And to be fair, why don't we care about statistics going the opposite direction? For instance, there are way more women than men in the nursing profession, yet no one seems to be up in arms about that.
That's because, to the best of knowledge, the reason that there aren't more men in nursing is not gender discrimination.
As for the discussion on the disparity of the ratio between men and women in the academic sciences, I've seen articles on that and can't help but wonder, is it possible that there are more men than women at the PhD levels in the sciences because more men than women WANT to be there?
Did you actually read the articles or just see them?
In reply to:
In other words, is it clear that the inequality is definitely a bad thing for women?
It's bad for women who want to be scientists; it's bad for women who are never given the chance to find out if they want to be scientists; and it's bad for science, because a lot of talented potential scientists will never enter the profession.
In reply to:
On an anecdotal note, my best calculus professor in college was a full-time mom, a math PhD who clearly had a lot of love for the subject and was able to fit in the adjunct professorship with her other duties and responsibilities. I think it can be done, though clearly it would be difficult to have a full-time academic career along with being a full-time mom.
Your anecdote supports my position more than it does yours. An adjunct professor is a low-ranked, low-salary, non-tenure-track academic position. Being an adjunct professor is generally not the same thing as having a successful academic career.
...the count for MD/PhD level scientists goes Males 7/females 2...
What are the percentages, according to gender, who get MD/PhD level degrees in your field?
I do not know the exact answer to this question, and do not know where to look it up. But limited personal experience makes me fairly certain that it is skewed towards more males, though not quite 7:2, maybe something like 5:3.
But than again, I am looking at new graduate students for the gut feeling of 5:3, and when I am looking at actual working MD/PhDs, I am looking at people who got their MD/PhDs 10-25 years ago. I think it is changing towards more equal spread, in terms of new students just entering the field.
Then, as I'm sure you are well aware, given your own estimates and timelines, it sounds as if the numbers you see in your lab roughly represent the talent pool. If there were more females in the higher levels than the talent pool had to offer for people who got their advanced degrees a while ago, then it would show gender-preferential treatment in favor of females.
No?
Also, of those numbers you estimate... Roughly how many have chosen to be full time moms later on, thus removing themselves from the talent pool? My sister-in-law has an advanced degree in biology, and worked in a lab in academia, got paid little, switched to a pharmecutical company, made lots of $$$, but gave it up 2 years ago to raise her twins.
Some women do this-- the bolded part. A lot more continue to work, but choose to work reduced hours.
But that's the whole point. The system is set up in such a way that you have to put in a lot more than 40 hours (unpaid overtime, of course, because you are on a salary, not an hourly wage) if you want to advance in an academic career. And that is hard to do if you want to have kids and actually spend some waking time with them.
Women are faced with career vs. kids choice. Men usually aren't, or at least not to the extent that women are. While there are certain situations where it makes more sense for the guy to reduce his working hours or stay at home completely to take care of the kids, and I know some men who do this, in most cases the male of the family earns more than the female, and that affects the decision of who stays home or reduces the hours.
Our University is only now (in the past year) introducing things such as emergency sick child care and overnight child care for work-related out-of-town trips. But even so, unless I absolutely cannot miss an important meeting, I am going to opt to stay home with a sick child instead of leaving her with a random stranger...
I'm somewhat ambivalent about this particular issue. Plenty of lifestyles are incompatible with a career in certain professional fields and it seems to me that procreating may be one of them. Certainly a business or institution should make allowances for any lifestyle they feel serves their interests, especially with respect to employee recruitment and retention, but is it reasonable to expect or even mandate it? I'm not sure I think it is. I'm also not entirely sure I think it unjust for some lifestyles to carry with them certain consequences with respect to what jobs the participating individuals may be "entitled" to.
I acknowledge there are some good arguments for enabling or encouraging more even levels of breeding across the socioeconomic spectrum and negative population growth can be problematic. So perhaps the issues raised in your post should be addressed for those reasons, but something about the idea of doing it for the sake of fairness or equality just doesn't sit well with me. I'm not sure I like the idea of people feeling so free and entitled to procreate without regard for circumstance or consequence. Not when doing so comes partially at the expense of individuals like myself who have chosen not to, and not when the means to prevent and negate pregnancy are so advanced and widespread.
I know having our cake and eating it too is an American tradition but sometimes priorities have to be chosen.
...the count for MD/PhD level scientists goes Males 7/females 2...
What are the percentages, according to gender, who get MD/PhD level degrees in your field?
I do not know the exact answer to this question, and do not know where to look it up. But limited personal experience makes me fairly certain that it is skewed towards more males, though not quite 7:2, maybe something like 5:3.
But than again, I am looking at new graduate students for the gut feeling of 5:3, and when I am looking at actual working MD/PhDs, I am looking at people who got their MD/PhDs 10-25 years ago. I think it is changing towards more equal spread, in terms of new students just entering the field.
Then, as I'm sure you are well aware, given your own estimates and timelines, it sounds as if the numbers you see in your lab roughly represent the talent pool. If there were more females in the higher levels than the talent pool had to offer for people who got their advanced degrees a while ago, then it would show gender-preferential treatment in favor of females.
No?
Also, of those numbers you estimate... Roughly how many have chosen to be full time moms later on, thus removing themselves from the talent pool? My sister-in-law has an advanced degree in biology, and worked in a lab in academia, got paid little, switched to a pharmecutical company, made lots of $$$, but gave it up 2 years ago to raise her twins.
Some women do this-- the bolded part. A lot more continue to work, but choose to work reduced hours.
But that's the whole point. The system is set up in such a way that you have to put in a lot more than 40 hours (unpaid overtime, of course, because you are on a salary, not an hourly wage) if you want to advance in an academic career. And that is hard to do if you want to have kids and actually spend some waking time with them.
Women are faced with career vs. kids choice. Men usually aren't, or at least not to the extent that women are. While there are certain situations where it makes more sense for the guy to reduce his working hours or stay at home completely to take care of the kids, and I know some men who do this, in most cases the male of the family earns more than the female, and that affects the decision of who stays home or reduces the hours.
Our University is only now (in the past year) introducing things such as emergency sick child care and overnight child care for work-related out-of-town trips. But even so, unless I absolutely cannot miss an important meeting, I am going to opt to stay home with a sick child instead of leaving her with a random stranger...
I'm somewhat ambivalent about this particular issue. Plenty of lifestyles are incompatible with a career in certain professional fields and it seems to me that procreating may be one of them. Certainly a business or institution should make allowances for any lifestyle they feel serves their interests, especially with respect to employee recruitment and retention, but is it reasonable to expect or even mandate it? I'm not sure I think it is. I'm also not entirely sure I think it unjust for some lifestyles to carry with them certain consequences with respect to what jobs the participating individuals may be "entitled" to.
I agree with you that a lifestyle choice, such as having kids, is a personal choice. But the consequences of such choice are dramatically different for men and women IN THE SAME FIELD of work.
I don't know ANY man who felt that he had to quit academic career in order to stay home with the kids.
I know many women who chose to quit and stay home after having kids. And I don't think many of them are unhappy about this choice, that is not the point. They felt they couldn't do both well under the circumstances, they chose to do one thing, and they moved on with their life.
on the opposite end, some women who wanted to have kids chose not to have them, in order to advance the career.
But as the result of both, the field lost some of the talent pool, or the next generation gene pool had lost some of the talent. And it doesn't make sense.
As a policy, it seems that only two extremes make sense.
Either you say that you are just not interested in having women pursue certain careers, and you won't waste any society resources on them, because they are going to quit anyway. ( AKA the good old days, probably can't go back to them)
Or, you say that you are going to do everything to achieve the point where common lifestyle choices are not affecting one gender much more severely than the other.
notapplicable wrote:
I acknowledge there are some good arguments for enabling or encouraging more even levels of breeding across the socioeconomic spectrum and negative population growth can be problematic. So perhaps the issues raised in your post should be addressed for those reasons, but something about the idea of doing it for the sake of fairness or equality just doesn't sit well with me. I'm not sure I like the idea of people feeling so free and entitled to procreate without regard for circumstance or consequence. Not when doing so comes partially at the expense of individuals like myself who have chosen not to, and not when the means to prevent and negate pregnancy are so advanced and widespread.
I wasn't really thinking of procreation when I started the poll, but I guess you can't talk about gender issues without bringing it into the picture.
As far as the procreation decision, You can't very well equalize the biology, that difference is always going to be there. But beyond just biological details, take a hypothetical family where both partners are on academic track in science, on the same level. Assume that they together decided to have a child. Consequences of that decision for male vs. female who started out being level before the decision to have kids are very different.
But once again, this is not about people who choose to have kids or not. The discrimination against females in many science careers starts well before they have kids, and the pressure continues regardless of their decision to have kids. The women who choose not to have kids at all, still have a harder time advancing in academic career than men do, regardless of whether they have kids, or not.
My girlfriend sent me an article a while back that observed that amongst female academics of all stripes, child-rearing occurred almost uniformly after tenure, whereas amongst men, that tended to only occur if their spouse was also an academic.
By the way, Adam, I've noticed that women in technical fields (I'm a TA for Engineering Physics I & II, so if a field needs physics in any way, I interact with freshman in that field) are terribly rare. Whatever it is that causes it is much earlier even than college. This is strange, to me, because the ratio is only like 3:1 amongst our grad students, while its about 10:1 over all undergrads in engineering, as well as physics, astronomy, chemistry, geology, and a few others. The advance lab I TA for (junior level physics lab) had no women in it last semester.
I, for one, think that the social pressures that keep women out of technical fields and the social pressures that lead to increasingly poor American student performance are interrelated.
Unfortunately, I'd have to agree.
But, a shot of hope...
As part of my work (Nuke) contributing to the communiyt, I have annually judged science fairs where I moved to in a relatively low income county in the South...
Last year, at the middle school, of the 12 students that we selected to move on up to the county level, 11 of them were females... I was impressed, as they knew their stuff, and even enjoyed talking about their stuff... They projected confidence and enthusiasm.
I agree with you that a lifestyle choice, such as having kids, is a personal choice. But the consequences of such choice are dramatically different for men and women...
Correct me if I'm wrong, as I am not a biologist, but doesn't nature have a lot to do with that?
I don't think nature really took into account career equality between men and women as much as what's best for the child when it equipped each of the sexes with different attributes.
As far as I am aware, ALL mammalian offspring are raised primarily by their mothers... Because they 'naturally' are better equipped to raise children? My kids could have suckled me all they wanted, but they would have starved, as I am not 'naturally' built to feed them as is a female. I tended to want to just leave (or kill them) when they cried uncontrollable, where my wife had patience and tollerance beyond what I could have imagined possible.
I also don't think that men, especially young men, have any type of oxytocin bonding with their infants, as almost all women do. Again, nature.
So, to a certain degree, we (humans males) "choose" to be more a part of the lives of our offspring, and of the family unit, as that doesn't really come naturally.
(This post was edited by rrrADAM on Jan 7, 2012, 1:54 AM)
I think society is skewed toward women in lots of ways. Not all, but enough so that I think yall have the advantage overall.
For example, my climbing gym is open from 5-10pm Mon-Fri. Mondays are "Ladies Nights" and the gym is closed to those with a Y chromosome for the entire 5 hours. Membership fees for males/females are the same. WTF?
I'm 110% for gender equality, but it's a two-way street.
Woeful inequality in wages, opportunities, and treatment in the workplace, but you drink free on Tuesdays and they close the gym to men for 5 hours a week.
Clearly, the men are the ones being oppressed here.
I agree with you that a lifestyle choice, such as having kids, is a personal choice. But the consequences of such choice are dramatically different for men and women...
Correct me if I'm wrong, as I am not a biologist, but doesn't nature have a lot to do with that?
I don't think nature really took into account career equality between men and women as much as what's best for the child when it equipped each of the sexes with different attributes.
As far as I am aware, ALL mammalian offspring are raised primarily by their mothers... Because they 'naturally' are better equipped to raise children? My kids could have suckled me all they wanted, but they would have starved, as I am not 'naturally' built to feed them as is a female. I tended to want to just leave (or kill them) when they cried uncontrollable, where my wife had patience and tollerance beyond what I could have imagined possible.
I also don't think that men, especially young men, have any type of oxytocin bonding with their infants, as almost all women do. Again, nature.
So, to a certain degree, we (humans males) "choose" to be more a part of the lives of our offspring, and of the family unit, as that doesn't really come naturally.
I agree to a large extent --and I even said above, that you can't equalize biology, that difference is always going to be there.
But human society is not really governed by rules of biology, is it? We keep people alive who would have died without medical intervention, we create living environment where human animals could never survive without massive technological intervention.
Yet when it comes to gender issues, the biology is dragged out as the primary reason for everything.
But this still stands:
lena_chita wrote:
But once again, this is not about people who choose to have kids or not. The discrimination against females in many science careers starts well before they have kids, and the pressure continues regardless of their decision to have kids. The women who choose not to have kids at all, still have a harder time advancing in academic career than men do, regardless of whether they have kids, or not.
What does the bolded part have to do with biology?
Woeful inequality in wages, opportunities, and treatment in the workplace, but you drink free on Tuesdays and they close the gym to men for 5 hours a week.
Clearly, the men are the ones being oppressed here.
Woeful inequality in wages, opportunities, and treatment in the workplace, but you drink free on Tuesdays and they close the gym to men for 5 hours a week.
Clearly, the men are the ones being oppressed here.
Although additional research in this area is clearly needed, this study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.
The US society still maintains a social expectation that the woman is the primary caregiver to both the young and the old. Until there is the assumption that a woman is no more or no less caring than a man, this gap will continue. We have lots of dumb social expectations that we place on genders (man hunter, woman as gatherer, man as sexual initiator, woman as nurturer, etc.) that we justify based on pseudo anthropology.
We have successfully eliminated most of the most egregious gender biases in our culture, especially those that related to women being inferior to men (although the counter position – that women are superior is subtlety present in many assumptions). However, we are still stuck with separating basic biology and early socialization (e.g. the ratio of boys to girls treated for ADD) and we still have bias based on religions.
It's probably just that I live in a sheltered environment, but my institute has close to a 50:50 gender ratio at all levels of seniority. I've seen my (female) mentor's salary, and cry myself to sleep over it sometimes. I've also seen her husband's salary - he probably cries himself to sleep too.
It's probably just that I live in a sheltered environment, but my institute has close to a 50:50 gender ratio at all levels of seniority. I've seen my (female) mentor's salary, and cry myself to sleep over it sometimes. I've also seen her husband's salary - he probably cries himself to sleep too.
Somewhere in that quote there lurks a Woody Allen joke about living in an institution, but I can't quite put my finger on it.
Jay
(This post was edited by jt512 on Jan 11, 2012, 7:52 AM)
It's probably just that I live in a sheltered environment, but my institute has close to a 50:50 gender ratio at all levels of seniority. I've seen my (female) mentor's salary, and cry myself to sleep over it sometimes. I've also seen her husband's salary - he probably cries himself to sleep too.
Somewhere in that quote there lurks a Woody Allen joke about living in an institution, but I can't quite put my finger on it.
Jay
I swear, with the quality of the students coming through lately, it feels like a sheltered workshop sometimes.
I agree with you that a lifestyle choice, such as having kids, is a personal choice. But the consequences of such choice are dramatically different for men and women...
Correct me if I'm wrong, as I am not a biologist, but doesn't nature have a lot to do with that?
I don't think nature really took into account career equality between men and women as much as what's best for the child when it equipped each of the sexes with different attributes.
As far as I am aware, ALL mammalian offspring are raised primarily by their mothers... Because they 'naturally' are better equipped to raise children? My kids could have suckled me all they wanted, but they would have starved, as I am not 'naturally' built to feed them as is a female. I tended to want to just leave (or kill them) when they cried uncontrollable, where my wife had patience and tollerance beyond what I could have imagined possible.
I also don't think that men, especially young men, have any type of oxytocin bonding with their infants, as almost all women do. Again, nature.
So, to a certain degree, we (humans males) "choose" to be more a part of the lives of our offspring, and of the family unit, as that doesn't really come naturally.
I agree that women are naturally different than men. But, I think what may have contributed to inequality is that the strengths women have shown, instead of being seen as a positive has historically been seen as a negative. The ability to care for another human being, was seen as a weakness. "Women belong in the kitchen and with the kids and men should make the money," rather than realizing how those traits can contribute to society, not to mention recognizing their other strengths.
For those of you who are mentioning advantages that women have like "Ladies nights" and "Free drinks", Give me a break.
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