From NPR:
How Stereotypes Can Drive Women To Quit Science
by SHANKAR VEDANTAM
It isn't just that fewer women choose to go into these fields. Even when they go into these fields and are successful, women are more likely than men to quit.
"They tend to drop out at higher rates than their male peers," said Toni Schmader, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia. "As women enter into careers, the levels of advancement aren't as steep for women as for men. ...
When male scientists talked to other scientists about their research, it energized them. But it was a different story for women.
"For women, the pattern was just the opposite, specifically in their conversations with male colleagues," Schmader said. "So the more women in their conversations with male colleagues were talking about research, the more disengaged they reported being in their work."
Disengagement predicts that someone is at risk of dropping out.
There was another sign of trouble.
When female scientists talked to other female scientists, they sounded perfectly competent. But when they talked to male colleagues, Mehl and Schmader found that they sounded less competent.
One obvious explanation was that the men were being nasty to their female colleagues and throwing them off their game. Mehl and Schmader checked the tapes.
"We don't have any evidence that there is anything that men are saying to make this happen," Schmader said.
But the audiotapes did provide a clue about what was going on. When the male and female scientists weren't talking about work, the women reported feeling more engaged.
For Mehl and Schmader, this was the smoking gun that an insidious psychological phenomenon called "stereotype threat" was at work. It could potentially explain the disparity between men and women pursuing science and math careers.
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85 comments:
aclu suing michigan cuz blacks fail.
http://www.amren.com/news/2012/07/aclu-alleges-michigan-school-district-violated-students-right-to-learn-to-read/
1. It's well known women talking to men "play dumb," often unconsciously. So the supposed incompetence of woman scientists talking to men scientists is likely just a reflection of the common pattern of m-f conversation carrying no greater meaning.
2. Women scientists "more engaged" when talking to men scientists about NON-work stuff: yeah, because most women are emotionally interested in relationships, not technical stuff, and most women scientists are heterosexual, so the relationships they are interested in are their own-- with the men around them, mostly male scientists.
stereotype threat again?????????????
please make it stop
So let me get this straight... A woman goes through all this trouble to be in a target rich environment when it comes to looking for a quality mate ( even gets a PhD in science, for Pete's sake) and once she gets there, the said targets want to talk about flippin science?!?!?! Jerks! I'd sound discouraged too. Also disgruntled.
@ Piper
You think you're defending women, but you're actually insulting them...
Smart chicks are not sexy. And they know it.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2012/07/kurt-loder-what-i-read/54296/#.UAbAkqSsUwE.facebook
The obvious staring-in-your-face solution would be a women's MIT, harvard, and yet....
the obvious staring-in-your-face solution when PC is your worldly framework(or if your memory screams out "Lawrence Summers" before you can crimethink) is that the gender walls need to be broken down some more, or/and to make the field more female-friendly and such overwhelmingly female that women don't get the feeling that they are talking with non-women
"an insidious psychological phenomenon called "stereotype threat" was at work."
lool you can almost see the danger to the future Marie Curies dripping from that adjective.
They should test how many male scientists felt disengaged from their work when talking to a good-looking female colleague with appreciable assets. So that then studies can be funded, and seminars can be held as to how they can be most effectively neutered to prevent the aforementioned woman from feeling creeped out.
and might this be true then:
Does socializing lower women's effective IQs?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3gbcFYoLqI
Then there was the impostor syndrome, but it turned out to be gender-neutral.
The impostor syndrome was once thought to be particularly common among women who are successful in their given careers, but has since been shown to occur for an equal number of men.[2] It is commonly associated with academics and is widely found among graduate students.
I was hoping that it meant that these women had an inkling of the fact that they weren't being independent as much as they were being copycats.
In other news... geeks and logic don't give women tingles.
Game, anyone?
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2012/04/whit-stillman-what-i-read/50787/
"Smart chicks are not sexy. And they know it."
Smart chicks aren't sexy to men they're smarter than.
Laugh all you want, but I keep seeing a story about this every other day. They're going to force women into the STEM fields, and this country's going to take an even bigger nosedive.
And, yeah, male scientists want to talk about science. The horror.
Question for everyone: is it the female scientists behind this, or feminists looking for a target? I lived in Boston for a while, knew some MIT grads, including some lady programmers, and they were not crazy about affirmative action (though thankful for it when they got it). In particular they were annoyed that popular girls of the sort who used to torment them had been flooding MIT. Can anyone who actually knows about this comment?
"For Mehl and Schmader, this was the smoking gun that an insidious psychological phenomenon called "stereotype threat" was at work. It could potentially explain the disparity between men and women pursuing science and math careers."
- Stereotype threat was debunked long ago.
The reality is that the IQ bell curve for men differs from that for women. As a result, there are vastly more men of high intellect than there are women, so not surprisingly, in a meritocracy, there will be vastly more men than women at the top in intellectual fields.
This also does not include the fact that the average man is out of the workplace for a much shorter time than the average woman, due to taking care of children. As a result, even fewer women will be at the top of competitive fields.
This isn't to say that a woman of high intelligence with a focus on work first can't be a professor in a field of science. There are a number of them, and women are given so many legs up by society, any woman who does meet these criteria must find it breathtakingly easy to get a tenured professorship. Only that they exist in far fewer numbers than their male colleagues for reasons other than boredom with science. Of course, these unpleasant truths would 'make women feel like they can't do it', so we must avoid telling the truth.
The purpose of women "in science" is to become the [deserving] wives of actual scientists and thereafter to become the [deserving] mothers of actual scientists' actual children.
I mean - sheesh - actual scientists need to breed, too, like, ya know?
It's well known women talking to men "play dumb," often unconsciously.
And there are very, very few things in life [maybe even nothing at all] sexier than smart chicks pretending to be airheads.
Maybe smart chicks pretending to be airheads whilst wielding large-caliber sidearms and shotguns and rifles?
Dressed in bikinis?
And high-heels?
We need more women like Professor Susan Greenfield!
http://ukcommentators.blogspot.co.uk/2007/11/were-not-having-kids-part-382-susan.html
Maybe the researchers should study what men and women talk about outside the work context to set base rates. I don't know, what about studying comics?
This is a hilarious article. They explain what's happening here word for word, but then ignore their own chain of logic to try to blame it on something unrelated.
It's really very simple. Women, even brainy nerd girls, enjoy their jobs more if they can spend their coffee breaks chatting about their favorite TV shows or gossiping about the sluts down in Accounting. That doesn't mean they don't enjoy their work, but they equally enjoy taking a break from it. When they find themselves in a lab with a bunch of nerd boys who want to spend their breaks talking about the work they've been doing for the past few hours, they're less happy.
That's not complicated, and it doesn't require any sort of "threat." It's just women being women and men being men. The funny part is, "having interests beyond work" should be a compliment toward women, but we can't admit any difference between men and women where work is concerned, so it can't be.
"Stereotype Threat", like "White Privilege", is like a malign version of God for the left. They can't point to specific proof of its existence, but look at the disparities! Nothing else could possibly account for them...
It could potentially explain the disparity between men and women
The search continues...
Stereotype threat is another form of 'privilege' the left loves going on about, even though there is no way to measure or prove it but you're an evil Nazi Rethuglican if you tell a liberal snowflake there is no such thing.
Classic example of going through an entire column of observations and facts and finishing with a politically correct conclusion in no way connected to anything that went before.
Think ... Tom Friedman.
sheesh. *facepalm*
and, what piper said.
Ha ha, Maya. That was pretty good.
"Question for everyone: is it the female scientists behind this, or feminists looking for a target? I lived in Boston for a while, knew some MIT grads, including some lady programmers, and they were not crazy about affirmative action (though thankful for it when they got it). In particular they were annoyed that popular girls of the sort who used to torment them had been flooding MIT. Can anyone who actually knows about this comment? "
There was MIT's Nancy Hopkins, and then there was an epicene picture that Steve posted.
And then there is the Marilee Jones saga, the disgraced dean of admissions, under whose leadership the female student ratio rose close to 50%. She was promoted for the very same purpose, so it wasn't girls having more than twice the acceptance rate of boys that got her fired(in fact her accomplishment was celebrated).
That insidious threat known as, 'Wanting to Gossip instead of work'.
the obvious solution is going to be to Title IX the sciences...and, sadly, conservatives are so meek about defending traditional, based-in-reality sex roles that they will let it help while making squeaky protests about fairness to men (they always know the losing argument to make!)
managerialist beta muppets like Obama fundamentally dislike white men for making them feel insecure about having so much power and wealth, yet still having to live in a world made by...white men
when will conservatives wake up? how many nerds here will start from the premise that women are simply ill-suited to science careers? BUT I KNOW THIS SMART GIRL HOW DARE YOU! yeah she is going to outsmart biology by going into debt for a STEM degree, putting off marriage while she works through her abbreviated career ladder, and then has an Aspergers child at 40...nice plan
heard this on NPR, made me sick. they ignored the elephant in the room: male's consistently larger standard deviation (more males at high AND low end of almost all variables). I was disgusted with this leftist craptrap. J. Haidt is right: leftists dismiss "taboo" (correct) hypotheses to come up with tangled-NON-OccamsRazor-fancy-socio-cultural explanations. panjoomby
When female scientists talked to other female scientists, they sounded perfectly competent. But when they talked to male colleagues, Mehl and Schmader found that they sounded less competent.
One obvious explanation was that the men were being nasty to their female colleagues and throwing them off their game.
Surely the "obvious" explanation is that male scientists "sound more competent" than female scientists because they are more competent?
"'Smart chicks are not sexy. And they know it.'
Smart chicks aren't sexy to men they're smarter than."
Ain't necessarily so.
But it's certainly true for book-smart, people-dumb women who just have to remind everyone around them how smart they are.
"When female scientists talked to other female scientists, they sounded perfectly competent."
They sounded perfectly competent to whom? Would a couple of psychologists be able to assess how competent someone is when talking about quantum chromodynamics?
"We don't have any evidence that there is anything that men are saying to make this happen," Schmader said."
But we will be blamed, none-the-less.
"But the audiotapes did provide a clue about what was going on. When the male and female scientists weren't talking about work, the women reported feeling more engaged."
So these women enjoy being scientists, as long as it does not involve talking about icky things like science.
If women scientists are so easily discouraged from continuing in their scientific careers, despite all the legal and cultural incentives they have to pursue science, then maybe it isn't really a passion for them. And if it isn't a passion, that would not only explain why they aren't as eager to discuss it as their male colleagues are and why they are more willing to give it up.
I laugh when I read about how Alma Schindler, at age 21, gave up her budding career as a composer to marry Gustav Mahler. This is now routinely portrayed as a great personal loss for her (she had no "voice") and for music. Gustav died ten years later, leaving her an affluent 32 y/o widow. She lived to be 85. Even out from under his shadow, she never resumed her musical career, instead apparently content to spend the next half century bossing around her lovers and husbands, sneering at Jews and bolstering her reputation at Mahler's expense (the "Alma problem"). I listened to one of her songs on YouTube. I know composers have their "off" days but it was cringeworthy, reminded me one of those German mountain movies, really overwrought in Teutonic way (yes, I know she was Austrian).
Science, like music, is a field in which more men than women have always excelled and without tortuous social engineering, doubtless that will continue to be the case.
I know three hugely successful women scientists. All of them have no life. Their science is all they ever think about. Men at the top seem to be able to balance it a bit better.
How anyone can take their conclusions seriously is beyond me. They spend dozens of paragraphs demonstrating that it's in the women's heads, then conclude with, "It's not in their heads. It's (insert ad hoc psychological concept here)."
Quotas Limiting Male Science Enrollment: The New Liberal War on Science
www.openmarket.org/2012/07/10/quotas-limiting-male-science-enrollment-the-new-liberal-war-on-science/
"women are given so many legs up by society, any woman who does meet these criteria must find it breathtakingly easy to get a tenured professorship."
Ah yes, the plight of the oppressed middle-class male. You'd need a heart of stone, etc.
Sad but true, the women college professors I meet rarely want to talk about their fields, be they poetry, politics, or history. They want to talk about TV shows, their kids/nephews/nieces, their "crafts," their sexual relationships, etc. They view being a college professor as a job, and want to talk about T.S Eliot, LBJ's legislative strategy and whether the Nazis made efficient use of Germany's resources about as much as a garbage man wants to talk about garbage or a store clerk wants to talk about his cash register's software.
Lawrence Auster had an entry that printed excerts of an article by Hans Bader of OpenMarkets.org entitled: “Quotas Limiting Male Science Enrollment: The New Liberal War on Science.”
Bader predicts that the Obama administration is going to impose Title 9 like requirements upon universities when it comes to Science. Here is his writing (not mine) on the matter:
"Quotas limiting the number of male students in science may be imposed by the Education Department in 2013. The White House has promised that “new guidelines will also be issued to grant-receiving universities and colleges” spelling out “Title IX rules in the science, technology, engineering and math fields.”
Bader reminds the reader that Title 9 was, as originally written, to impose limits upon male athletic scholarships to enable schools to afford its enactment. In short, male slots in science might have to be limited if the guidelines are followed to the letter under some potential (admittedly liberal) interpretations of it held sway. With a John Roberts on the court, who knows, right? The Bush appointees, both W and the Elder, have dissapointed haven't they? m
A lot of different kinds of conversations go on at scientific conferences.
1 In some cases there is conversation between some of the 7 or 8 people in the world who actually have an interest at the topic at hand and actually have sufficient training to discuss it. In this case women fully participate.
2. One upmanship. This is primarily a male sport and consists of people promoting the importance of their own work and passing negative judgment on the work of their closest competitors. There is a kind of informal pecking order, ranking the importance of various people, and it is surprising how much interaction is governed by people positioning themselves in this order. This is primarily a male form of behavior and most women aren't terribly interested in it. From my perspective this is a valuable contribution that women make to the scientific community.
3. Sex has very little to do with it. This may come as a surprise to some but people do not go to scientific conferences expecting to enhance their sex lives.
Having made these points about conferences, it should be added that a close look at the national meeting of the AMS would reveal that there is definitely a trend to more sessions devoted to teaching and such topics as mentoring faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students and this does seem to coincide with
the vast increase in the numbers of women in the profession.
I think it reflects the fact that women are more interested in the human relationship aspects of the profession such as teaching and advising than men are. And they tend to treat research as a worthwhile and interesting activity but not so much as a blood sport aimed at establishing dominance over others.
A sizable percentage of scientists today are women. Many of them are quite outstanding. And the entrance of women into the fields of science has been very beneficial.
However, there is one way in which it is troubling. A small number of politically ambitious women have discovered that by investing in the preferential treatment industry they can advance their own careers.
The determination of merit is always tricky and rating and awarding individual contributions is elusive at best and subject to all kinds of manipulation. But applying the sledgehammer of disparate impact to the sciences is a terrible idea. Awarding scientific prizes, faculty positions, tenure and promotion, merit increases, administrative positions, access to grant money, admission to competitive high schools, colleges and graduate programs to satisfy a gender demographic is a manipulation too far that can seriously damage the future of scientific work.
The little perks of the job that are small rewards for little things well done is important in the progress of the profession. It may seem petty but such things as rewarding good graduate students with better offices as they advance through their program is a way to encourage excellence. When the little rewards begin to reflect favoritism rather than merit, it is surprisingly demoralizing. The use of gender as a proxy for merit is a form of favoritism that is simply a step too far.
Title IX was a good thing for encouraging and rewarding women and girls who like to engage in competitive sports. But enforcing demographic equality to an activity that is considerably more popular among boys than girls is awful and applying the same to science could have disastrous consequences.
Smart women are more desirable, since tingles down there don't rule them as much (it still does) vs. less smart women who live from urge to urge. Less chance of "non-paternity" and other things like that.
Smart men are less desirable, unless mediated by the dark triad: narcissism, psychopathy, and machiavellianism. Smartness among men is highly correlated with less testosterone and aggression.
Since we are all prisoners of our primate DNA, this should surprise no one. Most primates form dominant male/harem reproductive systems, with dominance being personally aggressive and violent. Monkeys don't have mansions or property.
Does socializing lower women's effective IQs?
Does public school lower women's effective IQ?
Re the online higher ed issue you've been covering recently, apparently kids at brick and mortar universities are taking online classes. Not even from their dorms, but in computer labs i.e. classrooms with computers in them:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/education/edlife/colleges-awakening-to-the-opportunities-of-data-mining.html
"As Katye Allisone, a freshman at Arizona State University, hunkers down in a computer lab for an 8:35 a.m. math class, the Web-based course watches her back. Answers, scores, pace, click paths — it hoovers up information, like Google. But rather than personalizing search results, data shape Ms. Allisone’s class according to her understanding of the material."
So will this be the most likely outcome of all this online higher ed hype - kids still going to brick and mortar universities, but just taking online classes there? While genuine online ed - kid taking college courses from mom's basement - remains an embarassing backwater ala correspondence courses?
Most primates form dominant male/harem reproductive systems
Humans don't.
You game boys need to stop watching nature documentaries on TV and spend a little more time interacting with people.
For Sailer, this was the smoking gun that an insidious psychological phenomenon called "Occam's Butterknife" was at work. It could potentially explain the disparity between reality and wishful thinking among those pursuing social science careers.
I am Lugash.
In more prole terms, women don't like to talk shop like men do.
I'm shocked, shocked.
I am Lugash.
Smart women are more desirable, since tingles down there don't rule them as much (it still does) vs. less smart women who live from urge to urge. Less chance of "non-paternity" and other things like that.
Smart men are less desirable, unless mediated by the dark triad: narcissism, psychopathy, and machiavellianism. Smartness among men is highly correlated with less testosterone and aggression.
Smart women are less desirable, since giving men a tingle down there doesn't require brains.
Smart men are more desirable, since brains leads to wealth and wealth gives women a tingle down there.
See? One can plug one's personal fetishes into a comment and call them "science" all day long.
Smart women are less desirable, since giving men a tingle down there doesn't require brains.
Smart women are more desirable, but as friends.
Smart men are more desirable, since brains leads to wealth and wealth gives women a tingle down there.
Not necessarily. Brains don't always lead to wealth. How many women get a tingle from starving artists and Ph.D.'s driving cabs? How many get a tingle from a millionaire construction worker who worked his way up to owning the business?
"Bader reminds the reader that Title 9 was, as originally written, to impose limits upon male athletic scholarships to enable schools to afford its enactment."
How Title IX Sneakily Revolutionized Women's Sports:
When Title IX was signed into law 40 years ago this weekend, most people had no idea what an impact it would have on women's sports in America. And that's exactly what the architects of the bill wanted. That is the remarkable story told in a new documentary, Sporting Chance, which will air Saturday on ESPN2: In order to make Title IX the law of the land, its supporters had to keep the public ignorant of its potential for lasting social change.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a 36-word clause largely overlooked by the very lawmakers who passed the bill, requires equal access for women in all facets of education, most notably athletics.
Men smart, women smarter?
"But to a host of former lawmakers interviewed in the documentary, it was a seemingly impossible goal that took determination and a healthy dose of cunning by former Oregon congresswoman Edith Green.
As told through compelling first-person narratives in Sporting Chance, Green and Indiana senator Birch Bayh first floated the idea of Title IX in congressional hearings on equal rights for women in 1970. The measure was eventually added to the 1972 education reform bill, but it was generally thought to affect hiring and employment practices at federally funded schools.
That was how Green wanted it. As the bill made its way through Congress and landed on Richard Nixon's desk, the 10-term congresswoman muzzled most public support for the bill out of fear that its true scope would be publicized."
Smart men are more desirable, since brains leads to wealth and wealth gives women a tingle down there
If this were true then HBD-nerds would not be endlessly griping about how they can't get women.
The typical commenter on HBD blogs seems to have served as the role model for the socially inept (but very intelligent) geeks on The Big Bang Theory.
Smartness among men is highly correlated with less testosterone and aggression.
This is about the millionth time you've made this claim.
And the millionth time it has been pointed out to you that you don't know what you are talking about.
I see a corollary to their finding:
White men are worse at professional basketball because when they play with black men, stereotype sensitivity makes them nervous and puts them off their game. When they play each other, they're probably just as good as all the black players.
I see a corollary to their finding:
White men are worse at professional basketball because when they play with black men, stereotype sensitivity makes them nervous and puts them off their game. When they play each other, they're probably just as good as all the black players.
Women are greedier than men, so why should they go into STE fields which pay poorly for the amount of education and effort invested?
Medicine, dentistry, law, finance - all pay well. That's where the women are, not science. Be millionaires, meet billionaire men, raise daughters who will marry trillionaries - all helped by tax-funded AA programs.
"Sex has very little to do with it. This may come as a surprise to some but people do not go to scientific conferences expecting to enhance their sex lives."
- Dude, you're hanging with the wrong scientists.
When are we gonna start imposing quotas again on the Scots-Irish? After all they're far overrepresented in college, academia in general, tenured professorships,etc- in fact the farther up you go, the bigger the disparity. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If success is due to privilege and we're all supposed to be equal in results, then they must be getting some major undue privilege.
And don't give me the 'we're only 2% of the population, it wouldn't affect anything' crap- Irrelevant and intentional distortion.
Smart men are less desirable, unless mediated by the dark triad: narcissism, psychopathy, and machiavellianism. Smartness among men is highly correlated with less testosterone and aggression.
You just make this shit up out of thin air, don't you?
A blog obsessed by Jews, women in science and engineering, female attractiveness, and white birthrates has nothing to say about Marissa Mayer, the gorgeous, blonde, Jewish, pregnant, engineering genius new CEO of Yahoo!? For shame!
Who paid Mehl and Schmader for this drivel?
Zorro said...
Smart chicks are not sexy. And they know it."
Stupid men are though, apparently. Alpha this and alphas that, and I find out they're talking about some semi-retarded thug who throws balls in careful tangents. Alpha my ass.
Are the mentally handicapped the most appealing to you, provided they are not congenitally deformed? Do you care about the genes your children inherit? Would you prefer a blow up doll? I hear the Japanese are doing marvels in that area.
What makes more sense is that men are not enthusiastic about women more intelligent than they themselves are, in an area they really care about; studies bear this out. So if you don't find any "smart" women sexy, that may say something about your intellect quotient.
Most couples have IQ within a few points of each other, as do most close friends. Whether we know it or not, we are looking for similar intelligence in people we choose as "mates" for any length of time.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a 36-word clause largely overlooked by the very lawmakers who passed the bill, requires equal access for women in all facets of education, most notably athletics.
That's misleading. It prohibits discrimination against either sex.
Ot course, the government doesn't enforce Title IX as a law; it employs an outrageous double standard whereby discrimination against men and numerical imbalances in favor of women are ignored. The executive branch essentially uses the statute as a pretext for attainders.
I am a woman, not a scientist and I like to talk to men about science, or technology, or philosophy, or anything except small talk etc. Really I prefer to listen and ask questions, where they answer my particular interests. I just am interested in the info. I would be willing to do the same with women, but they aren't as willing.
typical. Mehl and Schmader (or anyway the reporter) don't speak about the distribution of women who are not enthused by talking shop. Some fraction of women STEM PhDs are thrilled to talk about science and feel totally engaged.
I hate reading this crap in the press where some group is characterized by its average. Say on a scale of 1 to 10 male scientists averaged a 6 for engagement when discussing science and females a 3. Well those men who rated a 2 and the women who rated an 8 are now just viewed as their group average, even though they are outliers.
It needs to be reported as the distribution, not the average, because the idiot reporters are misleading by characterizing that way.
Women are greedier than men, so why should they go into STE fields which pay poorly for the amount of education and effort invested?
Equality, Diversity, Sorority
"Women are greedier than men, so why should they go into STE fields which pay poorly for the amount of education and effort invested?"
Medicine, dentistry, law, finance - all pay well. That's where the women are, not science. Be millionaires, meet billionaire men, raise daughters who will marry trillionaries - all helped by tax-funded AA programs."
What are you talking about in your fevered state? Women in these fields are much more likely than men to leave law and medicine (I don't know about finance), for a less lucrative and more "fulfilling" occupation, such as, oh, psychology or art therapy. Happens all the time--I know several cases personally. They were single and it was only their own income that they could depend on. My friend's husband left teaching to become a chiropractor. Meanwhile, my female chiropractor friend left the practice to become a psychologist or something like that. And both these people were damn good in their first professions.
Isn't it better women make their own money and not oppress ex-husbands for alimony? Why is it "greed" for women to go into these professions (once all male anyway) and not for men? AA doesn't work for (white/asian) women anymore, as far as getting into programs, with a few exceptions. I worked in a graduate university office, and have some first hand info on this. Maybe years ago, but not for some time.
Womens jobs have not traditionally paid well compared to mens'. Secretaries (generally, not all). Librarians. Teachers. Animal welfare workers (mostly women, especially the volunteers), social workers, etc., and the various modern jobs leading from these jobs. Most of the idealists in non-profits, were women. Men too, but women are more represented. And often they supported themselves, and children. It is well known that women will go into helping professions with less interest in large remuneration. Perhaps this is due to lack of confidence, or just the market. Maybe men still worry about supporting families, but not all. I once had a personnel employee tell me men in retail needed to be paid more because they had families, but most of the males in that place were gay and sure weren't supporting anything except their own habits.
To enter science, you have to have a certain kind of ability, which appears to be far more prevalent among males. If it is not remunerated to the extent it should be, that has actually always been the case historically. Few scientists have ever been rich. I don't know who makes the rules about how much someone like Isaac Newton got paid, but it wasn't womenfolk. Nevertheless I know several brilliant women in the hard sciences, one extremely "high up" and the scientists she works with, male or female, don't do that badly monetarily. About as good as any grade 14 plus government employee.
You just make this shit up out of thin air, don't you?
Hardly. Working tirelessly in his mother's basement, Whiskey has mastered the secret of Zero Point technology, and now he makes shit up out of...PURE VACUUM!
"Sex has very little to do with it. This may come as a surprise to some but people do not go to scientific conferences expecting to enhance their sex lives."
Dude, you're hanging with the wrong scientists.
This comment made me really LOL. Yes, indeed, there is A LOT, a truly surprising amount of spontaneous shagging occurring during conferences. So that you know next time your spouse leaves for one :-)
There was this rumor at the place where I worked which made a high flying Female, CEO of another Company.
"She does business in the Horizontal"
"I am a woman, not a scientist and I like to talk to men about science, or technology, or philosophy, or anything except small talk etc. Really I prefer to listen and ask questions, where they answer my particular interests. I just am interested in the info. I would be willing to do the same with women, but they aren't as willing."
Exactly.
I work as an English language tutor for doctors in a top Japanese cancer hospital. While my male students are eager to discuss their work and general medical/science related topics, the lady doctors mostly want to spend their half hour away from work with me talking about their own lives. Vive la difference.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auLhL-6dk4Q&feature=related
"This comment made me really LOL. Yes, indeed, there is A LOT, a truly surprising amount of spontaneous shagging occurring during conferences. So that you know next time your spouse leaves for one :-)"
Considering the dearth of women, let alone attractive women, in the hardcore STEM fields, this shagging must be occuring between men.
Jonathan's comment corresponds to my experience, except that (3) depends a lot on the ages of the scientists--grad students and postdocs are a lot more likely to pair off than 50 year old tenured professors with a spouse and kids at home. My field is a bit incestuous--people working in the same basic area tend to know one another and have tangled "academic geneologies" (like your boss did his postdoc with the guy who taught my PhD advisor) --so hooking up with someone at a conference has many of the same features as hooking up with someone in a small town.
Women are better than men physiologically for the job of fighter pilot. Apparently the requirements of childbirth also yield benefits in pulling High 'G' turns in a fighter plane. It's also an advantage to be short in the cockpit and women are also shorter than men.
So why are almost all fighter pilots men? Easy, men dig personal combat, women don't. Go to the mall and observe the video game customers. The boys want to shoot things. The girls are off shopping somewhere.
I suspect that women similarly are just not turned on by research the way some men are. They could be good researchers but they are not real motivated.
When I was a senior looking at graduate school I went to a professor for a recommendation. I was going to apply to some doctoral program in experimental-physiological psychology.
He wouldn't give me a recommendation. That was a huge shock. I confronted him and told him that I had always been the best student in all of the classes of his that I had taken. He said - maybe , but you're not interested in research.
He was right. I could do research well enough but I was applying for doctoral programs because I was just on automatic pilot. I was good at undergraduate classes so I figured I would just continue my success in graduate school.
That failure to get a recommendation changed my life. I didn't think about getting a PhD in psychology again after that. I wasn't particularly interested in research in any way other than as a consumer. He saved me from becoming just another mediocre academic.
I think this is what happens to many smart women. They get good grades as an undergraduate and they just continue in school because when you're in school that's all you see. The rest of the world seems distant and forbidding. Men are better at breaking out of this academic trap. Women only realize later that they have been proceeding by inertia. Women are more Other Directed than men. They are more sensitive to their immediate environments. They are more likely to be trapped in academics.
In any case, who needs them? There are enough scientists for the market. Scientists have to hustle for work. They are not generally in demand. They don't make great money. It's not a career for the tepidly motivated.
Albertosaurus
Albertosaurus:
I think this is what happens to many smart women. They get good grades as an undergraduate and they just continue in school because when you're in school that's all you see. The rest of the world seems distant and forbidding
Women and girls are also unnecessarily coddled in school, college, and university. This was true for decades, even before being intensified by academic feminists. That may have something to do with it as well.
has nothing to say about Marissa Mayer, the gorgeous, blonde, Jewish, pregnant, engineering genius new CEO of Yahoo!?
Do you have evidence that this woman is an engineering genius?
"Engineering genius" may be what the news media read off a press release the media was force-fed.
My suspicion is that Ms. Mayer, like many femme big execs. at other firms, is the nepotistic beard for the real behind-the-scene boss of Yahoo.
This comment made me really LOL. Yes, indeed, there is A LOT, a truly surprising amount of spontaneous shagging occurring during conferences. So that you know next time your spouse leaves for one :-)"
Considering the dearth of women, let alone attractive women, in the hardcore STEM fields, this shagging must be occuring between men.
My friend at NASA was a beauty when young, and not half bad now. There are several young women scientists there who are considered beauties, others are average to attractive. It may be comforting for men to think brains does not equal beauty, but, alas for some, it often does. There have been studies on this--higher iq tends to correlate with greater attractiveness. STEM ability does not necessarily negate beauty in women.
"He wouldn't give me a recommendation. That was a huge shock. I confronted him and told him that I had always been the best student in all of the classes of his that I had taken. He said - maybe , but you're not interested in research."
Wow, Albertosaurus, you don't see this sort of thing nearly as much anymore, that was old school, you were lucky. There's been a lot of water under the bridge, what with Vietnam student deferments and institutions themselves becoming trapped in inertia, things like student funding pipelines and grad student immigration pipelines.
Imagine what would happen today if a white male prof said something like that to the wrong "deserving student of color" or a woman. I wonder if this sort of thing alone makes diverse societies unworkable in the long run. You can't tell truths on the merits of the matter; instead you're always doing diversity politics. Of course there are ways to eventually flunk folks out of filter courses and such, but it's probably so much easier to just be able to say "No, I just don't think it be for the best."
"Smart chicks are not sexy. And they know it."
I don't agree with this at all, either as a male or from what I've seen in the high-tech field, or just in life. Like someone said, the geek-o-sphere went wild over Marissa Mayer. If nothing else, past a certain level, men love women smart enough to understand their boasts (or the accomplishments of which they are boasting). For instance, I think the true American Scotch-Irish love a woman with a head on her shoulders for the same reason they love a women who knows how to use a rifle. When you're alone on the frontier, sometimes she might be all that's there to cover your back. What makes all the difference isn't the smarts, it's the attitude of the woman with smarts. Kind of like with a lot of men.
Women are better than men physiologically for the job of fighter pilot. Apparently the requirements of childbirth also yield benefits in pulling High 'G' turns in a fighter plane. It's also an advantage to be short in the cockpit and women are also shorter than men.
So why are almost all fighter pilots men? Easy, men dig personal combat, women don't. Go to the mall and observe the video game customers. The boys want to shoot things. The girls are off shopping somewhere.
That's a steaming pile. The fact that women can take higher g turns without passing out relative to men does not translate to "women are better than men physiologically for the job of fighter pilot." Not even close. And there is a hell of a lot more to flying a fighter jet than height, the ability to take high-g turns, and digging combat. Like, everything about being a fighter pilot.
If this were true then HBD-nerds would not be endlessly griping about how they can't get women.
If HBD commenters really were endlessly griping about how they can't get women, you'd have a point.
But then, if you really were able to keep up with the "HBD nerds" in a conversation, you wouldn't whistle past "ceteris paribus" as a matter of course.
That Mayer chick's got nothing on Yulia Tymoshenko. 'Course, she ain't in the joint, either.
There is a fine line between sounding smart and sounding arrogant, and both women and men frequently cross this line, by mistake, without knowing it.
But everyone else does.
"the obvious staring-in-your-face solution when PC is your worldly framework(or if your memory screams out "Lawrence Summers" before you can crimethink) is that the gender walls need to be broken down some more, or/and to make the field more female-friendly and such overwhelmingly female that women don't get the feeling that they are talking with non-women"
you are clearly a displaced female fighting for a system that completely favors the female psych.. there are and will always be disadvantages on both sides. consider women in the military.. they just plain endanger everyone by being less effective in combat, its really no one's fault. So this infinite equality war needs to end with equal policy. More women are getting degrees than men nowadays anyway. But why do you think so many women go into nursing? that could be argued. Yes, men are more likely to be distracted by attractive females. However, when you say the field should be "made more overwhelmingly female," you reveal your tendency towards moronic sexist reasoning. The study clearly shows that women, whether talking to men OR other women, did more poorly on cognitive tests because they are more emotionally reactive to their environments.. like neurotics. So perhaps they should be banned entirely from all professional careers because they seem incapable of performing in groups... see how ridiculous that sounds, and yet it is STILL more logical than your assertion.
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