Yes. But then, I'm European. The idea that blowjobs, or handjobs for that matter, aren't sex is a distinctive US cultural trait which many of the rest of us find quite funny.
Support a better rival, like eBid. On the internet, big monopolies with huge name recognition advantage can be ousted by upstart competitors, if they're sufficiently better to use. It's just difficult. Look what happened to yahoo.
Hmm... I see what you mean. Points for trying, anyway. But it still requires me to imagine a racist bigot who doesn't assume members of [his chosen target group] will have [sterotypical traits]. Conceivable... but somehow I'm not sure I'll ever meet this person.
Hmmm... good point, but not as clear-cut as you suggest. The problem with bigotry is precisely that it invariably involves prejudice... important decisions (such as, say, whether to put people in jail) are taken based on the flawed assumptions made by the bigot, rather than the actual evidence.
There can be prejudice without bigotry. But it's hard to imagine bigotry without prejudice.
Lookit, the Americans and Western Europeans did some bad things, and then we got over it! We moved on! We entered the 21st Century!!
Oh, please. Large parts of America and Europe haven't even entered the 20th century on this one. If you think Americans, or Europeans have 'gotten over' doing bad things to innocent people out of sexual prejudice, you are really missing out on a lot of important news.
You want to get angry, you want to get fired up, you want to actually do some good and maybe save some lives, go after Sharia, today, not Britain 50-60 years ago.
I don't see any reason why I can't be angry and fired up about both, not to mention Britain today. But the difference is: I'm not a citizen of any country run by Islamic fundamentalists. I am (partially!) responsible for the actions of the government of Britain, because I vote here. Fundamentalists (of any religion) do not "get a pass" from me. But their existence in other countries is not an excuse to ignore prejudice in my own.
(Gay people still do not have equal marriage rights in the UK, and until five years ago didn't have any marriage rights at all. That deserves an apology. But any step in that direction is a good idea.)
Governments suck at apologizing. They should be encouraged to practice.
Some movies have plot holes so you can use something many people seem to lack, an imagination.
Well, yes, but GP's entitled to argue the toss... since most movies have plot holes because everyone in charge is too @#$& stupid to notice or care. Sadly, especially with SF movies.
Well, the Nazis did have a number of weird and stupid theories about biology. But nothing's as vestigial as the grammar checker on GP's final sentence. Clearly the AC's long since evolved past punctuation.
And since you used buggered I assume you are British, which makes $39 USD...what? Like $2 in your currency?
We wish... Oh, how I miss those days.
(For those not in the know... we've had over a decade of government spending nearly as reckless as in the US, combined with underinvestment in infrastructure and industry. Our currency's recovered from the worst of its crash... but only compared to the dollar; the Euro is kicking our collective backsides. $39 is currently about £24.)
ObOnTopic: My CD-Rs from the early days with my £200 2-speed drive have mostly died. But none of the data from back then was still important to me anyway. My CD-Rs from a couple of years later have actually done better than several of my cheap pressed audio CDs from that period.
Wild optimism, IMO. We've figured out a marginally less bad base system for governance. It's clearly much better than all previous options - but most of the previous options consisted of 'feuding tribes', 'theocracy' and a lot of variations on 'military dictatorship'. And it's not as if we've done a lot of experiment into better alternatives; it's an almost entirely unexplored research area.
If there isn't a better way out there waiting to be discovered, it will be both surprising and extremely disappointing.
The strength of the system is those 'adjustments'; it has the potential to be incrementally transformed into something better, without the junk-it-all-and-start-again approach required for most other systems. But so far it's frequently been incrementally transformed into something worse. Cuts both ways.
The problem is that it's easy to start a new corporation, with a new name and the same people running it. Charter revoked? No problem. Start a new one.
(Language Fascist side note: You mean capital punishment.
Capitol punishment would be 'imprison everyone in D.C.' Which might not be such a bad idea, but I don't think it's what you meant.)
Yfrwlf is absolutely right here. One of the huge things holding linux back is how much work it is to just get the software you want running with your favourite distro.
If we ever want to bring the Windows users over into Infinite Fun Space, we have to get over this.
Well it's a nice theory, but in practice courts hate excluding evidence for any reason, and there's lots of nice justifications they can use for allowing it in cases much more egregrious than this.
The material they grabbed will be allowed in evidence.
The prosecution needs to make clear the charges, and the judge decides what law applies. That's how it works, and your personal belief of how it should work is irrelevent.
On the contrary - the greatest argument for the jury system is that it places a limit on the judge's ability to decide what law applies; thus placing a limit on what the legislature (and judiciary) can get away with. Sometimes the law is stupid or unjust. Sometimes the law is good, but the judge is stupid or unjust. On these occasions it is the duty of the jury to tell the court to get stuffed.
I don't know the US well enough to come up with an example, so I'll use an obvious UK example - the Clive Ponting case.
Fortunately in those cases there's no need to 'change the system through the proper channels' instead. The proper channel has been built into the system; it is called the jury.
(It doesn't always work well, but that's a different discussion.)
In my country the number of applications was and is climbing, but that may be statistically meaningless due to a general expansion of higher education and several other external changes. So no hard data there.
Allow me to clarify. The percentage of female applications should be slowly climbing. This would seem hard data to me.
Sorry, I was the one being unclear here; I meant the same as you. The figures for the UK show exactly what you suggest, a slow but steady rise in the percentage of female applications in maths. (Over the last fifteen years, from just over 35% to a shade under 41% last year.) But the changes in higher education over this period mean there are many possible explanations for this. Again, the same trend does not show up in the physics figures. Your guess is as good as mine why.
The best of these had to endure an enormous amount of unjustified crap from her (male) supervisor, which held back her career, and still does... and which her successor as his student did not have any trouble with. But then, her successor was a lesbian.
Wow. Wait a minute. Allow me to clarify here. She had trouble solely by being a woman but her successor had success (sorry, couldn't resist) because she was a lesbian woman? What was that about? Some weird fetish of the supervisor? A bonus because lesbians are less likely to have families?
I wish it was some weird fetish of the supervisor; that would be more explicable, and less shocking, to me, than what actually occurred. But I can't discuss the details, as I don't have permission from any of the parties concerned to publicise this one.
That is just shocking to me. Your country is advanced enough to allow a lesbian to succeed but backwards enough to discriminate women? In mine (Brasil) she would be burned at the stake if she came out. As a gay man, I know what I'm talking about. But discriminating (machist, I don't know if it's an english word) advisors here are far and between, and publicly ridiculed. Women just go to the right ones.
Open discrimination is almost unheard of, and publicly ridiculed, here too. But subtler bias and sexual harassment are sadly not rare at all. This is as shocking to me as it is to you, but I can't claim it's not true.
If I wanted to stereotipise the groups (which I do), I'd say the females were hard working, while the males were slackers.
Hmmm... I'd agree, actually. But I'm not sure whether that supports your argument or mine. If any.
What I was trying to say is that women had to work harder to achieve the same level of success than men. But this could just mean that they were working against the male establishment. I don't think they were, but it's not a good point anyway.
Can't judge; most women I knew, and most men, worked harder than I did - I'm a very lazy person. Some women I knew seemed to work harder than many male students... but also did better. This doesn't prove anything more sophisticated than 'hard work causes greater success', which I think we both knew, and it certainly isn't helpful data.
This is where we part company again; if the history of gender/ethnic group/national/whatever relations tells us anything, it's that '[group X] are innately less talented at [activity Y]' is a natural, but extremely dangerous, default assumption. There too many easily concealed social biases for this one ever to be safe without strong, direct evidence. We know for certain that there were very strong social factors preventing equal opportunity for women in sciences, until (at best) recently. So any claim that these factors are now safely gone requires a strong burden of proof... it's certainly easy to name other areas where the biases
Suppose that women don't feel the desire to succeed in this particular area for an unjust reason. The unjustness of the reason doesn't change the fact that the women lack the desire. You can't make up for one injustice by adding a second injustice, shoving women into science and engineering careers that they won't enjoy.
Yet again, you're just conveniently assuming - wrongly, and ridiculously - that women 'don't feel the desire to succeed' in maths. I say for the third (and last) time: Back this up with facts. (So far you haven't managed even anecdote, much less data. Have you ever met a female mathematician who hated her research career but felt she'd been 'shoved' into it by undue pressure to be a scientist? Of course not, and you never will; you can't make someone be a mathematician.)
Even if your claim were true, your argument would be false: you wouldn't have to 'shove women into science and engineering careers that they won't enjoy'; you could change the unjust social structure so that future generations have an unbiased opportunity. This is, of course, exactly what we've already spent the last century doing... but the job's not quite finished yet.
(How exactly would you go about 'shoving' someone into science anyway? I certainly have no idea, perhaps you can suggest a mechanism.)
Other possible reasons include that women have less opportunity to succeed, or are discouraged from succeeding.
Getting rid of a bad female employee requires a bigger paper trail than getting rid of a bad male employee.
Not in any company I've ever worked for, but then I'm over in the UK. Possible the US is different.
Women are being shoved into science and engineering; it seems that many people feel some duty to shove women into these fields. Picture that Monty Python woman screaming "I don't like science!" after being offered science, science, science, science, engineering, and science. Meanwhile, the vikings sing: math, wonderful math!
Can we give up on this costly social experiment now? It's making people miserable, women included.
LMAO. This picture is deeply hilarious.
But Monty Python sketch != actual argument, and now your own bias is showing... did you, by any chance, once work in some technical field with a woman who was 'hired first and laid off last'?
Again, anecdotes != data - although so far you haven't even provided the anecdotes.
The many women I know in science and engineering careers are neither miserable nor lacking in desire to succeed, and the idea that any of them could have been 'shoved', or even 'lightly pressured', into doing it is simply laughable. (I do know one who was angry because she had too much desire to succeed in maths; she feels - with good justification - that in order to have her career she had to compromise family life in ways that her male colleagues simply were not required to do.)
I will plead guilty to trying to 'shove' women into medieval fencing, but that's off-topic, so I'll shut up now.
...but the 'you' was intended to be the impersonal and general 'anyone' you; I didn't mean you specifically. My bad.
Oh. Indeed. I'm sorry, I guess my english still lacks polishing.
My fault; in hindsight I wrote that in a way that was very easy to misread. Sigh. Must use more emoticons. Or less sarcasm.
I stand by my basic point, however - I think you're leaping from the facts you have to a conclusion that's completely unsupported. The data certainly suggests that there exists a reason why women do not pursue careers in physics research. I see no evidence that this reason is 'women are inherently less likely to be talented mathematicians'.
Rereading my post, I plead guilty on non sequitur. However, one thing is still right: there's no correlation (in my data) between the period that women usually have children and the rate of dropouts. And, anecdotally, I seem to recall my female teachers were all married with kids (except the lesbian ones). So, family-making is not a plausible explanation.
Cultural baggage is not either. It would have been about 30 years ago, but nowadays we're far more advanced.
I'd love to believe that, but consider it strongly unproven. The biases are certainly less visible; this isn't the same as 'gone away for good'. Perhaps older heads than mine can weigh in... have the career path requirements significantly changed since, say, the seventies? Because if not, then the old biases are still built in, and will remain so. (Certainly, all female mathematicians of my acquaintance claim that the career path is endemically biased in favour of men and of people who don't want families. But that's not a statistically significant sample.)
And if it were, we'd see the number of applications slowly climbing as we evolve, but they're mostly constant in the recent years.
In my country the number of applications was and is climbing, but that may be statistically meaningless due to a general expansion of higher education and several other external changes. So no hard data there.
So, there must be an alternative explanation. I have no serious data to support my hypothesis. But from my experience: the mean grade of the females was always lower than the male one (any chance of finding public records on this?).
As the group of females was always small, this is quite sensible to fluctuations. And, now I'm gonna sound like a real misogynist, none of the women I worked with was actually brilliant.
I don't find this misogynistic at all - it's a reasonable description of people you actually met. (It's anecdotal, but you knew that.)
Equally anecdotal: Grades for female undergrads in my department averaged slightly, but not significantly, higher. And the women I knew in my brief stint as a postgrad included several of the most brilliant minds I've ever worked with. The best of these had to endure an enormous amount of unjustified crap from her (male) supervisor, which held back her career, and still does... and which her successor as his student did not have any trouble with. But then, her successor was a lesbian.
If I wanted to stereotipise the groups (which I do), I'd say the females were hard working, while the males were slackers.
Hmmm... I'd agree, actually. But I'm not sure whether that supports your argument or mine. If any.
I could even imagine that, back to hunter-gatherer society, males had more necessity of understanding velocity, position and rates of change. Very useful in hunting. But I'm not a biologist, and this intuition would hardly do any good to someone studying quantum information.
I believe there is evidence that men rate more highly in spatial awareness... but I'm no biologist either.
Women are inherently less likely to value math accomplishment for themselves...
Again I repeat: Do you have evidence for this? Or are you just making assumptions? Facts, please.
do you have any evidence that this is an innate difference of men and women, not just a socially created one?
Does it matter? I happen to believe the difference is innate, but that wouldn't really change anything. If women don't feel the desire to succeed in this particular area for whatever reason, then we ought to accept that.
It matters a lot; this difference is the whole point. If it's innate then we ought to accept it. If it's not, then a socially ingrained prejudice is discouraging women from maths-based careers - bad for women with maths talents (as they miss out on their ideal careers) and for all of the rest us (because it's a waste of talent).
The problem here is another huge leap you've taken... your argument requires us to assume that if women don't succeed in maths, it's because they 'don't feel the desire to succeed'. That is, of course, one possible reason. Other possible reasons include that women have less opportunity to succeed, or are discouraged from succeeding.
If either of these are true, then we definitely should not 'accept that'; it would be not only an injustice but a waste of valuable talent.
So to compare like with like, I'm going to take us back in history until we reach a point where I hope we can both agree on the facts and the reasons for them:
There were disproportionately few female mathematicians in the US 1910. There were also disproportionately few black mathematicians.
This was not then, and is not now, evidence that black people are innately poorer at maths, or less interested in science careers. They just had less opportunity.
If this isn't far enough for you and I to agree on the bare facts, we can just keep going... if we head back past, say, 1750, we can easily find a time when there were no female career scientists in Europe. I assume you won't claim that there was not a single woman in Europe at the time with mathematical talent, or the desire to use it.
This is the reason I demand evidence. We know for certain that in the past, until very recently (historically speaking), there was massive, ingrained and endemic prejudice in most societies (and there still is in many) that prevented women from succeeding in maths (or indeed, at anything else). This was frequently covered with the claim that women were innately less interested in, or talented at, [whatever subject]. So when this claim is raised as an explanation, it demands scrutiny, and evidence. It's not impossible that this is the correct explanation - but we should ask, why is it your first choice explanation? What evidence do you have that this is a better explanation than the others I offered? (Or the many I didn't mention.)
History tells us to be very wary of explanations of form: [group X] are innately not as good at/interested in [activity Y]. They haven't always been wrong. But often enough to demand hard data before I accept one.
As iris-n (correctly) chided me - guesses are not facts. Without figures, it is opinion at best, prejudice at worst.
We might as well get all bothered by men not wearing skirts. That might even be more logical; skirts appear to be comfortable in hot weather and easier to deal with in the restroom.
The principle is the same, yes. (My Scots friends claim it's more comfortable even in winter, but that may be national pride talking.) But this is a much smaller restriction of your freedom than being channeled away from your ideal career choice. (I notice that you're not claiming men are innately less able, or less willing, to wear skirts, just because they don't.)
Of course my bias is showing; my entire post was a declaration of my bias. The question is: is my bias supported by the facts?
Iris-n was asserting that women are inferior in mathematical ability, and I, obviously, disagree. Whether mathematical ability is more important than, or less than, or orthogonal to social skills is irrelevant.
The problem is in your approach here. The idea that valuing maths is somehow a 'male standard' and valuing social capability a 'female standard' is itself a whopper of an assumption. You're deciding that women are inherently less capable of valuing maths before you even start. (And that men are less capable of valuing social skills, but that's a different argument.)
If this is true, it's a very important point, so can you provide any evidence? In particular, even if it's true - which I don't concede - do you have any evidence that this is an innate difference of men and women, not just a socially created one? (Men are also much less likely than women to wear skirts - in our culture. But there's nothing inevitable about it; it's just how we're taught. Other cultures can, and do, have different figures.)
(Later on we both claimed superiority for maths and physics over humanities... but that was maths geek pride; neither of us claimed it in our arguments. For the record, I don't consider maths to be intellectually superior to social capabilities; people are _difficult_. It seems different only because we are all required from birth to become at least amateurs in dealing with people, whereas only those with the interest study maths. Truly capable diplomats or sociologists are as rare as truly capable scientists... but much more concealed by the masses of mediocrity.)
You have been thoroughly impolite with these ad hominem attacks. Nevertheless, I will still be honest with you, even if a bit sarcastic.
Not my intention to make any personal attacks, so I apologise - that it read that way is clearly a result of my sarcasm, which was intentional. Your own is therefore welcome.
First, a little surprise for you: not all universities are the same. I quoted data about my field (physics) and my university. And frankly, I've never seen numbers very different from these. I will give you references, in case you think I'm making them up.
I think no such thing, as I assumed - correctly - that you were talking from experience. I was expressly trying to raise a counterexample; your experience clearly does not match mine.
Undergraduate: ~10% women. Actually, I can't give a reference on this one, as the numbers fluctuate a lot and there's no public record of them.
In the UK (where I am) there are good public records on this one, so I googled quickly.
UCAS figures via IOP.
In 2007 the figures were just over 40% female for maths undergrads. Of distinct interest to our argument, the figure for physics undergrads was about 18% - assuming this difference is in any way consistent between our geographical areas, it alone counts for a great deal of the difference between our observations.
There's nothing here to suggest an inborn, rather than socially generated, difference in ability or interest.
...
You have to be a serious failure as a statistician to look at a drop off like that and not think there's an endemic bias in the system.
That was very rude of you. I'm not a statistician but I am quite capable of gathering data and analysing it. You assumed your data and mine are the same. They aren't. And a serious statistician would never quote numbers from his memory.
Anyway, there isn't any drop between doctorate students and faculty members. The number of women is very low from the start. Interestingly, more women get to postgraduation than men, but from there the trend is smoothly downward.
Ah, and now I see how I was rude. I was being both sarcastic and facetious here, but the 'you' was intended to be the impersonal and general 'anyone' you; I didn't mean you specifically. My bad. I certainly didn't assume that your data was the same as mine; that it clearly is not was the point of my post.
And iris-n? When you say "Women don't like math. They don't have ability with math... their brain it's not suited to do math.", you are saying "stupid bitches", complete with your condescending 'but I'm sure they "often do well in other fields".' Women do pretty damn well in this field, given a chance, so the other fields can go recruit elsewhere.
You just don't want to admit to yourself that you're saying 'well, you suckers who want families can always leave the hard sciences for us men, and go back to your humanities playground.'
Well, I do consider humanities a playground. I've made up my mind to learn some real philosophy one time, and took a one semester course in a respected humanities college. The horror, the horror.
Nevertheless, there are fields other than hard sciences and humanities. Medicine strikes me as a hard subject in which women seem to do very well.
And I was not aware that the fields were currently recruiting. We are heading to a war of the sciences? Man, I must be getting old. In my time people enroled in a field because they were interested in it.
I also consider humanities a playground, in practice if not in principle. You have the respect due to any survivor of a horrific experience; I once made the mistake of diving in there myself, while I w
The problem with this idea is that it's total nonsense. Of course there are biological differences between men and women - but your argument that maths is one of them is totally lacking in evidence, or even sense.
In the interests of avoiding the 'quote random garbage from the net'/. syndrome, I'll stick to facts from my own experience.
Undergraduate:
Pretty much 50/50 male/female.
(Just over 51% female, when I was on the course.)
Postgraduate - Masters:
Still 50/50. (Actually about 53% female when I did it, but we're now talking about a mere 60-70 students so that's not significant.)
Postgraduate - Doctorate:
50/50. (55% female - of course, we're now down to about 20 people in the department.)
Postdoctoral:
Ummm... I'm sure we give postdoc positions to a woman sometimes. After all, I know of one time it happened. In the last ten years.
Of the women doing postgrad work when I was a PhD student, _one_ was able to go on to an academic career. After an exhausting grind and required world-hopping postdocs that would have left no chance for a family, _whoever_ stayed home with the kids.
You have to be a serious failure as a statistician to look at a drop off like that and not think there's an endemic bias in the system.
And it's not like families prevent maths research. You can do pure maths research perfectly well in a tiny room armed with a pencil and pad of paper. For applied, add one laptop.
What you can't do is have a family and still get _funding for your career_. The problem's social, not technical.
(This is not the only way in which academia lags behind the business world. Can't speak for the US, but universities in my country routinely pull shit around job applications that would get HR people in business fired on the spot.)
And iris-n? When you say "Women don't like math. They don't have ability with math... their brain it's not suited to do math.", you are saying "stupid bitches", complete with your condescending 'but I'm sure they "often do well in other fields".' Women do pretty damn well in this field, given a chance, so the other fields can go recruit elsewhere.
You just don't want to admit to yourself that you're saying 'well, you suckers who want families can always leave the hard sciences for us men, and go back to your humanities playground.'
No, anyone who pays attention to geologic history knows we're a decade or two away from what would have been an ice age if there weren't six billion people burning things for warmth, not to mention messing with the atmospheric parameters.
The geology in question predates the internal combustion engine. This fact is crucial.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. But then, I'm European. The idea that blowjobs, or handjobs for that matter, aren't sex is a distinctive US cultural trait which many of the rest of us find quite funny.
Support a better rival, like eBid. On the internet, big monopolies with huge name recognition advantage can be ousted by upstart competitors, if they're sufficiently better to use. It's just difficult. Look what happened to yahoo.
Hmm... I see what you mean. Points for trying, anyway. But it still requires me to imagine a racist bigot who doesn't assume members of [his chosen target group] will have [sterotypical traits]. Conceivable... but somehow I'm not sure I'll ever meet this person.
Actually, there is something you can do about it now. You can take steps to ensure it doesn't happen again. And that's what this is really about.
There can be prejudice without bigotry. But it's hard to imagine bigotry without prejudice.
Lookit, the Americans and Western Europeans did some bad things, and then we got over it! We moved on! We entered the 21st Century!!
Oh, please. Large parts of America and Europe haven't even entered the 20th century on this one. If you think Americans, or Europeans have 'gotten over' doing bad things to innocent people out of sexual prejudice, you are really missing out on a lot of important news.
You want to get angry, you want to get fired up, you want to actually do some good and maybe save some lives, go after Sharia, today, not Britain 50-60 years ago.
I don't see any reason why I can't be angry and fired up about both, not to mention Britain today. But the difference is: I'm not a citizen of any country run by Islamic fundamentalists. I am (partially!) responsible for the actions of the government of Britain, because I vote here. Fundamentalists (of any religion) do not "get a pass" from me. But their existence in other countries is not an excuse to ignore prejudice in my own.
(Gay people still do not have equal marriage rights in the UK, and until five years ago didn't have any marriage rights at all. That deserves an apology. But any step in that direction is a good idea.)
Governments suck at apologizing. They should be encouraged to practice.
Some movies have plot holes so you can use something many people seem to lack, an imagination.
Well, yes, but GP's entitled to argue the toss... since most movies have plot holes because everyone in charge is too @#$& stupid to notice or care. Sadly, especially with SF movies.
Well, the Nazis did have a number of weird and stupid theories about biology. But nothing's as vestigial as the grammar checker on GP's final sentence. Clearly the AC's long since evolved past punctuation.
And since you used buggered I assume you are British, which makes $39 USD...what? Like $2 in your currency?
We wish... Oh, how I miss those days.
(For those not in the know... we've had over a decade of government spending nearly as reckless as in the US, combined with underinvestment in infrastructure and industry. Our currency's recovered from the worst of its crash... but only compared to the dollar; the Euro is kicking our collective backsides. $39 is currently about £24.)
ObOnTopic: My CD-Rs from the early days with my £200 2-speed drive have mostly died. But none of the data from back then was still important to me anyway. My CD-Rs from a couple of years later have actually done better than several of my cheap pressed audio CDs from that period.
Vampires, sadly, have nothing to do with it. Although, most articles on DRM make me want to impale someone, so I suppose there's a connection.
Also, I do live in a very small world. But that's a different issue.)
Nothing. Of course MS wants to make a profit, and good luck to them. But I don't work for them, so MS profits don't benefit me.
If there isn't a better way out there waiting to be discovered, it will be both surprising and extremely disappointing. The strength of the system is those 'adjustments'; it has the potential to be incrementally transformed into something better, without the junk-it-all-and-start-again approach required for most other systems. But so far it's frequently been incrementally transformed into something worse. Cuts both ways.
(Language Fascist side note: You mean capital punishment. Capitol punishment would be 'imprison everyone in D.C.' Which might not be such a bad idea, but I don't think it's what you meant.)
If we ever want to bring the Windows users over into Infinite Fun Space, we have to get over this.
Somebody mod parent up, please.
The material they grabbed will be allowed in evidence.
The prosecution needs to make clear the charges, and the judge decides what law applies. That's how it works, and your personal belief of how it should work is irrelevent.
On the contrary - the greatest argument for the jury system is that it places a limit on the judge's ability to decide what law applies; thus placing a limit on what the legislature (and judiciary) can get away with. Sometimes the law is stupid or unjust. Sometimes the law is good, but the judge is stupid or unjust. On these occasions it is the duty of the jury to tell the court to get stuffed.
I don't know the US well enough to come up with an example, so I'll use an obvious UK example - the Clive Ponting case.
Fortunately in those cases there's no need to 'change the system through the proper channels' instead. The proper channel has been built into the system; it is called the jury.
(It doesn't always work well, but that's a different discussion.)
In my country the number of applications was and is climbing, but that may be statistically meaningless due to a general expansion of higher education and several other external changes. So no hard data there.
Allow me to clarify. The percentage of female applications should be slowly climbing. This would seem hard data to me.
Sorry, I was the one being unclear here; I meant the same as you. The figures for the UK show exactly what you suggest, a slow but steady rise in the percentage of female applications in maths. (Over the last fifteen years, from just over 35% to a shade under 41% last year.) But the changes in higher education over this period mean there are many possible explanations for this. Again, the same trend does not show up in the physics figures. Your guess is as good as mine why.
The best of these had to endure an enormous amount of unjustified crap from her (male) supervisor, which held back her career, and still does... and which her successor as his student did not have any trouble with. But then, her successor was a lesbian.
Wow. Wait a minute. Allow me to clarify here. She had trouble solely by being a woman but her successor had success (sorry, couldn't resist) because she was a lesbian woman? What was that about? Some weird fetish of the supervisor? A bonus because lesbians are less likely to have families?
I wish it was some weird fetish of the supervisor; that would be more explicable, and less shocking, to me, than what actually occurred. But I can't discuss the details, as I don't have permission from any of the parties concerned to publicise this one.
That is just shocking to me. Your country is advanced enough to allow a lesbian to succeed but backwards enough to discriminate women? In mine (Brasil) she would be burned at the stake if she came out. As a gay man, I know what I'm talking about. But discriminating (machist, I don't know if it's an english word) advisors here are far and between, and publicly ridiculed. Women just go to the right ones.
Open discrimination is almost unheard of, and publicly ridiculed, here too. But subtler bias and sexual harassment are sadly not rare at all. This is as shocking to me as it is to you, but I can't claim it's not true.
If I wanted to stereotipise the groups (which I do), I'd say the females were hard working, while the males were slackers.
Hmmm... I'd agree, actually. But I'm not sure whether that supports your argument or mine. If any.
What I was trying to say is that women had to work harder to achieve the same level of success than men. But this could just mean that they were working against the male establishment. I don't think they were, but it's not a good point anyway.
Can't judge; most women I knew, and most men, worked harder than I did - I'm a very lazy person. Some women I knew seemed to work harder than many male students... but also did better. This doesn't prove anything more sophisticated than 'hard work causes greater success', which I think we both knew, and it certainly isn't helpful data.
This is where we part company again; if the history of gender/ethnic group/national/whatever relations tells us anything, it's that '[group X] are innately less talented at [activity Y]' is a natural, but extremely dangerous, default assumption. There too many easily concealed social biases for this one ever to be safe without strong, direct evidence. We know for certain that there were very strong social factors preventing equal opportunity for women in sciences, until (at best) recently. So any claim that these factors are now safely gone requires a strong burden of proof... it's certainly easy to name other areas where the biases
Suppose that women don't feel the desire to succeed in this particular area for an unjust reason. The unjustness of the reason doesn't change the fact that the women lack the desire. You can't make up for one injustice by adding a second injustice, shoving women into science and engineering careers that they won't enjoy.
Yet again, you're just conveniently assuming - wrongly, and ridiculously - that women 'don't feel the desire to succeed' in maths. I say for the third (and last) time: Back this up with facts. (So far you haven't managed even anecdote, much less data. Have you ever met a female mathematician who hated her research career but felt she'd been 'shoved' into it by undue pressure to be a scientist? Of course not, and you never will; you can't make someone be a mathematician.)
Even if your claim were true, your argument would be false: you wouldn't have to 'shove women into science and engineering careers that they won't enjoy'; you could change the unjust social structure so that future generations have an unbiased opportunity. This is, of course, exactly what we've already spent the last century doing... but the job's not quite finished yet. (How exactly would you go about 'shoving' someone into science anyway? I certainly have no idea, perhaps you can suggest a mechanism.)
Other possible reasons include that women have less opportunity to succeed, or are discouraged from succeeding.
Getting rid of a bad female employee requires a bigger paper trail than getting rid of a bad male employee.
Not in any company I've ever worked for, but then I'm over in the UK. Possible the US is different.
Women are being shoved into science and engineering; it seems that many people feel some duty to shove women into these fields. Picture that Monty Python woman screaming "I don't like science!" after being offered science, science, science, science, engineering, and science. Meanwhile, the vikings sing: math, wonderful math!
Can we give up on this costly social experiment now? It's making people miserable, women included.
LMAO. This picture is deeply hilarious.
But Monty Python sketch != actual argument, and now your own bias is showing... did you, by any chance, once work in some technical field with a woman who was 'hired first and laid off last'? Again, anecdotes != data - although so far you haven't even provided the anecdotes.
The many women I know in science and engineering careers are neither miserable nor lacking in desire to succeed, and the idea that any of them could have been 'shoved', or even 'lightly pressured', into doing it is simply laughable. (I do know one who was angry because she had too much desire to succeed in maths; she feels - with good justification - that in order to have her career she had to compromise family life in ways that her male colleagues simply were not required to do.)
I will plead guilty to trying to 'shove' women into medieval fencing, but that's off-topic, so I'll shut up now.
...but the 'you' was intended to be the impersonal and general 'anyone' you; I didn't mean you specifically. My bad.
Oh. Indeed. I'm sorry, I guess my english still lacks polishing.
My fault; in hindsight I wrote that in a way that was very easy to misread. Sigh. Must use more emoticons. Or less sarcasm.
I stand by my basic point, however - I think you're leaping from the facts you have to a conclusion that's completely unsupported. The data certainly suggests that there exists a reason why women do not pursue careers in physics research. I see no evidence that this reason is 'women are inherently less likely to be talented mathematicians'.
Rereading my post, I plead guilty on non sequitur. However, one thing is still right: there's no correlation (in my data) between the period that women usually have children and the rate of dropouts. And, anecdotally, I seem to recall my female teachers were all married with kids (except the lesbian ones). So, family-making is not a plausible explanation.
Cultural baggage is not either. It would have been about 30 years ago, but nowadays we're far more advanced.
I'd love to believe that, but consider it strongly unproven. The biases are certainly less visible; this isn't the same as 'gone away for good'. Perhaps older heads than mine can weigh in... have the career path requirements significantly changed since, say, the seventies? Because if not, then the old biases are still built in, and will remain so. (Certainly, all female mathematicians of my acquaintance claim that the career path is endemically biased in favour of men and of people who don't want families. But that's not a statistically significant sample.)
And if it were, we'd see the number of applications slowly climbing as we evolve, but they're mostly constant in the recent years.
In my country the number of applications was and is climbing, but that may be statistically meaningless due to a general expansion of higher education and several other external changes. So no hard data there.
So, there must be an alternative explanation. I have no serious data to support my hypothesis. But from my experience: the mean grade of the females was always lower than the male one (any chance of finding public records on this?).
As the group of females was always small, this is quite sensible to fluctuations. And, now I'm gonna sound like a real misogynist, none of the women I worked with was actually brilliant.
I don't find this misogynistic at all - it's a reasonable description of people you actually met. (It's anecdotal, but you knew that.) Equally anecdotal: Grades for female undergrads in my department averaged slightly, but not significantly, higher. And the women I knew in my brief stint as a postgrad included several of the most brilliant minds I've ever worked with. The best of these had to endure an enormous amount of unjustified crap from her (male) supervisor, which held back her career, and still does... and which her successor as his student did not have any trouble with. But then, her successor was a lesbian.
If I wanted to stereotipise the groups (which I do), I'd say the females were hard working, while the males were slackers.
Hmmm... I'd agree, actually. But I'm not sure whether that supports your argument or mine. If any.
I could even imagine that, back to hunter-gatherer society, males had more necessity of understanding velocity, position and rates of change. Very useful in hunting. But I'm not a biologist, and this intuition would hardly do any good to someone studying quantum information.
I believe there is evidence that men rate more highly in spatial awareness... but I'm no biologist either.
Isolated, these aren't strong data, but co
Women are inherently less likely to value math accomplishment for themselves...
Again I repeat: Do you have evidence for this? Or are you just making assumptions? Facts, please.
do you have any evidence that this is an innate difference of men and women, not just a socially created one?
Does it matter? I happen to believe the difference is innate, but that wouldn't really change anything. If women don't feel the desire to succeed in this particular area for whatever reason, then we ought to accept that.
It matters a lot; this difference is the whole point. If it's innate then we ought to accept it. If it's not, then a socially ingrained prejudice is discouraging women from maths-based careers - bad for women with maths talents (as they miss out on their ideal careers) and for all of the rest us (because it's a waste of talent).
The problem here is another huge leap you've taken... your argument requires us to assume that if women don't succeed in maths, it's because they 'don't feel the desire to succeed'. That is, of course, one possible reason. Other possible reasons include that women have less opportunity to succeed, or are discouraged from succeeding.
If either of these are true, then we definitely should not 'accept that'; it would be not only an injustice but a waste of valuable talent.
So to compare like with like, I'm going to take us back in history until we reach a point where I hope we can both agree on the facts and the reasons for them:
There were disproportionately few female mathematicians in the US 1910. There were also disproportionately few black mathematicians. This was not then, and is not now, evidence that black people are innately poorer at maths, or less interested in science careers. They just had less opportunity.
If this isn't far enough for you and I to agree on the bare facts, we can just keep going... if we head back past, say, 1750, we can easily find a time when there were no female career scientists in Europe. I assume you won't claim that there was not a single woman in Europe at the time with mathematical talent, or the desire to use it.
This is the reason I demand evidence. We know for certain that in the past, until very recently (historically speaking), there was massive, ingrained and endemic prejudice in most societies (and there still is in many) that prevented women from succeeding in maths (or indeed, at anything else). This was frequently covered with the claim that women were innately less interested in, or talented at, [whatever subject]. So when this claim is raised as an explanation, it demands scrutiny, and evidence. It's not impossible that this is the correct explanation - but we should ask, why is it your first choice explanation? What evidence do you have that this is a better explanation than the others I offered? (Or the many I didn't mention.)
History tells us to be very wary of explanations of form: [group X] are innately not as good at/interested in [activity Y]. They haven't always been wrong. But often enough to demand hard data before I accept one.
As iris-n (correctly) chided me - guesses are not facts. Without figures, it is opinion at best, prejudice at worst.
We might as well get all bothered by men not wearing skirts. That might even be more logical; skirts appear to be comfortable in hot weather and easier to deal with in the restroom.
The principle is the same, yes. (My Scots friends claim it's more comfortable even in winter, but that may be national pride talking.) But this is a much smaller restriction of your freedom than being channeled away from your ideal career choice. (I notice that you're not claiming men are innately less able, or less willing, to wear skirts, just because they don't.)
Iris-n was asserting that women are inferior in mathematical ability, and I, obviously, disagree. Whether mathematical ability is more important than, or less than, or orthogonal to social skills is irrelevant.
The problem is in your approach here. The idea that valuing maths is somehow a 'male standard' and valuing social capability a 'female standard' is itself a whopper of an assumption. You're deciding that women are inherently less capable of valuing maths before you even start. (And that men are less capable of valuing social skills, but that's a different argument.)
If this is true, it's a very important point, so can you provide any evidence? In particular, even if it's true - which I don't concede - do you have any evidence that this is an innate difference of men and women, not just a socially created one? (Men are also much less likely than women to wear skirts - in our culture. But there's nothing inevitable about it; it's just how we're taught. Other cultures can, and do, have different figures.)
(Later on we both claimed superiority for maths and physics over humanities... but that was maths geek pride; neither of us claimed it in our arguments. For the record, I don't consider maths to be intellectually superior to social capabilities; people are _difficult_. It seems different only because we are all required from birth to become at least amateurs in dealing with people, whereas only those with the interest study maths. Truly capable diplomats or sociologists are as rare as truly capable scientists... but much more concealed by the masses of mediocrity.)
You have been thoroughly impolite with these ad hominem attacks. Nevertheless, I will still be honest with you, even if a bit sarcastic.
Not my intention to make any personal attacks, so I apologise - that it read that way is clearly a result of my sarcasm, which was intentional. Your own is therefore welcome.
First, a little surprise for you: not all universities are the same. I quoted data about my field (physics) and my university. And frankly, I've never seen numbers very different from these. I will give you references, in case you think I'm making them up.
I think no such thing, as I assumed - correctly - that you were talking from experience. I was expressly trying to raise a counterexample; your experience clearly does not match mine.
In the UK (where I am) there are good public records on this one, so I googled quickly. UCAS figures via IOP.
In 2007 the figures were just over 40% female for maths undergrads. Of distinct interest to our argument, the figure for physics undergrads was about 18% - assuming this difference is in any way consistent between our geographical areas, it alone counts for a great deal of the difference between our observations.
There's nothing here to suggest an inborn, rather than socially generated, difference in ability or interest.
You have to be a serious failure as a statistician to look at a drop off like that and not think there's an endemic bias in the system.
That was very rude of you. I'm not a statistician but I am quite capable of gathering data and analysing it. You assumed your data and mine are the same. They aren't. And a serious statistician would never quote numbers from his memory.
Anyway, there isn't any drop between doctorate students and faculty members. The number of women is very low from the start. Interestingly, more women get to postgraduation than men, but from there the trend is smoothly downward.
Ah, and now I see how I was rude. I was being both sarcastic and facetious here, but the 'you' was intended to be the impersonal and general 'anyone' you; I didn't mean you specifically. My bad. I certainly didn't assume that your data was the same as mine; that it clearly is not was the point of my post.
And iris-n? When you say "Women don't like math. They don't have ability with math... their brain it's not suited to do math.", you are saying "stupid bitches", complete with your condescending 'but I'm sure they "often do well in other fields".' Women do pretty damn well in this field, given a chance, so the other fields can go recruit elsewhere.
You just don't want to admit to yourself that you're saying 'well, you suckers who want families can always leave the hard sciences for us men, and go back to your humanities playground.'
Well, I do consider humanities a playground. I've made up my mind to learn some real philosophy one time, and took a one semester course in a respected humanities college. The horror, the horror.
Nevertheless, there are fields other than hard sciences and humanities. Medicine strikes me as a hard subject in which women seem to do very well.
And I was not aware that the fields were currently recruiting. We are heading to a war of the sciences? Man, I must be getting old. In my time people enroled in a field because they were interested in it.
I also consider humanities a playground, in practice if not in principle. You have the respect due to any survivor of a horrific experience; I once made the mistake of diving in there myself, while I w
In the interests of avoiding the 'quote random garbage from the net' /. syndrome, I'll stick to facts from my own experience.
Undergraduate: Pretty much 50/50 male/female. (Just over 51% female, when I was on the course.)
Postgraduate - Masters: Still 50/50. (Actually about 53% female when I did it, but we're now talking about a mere 60-70 students so that's not significant.)
Postgraduate - Doctorate: 50/50. (55% female - of course, we're now down to about 20 people in the department.)
Postdoctoral: Ummm... I'm sure we give postdoc positions to a woman sometimes. After all, I know of one time it happened. In the last ten years. Of the women doing postgrad work when I was a PhD student, _one_ was able to go on to an academic career. After an exhausting grind and required world-hopping postdocs that would have left no chance for a family, _whoever_ stayed home with the kids.
You have to be a serious failure as a statistician to look at a drop off like that and not think there's an endemic bias in the system.
And it's not like families prevent maths research. You can do pure maths research perfectly well in a tiny room armed with a pencil and pad of paper. For applied, add one laptop.
What you can't do is have a family and still get _funding for your career_. The problem's social, not technical.
(This is not the only way in which academia lags behind the business world. Can't speak for the US, but universities in my country routinely pull shit around job applications that would get HR people in business fired on the spot.)
And iris-n? When you say "Women don't like math. They don't have ability with math... their brain it's not suited to do math.", you are saying "stupid bitches", complete with your condescending 'but I'm sure they "often do well in other fields".' Women do pretty damn well in this field, given a chance, so the other fields can go recruit elsewhere.
You just don't want to admit to yourself that you're saying 'well, you suckers who want families can always leave the hard sciences for us men, and go back to your humanities playground.'
No, anyone who pays attention to geologic history knows we're a decade or two away from what would have been an ice age if there weren't six billion people burning things for warmth, not to mention messing with the atmospheric parameters. The geology in question predates the internal combustion engine. This fact is crucial.