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Dutch Science Academy Plans A Women-Only Election (sciencemag.org)
greg65535 writes: In order to reduce its gender imbalance, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in Amsterdam will hold special election rounds, one in 2017 and one in 2018, for which only women can be nominated.
The plan "does not come at men's expense," argues the academy's president, Jose van Dijck, because all the regular election rounds for membership will also still continue as planned. Currently 13% of the academy's 556 members are women, a slightly higher percentage than the 10% at Germany's national science academy and the 6% in the U.K. The plan was proposed by two male board members and approved by a 73% majority, though ironically, the first female president of the U.S. National Academy of Science says "I don't think we would do that. Other people might feel that women elected this way somehow did not meet the same standards as their male counterparts, or even other women elected through the regular process."
The plan "does not come at men's expense," argues the academy's president, Jose van Dijck, because all the regular election rounds for membership will also still continue as planned. Currently 13% of the academy's 556 members are women, a slightly higher percentage than the 10% at Germany's national science academy and the 6% in the U.K. The plan was proposed by two male board members and approved by a 73% majority, though ironically, the first female president of the U.S. National Academy of Science says "I don't think we would do that. Other people might feel that women elected this way somehow did not meet the same standards as their male counterparts, or even other women elected through the regular process."
I thought we already knew separate was not equal?
first female president of the U.S. National Academy of Science says "I don't think we would do that. Other people might feel that women elected this way somehow did not meet the same standards as their male counterparts, or even other women elected through the regular process.
If you want people to stop using the "You only got _____ because of _____" you need to stop giving people ______ because of __________.
XX-chromosomes dept.
This is fucking slashdot. Not Reddit. I'm perfectly content with www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes existing. I have no qualms about them. However I don't read it because that's not what I want to read. Consequently I read slashdot for none of this shit.
Damn it new owners. You were doing good. And I'll admit that it's been better than the Dice years but Make Slashdot Great Again by cutting out this crap. There's enough in tech to not even ever have to bring up gender and politics.
Rrrriight...
So, with the equality of opportunity achieved long ago, the inequality of results is telling us something... Instead of admitting, that maybe, just maybe, there is something inherently different about the genders, these people double and triple on their dogmas.
We already have Women Grandmasters in chess — because appallingly few ladies could rise to the real GM. The Dutch will now have Women Academics. Though they wouldn't be as good as the real Academics, their titles and privileges will, no doubt, be made equally acceptable (and, perhaps, financially-rewarding) as the real thing. Not at men's expense? Indeed. At the expense of all the Dutch...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Black, white, yellow, green, male, female..... whatever happened to simple merit?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Of course you'd label men complaining about this misogynists, but when women complain, it's a-ok. You fail to grasp that by selecting people based on sex in either direction, you're making sexism acceptable as long as it favors women. If the goal is to eradicate it, you've failed before you started.
The Dutch Academy has abandoned merit for political correctness. Who will take any of them seriously again?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Also, unworthy of any institution claiming to respect science. Correcting the result of an application of a metric is about the most stupid and unscientific thing possible. Any halfway competent scientist knows that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Very much this. And it is pretty clear that in science there are no gender-based barriers to entry or advancement. These votes are about scientists. Gender is immaterial. As long as equal opportunity is a given, any "gender imbalance" is at best a thing to study, but most decidedly not something to correct. What they do is basically in the same moral level of faking statistical results in a scientific publication and entirely despicable.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The plan "does not come at men's expense," argues the academy's president, Jose van Dijck, because all the regular election rounds for membership will also still continue as planned.
This guy is being a total Dijck.
(Sorry, couldn't resist)
#DeleteChrome
Mansplaining.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
They wouldn't be called feminists if they wanted equality. Slavery abolitionists didn't want an equal number of free people to slaves. This isn't a "civil rights" or "women's rights" movement, it's a feminist as there are communists or rationalists, it's not an equality of opposing views or people they want.
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Mathematically incorrect. A plan which foresee a woman only election, if the number of member is maintained constant, can only be at the expense of the men's number. Now the obvious goal is to put more women, whether one find that good or bad is up to one's ethic and socio political feeling. But to say it won't come at men's expense is a lie. If men are excluded no matter their capacities because forcefully the number of women is increased by artificially having women's election, then you are doing at their expense. Again I am not judging whether it is right or not to do that, just that the it will come at the expense of men which would have been elected otherwise.
The problem I have with all that is simple , I think this is the wrong approach. What we should strive for , is equality of opportunity, not equality out of outcome. Equality out of outcome is artificial and forcefully place people with lesser capacities, take the place of people of better capacity , to have a certain goal non related to their work capacity. E.g. you want a 50/50 women/men no matter how good people are, you will most probably forgoe better hire just to have a quota filled. What we should strive for is an equality of opportunity, e.g. striving to make sure your gender or race do not matter, what is your work quality should. That is an equality of opportunity. Equality of outcome are never good, they have by definition enforce a sexist selection, to get that outcome.
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You ended with a crappy president because you selected the democrat candidate this way, even with it being incredibly corrupt and hated by the general populace.
Any other candidate that was competing would win against the annoying orange.
Madam Curie won two nobel prizes, one in chemistry (1911), one in physics.(1903). She didn't need "women's privilege" to do it. She did it the old fashioned way, she earned it. All women's privilege does in any area is debase it. But if the Dutch wish to debase their science for reasons of gender pandering and political correctness, that is their right. Too bad. They can kiss goodbye to respect for Dutch scientific achievement.
E Proelio Veritas.
Yes, indeed.
But the point is that if dems did voted on the one that public was more in favor of than choosing the female in sake of being the female, they would had won this election.
This is what happens when you let anything go over actual qualification.
They didn't choose her because she is a woman, they chose her because she is Hillary Clinton. It was her fucking turn, and you deplorable scum ruined it for her!!
1: the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes
That complete skips over the crux of the issue: Is it equality of opportunities, or equality of outcomes?
98% of chess tournaments are won by men. Is that a result of sexism? Or are men inherently superior? Or is it because most women think chess is a pointless waste of time? Is this a problem that our society needs to fix, and if so, what is the solution?
And women elected in these will forever be branded as "diversity hires" and never given credit for anything, even if they deserve it. The only thing that "affirmative action" shit like this accomplishes is it creates deeply seated prejudice. It may be hidden, but it's there, and people don't forget. The only way to avoid this is by promoting strict, unyielding meritocracy.
Well you've kinda hit the nail on the head there, it's that second definition that the grandparent is complaining about. This touches on a complex issue: can equality be achieved by pursuing advocacy of one group over another, even if the promoted group is started from a disadvantaged position?
I'm not going to try to argue this, there's a lot to be said about it, but just stating that "feminism is about promoting equality" or "feminism is inherently sexist" is not a complete description.
Clinton didn't lose because she's a woman, she lost because she was an astoundingly weak candidate for a number of reasons. She should never have been nominated, the DNC should have recognized what the Republicans were doing for the last 8 years, pulled her aside and quietly offered her a nice posting to fuck off for the election.
They didn't, so now we have Trump.
us white men are still doing just fine.
We are? If I believe what I hear from the left, we (white men) are a couple of grades lower than dirt.
Wow, you completely glossed over my "the world is shades of grey not black and white" comment didn't you? That was pretty much the answer but here goes number 2.
Do we want more role models in a given category of person in order to inspire more participation by that category? Maybe we need to fudge the numbers a bit then in the name of a good goal. Maybe not. I'm not peddling easy answers so there is no easy answer to your question because that's just not how the world works. The real world requires compromise to work properly most of the time. Debate over what compromises need to be made is right and proper but demonizing a term like "feminism" because you want to eliminate the language of the opposition is Orwellian in the worst way.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Wow, you completely glossed over my "the world is shades of grey not black and white" comment didn't you?
Because it's a dodge. Yes, the world is shades of gray, but there are poles too.
Do we want more role models in a given category of person in order to inspire more participation by that category? Maybe we need to fudge the numbers a bit then in the name of a good goal.
And this is where you have to define the "goal". Are you not going to stop until you see equality of outcome? Why is it a "good goal" to have more women in STEM if that's not where their interests lie? There are differences between the sexes, statistically, when it comes to interests and abilities.
Debate over what compromises need to be made is right and proper but demonizing a term like "feminism" because you want to eliminate the language of the opposition is Orwellian in the worst way.
What's Orwellian is politically clubbing people over the head with the noble idea of equal rights and then using it to excuse all kinds of abominations of unequal treatment. That's why modern feminism has such a bad name.
What points? All you've really said is that your notion of a republic is one of competitive bargaining, in that individual groups should advocate for their own best interests. So I guess feminists would look to promote women and there'd be some other group, meninists, who would look to promote men and we'd all just have to hope that would work itself out once they had gotten tired of fighting.
That sounds terrible. Competition is by no means part and parcel of representative government, we still operate under the notion of cooperative problem solving even if special interests have weaseled their way in to an alarming degree. Elected representatives are there to ensure that their constituents are a part of this cooperative effort, in principle they are not there to grab whatever they can. In principle.