Great article! I really liked the author's second point about science being practically a religion. As a scientist myself, I'm acutely aware that we are all incredibly biased - I believe in a lot of things I don't have much evidence for, and I'm against some theories that have a lot of evidence behind them. And I'm not alone, either. Most of the scientists I know are like this as well. I mean, most of the time we do experiments, it's because we suspect something is true, so we go out and investigate it. And that's fine! Ideas have to come from somewhere, and if it weren't for intuitions a lot less science would get done. But we need to recognize it and stop pretending like we're the ultimate voice of objectivity.
I'd say that last bit really depends on where you live. In a lot of the US there's a huge problem with scientific literacy. We've got people who don't believe in global warming. We've got people who don't believe in evolution or dinosaurs. Science isn't perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than the alternative. Regardless of how successful they are, scientists most certainly are involved in the pursuit of knowledge. As far as all this intense focus on demographic information goes, I don't think it tells us much. Equality of opportunity is a great thing to aspire to, but insisting on equal outcomes is ridiculous. Just because women tend toward some fields while men trend toward others does not mean they're being oppressed. Ignoring the agency of women in their career choices is a bit sexist if you ask me. It's certainly not respectful or helpful.
I'm kind of unorthodox here in that I think what some would deem "equality of outcome" in certain general metrics is actually far more important than "equality of opportunity". If women (or indeed any class of people with particular shared interests), lack sufficient social, political, and economic leverage in society as a whole, then they won't be able to defend themselves from the attempts of men to exploit, control, or oppress them. It's like the balance of power with nation states, except applied to social classes. Rather than calling this equality of opportunity or equality of outcome (which is a distinction that really doesn't make much sense if you accept that human behavior is deterministic), it makes more sense to call this "equality of power relations" or "relational equality" for short. But I agree that perfect gender parity in STEM isn't strictly necessary for relational equality to exist, and that feminist activists might be obsessing over it too much. We just shouldn't have open sexist discrimination and bullying happening in laboratories and startups the way it currently is.Equality of opportunity is a great thing to aspire to, but insisting on equal outcomes is ridiculous. Just because women tend toward some fields while men trend toward others does not mean they're being oppressed.
Except that if you insist on equality of outcome you ignore the differences between individuals. There's a profound lack of respect for individual decision making on the part of these people who are obsessing over demographics. There's no point, with focus on equality of outcome, that you can ever know things are better. People could be doing exactly what they want and if it's not all perfectly balanced with demographic information we'd still have "a problem". To me people doing what they want is not a problem. To me the major difference is in how these things are being measured. I don't see people measuring 'relational equality', and frankly I'm not really sure what that is. I do see people constantly measuring equality of outcomes. It's all about what percentage of what group is what demographic. How would you measure relational equality? But yeah, Tim Hunt is an old dude who still has some sexist ideas. We should certainly try to get away from that. I don't think that we should be encouraging a culture in which people need to resign over differences of opinion either though.
How would you measure the balance of power between states? People don't really bother to, because it isn't necessary to. What matters in the end is: Do women as a class have sufficient means at their disposal to keep the threat of exploitation at bay without having to depend on the goodwill of men? Also, "equality of outcome/opportunity" is a nonsensical distinction. If it is true that we live in a deterministic universe, then equal opportunity must necessarily lead to equal outcome. If not, then there are unequal differences from the very beginning, whether environmental, biological, or both, that can potentially be corrected through social policy or medicine.How would you measure relational equality?
Not at all. Everyone isn't the same. We all have different motivations, different beliefs and desires, different skills and preferences. There's no single best job or single best life. The things that make you happy aren't necessarily the things that make me happy. It's a very important distinction. Striving for equality of opportunity means trying to give everyone the same chance, striving for equality of outcome means trying to force people to be the same regardless of what differences they might possess. It doesn't respect individual agency or diversity of motivation and priorities.If it is true that we live in a deterministic universe, then equal opportunity must necessarily lead to equal outcome.
I understand that people's freedom and diversity ought not to be infringed on without compelling reason. But what if some of these differences are such that within our social system they allow one group of people to lord over others, thus denying the oppressed full agency? Is that not a compelling reason to, at the very least, change the social system to be more fair, or if that proves unwise, to eradicate the differences?We all have different motivations, different beliefs and desires, different skills and preferences.
I'd say that for the most part we have changed the social system to be more fair. We've got more women in college than men, but there's still a tendency to prefer flexibility and shorter hours. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm not into working overtime either. The thing is though, you've got to look at what you're measuring and what that tells you. If all you're measuring is how many people of what demographic are in which jobs, that doesn't tell you why. Personally, I don't think it's terribly healthy to focus on demographic information or to attribute the actions or status of one individual to others simply because they share some fairly unimportant traits. Especially when the difference is between two populations who universally show a statistical divergence of opinion and behavior. Binary gender may not be a cultural universal, but gender as a whole most certainly is. If women tend not to be as interested in working 60 hours a week as men, why should we need them to? How is that oppressing their full agency? There are women who do choose to take these work intensive career paths who do incredibly well. Women are overrepresented in college at this point. At what point can we stop denying women the benefit of their own decision making? Would it be better to have inequality of opportunity in order to foster equality of outcome? Because if women, demographically, are, say, just always going to be statistically less likely to go into STEM than men, wouldn't we have to destabilize equality of opportunity to achieve anything like equality of outcome? Why should it matter what boxes you check on the census? If there's clear discrimination going on, such as teachers telling girls they shouldn't go into math and science, that's definitely something we should address, but that doesn't justify leaping to the assumption that all fields should have a 50/50 gender split or there's sexism afoot.
Yes, we have, but clearly not enough. Example: A huge part of the overall wage gap can be attributed to the fact that most workplaces simply aren't flexible enough to accommodate women who become pregnant and have to take care of a young child for a few years. Hence there is currently a huge opportunity cost between career success and having a family. So, the mass of women who choose their career end up driving down the fertility rate, and the other mass of women who do choose to have a few children end up driving up the gender wage gap at the same time. The obvious solution to both these problems is to get the state to extensively subsidize childcare and pay for it with increased taxes, like they do in France. But of course in America they're idiotically resistant to anything that makes sense. Gendered oppression is often not about sexism at all; a lot of the time there's just some shitty economic or political policy behind it. Because it denies them wealth and promotions, putting them in an inferior economic and social position that leaves them weak when it comes to representing their collective interests (like including women's reproductive health in company healthcare packages, or making sure they aren't sexually harassed) and defending their collective rights (perhaps if we had a few more female billionaires to lobby Congress, they wouldn't have dismantled abortion access across the South). Again, if we were talking about two rival nations, nobody would bat an eye at the suggestion that an equal balance of power ought to be maintained between them to deter any threat of invasion. But when it comes to social classes at odds within those nations, suddenly the more powerful party objects to any such notion that everyone ought to have sufficient leverage to protect themselves against exploitation.I'd say that for the most part we have changed the social system to be more fair.
If women tend not to be as interested in working 60 hours a week as men, why should we need them to? How is that oppressing their full agency?
I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree here. I don't see any problem with people making choices in their lives and I think its sexist and controlling to deny women's agency. I also strongly disagree that men and women can be construed as cohesive parties. I don't see much headway being made in this direction. I have to say, though it's nice to be able to have conversations like this, intractable as our positions may become, without all the hostility I'm used to seeing surrounding this sort of thing. :D
Arguably, reforming our labor laws and subsidizing childcare would increase women's agency and the choices that women can make in their lives by removing the heavy opportunity cost between career and family. And it is estimated to be a cause of a large portion of the overall gender wage gap as well. If anything, we should both be able to agree that this is a good idea, even if our political frameworks are completely different! Ikr? Hubski is amazing.I have to say, though it's nice to be able to have conversations like this, intractable as our positions may become, without all the hostility I'm used to seeing surrounding this sort of thing.
Personally, I don't see why breeding specifically should be subsidized above and beyond other aspirations. Loads of people are stuck in jobs that aren't perfect for them without the ability to spend their time on the things they'd rather do without sacrificing some aspect of their position, whether that be raising a family, taking a trip, creating art, whatever. The reality is that there is a legitimate opportunity cost between career and basically any other aspiration. Personally, I think that if we can, as a society, we should try to allow people to do the things they really want to do. I'm a supporter of universal basic income. I think that if people's basic needs are taken care of they'll generally apply themselves to more worthwhile things than they would to earn a paycheck, because the weight of the fear of failure is removed. I can see how applying this idea to women specifically would be good in terms of allowing women more flexibility in the workplace, something they show a strong preference for, but where does that leave everyone else? What about women who want to be artists, rather than mothers? Or men who want to climb Mt Everest? Conversely, what about those people who do work 60 hours a week every week for 40 years or whatever? Shouldn't they get a significant leg up over the rest of us who, quite rationally, can't be bothered with that sort of insane grind? I'm just not sure why having children is more important than other aspirations or, for that matter, why child-rearing ought to be specific to women. At the same time I do see that more women seem to choose to spend more of their time on their children than men, and I really don't see a problem with that. Don't we have maternity leave in most of the US at this point anyway? To what point do we further extend accommodations? How, again, are we measuring success? Are we measuring success in a way that distinguishes choice from compulsion or that muddies the two and leaves us to guess what's what? That, to me, is really what makes all the difference. Do we know what's going on with people, or are we filtering vague information through an ideological lens to get a specific answer that we're trained to search for? We should always try to eliminate bias, I'd say.
Honestly, it's because I'm working under the assumption that childcare is necessary labor to sustain the population and thus maintain society. But if you believe that most jobs are going to be automated away in the future, and so less people would be a better thing, and childcare is a non-essential choice, I can see where you're coming from. Indeed, a basic income would be liberating for everyone, including women. But I'm still confused by your lack of concern about the lack of leverage that women have relative to men and the real indignities that it enables. Again, back to the geopolitical analogy: Would you advise a country to not maintain a standing army just because taxes infringe a bit on free choice? How, then, will the country defend itself from the threat of external aggression or secure its state interests against its competitors? Why is it any different when it comes to competition between classes? One last thing, we do have some maternity leave in the US, but it's atrocious compared to what exists in almost every other country.I'm just not sure why having children is more important than other aspirations or, for that matter, why child-rearing ought to be specific to women.
Oh, I definitely agree! Scientific illiteracy is rampant, and definitely not a good thing. But scientists being circle-jerking elitists is not cool and ignores much of what science is about. I do have to say that I very much disagree with your second point, though. There's a lot of research that suggests girls are discouraged from STEM fields from a very young age, starting as early as elementary school. Being subtly discouraged for your whole life means that you're less likely to want to go into a particular field. This is unfortunate because it's possible that those people would have really enjoyed being in STEM and could have made fantastic discoveries, but were driven away in their formative years because they were socialized to believe that science is for boys. I have a very distinct memory of being told by an elementary school teacher that boys were better at math and that I should be a stay-at-home mom. I don't think it's much of a coincidence that after that, I barely paid attention in science and math classes until I was in high school. I had a fantastic (female) chemistry teacher and I discovered that I really, really loved science. When she noticed that I liked science, she encouraged me to apply for lab internships and eventually to research universities. I had multiple lab internships in high school with female PIs. Suddenly, being a woman in science didn't seem so weird! Science is my passion and I truly love what I do. I sometimes wonder where I would be if I didn't have such a fantastic string of female science role models in high school. It makes me sad to know that I am in a minority of women who had this experience. Even putting that aside, though, what Tim Hunt said is still insane. It's not like he said that having a gender imbalance in science is fine. Although I disagree, people express this opinion all the time. What he said is that women "fall in love with you" and "cry when you criticize them" and should be completely separated from men in labs. What?! I don't know how many female grad students he's had in his lab, but I have a lot of female friends in science, none of whom have fallen in love with their PIs or cried in front of them.
Study finds, surprisingly, that women are favored for jobs in STEM "Women are wonderful" effectThe “women are wonderful” effect is the phenomenon found in psychological research which suggests that people associate more positive attributes with the general social category of women compared to men. This effect reflects an emotional bias toward women as a general case. The phrase was coined by Eagly & Mladinic (1994) after finding that both men and women participants tend to assign exceptionally positive traits to women (men are also viewed positively, though not quite as positively), with woman participants showing a far more pronounced bias. The authors supposed that the positive general evaluation of women might derive from the association between women and nurturing characteristics.
People like to throw that study around, but it has serious methodological problems (for more, see, e.g., this response). Even if there weren't giant problems with that study, tenure track faculty positions are in the extreme minority of STEM jobs in terms of numbers. There are maybe a few hundred open positions in the US per year in all STEM fields. This is in stark contrast to the tens of thousands (or more) of other possible STEM jobs outside of universities.
If you weren't so absurdly politically biased, you would recognize immediately that this statement doesn't follow from the conclusion of the study you linked. People "associating more positive attributes" with women is inherently tied to discrimination against women; it means they're treated like children and not like adults. People have the same bias towards evaluating children positively too, but we don't allow children to have any responsibility. As for the first study you linked, there's another study that follows almost an identical methodology and comes to exactly the opposite result. It's a gross distortion to present your single study as the last word of SCIENCE!!!! on gender equality in stem. Here is a good overview of the problem. Personally, I feel that college labs at least strive to be quite gender neutral on the whole (even if sometimes they don't quite succeed), and the conclusions of both studies simply reflect the known political biases of their authors.The point is that people will discriminate in favour of women, not against.
Don't get me wrong, I'll be applying to tenure track positions in 4-5 years so it's relieving to know that I won't have the problems that a majority of women in STEM have (although TT chances are <1% anyway). But you can't pretend that women aren't at a disadvantage in every other STEM job (except for nursing, ofc).
Have you watched this documentary called "Brainwash: The Gender Equality Paradox"? It proves that the reason women are a minority in STEM jobs is simply because more men than women are interested in them, due to biological differences between the sexes. I think you're very lucky to be a woman who wants to work in that field, since you'll probably be favoured over your male colleagues simply by virtue of being a woman.
Cue scene from Orange is the New Black: "You can handle that all by yourself, honey?" "I think I can fix it if I focus extra hard with my lady brain."" Edit: pretty sure I really messed that quotation up, but I can't find a clip >:O
Interesting! Thanks for recommending, I'll make sure to check this out. Identifying biological bases of personality and behavior is notoriously difficult and fraught with methodological problems so I'm sure they feature discussions from only the top researchers. As for your last comment, I'm not in one of the fields that was surveyed in the study (linguistics/cognitive science), so you have absolutely no basis for that statement. It's totally fine for you to believe one study with questionable methodology that finds opposite results as every other study done before it, but it's not okay to use that belief to put down other people. Have a nice day!
It's pretty much a fact that men and women are different and have different interests, only social "scientists" and feminists would dare to deny it. As for pro/anti-female biases in STEM, are you telling me that you haven't noticed all the campaigns and programs meant to increase the number of women in those last few male-dominated fields? Female scientists are in high demand these days.
Yeah; it's also a fact that everyone grows up in a society, and society shapes people's interests a lot. It's very difficult to tell what is biological and what is social. I find it interesting that you put scientists in quotations. Are you implying that people who publish in this field, who have years of research experience and extensive training in their field, are not real scientists? I find it extremely hard to believe that you are this ignorant of how science works. There's a reason those programs are in place, because women face discrimination in science. It's currently our best fix for this discrimination. When the discrimination is gone, the programs will also be gone.
Some differences are pretty obviously biological, so much so that they've been observed even in other primates (so we can't say that it's society's fault): Male And Female Chimps Play Differently Male Monkeys Prefer Boys' Toys Female Chimps Play With Stick Dolls I've yet to see evidence of anti-female discrimination in science, to be honest, and even if it existed, I doubt that it could be solved by flooding the labs with female students who needed to be encouraged to be there. If anything, wouldn't that just give the guys a legitimate reason to treat their female colleagues with contempt? I think that the disparity in the representation of males vs females in certain fields can be explained without having to blame sexism, and that feminists are trying to force a political solution on a non-problem (thereby creating a problem). And yeah, I don't have a lot of respect for the social sciences. It seems to me that the kind of people who flock to those studies are more interested in pushing an agenda than doing science.
Interesting articles! I'll have to get back to you when I have a chance to do an in depth reading of the original papers. Wait, so you're telling me that the only thing you've read on this subject is the Washington Post piece on the Williams & Ceci PNAS paper? I alluded to a literature containing hundreds of opposite results assuming you were familiar, but apparently not. If you want a place to start, here are some Google Scholar results for "gender discrimination bias hiring STEM". If you're unfamiliar with how to perform a deep review of the literature of a field, I'd be happy to provide some tips. This article is also a good resource. Let's walk through how the scientific process works. 1. Observe some phenomenon out I'm the world. 2. Read the litrerature of the field, and formulate a hypothesis to account for your initial observation. 3. Test this phenomenon using an appropriate methodology and statistically analyze the results. 4. Determine whether or not your hypothesis is supported by your results. 5. Write this all up and submit to a conference or an appropriate journal in the field. This is how every single scientific field works. If social scientists are undeserving of respect and are just pushing an agenda, something in the above process must be going wrong. Let's think about some possibilities: Possibility 1: Social scientists don't use the process above at all. This is demonstrably false, read and journal article and it goes through each of the steps above. Possibility 2: Social scientists do experiments, but they all fabricate their data. While technically possible, this would require an extensive conspiracy between thousands of scientists over many generations, and is extraordinarily unlikely. Possibility 3: Social scientists' studies are so methodological flawed we can't conclude anything from them. While sometimes this is true, bad methodology can happen in any field, and I'm not aware of any studies that attempt to determine whether any field is "worse" than the rest metbodologically. Let me know if you know of any! Possibility 5: Social scientists are so bad at statistics that even though they have well-designed studies they constantly find false positives and false negatives. Again, while this is possible, statistical ineptitude is a problem in a lot of fields and I know of no evidence that any field is worse than any other. Let me know if you know of any studies on this! Possibility 5: Social scientists do fine studies, but their conclusions over interpret or overgeneralize their data. Again, possible, but unclear that any field is worse than any other. Plus, this is the sort of thing that peer review us good at catching. Since you must have a principled reason to disrespect social scientists, which of these possibilities do you think is true and why? Or if you think it's something else, what is it and why?I've yet to see evidence of anti-female discrimination in science
I clicked on a few of those articles but they're all behind a paywall. Before linking to a list of articles as evidence of something, you should make sure that they're actually available to the person you're trying to "educate". And I know how the scientific process works, but I also know how people work - especially feminists. They think logic is a tool of the patriarchy.
The nice thing about Google scholar is that they often have free pdfs or articles. They'll either appear as links to the right of the search result, or there is also a link below the search result that says "All X versions", which often have free pdfs. I don't doubt you know how science works, but I wanted to lay it out explicitly so that it is easier to identify exactly where things can go wrong in science. Since you think that social scientists don't do science, you should be able to identify where you think the problem is and why it is a problem.
Can you link to some of this large body of research? I keep hearing it mentioned but I've never actually seen evidence. That's certainly not something that should have happened but it's also not necessarily indicative of a larger pattern. And yeah, Tim Hunt is old and out of touch.I do have to say that I very much disagree with your second point, though. There's a lot of research that suggests girls are discouraged from STEM fields from a very young age, starting as early as elementary school.
I have a very distinct memory of being told by an elementary school teacher that boys were better at math and that I should be a stay-at-home mom. I don't think it's much of a coincidence that after that, I barely paid attention in science and math classes until I was in high school.
Of course! Here's a book-length treatment on the issue; the introduction is very accessible and covers most of the issues, and is available through Google books. If you're interested in further reading, you can look up the articles that are cited within the book.Can you link to some of this large body of research? I keep hearing it mentioned but I've never actually seen evidence.
Lol, Rorty. It's good that she is familiar with him, but she could certainly have gone deeper into explaining who postempiricist/pragmatist philosophers like Rorty, Kuhn, and Feyerabend were and why their arguments against Hunt's naive philosophy of science as a search for Absolute Truth are compelling. Philosophy of science hasn't believed in such notions of absolute scientific truth for close to a century now. The author also fails to explain the connection between patriarchy and epistemic overreach in the sciences, if there even is any.Or, as the late American philosopher Richard Rorty said, “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.”