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Females more likely than males to be elected in US scientific societies

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Re: Females more likely than males to be elected in US scientific societies

#91

Post by epistasis »

stuckinhell wrote: post #26
epistasis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the amount of harassment and pressure on women in science that men don't experience, I've always found that the women who stick around tend to be more capable than the average male scientist. If you have to relax standards to hire women, you're doing it 100% wrong and should evaluate your sourcing of candidates. And perhaps the evaluation process and environment itself. Women know bad environments, and capable…

Sure but that's not incentives work in businesses. If I can get a women engineer onto a certain team of extremely high performing all male engineers at my firm, I can get a bonus of 20k easily, and hit a DIE initiative goal which is good for my career. It's good for my career unless the team stops performing well, but if I've already leveraged it into another position then who cares ? These are some of dynamics occur…

You get bonuses specifically for hiring certain demographics? That sounds incredibly toxic, and I'm glad that where I work doesn't have anything like that.

Teams I've created have always been fairly balanced on gender, and it's been good for productivity. When I've taken over all-male teams, and hired women, it's been good for productivity. That's just my experience, and I know it runs counter to some others, but then I've never encountered the difficulties that others have had with hiring talented women who are great assets to their team. It's weird that I'm getting downvoted for what are very reasonable experiences, though. Makes me think that HN is trending more towards politics and less towards news for hackers...

Re: Females more likely than males to be elected in US scientific societies

#92

Post by safety1st »

wpietri wrote: post #69
readthenotes1 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ending inequality requires asymmetric behavior." 2 wrongs make it right?

I don't agree with your framing that all asymmetric behavior is necessarily wrong. But accepting it for the moment, wrongs are sometimes necessary to make rights. A good example here is the American Revolution. Oppression by force is an obvious wrong. So is killing people. Was it wrong for Americans to revolt, knowing they would have to commit wrongs along the way?

It's not always wrong to kill someone. It's both legal and moral to kill someone in self defense if they're threatening your life and you have no alternative.

It is legal and moral for police to use violence against someone who poses an immediate threat to those around them, preferably detaining, but if necessary killing them.

It was by and large moral (though not legal) for all colonies and colonized people to violently oppose and overthrow the colonial powers that oppressed them. When enemy soldiers arrived and they killed those soldiers, they did the right thing.

None of these cases are examples of two wrongs making a right. They are examples of people doing the right thing in response to a wrong, even though it was difficult.

Re: Females more likely than males to be elected in US scientific societies

#93

Post by mpweiher »

DSMan195276 wrote: post #82
mpweiher wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which hiring practices are those? The ones that favor women by 2:1? https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112 Anecdotally, an executive recruiter friend I talked to recently here in Europe said that she now has to get approval from corporate headquarters in the US for a straight white male candidate.

If you read that article they believe it is due to women self-selecting out of the field before ever applying for those positions. Or IE. the hiring standards for both groups are not necessarily different, but female candidates are less likely to apply and those that are willing to apply are better qualified: > Our research suggests that the mechanism resulting in women’s underrepresentation today may lie more on the…

> If you read that article they believe it is due

I did read it. A while ago. And a lot of the angry "rebuttals" as well.

From the section you quoted:

"...the mechanism resulting in women’s underrepresentation..."

So the "it" you refer to is not the 2:1 hiring advantage, but the underrepresentation.

The rest of your comment suffers from the same misunderstanding.

Re: Females more likely than males to be elected in US scientific societies

#94

Post by throway33 »

dasil003 wrote: post #65
mpweiher wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's fair to say men hold a disproportionate amount of power No it's not. It's neither accurate nor fair. A disproportionate amount of power is held by people who happen to be men. That does not mean men as a group hold a disproportionate amount of power. People always confuse these things. Treat people as individuals, not as instances of groups.

I feel you are fundamentally in agreement with my point and splitting hairs to satisfy a pedantic desire to make a very specific semantic distinction. It might feel good, but you're not going to win anyone over with this type of nitpicking.

It's actually an important point. For example, one of the most misogynistic societies I can think of are the polygamous communities like Bountiful, BC, which are basically ruled by a small cadre of elite senior men with multiple wives. Women are very oppressed. However young men are just as oppressed; they are treated as competition by the elite, and essentially exiled or put to work as child labour in dangerous jobs. This community is very misogynistic and ruled by a patriarchy, and clearly the power is concentrated in the hands of men; at the same time it is not a community that you would want to be born into as a man or a woman, and the median man will end up with none of that patriarchal power or status.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2006/05/26/Bountiful/

This is why it's important not just to average over groups. Dear Leader might always be a man, but that's not relevant to the fate of 99.99% of men who will never be Dear Leader, nor will they receive favour from him for sharing his gender.

This is why a lot of people are sensitive to arguments that use language that equivocates between the entirely non-equivalent propositions "if you have power, you probably are a man" and "if you are a man, you probably have power".

And yet the confusion between these two propositions is so widespread that probably most of the arguments in this HN comment section will come down to it.

Re: Females more likely than males to be elected in US scientific societies

#95

Post by dennis_jeeves1 »

safety1st wrote: post #54
stuckinhell wrote: post #4

National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112 Even where I work, I'm under a lot of pressure to hire more women engineers to the point we bend rules and relax standards. There is a ton of societal and economic pressure with slogans like "the future is female". I'm a mother and I do not think this is a good thing. I have a so…

In the US: * The majority of suicides are male * The majority of homeless are male * Men are less likely to go to college * The vast majority of prison inmates are male * The vast majority of workplace deaths are male * The majority of violent crime victims are male * The vast majority of police brutality victims are male Now if we were talking about say India it would be a different story, and this is not to suggest…

> But as a society we simply ignore the gendered nature of these atrocities. For some reason we can shrug off another human being's suffering when it's a son or a brother, far more easily than when it's a sister or daughter.

The roots are biological, men are the dispensable gender, given that a single man can potentially impregnate several women. On the other hand if a female is lost, her potential progeny is also lost. I'm not alluding to the fact that it is justified just because it's biological. What is also biological is that a large number of very responsible men have lone wolf tendencies, where they despair in loneliness due to the responsibilities, and burden of expectations placed on them.

A some what workable solution ( though again the innate biology can hinder) would be for men to from support groups for each other. Most governments, family, society, and women are not going to do that for men in trouble. Let that cold fact sink in.

Re: Females more likely than males to be elected in US scientific societies

#96

Post by norwalkbear »

wpietri wrote: post #85
norwalkbear wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"asymmetric behavior" is just a way to whitewash retribution.

It could be. But there are plenty of other things it could be. Perhaps consider why you leapt to that particular conclusion.

Perhaps you should think why you felt the need to be passive aggressive instead of giving a direct response.

You are passive aggressive because you know my central point is correct, and are seeking to downplay it.

Re: Females more likely than males to be elected in US scientific societies

#97

Post by wpietri »

jorgesborges wrote: post #89
wpietri wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, you've lost me. What specific "inflicting pain and trauma on children [...] in the name of progress" do you believe is going on?

The idea is that letting a generation of young boys think they're personally responsible for a history of oppression and discrimination inflicts pain and trauma.

Ok? I'm not avocating for that idea. If somebody is, you should go talk to them. If I ever see it happen, I'll talk to them too.

What I do believe is that those of us with privilege are personally responsible for how we use it. We can use it to support the oppression that gave it to us, or we can use it to undermine it. I think it's perfectly fine to tell everybody, children included, that whatever power they have, they're responsible for how the use their power in the world.

Re: Females more likely than males to be elected in US scientific societies

#98

Post by wpietri »

tharne wrote: post #87
wpietri wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing I never said that the real world is based in rationality. But we should use our rationality both to make sense of the world and to shape the world so it is more reasonable.

> we should use our rationality both to make sense of the world and to shape the world so it is more reasonable. Recommending that groups take revenge on one another for past behavior and wrapping it in some Orwellian term like "Asymmetric Behavior" is neither rational nor reasonable. It's immoral.

Thank goodness I have never advocated for revenge, then.

Re: Females more likely than males to be elected in US scientific societies

#99

Post by wpietri »

norwalkbear wrote: post #96
wpietri wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be. But there are plenty of other things it could be. Perhaps consider why you leapt to that particular conclusion.

Perhaps you should think why you felt the need to be passive aggressive instead of giving a direct response. You are passive aggressive because you know my central point is correct, and are seeking to downplay it.

I thought my answer was direct enough, but if you need it spelled out further, I'm glad to give it a go.

It is possible that there are some people seeking "retribution". It is also possible that somebody might seek to whitewash retribution under the label of asymmetric behavior.

However, I am not doing that. I specifically chose that phrase because it's extremely broad, because in encompasses all sorts of things. If you are choosing to see anything asymmetric as retribution, that's not about me. That's about you.

Re: Females more likely than males to be elected in US scientific societies

#100

Post by sidlls »

SapporoChris wrote: post #55
sidlls wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be true that entrenched systems favor males in some areas, and new social and cultural phenomena disfavor them in others at the same time. My wife has made the observation that there seems to be so much more media, events, toys, etc., targeted at girls in a positive way than for boys. We have two boys, and she has been quite the feminist in the time I’ve known her. As a guy I tend to err on the side of being s…

The pay scales seem to indicate that we are pretty damn far from having a general problem with anti-male prejudice. Media events targeted to girls, like the super bowl, Mardi Gras, military conflicts, just naming a few. Sorry, I'm missing it. What media events favored women.

I seem not to have communicated my point clearly: inequity in one direction can exist in some areas (e.g., payscales) and in the other in other areas (e.g., social validation in the form of the availability of positive media, toys, and events such as birthday parties, etc.).

So, yes, payscale inequality is a thing. That doesn't mean we haven't "overcorrected" in the opposite direction in other areas.

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