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Study: Science Still Seen As a Male Profession
sciencehabit sends news of a study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology which found that science is still perceived as a predominantly male profession across the world. The results were broken out by country, and while the overall trend stayed consistent throughout (PDF), there were variations in perception. For explicit bias: "Countries where this association was strongest included South Africa and Japan. The United States ranked in the middle, with a score similar to Austria, Mexico, and Brazil. Portugal, Spain, and Canada were among the countries where the explicit bias was weakest." For implicit bias: "Denmark, Switzerland, Belgium, and Sweden were among the countries with the highest implicit bias scores. The United States again came in at the middle of the pack, scoring similarly to Singapore. Portugal, Spain, and Mexico had among the lowest implicit bias scores, though the respondents still associated science more with men than with women."
Nursing and Childcare are *still* seen as female professions. Who gives a fuck?
Here we go again... It's a trap people!
It's a man's world. That is HIStory of MANkind.
As long as female culture remains the culture of fear (anti-nuclear, anti-GMO, anti-vax) it is women who will see STEM as being a man's world.
Came a day late this week?
Is this news? I'm not saying that to be snarky. What I'm getting at, is this is a repeated study again and again. I doubt it has been a month since the last time a related study about this was released and published. I'd label this a generational trend, in how long it takes to change. Can a generational trend change in such a small time frame? Not going to have a 9/11 type of reaction to change the culture, it could only work in reverse.
I could see use of some sort of Science Gender Index, published yearly to monitor perspectives, but another study that just repeats, "Yeah, scientists are thought to be male by default." isn't interesting. There are never any good solutions, assuming that there is a significant problem with the gender bias. I understand there are problems socially, but not from the standpoint of being able to do or not do science things. The best solution might be to just hire a great PR firm and have them make Pro-science commercials aimed at young girls, and even then, it'd take a decade before the trend starts to move.
Everybody was asked to draw a scientist. As I recall, most people ended up drawing men in lab coats. One person drew a woman that I recall, maybe two. Another person drew a sailor looking guy.
I drew an alien. Whose gender was not something I thought about since it was a non-Mammalian life-form.
Because it is much easier to sign up for sociology and complain about it after the fact than it is to bring brains to the table.
Teaching is still seen as a woman's profession. Your point?
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
UK deploys pictures of shirtless Fabio with caption "For sale" to address this scourge
Science belongs to everybody - young; old; female; male; Americans; Koreans; Europeans; Africans ...
What really irks me is that the political correctness movement likes to split up the human beings into categories and then fanning the fires accusing one group of doing such or such, when the truth is that things like Science belongs to EVERYONE
What is political correctness trying to do?
Is it trying to sabotage Science?
What does it get by sabotaging Science??
I dunno man. I just can not understand those who insist that such and such must include this or that group of human beings just so that it can be 'complete'
C'mon, man!
Science benefits EVERYBODY --- it doesn't only benefit the men, or only the Americans
We're still animals with DNA that works very well for the simple tasks at hand. Female brains procreate, male brains create.
2015 is the year of the scientific male patriarch!
Power to the blamers! There is far too much power to be garnered from inflaming (occasionally real, but often wholly manufactured) biases.
But things like the Rolling Stone UVA rape hoax, global warming, GamerGate, &c have blown the lid off what a bunch of cheap hucksters the Grievance Industrial Complex are.
Go back to hell and stay there, creeps.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Or girls for that matter?
Studies (and my own experience) have already shown we coddle girl more than boys. Even to babies, humans tend to rush to a crying girl faster than to a boy. And guess which gender is now falling behind in school? I guess making an environment where boys have to sit still longer and longer with less and less physical activity isn't suitable for them, huh. Oh no, that's ADHD, here take a pill you spaz.
So the answer to all this is to coddle girls even more, I guess? Sorry, that ain't going to make them cut out for passing engineering courses or other STEM courses in college, and holy shit if the job came with any sort of pushback.
Maybe the answer isn't more coddling, but toughen the fuck up for once.
I just got back from a scientific conference with thousands of attendees from around the world. There were plenty of women around (still less than half, of course), but virtually no black people, and not too many Hispanics either. Lots of white people and Europeans and Asians. Just an observation - I'm not trying to emphasize any particular issue or value anything over anything else.
It's THIS topic again...
The greatest unsolved mystery to Man is Woman. Men who don't score try to understand why that is. Men denied a solution are programmed to decompose problems. Less complex than Woman is Science. One cannot hope to comprehend the one prior to the other.
The greatest unsolved to Woman is why Man doesn't get it. Women are programmed to multitask. From birth, they apply a duality of logic: How to serve Tribe and Family equally. To that end, they give hope to the scientists who by extension serve Tribe, and they give body to real men who by application serve Family.
And yes, I posted this as Flamebait.
Far more men than women are interested in joining the sciences as a career.
So really, Science is predominantly male and that is by choice of the women. The good thing is that any woman that wants to be a scientist and has the talents and skills can be one in the western world. The reality is that most do not want to. Deal with it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The comments section for a story like this is a great case study on who's home on a Saturday night and at their computers. Slashdot knows their audience, I'll give them that.
[I have an excuse: It's between periods of the Blackhawks/Ducks game]
You are welcome on my lawn.
It turns out that in countries where more scientists are men, more people associate men and scientists. Total shocker, I know.
feminism expands the pool of labor.... growing the supply of labor faster than the demand for labor suppresses wage growth, which increases profit growth. That means more money for corporate shareholders and more money spent on advertising in the corporate media. Won't someone PLEASE think of the corporations, the plutocrats that own them, and the media that is supported by them???!!
posting at http://leftistconservative.blogspot.com
Dorothy Latimer - the coelacanth, Evelyn Trewavas - Rift cichlids, Lynne Parenti - Killifish and presently curator of fishes at the Smithsonian.
It was a woman who identified the DNA molecule as Pauling's alpha Helix, Crick and Watson literally stole her notes form her desk. Madam Curie was the first person to win a double Nobel. This Is off the top of my head. If the report is true it's changed, while the first two women mentioned did have to fight a bit I don't believe Parenti did, by the 80s things had changed I could ask her I guess, maybe I will soon.
Te genus and family of the Coelacanth is named after Dot, Trewavas has fish named after her, Parenti will in time be recognized with honorific scientific name of some Cyprinodont I'm sure.
I don't think it's as bad as the report make sit sound in Ichthyology.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I know at least one but she would be mad at me if I posted her here..
and yes she is Canadian.
Yes I know some of the MRA types got that way from not being able to see their kids or something - rant at the courts and not some feminists who still can't get into a movie awards night without wearing high heels - go for the people with real power instead of the almost totally powerless.
It started that way FFS. Seriously guys, how many PHP cut and paste dudes know assembly for a CPU, any CPU? Programming has got a lot LESS complicated and scientific over time, far less than when Grace Hopper was at the keyboard.
I mean there's simply no way that the constant flood of articles screaming about how science is filled with gross evil woman-hating nerds^H^H^H^H^H neckbeards could possibly have led to this perception. And of course nobody stands to gain money and social prestige pounding the war drums over this...
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Men are overwhelmingly responsible for the advances that make modern life possible - economics, electricity, agriculture, literature, mathematics, etc etc. If men have any special privilege it's because we earned it.
14/88
Hmm. "self-selecting participants from 66 countries who chose to complete an online, publicly available association test". That's not how I run market research surveys.
IMO science is a scientist's profession and gender is irrelevant. Silence however is definately mostly in the realm of male.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
The implicit bias test used is controversial, to say the least. According to mainstream cognitive psychology, it measures temporary perceptual associations via priming. These do not have a causal relation with higher level opinions. The effect can be caused by something as uninteresting as the local way of referring to science and scientists.
Methods? They had a large number of factors to correlate with their data: 25 (possibly a few more, depending on what you read), and ran a multiple regression over it, and are reporting an effect for every p .05. That's bad science at multiple levels.
It's just another fishing expedition.
Amen! Science is a difficult profession with a long and winding road until you get a stable career, and no guarantees even after boatloads of education. You often have to be willing to sacrifice a family and personal life early on to make coin in the profession.
Women tend to value family life and family issues more than men. I won't put a value judgement on that preference here, but the practical side is that science is NOT a family-oriented line of work.
Table-ized A.I.
Should women be given free choice or not? One wonders exactly what the social-justice crowd had in mind.
The vast majority of women choose to study social sciences. Men don't.
Should their freedom of choice be curtailed? Should we 'force' women to study something they're not interested in? Because if such inhibition of personal freedoms is not acceptable then perhaps we should stop treating these obvious gender-aligned differences in preference as "flaws", and start treating them as "features" of our species.
The social justice crowd would of course insist that it's all "nurture" and not "nature". But how many times must this absurd belief system be obliterated with logic for it to finally disappear? ---> https://vimeo.com/19707588
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Is slashdot trying to drive away the male audience?
What does that mean other than people who aren't scientists think that men are mostly scientists?
Isn't that what every demographic poll on STEM being made to show?
Is this a problem? Is it horrifying that people believe the statistics they're told, generally?
What, precisely is the problem here? Other than "Uh, gender studies. We need to study something about gender, or we don't get anything done!".
Or, rather, every time a man talks about their persecution, you pop up and scream it down, shaming men for DARING to talk about THEIR problems when they aren't a woman.
This is 100% identical to what you claim MRAs do.
If you're doing it, then stop complaining about it, or stop doing it. Those are your only two choices.
If you choose to do neither, and continue to complain about it, then you're adding hypocrisy to your sins, which MRAs are not guilty of in your diatribe. Ergo you are worse than them.
But it takes a long time for the few people who want that sort of mostly thankless job with low pay for the education required to change the pattern if it's much different.
But women are totally able and allowed to do as you ask.
Maybe fewer women want the job than men. In which case, there will ALWAYS be a difference in gender.
Why?
Because people look for patterns and then assume the pattern has significance.
Just because STEM is male dominated doesn't mean that means anything other than the numerical fact of the number of men being higher than the number of women if you choose a particular subset (which you may have chosen because it gave you a "pattern" to see).
Men are totally allowed to become nurses.
The number of men BEING nurses is much smaller than the number of women.
Does this mean we must change how recruitment works in the healthcare profession?
Or is it just that in any free choice, you will get variations in some indicators of the people choosing to be in that group? That this indicates free choice and not enforced conformity, and that this is how these people WANT to be?
If so, what's the problem? Freedom of choice allowing people to choose "wrong" from your point of view?
Expected some, didn't expect all above 4 to be.
For a crowd claiming to be pro science, you come across as a bunch of rednecks defending a flat earth when it comes to social science. I guess everyone has a blank spot, but please stop defending it so intensely.
Has anyone checked to see if there's a gender gap in this field? I suspect there is, since it combines three fields that are traditionally dominated by women: Journalism, Education, and Psychology.
If most scientists are, in fact, male, then a perception of science as a predominantly male profession is not a bias -- it is simply an accurate perception. A bias would be a perception that was consistently misaligned with the reality.
Wow! What a deal. American men will be catching on also.
There was a recent article about a study clearly showing a hiring bias favouring female applicants in STEM faculty positions. So can we stop the "women are disadvantaged and oppressed and kept out of science" social justice warrior non-sense. Please.
They are observing that people more quickly associate "science" and "male" in countries where the population of scientists is predominantly male. The simplest explanation is not that gender bias causes women to stay out of science, the simplest explanation is that human associations reflect what people actually experience in the real world.
And that point is encapsulated in a single adverb: still. "Still" is what makes this news; it wouldn't have been news twenty or thirty years ago.
I am old enough to remember when genital equipment was considered employment destiny. When my wife went to oceanography graduate school the sysadmins of the school minicomputers were all female. The all-male faculty called them -- I kid you not -- "Data Dollies". Data dolly was considered a good job for a technically inclined woman because it paid well for an entry level job, involved computers, and was an easy job to hand off when you quit to marry the professor you'd snagged. Plus they'd have a hard time getting work in industry. Clearly that was a transitional moment because there were a substantial minority of women graduate students in the program, but *no* female professors, much less senior administrators.
But given the strong cohort of women in that class, it is surprising the thirty years later there is still a lingering perception in this country that science isn't for women. But maybe it shouldn't be surprising. Change doesn't happen instantaneously, nor does it necessarily ever become complete. When I was in college the notion that women had to become full time homemakers was still predominant -- not among students, but of people over thirty or so, practically everyone in positions of hiring and authority. That attitude seems weird and foreign to a young person today; I expect it's hard for a young person to grasp how pervasive and indeed how genuinely oppressive that belief was. It's a bit like the difference between the way I experience watching Mad Men and the way my kids do. I actually *recognize* that world where smoking was everywhere, big shots drank during office hours, and "womanizing" was a word people actually used without irony. It was fading fast, but still there. To my kids it's like an alien civilization in Doctor Who. So yes, the news that many Americans see science as a profession that somehow belongs to men is a bit like discovering a Silurian in the closet.
The women of my generation fought hard to establish a beachhead in male dominated professions, and if they're sometimes a bit snippy about it, well they earned the right. It wasn't easy to be an oddball among your peers and freak to your parents, teachers and and people in authority generally. And this was at a time when there was no such thing as geek chic to offset the disadvantages being an oddball. Being a geek was bad, period.
Now that cadre of pioneering women is at or approaching the apex of their careers. They're still a minority in their age cohort, but they left a wide open hole in their wake for the next generation. It's taken awhile for that hole to fill up because when opportunities open for a group they go for more high-profile professions (47% of medical students are women, as are 48% of law students). But in another generation I am sure the view that science belongs to one sex or another will be a truly fringe belief.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Men and Women are biologically different and in many cases want different things in life. The popular radical homosexual justice warriors and their blind followers need to stop trying to change that fact due to their own insecurities about being different.
Are they making the "wrong" choices, then? Who made you able to tell everyone else what choice they must make? And why do you think women are so weak willed that they won't choose properly and need YOU to help them?
Too bad 'the world' is still fixated on gender.
What is your profession? I am a welding.