“The myth about women in science” reports on an interesting CNN-conducted experiment. Underneath a photo gallery of mostly childless and/or divorced female scientists and engineers (plus the beyond-awesome Sara Seager, married mother of two!), the article describes how universities actually do what they say they do: discriminate against white/Asian men in favor of hiring female professors in scientific and technical fields. The authors created fictional candidates for academic jobs and got real-world academics to rank them.
In addition to the bias against men the study shows that university employees are thoughtful about avoiding hiring workers whose productivity has been impaired by being on the losing side in the American divorce, custody, and child support system:
When we looked at the effects of lifestyles on hiring, some traditional values emerged. In a competition between a married father with a stay-at-home spouse and an equivalently qualified divorced mother of two preschoolers, female faculty members preferred 4-to-1 to hire the divorced mother, but men felt the opposite. (Note, however, that both genders preferred a divorced mother when she competed against a divorced father.)
(emphasis added) U.S. Census data show that women are more than 90 percent likely to get the children and, with them, the house and the cash going forward. The victorious parent in our winner-take-all system will likely be in a better mood and more productive than the defeated parent. (Also, women are more likely to sue their husbands than vice versa (2.57:1 ratio in the courthouse we surveyed in Massachusetts; closer to a 2:1 ratio elsewhere in the nation), so the divorced woman is, on average, someone who initiated a lawsuit and got what she wanted rather than someone who was sued and lost whatever it was that the plaintiff sought. Why hire a passive loser when you can hire an active winner?)
The article is also interesting because it shows how little faith one should put in what a university professor says:
The prevailing wisdom is that sexist hiring in academic science roadblocks women’s careers before they even start. The American Association of University Professors and blue-ribbon commissions attest to this. An influential report by the National Academy of Sciences in 2006 concluded that “on the average, people are less likely to hire a woman than a man with identical qualifications,”
In other words, people who are paid because they are supposedly wiser-than-average are unaware of basic facts in their own workplace: “the facts tell a different story. National hiring audits, some dating back to the 1980s, reveal that female scientists have had a significantly higher chance of being interviewed and hired than men.”
Maybe this contributes to public skepticism regarding statements by academics regarding the temperature of the Earth 100 years from now. The same eggheads are confidently mistaken about what is going on right in their own building.
Related:
Nice data, but your opponents are openly disdainful of “facts” and “truth”. The following article generated discussion today on Hacker News:
https://medium.com/@aristoNYC/social-justice-bullies-the-authoritarianism-of-millennial-social-justice-6bdb5ad3c9d3
Link to the discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9394089
Some of the top comments:
“Be very careful about how you interact with these people, the mere act of following a person on Twitter who disagrees with them can land you up on a list that makes you unemployable. They claim to be feminists, and because that is a real issue today people believe them by default; without ever questioning whether they are the extremists in ways that the article explains.”
“There’s a cadre of people who troll this site for crimethink, then screencap it and post it to Twitter under the hashtag #hnwatch. If you have your name or company in your profile, be careful about posting here too.”
Because most faculty members in STEM fields are still male, in order to achieve a 50/50 balance, most academic hiring in those depts. will have to be female for the next couple of decades (and if the female is a minority, so much the better). So if you are a white male interested in pursuing an academic career in STEM in the near future, fuggedaboutit.
“Affirmative action” ignores the fact that hiring, college enrollment, etc. is a zero sum game. In place of past discrimination against one group, you are merely substituting discrimination against a DIFFERENT group. No,no, the advocates say, we are not discriminating AGAINST anyone, we are just discriminating IN FAVOR of a formerly oppressed group. They completely miss (or maybe they don’t – see below) that what they are saying is logically impossible. For leftists, good intentions are more important than facts and logic.
At some point, you have to wonder whether these people (at least those at the top) are aware of their hypocrisy and are cynically spouting untruths that they think that they can get away with. Yesterday, I saw a campaign commercial for the next mayor of Philadelphia. The commercial consisted of various supposed “voters” saying things along the line of ” Candidate X will represent ALL the citizens of Philadelphia.” You might have thought that the supposed voters shown would have therefore been a gorgeous rainbow of various races of voters to illustrate the concept, but no, every single endorser was African-American (as is the candidate). So I can only conclude that there was a mixed message intended – the words said one thing, but the pictures were intended as code to mean something quite different – it was really an Animal Farm message intended to appeal to his base . What was REALLY being conveyed was “Candidate X will represent all the citizens equally, but some a little more equally than the others.”
Izzie L., when affirmative actions and other “positive discrimination” programs were conceived and sold in the 1960s, it was in a period of incredible and unhistorically large economic growth, which we haven’t seen again. So the argument could be and was made that these programs were not zero sum, in the future we know we will need more scientists, so the “more scientists” will come from women and minorities without displacing the male white scientists. We know that the actual amount of economic growth made this a zero sum game after all.
Even at the time, it was possible to predict that the exploding population growth would more than cancel out the effect of economic growth as far as the labor market was concerned (I have 70s era books quoting ILO reports that did exactly this).
No one I know will believe me when I say that in the US labor market since roughly about the time I entered it (the early 90s), it has been easier for a woman to get at least an entry level job than a man, but I keep on seeing data that supports my observation.
On climate change, Scott Adams had an article out recently that said you get “denialsm” because scientists have thoroughly blown their credibility on other matters -he cited nutrition. I think the underlying data and just common sense about how the industrial economy processes raw materials supports something like climate change happening, but maybe they are making up the underlying data.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/04/08/1418878112.long
National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track.