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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."
There are solutions, but it is very hard to convince Americans to accept the hiring of the third-best job candidate in order to get more women into a field. They start going ape and pretending that hiring should be a meritocracy, conveniently ignoring the fact that the playing field for opportunities is skewed male.
Source: I am a woman who plays with particle accelerators for a living. I fix them. I write control software for them. I smash atoms together with them. The women I work with, though woefully few, are harder working and smarter than most of the men. Their resumes are less impressive because they had to fight the system every step of the way to get where they are, while the men stepped onto a well worn path and got groomed every step of the way.
If your reaction to this is to disbelieve my credentials, then you are part of the problem.
This article came too late and unexpected. All the SJWs are sleeping. Don't worry. Will be 'Troll' in a few hrs.
So how about we just let people go into any career that makes them happy and fulfilled, and not worry about their gender? Want to be a nurse, a scientist, a homemaker? Male or female, who cares, just do it.
The only issue here is that society doesn't see it that way. The issue isn't that "oh man, women are 51% of the population but only 41% of the scientists (numbers not meant to be accurate, just illustrative) so we have a crisis and we better do whatever before the sun implodes." The issue is to allow and encourage people, without judging them or imposing preconceived notions, to seek their own destiny in their own way.
But some things simply will never change. Women are still going to be 100% of the mothers and men 100% of the fathers. (I did *not* say caregivers or homemakers.)
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.