patrick.net

The solutions are quite obvious:

1. Remove sexist laws that mandate paid maternity leaves. So potential employers do not have to add 20% to the cost of hiring a breeding age woman to statistically arrive at the actual cost of employment.

2. Require gender-blindness in admission and grading in STEM education. It should be against gender discrimination law to admit girls on lower standards or grading women higher than men for the same course work. Female students choosing to sleep with professors to get better grades should be automatically excluded from receiving degree. There, the future employers and colleagues then won't have to ask the female candidate to prove herself again.

3. Reduce female support staff to the ratio that match the gender ratio of STEM principles. Then people don't have to statistically assume a woman is likely part of the support staff. Discriminatory hiring practices to counter balance the gender ratio among principles is illegal and should be enforced.

4. People on STEM jobs have to take hormonal replacement or suppressant therapy until their hormonal levels match those of the principles.

There, problems solved :-)

Edit: or is that "problem solving" approach too male-centric, as opposed to the female approach of "just listen to my complaints"? LOL.

It doesn't solve the problem this problem:

"A 2012 randomized, double-blind study gave science faculty at research-intensive universities the application materials of a fictitious student randomly assigned a male or female name, and found that both male and female faculty rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hirable than the woman with identical application materials."

The same thing happens to black people. How do we expect to get the best results when we pass over women for lesser performing men due to prejudice?

See point 2 above.

It's obvious that those faculties suspect the resumes reflect statistical grades-inflation associated with gender.

Alternatively: neither male nor female faculty members prefer working with another female STEM candidate. That may just be unpleasant fact, just like neither tall nor short basket ball players prefer teaming up with another short basket ball player. Two females may not make for the best team where collaboration is of utmost importance?? Just like lesbian divorce rate is much higher than divorce rate among gay men marriages; a statistical fact, can't exactly blame men or discrimination for that.

Snooze ... here's an interesting tidbit, 50+% of medical students, M.D. program (a graduate/professional program in the biosciences), are WOMEN.

Here's why, a doctor gets paid well and has a near guaranteed job upon completion of residency.

Can one say the same for science/engineering work, where much of the tasks get outsourced regularly? And then, upon the age of 45, face long term age discrimination?

Rin says

M.D. program

*Hint, the above is a STEM (*Read the Biosciences piece) graduate program but one, geared towards a high paying clinical practice.

Two-thirds of the women interviewed, and two-thirds of the women surveyed, reported having to prove themselves over and over again – their successes discounted, their expertise questioned. “People just assume you’re not going to be able to cut it,” a statistician told us, in a typical comment.

Whenever you interview for any STEM job you have to prove it. This has nothing to do with gender and men experience it every bit as much; we just don't bitch about it. STEM is extremely competitive. Due to outsourcing and H1B Visas, there are typically dozens of candidates for every job. Most people who attempt to work in STEM are going to fail hard. It's the contrapositive of the Pigeon Hole Principle.

Women need to behave in masculine ways in order to be seen as competent—but women are expected to be feminine. So women find themselves walking a tightrope between being seen as too feminine to be competent, and too masculine to be likable.

Complete bullshit. I've been in STEM for my entire career. I don't look at male or female coworkers as potential mates or sexual beings. Corporations are sexless work environments and have been since at least the 1990s. In any professional environment you are expected to keep your personal life separate from your professional life.

When professional women have children, they often find themselves running into a wall: their commitment and competence are questioned, and opportunities start drying up.

That sounds like a problem with capitalism, not STEM. What employer in any field is going to want to pay someone who's not doing work for three months?

Studies show that women who have encountered discrimination early in their careers often distance themselves from other women. An Asian-American statistician described how an older woman who “probably had to go through hell” made sure younger women did, too. This is just one of several ways gender bias can fuel conflict between different generations of women.

Sounds like a problem with women, not STEM. But it's not a problem I've ever observed in any of the companies I've worked for. Yeah, management can be dicks, but they are dicks to everyone.

ur new study uncovered a fifth pattern of bias that seems to apply mainly to black and Latina women. On our survey, 42% of black women agreed that “I feel that socially engaging with my colleagues may negatively affect perceptions of my competence,” only slightly more than with as compared with Latinas (38%), Asian-American women (37%), and white women (32%) – but in our interviews, black women mostly mentioned this pattern.

This has nothing to do with STEM.

There is nothing in the article that gives one scientific reason to believe that women are being pushed out of STEM. Anyone who actually works in STEM, as I do, knows that the industry and colleges bend over backwards to encourage, support, and subsidize women in STEM while treating men like worthless shit, too common to be cared about. And don't give me any crap that men in STEM haven't been doing everything to urge women into as well.

The only people to blame that there are so little women in stem is WOMEN. If they didn't look down on STEM then there would be a hell of a lot more women in STEM. Women are social conformists. They don't defy the rules other women place on what is cool and what isn't. Until women treat STEM workers and students like they treat doctors, with utter awe, you can expect there to be few women entering STEM.

Oh, and by the way, doctors are STEM workers and there are plenty of female doctors because doctors are respected.

According to Thomas Sowell it is also because women gravitate to jobs that don't change much because of technology. IOW they will shy away from STEM jobs, this is because they don't want to get behind if they leave the work place for some years to raise children.

This and they naturally prefer part time work.

Women prefer the caring professions; people over systems and things. Men are the opposite.

This starts within weeks of birth, before hearing and eyesight are fully developed. Children with only several months will behave differently. The vast majority of boys crawl to blocks, trucks, things with buttons. The vast majority of girl infants crawl to dolls and stuffed animals.

These tests have been done all over the world with thousands of children, and the results are the same.

True also for Rhesus Monkeys
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0018506X08000949

Women are hypocrit . They dont date shot men, poor men, n almost always marry up. Then they demand equality. How bout dating people who make same money as you n watch how it works out.

Stem requires math to solve problem. Male mind is more on that side vs female mind is more on social side. Till we change physiology , which is impossible, you cant have equality in stem.

If you take out 5 days of pms, n meatiernity, n male counter part who puts more hours in, It works out .
Women dont say hi, we will put in more hrs.

Dan8267 says

Women need to behave in masculine ways in order to be seen as competent—but women are expected to be feminine. So women find themselves walking a tightrope between being seen as too feminine to be competent, and too masculine to be likable.

Complete bullshit. I've been in STEM for my entire career. I don't look at male or female coworkers as potential mates or sexual beings. Corporations are sexless work environments and have been since at least the 1990s. In any professional environment you are expected to keep your personal life separate from your professional life.

I think it varies a lot by workplace. There are some startups where the entire company culture is set by the 20-something male founders and frat-type antics are de rigueur; lots of partying, weekend road trips to Tahoe, etc. A woman would probably have trouble fitting in at such a place, as would most men over the age of, say, 35 or anyone with a family. My employer (largest tech employer in San Francisco) is, I really think, extremely friendly to female employees; on my current team of ten exactly five are women for example.

There are no statistical methods to the "study". To publish rubbish like this under scientific studies is a disgrace for science.

thunderlips11 says

These tests have been done all over the world with thousands of children, and the results are the same.

All true, but there used to be women in computer science. CS started during WWII when all the men were out fighting and women took over their jobs. When the men came back, women gave their jobs back to the men. However, there were no men coming back to take programming jobs because they didn't exist before the war. Women were very well represented in programming until the 1970s when Hollywood poisoned the field by inventing the ridiculous and inaccurate stereotype of the computer nerd. As soon as that happened, the enrollment by women in computer science plummeted. It has never recovered.

Why would women, who are very social conscious, enter a field that is looked down upon by society? Most American women scorn STEM and so, of course, few American women are going to enter it even if they have an interest in it. That's on American women, not men.

And all these efforts to get women into STEM aren't really about getting women into STEM. There are plenty of Chinese and Indian women in STEM. What these efforts are about is getting the right women in STEM; right read white and black women. White and black American women are precisely the ones who denigrate the people who study and work in STEM. In contrast, China and India consider STEM to be a highly respectable field just like America looks at doctors, actors, and musicians. If you want more white and black American women in STEM, you need to get them to respect the field and the people in it. Everything else is bullshit.

bdrasin says

There are some startups where the entire company culture is set by the 20-something male founders and frat-type antics are de rigueur;

You to a typical frat party at any college other than MIT or CalTech and count the number of STEM students versus liberal arts students and jocks. Your typical STEM male student isn't partying in college. He's not partying when he gets his first job either. He's worked damn hard through college and continues to do so in his first job.

There are a lot of startups started by dumb ass MBA graduates who drank and partied all through college. They don't represent STEM at all.

mell says

There are no statistical methods to the "study". To publish rubbish like this under scientific studies is a disgrace for science.

The original article was not a published scientific study. It was an article written for a business review magazine. It cited plenty of peer reviewed studies. Most people don't read or even have peer reviewed articles, so articles about the peer reviewed research is how they get info. Even people who can and do read peer reviewed studies in a couple of fields rely on these summaries to inform themselves on other topics. There is no disgrace here.

What a joke. Every single graduate school in science or engineering automatically accepts female applicants and provides them with a fellowship so they don't have to TA and can focus exclusively on their classes while getting paid more than their male counterparts. The NSF and NIH have dedicated billions of dollars for this purpose. And when they are incompetent, they get passed through the program and are graduated in 4 years. If a woman is willing to go into Science or Engineering, she has a free ticket to success.

I've got a ton of stories that verify this. The worst one was this one girl who I'm not even sure she understood the subject at the freshman level. She get kicked out of labs left and right because not only was she was stupid but she was also psychotic. At some point, the admin forced a professor to take her in and he graduated her after a year and a half with her doctorate. Magically, she has ended up as a professor at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey. According to the student feedback on her from ratemyprofessor, she's a complete trainwreck, doesn't know how to run or teach a class. How she got hired is a mystery to me. But I'd wager 1000 bucks she gets tenure and has a job for life. I've already seen it happen nearly half a dozen times.

HELLO! Medical school is STEM; it's called a Masters degree in the biosciences with clinical electives.

The end result ... a high paying and stable job and thus, no shortage of women applying for MD programs.

Once electrical and mechanical PhD programs figure this out, then there will be tons of female applicants for traditional engineering graduate programs.

thunderlips11 says

True also for Rhesus Monkeys

Careful here, you are running against the mainstream dogma that it's all culture, what we tell baby girls, what we expect from them etc...

YesYNot says

These observations have removed the 'blank slate' concept of a baby.

Well they haven't removed the assumption that we can completely remove biologic gender differences from the work environment.
This is a toxic dogma, that leads women to try to act like men and oppresses every masculine instinct in men.
Feminists will not rest until they force men to play doll, and force women to abandon kids and go slave in front of a computer, maximizing the unhappiness of everyone involved.

Dan8267 says

When professional women have children, they often find themselves running into a wall: their commitment and competence are questioned, and opportunities start drying up.

That sounds like a problem with capitalism, not STEM. What employer in any field is going to want to pay someone who's not doing work for three months?

This is not a problem, this is the simple fact that a mother with 2 kids simply cannot spend the same time as a single woman or a man.
This is not employers discriminating, it's a basic (and critical) biological function.
If feminists had a brain they would stop trying to copy men and instead try to get more recognition for such a critical task.

YesYNot says

Female doctors I know did not take time off work for kids.

My sister did. She gave birth to a beautiful, healthy girl, and both she and her husband took off time. She took off considerably more, but not nearly as much as they do in Europe.

Dan8267 says

And all these efforts to get women into STEM aren't really about getting women into STEM. There are plenty of Chinese and Indian women in STEM. What these efforts are about is getting the right women in STEM; right read white and black women. White and black American women are precisely the ones who denigrate the people who study and work in STEM. In contrast, China and India consider STEM to be a highly respectable field just like America looks at doctors, actors, and musicians. If you want more white and black American women in STEM, you need to get them to respect the field and the people in it. Everything else is bullshit.

That Norwegian Movie I posted a while back deals with this.

Indian and Chinese women are looking for higher standards of living. However, once they achieve it, their middle class daughters desire to be Doctors and Lawyers and Social Workers, and not follow mom or dad's footsteps. This is NOT true for sons. Even daughters of two STEM professionals disproportionally choose "Caring" Careers rather than System-Thing Careers.

thunderlips11 says

However, once they achieve it, their middle class daughters desire to be Doctors and Lawyers and Social Workers, and not follow mom or dad's footsteps. This is NOT true for sons. Even daughters of two STEM professionals disproportionally choose "Caring" Careers rather than System-Thing Careers.

My experience supports those statements. Every female STEM worker I come across is a first-generation immigrant. Often they are married to other STEM workers. I don't think I've ever seen a second-generation female Indian or Chinese STEM worker, but first-generation ones are common.

Of course, those second-generation middle class daughters are living in the U.S. so that still supports the culture bias. I wonder what second-generation middle class daughters living in China or India think of STEM. If they went into STEM, it's mostly a culture bias. If they don't, then it's mostly a biology thing. I don't have the data to determine which, and no liberal arts research center is going to address this issue because neither answer is politically correct.

Dan, I meant taking off more than 2 to 3 months. Sorry, I wasn't more clear. My wife took two months unpaid (as a vet). Three friends who are doctors (white or half Asian) took off the allotted time, but not years missing from the career. I've known other women in ChemE jobs who have taken a couple of months, but otherwise kept working. I can appreciate employers not wanting to give 2-3 months paid, but it's not a huge deal for those companies. In fact the trend in multi-nationals is to extend longer leave and I think to extend leave to men as they do in Europe. Small companies don't have to do it, and don't. Employers would also rather hire single people for purely financial reasons (less family pressure, less benefits) but don't seem to discriminate. Some prefer married people with kids as that tends to limit mobility and keep them more loyal.

Doctors and vets typically can't really afford to take more than a couple of months unless they are independently wealthy.

Somewhat related:
GWU joins large list of Universities no longer requiring standardized tests.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/07/27/george-washington-university-applicants-no-longer-need-to-take-admissions-tests/?hpid=z1

YesYNot says

GWU joins large list of Universities no longer requiring standardized tests.

Not a surprise, George Washington is a Rich Man's School like NYU. SAT/ACT tests were designed by meritocracy idealists. They are flawed, but it's pretty rare for a dumbass to ace a Standardized Test and a smart kid to bomb them.

YesYNot says

Doctors ... typically can't really afford to take more than a couple of months

This is not true. Doctors can moonlight at $75/hr or more, a couple of days per week. In order for a regular engineer to do that, he'd have to have his own consulting business with a stream of reoccurring clients, who don't demand a full week of work. In addition, as long as board certifications are maintained, a doctor can return to work after a long hiatus. After a year or so, many companies will not even interview an engineer, nevermind hire him. Like Dan said, being an engineer is brutal.

There is no incentive for anyone to enter STEM. Even the guys who'd started as engineers, later on in their careers, move into management, sales, or some consulting role. Look no further than LinkedIn and it's apparent, the number of ppl, esp men, who'd started with a degree in engineering, leave for more business-y roles within a 10 to 15 year career span. The reason why so many men enter STEM programs is one, they did well in math during high school and two, were lied to, by academics, telling 'em that there's a perennial shortages of S&Es.

In contrast, women see the situation for what it is, a lot of homework when a certified public accountant can achieve the same salary for half the effort, or even better, a chartered financial analyst (CFA). And thus, you don't see a shortage of women entering the monied fields.

I work for a hedge fund today. Some of us had started as engineers/programmers/DBAs/etc some years ago. If a cadre of Wharton/Columbia/London MBA types didn't take our work seriously, this firm may never have gotten the financing to get off the ground. Today, none of us call ourselves engineers anymore. At best, one guy still says that he's a quantitative analyst at gatherings, just to sound like an intellectual. But in reality, it's our senior partner, the guy with an MBA from Columbia and a law degree from London, who's seen as the worldly intellectual.

YesYNot says

Dan, I meant taking off more than 2 to 3 months. Sorry, I wasn't more clear.

I'm a firm believer that people should get paid 80-95% of the wealth they produce. In our current system, people are paid about 30-40% of what they produce and the rest goes to owners.

If a person takes off 3 months and isn't generating any wealth for that period, any pay he or she gets from a company comes from other people in the company. And it's not coming from the owners. It's coming from coworkers in the form of less pay. Personally, I'm all for people working the hours they want and being paid on their productivity. If anyone, new mother or not, wants to work only part time or take a few months off for whatever reason, I'm ok with that. But I'd rather people be paid justly based on what they produce rather than taking money from one set of people and giving it to another for arbitrary reasons.

Being paid for a job has nothing to do with subsidies. Only the government should subsidize an activity, and even then rarely. Corporations should not subsidize reproduction by docking one person's pay to continue the salary of someone on maternity leave, which is essentially what paid maternity leave is. Instead, corporations should tax their employees less by paying them a larger share of their productivity and allow each worker to decide how much time he or she wants to spend working and producing. If employees were exploited so much by corporations then paid maternity would not be necessary as even people taking time off would make more money then they do now. The American worker is more efficient and produces more wealth per hour than at any other time in our history. So why does it take two full time jobs to make ends meet? Only because of the excessive taxation of employees by employers.

Related to this, everyone should be paid for overtime no matter how much they work. Better yet, pay people based on what they produce rather than how long they work.

Rin says

Even the guys who'd started as engineers, later on in their careers, move into management, sales, or some consulting role. Look no further than LinkedIn and it's apparent, the number of ppl, esp men, who'd started with a degree in engineering, leave for more business-y roles within a 10 to 15 year career span.

Another unfortunate truth.

Management should not be considered a higher position than engineer. Engineering produces wealth. Management is, at best, overhead.

thunderlips11 says

SAT/ACT tests were designed by meritocracy idealists. They are flawed, but it's pretty rare for a dumbass to ace a Standardized Test and a smart kid to bomb them.

One major problem with the SATs is that the were designed by liberal arts professors who knew that if they made the math and language sections equally advanced, all the students entering liberal arts would have half the scores of the students entering STEM. So the math portion is so dumbed down that a competent freshman could ace it.

The GMATs, the graduate school equivalence of the SATs, is even worse. The math on the GMATs is simpler and easier than the SATs! Why would graduate level math be less advance than high school math? Because the vast majority of liberal arts majors haven't taken a math class in three or four years and don't even remember algebra!

As for the language sections of both tests, they are clearly designed to maximize the scores of liberal arts students by using worthless words like cacophony, which just means noisy like 50 other words do, instead of useful and unique words like recursion, quark, exponential decay, invariant, covariant, contravariant, non-reentrant, stateless, lepton, field, acidic, lithosphere, ornithology, tensor, osmosis, solvent, sylvan, ichthyology, lipid, antigen, non-volatile, etc. There is no other word in the English language that means the same thing as any of these terms and as such they are irreplaceable, unlike the word cacophony. But if these words were included in the SATs, the liberal arts students would score far lower than STEM students in vocabulary and reading comprehension.

The fact is that STEM students are way smarter and more knowledgeable, and quite frankly, more mature than liberal arts students. And this fact scares the hell out of the professors behind the SATs, so they have to design the test to conceal this truth.

Dan8267 says

The fact is that STEM students are way smarter and more knowledgeable, and quite frankly, more mature than liberal arts students. And this fact scares the hell out of the professors behind the SATs, so they have to design the test to conceal this truth.

There are the SAT IIs in biology, chemistry, physics, and math, so it's not so bleak.

At the same time, there are national Olympiads in the sciences but sure, they're not used for admissions.

Shuffling around with swollen ankles, painful tits, bloated face and a baby bulge does not inspire confidence in the STEM world.

What the popular press seems to fail at, is delineating the fact that Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs are owners of intellectual properties and corporations. In other words, those who log their hours at those places, a.k.a the STEM employees, don't own the rights to any of their work.

So what happens is that then, the media confuses the likes of a Steve Jobs with that of a neurosurgeon, prop trader, or investment banker and thus, STEM is depicted as both, lucrative and prestigious. In reality, it's quite the opposite.

The prestige of STEM is mainly limited to the academy where you get the *oo, aah* of those who're impressed that someone could take Complex Variables, Thermodynamics, Transport Phenomena, and Circuit Analysis, all in one semester. Once the days of the academy are over, it's actually the reverse.

A STEM guy I know of, who's working in a biotech facility, is actually considered by his friends and family, to have a lesser career track than his wife, who works at a helpdesk in some currency resolution dept for a big bank. He's got degrees in chemical engineering and biochemistry and her, basic economics, not even a BS in finance or accounting. And no, she's not a London Economics grad so there's no pedigree effect here. It's the fact that she works in an area, where the public thinks she's got upward mobility, whereas he's seen as a lab rat nerd.

Rin, I agree. Several of my friends in STEM went into finance. Several went into consulting. People in STEM studies usually figure out while at the University that the money is in management or finance. A good performance in a STEM field will often open up some opportunities in those worlds to those without connections. I received an offer to be a quant at the trading arm of an Energy company, for example, after graduate school. The other guys I know who went into the financial sector (and it was mostly guys) didn't have any prior connections. B school would open up more as a post-graduate program.

Some of the smartest women I know are in stem, Doctors, Dentists, Chemists, Engineers.

FYI theres not many Males in the US in Science either.

YesYNot says

You seem to be willing to state that one side has been unequivocally proven correct without bothering to give a reason why.

I have no problem radically changing my beliefs if new information gives cause to do so. In fact, I have no choice in what I believe as facts and rationality dictate those beliefs. That said, I'd have no problem accepting that the world is flat if and only if the facts demonstrated that. I'd even accept that the universe was created by a giant space smurf ejaculating the stars, if the evidence and the math demonstrated that.

Furthermore, my willingness to accept truths that contract my beliefs was thoroughly demonstrated on this thread in which I accepted a study that showed GMO foods caused cancerous tumors in rats even though I did not believe GMOs caused cancer before I read that study. And then when New Renter pointed out that the study was debunked and that the study did not disclosed they used rats bred specifically for developing tumors -- a giant omission, by the way -- I immediately changed my position again.

As for why the study in your original article is not accepted, here's the executive summary.
1. The study was not repeated. All scientific experiments are repeatable and should produce the same results.
2. The study was debunked.
3. The study claims other things that have been thoroughly debunked.

A 2012 report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology indicates that training scientists and engineers at current rates will result in a deficit of 1,000,000 workers to meet United States workforce demands over the next decade.

There is no shortage of STEM workers.
4. There are more studies, each of which is repeatable, that contradict the study you quoted.

Here are some of the studies showing that men are highly discriminated against in STEM.

From Science Careers Magazine, STEM study: Women twice as likely to be hired as comparably qualified men

At ScienceInsider, Rachel Bernstein writes about a new study showing that a highly qualified woman applying for a tenure-track faculty position in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) at a U.S. university was twice as likely to be hired as an equally qualified man. “The results,” Bernstein writes, “run counter to widely held perceptions, and suggest that this is a good time for women to be pursuing academic careers.

From PNAS, the same source you site, National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track

Contrary to prevailing assumptions, men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference.

Oh, and economics is so not STEM. Not even close. So the one exception isn't even an exception to the rule that women have a 2:1 advantage on being hired for STEM tenure tracks.

Financial incentives are given for hiring women as the University of Copenhagen reports

The University of Copenhagen's (UCPH) pro-women gender policies have broken the law. This is according to an article in the Danish law journal Ugeskrift for Retsvæsen authored by UCPH history professor Hans Bonde and lawyer Jens Ravnkilde.

UCPH had a plan to increase the number of female professors between 2008 and 2013. It included a financial incentive to faculties that hired female professors in the form of a 'bonus professorship' for either men or women. The plan has since been superseded by a new scheme that is also designed to increase the number of women professors.

Faculties that increased their numbers of female professors by five percent were rewarded with anything ranging from DKK 1 to 3 million depending on the size of the faculty. Ultimately, all of UCPH's faculties received this bonus.

That's a lot of money.

From the University of San Diego, $600k Grant Helps USD Hire Women STEM Profs

Hoping to boost the number of women who decide to major in STEM fields, the University of San Diego has hired eight new female professors in science, technology, engineering and math with the help of a $600,000 federal grant.

There are no federal grants to help men in any field.

Even the White House provides support for women, not men, in STEM

“One of the things that I really strongly believe in is that we need to have more girls interested in math, science, and engineering. We’ve got half the population that is way underrepresented in those fields and that means that we’ve got a whole bunch of talent…not being encouraged the way they need to.”

-- President Barack Obama, February 2013

Men in STEM, and in the vast majority of fields, get absolutely no support or encouragement. It's sink or swim.

Here's an graph illustrating the bias in favor of women in the software industry.

18% of computer science majors are women, yet 20% of jobs in software development go to women. That's an 11% advantage for women.

There is an enormous amount of time, effort, and money being thrown at encouraging and supporting girls and women in all STEM fields. Meanwhile, males in these fields are treated like second class citizens and social pariahs. So why the hell are only 18% of computer science majors female? Either women are weak minded, spineless twits who give into peer pressure, and thus are unqualified for any important work including STEM, or women are choosing to say fuck no to STEM despite all the advantages they are given. The later makes women look a lot better, by the way. But either way, it's still all about the choices that women make.

Men have been going into STEM despite the sheer level of adversity flung at them for doing so. The prom king is always the quarterback, not the debate captain, the head of the science club, or the top programmer at the school. So, are men simply intellectually stronger than women and thus able to overcome the immense social pressure not to enter STEM, or do women simply have different interests.

If you chalk it up to interest, at least women don't come out looking like pathetic, weak-minded buffoons, but you still can't place the blame on anyone but women for their choices. If you don't accept that women don't go into STEM because of their personal preferences, then the inescapable conclusion is that there is something inferior about women, and I doubt that you would be willing to accept that.

As for me, I have no problem with the idea that women simply don't like STEM as much as men and there's nothing wrong with that. Men are far more likely to like sports than women, and there is nothing wrong with that just as there is nothing wrong with a woman who loves sports or a man that hates them. And this is coming from a man who has absolutely no interest in sports, but I realize I'm the exception to the rule.

Instead of trying to force more women into liking STEM, why don't you just allow people to pursue the goals that make THEM happiest and accept that their life choices can and will differ from yours. I have yet to see anyone rally to get men more representation in the supermodel industry. In that industry, men are paid far less and there are far fewer of them. Why not give us federal grants and a support system to help us become highly paid supermodels? I'd give up my day job for that.

YesYNot, if you have any doubt that girls and women get far more support than boys and men, this statistics says it all.

The ratio within just STEM is even more staggering. Yet no one seems to give a shit about that. You own a penis? You're on your own. Don't expect any support for any problem you have. A lot of male STEM students burn out and kill themselves when they fail. Does this ever happen to female STEM students? No. We give women all the support they ask for, but we don't support young men at all because we view them as the bad guys. We are failing our sons.

Why schools are failing our boys
How We Are Failing Our Teenage Boys
We Are Failing Our Boys
Who is to blame for boys struggling at school?

Dan8267 says

YesYNot, if you have any doubt that girls and women get far more support than boys and men, this statistics says it all.

It does bother me. The biggest reason for gun control is that 20K or so men use them to shoot themselves each year. Men take more risks and die more too. Women value a social network more than men, and that is the biggest predictor of happiness. Men should be taught these things. Men's rights advocates should be advocating for these things that would really improve their lives.

Every guy who owns a gun thinks he is more likely to use it to save his own life than take it. The statistics show the reverse, and it's not even close. You can complain about changing the subject again if you like, but you brought it up.

Dan, your other post was long and it is clear that you put some thought into it. I'll try to get to it later, but at least I see that you did not make a snap judgement on it.

Dan8267 says

o. In fact, I have no choice in what I believe as facts and rationality dictate those beliefs.

By the way, I've read that the more people claim this (and think it), the more likely their opinions are colored by bias.

I'm pretty sure this has been posted before, but this is what happens when rationality is second to social networks:

Must watch video (stick with it for a few seconds)

https://www.-4EDhdAHrOg

YesYNot says

Women value a social network more than men, and that is the biggest predictor of happiness. Men should be taught these things. Men's rights advocates should be advocating for these things that would really improve their lives.

I believe this to be true, but I have no idea whether it can easily fixed.

Men prefer activities which involve competition or discussing something clear-cut and distant: "How about those draft picks?" (Drinking doesn't really count, since bars are places where people go to be alone together.) My male friendships are a bitch to maintain - in most of them, speaking about one's feelings is flat-out verboten; it is easy to see why drum circles were a big deal in the early 1990s.

At work, it's wise to limit your friendships to people not directly connected to your department, and I think men tend to be more circumspect about forming work friendships - and they may lack the skills necessary to do so as easily.

Men have a problematic existence where social networking is concerned.

YesYNot says

The biggest reason for gun control is that 20K or so men use them to shoot themselves each year. Men take more risks and die more too.

Guns and risk taking isn't the reason that intellectual males, often called nerds and geeks in our society, commit suicide. Most intellectuals aren't gun owners or enthusiasts. Nor does risky behavior cause suicide. Suicide is, by definition, a deliberate choice not an accident due to risky behavior.

The fact is that the "lack of support" that women complain about is nothing compared to the lack of support experienced by all boys growing up. This problem is most obvious in troubled boys in poor households who struggle with school and discipline and are often put on mind-altering drugs like Ritalin. However, even very smart young men who go to schools like MIT, CalTech, Princeton end up committing suicide due to failed romances, pressures to succeed, or finding out that although they were geniuses in high school, they are now in a peer group where they are below average. These young men have absolutely no support network and they are ignored by all the advocates who promote women in STEM because they are just worthless, common men.

As for the lower academic achieving males, I think that the single greatest child abuse problem in our society today is the false diagnostic of ADD/ADHD and the subsequent prescription for Ritalin and similar drugs. Instead of dealing with teaching boys to become responsible, productive, and well-adjusted members of society, parents, teachers, and doctors take the easy way out and just dope the kids, mostly boys, so they are good little zombies. The effects will last a lifetime.

I'm sure there are a small percentage of children who benefit from drugs like Ritalin and have a legitimate medical condition, but the cases of ADHD have reason exponentially over the past 30 years, and I don't think that's based on actual science but rather a change in social preferences to nullify boy behavior.

And the diagnoses of ADHD have been increases a exponentially since 1980.

Chart from http://newscentral.exsees.com/item/3298eb58e5c873e92f2592a4cd41eb9e-0ac0cb891c08c34a68204dbed01e3965

And here's the use of Ritalin over the years from The President's Council on Bioethics

From http://emiliedwolf.blogspot.com/2010/09/calvin-on-ritalin.html