Maybe this depends on where you are -- or maybe you don't have many friends with young kids -- but I would not say that breastfeeding is "at odds with the norms of public behavior in the USA." My friends nurse in public all the time, and nobody bats an eye. And I don't see any flesh, and the men don't get aroused. It's just normal and unremarkable.
No one refers what a colleague may or may not have done last night? When you go out to lunch with colleagues, no one discusses the possibility that you might be interested in the waitress? At no time do you go to the bathroom and hear a colleague say something off-the-cuff regarding your habbits? No one discusses your car, or how you may be a little too particular when it comes to your organizational habbits?
No. What the fuck is wrong with you?
I am close friends with many of my male colleagues, but there is a difference between a business lunch and a Friday night poker session. It sounds like you would do well to learn the difference yourself.
why do so many people fail to see the obvious.. Women are generally not interested in CS and/or engineering. . . . This could be why men prefer action/horror movies, and women prefer drama/romance movies such as "Sex & the City".
The problem is that it's really not obvious. I could talk about parallel algorithms all night, and my husband has watched more episodes of Sex & the City than I have. He's the one who's more affectionate with kids and dogs, and I'm the one who can't multi-task.
You talk about "forcing" women into CS, but you're the one keeping men and women in their little gender-specific boxes. We're all so much more complicated than that.
It's sexist -- or at the very least, ignorant -- if you never stop and think about why the class has that makeup. Or if you never wonder why you're defending the status quo so strenuously.
Over the past fifty years, women and minorities have made great progress in fields that were previously only open to white men. Why assume that the progress stops here?
The reason nobody gives a rat's ass about gender equality in those jobs is because nobody is envious of those job's salaries.
Not quite. No one cares about gender equality in those jobs because they're women-dominated. Meanwhile, the pay is generally low because they're women-dominated -- it's a pretty vicious cycle of shunting women towards lower-paying jobs, and then artificially keeping the status of them low to justify the low wages. And because the status and wages are low, men aren't encouraged to pursue that line of work. The two biggest examples of this are teaching and nursing.
If what you are devoted to is math or programming, it really helps to be unpopular for at least a period in your life, especially earlier. The same is not true if you are devoted to theater, chemistry, or biology, which you can practice in a more social environment.
But even if your school doesn't have a math team or a programming club, there are a million and one webforums and mailing lists and Facebook groups out there for budding nerds to connect with other budding nerds. The hard part is finding one that's actually woman-friendly.
I think it is easier to be unpopular as teenage boy than it is as a teenage girl.
It depends -- sometimes the attacks (verbal and otherwise) on the unpopular boys are worse than the ones on the unpopular girls. I was an unpopular girl, and managed to stay under the radar. But my school was pretty big on athletics, so nerdy, unpopular guys got picked on a lot.
It's a responsibility and an accountability that very few people of any gender choose to accept. But it is one of those things that benefits from over-confidence, and macho self-righteousness -- something males tend to have much more often.
This is actually a hiring problem on several levels. You don't want to hire the most over-confident and macho person who applies, because in the long run he or she is most likely to make mistakes or not admit to wrong-doing.
Umm, I think there's some context missing to that notion -- men sexually harass men with equal frequency and grace. We simply don't call it harrassment because it's a part of our natural discourse.
For starters, most men stop sexually harassing each other once they're out of college. Secondly, men sexually harassing each other is not actually appropriate in the workplace. If you want to act like a frat boy at the bar, fine, but for god's sake please act like a professional at work.
I'm in a casual, male-dominated field, and I have never seen my male colleagues sexually harassing each other. It would be the height of inappropriateness, and they would have their asses handed to them. I'm sorry if expecting professionalism at work is too much for you.
But in most cases, the difference is being caused by negative pressure. Efforts to improve the working environment for women result in a better environment for everyone, and a higher percentage of women in the field. Not everything has to be 50-50, but if you're many sigma away from 50-50, and/or there's a leakier pipeline for women than for men, it's worth looking at why that is.
Computer programming isn't a task that requires vast quantities of upper body strength (the biggest biological difference between men and women). Aren't you ever worried that you're missing out on half of the available talent?
Don't worry about a combined ticket -- Sens. Obama and Clinton clearly do not like each other, and I absolutely do not see them on one ticket together.
No matter who the nominee is, my current best bet for the VP candidate for the Democrats is Mark Warner, the former governor of Virginia. He's a governor, he's a Southerner, and he's a white guy. (He's running for Senate himself, so I don't know if he would consider withdrawing from that race or what, but I guarantee you he's on some short lists.)
Yes, but in this case, the exit polls matched the final results. It was the polling before the election that didn't match the final results.
There are several reasons this could be: - Obama genuinely did better than Clinton in the smaller, more rural towns where votes were hand-counted. - Many people made their decision on the last day. - NH has an open primary -- since polls before the election showed Obama with a large lead, some of them may have voted on the Republican side for McCain. - There is the issue that voters will say they're willing to vote for an African-American candidate, but once in the voting booth, find that they actually can't. Although we didn't see that in Iowa, so I don't think that's likely the case in NH. - Turnout was extremely high -- much higher than expected -- and people who hadn't been in polls of "likely voters" came out and voted for Clinton.
Again, when exit polls don't match the results, there's a problem. When the polls before the election don't match the results, it means there were sampling problems in the polling, or a genuine swing in opinion in a short time.
We'll see just how it stacks up but based on the other networks' actions, I doubt it will be nearly as popular as the content available in one place - YouTube.
Have you used the new Daily Show video site yet? (I know, it was slashdotted, but it's working well now.) There are still some bugs, but clips have been consistently and accurately tagged, the video search function works well (although not the "search this site" one in the upper right), and they also have everything organized by date. I've been able to quickly find nearly every clip I was looking for. Even if TDS clips were also still on YouTube, I would never go back.
If I ignore my hypothetical chicken-pox-stricken child for a week to finish an urgent project, come payday, I deserve consideration over a comparable employee who took that week off to attend their child's piano recital.
You also deserve whatever people say to you. So does your boss, for taking advantage of your selflessness. People like you are why some fields set a maximum number of hours you're permitted to work during a week -- so people who do their jobs but also have lives aren't penalized by comparison to person who only has his career advancement.
I suspect that if you can make that work, you wouldn't have anything to complain about on Slashdot.
Really? What about this comment? Oh! I laughed! It was so hilarious! And this one was almost as great! Oh, I'm so glad that since I have a successful career in the physical sciences, I don't have anything to complain about on Slashdot!
I believe a fair fraction of that is due to the incarceration fraction being much higher among men than among women. Any felonies -- and some misdemeanors -- in one's past will lead to diminished earning potentials.
What I find amusing or ridiculous--take your pick--is that many women's groups think women should make as much as men even if they have a family, don't work or work part-time. This is nothing but a sense of entitlement. And if women are single and working full time in the cities, then decide to have a family and move to small towns and work part-time or not at all, of course their wages will go down. That is called a trade-off, not necessarily discrimination.
Most women's groups also want companies to offer better maternity leave and paternity leave. The maternity leave in the US is paltry compared to most other countries, and although some men are eligible under FMLA, not all of them are. And most male employees are pressured not to take paternity leave. Better leave policies could make it easier for women to go back to work after having kids -- many women working part-time would prefer to work full time. Sometimes women don't opt-out -- they are forced out.
If women and men are truly equal, then we can stop worrying about parity between the sexes in any given profession.
Not yet. There are still vast differences in the socialization of men and women, and on the social pressures they face. Many fields -- including medicine and law -- have nearly reached gender parity. Nowadays, you don't hear people talk about how women can't hack law, or don't have the fortitude to make it through a medical residency. But twenty or thirty years ago, you did. So if women are still making gains in many fields, why should we stop and say, "Oh, they've had plenty of time to overcome thousands of years of societal discrimination! Guess chicks just aren't good enough for IT!"
And by the way, there is a similar problem that men who are nurturing or good with kids aren't encourage to become teachers or nurses, because those sorts of jobs are for wimmin.
No more locker room camaraderie for men in groups, keep to yourselves, watch your language....avoid things that previously made the group function and fun.
That's not being PC -- that's being professional and respectful of your colleagues. Furthermore, not every guy is interested in dishing about his latest conquest to his work pals.
While a dense enough universe could collapse into a "Big Crunch", that is not the hypothesized ending of our universe. The density of our universe is not dominated by matter, but by energy, such that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
You're right that it's difficult to extrapolate to a time several orders of magnitude greater than the current age of the universe, as currently-unknown physics could end up dominating. (Someone observing the universe about 8 billion years ago would have been unable to measure the energy density of the universe, for instance.) But that does mean we shouldn't even try?
Why can't I turn this around and say, "Some of us still obsess with thinking we know the meaning of life . . . Can't we just leave the Big Answers to the Sciences?" It's a different approach to trying to understand the universe. You're free to think that scientists are arrogant, but they're no less arrogant than you are in your comment.
That being said, I think time spent on the internet is a much greater measure. I bet men spend far more time on the internet than women, despite the apparent data that says women dabble with it more often.
If most of the growth of women users is in the teen demographic (according to TFA, adult males still outnumber adult females online), that growth is likely due in large part to ecommerce and social networking sites, so I'd be surprised if men spend more total time online than women.
And if Myspace and Amazon are just "dabbling", then what's Slashdot?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe this depends on where you are -- or maybe you don't have many friends with young kids -- but I would not say that breastfeeding is "at odds with the norms of public behavior in the USA." My friends nurse in public all the time, and nobody bats an eye. And I don't see any flesh, and the men don't get aroused. It's just normal and unremarkable.
No. What the fuck is wrong with you?
I am close friends with many of my male colleagues, but there is a difference between a business lunch and a Friday night poker session. It sounds like you would do well to learn the difference yourself.
The problem is that it's really not obvious. I could talk about parallel algorithms all night, and my husband has watched more episodes of Sex & the City than I have. He's the one who's more affectionate with kids and dogs, and I'm the one who can't multi-task.
You talk about "forcing" women into CS, but you're the one keeping men and women in their little gender-specific boxes. We're all so much more complicated than that.
Over the past fifty years, women and minorities have made great progress in fields that were previously only open to white men. Why assume that the progress stops here?
Not quite. No one cares about gender equality in those jobs because they're women-dominated. Meanwhile, the pay is generally low because they're women-dominated -- it's a pretty vicious cycle of shunting women towards lower-paying jobs, and then artificially keeping the status of them low to justify the low wages. And because the status and wages are low, men aren't encouraged to pursue that line of work. The two biggest examples of this are teaching and nursing.
But even if your school doesn't have a math team or a programming club, there are a million and one webforums and mailing lists and Facebook groups out there for budding nerds to connect with other budding nerds. The hard part is finding one that's actually woman-friendly.
I think it is easier to be unpopular as teenage boy than it is as a teenage girl.
It depends -- sometimes the attacks (verbal and otherwise) on the unpopular boys are worse than the ones on the unpopular girls. I was an unpopular girl, and managed to stay under the radar. But my school was pretty big on athletics, so nerdy, unpopular guys got picked on a lot.
This is actually a hiring problem on several levels. You don't want to hire the most over-confident and macho person who applies, because in the long run he or she is most likely to make mistakes or not admit to wrong-doing.
Umm, I think there's some context missing to that notion -- men sexually harass men with equal frequency and grace. We simply don't call it harrassment because it's a part of our natural discourse.
For starters, most men stop sexually harassing each other once they're out of college. Secondly, men sexually harassing each other is not actually appropriate in the workplace. If you want to act like a frat boy at the bar, fine, but for god's sake please act like a professional at work.
I'm in a casual, male-dominated field, and I have never seen my male colleagues sexually harassing each other. It would be the height of inappropriateness, and they would have their asses handed to them. I'm sorry if expecting professionalism at work is too much for you.
But in most cases, the difference is being caused by negative pressure. Efforts to improve the working environment for women result in a better environment for everyone, and a higher percentage of women in the field. Not everything has to be 50-50, but if you're many sigma away from 50-50, and/or there's a leakier pipeline for women than for men, it's worth looking at why that is. Computer programming isn't a task that requires vast quantities of upper body strength (the biggest biological difference between men and women). Aren't you ever worried that you're missing out on half of the available talent?
Don't worry about a combined ticket -- Sens. Obama and Clinton clearly do not like each other, and I absolutely do not see them on one ticket together.
No matter who the nominee is, my current best bet for the VP candidate for the Democrats is Mark Warner, the former governor of Virginia. He's a governor, he's a Southerner, and he's a white guy. (He's running for Senate himself, so I don't know if he would consider withdrawing from that race or what, but I guarantee you he's on some short lists.)
Yes, but in this case, the exit polls matched the final results. It was the polling before the election that didn't match the final results.
There are several reasons this could be:
- Obama genuinely did better than Clinton in the smaller, more rural towns where votes were hand-counted.
- Many people made their decision on the last day.
- NH has an open primary -- since polls before the election showed Obama with a large lead, some of them may have voted on the Republican side for McCain.
- There is the issue that voters will say they're willing to vote for an African-American candidate, but once in the voting booth, find that they actually can't. Although we didn't see that in Iowa, so I don't think that's likely the case in NH.
- Turnout was extremely high -- much higher than expected -- and people who hadn't been in polls of "likely voters" came out and voted for Clinton.
Again, when exit polls don't match the results, there's a problem. When the polls before the election don't match the results, it means there were sampling problems in the polling, or a genuine swing in opinion in a short time.
Have you used the new Daily Show video site yet? (I know, it was slashdotted, but it's working well now.) There are still some bugs, but clips have been consistently and accurately tagged, the video search function works well (although not the "search this site" one in the upper right), and they also have everything organized by date. I've been able to quickly find nearly every clip I was looking for. Even if TDS clips were also still on YouTube, I would never go back.
If I ignore my hypothetical chicken-pox-stricken child for a week to finish an urgent project, come payday, I deserve consideration over a comparable employee who took that week off to attend their child's piano recital. You also deserve whatever people say to you. So does your boss, for taking advantage of your selflessness. People like you are why some fields set a maximum number of hours you're permitted to work during a week -- so people who do their jobs but also have lives aren't penalized by comparison to person who only has his career advancement.
I suspect that if you can make that work, you wouldn't have anything to complain about on Slashdot. Really? What about this comment? Oh! I laughed! It was so hilarious! And this one was almost as great! Oh, I'm so glad that since I have a successful career in the physical sciences, I don't have anything to complain about on Slashdot!
I believe a fair fraction of that is due to the incarceration fraction being much higher among men than among women. Any felonies -- and some misdemeanors -- in one's past will lead to diminished earning potentials. What I find amusing or ridiculous--take your pick--is that many women's groups think women should make as much as men even if they have a family, don't work or work part-time. This is nothing but a sense of entitlement. And if women are single and working full time in the cities, then decide to have a family and move to small towns and work part-time or not at all, of course their wages will go down. That is called a trade-off, not necessarily discrimination. Most women's groups also want companies to offer better maternity leave and paternity leave. The maternity leave in the US is paltry compared to most other countries, and although some men are eligible under FMLA, not all of them are. And most male employees are pressured not to take paternity leave. Better leave policies could make it easier for women to go back to work after having kids -- many women working part-time would prefer to work full time. Sometimes women don't opt-out -- they are forced out.
Yes. Too bad that aggressive men are admired, while aggressive women are reviled. I can't imagine why women are accused of being underhanded sometimes, if direct approaches get them fired.
If women and men are truly equal, then we can stop worrying about parity between the sexes in any given profession. Not yet. There are still vast differences in the socialization of men and women, and on the social pressures they face. Many fields -- including medicine and law -- have nearly reached gender parity. Nowadays, you don't hear people talk about how women can't hack law, or don't have the fortitude to make it through a medical residency. But twenty or thirty years ago, you did. So if women are still making gains in many fields, why should we stop and say, "Oh, they've had plenty of time to overcome thousands of years of societal discrimination! Guess chicks just aren't good enough for IT!" And by the way, there is a similar problem that men who are nurturing or good with kids aren't encourage to become teachers or nurses, because those sorts of jobs are for wimmin.
No more locker room camaraderie for men in groups, keep to yourselves, watch your language....avoid things that previously made the group function and fun. That's not being PC -- that's being professional and respectful of your colleagues. Furthermore, not every guy is interested in dishing about his latest conquest to his work pals.
While a dense enough universe could collapse into a "Big Crunch", that is not the hypothesized ending of our universe. The density of our universe is not dominated by matter, but by energy, such that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. You're right that it's difficult to extrapolate to a time several orders of magnitude greater than the current age of the universe, as currently-unknown physics could end up dominating. (Someone observing the universe about 8 billion years ago would have been unable to measure the energy density of the universe, for instance.) But that does mean we shouldn't even try?
Why can't I turn this around and say, "Some of us still obsess with thinking we know the meaning of life . . . Can't we just leave the Big Answers to the Sciences?" It's a different approach to trying to understand the universe. You're free to think that scientists are arrogant, but they're no less arrogant than you are in your comment.
That being said, I think time spent on the internet is a much greater measure. I bet men spend far more time on the internet than women, despite the apparent data that says women dabble with it more often. If most of the growth of women users is in the teen demographic (according to TFA, adult males still outnumber adult females online), that growth is likely due in large part to ecommerce and social networking sites, so I'd be surprised if men spend more total time online than women. And if Myspace and Amazon are just "dabbling", then what's Slashdot?