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The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

theatlantic.com

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Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#71

Post by cgiles »

wayoutthere wrote: post #36
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #9

This! I have said this so many times and all my girl friends hate me for it! I also believe in gender segregated schools(after HS and at university level). I am not advocating gender segregation but just gender segregated education. This is only a BS theory of mine..and so I am trying to work it into my hobby fiction writing. Please allow me to test it here for opinions. I think that in formative years, children shou…

So this is incredibly misguided and sexist. But I've lived as a man and a woman, I feel qualified to comment. The problem is that society holds men and women to a different standard: women are expected to be in control of their emotions / self and men are not. If a woman's emotions come out (screaming or whatever) then she's unhinged, irrational. If a man does it, he's just blowing off steam or asserting himself. Men…

> women are expected to be in control of their emotions / self and men are not

> Men are not often held accountable for taking their emotions out on people, be they anxiety, depression or insecurity

I think a more accurate framing is that women are not allowed to be angry or aggressive, and men are not allowed to be sad or vulnerable. In public, at least. Consider how much more tolerable, and therefore common, it is for a woman to cry in public than a man.

So when men feel anxiety, depression, or insecurity, they express it in the socially acceptable way for men: anger and irritability. Presumably women feel angry a lot more frequently than they show, and have to find other ways to channel it. However, the latter is changing, because it is becoming much more acceptable for women to be angry and aggressive than it used to be.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#72

Post by rayiner »

DuskStar wrote: post #44
pj_mukh wrote: post #35

Coming from one of these countries to America, the answer seems obvious. STEM jobs have a HUGE differential in stability and status in those countries, so women put up up with much more patriarchal BS at the workplace to hold on to them. My sister was a STEM worker in India. When she moved to America, she looked around to see writers with relatively safe, high-status job and switched out immediately. Yes, women in Am…

The problem I always have with this argument is "Why not medicine? Why not Law?" Why is it that two professions that you'd naively expect to be just as sexist, if not far more sexist than STEM (Higher status, more of an "old boys club", established hierarchy that has positions like nurses for women, etc) have achieved gender parity, while STEM hasn't?

The legal profession is far ahead of STEM in addressing sexism. Many law firms have adopted the Mansfield Rule, which requires the pools of promotion candidates to comprise 30-50% women or other underrepresented groups: https://www.law.com/dailyreportonline/2019/09/06/more-firms-.... Major clients are imposing diversity criteria on outside counsel hired for their matters. Many major firms have 20% or more women in the equity partnership ranks. About a third of newly promoted partners are women. More than 30% of Fortune 500 GCs are now women.

That’s the result of decades of work, which started with affirmative efforts by law schools to achieve gender parity at the beginning of the pipeline. (Those efforts proved self sustaining. Once women didn’t have to swim upstream to choose law school—facing years of being in a small minority at the outset of their careers—efforts to recruit them specifically became unnecessary.) There is a ways to go yet before we hit parity, but I feel like in STEM folks are still litigating the issue of whether numeric parity should even be the goal. That question was settled in the legal field a long time ago.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#73

Post by nervousvarun »

eindiran wrote: post #60
nervousvarun wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily disagreeing or commenting on your point, but doesn't medicine typically fall under STEM?

It depends who you ask, but typically not. STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (ie the 'M' isn't 'medicine', which is what a lot of people think).

Right I definitely knew it was math (have 2 engineering degrees myself :) )...but still assumed it was commonly assumed to fall on the spectrum of STEM (definitely on the opposite end from say...physics...but still on the spectrum).

How can anyone get a qualifying score on the MCAT without significant exposure to science?

Disclaimer: I'm definitely coming at this from a U.S. point of view which someone mentioned in another comment effectively (not always but definitely in the overwhelming majority of cases) requires STEM undergrad degrees to get into medicine.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#74

Post by lifeformed »

DuskStar wrote: post #44
pj_mukh wrote: post #35

Coming from one of these countries to America, the answer seems obvious. STEM jobs have a HUGE differential in stability and status in those countries, so women put up up with much more patriarchal BS at the workplace to hold on to them. My sister was a STEM worker in India. When she moved to America, she looked around to see writers with relatively safe, high-status job and switched out immediately. Yes, women in Am…

The problem I always have with this argument is "Why not medicine? Why not Law?" Why is it that two professions that you'd naively expect to be just as sexist, if not far more sexist than STEM (Higher status, more of an "old boys club", established hierarchy that has positions like nurses for women, etc) have achieved gender parity, while STEM hasn't?

I think STEM just has a much lower barrier to entry than med and law. It's a lot more accessible in terms of cost and number of opportunities available, and doesn't require spending a third of your life in school.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#75

Post by lowdose »

When people are more equal they will have more reason to differentiate. Women in countries like Norway tend to choose more professions based on the alignment with their gender. Men in the same country are known to have more typical "guy" hobbies and toys. It's basically a catch-22.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#76

Post by jelliclesfarm »

glofish wrote: post #25
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course not... I am soliciting opinions. What do you feel about what I said? TIA.

You just said you advocate gender-segregated education. How is that not a statement on what you believe to be correct for everyone?

I did say that ‘this is a BS theory of mine’ and that I would like to know what others feel about it.

It’s right at the beginning of my comment. Do you want to read it again?

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#77

Post by diffeomorphism »

maxnoe wrote: post #54
nervousvarun wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily disagreeing or commenting on your point, but doesn't medicine typically fall under STEM?

NOOO. Science, Technics, Engineering, Math. The M is not for Medicine

But science includes biology, chemistry, pharmacy and medical research (e.g. molecular biology, neurology,...). So just because it is not the M does not say it is not part of STEM.

Actually, I am unsure how country specific this is and where to put medicine with respect to hard sciences, soft sciences, social sciences etc.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#78

Post by jelliclesfarm »

zarkov99 wrote: post #39
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #9

This! I have said this so many times and all my girl friends hate me for it! I also believe in gender segregated schools(after HS and at university level). I am not advocating gender segregation but just gender segregated education. This is only a BS theory of mine..and so I am trying to work it into my hobby fiction writing. Please allow me to test it here for opinions. I think that in formative years, children shou…

I think you are probably right, though you could have left your diatribe about the men who work for you out. One could easily come up with equally typical scenarios to ridicule neurotic, shallow and emotionally unstable women. Each gender has its set of typical pathologies. But somehow we made it work, together, as a species, so there is some magic in the balancing the two.

Why is it a ‘diatribe’? It is my life. It is my work.

That each gender has its own set of pathologies is exactly my point. When they don’t complement each other, why not create an environment where each of us can be our best?

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#79

Post by calibas »

throwaway8548 wrote: post #63
allovernow wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's about equal rights, equal treatment, it does not mean that men and women are the same, it's not a mathematical equality. Sure, perhaps in theory. In practice, the kind of differences in performance and achievement that would be explained by psychological and physiological differences between men and women are immediately blamed on discrimination and the like. There is an implicit assumption that men and women a…

> the kind of differences in performance and achievement that would be explained by psychological and physiological differences between men and women That's a bit of circular reasoning though. - Look how men and women behave differently! - But why do they behave differently? - Because they're different. - How do you know that? - Because they behave differently. It's not logically consistent and doesn't answer anythin…

Are observable differences not the basis of empirical science?

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#80

Post by TeMPOraL »

DuskStar wrote: post #44
pj_mukh wrote: post #35

Coming from one of these countries to America, the answer seems obvious. STEM jobs have a HUGE differential in stability and status in those countries, so women put up up with much more patriarchal BS at the workplace to hold on to them. My sister was a STEM worker in India. When she moved to America, she looked around to see writers with relatively safe, high-status job and switched out immediately. Yes, women in Am…

The problem I always have with this argument is "Why not medicine? Why not Law?" Why is it that two professions that you'd naively expect to be just as sexist, if not far more sexist than STEM (Higher status, more of an "old boys club", established hierarchy that has positions like nurses for women, etc) have achieved gender parity, while STEM hasn't?

In case of medicine - because it's a large field full of career paths that are very different from each other. The daily realities of being a pediatrician, a surgeon, a psychiatrist or a radiologist have very little in common.

There's this hypothesis that men statistically tend to pick jobs involving working with and treating patients as things, and women tend to pick jobs involving people and socializing. Medicine as a field is full of high-status jobs of both kind, so - under this hypothesis - gender parity of the overarching field is entirely unsurprising. And, as predicted, individual specializations tend to show strong gender skew.

Law is also a very large field, so I suspect the profession probably shows a similar dynamic.

Viewed through this lens, our industry is less like "medicine", and more like "radiology". And I suspect - but didn't check - that if you expand the definition of "software" to include supporting fields like design, UX and testing, the overall gender ratio will be much closer to 1:1.

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