Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies
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Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies
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Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies
#2From my experience location dependence is the greatest obstacle for women to join high earning STEM jobs. With paygap women find it more difficult to live in expensive cities. Also remote work allows more life balance for care givers (who are mostly women).
It should be seen as sexism, if company does not offer remote jobs.
Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies
#3This is a "culture war" topic, let's prepare for the shitshow in the comments.
I'd like to offer some advice to make things go a bit more smoothly. There's a widespread view that all beliefs are political, you can't be apolitical, and anyone arguing for a belief opposing yours must be an enemy. To me, that view is pretty much a type error. Beliefs are value-neutral. Only arguments for or against beliefs can be political or not.
More specifically, some arguments are rational (based on evidence) while other arguments are political (based on who benefits and who loses). You can be a very civil person, but still reach for political arguments when defending your beliefs, and thus cause net harm. Or you can be a rude person, but drawn to arguing based on evidence, and thus cause net benefit. It's up to you.
Now go forth and make a flamewar :-)
Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies
#4This is a "culture war" topic, let's prepare for the shitshow in the comments. I'd like to offer some advice to make things go a bit more smoothly. There's a widespread view that all beliefs are political, you can't be apolitical, and anyone arguing for a belief opposing yours must be an enemy. To me, that view is pretty much a type error. Beliefs are value-neutral. Only arguments for or against beliefs can be politi…
I'll be dammed. Opened the comments expecting a shit show and saw yours first. Thank you for brightening my day.
Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies
#5[deleted]
Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies
#6I think people will always be scared of losing their job or their way of life changing.. so coming up with reasons why somebody who is different from you is somehow not as good at what you do, is a comforting path to go down for many people. It will be a battle between people that don't want things to change and the people who want to see things change. I do think that when anybody says "hey ya know you should just be happy about more women or minorities or whatever being helped to get into your field, or "you can't complain you've had a bunch of advantages to get where you are.." I do think that causes a bunch of push-back from people who do have a reasonable basis to say that whatever advantage they may have had may also have been tiny or in their case non-existent or whatever. So I do hope the narrative does eventually shift toward something more constructive like saying lets support women and minorities getting into the STEM area, but should also help to remove from the discourse statements that undermine the hard work that the men did to get into these challenging fields. If somebody makes a statement like "and you look at this math department and they are all men.. clearly something is going on.." that is implying that those men don't deserve to be there, which obviously creates a very negative situation for everybody involved both the men and the women seeking to be in those fields that historically have large percentages of men.
Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies
#7From my experience location dependence is the greatest obstacle for women to join high earning STEM jobs. With paygap women find it more difficult to live in expensive cities. Also remote work allows more life balance for care givers (who are mostly women). It should be seen as sexism, if company does not offer remote jobs.
Your first two sentences seem like a circular argument. Women can't get the high paying jobs because they don't live in the right places, they can't live in the right places because they can't get the high paying jobs.
Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies
#8From my experience location dependence is the greatest obstacle for women to join high earning STEM jobs. With paygap women find it more difficult to live in expensive cities. Also remote work allows more life balance for care givers (who are mostly women). It should be seen as sexism, if company does not offer remote jobs.
Hahahaha sexism if they don't offer reomte jobs?? You're a loonie!!
Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies
#9it’s fine and valid to research whether people encounter improper bias in their careers, which is clearly often the case. But their discussion is incomplete without at least recognition of another possible partial cause of gender disparity in tech, the fact that many sexist anti-STEM cues are given to children at a much earlier stage, way before careers are even on the horizon. These cues are delivered by parents, teachers, parents of friends, other adults, and other children. Cues can be as subtle as a wide-eyed look while reacting to the news that Sally wants to be a programmer, where Joey gets no such wide eyes for the same news. Any study that overlooks that cause, in order to focus only on the causes highlighted in recent dramatic episodes, is an example of the phenomenon mentioned in the title of the book their chapter appears in: Groupthink.
Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies
#10This is a "culture war" topic, let's prepare for the shitshow in the comments. I'd like to offer some advice to make things go a bit more smoothly. There's a widespread view that all beliefs are political, you can't be apolitical, and anyone arguing for a belief opposing yours must be an enemy. To me, that view is pretty much a type error. Beliefs are value-neutral. Only arguments for or against beliefs can be politi…
As a counter-point: People can hold beliefs because they have certain consequences. Simple example: "all people are created equal". This is a belief that is (probably) frequently held because it has assumed beneficial consequences for society.
So if people choose to believe in something because that has certain consequences - then a belief can be political.
EDIT: To expand on this a little... It seems to me that you divorce a belief itself from its consequences. As there are a lot of beliefs that have immediate and direct political and social consequences, i think that this separation is questionable.
If you have a belief, you probably will act on that belief. Having a belief and _not_ acting on it _at all_ seems rather useless and abstract to me. I'm not saying that this doesn't happen, but in general, if some person has a belief, he (or she) will act on that belief.
So, to be blunt: for some beliefs, having them is a political act.