[flagged]
this is not the right forum to present such thoughts
Why Are Women Under-Represented in Physics?
31–40 of 47 posts
Re: Why Are Women Under-Represented in Physics?
#32Remember a week ago when this site scoured a public GitHub repo to ensure a woman physicist wasn't getting more credit than she was due? Imagine having to conduct yourself in your professional life as though you were under persistent threat of audit by some know-nothings if you stuck your head up too high. I would go insane.
She wasn't a physicist, she was a computer scientist. Harrassing her was wrong, but so is what happened to this physicist. Stop trying use her to push divisions. If you truly cared about harrassment, you'd be just as offended at what happened to this guy as much as you are about her. Also, people like you do far more to push women and minorities out of STEM than anything. You are constantly telling women and minoriti…
It is not pushing divisions to highlight existing divisions. They must be addressed, not papered over. Academia (and other places) indeed is or can be a racist & misogynistic place, but you don't have to take my word for it - many women scientists have spoken up about this issue.
Re: Why Are Women Under-Represented in Physics?
#33> With colleagues, I spent the summer checking the data and exploring ways to present them at the workshop that wouldn’t harm our careers.
I wonder how many of those colleagues were women?
Re: Why Are Women Under-Represented in Physics?
#34I think the single most interesting result from this whole thing is that there is near equal representation of both men and women in the law profession.
I wonder why that is? What was counted as a person in a "Law profession"? Where support staff and secretaries included? If it was just lawyers, what are they doing right to get equal representation that everyone else does wrong?
Re: Why Are Women Under-Represented in Physics?
#35> I find it alarming that a scientific organization has rules that restrict free speech using such vague, subjective language. Feminism has always been a sexist power movement, and the natural outcome of that is always authoritarian social policy. At it's core, feminism is about the sole focus on accruing benefits and status for one sex (or gender, depending on who you ask). Feminism fights for women's rights, but no…
Could you please follow the guidelines more closely?
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
> Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Additionally, this is a pattern with the account that needs to change:
> Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, and we ban accounts that do it.
We count alternate accounts as well, so they all get banned unless all improve.
Re: Why Are Women Under-Represented in Physics?
#36> With colleagues, I spent the summer checking the data and exploring ways to present them at the workshop that wouldn’t harm our careers.
Yeah looking at his slides he did a shit job. Some genuinely interesting data and theories but it's filled with indignant snippets like "not sexism - it's merit!". The data could easily have been presented in a far less confrontational and provocative way.
Re: Why Are Women Under-Represented in Physics?
#37Remember a week ago when this site scoured a public GitHub repo to ensure a woman physicist wasn't getting more credit than she was due? Imagine having to conduct yourself in your professional life as though you were under persistent threat of audit by some know-nothings if you stuck your head up too high. I would go insane.
She wasn't a physicist, she was a computer scientist. Harrassing her was wrong, but so is what happened to this physicist. Stop trying use her to push divisions. If you truly cared about harrassment, you'd be just as offended at what happened to this guy as much as you are about her. Also, people like you do far more to push women and minorities out of STEM than anything. You are constantly telling women and minoriti…
Bro.
Re: Why Are Women Under-Represented in Physics?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this argument would carry more weight if, you know, the numbers had changed. If the top spots in the highest paid fields (finance, medicine, management, research, technology, media, government) were actually reasonably close to parity, you might say the movement has run its course. But since we are still far off from that, and women are still expected to do more than half the work around the house and so on,…
The top-paying subfields in finance, medicine, sci/tech, are all heavily affected by the "people vs. things" distinction that the article talks about, in being highly skewed towards "things". (Business management actually has similar problems as managers are heavily selected for being risk-loving and it's well-known in the social-science literature that women tend to be more careful than men at assessing risk.) There…
People vs things is not a thing.
Imagine someone wrote a paper that said men are horrible at management or anything collaborative because all their testosterone makes them so angry that they simply get too emotional to work with others.
If you are a man -- and who knows on the internet -- you know this is garbage. Yes men have more testosterone. That is a fact, and no one is arguing. Yes, testosterone means you are more likely to get angry, but it doesn't follow that your anger levels prevent you from working. Come on!
But now, instead of believing you, people say you are hysterical and anti-science, and you have to do a study to prove you don't get so angry you can't work. Every day people post examples of men who went ballistic at work. The study is inconclusive and you are wasting all this time trying to prove that the testosterone doesn't make you angry. Every time you lose your temper, people point out that you are a guy and of course you're prone to that.
That's what this "people vs things" distinction is like.
Re: Why Are Women Under-Represented in Physics?
#39Why are women underrepresented in construction, police force, military, etc. Why are men underrepresented in day care, nursing, etc.
Re: Why Are Women Under-Represented in Physics?
#40I think the single most interesting result from this whole thing is that there is near equal representation of both men and women in the law profession. I wonder why that is? What was counted as a person in a "Law profession"? Where support staff and secretaries included? If it was just lawyers, what are they doing right to get equal representation that everyone else does wrong?
> If it was just lawyers, what are they doing right to get equal representation that everyone else does wrong?
Phrasing the gender gap in different areas as "wrong" is weird. Do you see people fighting to bring people into law enforcement, construction, etc? Or to bring men into nursing or day care? Let's accept that there are biological differences that affect what men and women are interested in (which says nothing about their intelligence and aptitude), and leave this far left liberal agenda on the side.