Yeah looking at his slides he did a shit job. Some genuinely interesting data and theories but it's filled with indignant snippets like "not sexism - it's merit!". The data could easily have been presented in a far less confrontational and provocative way.
Interesting article but it eludes me what his bibliographical research found other than gaps which where already known. I fail to notice where he differs from mainstream based on results his research found.
To be clear I don't like stifling discussion with non-scientific arguments either (which the author accuses CERN of). But imho the article fails to bring his arguments across other than "I was attacked on unscientific grounds". If he bases broader male variation on observations of citation indexes I think this is a poor measure as citation indexes favor the incumbents very much. A problem which also male newcomers have trouble with.
Jordan Peterson constantly alludes to similar findings in similar studies; gender difference actually correlates strongly with a country’s gender equality. The more “equal” a society, the starker the difference of male and female outcomes. He also noted that smart women are generally more talented than smart men; if a woman is good at math, she is likely to be good at other things whereas a man who is good at math is less likely to be good at other things. So smart women often end up out of STEM because it’s easier for their intelligence to manifest. I’m frankly amazed this article got this high on HN, and I hope you all give yourselves a chance to fully analyze it before letting a political bias force you to downvote.
I'm pretty amazed as well, honestly. I think people get too emotional when you even discuss this topic. I may disagree, I may even be offended, but so what. Downvoting to oblivion, blocking, banning dissenting opinions is literal censorship. If you disagree with me, write a response that shows how dumb I am and then move on with your life.
That said, any hints I see at trying to force an equality of outcome at the expense of other groups is authoritarian, and should be stopped.
Remember a week ago when this site scoured a public GitHub repo to ensure a woman physicist wasn't getting more credit than she was due? Imagine having to conduct yourself in your professional life as though you were under persistent threat of audit by some know-nothings if you stuck your head up too high. I would go insane.
She wasn't a physicist, she was a computer scientist. Harrassing her was wrong, but so is what happened to this physicist. Stop trying use her to push divisions. If you truly cared about harrassment, you'd be just as offended at what happened to this guy as much as you are about her. Also, people like you do far more to push women and minorities out of STEM than anything. You are constantly telling women and minorities what a terrible racist and misogynist place academia is.
It is not pushing divisions to highlight existing divisions. They must be addressed, not papered over. Academia (and other places) indeed is or can be a racist & misogynistic place, but you don't have to take my word for it - many women scientists have spoken up about this issue.
Or you know, work hard and have integrity by not taking undue credit or unfair favoritism so that any audit by "know-nothings" (?) becomes fruitless. The reason for the "audit" is that looking closer at stories like this very often reveals a hidden truth: it's made up fluff to push an agenda.
I'm not saying this to stir up some kind of controversy. But, I think it's wrong to silence him simply because we don't agree with him. He presented data, some efforts to support his view points. This is far better than fuelling hatred and bigotry just by providing opinions.
For instance, this person who wrote this article titled ("Why can't we hate men?") is actually a gender studies professor (now a director?) in a well known top university in Boston and still has their job:
> I find it alarming that a scientific organization has rules that restrict free speech using such vague, subjective language.
Feminism has always been a sexist power movement, and the natural outcome of that is always authoritarian social policy.
At it's core, feminism is about the sole focus on accruing benefits and status for one sex (or gender, depending on who you ask).
Feminism fights for women's rights, but not men's: the vote, but not forcing women to enlist in selective service; workplace rights, but not for men to have parental rights; women in STEM, but not men in psychology, teaching, etc -- or even men in school at all.
Perhaps there was a time that kind of sexist focus was a force for good, but I have to seriously question that. Regardless --
If you're part of feminism in an academic context, you're part of a majority power movement, which routinely denigrates and attacks the minority gender in blatant violation of Title IX -- and have been for decades.
Feminism is sexism.
So it's surprising to me that the scientists are surprised.
As far as I know, women aren't a minority. They have longer lifespans than men.
But overall I do agree, they needed some extra rights. However, the feminist movement now feels extraneous, as most of their rights have been achieved.
Like any good bureaucracy, IMO the organization exists to further promote its existence, goals be damned.
No, but women are marginalized in many aspects of life, including their careers. That leads them to be minorities in leadership positions and other positions of power, which then perpetuates the cycle.
It's odd to me that you circumscribe justice to only "minorities".
On the left, we don't use the word "minority" any longer, because the number of people in the group is largely immaterial in its marginalization.
Instead, we talk about "marginalized" groups which, regardless of their size, face systemic disadvantages peculiar to themselves. I consider the American white masses to be marginalized in ways made clear to me by Nancy Isenberg's "White Trash"[1], despite our numerical predominance (and complementary privileges).
So when one seeks to falsify Feminism, it doesn't strike me as remotely relevant to discuss the overall ratio of women:men. Women's marginalization is no less significant because it's widespread. To falsify Feminism, instead, one must adopt immutable definitions of "women" "men", I think.
I haven't personally teased apart my own socialized gender ontologies, however.
I think this argument would carry more weight if, you know, the numbers had changed. If the top spots in the highest paid fields (finance, medicine, management, research, technology, media, government) were actually reasonably close to parity, you might say the movement has run its course. But since we are still far off from that, and women are still expected to do more than half the work around the house and so on, it seems there is still work ahead.
I'm not saying men should not have parental rights (and, it should be added, obligations). And of course there are people working on that issue (to pick one). But do you have data that suggests this is as large an issue as, say, the dearth of women in top positions?
> If the top spots in the highest paid fields (finance, medicine, management, research, technology, media, government) were actually reasonably close to parity, you might say the movement has run its course.
That's exactly what I'm calling out --
That conclusion, that they should reach "parity", is an authoritarian fantasy unsubstantiated by actual data and represents a bigoted sort of view of the world: the only outcome that matters is tribal equality, because people are defined by these base, essentialist tribes.
I'd counter the only outcome that matters is people who want to pursue a career are free to do so -- to which I'd point out that women entering male dominated fields enjoy considerably more support than men entering female dominated fields.
As far as we can tell, when women are freer to choose their careers, such as in Scandinavian countries contrasted with Eastern European ones, they tend to choose different careers on average than men.
Feminism, as such, has morphed from gaining rights for oppressed people into trying to oppress people into a paint-by-numbers outcome, and a position that women aren't accountable for the outcome of their actions, such as when they make different choices than men do.
The top-paying subfields in finance, medicine, sci/tech, are all heavily affected by the "people vs. things" distinction that the article talks about, in being highly skewed towards "things". (Business management actually has similar problems as managers are heavily selected for being risk-loving and it's well-known in the social-science literature that women tend to be more careful than men at assessing risk.) There might be more hope wrt. the people-focused part, and we do see women having quite a bit of success there, even more so in parts of the world like East Asia where contemporary feminist ideology, with its pandering to wishful thinking and populism while neglecting the facts on the ground (as described by OP) is not really a major focus compared with the West.
Imagine someone wrote a paper that said men are horrible at management or anything collaborative because all their testosterone makes them so angry that they simply get too emotional to work with others.
If you are a man -- and who knows on the internet -- you know this is garbage. Yes men have more testosterone. That is a fact, and no one is arguing. Yes, testosterone means you are more likely to get angry, but it doesn't follow that your anger levels prevent you from working. Come on!
But now, instead of believing you, people say you are hysterical and anti-science, and you have to do a study to prove you don't get so angry you can't work. Every day people post examples of men who went ballistic at work. The study is inconclusive and you are wasting all this time trying to prove that the testosterone doesn't make you angry. Every time you lose your temper, people point out that you are a guy and of course you're prone to that.
That's what this "people vs things" distinction is like.
> If you're part of feminism in an academic context, you're part of a majority power movement, which routinely denigrates and attacks the minority gender in blatant violation of Title IX.
Are you saying men are "the minority gender"? What planet do you live on? People who are academics are still part of the general population.
Men are the minority gender on US university campuses, yes.
> The male-female ratio in higher education has been steadily moved in favor of the females ever since the 1970s. Total enrollment figures show that females outnumbered their male counterparts for the first time in the late 1970s, and they have steadily increased their numerical advantage ever since. The superiority first came in public universities, but soon private universities saw female enrollment surpass male enrollment.
University feminism has been a majority power movement for an entire generation.
Could you please follow the guidelines more closely?
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
> Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Additionally, this is a pattern with the account that needs to change:
> Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, and we ban accounts that do it.
We count alternate accounts as well, so they all get banned unless all improve.
- The topic of discussion was feminism, its application to institutions, and the consequences of that. I didn't introduce any topic.
- This post is directly related, and discusses how the impacts observed in the article extend from the philosophical basis of the movement and its long-term choices about which political battles to engage in.
- The post itself, and subsequent ones, were upvoted.
- The only fact that was contested was the status of men as a minority at university, which I provided a citation for.
- My post was direct, and used plain language for its points, but was not uncivil.
As far as I can tell, you're utilizing the code of conduct to empower a minority trying to censor my speech for political reasons to shut down discussion.
You are of course free to engage in politically motivated censorship as a private website, but I'd suggest you enumerate what you believe I did wrong instead of hiding behind vague allegations.
Vague allegations of violating decorum, sans factual refutation or even a challenge on the substance of my post, are the tools of a tyrant.
Women are just as smart as men, i don't think anyone can debate this. Are women just as interested in the same things men are? This is highly debatable. There are biological differences between men and women.
I think there's an arguable point: Men are more likely to be stupid (defective chromosome and all that), and going into academia today is a really stupid choice.
It's stupid in the "high risk, but maybe high but questionable payoff" sense in the same way that wingsuiting is, and there's also a gender gap in wingsuiting too.
> All or most of the major tests commonly used to measure intelligence have been constructed so that there are no overall score differences between males and females. Thus, there is little difference between the average IQ scores of men and women. Differences have been reported, however, in specific areas such as mathematics and verbal measures. Also, studies have found the variability of male scores is greater than that of female scores, resulting in more males than females in the top and bottom of the IQ distribution.
Just saying "biological differences" is too handwave-y I think. I'm a programmer and not a scientist of any kind but I would guess we go against our biology in many, many ways in modern day-to-day life, and without better justification it feels a bit silly to run with this reasoning for a clearly complicated issue. If it were a truly unsolvable problem, then I assume we would never make any progress, but that's not the case.
> Data show that, at the moment they’re hired in research or academic posts, female physicists have on average fewer (fractionally counted) papers and citations than their male equivalents. As the careers of physicists progress, the initial representation gap doesn’t change much, and a second difference known as the “productivity gap” appears. This was confirmed by my data.
I can confirm this does happen based on my limited observations. Some people get hired at the expense of candidates which are better by objective measures of publication, citation and funding records, and those people tend to be women and/or minority groups. And despite being an unfair practice, it is encouraged from top and employed.
If there is a sexism/racism problem, I don't understand how more sexism/racism would solve it. I don't understand how there can be a righteous and endorsed flavor of sexism/racism.
If he had acted with more tact, he could have avoided the outcry. His presentation was not at the right time nor place. Then going public (although he's not the only one at fault here) made things worst. You cannot do science in the public sphere. It speaks for itself that he was quickly embraced by anti-intellectual political factions.
This is an example of where a topics based news aggregation and discussion would be better rather than article based aggregation and discussion. Instead of getting one side's story (one article), how great would it be if we had a "CERN gender topic" and a list of articles about that topic that encompasses all sides ( and possibly different regions ). Beyond one side or the another, wouldn't it be interesting to see what indians, chinese, south americans, africans, etc think of it too? I'm sure this topic is a lot more nuanced and complex than either side lets on and I feel these issues lend themselves to topic based aggregation and discussion. Just an opinion.
But whatever side you are on, I think the real issue here is the personal and professional attacks this academic got for providing an honest opinion ( backed by stats and sources ). The viciousness displayed by his fellow phycists and CERN as an organization is really disappointing as is their attempt to silence him. One of the basis of academia is the idea of "devil's advocacy". Where you or someone takes the other's side in order to getting a fuller understanding of any topic. How is any discussion possible when the opposing side is silenced?
why would he present the results in an academic conference anyway? Those are archaic gatherings with extreme social/political biases and nothing good ever came out of them (i ve been in quite a few). not a very smart academic
I think the single most interesting result from this whole thing is that there is near equal representation of both men and women in the law profession.
I wonder why that is? What was counted as a person in a "Law profession"? Where support staff and secretaries included? If it was just lawyers, what are they doing right to get equal representation that everyone else does wrong?
> If it was just lawyers, what are they doing right to get equal representation that everyone else does wrong?
Phrasing the gender gap in different areas as "wrong" is weird. Do you see people fighting to bring people into law enforcement, construction, etc? Or to bring men into nursing or day care? Let's accept that there are biological differences that affect what men and women are interested in (which says nothing about their intelligence and aptitude), and leave this far left liberal agenda on the side.
It is an interesting question, through I think I suspect the answer has to do with the values that profession provides to the employee. In many studies we see a gender difference in men valuing high pay over other aspects in work place, and women valuing social respect and a feeling of helping more than high pay. The legal profession, and I suspect pro-bono lawyers in particular, provide tends to a value of respect and being helpful, while high profile cases brings in the high pay. It would not surprise me if men and women would give very different answer in surveys on why they entered the legal profession.
This is a glorious example of where the truth is hated simply because it’s inconvenient and utterly fails to support the sociopolitical narrative.
The reaction of the far-leftists to evidence like this is what has pushed me clear out of the left and into centrism. I will never become a conservative (that philosophy has even more patently bankrupt ideas it still desperately clings to), but I cannot consider myself “of the left” anymore. I simply cannot abide those levels of toxicity and religious-like ideology against which any dissent is heresy to be punished and crushed.
46 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 99.5 ms ] threadTo be clear I don't like stifling discussion with non-scientific arguments either (which the author accuses CERN of). But imho the article fails to bring his arguments across other than "I was attacked on unscientific grounds". If he bases broader male variation on observations of citation indexes I think this is a poor measure as citation indexes favor the incumbents very much. A problem which also male newcomers have trouble with.
That said, any hints I see at trying to force an equality of outcome at the expense of other groups is authoritarian, and should be stopped.
For instance, this person who wrote this article titled ("Why can't we hate men?") is actually a gender studies professor (now a director?) in a well known top university in Boston and still has their job:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-cant-we-hate-men...
But we are offended and want to silence someone and fire them for providing atleast reasonable data to back his claims?
Feminism has always been a sexist power movement, and the natural outcome of that is always authoritarian social policy.
At it's core, feminism is about the sole focus on accruing benefits and status for one sex (or gender, depending on who you ask).
Feminism fights for women's rights, but not men's: the vote, but not forcing women to enlist in selective service; workplace rights, but not for men to have parental rights; women in STEM, but not men in psychology, teaching, etc -- or even men in school at all.
Perhaps there was a time that kind of sexist focus was a force for good, but I have to seriously question that. Regardless --
If you're part of feminism in an academic context, you're part of a majority power movement, which routinely denigrates and attacks the minority gender in blatant violation of Title IX -- and have been for decades.
Feminism is sexism.
So it's surprising to me that the scientists are surprised.
I mean, that's the whole purpose. I don't have a crystallised opinion on 3rd wave feminism but the 1st and 2nd were clearly necessary.
It's like saying the black panthers were bad because they were not fighting for white people's rights.
But overall I do agree, they needed some extra rights. However, the feminist movement now feels extraneous, as most of their rights have been achieved.
Like any good bureaucracy, IMO the organization exists to further promote its existence, goals be damned.
On the left, we don't use the word "minority" any longer, because the number of people in the group is largely immaterial in its marginalization.
Instead, we talk about "marginalized" groups which, regardless of their size, face systemic disadvantages peculiar to themselves. I consider the American white masses to be marginalized in ways made clear to me by Nancy Isenberg's "White Trash"[1], despite our numerical predominance (and complementary privileges).
So when one seeks to falsify Feminism, it doesn't strike me as remotely relevant to discuss the overall ratio of women:men. Women's marginalization is no less significant because it's widespread. To falsify Feminism, instead, one must adopt immutable definitions of "women" "men", I think.
I haven't personally teased apart my own socialized gender ontologies, however.
1. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27209433-white-trash
I'll just note that we're two decades into this one.
I'm not saying men should not have parental rights (and, it should be added, obligations). And of course there are people working on that issue (to pick one). But do you have data that suggests this is as large an issue as, say, the dearth of women in top positions?
That's exactly what I'm calling out --
That conclusion, that they should reach "parity", is an authoritarian fantasy unsubstantiated by actual data and represents a bigoted sort of view of the world: the only outcome that matters is tribal equality, because people are defined by these base, essentialist tribes.
I'd counter the only outcome that matters is people who want to pursue a career are free to do so -- to which I'd point out that women entering male dominated fields enjoy considerably more support than men entering female dominated fields.
As far as we can tell, when women are freer to choose their careers, such as in Scandinavian countries contrasted with Eastern European ones, they tend to choose different careers on average than men.
Feminism, as such, has morphed from gaining rights for oppressed people into trying to oppress people into a paint-by-numbers outcome, and a position that women aren't accountable for the outcome of their actions, such as when they make different choices than men do.
Imagine someone wrote a paper that said men are horrible at management or anything collaborative because all their testosterone makes them so angry that they simply get too emotional to work with others.
If you are a man -- and who knows on the internet -- you know this is garbage. Yes men have more testosterone. That is a fact, and no one is arguing. Yes, testosterone means you are more likely to get angry, but it doesn't follow that your anger levels prevent you from working. Come on!
But now, instead of believing you, people say you are hysterical and anti-science, and you have to do a study to prove you don't get so angry you can't work. Every day people post examples of men who went ballistic at work. The study is inconclusive and you are wasting all this time trying to prove that the testosterone doesn't make you angry. Every time you lose your temper, people point out that you are a guy and of course you're prone to that.
That's what this "people vs things" distinction is like.
Are you saying men are "the minority gender"? What planet do you live on? People who are academics are still part of the general population.
> The male-female ratio in higher education has been steadily moved in favor of the females ever since the 1970s. Total enrollment figures show that females outnumbered their male counterparts for the first time in the late 1970s, and they have steadily increased their numerical advantage ever since. The superiority first came in public universities, but soon private universities saw female enrollment surpass male enrollment.
University feminism has been a majority power movement for an entire generation.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ccap/2012/02/16/the-male-female...
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
> Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Additionally, this is a pattern with the account that needs to change:
> Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, and we ban accounts that do it.
We count alternate accounts as well, so they all get banned unless all improve.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- The topic of discussion was feminism, its application to institutions, and the consequences of that. I didn't introduce any topic.
- This post is directly related, and discusses how the impacts observed in the article extend from the philosophical basis of the movement and its long-term choices about which political battles to engage in.
- The post itself, and subsequent ones, were upvoted.
- The only fact that was contested was the status of men as a minority at university, which I provided a citation for.
- My post was direct, and used plain language for its points, but was not uncivil.
As far as I can tell, you're utilizing the code of conduct to empower a minority trying to censor my speech for political reasons to shut down discussion.
You are of course free to engage in politically motivated censorship as a private website, but I'd suggest you enumerate what you believe I did wrong instead of hiding behind vague allegations.
Vague allegations of violating decorum, sans factual refutation or even a challenge on the substance of my post, are the tools of a tyrant.
It's stupid in the "high risk, but maybe high but questionable payoff" sense in the same way that wingsuiting is, and there's also a gender gap in wingsuiting too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenc...
I can confirm this does happen based on my limited observations. Some people get hired at the expense of candidates which are better by objective measures of publication, citation and funding records, and those people tend to be women and/or minority groups. And despite being an unfair practice, it is encouraged from top and employed.
If there is a sexism/racism problem, I don't understand how more sexism/racism would solve it. I don't understand how there can be a righteous and endorsed flavor of sexism/racism.
But whatever side you are on, I think the real issue here is the personal and professional attacks this academic got for providing an honest opinion ( backed by stats and sources ). The viciousness displayed by his fellow phycists and CERN as an organization is really disappointing as is their attempt to silence him. One of the basis of academia is the idea of "devil's advocacy". Where you or someone takes the other's side in order to getting a fuller understanding of any topic. How is any discussion possible when the opposing side is silenced?
I wonder why that is? What was counted as a person in a "Law profession"? Where support staff and secretaries included? If it was just lawyers, what are they doing right to get equal representation that everyone else does wrong?
Phrasing the gender gap in different areas as "wrong" is weird. Do you see people fighting to bring people into law enforcement, construction, etc? Or to bring men into nursing or day care? Let's accept that there are biological differences that affect what men and women are interested in (which says nothing about their intelligence and aptitude), and leave this far left liberal agenda on the side.
The reaction of the far-leftists to evidence like this is what has pushed me clear out of the left and into centrism. I will never become a conservative (that philosophy has even more patently bankrupt ideas it still desperately clings to), but I cannot consider myself “of the left” anymore. I simply cannot abide those levels of toxicity and religious-like ideology against which any dissent is heresy to be punished and crushed.