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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 son and I caught him and friends gravitating to Andrew Tate like content. He's so young, and he already feels that society is hostile against him.
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 that being a woman doesn't come with its own hazards, like a higher risk of being sexually assaulted.
But it's an objective, quantitative fact that there are way more men in awful life circumstances than there are women. Frankly in 2023 if a woman is strutting around an American college campus with a shirt that says "The future is female," she's a member of the ruling class who's rubbing it in.
In fact men so overwhelmingly dominate the worst outcomes in our society that I would go as far as to say that we cannot fix its worst injustices until we recognize many of them are uniquely male problems. Police brutality will remain permanently unsolved. Our world-leading incarceration rate will remain permanently unsolved.
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.
> 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.
I directionally agree with you but there's definitely more nuance when you dig into any individual issue. For example, there are more male suicides because men use more effective methods, and more male prisoners because men are more violent. (I don't say that as a knock on men, either; it's a reflection of the biology-driven distribution of behavioral tendencies that each sex has evolved.)
>I have a son and I caught him and friends gravitating to Andrew Tate like content. He's so young, and he already feels that society is hostile against him.
Society is hostile against him. Anti-male prejudice is absolutely everywhere. Andrew Tate is a get-rich-quick grifter and possibly a criminal, but he’s right about some things.
Maybe but his family isn't.
I'm trying my best to protect him, which is why it was so shocking when I checked his internet usage.
https://www.payscale.com/research-and-insights/gender-pay-ga...
Yes, the anti-male prejudice is just awful. /s
Well, your son has inherited your perspicacity, so be thankful for that. He's right: society is hostile to him. He's not even twenty. Twenty years ago, we had shirts like "Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them." Not long after, Obama was saying that we need more women in college ... despite them being fifty-five percent of the enrolled. And so on and so forth. Your son is only picking up his environment.
If you want him to avoid people like Andrew Tate, provide some other positive male role model for him. Don't seem to be a lot around. Be honest with him: "Yes, you picked this up. Yes, it's true. Yes, I may have benefited from this. No, it's not fair. No, it isn't going to go away any time soon. No, I don't think it is a good idea either. I'm sorry."
You'll have to prepare him against people who will say dumb things like "it only feels like oppression because they had it so good." Your child isn't a collective they, he's an individual, he never experienced it being Great to Be a Guy. The people who want to tell him that have visions of some elderly ass-pinching stereotype from Mad Men who is finally getting his comeuppance, not your child ... but they're pretty okay with your kid taking the hit by proxy. They're pretty okay with it, they're not going to lose any sleep at night. They'll tell you this to your face if you ask. You're going to have to warn him about the world he is entering.
> He's so young, and he already feels that society is hostile against him.
This really shouldn't be surprising. It's incredibly tough when from the moment you enter the education stream, every single chip is stacked against you, you are constantly blamed for problems you had no hand in, and are then bombarded with fundamental questions about your identity such as if you're sure you're even a boy.
If you make it to the age where you realize that the adults are very wrong and your teachers can have specific biases against you, then you can make it. But until that point, there's a lot of confusing suffering to survive through.
Ending inequality requires asymmetric behavior. Achieving equality will feel like oppression to those used to having a good deal. Society isn't generally hostile against your son; its hostility is to patriarchy, something Andrew Tate seeks to restore and extend.
As a guy, I'm perfectly fine with things like "the future is female" for the same reason I'm fine with things like "gay pride" and "black pride" even though I'm straight and white. I recognize the historic inequality. As any good American should, I respect struggles for freedom and celebrate the successes of people seeking equality. I have no reason to think that any of those movements, no matter how successful they are, will shift into the same sort of oppression my fellow straight, white men have been perpetrating for centuries and that I benefited from.
I get why your son got sucked in, and I feel for both you and him. He's having to make choices about his identity in a time when all sorts of things in flux. But you can help him understand that society is not hostile to him personally, and that any hostility he is seeing is mainly a reaction to past harm. That he gets to make choices about what parts of the old world get sustained or get left behind. And that as long as he's working for what's right, he doesn't have to worry too much if people's trauma leads them to mistake him as being part of something wrong.
This might be my management role leaking, but in my experience you are being far too rational.
Humans are emotional beings first and foremost, then rational.
I do think society is hostile to him, but I don't want him to become a reactionary, or a culture warrior.
I'm his mother, I want him to be happy. I won't sacrifice my son to some abstract societal goal no matter how noble it might seem.
This is why I cannot agree with your idea of ending inequality requires asymmetric behavior. It is wrong to rationalize away all the collateral damage that happens to living human beings under the guise of statistics and history.
> Ending inequality requires asymmetric behavior.
You lost me here. If you were serious about fairness, you would propose reparations for past harm, and an equal system going forward. It's absurd to try to replace one unequal system with another unequal system.
I hope you're young because this level of naivety in an older person would be very concerning. As others have pointed out, the real world does not work based on rationality, and assuming it does will lead to some very bad decisions.
> he doesn't have to worry too much if people's trauma leads them to mistake him as being part of something wrong.
We're not talking about mature adults capable of reasoning and addressing historical and generational nuance. Children are internalizing the idea that they're bad by virtue of being born a certain way and that's terrible. It's not something they can "not worry too much about". Inflicting pain and trauma on children who had nothing to do with the past in the name of progress is stupid.
"Ending inequality requires asymmetric behavior."
2 wrongs make it right?
"asymmetric behavior" is just a way to whitewash retribution.
I feel you hold a different view then most women. Very different. In fact your views can get you attacked by other women and a few men who completely buy into the whole mainstream story. It's ok for a woman to say what you say in a forum of mostly men, because as a woman you have more credibility than men themselves to speak out against extremist feminist policies.
Please answer honestly. If you never had a son, would you view things the same way? Would you have viewed things the same way when you were younger, before you had a son?
If I never had a son, I would have never understood what boys go through.
It's so fundamentally different than girls, it's hard to believe.
Watching a part of you grow up, learn, smile at you, its just something beyond what any words can describe. You want to protect them. You watch them closely. You slowly realize just how different your son is from yourself and your daughter. I still remember the first day he got a sports injury, and was trying so hard to not cry in front of his friends.
Motherhood changed my life and opened my eyes a lot more.
So do something about it? Certainly no male can advocate for simple merit based hiring in academia anymore.
As Jordan Peterson has been championing, equality of outcome is not the same as equality. Better candidates, more qualified students are being passed up because they are male, white, pick your stereotype of privilege here. It’s a serious societal problem leading to anger and extremism.
This ^^^
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 women will stay far away.
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 occurring in reality of many fortune 500 companies right now with recruiters, managers, directors, and executives.
It’s funny, for men to think society is against them, when in reality they define society.
As a straight white male, there are very few rooms, very few jobs, very few situations where I don’t have absolute confidence that I belong there. Is it so bad to think everybody should feel that way?
Your son will be fine.
You sure have a lot of assumptions there.
Generational changes are occurring, he won't live the life you or I did.
Also my son isn't white.
What are your thoughts on the study GP linked to?
No one group defines society. It's fair to say men hold a disproportionate amount of power, and its admirable to acknowledge your own privilege as you are doing here, but it's critical to not start believing that the cultural narrative du jour is somehow the ground truth. The minute we do this, we feed political polarization between genuinely good people, and open the door for liars and sociopaths to manipulate us like herd animals to their own ends.
As a male engineer, whose grandmother got PhD in Physics around 1960 when overall PhDs were more strict than today, and especially for women, I think it is both bad when women are being held back “because they should stay at home and raise a family”, and when we want to right a historic wrong by having double standards so we could hire more women in STEM roles. We need meritocracy.
I get that, and I have been there before. But how do you fairly judge true merit in an oppressive world? A lot of the typical ways just support or amplify existing biases. That's not to say it's impossible, but an awful lot of people crying "meritocracy" do so in defense of conspicuously unexamined hiring practices.
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.
We are living in the matriarchy now, and it will only increase in the future.
Women now get 60% of all degrees, and I've read somewhere that projections are that they will get 70-75% in the next 10-15 years.
The only reason men are still most of the Fortune 500 CEOs, president of the USA, and other positions of power is because of legacy reasons - men who graduated 30 or 40 years ago and were in the workforce for a long time.
With fewer men graduating from university, now and even more in the future, it's logical that women will take over all forms of power in society in the medium-term future - starting now but snowballing faster and faster until in 25 years, it will be all females ruling most of society. Sure there still will be powerful men, but I'm talking about society as a whole.
Title IX started in 1972 to make an equal academic playing field for women. At that time, in 1972, the diparity between men and women was men had 12% more of university graduates. Now women are 20% more and rising.
We are living in the matriarchy but it's like that "he who must not be named" kind of thing. If you say that we live in a matriarchy, it is instant banishment from the kingdom in the form of instantly being labeled as a misogynist or incel, just for saying we live in the matriarchy.
In physics at least, it's been my experience that even though the percentage of women physics professors is low, almost every one is an above-average researcher. They are certainly harder working on average. Meanwhile, there will be several men in the department who have just coasted. This isn't among new profs, but among those who have been around long enough that they definitely experienced gender discrimination in hiring. I don't think this is a biological thing, just an interesting side effect of strong gender discrimination, where the women who make it in have to be exceptional to do so.
This is undoubtedly true for almost all women who have advanced significantly in any field up until about a decade ago.
Since then however, things have turned so sharply it’s almost the opposite now.
Some people think it’s fine, they are so mad at the men of the 1950s that they’re perfectly willing to inflict their revenge on the young men of today.
Then everyone is surprised when young men start listening to political operatives that don’t talk to them like they’re the scum of the universe.
I’m just very grateful I was hired at my current position back in the early 2010s. Before things became… different.
Let’s just say I don’t see many white men in the interview loop these days.
This isn’t particularly surprising to me. I’m a scientist, and in my field, women have outnumbered men in my undergraduate and graduate programs, and also in every lab I’ve worked in as a professional.
The hard sciences haven’t had the gender imbalance currently seen in engineering and tech jobs for decades now.
I dont understand, I am constantly told that Stem is patriarchal and full of white supremacist's. Its almost as if we have been lied to.
Unless the majority of academy is female, I would guess that you probably have a lower number of women running and a lot of pressure to get more women into these positions. This is what happens when you favor equality of outcome vs equality of opportunity.
How is this an "accomplishment for gender equity." Isn't this still inequity? I think the fact that the writer couldn't perceive how this is still, logically speaking, "inequity" speaks to the bias at play in this area.
But then again is true equity even possible? Is it a logical possibility given the biological differences between men and women? Perhaps it's a scientific fact that women are superior to men in science that's why we see this difference.
There is also more women attending universities then men. This also speaks to the possibility of greater intellectual superiority in women than in men.
What about the fact that virtually all of science, technology and modern infrastructure was created by men? It is clear from any layman that the frameworks and foundation of advanced civilization were built (with some exceptions) exclusively by men. This of course does not obviously speak to any intellectual differences between men or women but speaks more to oppression. Before modern movements toward gender equality, men regularly oppressed women making it impossible for women to display their superior intellect.
But is this the real narrative? Or is equality actually real? This is a controversial opinion but I think men are in fact much stupider then women and equality is a made up fantasy.
This is the real question everyone is tip-toeing around. At the end of the day how are men and women different in raw terms of absolute performance and intelligence? And are the elections a reflection of raw performance OR not?
Greater intellectual superiority because of the % entering college?
College is a status symbol and women are buying into it more than males. It shows men are more independent thinkers and feel confident they can get along without a degree. It also because entry level jobs in fields women are interested in require college where men have more options in the trades.
As women are dominating college entry over men a college degrees is less a proxy for intelligence and more for a middle class status symbol.
As companies fight over the pools of women grads the smart companies are picking up the males who are being excluded and reaping the rewards
>College is a status symbol and women are buying into it more than males.
Isn't this a sexist statement? You're saying that women are more into superficial status symbols than males. This clearly isn't true and is sexist.
What isn't sexist at all is to say women are, from a biological perspective, intellectually superior to men. This is the only logical and scientific conclusion when you look at everything from an analytical perspective.
Think about it. Any other formulation of what's going on inevitably leads to a sexist conclusion which automatically, by fundamental logic, precludes it from consideration.
Do you have anything at all to back that up? It makes some sense as a story I suppose.
I wonder if for many righting a historic wrong ends up spilling into retribution territory, where it feels justified to inflict vengeance upon one demographic group for a past injustice.
Look at wpietri in this thread, old man got his stuff, and is now fine with enacting retribution on all young men.
He calls it "asymmetrical behavior" to whitewash the concept.
"This also speaks to the possibility of greater intellectual superiority in women than in men"
Or the ability to do diligent repeating work and sit in a chair.
People are OK with injustice unless it affects them personally.
>How is this an "accomplishment for gender equity". Isn't this still inequity? I think the fact that the writer couldn't perceive how this is still, logically speaking, "inequity" speaks to the bias at play in this area.
There are various definition of equity and equality: equality of outcomes, of opportunities etc...
If you have a person who has been in chains for ten years and one who has been training daily compete in a race is it really surprising that they won't perform equally?
> Perhaps it's a scientific fact that women are superior to men in science
The only valid broad generalization is that there are no valid broad generalizations.
My take? I think we men are used to having things handed to us, and women in our society are used to having to try hard, and with more or less equal opportunity, they're kicking ass.
The headline has lost some nuance:
> The paper finds that since 2019, female researchers have comprised around 40% of new members in both prestigious academies1. Historically, across disciplines in each academy, there have been substantially fewer female researchers than male ones. Before the 1980s, female members comprised less than 10% of total academy membership across all scientific fields.
So, if you choose a random person getting admitted, they'll probably be a man.
They claim that if you equalise for "achievement" then woman are overrepresented. Which you can interpret as "woman are inferior, even if we give them an advantage they're still not good enough" or "woman are broadly equal to men, but are held back by the predominance of men in science (and society) and consequent sexism"