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An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

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Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#651

Post by LMMojo »

buzzkillington wrote: post #490
pmiller2 wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mine ended when I realized professors were graduating more than 1 PhD student apiece on average, and that I’d almost certainly need to wait for someone to die before I got a job. (Ok, die or retire, but profs don’t just retire at 65.)

There were 50 PhDs graduated in the time I was at my alma mater, there was one opening for one tenure position.

At my work (state University), we hire at least 4 faculty a year, graduate between 15 and 20 PhDs a year, and have a policy to not directly hire and of our own PhDs into faculty positions right after graduation. They need to first work at another institution as faculty or lecture. We have at 3 faculty which completed their PhD in our program. I think we have around 40 faculty.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#652

Post by lordnacho »

kkarakk wrote: post #625
lordnacho wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the economy permitted it, the dating market would reflect that and you'd more easily find someone at a young age. Just like it used to be.

Nah economy is just one part of the puzzle, society has moved on from the "you need to have kids to live a full life" mentality too. Good luck finding an interesting career driven woman who wants kids at 20 something. Also, imo- for the most part kids degrade life experience significantly before they improve it, often in the part of your lifespan that you can actually enjoy life the most. Are you going to be taking r…

But those attitudes are also a result of the state of the economy?

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#653

Post by knorker »

dcole2929 wrote: post #242

A lot of people would argue, imo correctly, that this is just a different form of sexism. The idea that progressing in your career means sacrificing work/life balance and more importantly family could absolutely be construed as the end result of a sexist mind state that doesn't value motherhood and family rearing to the degree it should. Obviously this affect men who want to be present and active participants in thei…

It's sexism that the more time and effort you put into your career the more you're progressing?

I don't disagree with most you said, but if you weren't there then no amount of artificial thinking will compensate for that.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#654

Post by e12e »

pnako wrote: post #480
e12e wrote: post #117

Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems to be typical sexism: there's work at work which is paid, and work at home which is not. Men do little enough of the latter, that doing the paid work isn't a problem. Women do such a large part of the former, that they feel the need to chose between which part get done. Sure, the positive way to change this, is to reduce the unpaid work (child care professionals are paid, c…

You are offering a solution to something that is not a problem, and you should probably question why you think that / where this ideology is coming from. You need resources and work to care for your family. The fact that in some cases you are 'paid' (i.e. you have to trade labor) is completely irrelevant. Beaver families are not paid by anyone to care for their home and family. You could, and can, completely trade ou…

Beaver families are not charged rent, money for food, etc.

Just because housework isn't recognized, doesn't mean it doesn't add value to our society. But it's not priced, and it's not taxed.

At any rate - the interesting part is, if we say there's something like five hours of work every day to run a home - how come men seem fine with dropping that in favour of paid work, and women not?

There's a limited few months of giving birth to a child that only women can do, but we see that disproportionately women seem to end up doing much more. Sure, we can simply reduce the amount of unpaid work, by paying people to clean, cook and watch children - but that doesn't answer why not doing so affects women disproportionately from men.

One plausible explanationis sexism; that our society isn't equal.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#655

Post by acollins1331 »

oefrha wrote: post #528
Fomite wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in the health sector and honestly, it comes down to a couple things: 1) They have more data. It's not clear that it's better. 2) That difference is, to the eyes of many of us, showing up, making things worse, and then "pivoting". 3) I get to decide what I want to do. I want to add a project on X? I go work on it.

I have a friend who’s a physicist-turned machine learning researcher working on health issues. I asked him about why he decided to say an academic researcher instead of going to the industry where (to me) there’s clearly more data. I was told that academic institutions tend to land better partnerships that companies don’t tend to get maybe due to privacy concerns.

This. As a physics person turned machine learner, I've noticed the same thing. It's a lot easier getting funding and contracts from the DoD etc. as an academic then it would be to get into Lockheed or whatever.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#656

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

usaar333 wrote: post #581
detoxdetox wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. A bit of nuance: Young children are information sponges. Think about how easy a 2-3 year old picks up language. It is not that hard to believe that 2-3 year olds also pick up behavioral patterns from their surroundings. For life. Do we want Mothers to shape their young children's behavioral patterns, or low paid child care workers with no skin in the game? 8 year olds? Send them to school with a key aroun…

> Do we want Mothers to shape their young children's behavioral patterns, or low paid child care workers with no skin in the game I'm willing to bet that there are plenty of childcare workers more passionate about raising children than the parents themselves. Fwiw, in many societies retired grandparents raise the kids which has better alignment and allows parents to readily keep their jobs.

No matter how well-trained and passionate the childcare workers are. At least in my country, a typical daycare has around 6 kids per caregiver for children less than a year old, 10 for 1-year-olds and maybe 15 or so for 2-year-olds.

If you have ever cared for a less than a year old child, you will surely know that caring for six at the same time, and doing it well, is simply impossible. So most of the time they end up sticking them into "baby holding devices", largely ignoring them (as they have no time to pay attention to all the children), or what's worse, hypnotizing them with videos on a smartphone.

I don't blame the childcare workers, I would do the same (or worse) because it's physically not possible to do better with such numbers of children. I don't blame the childcare managers, childcare is already a significant expense for most parents and if they multiply the cost by 2 or 3 by hiring much more personnel, most parents just wouldn't be able to afford it. It's a problem that really needs either heavy public spending or societal change to fix.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#657

Post by SkyBelow »

danharaj wrote: post #126
SkyBelow wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sexism is not merely about personal conduct but also how we structure society. Great. But my personal experience is that this notion seems to vanish as soon as we look at things like rates of workplace deaths, life expectancy, hours worked, imprisonment, or numerous other areas. And even if they don't vanish, the level of attention devoted seems to be remarkably different. Would the way we structure society in regar…

This might surprise you but a lot of feminists are also strongly in favor of workers' rights and prison abolition. For example, bell hooks and Angela Davis. I have never met people more passionately invested in the wellbeing of men than the feminists I read and live with. It is a shame to me that decades of propaganda have buried those voices and raised the voices of those who insist that feminism is a zero sum game.

>prison abolition

As in, no criminals go to prison? I wonder what these feminist feel should be as the punishment for rape.

>I have never met people more passionately invested in the wellbeing of men than the feminists I read and live with.

Many of those who want to ban abortion are very passionate about protecting the women seeking such, as they believe it is far better for those women to be denied such an opportunity (such as saving them from doing something they will regret, at least per the belief of the people supporting anti-choice legislation). Intentions and passion shouldn't be ignored, but neither do they provide a complete picture.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#658

Post by Faark »

uncle_j wrote: post #494
Faark wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woman give birth, men cannot breastfeed. That are indeed biology. Kids being picked up from school predominately by woman is a social arrangement, the kind we hopefully at least try to change if we consider there to be better options. But yes, many kinds of social arrangements come up naturally and woman taking care of house and kids seems to be one of them. Another one is "the powerful rule over the weak"... somethi…

> Kids being picked up from school predominately by woman is a social arrangement, the kind we hopefully at least try to change if we consider there to be better options. Define "Better". Why should we be trying to change it? Why should we be meddling with other people's lives? People aren't being harmed here. > But spending effort to keep pre-defined gender roles in check must be somehow bad? Both men and women at l…

> I seems to me that they are already kept in check.

To a degree, yes. But are you really trying to pretend it's already perfect?

Though you seem to not believe in systemic injustice, so I doubt we will be able to find a shared consensus.

Custody is a more widely known example were us men fight an uphill battle. Obviously not everyone is unsatisfied with societies default roles, but I'd certainly consider this a harm, if I ever end up in such a situation.

Again, it could be worse. And I'm not trying to meddle in your life. If you and your SO want to live by traditional roles, that's great. But I don't want those thrust on (and thus being meddled with) my life. And I don't want to live in a society that doesn't even try to improve anymore.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#659

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

lutorm wrote: post #588
Stupulous wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry if I'm just missing it, but isn't that exactly what they're recommending there, if not more?

Their point presumably was that once the kids don't breastfeed exclusively, the mother doesn't need to stay home to perform that task.

It doesn't work like that, because the "complementary food" is just that: complementary. The main source of nutrition according to the WHO should still be breastfeeding until two years old. The typical recommendation is to start each meal by breastfeeding first, and then give some food afterwards as a "second course".

The mother can still go to work by using a breast pump to extract milk and leave it refrigerated or frozen, but the logistics are quite hellish and breast pumps not even always work.

All in all, and I say this as a parent that ideologically supports equality and believes that both parents should share parenting efforts equally... nature just doesn't work that way. At all. :(

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#660

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

dabbledash wrote: post #382
maximente wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WHO recommends breast feeding until age of 2, so that's at least one thing that seems not readily changeable across sexes.

That’s because people in many countries don’t have access to clean water. There’s no reason to pressure women in developed countries to breastfeed for 2 years. Unless you’d like to push them out of the workforce.

No, it's because there are a lot of scientific results correlating it to all kinds of better health outcomes both for the child and the mother, also in developed countries.

Whether this benefit is worth the great burden two years of breastfeeding imposes on women is, of course, debatable, and each woman should choose and not be questioned on their decision (as people often do). But sweeping the issue under the rug by denying the proven benefits of extended breastfeeding is not helpful.

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