>My point is (or rather society's) is that if you're male and have a good start then you're automatically golden, but for those that do not have the same starting opportunities there are simply no other options that are, on the other hand, available to girls from all backgrounds.
This is definitely due to the mentality of "all boys are the same" and "all girls are the same" collectivist mentality that's so popular today. The same thing exists for races, ethnicities, etc. Basically, rather than looking at the background of a person these people tend to blindly make assumptions about exactly who and what they are. I think that this is one of the reasons affirmative action is especially broken -- a poor Asian student is basically doomed for failure whereas a rich Black student is going to have a huge advantage (over both White students at their socioeconomic level and poorer Black students). Rather than fixing the problem that people get unequal opportunities it sort of decides what the opportunities should be for every single person regardless of their actual situation, and that creates really skewed edge cases.
>Whats the deal with gender issues anyway in North America...
I think that the root of this issue is that there are basically two ways to fix inequalities: flattening out the entire system or raising those below up to the same level as everyone else. The technique that has proven most successful was really the type of communist philosophy that was used by lots of these Eastern European states, and that essentially comes out to be leveling the playing system by putting everyone below where they could possibly be. Of course raising everyone up is a possibility, but as a whole it's proven extremely difficult to do.
>Meritocracy should be the paramount consideration in all things, and possibly a small consideration of diversity of ideas and beliefs, but not diversity of skin color or genitalia.
>If all of the most brilliant astrophysicist minds in the world happen to be Japanese women, why shouldn't they be preferred over all others in getting into prestigious colleges to study astrophysics? Why do we care if we have a certain number of European males in that situation?
The fallacy with assumptions like these is that it presupposes a completely level starting point for all demographics/ethnicities.
If everyone had access to the exact same resources throughout the entirety of their developmental lifespan, then yes, no one would rightfully care whether or not $genderNationality was predisposed to be above-average at a given discipline.
That is just not how reality plays out though. More often than not, certain groups are predisposed to excel because they simply won the socioeconomic lottery. To draw on your hypothetical example, if Japanese women happen to dominate the field of astrophysics, is it because they're predisposed to it? Or is it because Ugandan men and Mongolian women simply don't have the same access to the educational systems and resources that give them a decided advantage in preparing for a rigorous, top-10 education in such a discipline?
I think a lot of times people look at efforts like this and try to oversimplify it to "oh look they just arbitrarily think they need more of a certain gender or ethnicity".
It's far more complex than that, and we need to make an honest effort to understand why some groups are underrepresented. I'm willing to be it has less to do with pre-disposition, and more to do with inherent inequality in an adversarial and unevenly distributed socioeconomic system.
>Only recently have we stripped away a lot of the sexism however, providing a successful transition to higher education.
Is it really so difficult to consider that career preferences are gendered? That millions of years of sexually dimorphic specialization could lead to statistically significant differences in interests, abilities, and desired life outcomes?
The recent popularity of blaming any disparity on {$x}ism really bothers me. Culture and genes influence outcomes at least as much as any external force in the modern world. That goes for gendered differences too.
>girls are more likely to do their damn homework
Also ironic that the people who are so eager to fight against sexism/racism have no qualms about generalizing their scapegoats. But it sort if proves my point: you are willing to acknowledge that males may have intrinsic negative traits which could cause them to underperform, but of course acknowledging the obvious implication that such groups may have innate advantages is forbidden; maybe because doing so would undermine the very underpinnings of the modern progressive push for equality of outcome.
Metrics targeting equal representation among all industries/disciplines are fundamentally flawed. There's no reason to expect such parity if people are truly free to choose their own paths, nordic countries are an example, where gender disparity persists despite an egalitarian culture.
> When males outperform females, everyone concludes the system is biased and we should remove the bias.
> When females outperform males, they say things like "This is baffling on the most obvious levels."
You point out hypocrisy, but follow it up with an equal but opposite?
> Maybe the educational system is biased, favoring how girls learn and behave. Is it hard for people to imagine that systems can benefit girls at the expense of boys, or can they only see the opposite?
> If there are biases favoring how girls learn, then they are disadvantaging boys and might consider removing the bias.
Are you saying that these schools unfairly favors girls, but not so when it's the other way around?
Can it not be that this instead proves that systems can be and are biased, in both directions?
> Schools are not performing as well for men as they do for women.
Maybe men are just not inherently less suited to academic success, which is being made more clear now that systematic discrimination in their favor isn’t preventing equal-terms comparisons with women in that domain.
Equality of opportunity doesn't mean equality of outcomes, after all.
When I've spoken to people about this i get a "that's because they dont try as hard" (anecdote not data).
Which has always struck me as odd. When women didn't do well it was because the institutions weren't designed to accommodate them or their educational needs.
I think for young people in school a solution could be some evaluation on how that student learns and put them into a class that caters to that style. One size fits all education doesn't work. It didn't work for young women in the past and it doesnt work young men today.
> If the difference is mainly caused by the genders having different statistical distributions of interests, you're actually using discrimination to fight peoples career choices.
Conversely, if genders don't have a different intrinsic, permanent distributions of interests, then not using some affirmative action to correct the situation amounts to preserving the status quo of known cultural discrimination.
The problem with what you said is that we already have data, the distributions of interest have changed dramatically over time recently, and they are currently different from country to country.
That's pretty clear, hard evidence that the gender differences in occupation choice we have today in the US (for example) are not intrinsic to the genders. So, what does that leave as possible causes?
> Just 16% of girls think a career in engineering is suitable for someone like them, compared to 44% of boys.
Serious question, why is this "bad"? Is absolute equality in everything intrinsically valuable always? It seems progressives have taken the idea of liberal equality under the law and extend it to human nature for no reason other than to achieve a contrived version of a utopia. There are many ways to achieve a good society, and I don't see why differences existing between different groups of people needs to get in the way of that. Furthermore, I don't think this can be top-down engineered by politicians (and in fact attempting it has caused historic catastrophes). Maximizing individual freedom has been the most consistent producer of progress.
> Historically, in feminist, anti-colonial, and anti-racist circles, an inequality of outcome, on the basis of race or sex is the best indicator one would have of an inequality of opportunity.
It's only reasonable to expect equality of outcomes if everything else is the same. If people in different groups still have different parental income levels or cultural norms or diets or religious beliefs or a thousand other things then you wouldn't expect the same outcomes, even if both groups have the same opportunities, because their treatment isn't the only statistical difference between them.
> Those that hold that certain races or sexes are inferior conclude that these inequalities are due to the natural, inherent superiority of men/whites/westerners/etc rather than an inequality of opportunity. It doesn't take being in the so-called "progressive mob" to reject that line of reasoning.
It doesn't take accepting that it's due to inequality of opportunity to reject it either.
If you have two kids and they had the same opportunities but one became an engineer and the other a janitor, it doesn't have to be genetics, it could be that one had parents who encouraged them to become an engineer and the other didn't.
> Does anyone truly believe that this is not the case?
Of course! Especially with the "naturally" part. Biological differences in pertinent cognitive abilities, while they certainly exist, have never been shown to be too big (certainly not big enough to be the major cause for observed differences in representation). It is certainly logical to believe that most observed differences are mostly explained by social causes.
> 'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights.
Not exactly. Equal rights implies legal rights, and gender equality (as well as racial equality) goes beyond that. The idea is that the sexes (and the races) be treated similarly in society, and not have their choices limited -- not just by laws but by hidden biases which translate to social pressure. The desired result is equal power not equal rights (but, as you correctly note, not "sameness"), as rights alone are a necessary but insufficient condition in the change of the power distribution.
> And all the studies done to understand those numbers show the difference in outcome is driven by tze social environment and esucation systems, and not the sexe.
No this is wrong, the studies done has shown that you can make girls do better and boys do worse by priming them. No study done has shown that you can eliminate this gap, just move it towards boys or girls being advantaged.
> You, of course, will ignore that I am sure
No, I read those studies. The stereotype threat paper just show that you can boost girls performance at the cost of boys performance and thus get equal performance at math, not that you can get relative equal performance at math and language. No such paper has shown that you can eliminate the language-math gap between girls and boys, and all data shows that the language-math divide for boys and girls stays the same.
So, all the progressive help to get girls better at math just made girls equal to boys at math, but now girls has an enormous advantage at language because they boosted girls score overall, they didn't make things equal.
> You assume that all men are automatically welcomed into the high ranks of science, which is untrue.
No I don't.
> Yes, maybe more boys got a home computer for Christmas than girls - but how many girls had that home computer on their wish list?
Exactly, I'm glad you see the problem. Everyone unconsciously adopts stereotypes based on how people around them act, and what they see in the world. Children are especially susceptible.
> Entering fields were nobody looks like you: maybe the women from Harvard is more similar to the man from Harvard than another man from community college, though?
Good point, class and upbringing are diversity issues too. You do see a lot of efforts to introduce computing and sciences to low-income schools and neighborhoods, which is great.
> Some studies have some merit, like the response rate according to names, but it is not really enough to chalk it all up to discrimination.
Nothing is 100% discrimination, but where it's a problem, it should be addressed.
> As for the 80%, no it is not random chance - men and women are different.
> My not-validated theory to explain it: maths is hard, let's go shopping! (Translation: women have other options).
Oh, I see. Should have read your whole comment before I started writing a response.
I happen not to agree with them, but leaving that aside they're often that Ok fine, it's a pipeline problem^, but the solution is to address that at every stage, not just the beginning.
(^meaning for example schoolgirls aren't sufficiently interested and encouraged into STEM so university applications are low, so admissions are low, so graduations are low, so job applications are low, so offers are low, so employer gender ratios are low)
> It's true that some gender and racial inequalities have lessened slightly, but many people including myself would say they should be eliminated entirely.
(Just to make the point) The West seems to have recently decided that people are born innately masculine or feminine, which strikes me as a Regressive step from the previous Progressive position that people were unique individuals incidentally sexed purely for the purposes of reproduction (and therefore society should eliminate normative gender expectations and other gender-based discrimination).
How can we eliminate gender discrimination when it has become problematic merely to suggest that sex is real, that sex itself can be a chosen basis for identity, and that some (arguably most) gender-based discrimination is actually sex-based - for example failure to progress in an organisation after taking one or two extended breaks for pregnancy and infant care?
In a world where sexism is still a huge problem, it seems that forcing students into a monosexual environment would only contribute to stunting their social development even more. Compare, for example, the relative incidence of sexism in a heavily male field like programming or philosophy with the amount of sexism in a gender-integrated field like biology.
This idea of separating students by gender to increase performance is really treating them like little test-taking machines: students, by and large, do not choose to take gender-segregated courses unless their parents require it of them. They're human beings. They have a fundamental right to develop in a natural social environment. And, like it or not, schools provide a large proportion of a child's social interaction, which isn't going to change anytime soon.
But most importantly, any improvements are highly controversial and tend to disappear once researchers attempt to correct for confounding.
The most successful school systems in the world, in Northern Europe and East Asia, are all coeducational. There are also a whole lot of interventions that don't require such drastic measures. Cracked of all publications wrote a surprisingly well-researched article on the subject:
> This is a claim that nobody is making. The claim that can be made is that no equivalent effort is made to include men. That is, there is more opportunity for women, but still fewer women ultimately participate.
I think we are at an impasse here. Our definitions of what it means to be denied opportunity in a field are divergent.
I was imagining systemic hurdles to participation. I don't think outreach to a community or even specific scholarships qualify as such.
> If you have had any connection to an HR department at a typical North American company in the 2010s, you would know that programs to specifically recruit men are effectively nonexistent; so it doesn't much matter what the specific measurements for the female recruitment programs are, because no matter how much or how little the investment, it is infinitely more than no investment whatsoever.
I would also posit that focusing on any particular program and claiming since it isn't accessible by all that there is unequal opportunity.
Do you object to the myriad of scholarships that are only available to specific ethnicities?
> Interesting metaphor, but the author could've substituted "women" with "blacks", "hispanics", or any non-white male demographic and the article would've had the same effect.
There is an important distinction between women and blacks and hispanics, which is that the various challenges facing the latter groups are deeper and more varied. If you pick a random black man in the U.S., statistically his parents will be poorer and less educated than if you pick a random white man. So equality for those groups is deeply tied up with persistent economic disparities.
But with women that problem doesn't exist. An equal number of boys and girls are born into rich, well-connected families. Which eliminates a whole class of issues that could cause disparities between males and females, and makes the problem of gender representation in a way "easier" to solve.
>then why try at all? if we believe this goal should be achived then we should keep trying until we get there.
It is good to try, but we already tried a million times. It just does not work. This is like trying to jump from the top of a building and trying to not get hurt when you smash the ground. Reality has a certain shape. Some people try to fight reality based on the fact of "things should be like in my mind" ignoring all psychology, antropology, biology and other aspects behind it saying it is just a cultural thing.
As I said before, it this was just cultural, numbers would not have come back to the starting point. This is a very clear signal that we should not be doing that, but something else. Or probably nothing! Because doing that creates side effects. I am ok with promoting women to study engineering, as my parents did with "what do you like better?", "wanna try this?", for which I and them payed the cost in time and money. But I am totally against arranging public resources systematically so that people that are valuable cannot enter a place because of a stupid quota. That should be, literally, illegal, under the premise that discrimination is forbidden for reasons of gender, race, etc.
> one question is, what goal do we want to achieve. the other question is, how do we achieve it?
The goal is that people should be happy and doing what they want. You do not need a grant to give an engineering to someone bc she is a woman. That is not true. You just need to encourage them. Yet they do this, why?
If some people are not happy by how the world looks in their mind (I think we all find things we do not like), that is not a reason to start public scholarships and stuff like that to do things that clearly do not work, or at least, have not worked before. If I try a business, or something to promote
something positive to others, I am not entitled to make 3rd parties pay the economic and discrimination (they get out of the system bc of quotas). The second thing is even worse than the economic part, which is not good either, anyway, IMHO, bc it violates the right of people to their property/effort.
> if discrimination by men is what keeps women out of engineering, then what we need to do is to get men to change.
Where did you take that men discriminate women in engineering? Please show me the facts. This is so silly. I have worked with women in engineering, for me they are just my mates. This is like saying I am discriminated when I am a man and date bc girls look more at certain aspects of me than what I pay attention from them.
It is just different interests, you cannot do anything against that. And there is nothing bad in it. If it bothers someone, it is that person who has a problem accepting reality. They pretend the one who has the problem is reality. This is highly absurd...
> i don't care about gender balance in engineering or any other profession (except teaching)
Me none. I do not care almost 70% are women in Spain university, as long as there is no incentive to promote girls and leave guys out. If things are like that, there must be a reason, and the reason is not discrimination, at least in Spain. That is silly. The only discrimination I saw is the fact that they are actively bribing girls to study certain degrees, but when a degree is full of women, they do not do the opposite. That said, I am against this kind of briving in either direction. If you want to study something, it is bc you have a natural motivation in the first place: shifting the cost to third parties should be illegal, as I said.
> you are saying that as if it were a contradiction. yes of course we need to analyze the real causes.
The problem is that they do not, at least it looks like no when they run public programmes. What they do is to try to maximize the votes like when a scammer tries to sell you a broken product or service. Their interest is to maximize the benefit for them, not for us. This, unfortunately, is the nature of politics (and of humans, in general): we do what benefits us the most first, and later, yes, we are not super bad and we have a heart there. But we go first. It is like that. There is plenty of literature showing all this...
> but we also need to find an approach to solve the problem.
There is not a problem. It is not a problem that most girls are teachers or most guys are engineers. Look how easy it is: you talk to men and you tell them why they should be teaching. You talk to women and you tell them why they should do engineering (higher wages, blabla). If they do not want to choose it, there is nothing you can do, you have to respect it and not starting an artificial war that just has bad side effects: kicking out people that genuinely wanted to study something bc of a quota, creating an artificial incentive and have people with zero vocation on a job... things like that.
You just make things worse when you do this. Honest opinion: the problem does not exist. Bc "we want more men, women, black, white, whatever" in place X is just a wish of the mind that should not be a real goal just bc of our taste for symmetry. It would be nice? Probably for some. But you are making others pay the cost. Noone is entitled to shift the cost of things they do not pay for to 3rd parties. I will always be against that, and it should be illegal (in theory it is..., at least in Spain, but in practice they do it).
>This is a dangerous line of thinking. If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things.
Does anyone truly believe that this is not the case? People are different, sets of people differ along various, sometimes similar parameters.
>This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality.
It really shouldn't though. Differing from one subset of people should not impact your rights as a human being. 'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights.
This is definitely due to the mentality of "all boys are the same" and "all girls are the same" collectivist mentality that's so popular today. The same thing exists for races, ethnicities, etc. Basically, rather than looking at the background of a person these people tend to blindly make assumptions about exactly who and what they are. I think that this is one of the reasons affirmative action is especially broken -- a poor Asian student is basically doomed for failure whereas a rich Black student is going to have a huge advantage (over both White students at their socioeconomic level and poorer Black students). Rather than fixing the problem that people get unequal opportunities it sort of decides what the opportunities should be for every single person regardless of their actual situation, and that creates really skewed edge cases.
>Whats the deal with gender issues anyway in North America...
I think that the root of this issue is that there are basically two ways to fix inequalities: flattening out the entire system or raising those below up to the same level as everyone else. The technique that has proven most successful was really the type of communist philosophy that was used by lots of these Eastern European states, and that essentially comes out to be leveling the playing system by putting everyone below where they could possibly be. Of course raising everyone up is a possibility, but as a whole it's proven extremely difficult to do.
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