The pay gap statistic is wrong.
First, it conflates all workers on the basis of education and does not factor whether people actually followed through with those careers.
Second, it counts total life time earning power to get to 72 percent and which means the years women often take off work to care for children are counted the same as the years men stay in their jobs working.
Third, when professions are matched, they're typically only matched by industry. So a person working in the office of a coal mine is counted the same as someone working in the actual coal mine.
These errors and many more render the pay gap statistic meaningless. It was disproven in the 1970s pretty much instantly by the first academic that reviewed it. But shameless politicians, lying interest groups, and hack ideological professors bring it out with some regularity to dupe the gullible.
You see the same thing with Malthus's theories on population. Crypt-communists love bringing him up... but they rarely point out that Malthuse's theories were disproven in his own time, he personally disavowed them, and the whole thesis was based on the fact that the Irish were starving to death while ignoring that the British were literally exporting food from Ireland in the middle of a fucking famine.
Look, if you want to have beliefs, that is fine. You are entitled to believe whatever you want. However, you are not entitled to make up your own facts. Either make an argument that does not rest on facts what so ever or fit your argument TO the facts.
If you did that, you'd drop the whole gender disparity thing and go find something else to bitch about.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Malthus pointed out that population, given enough food, grows exponentially, while food production isn't going to. Therefore, unless there was some way of limiting fertility, population was always going to outrun resources. As it happens, giving women equality or a reasonable facsimile of, including education and birth control methods, lowers the fertility rate. This was not understood until fairly recently, and could not have been understood in Malthus' time.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Your post only proves the point he was trying to make. All this random hate and vitriol at nerds lately, and then people come in and slam them even more. I was always the outcast at school, always introverted. I came out of my shell after HS (away from people like you), and I have a very expansive social life, tons of friends, and even dated a model for a bit. Not a supermodel though. The point is that assholes like you were why I was the way I was in HS. It was the stereotypes cast upon me by an outside group making sweeping judgments about who I am based on what I like. Everything that gets posted is basically "Not all men, but srsly, all men". Its about as see through as when someone starts a sentence with "I'm not racist, but..."
Seriously, get bent.