Absolutely - but, once again, that's not what was being discussed. Look at the headline of the article: "The Push for Quotas for Women in Science".
I know that it's much easier to knock-over a straw man, but I'd appreciate it if you'd stop constructing them:)
Well, gee. Why don't we talk about the TFA itself instead of the headline on slashdot? If you had read it, you might discover that is says nothing about quotas. The strawmen here are all yours.
Do you realize that you completely ignored my point? I think you seem to have a real fixation on the obvious factoid that men and women are different, as if no one else can see that with their own eyes.
But what you have completely failed to do, heck you haven't even tried to address, is show that such minor biological differences are the one and only cause of the specific differences under discussion in this article. You have offered up exactly zero proof that these biological differences mean women inherently dislike engineering and math. Especially in light of the point made by the poster from Malaysia that his university has gender parity in the engineering and math programs.
Even a simple wikipedia check reveals neurological dimorphism between the human sexes
Maybe because you make the blatant logical error that some differences mean all differences? Like I wrote in a different post - if one shoe is black and another shoe is white it doesn't mean that one will fit better than the other. It is a gynormous leap from minor differences in basic brain chemistry to high level predilections.
To be more clear - by definition genders are different, but it is far, far from obvious that they are different in this way.
Maybe the reason for that is up until puberty the male and female brain are practically the same, and it takes that majour boost of sex hormones at the onset of puberty to cause the brain to develop along a certain lines.
So then, please explain all the other people in this thread who argue that "boys will be boys" (rambunctious) and "girls will be girls" (talk a lot) even at a very young age. If it takes a puberty to make a difference, then why all the gender differences between younger kids?
Furthermore, you don't have an explanation for why puberty should cause a difference - what "evolutionary psychological and basic biological" reasons are there for this difference in interests?
I'll clarify: men and women have different interests. Doesn't matter what the cause is, quotas are not a way to change those interests, just to piss off all the people who have no legitimate bias.
Which is why I said you were fighting strawmen. You may have the right article (although title ix is not about quotas, its about equal funding) you definitely have the wrong thread, neither the OP or my response said anything about quotas.
race is a valid biological categorization (even if not special in terms of level of detail, in that you can further subdivide groups, so race is just one arbitrary level in a genealogical hierarchy). This means that there will be natural predispositions in fields of study and career choices, as well as aptitude
Uh, no it doesn't. If one pair of shoes is white and another pair is black, it doesn't mean one will fit better than the other.
Biological differences like frequency of sickle-cell anemia and susceptibility to malaria don't have a thing to do with predispositions in fields of study and aptitude nor career choice except possibly being a foreign aid worker in an area with high rates of malaria.
And was that problem fixed by racial quotas? And was that problem fixed by racial quotas? Or did it just work itself out once we gave blacks the same rights and opportunities as whites?
First off "quotas" is a misstatement of the equal employment opportunity laws, and second the entire point of equal opportunity was to insure the same rights and opportunities that whites have.
And spare me this silly "society makes the genders different" nonsense. There are innate differences between the sexes! Go to a fourth grader's birthday party and see. The boys are raising hell and the girls are sitting around talking. Give a little boy a doll, he burns it or rips off the head. Give a little girl a firetruck, she names it and puts it to bed.
Why do think that anecdotal behavior of children who exist in the current system of social conditioning somehow proves that social conditioning does not exist? When in a large group together, all the boys do one thing and all the girls do another thing, sure seems like a strong argument for the existence of social conditioning - that girl who wants to run around and raise hell is shamed into behaving like a good little girl and that boy who wants tuck his firetruck into bed is laughed at.
If what you claimed were true, then there would be few to no scientific studies showing otherwise. At best you've got large minority of studies that show there are innate differences in a minority of areas, but math and science are rarely the areas.
And why would men and women have the same interests? What biological basis is there for that?
Because there is no evolutionary reason for them not to. Because as children and pre-teens, on average, interest in precursor topics seems to be roughly equal between the genders with girls often pulling ahead during certain age ranges.
To some degree it does. If a school has a disproportionate number of men's sports then it's not uncommon for them to eliminate those programs to get the numbers in line with IX requirements. The men's swim team was disbanded at my alma mater for this reason.
Chicken and the egg. Enforcement of Title IX caused the disbandment, but in an environment where Title IX was the rule from the start the disparity would never have arisen to begin with.
I'm sorry, but you will have to define "that" - you've used it twice in two separate postings and neither posting defines "that" nor shares enough in common for a critical reader to distinguish your intended meaning.
My definition of your "that" is "men and women naturally hold different interests because there is no such thing as gender-based social conditioning." Which seems like one ridiculously dumb belief.
Without any intervention on my or my wife's part the boy was rambunctious and likes race cars and trucks. The girl took to baby dolls and almost anything pink. No conditioning.
Do your children live in a social vacuum? No interaction with other children, never see or hear a tv or the radio, never have a book read to them? You think they don't pick up on your own stated beliefs? I think you don't quite grasp the meaning of "social conditioning."
Oh, and blocking men from hard science jobs so that you can fill those same slots with whatever women you can come up with isn't a vast over-simplification?
Yes it is. Funny that YOU are the one who made it.
RTFA - does Title IX block men from sports so they can fill those same slots with whatever women they can come up with?
Has not this view been repeatedly disproved by now?
Uh, no. And it would have taken less time to find 10+ studies that suggest otherwise than it did to write your posting. Here's the first one that came up in google for me: How Dads Influence Their Daughters' Interest In Math
As for your elmer fudd analogy - WTF are you smokin?
Perhaps its not clear to you that similar arguments were made about black people not so long ago. "They just aren't interested in white-collar jobs. Can't you just admit that blacks and whites are different?"
Forcing women into science if they are not interested, or keeping men out because of a need to meet quotas for female enrollment, doesn't suddenly cause women to be interested in those fields.
Of course that is a vast over-simplification, but feel free to joust at all the strawmen riding windmills that you wish.
Why is this so terrible to admit? It's obvious to everyone, yet all these PC jerks want to deny it.
Trouble is, you are confusing the end result with the root cause.
What these "PC jerks" believe is that women and men are socially conditioned to have different interests -- in other words, it just ain't natural. The concern is that the social conditioning is detrimental. That stereotypical "women's interests" are less valued and thus less rewarding than stereotypical "men's interests."
Ouch, I didn't realize how common this was. Feel free to moderate the grandparent post into oblivion.
No, don't. Just because 'everyone' does it doesn't make it any less stupid. Its like the terrorism threat levels - they don't have any correspondance to what is likely to happen to you as an individual. Even if SANS says the "internet threat level is green" you can still get DDOS'd, or get infected by a virus, or browse to the wrong website and get suckered by a cross-site scripting attack, or any number of other things.
The internet is just as dangerous to individuals regardess of what the 'threat level' is.
The Obama/FISA analogy naturally occurred to me because, as a Democrat, I pay attention to what my candidate is doing; I'm sure a Republican could have come up with a similar analogy involving McCain.
Like claiming to be pro-FISA and pro-immunity but not actually voting for the bill! How screwed up is that?
It doesn't work like that. Bad debts get resold from one agency to another. In theory, each time it gets sold, it is cheaper (because there is less chance of collecting if everybody else has failed to collect so far). Anyway, each new agency starts off with the same information, they don't pay heed to anything like do-not-call information from the previous agency's efforts (after all, that might be the reason the previous agency failed to collect).
...once you've actually set it all up in the first place.
Huh? You mean install the software ONCE? I guess you just have to do it to know what you are talking about. I spend less than 10 minutes per movie on average in addition to whatever it takes to rip the movie itself which is the same whether you keep the entire rip or reduce it.
"Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins".
Many people would argue that your nose "begins" at the root, where it has grown outward from your face. It certainly didn't start out floating in free space and eventually connect up to your face as you grew older.
Which suggests an entirely different meaning to that phrase than you probably meant.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely - but, once again, that's not what was being discussed. Look at the headline of the article: "The Push for Quotas for Women in Science".
I know that it's much easier to knock-over a straw man, but I'd appreciate it if you'd stop constructing them :)
Well, gee. Why don't we talk about the TFA itself instead of the headline on slashdot? If you had read it, you might discover that is says nothing about quotas. The strawmen here are all yours.
Do you realize that you completely ignored my point? I think you seem to have a real fixation on the obvious factoid that men and women are different, as if no one else can see that with their own eyes.
But what you have completely failed to do, heck you haven't even tried to address, is show that such minor biological differences are the one and only cause of the specific differences under discussion in this article. You have offered up exactly zero proof that these biological differences mean women inherently dislike engineering and math. Especially in light of the point made by the poster from Malaysia that his university has gender parity in the engineering and math programs.
The universities that are forced to provide free tuition because of a government program might have a little resentment as well.
You mean that government which gives orders of magnitude more money to the uni than they would ever have to "give away" in scholarships?
Even a simple wikipedia check reveals neurological dimorphism between the human sexes
Maybe because you make the blatant logical error that some differences mean all differences? Like I wrote in a different post - if one shoe is black and another shoe is white it doesn't mean that one will fit better than the other. It is a gynormous leap from minor differences in basic brain chemistry to high level predilections.
To be more clear - by definition genders are different, but it is far, far from obvious that they are different in this way.
Maybe the reason for that is up until puberty the male and female brain are practically the same, and it takes that majour boost of sex hormones at the onset of puberty to cause the brain to develop along a certain lines.
So then, please explain all the other people in this thread who argue that "boys will be boys" (rambunctious) and "girls will be girls" (talk a lot) even at a very young age. If it takes a puberty to make a difference, then why all the gender differences between younger kids?
Furthermore, you don't have an explanation for why puberty should cause a difference - what "evolutionary psychological and basic biological" reasons are there for this difference in interests?
It is also a strong argument for explaining to you the difference between correlation and causation.
Where "you" == "unassimilatible" yes.
Common sense is not so common as you keep demonstrating:
(yes, she, since they rarely let men work at such places - so much for men conditioning these stereotypes!) has to say about innate differences.
Why do you think that only men are responsible for such conditioning? You just keep digging yourself into a deeper and deeper hole of illogic.
I'll clarify: men and women have different interests. Doesn't matter what the cause is, quotas are not a way to change those interests, just to piss off all the people who have no legitimate bias.
Which is why I said you were fighting strawmen. You may have the right article (although title ix is not about quotas, its about equal funding) you definitely have the wrong thread, neither the OP or my response said anything about quotas.
race is a valid biological categorization (even if not special in terms of level of detail, in that you can further subdivide groups, so race is just one arbitrary level in a genealogical hierarchy). This means that there will be natural predispositions in fields of study and career choices, as well as aptitude
Uh, no it doesn't. If one pair of shoes is white and another pair is black, it doesn't mean one will fit better than the other.
Biological differences like frequency of sickle-cell anemia and susceptibility to malaria don't have a thing to do with predispositions in fields of study and aptitude nor career choice except possibly being a foreign aid worker in an area with high rates of malaria.
And was that problem fixed by racial quotas? And was that problem fixed by racial quotas? Or did it just work itself out once we gave blacks the same rights and opportunities as whites?
First off "quotas" is a misstatement of the equal employment opportunity laws, and second the entire point of equal opportunity was to insure the same rights and opportunities that whites have.
And spare me this silly "society makes the genders different" nonsense. There are innate differences between the sexes! Go to a fourth grader's birthday party and see. The boys are raising hell and the girls are sitting around talking. Give a little boy a doll, he burns it or rips off the head. Give a little girl a firetruck, she names it and puts it to bed.
Why do think that anecdotal behavior of children who exist in the current system of social conditioning somehow proves that social conditioning does not exist? When in a large group together, all the boys do one thing and all the girls do another thing, sure seems like a strong argument for the existence of social conditioning - that girl who wants to run around and raise hell is shamed into behaving like a good little girl and that boy who wants tuck his firetruck into bed is laughed at.
If what you claimed were true, then there would be few to no scientific studies showing otherwise. At best you've got large minority of studies that show there are innate differences in a minority of areas, but math and science are rarely the areas.
And why would men and women have the same interests? What biological basis is there for that?
Because there is no evolutionary reason for them not to. Because as children and pre-teens, on average, interest in precursor topics seems to be roughly equal between the genders with girls often pulling ahead during certain age ranges.
Which is a load of bullshit -- I can not recall a single instance during school where a female was ever discouraged from any math or science pursuits,
Would you have even recognized it if happened? You think it is as simple as some authority figure telling a girl she's just no good at science?
Its a lot more subtle and a lot more pervasive than that. Like the relatively few number of women portrayed in those jobs in movies and television.
To some degree it does. If a school has a disproportionate number of men's sports then it's not uncommon for them to eliminate those programs to get the numbers in line with IX requirements. The men's swim team was disbanded at my alma mater for this reason.
Chicken and the egg. Enforcement of Title IX caused the disbandment, but in an environment where Title IX was the rule from the start the disparity would never have arisen to begin with.
Why is that so hard to admit?
I'm sorry, but you will have to define "that" - you've used it twice in two separate postings and neither posting defines "that" nor shares enough in common for a critical reader to distinguish your intended meaning.
My definition of your "that" is "men and women naturally hold different interests because there is no such thing as gender-based social conditioning." Which seems like one ridiculously dumb belief.
Without any intervention on my or my wife's part the boy was rambunctious and likes race cars and trucks. The girl took to baby dolls and almost anything pink. No conditioning.
Do your children live in a social vacuum? No interaction with other children, never see or hear a tv or the radio, never have a book read to them? You think they don't pick up on your own stated beliefs? I think you don't quite grasp the meaning of "social conditioning."
Oh, and blocking men from hard science jobs so that you can fill those same slots with whatever women you can come up with isn't a vast over-simplification?
Yes it is. Funny that YOU are the one who made it.
RTFA - does Title IX block men from sports so they can fill those same slots with whatever women they can come up with?
Has not this view been repeatedly disproved by now?
Uh, no. And it would have taken less time to find 10+ studies that suggest otherwise than it did to write your posting. Here's the first one that came up in google for me:
How Dads Influence Their Daughters' Interest In Math
As for your elmer fudd analogy - WTF are you smokin?
That still means they have different interests.
Perhaps its not clear to you that similar arguments were made about black people not so long ago. "They just aren't interested in white-collar jobs. Can't you just admit that blacks and whites are different?"
Forcing women into science if they are not interested, or keeping men out because of a need to meet quotas for female enrollment, doesn't suddenly cause women to be interested in those fields.
Of course that is a vast over-simplification, but feel free to joust at all the strawmen riding windmills that you wish.
Why is this so terrible to admit? It's obvious to everyone, yet all these PC jerks want to deny it.
Trouble is, you are confusing the end result with the root cause.
What these "PC jerks" believe is that women and men are socially conditioned to have different interests -- in other words, it just ain't natural. The concern is that the social conditioning is detrimental. That stereotypical "women's interests" are less valued and thus less rewarding than stereotypical "men's interests."
The point IS to hide what's going on, not to lock things down.
Right, this is not security through obscurity folks.
It is obscurity through obscurity!
Ouch, I didn't realize how common this was. Feel free to moderate the grandparent post into oblivion.
No, don't. Just because 'everyone' does it doesn't make it any less stupid.
Its like the terrorism threat levels - they don't have any correspondance to what is likely to happen to you as an individual. Even if SANS says the "internet threat level is green" you can still get DDOS'd, or get infected by a virus, or browse to the wrong website and get suckered by a cross-site scripting attack, or any number of other things.
The internet is just as dangerous to individuals regardess of what the 'threat level' is.
The Obama/FISA analogy naturally occurred to me because, as a Democrat, I pay attention to what my candidate is doing; I'm sure a Republican could have come up with a similar analogy involving McCain.
Like claiming to be pro-FISA and pro-immunity but not actually voting for the bill!
How screwed up is that?
It doesn't work like that.
Bad debts get resold from one agency to another.
In theory, each time it gets sold, it is cheaper (because there is less chance of collecting if everybody else has failed to collect so far).
Anyway, each new agency starts off with the same information, they don't pay heed to anything like do-not-call information from the previous agency's efforts (after all, that might be the reason the previous agency failed to collect).
...once you've actually set it all up in the first place.
Huh? You mean install the software ONCE?
I guess you just have to do it to know what you are talking about.
I spend less than 10 minutes per movie on average in addition to whatever it takes to rip the movie itself which is the same whether you keep the entire rip or reduce it.
"Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins".
Many people would argue that your nose "begins" at the root, where it has grown outward from your face. It certainly didn't start out floating in free space and eventually connect up to your face as you grew older.
Which suggests an entirely different meaning to that phrase than you probably meant.