Bullies on the team are useful. And experienced managers and administrators know this. Managers protect people from bullies, when the value of the person to the team is greater than the value of the bully to the team. #FactOfLife
Look at the way society is handling Prime Bully Trump. He has written the text book for all other bullies to follow. And they happily will, taking a piss on whatever social norm or code of conduct, everyone else is obediently following. If he can climb to the top of the hill, they know they can too.
You don't want Bullies in an org, you have to be better than them and more useful than them. It's that simple.
Counterpoint: bullies are poisonous to teams. They drain morale, make people spend emotional energy resisting their bullying rather than working, and often shout down people with better ideas.
I'm sure that happens too. I didn't really mean "shouting" to me taken literally, but it's out in the open rather than subtle behind-the-scenes manoeuvring. My experience is from academia where it's pretty difficult to fire someone without going through a long drawn-out process which is often more draining than trying to ignore the bullying, at least in the short term, and with an uncertain end. This means that pretty undisguised derision can be let slip if that person is relatively powerful.
That's a pretty disgusting comment to be honest.
It's very disingenuous too, being a bully is a personality issue and shouldn't have any place in a professional setting.
It makes others uncomfortable and leads to unnecessary confrontations and distraction. It's a very obvious personality flaw too, it's always aimed at someone in a lower position of power than yourself. Go try and bully your manager or department head, see how that works out.
If they’re being bullied and you don’t do anything about it, you seem to fail your own criteria for wanting someone on a team. The usefulness of “standing up for yourself” for which you claim bullying is a good test, only seems to have faculty when bullying is present.
Where did i say i dont?
You can stand up for yourself while others support you.
Its not mutually exclusive
You always have Situations where something did go wrong. Usually multiple persons involved.
Owning up their share of the blame has a corellation to standing up for yourself in my experience
You implied it by suggesting bullying is useful for getting rid of those people. I don't know how you advocate for them being bullied and removed, yet stand up for them at the same time.
> Owning up their share of the blame has a corellation to standing up for yourself in my experience
I would not be surprised if there is a correlation; but the causality seems pretty obvious to me. If you were bullied would you admit to anything that might result in more bullying? What if the people who supposedly support you are secretly hoping you fail?
I have no problem standing up for myself, even if I have no support. I also have no problem with the truth. I'll look my boss in the eye and tell him if I screwed up. I do it out of respect and because I'm about solving problems, even if I created it. But, if he's a bully and the only thing that is going to happen is I'm going to get more abuse? Well, I've probably already complained to HR and/or quit, but if I haven't... screw that guy. He can prove I was the one who screwed up or he can stuff it.
But let's not forget the context: bullies are useful. So what if the bully is the one who screwed up? Is he going to take his share of the blame? Doubtful. My guess is he blames his victim.
I have an ideal occupation for you then: being a prison inmate. They spend all their time worrying about how to be perceived as "people that can stand up for themselves".
I would rather be a part of a work culture where I can focus on getting work done rather than dealing with antisocials.
Your example shows that merely being better or more useful is not enough. Bullies get to the top of the hill not through competence, but through bullying.
Intent probably has something to do with it. In my mind, bullying is "targeted" and persistent over time. Not sure if that is their definition as well.
I also tend to associate the term bullying with kids, and use mobbing for workplace bullying. Apparently wikipedia uses the two terms almost interchangeably.
Why don't you find it acceptable? There are plenty of jobs where there is lots of shouting involved. - much of the military, football managers for example.
In large parts of the publicly-funded science ecosystem in the STEM fields, I have a very strong impression that the pendulum has swung so far that women are now at a significant advantage over men as a result of affirmative action policies. They should really not be complaining about discrimination.
For example, the DOC fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences which funded my PhD was structured in such a way that the grant was split into two equal pots. One pot took applications ONLY from women. The other pot was enforcing 50% of the fellowships going to women. That means: The rules stipulated that there was 3x as much funding available for women as there was for men, despite the fact that there were much fewer female applicants, so chances for a female to get funding were, by design, at least an order of magnitude higher than for a man. -- This was the only publicly funded scholarship program in Austria that pays enough to study at, say, an ivy leage in the U.S. or something like that. -- On top of that they had great mentoring programmes and networking opportunities that were open ONLY to women, and nothing of the sort that men were welcome for.
Similar story told to me by my male cousin, working for a solar technology startup with close ties to an Austrian university and the Austrian science funding ecosystem: They had received public funding to hire some physicists, but some of the funding was earmarked so it could be used only for hiring women. Hiring a woman proved to be a thing of impossibility, since they couldn't find a single one that wanted to apply. They ended up having to give back the funding. An applicant could have had a job there, and all it would have taken was to (a) be vaguely a physicist (b) be female. She didn't need to be good or anything. She just needed to show up, and the job would have been guaranteed to her, since, from the company's POV, it was free money being left on the table to do anything else.
I know a lot of people working for research institutions being funded by the Austrian taxpayer. They tend to all have really shitty careers, with one exception. Guess what that exception was. You guessed right: The one woman I know that travels in those circles.
I don't know if things are as bad in Germany yet as they are in Austria, but women in the publicly-funded science ecosystem in the STEM fields complaining about discrimination at this point in history is simply outrageous. If anything, men should be the ones complaining.
Another male friend of mine, working for a U.S.-based tech startup, told me the following story: They are hiring a backend engineer right now. What applicants don't know: They want to hire a woman. Word came down from on high, that a team of 10 backend engineers being all-male is a situation that's going to end.
So they're hiring a woman, doing whatever it takes, as in: (a) making a conscious effort to lower the bar (b) making up a role that they don't even need with a job description that will appeal to women (c) paying high premiums for recruiting channels that will deliver female applicants (d) running the process in such a way that, unbeknownst to applicants due to legal ramifications, all applications by men are dead on arrival.
Especially in Europe, it's very clear that in tech, there's a huge unfair bias for women. I mean look at the speaker lineups of conferences and management / tech teams of large tech organizations. It's hard to spot a single man among the ranks.
I'm assuming you're being sarcastic, but for anyone who didn't check out the links:
Zalando:
> On top of this improved focus, we remain committed to increasing female leadership – our target is to have 25% of positions at the first level and 30% at the second level below the Management Board filled by women by 2022 (currently 11% and 16% respectively).
Curry On:
2/4 keynote speakers are men, 11/12 invited speakers are men, 29/32 presentations are held by men (as far as I can tell based on names and pictures).
Are you sure? The impression I get in NL is that women don't particular like to work too much : they favor 32 over 40 hrs. I even overheard a young woman say she went to 24 hrs ( from 32 hrs ), because 'why not?', they could afford it.
My impression is women are less ambitious and value quality of life much more than men ( I don't blame them, I try to do as little as possible as well ).
My perception is that if a man works less than full time, people think he must be a go-getter who isn’t afraid to ask his boss for it, must be earning a lot already, etc. It’s seen as an enviable position to be in. When women work less than full time they tend to be called “unambitious”.
I've been working in the EU for some time, and I have A. Not seen evidence of these policies B. Continued to note an overwhelming majority of my colleagues (90+%) is male.
When I go to conferences and look at management/tech teams, I see the opposite of what you are talking about: Very few women (or no women). I would like to know some of these woman-friendly conferences that you go to so I can actually attend, it might be nice.
I assume the sociologists do actually ask a lot more questions and they simply don't filter through to tech boards, but the really interesting ones seem to me to be:
* Are average women making a more rational decisions than average men in avoiding these fields?
* Is there a difference in how much pain average men and women will tolerate before they leave? Ie, is the average man desperate to achieve a certain type of success, leading to increased competitiveness?
I think we all know that leadership positions in STEM companies and academia (and beyond) tend to skew male, the entry level incentives skew female and that females are the target of lots of unwanted male attention.
This obviously implies a bias, because half the apt are going to be female. However the efforts to correct this bias don't seem to have done their due diligence to figure out what the cause is; because at the moment the entry level incentives are clearly unfair in and of themselves. Two wrongs don't make Right, they make Very Wrong - it is a bad idea to correct bias by introducing more biases. Also, my experience in the mining industry makes me think that these incentives aren't likely to work because the cause of the bias is not concern about monetary compensation. I'll spare the crowd my personal theories.
> However the efforts to correct this bias don't seem to have done their due diligence to figure out what the cause is; because at the moment the entry level incentives are clearly unfair in and of themselves. Two wrongs don't make Right, they make Very Wrong - it is a bad idea to correct bias by introducing more biases.
What if the cause is due to the existing precedent? Then wouldn't positive discrimination be an effective solution?
they could always admit their ratios are way off, fire everybody, and create 10 new backend job applications - 5 of which will go to men and 5 to women, so that way their hiring is more fair to both men and women.
The way you're phrasing it, they need to "admit guilt". They are guilty of nothing. First of all, what kind of heartless jerk fires every one to win PC points? That's a really bad practice, not fair to your employees, and I certainly wouldn't want to work for a company who did that.
Clearly, there are problems finding women. There are fewer women; that means it is not possible to have 50/50 across the board. He just said that they are lowering the bar. What are they doing about hiring that is unfair? Probably nothing, if they have to hire less-qualified women or a more-qualified man.
There are fewer women in tech. Why is immaterial to the current discussion. For better or for worse, that's where we are. If you want my two cents, I think part of it is risk. I worked in a start-up for a few years (not in the valley), and there was one female developer in a company of thirty. Why? I think men (especially young ones) are more willing to pick up and move for a high risk/high reward opportunity.
But all that aside, seriously, who actually advocates firing every one so you can have a nice press release? Would you want to lose your job to give some random woman one?
Certainly it's not fair to the employees. Certainly they probably didn't expect to get 10 men and 0 women in their current makeup. There may be no intentional guilt, but it's also not possible to know how they ended up with the makeup they have, 10 to 0, though it was probably incremental and without reflection on the makeup of the team along the way. Assuredly it probably wasn't malicious, but it's also like the people doing the hiring didn't reflect along the way - "hey, we've got 9 engineers and we need 10 and we are going to hire _another_ man for this role".
It's clear they (in this case the company) want to fix this in some way, as instructions "from on high" came down. Again company may or may not know how they got there. The company may also be failing to attract clients who want to vote with their dollars for a diverse company - so there could be a valid business case for this. Or not, maybe they just don't want a company with all dudes.
The original post was pointing out an unfair hiring practice due to this policy. I'm pointing out there is an alternative equitable hiring practice which actually leads to a fairer hiring practice for men and doesn't necessarily involve affirmative action, but that involves starting from scratch again (nobody said you'd necessarily lose your job - they could also easily make those positions available). Obviously this is not a tenable thought experiment, especially in academia thanks to tenure, so that's why we have these systems which, on the surface, may appear to discriminate against men. That said, many people interview for their current jobs in corporate restructurings all the time. That's probably not fair either, but it's accepted practice in the US.
I don't understand what you mean. Do you really think they should hire a less-qualified person because of her sex? "we are going to hire _another_ man" - if he's the most qualified, why wouldn't you?
What is this equitable hiring practice? Fire your team over and over until you get more women? What if your ten most qualified applicants are again men? It seems very possible.
And what is this unfair hiring practice? How do you know the most qualified weren't all male? You are using the term "equitable" over "equal", and I'm assuming you understand the difference. I don't believe a company ought to disadvantage men to the advantage of women, because I don't believe discrimination is just.
As for your "nobody said you'd lose your job", yes, you did. Your assumption is that at least one man will lose his job for a woman.
You did not answer my question - would you, personally, be willing to quit your job to allow a woman to take it? Even were she less qualified?
Just yesterday, I read about a dutch university (Eindhoven) that wants to only hire women for the next 18 months (and give them a bonus 100k€ grant on top that male hires wouldn't get).
I am 100% pro equal rights for everybody, but this is just the opposite, and all it will achieve is to create tension, prejudice and anger towards women hired under this rules.
Where did you read about "18 months"? Sounds like "first 6 months" to me. In my experience searching for good academic staff, especially in fields with a lucrative industry takes ages, so I wouldn't be too sure that there will be a strong discriminatory effect when there are not that many women to recruit anyway.
I agree that this move is not the best one. It will end up sending the wrong signals again, which will just lead to backlash on women working in STEM fields. Attacking with opposite discrimination is certainly a bad temporal fix for an existing systematic bias and the tendency of men to downplay competent women.
However, this tendency costs society a lot. It is a fix at least. Someone listened.
I wouldn't expect that they want to make this permanent once things have equaled out a bit.
"If a vacancy fails to attract suitable candidates within six months, it will be opened up to men, and after 18 months the entire scheme will be revised, the university said on Tuesday."
The rule is: For the first 6 months of any recruitment process, only look at female CVs. After this time, also start inviting the men. After 18 months, evaluate the success of this rule and decide whether to follow through for the full 5 years.
For the next 18 months, at least, they will have the following policy; to spend the first the first 6 months after posting each new position trying to fill that new position exclusively with a woman.
So yes, in that article it does say “18 months”. It’s right in the part where it says “18” and “months”.
If you want to be pedantic, dual_dingo wrote that the university wants to (not will) hire only women for the next 18 months, which is a pretty accurate representation of their new policy. So if suitable female candidates show up for every position in the next 18 months, then no male candidates will be hired at all.
> For the next year and a half, this will apply to 100 percent of vacancies, after which the university will review the percentage covered by the scheme each year.
but frankly, I don't really understand what they mean by
"in the first six months of recruitment".
Even in that article with its highly click-baity and wrong headline (Spiegel Online has not been "reputable" for long time) they say that 18 months is merely the period after which they want to evaluate their 5-year program.
The interview clearly says that the rule applies to "the first 6 months of recruitment", which in my understanding of the process means "after the job ad is posted".
Btw, imho Dutch people have a tendency for "certainly good enough" solutions because it keeps things moving (instead of perfectionist stagnation whenever confronted with complexity like us germans often do). This 6-month period of only looking at female applicants during recruitment looks like one of those. Nobody says that this will stay the rule forever. Also consider that they will get very few female applicants anyway, so there is still a lot of room for men.
If no solution is applied at all because people are waiting for the perfect one, there will be continued discrimination against competence. This has costs too.
"Take no action" might not feel like a decision, but it is one and has ill effects.
Is this better than trying a fix for a short period of time that may be mediocre, but is at least effective?
That these skewed measures favouring women exist, does not mean that discrimination and sexual harassment towards women doesn't also exist. Sexism is still depressingly common. These measures seem like a very heavy-handed way to even the scales, but it tries to fight a symptom rather than the cause, and it's probably not very effective at that.
It absolutely is. All other things equal, a graduate program with 20% women phd students vs one with 40-60% women phd students will have a lot more misogyny. Forcefully raising the number of women in a program insures that there are enough of them that they can work together and speak up when harassment and discrimination happens.
But the primary goal of a graduate program isn't avoiding harassment and discrimination at all costs. It's to provide the best candidates for the relevant field. To "forcefully" throw in some extra "support pets" feels like a really silly solution to tackle that problem.
I don't agree at all. I think the primary goal of every government funded institution is to promote social welfare - not economic growth. As a physics PhD, I am totally happy if the progress in my field slows down by even 50%, if it means that 50% of the population, who currently are and feel discriminated against, aren't and don't feel that way any more. I will always vote for the political candidate who supports one over the other.
In most (but not all) fields of human intellectual endeavor, we have made progress far beyond needed, that with the right politics and social commitment, every human on this planet can have all their needs and basic wants fulfilled. There is no need to constantly fuel the GDP, only the craft a world in which people can be happy.
We agree to disagree then, though my point isn't the GDP. As a not entirely neurotypical human being, I not unsurprisingly believe that mono-focus causes progress in technology and science; progress which has the potential to improve conditions in the world. I don't think the relative equality in today's (at least North/West European) society would have been possible without this progress beyond a society based on brute force. To me, scientific progress and understanding enables social welfare.
At some point – and you can adapt this example to other fields – you want build a bridge that doesn't collapse, and niceness is not going to get you there. The engineer can be female, from an ethnic minority, disabled or a kid with rich parents, but you want to rely on them being a good engineer and not someone who got a free pass and cuddle treatment.
This is why the primary goal should be skill and not some rather subjective sense of social justice. I feel you promote equality of outcome and not just equality of opportunity.
This needs not be a black and white comparison, but consistently choosing politicians that prefer cuddle over hard results could very well lead to a society where there is no money for the weak, unprivileged, disadvantaged minorities, education, social welfare, medical care, etc; a society that – perhaps out of necessity – will squeeze out some of those people you'd want to support.
Yes, but the concern of the parent is that maybe these measures might hurt women in the long run.
I am more or less neutral at this. I never experience those extreme by myself.... except in some job-ad "For the same qualification, we will hire female candidate".
I think a perception problem occurs if less-qualified women get more funding than men. That means that the male scientists who get funded will actually just be better at their jobs, which is going to have the effect of perpetuating the perception that men make better scientists (which I think is obviously untrue, but this has always been a problem with affirmative action policies). I don't really see a way to solve this at the grant funding level.
This perception problem is in fact a problem, but this also ignores another explaination (speculatively) that less-qualified men are getting more funding over more-qualified women due to unconscious biases of the reviewers. Which at least has studies that say this might be the case.
I don't know if we have studies that indicate evidence that less-qualified women are getting more funding than more-qualified men. For example this comment chain is mostly anecdata, which makes it difficult, as it relies on how good-faith we wish to take the anecdote and how that anecdote either enforces one's existing biases or can just be dismissed as anecdotal and not genuine studies. But even the "genuine" studies are in a field where we have a replication crisis.
So, what I'm saying is: I don't know, and I don't think anyone else knows, the whole truth and breakdown of the matter. And I'd be suspicious of anyone claiming they are under a broadsale impression of anything regarding the quality of women in STEM.
This can of course also be turned the other way around: "less-qualified women are getting more funding over more qualified men due to unconscious biases of the reviewers"
studies that say this might be the case.
Those 'studies' generally suffer from various forms of bias, in particular
social desirability bias [1], and never reflect upon their social desirability bias. Often the authors of such studies also have a direct financial in the claimed outcome of the 'studies': To paraphase Upton Sinclair "It is difficult to get a woman to understand something, when her salary depends upon his not understanding it!".
I challenge you to show me studie along the lines of what you suggest that even mention social desirability bias and financial interest as threats to validity.
I feel you are making rebuttals to portions of my comment without actually reading the full comment to realize that everything you're rebutting is actually in agreement with your rebuttal. This behavior is confusing. Could you explain yourself?
EDIT: In clarification, I'm essentially saying 'Well, X, but Y. On the other hand, P, but Q.' and you're demanding I prove X to arbirary metric M, even though Y evidences that I'm not in the interest of proving X at all.
I apologise if I was unclear. What I tried to do was subtly to entice my readers to reflect on the validity of the ruling beliefs about women in STEM -- knowing full well that I'm flying outside the tech crowd's Overton window. Let me try to express my belief in a different way, using four bullet points. I hope it's more clear this way.
(α) All the studies that claim show that the reason we have more men
than women is due to malice (eg. misogyny, unconscious bias) are not
standing up to scrutiny. They have no scientific validity.
(β) The reason that there are so many 'studies' of
the kind I criticise as scientifically baseless is political. There
is a political will to have more women in STEM positions.
(γ) The overt explanation for this political will is structurally rather
similar to the explanation given by the early Soviet Union for the
promotion of non-Russian ethnicities over Russians in the policy of constructing the New Soviet man (новый советский человек). This reason is cogently described in Marxism and the
National Question [1].
(δ) I'm generally worried about policies similar to those carried out by the author
of [1].
I'd love to see what your basis for your first point is. Misogyny is hardly unproven, and unconscious bias has also been shown through various studies. Sexism is sadly still common in many areas.
I think there's mostly an economic need for more people in STEM positions, and with women being underrepresented, that's an obvious place to look for more talent. And there are countries that do have more women in STEM or other scientific positions. So for countries that don't, figuring out what's stopping those women is a valid concern.
I have read 100s of such 'studies' over the years, they are not meeting even the most basic scientific standards. I have brought one such case to the attention of the university of its author -- to no avail, the university buried it. Publication hoaxes like [1] don't exactly increase confidence, as far as I'm aware the author who exposed the publishing hoax was punished. And then there's the replication crisis (which is not limited to the question at hand), e.g. try to find a suitable replication of stereotype threat.
Misogyny ... Sexism
Misogyny and Sexism are political terms, they are "Essentially Contested Concept" [2].
mostly an economic need for more
people in STEM
I agree with this, but note that this is a political reason in a general sense, not one of 'oppression'. So you seem to be agreeing.
countries that do have more women in STEM
Yes, and the best example are the former Soviet block countries. Note that they did not engage in modern affirmative action as we now know them for STEM in the west -- they more or less allocated people to jobs.
is a valid concern.
Indeed, but I don't see any reason to believe that the current approach in the west is the best possible one. Mostly it seems to be creating an unaccountable, non-democratic industry of enforcers.
"What I tried to do was subtly to entice my readers to reflect on the validity of the ruling beliefs about women in STEM"
This may sound rude, by why are you even talking to me if you're not desiring to engage with me and my literal words? Wouldn't a blog be more suitable for you? Because I'm still not entirely sure how your points interact with me, and why you're responding to me.
everything you're rebutting is
actually in agreement with your rebuttal.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you are saying. I read your post as: "X is the case, arguments for not-X are anecdata, we have to take not-X on trust,
nobody knows if X or not-X but I'm suspicious of not-X" I apologise if that's not what you are trying to say.
It's an extreme situation. I'd assume that, given more hurdles for women than for men, the women who do make it are likely to be more qualified than men, not less.
When the few women you can find are less qualified, you should ask yourself why. Why are the more qualified women avoiding you? If either your company or your industry had developed a reputation for being toxic and sexist, I can totally see why qualified women would avoid it. Giving more money to women is not going to solve the real problem here. It's also possible that your culture has somehow decided this is not a job for women. I work at a Dutch company that employs plenty of female developers, but all the female developers are from India. I don't think I know even a single female Dutch programmer here, which is weird. Why is this?
Those are the real issues we need to figure out. Simply occasionally throwing money at people, even if it's a lot, is unlikely to fix the structural problems here.
It has been figured out: The more egalitarian a society is, the more women follow their actual interests. Programming is not one of these (in general, there are of course always exceptions).
> I'd assume that, given more hurdles for women than for men, the women who do make it are likely to be more qualified than men, not less.
Sure — ashelmire's point was that right now there are more hurdles for men, which leads to men being more likely to be more qualified than women, which perpetuates and amplifies a stereotype.
Maybe in some very specific situations there are indeed more hurdles for men than for women, but in general, in STEM in particular, there are clearly more hurdles for women than for men, as evidenced by the fact that more men than women make it through.
Though I don't think the solution is to compensate by creating more hurdles for men; we need to identify and remove the hurdles for women. And whatever hurdles remain for men.
> there are clearly more hurdles for women than for men, as evidenced by the fact that more men than women make it through
This has three very large assumptions:
1. Men and women share the same distribution of relevant abilities
2. Men and women share the same distribution of relevant interests
3. Men and women share the same distribution of societal expectations and external opportunities
A lot of people seem to assume that either #1 or #2 are false, and there's research to support #2 being false. #3 being false also seems intuitively obvious to me, given that it's stereotypically more acceptable to be a housewife than a househusband (as one example of many).
3 is the big one. I once heard Neil DeGrasse Tyson talk about how every time he said he'd want to become an astrophysicist, people would ask him if he shouldn't become an athlete. He was a good wrestler, wasn't he? Athlete is a socially acceptable career for black men. I can't help but wonder how many potential astrophysicists became athletes instead due to such social pressure.
I'm struggling to imagine women (as a category) being any more incompetent or unqualified than the men (as a category) I've worked with.
There's always a bell curve distribution of skill, talent, aptitude, whatever. When the work force population (mostly) reflects the general population (gender, ethnicity, age, whatever), we'll see that people are just people. Some good, most meh, and a few whoopers (who should be paid to stay home, for the benefit of the rest of us).
I see it happen, though there's obviously less of a threat to female advances due to physiological reasons. Then again, most sexual activity isn't driven by physical power and violence, and situations can turn pretty awkward also when women take things too far.
Generally speaking, a man doesn't need to fear that the woman giving unwanted attention may try to physically overpower them. So while we shouldn't ignore any difficulties faced by men, the situation isn't the same.
Obviously, this only applies to heterosexual situations.
I'll give you an example - a female boss asked me to "come to her hotel room" during a weekend on her visit to my city, making it clear with her body language what she wanted. I declined. Half a year later my earned/promised promotion didn't happen.
Another situation - a former female colleague, a married wife with children, during a business trip suggested I go to her "beautiful" rented apartment she wanted to show me and that I could sleep there; "pajamas not needed", "marriage is just marriage, it's not important". I declined; she went cold in subsequent mutual interactions, and as she was a close friend of my boss (I don't want to explore how close), boss started to be cold towards me as well.
So no, there is no threat of physical violence, but there is a significant threat of unjust manipulation that for some reason is not on our society's radar at all. Shitty behavior comes in all genders, but only one is called out for it.
Anecdotally, the shittiest groups/institutions that I have worked in were over 80% male. In my experience the organizations that are diverse are also the most productive and enjoyable to work in.
You've definitely identified a correlation, but which direction is the causation, if any? I can easily imagine it going either way (or there be none at all), which means more investigation is required.
You can take a look at https://bmbwf.gv.at/fileadmin/user_upload/gender/2019/EN_KV_... Women are still fairly underrepresented in the pipeline converting undergrads to phds->postdocs->profs, with numbers dropping most of the way. I am pretty okay with affirmative action happening till those numbers are closer to 50% and then slowly phasing them out.
As far as your cousin story goes, that exactly illustrates the problem. There is no reason a women could not have become a solar tech physicist. But the persistent misogyny that permeates academia, despite all these financial incentives from the top, stopped most women from taking that particular line. We need to fix the problem. You can argue that throwing money at women is perhaps not the best way, but then you have to present a method that works better at righting the wrongs in academia.
You could also argue this: The part you stated before the "BUT" is a statement of fact. The part you stated after the "BUT" is complete speculation. I've never seen misogyny actually happen at any company I worked for, ever. Another piece of speculation: Women don't get those jobs because they DON'T WANT those jobs. So why throw these jobs at them, against their will? Why engage in some weird social engineering projects to make little girls want to build robots when, clearly, they don't?
I’ve seen plenty of misogyny at nearly every tech event and gathering I’ve ever been to, as well as within the occasional work I’ve had, so either I’m going to the wrong places or you’re not looking very hard.
If you follow any high-profile women in tech on Twitter, wade into their mentions to see sex-based harassment directed at them. It's consistent and ongoing and must be exhausting for them to deal with. (I know it would be for me.)
If one's answer is that that's somehow not representative, I'd like to know why one thinks that shows up on a public forum but doesn't translate to any other parts of the industry.
You really shouldn't believe anything someone (male or female) with a high profile on Twitter says. The more someone is driven by attention, the less trustworthy they are.
They are outliers and not representative of the actual community or workforce.
I'm not sure how much time I'm willing to spend scrolling through and screencapping this stuff, but what you're saying doesn't match what I see at all. I also have all the quality filters off and often click the "show more" filter, though, and I seldom block people (and don't use any blocklists).
"The part you stated before the "BUT" is a statement of fact. The part you stated after the "BUT" is complete speculation."
Yes, actually, this entire comment chain is speculation because the original comment was a speculation. If that means that these positions are less merit then this entire comment chain has less merit.
You might find this illuminating https://www.nap.edu/read/24994/chapter/5#65 For instance Fig 3-2 suggests that 40% of female graduate students have experienced some sort of sexist hostility.
Which lines up pretty well with what I personally observed during my graduate program.
Don't you think taking off to have children might explain a lot of it? That academic path you're charting eats up almost all of the safe childbearing years.
Having children should impact men as much as women, professionally and academically. The fact that it doesn't is a cultural decision, not a biological one.
Why aren't men with children staying home with the kids and having the same thing happen to them? Sexism.
If women want to stay home with children more than men do and successfully achieve that, it's quite the opposite of sexism. Most stay at home moms are doing exactly what they want and it's actually sexist to question their decisions.
Against women or men? Is it not sexist that men are expected to work much more than women and provide?
I would say it is because of understandable historical reasons and that it is changing in a lot countries. For example in Sweden dads are taking out a larger and larger part of parental leave. It is still only 28% but increasing every year I think.
There are of course many other factors that weigh in of who will take parental leave. To take some anecdotes I've seen in my circles:
1. Women tend to have partners that are older and equal or higher in social status so it is not uncommon that the men have come further in their careers. So when the man is home there will be less money for the household. Sometimes the woman uses that as an excuse to be able to home more and sometimes the man uses it because they don't want to be home.
2. Women will logically be home in the beginning due to them nursing and some want to be home longer total and the dad say yes because they feel the mom have earned it. Some women also feel that the dad will get the more fun stay at home time and want a part of that as well and not only in the beginning.
It is changing but people also prioritize differently and not everything is sexism.
Because men can have children later in their careers. Women being forced biologically to have children by their mid 30s is often during the time they'd have made the most advances. It's not at all uncommon for men to be 5-10 years older. And then the parental roles elected are often asymmetrical. I'm guessing that you'd gladly attribute this to internalized misogyny, but unfortunately not everything can be written off as a social construction.
Absolutely is part of the answer in the current system. So the way to think about this is the following. 20% of professors are currently women. Are 60% [1] of the women permanently stay at home mothers? If not, then we have to ask why its not possible to make accommodations for people doing enormous social good (having ~<2 kids), and ensure that their social contributions do not stump their ability to pursue their choice of profession? To be explicit, the system should be that women can go away for a few years to have children and still come back and be promoted to the top positions in the organization.
[1] 20% of all profs/50% societal gender ratio = 40% of women are employed as prof assuming only two careers (prof and SAHM).
These positions as the OP describes require continuous, unbroken professional desication to reach top credentials. You can't just compare it with the general working female population outside of academia and/or sum up average total years spent in the field.
> Women are still fairly underrepresented in the pipeline converting undergrads to phds->postdocs->profs, with numbers dropping most of the way. I am pretty okay with affirmative action happening till those numbers are closer to 50% and then slowly phasing them out.
You're assuming that 1) affirmative action is effective, 2) that women are dropping out for reasons related to sexism, 3) that entrenched policies are so easily "phased out". I'm not sure any of these are true.
I always invite people who is in favor of affirmative action to make it into a general rule to address gender segregation.
Here in Sweden we had last year one higher education program where every single student is of the same gender. 100% gender segregation. The profession that those students graduate for is also unsurprising the profession with highest gender segregation.
I have toyed with the idea that maybe a good step to right the wrongs and get all industries numbers closer to 50% would be to create a new tax which gave under represented genders a tax cut and over represented genders a corresponding tax increase depending on how gender segregated their chosen profession is. That would create an incentive to break gender norms in a country where 88.5% of women and men work in professions that is considered gender segregated, and employment rate of both is almost identical.
Women tend to suffer the hardest under a dysfunctional, abusive, bullying-infested work environment. They have to take abuse from narcissistic, harrassing men, and from women higher-up in the hierarchy, who are well known for bullying their female subordinates while mostly leaving males alone! They may have an easier time getting hired but that doesn't mean they have it easy all-around once they're onboard.
>They have to take abuse from narcissistic, harrassing men
The worst are narcissistic, harassing women who are presumed to be incapable of such behavior by people like you, and shielded from any consequences for their recurring bad behavior that spans across years.
I am wondering how many scientists are going to become temporarily transgender to have a larger pool for funding available... Or another take, bureaucrats know that not many women show up, so that's a neat way to reduce expenses in sciences.
We were a very technical field of studies and had only a few woman enlisted. Bringing those few successfully through their time was valued quite high.
Requirements to their work were clearly lower than for us and getting an appointment with the professors was easier for them, too. All in all it was less of an overall-hassle for them.
But yeah, one might say this is some kind of survivorship bias or whatever, I don't care. It's what I perceived and it was also a recurring topic in "mens only"-discussions. So other perceived it that way, too.
Women have been earning more degrees than men since 1978.
For the past forty years, there have been no male-only advancement programs, and (nearly) all sex-based funding has been provided to the majority sex, to advantage them in any field where they’re not currently dominant (and sometimes, just to advantage them in general).
It’s a willful and generational-scale violation of Title IX: that kind of sexist favoritism of the majority is blatantly illegal under discrimination laws.
For forty years, feminism on college campuses has been a majoritarian, sexist power movement — and now it’s spreading to the workplace, as a generation of entitled women graduate and demand the continuation of privilege.
If women have been earning more degrees than men since 1978, why are the majority of educated leadership still men? If women have been a majoritarian sex-based power movement for 40 years this should be plenty of time to replace professors, CEOs, business owners, presidents and vice presidents, grant reviewers, and significant, public-facing leaders of the world's top educational instutions.
Why is this not the case?
(For the record: I'm not denying your understanding of the situation. I'm trying to understand your position regarding feminism's role in empowering women and the disparate power between men and women that you're seeing.
Women are presently becoming presidents, vice-presidents, etc and forming women advocacy committees inside of corporations and other organizations to use their influence to create special programs for women which advantage them in the same way we’ve seen from the educational system.
And women have become prevalent in all of those fields, over the same time period.
The reason you don’t see them storming the ranks of business leadership is twofold:
1. It simply takes time. A woman who was 22 in 1978 is 63 now, so the very beginning of that group is only now reaching senior leadership — exactly in line with the timing of female advantage programs in the workplace. If my theory is right (and people don’t do anything — which is unlikely), then we’d see the same sexist programs from colleges rolled out into the workplace over the next twenty years. (I think pointing it out is part of pushing back on excess in democracy — hence me calling it out here.)
2. Biology is a thing, and we see that in equitable societies — where women are free to pursue passions rather than coerced to amass power — they tend to choose a different distribution of lifestyles than men. There’s two cohorts in women that are smaller in men, the ones who want to stay home as caretakers and the ones who want to work part time and be part time caretakers. It’s not clear that women try to lead major corporations at the same rate as men — and as anecdata, around half the small business owners, and majority of crafters or service contracting company owners, I meet are women. We may actually be seeing a more fair outcome than first blush would lead you to believe — and desires simply aren’t evenly distributed.
I’m not saying there isn’t sexism anywhere. I’m just saying there’s systemic sexism against men in education — and women who are accustomed to that are trying to bring it into the workplace.
The most obvious explanation is that there really are inherent differences between men and women such that (some) men drive themselves harder to attain these high level positions. Sadly, this is an area that's more or less forbidden to investigate and discuss due to politics.
I would describe myself as "burning for the job", to a level that is not really healthy sometimes. But I love what I do, it's more than a job for me and I will (maybe) stop looking for better jobs and giving 110%, once I reach a salary of 100k or more a year (this is still quite a number in Germany, I think).
While some male colleagues also really burn for their jobs and want to achieve great things, my female colleagues are really hard to motivate to go the extra mile. They value free time and work-life balance more than staying overtime, getting something done today and not tomorrow and things alike.
Maybe they are doing the right thing, work is not everything, but I think this might lead to men taking positions which require the aforementioned "mindset", no matter whether it's healthy or not.
I agree that the choice to not prioritize career need not be viewed in a negative light. The focus on everyone having a high powered career seems somewhat anti-human to me. It devalues the very important role of family in society. It also seems somewhat sexist to label what has traditionally been a stronghold of women (motherhood) as being somehow less important that working a full-time job.
Being a stay at home parent is very difficult and very valuable work.
Arguably, if it was the case there is a systematic push of women to dominate all levels of higher education, then only a minority of extremely hard working or talented men would achieve high level positions while the vast majority would be women who used nepotism and social networking to achieve their standing (via feminism-boosting).
So it still isn't making intuitive sense to me why most leadership is still male if it holds true that women should have the most power and have held the most power over the leadership pipeline for over a generation.
I would say because at the end of the day, the work must still be done and social networking and nepotism aren't producing the candidates that can do the job. They are just filling the middle to upper middle ranks with those who benefit from it but those at the top get there through some combination of competence, extreme dedication and ruthlessness. Some of which are qualities that we probably don't want highly represented in the general population.
Middle to upper middle ranks are still mostly men in many instutions, so much so that its well known that male nurses statistically advance faster than female nurses into middle to upper-middle nurse management. If one were to attribute it to competence and dedication, this would mean that by and large only men are capable of extreme dedication, competence, and ruthlessness. Is this the conclusion we wish to garner? That simultaneously men are systematically oppressed but also the only sexual demographic inherently capable of consistently achieving excellence?
It’s not about what anyone “wishes to garner”, it’s about being factual.
I don’t find it hard to believe at all that extreme dedication and ruthlessness are highly correlated with testosterone for instance. We already know it’s coupled with aggression.
Edit: And this isn’t to say women aren’t competent and can’t be leaders! There are females CEOs, just not as many as males CEOs. There are also more male inmates and homeless. The same traits can easily lead to opposite results.
Yes, however, we don't have facts here. We're speculating based on assumptions that have no proof (ie. that women are systematically oppressing men and also that men are by and large the default gender to excel in the job market due to their testosterone). I'm trying to ask that if the hypothetical is actually represent of reality, why there exists phenomena that intuitively makes no sense.
For example, it makes no intuitive sense that the vast majority of world leaders, CEOs, business owners, etc. are men if all men are being systematically oppressed by feminisim. This isn't how any other system of oppression works (race, class, physical ability). It also makes no sense that extreme dedication is correlated with testosterone but males are not correlated with child rearing, which requires arguably the maximum possible dedication.
There are very few CEOs in this world, there are millions of men in prison though. I'm not sure how many homeless there are, but definitely more than there are CEOs. I think there are a lot of other things you have to look at but by your logic that's evidence of oppression.
That pretty much doesn’t function like any sort of oppression that we know of. By this reasoning, poor people would simultaneously be overwhelmingly CEOs as well as homeless. Black people would be overwhelmingly POTUS multiple times over.
If there was a systematic push of men to dominate all levels of higher education, then only a minority of men would end at the bottom of society while the wast majority at the bottom would be women.
So it isn't making intuitive sense why the most people at the bottom of society is male if it holds true that men should have the most power and have held the most power over the success pipeline for over a generation.
It also does not make any sense looking at other system of oppression. If we model our theory based on the typical caste system with the oppressed at the bottom and the powerful at top, then men and women as either the oppressed or oppressor does not fit.
Because many women don't want power over others, preferring co-op over hierarchical structure, while a lot of men don't want equality but to fight and climb the ladder (or die)?
I'm not asserting as univocally true, just musing that the environmental structures in which "normative" men and women thrive might be quite different.
In other words, are men collectively squeezing women out of the game, or are men playing each to the death for personal victory, not handing out free passes to the other opponents, male or female? While the former might regrettably happen, I feel the latter is really the common case.
This is a silly generalisation, but women want to live in a female world and men want to live in a male world. Male thoughts and drives are not acceptable in a modern mixed environment – at least openly – so the rules of mixed environments really become the rules of female conversation and social behaviour.
Oppression conjures images of physical force, so perhaps intolerance is a better word than oppression, by a small but very vocal group of women. You can control others without taking part in a hierarchical structure.
On the one hand, women seem to be evolutionarily adapted to want to be cared for. At least a subset of them is going to complain about just about anything much like children and taking that seriously is beginning to have seriously adverse consequences.
On the other hand, there are sneaky males who try to get the attention of women by standing in for them. Such males are largely pushed to such strategies because they have been starved of physical affection because society denies the fact that women predominantly want men who emerge from dominance competition over them and ceased to cultivate this, which itself is a consequence of women's complaining taken seriously.
These two mechanisms form a feedback loop that is hard to break, especially in the current political climate.
Plenty of men want to be listened to. You just have to be the kind of person who they feel safe confiding in. If you believe in gender essentialism as you appear to, your male friends probably don't consider you safe to open up to.
All babies cry for help and attention. The bifurcation into two rigid binary genders with roles and expectations layered on later is cultural and varies through history. Evolution isn't that fast.
Human females always had a much lower economic output until recently. Even in the most matriarchal cultures, men were in charge of >90% of the agriculture, military, politics etc. Human matriarchies have never existed. Men have always been selected by dominance competition, though dominance is frequently very subtle; it's mainly about status, affiliation, competence, attire, ornamentation, art etc., but also ... pecking order.
At best, our picture of human history is incomplete. Historians routinely compress concepts to what they understand, and their compressions become The Understanding.
For example: historians often assumed all relationships between two men were platonic because they were raised in a society with enforced heterosexuality. Their lens became the story. Alternate explanations, like trying to read a character as queer, can fall victim to the same conformation bias. You can look to more recent times to, for example, see Native culture crushed legally and compressed until people believe running around in mass produced war bonnets while hollering respects the culture.
Loki, however, was definitely genderfluid and pansexual.
Only a small minority of cultures allowed homosexuality and even in those it wasn't very common. Even in modern societies, where it is socially acceptable only a small minority has deviant sexual preferences, probably less than 5%, so, no, this has never been normal and will likely never be. So enough of this already; the backlash is going to be harsh if natural sex roles will be stifled any further. It should be even in the interest of queers to let it cool off at this point.
What the hell dude? First of all, this survey shows how widespread bullying, sexual harrassment, and exclusion is for women (and foreigners) at Max Planck (quite representative of academia) and your first reaction is "but what about men?"
Secondly, these programs are there to counteract long-standing structural discrimination of women in those fields. Mere legal equality and lack of blatant discrimination does not mean equality is achieved. These programs help push toward a society that may give women equal standing not only in the legal but also in the political, social, cultural, and economic spheres. (Outcomes can speak to existing inequalities in society [1])
Women are paid less than men, are much less represented in well-paying jobs, and barely hold any jobs in many academic fields and decision-making (funding) bodies. Computer science is still a hostile environment for many women [2]. You might common with the continuously disproven "it's due to personal choice" but it ain't that easy: These choices of e.g. working less hours are strongly influenced by our social surroundings and the fact that e.g. working less earns you a lower hourly wage is too. For example, in Germany the share of female academics suddenly drops as they move up the ladder because that happens at an age, when many women might choose to become mothers [3]. However, limiting career progression because of a possible pregnancy is definitely not their choice. Also, the idea that women are just naturally less assertive doesn't hold as studies show that when the social pressure wanes (e.g. by advocating for someone else) they become comparable assertive [4]. The idea that women choose not to work in high-paying professions is also wrong, looking at the historical change in CS [5] or at countries like India or Turkey [6]. Also, pay drops when women move into an industry [7]. Stuff like long working hours also factor in [8].
Third, you are merely offering some anecdotal evidence without providing any case for why women are more advantaged now. The existence of positive discrimination doesn't show equality is achieved and by stating that women are evena dvandatged now, you're going against the scientific consensus.
That doesn't detract from the original point: Your whataboutism regarding funding earmarking has nothing to do with sexual harrassment and bullying. It's still interesting how all the comments piling up ere are based on anecdotes of shock "discrimination" - probably the first time they experience something like that.
[1] For the case: Phillips, Anne. 2004. “Defending Equality of Outcome.” Journal of Political Philosophy 12(1): 1–19.
[4] Amanatullah, Emily T., and Michael W. Morris. 2010. “Negotiating gender roles: Gender differences in assertive negotiating are mediated by women's fear of backlash and
attenuated when negotiating on behalf of others.” [eng]. Journal of personality and socialpsychology 98 (2): 256–67.
I stand by my whataboutism. A woman responding in a survey that she feels the victim of gender-based discrimination is doing nothing to substantiate her claim, not even giving her name if it was an anonymous survey. All it takes for her is to not get the promotion and some wheels grinding in her head going "Surely, it must be because I'm a woman". That kind of evidence does not weigh more heavily than evidence that exists in black-and-white in the form of rulebooks and institutional policy for funding agencies and science organizations which plainly state that women are to be put at an advantage. -- Some of the things I described were bits of anecdotal evidence. But the thing I wrote about the structure of the DOC scholarship is black-on-white evidence of discrimination against men, and many people commented with pointers to similar things.
About the survey: The question is actually a leading question. Why is sexual harrassment and gender-based discrimination being put in the same category? That very phrasing already suggests "If your boss got a little drunk at the company event, leading him to say nice things about your perfume, you clearly have a very good reason to presume that you not getting the promotion has something to do with that. Do you agree that's what happened to you in the last year?" If you phrase it like that, and 93% of the women go "Well, ... no!" then, really, I must complement the upstanding gentlemen of Max Planck!
About your third paragraph, which strikes me as a very recognizable feminist narrative from the 80s, just a few points that I'd raise as food for thought: (a) The way these organizations, in particular, work, it's not a game of musical chairs where you lose when you don't do the right thing at a key point in time. They are very flat organizations, more bazaar than cathedral, with reverse-hockeystick careerpaths. If you go away for a year, you just get to the same point in your career a year later. (b) Nowadays, men in Austria and Germany, when they have children, generally do take the opportunity that the law prescribes that parenting time can be split between man and woman. Not a single one of the men that I grew up with in Austria was an exception to that rule when they had a child. Not a single male colleague that had a child during the time I was working for a German company was an exception to that rule. When their wives interrupted their careers, so did they. Again, anecdotal. But there you go. (c) Austria is one of the countries with the lowest Gini-coefficients in the world. If everybody earns the same, what is the point of that "money is power is status and women don't have any" narrative? Many women prefer to be teachers, nurses, etc. If that doesn't lessen their status in society, then how do you explain it to a 5-year-old girl that wants to play with dolls, not robots, that you think that that's a problem?
Well that line got me thinking, because it absolutely does. Nurses have lower status than doctors and teachers have lower status than professors. For that matter, dolls have lower status than robots, there are heavily pushed competitions for Lego robots with prizes and institutional support but I've never heard of a competition for doll narrative building. Anti-natalists might think that they're a rebellious rationalist subculture, but I think they're closer to a direct expression of what our society values.
But that follows logically does it not as one is more difficult than the other?
I think a more interesting comparison would be what has highest status between a male software developer and a female nurse? If we ignore compensation because software development is in a pretty special situation right now.
That in and of itself is a weird one. I used to think that physics was harder than sociology, because of the stereotype that physicists were smarter than sociologists. Then I realized that whatever it is that sociologists do, you could make it twice as hard by making them do twice as much, or by raising the quality standards twice as high. Likewise you could make physics the easiest science by altering the publication requirements to be, well, easier than every other science. It's not that studying the universe is harder in any objective way than studying sociology, it's that what counts as success is defined based on other people's success.
To use doctors as an example, the standard for how good you have to be to practice would get lower if all humans were altered to be half as good at medicine. At the same time, med school for doctors is far harder than med school for nurses. I'm not sure what sets the hard-ness levels for these different fields, but the point is, we absolutely could have a society where nurses were driven twice as hard and had to be twice as smart as doctors, but for some reason that didn't happen.
But some things are inherently more difficult and that means a smaller part of the population are willing to put in the effort or are are smart enough. Nurses do different things than doctors and that means there are different requirements on their education.
Just like a software engineer that creates simple internal CRUD applications for an Enterprise will have lower requirements than someone who works in R&D at a cutting edge field. One is easier than the other while both still give value and both are still important.
One thing to note is that when it comes to for example doctors there are more young female doctors than young male doctors in Sweden these days so soon we will probably see a field were that is true for all age groups.
>Just like a software engineer that creates simple internal CRUD applications for an Enterprise will have lower requirements than someone who works in R&D at a cutting edge field.
You're comparing the upper and lower ends of the same field, and I agree that it's clear enough why one is harder than the other. However, doctors and nurses do not simply have two versions of the same job.
Using your example, suppose that every software developer was worse. Then, CRUD apps would be cutting edge R&D and enterprise applications would be, I don't know, Excel spreadsheets. If CRUD apps were cutting edge R&D, programming would be easier, and worse programmers would be able to keep their jobs. The field is easier because the people are worse, the people are worse because the field is easier. The question is, what starts this cycle?
While I may not grasp the full context of nursing vs medicine, when it comes to my healthcare I would expect my doctor to be able to perform the full extent of what my nurse could do, whereas the same could not be said of the reverse.
Nursing is a tough job, with demanding hours, but I could get a nursing degree in 2 years, whereas I probably couldn't even get into med school, much less get through 4 years + residency. (I'm a biomedical Engineer, have most of the background).
Also, your argument doesn't hold up. If every software developer was worse, it would be as difficult to get into because everyone is worse, not just current devs.
Big systemic problems can't be solved with spot treatments. A personal example: the SCOTUS ruling in favor of marriage equality didn't end homophobia. People claimed it did out of ignorance, but it didn't. See: Pulse. I was afraid to leave the house for a week, and looked over my shoulder outside for months. That fear affects everything, and it didn't go away completely once the memory of the event faded. The fear is reinforced through negative stereotypes in media and the occasional gaybashing/murder.
Affirmative action and legal victories can help, but it doesn't mean much without a society-level movement. I do see how this could become a problem at the university level if the pipeline situation isn't fixed. You can see it in other fields where the gender balance flips. Programming became highly paid and women got pushed out. PHDs became overworked and underpaid, and now men don't want to do it because they can access better opportunities.
It becomes a matter of status and culture where people who don't look like everyone there feels it and goes on to other fields. Men may not care about the pay difference, but they do care about the bullying in the workplace and the negative stereotypes.
Spot treatments are usually a frustration thing. They come when people run out of energy trying to fix the system and start looking for Infinity Stones.
> See: Pulse. I was afraid to leave the house for a week, and looked over my shoulder outside for months.
Hilariously enough, the Pulse shooter didn't know it was a gay nightclub [0]. Not that this hurts your position - after all, fear doesn't have to be real. But it does offer a (potential) parallel to the "women are being discriminated against in tech!" issues we've been seeing lately...
I didn't know about that. But you're right. People looking to start something just need the motivation. Events are motivating on all sides of an issue even if it turns out to be bogus, misreported, or planned.
But I also based that on the report of his father saying he planned the attack after seeing people kiss outside the club. I'm sure he figured out what it was when he saw the room full of people there for Latin Night. It may be that he knew what it was and had it as a backup because of what it was.
>> "On the day of the shooting, Mateen's father, Mir Seddique Mateen, said that he had seen his son get angry after seeing a gay couple kiss in front of his family at the Bayside Marketplace in Miami months prior to the shooting, which he suggested might have been a motivating factor."
One theory is that he was deep in the closet, self-hating, and knew about it because he went there. The FBI thinks not because they found no evidence, but it's normal for people in the closet to bifurcate their lives. If he were planning to go out like this, ensuring no one found any evidence of that would be a priority.
History is hard to pin down when the people in it are dead.
I'm hesitant to include "in German" as the summary is chock full of anglicisms such as "mobbing", "dual career", "work-life balance", or "code of conduct" which mean exactly nothing in a scientific context. I'm not trying to downplay any results the survey may be showing, but what is "mobbing" anyway? If you can't think of a satisfactory definition in English, think about the even more diluted meaning of this term in German where there's a habit of brainlessly using anglicisms to hide lack of clarity of thought, and even to make up pseudo-English words.
I think bullying and gender issues are just a symptoms of a deeper problem nobody of the responsible likes to admit: academia has a strong hierarchical structure of power which necessarily leads to abuses of this power. We already solved this problem for politics long time ago by inventing democracy.
And consequences to one's actions in the professional world. People get written up and fired for misconduct, or criminally charged if it crosses the line.
Does that mean you would prefer an autocratic system with codes of conduct and laws where authorities might get fired or even criminally charged if they cross a line over a democratic system? I could imagine that in terms of efficiency it would actually be preferable.
Yes, the Chinese seem become more and more efficient when it comes to... uhmmm... "influencing" "for the better" their citizens' behavior, e.g. with their social score system.
> academia has a strong hierarchical structure of power which necessarily leads to abuses of this power. We already solved this problem for politics long time ago by inventing democracy
And societies are now egalitarian without hierarchical power structures?
Sorry, I should have added 'in theory'. Of course there are still hierarchical power structures in practice, but we know how we could get rid of them in theory.
I suppose that depends on what you understand as "egalitarian". Lots of dictatorships could advertise as "flat hierarchies (dictator > military > everyone)".
Most democracies have a lot of hierarchies, both on the government levels (federal, state, county, city etc) and in the political parties that make up those governments. Democracy formalizes decisions and transitions, but I haven't seen a lot of hierarchies removed.
You really think democracy solved these? The Greeks had their demagogues, and today we still have political elites. Even a "perfect" democracy would still be majority rule (as benevolent it voluntarily might act towards the minorities).
Hierarchies save us from chaos and anarchy. And at the same time they open us up for abuse and make everything less democratic.
In practice, we seem to strive to find a balance where we allow some hierarchy to avoid chaos (representatives in our democracy, chain of command in governments) while we simultaneously try to cap the powers of such hierarchies and also establish competing hierarchies so they can check each other (e.g. separation of powers in most democracies).
However, we did not really solve anything, but created a system we constantly try to re-adjust once it tilts too much to either direction, and from which we try to eliminate bad actors.
I think there are pro's and con's when it comes to democracy. All I tried to point out that we theoretically have a solution to the problem that people have personal biases which potentially makes them abuse their power. And this solution is simply a majority vote where personal biases average out.
If only it was so easy. History is chock-full of examples where the majority made minorities or individuals suffer for no apparent reason other than ideology, bias and/or outright moronic beliefs.
I wonder what a good approach would be for academics. There's already a very strong and I think unavoidable have/have-not divide between those who have knowledge (faculty) and those who don't (students, who go on to become teaching & research assistants).
And many academic institutions even add another power structure: non-academic administrators, whose primary incentive is to expand non-academic administration, build buildings &c.
And then there are collegiate sports. I don't even know why those exist, but for some reason they do, and for some reason they are an important power base in an American university or college.
I think it would make sense for a college or university to be primarily run by the tenured faculty: they do, after all, have the knowledge which is the whole reason that a school exists. They don't necessarily have administrative skills, so it makes sense that there be some sort of executive, accountable to the school government.
Perhaps there could be a tricameral school government: tenured-faculty senate, non-tenured employee representatives, student representatives. Assign certain decisions to each; make certain decisions decidable by two out of the three and others requiring all three to agree. Make administrators accountable to all three, perhaps on a sliding scale such the the chief administrator can be removed by one house but the lowest level of employee needing censure by all three to be removed.
Emphatically, this is untrue to an almost hilarious degree. It's not even unusual to hear about cronyism and weird individual biases influencing almost every layer of the political machine (both in the EU and the US, the two big "democratic" powers).
Definitely spend some time interacting with people that work in the space and listen to their stories, you'll quickly find out exactly how fair a democracy inherently makes things (not at all fair, in other words).
Quite right. It should be expected that democracy is imperfect and requires at least these three things to work at all:
1) A unifying incentive that makes people cooperate (prospects of improvement, opportunity, economic growth).
2) Mechanisms of removing bad actors.
3) Free speech that allows a constant re-negotiation of ideals, values, interests etc. Don't expect a single formula or law is going to solve everything for good, but expect a constant dialogue which allows to adapt to constantly changing requirements even though it may seem tiring.
Decentralizing decision power alone does not cut it as people are going to be sneaky and selfish.
Then all democracy on Earth today fails the first point you made. People are doomed to disagree on incentives. Improvements, opportunities, growth, yes, all good, but for who? That is the problem. There are so many differentiators like races, regions, religions, etc, etc.
Research institutions are bravely fighting with "sexual discrimination" and at the same time:
- they implicitly discourage men to apply for job by adding "We especially encourage women to apply." to job ads,
- they understand "equality" as equal number men and women working at some institute/position/area instead of equal rights and opportunities and promoting best minds,
- they have plenty of grants and awards considered only for women.
And all above is coming from so called "smart people" that should give education for the next generations.
> they implicitly discourage men to apply for job by adding "We especially encourage women to apply." to job ads,
Wait, how does that implicitly discourage men to apply? Sure, it is a direct encouragement to women to apply, but that is not therefore an implicit discouragement to men. An implicit discouragement to men would say something like: "We encourage women to apply above others" or "We encourage men to also look for other opportunities".
Yeah, if you also encouraged other types of people too. But, like, listing out all the types would be a little much.
Like, women are obviously under represented in tech, despite many efforts by the Big 4 to increase representation [0]. The Big 4 are doing better at getting women into tech, but they still have a ways to go. The survey details some of those struggles. So, logically, you'd like to continue to encourage women to apply. WASPy men don't seem to need this encouragement thus far, but times may change.
Would you please not take HN threads into yet another generic gender flamewar? That breaks the site guidelines, like this one:
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
The reason we have guidelines like this is that these discussions are totally predictable, and therefore devoid of curiosity. They generate a lot of het-up agitation though, which is destructive to the community.
"(...)Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
One of the topics mentioned in linked article is "sexual discrimination". How is it suddenly not related?
"The reason we have guidelines like this is that these discussions are totally predictable, and therefore devoid of curiosity. They generate a lot of het-up agitation though, which is destructive to the community."
Saying the truth is destructive to the community? Is this some kind of censorship?
The topic is a survey about bullying. Turning that into a yet another internet gender flamewar is certainly an example of what that guideline asks you not to do. There's always some tangential point in an article that leads to one of the major tire fires via a hop or two. The guideline asks you to have the self-control not to be triggered by that, and avoid triggering others in turn.
HN is moderated. You can call that censorship if you like; that word is used in so many different ways that at this point it just expresses a feeling.
"You can call that censorship if you like; that word is used in so many different ways that at this point it just expresses a feeling."
Censorship is not a feeling. You are not even correcting me. It's seems that you are marking my comment because you are told so, not because you can show any failure in my logic. Shame on you.
That's not what the study said. Successful women reported more discrimination to the study authors. There's no assertion that they made accusations against specific men, and absolutely no evidence that this "helps career advancement". Care to cite your source on that?
In practice virtually every such accusation I've seen reported ends up with the woman leaving the employer, not the reverse.
The counter hypothesis is that women who don't want to deal with the sexist bullshit just give up on careers like this. This has the notable advantage of explaining the gender balance and the inversion of accusation rates.
To clarify: I do not mean that making reports per se is the putative mechanism for this advancement. Perhaps there is some more fundamental quality that causes both. Also, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and that creates an incentive, like it or not. And don't disregard the first word, "if"!
I wonder how much of bullying is just descended-from-apes social dominance behaviors that cross an ambiguous line representing what is and is not socially acceptable for a particular group. Some behavior is maladaptive in certain contexts [0] but given its persistence obviously advantageous from an evolutionary standpoint.
The advantage is likely mainly an eugenetic one, but also one of sortation: Decision about power should be based on competence. A means of removing incompetent people is bullying them out. This is unlikely to be very effective though because mostly it's not the most competent who bully the most, but it selects for criteria like resilience, disagreeableness. Though conversely, means of avoiding bullying could also result in poorer sortation as people can strategically pull the bullying card to get ahead. For this reason such measures should be treated with caution, I think. Especially when it is about jobs concerning critical infrastructure.
Ok, lets say that humans in groups are typically more effective than individual humans even if the humans in the group are individually less effective (Mythical Man-Month, etc.). Even if a group makes every group effort decision based on consensus, the decisions may be influenced by factors other than an evaluation of competence. What wins, competence or influence?
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadLook at the way society is handling Prime Bully Trump. He has written the text book for all other bullies to follow. And they happily will, taking a piss on whatever social norm or code of conduct, everyone else is obediently following. If he can climb to the top of the hill, they know they can too.
You don't want Bullies in an org, you have to be better than them and more useful than them. It's that simple.
Interesting. In my experience bullies tend to play politics rather than out-and-out shouting matches.
It makes others uncomfortable and leads to unnecessary confrontations and distraction. It's a very obvious personality flaw too, it's always aimed at someone in a lower position of power than yourself. Go try and bully your manager or department head, see how that works out.
Describe to me the special utility of a bully, which cannot be provided by someone employing non-bullying methods.
To avoid confusion, let's use a dictionary definition of bully
Oxford: A person who habitually seeks to harm or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable.
Dictionary.com: a blustering, quarrelsome, overbearing person who habitually badgers and intimidates smaller or weaker people.
> You don't want Bullies in an org, you have to be better than them and more useful than them.
Doing absolutely nothing (no work done) is better than bullying (negative work done).
Your "fact of life" is not only unethical but if proven it can be grounds for constructive discharge.
If they cant stand up for themselves i guess they wont do it for me either which makes me not wanna work with them.
So a little bit friction/bullying isnt that bad i guess. If often goes too far though
You always have Situations where something did go wrong. Usually multiple persons involved. Owning up their share of the blame has a corellation to standing up for yourself in my experience
You implied it by suggesting bullying is useful for getting rid of those people. I don't know how you advocate for them being bullied and removed, yet stand up for them at the same time.
> Owning up their share of the blame has a corellation to standing up for yourself in my experience
I would not be surprised if there is a correlation; but the causality seems pretty obvious to me. If you were bullied would you admit to anything that might result in more bullying? What if the people who supposedly support you are secretly hoping you fail?
I have no problem standing up for myself, even if I have no support. I also have no problem with the truth. I'll look my boss in the eye and tell him if I screwed up. I do it out of respect and because I'm about solving problems, even if I created it. But, if he's a bully and the only thing that is going to happen is I'm going to get more abuse? Well, I've probably already complained to HR and/or quit, but if I haven't... screw that guy. He can prove I was the one who screwed up or he can stuff it.
But let's not forget the context: bullies are useful. So what if the bully is the one who screwed up? Is he going to take his share of the blame? Doubtful. My guess is he blames his victim.
I would rather be a part of a work culture where I can focus on getting work done rather than dealing with antisocials.
I have experienced 3 out of 4 of these and never considered it bullying. Arsehole / incompetent behavior from my superiors, yes, but not bullying.
I never have been and would be completely shocked if anyone did shout at me during my job, no matter what I did. That’s completely unacceptable.
Bullies may seem super productive, but they will bring down the organizations productivity as a whole.
For example, the DOC fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences which funded my PhD was structured in such a way that the grant was split into two equal pots. One pot took applications ONLY from women. The other pot was enforcing 50% of the fellowships going to women. That means: The rules stipulated that there was 3x as much funding available for women as there was for men, despite the fact that there were much fewer female applicants, so chances for a female to get funding were, by design, at least an order of magnitude higher than for a man. -- This was the only publicly funded scholarship program in Austria that pays enough to study at, say, an ivy leage in the U.S. or something like that. -- On top of that they had great mentoring programmes and networking opportunities that were open ONLY to women, and nothing of the sort that men were welcome for.
Similar story told to me by my male cousin, working for a solar technology startup with close ties to an Austrian university and the Austrian science funding ecosystem: They had received public funding to hire some physicists, but some of the funding was earmarked so it could be used only for hiring women. Hiring a woman proved to be a thing of impossibility, since they couldn't find a single one that wanted to apply. They ended up having to give back the funding. An applicant could have had a job there, and all it would have taken was to (a) be vaguely a physicist (b) be female. She didn't need to be good or anything. She just needed to show up, and the job would have been guaranteed to her, since, from the company's POV, it was free money being left on the table to do anything else.
I know a lot of people working for research institutions being funded by the Austrian taxpayer. They tend to all have really shitty careers, with one exception. Guess what that exception was. You guessed right: The one woman I know that travels in those circles.
I don't know if things are as bad in Germany yet as they are in Austria, but women in the publicly-funded science ecosystem in the STEM fields complaining about discrimination at this point in history is simply outrageous. If anything, men should be the ones complaining.
So they're hiring a woman, doing whatever it takes, as in: (a) making a conscious effort to lower the bar (b) making up a role that they don't even need with a job description that will appeal to women (c) paying high premiums for recruiting channels that will deliver female applicants (d) running the process in such a way that, unbeknownst to applicants due to legal ramifications, all applications by men are dead on arrival.
https://corporate.zalando.com/sites/default/files/media-down...
https://www.curry-on.org/2019/
https://www.awm-muenchen.de/ueber-uns/struktur/werkleitung.h...
This is Europe now.
Zalando:
> On top of this improved focus, we remain committed to increasing female leadership – our target is to have 25% of positions at the first level and 30% at the second level below the Management Board filled by women by 2022 (currently 11% and 16% respectively).
Curry On:
2/4 keynote speakers are men, 11/12 invited speakers are men, 29/32 presentations are held by men (as far as I can tell based on names and pictures).
My impression is women are less ambitious and value quality of life much more than men ( I don't blame them, I try to do as little as possible as well ).
When I go to conferences and look at management/tech teams, I see the opposite of what you are talking about: Very few women (or no women). I would like to know some of these woman-friendly conferences that you go to so I can actually attend, it might be nice.
* Are average women making a more rational decisions than average men in avoiding these fields?
* Is there a difference in how much pain average men and women will tolerate before they leave? Ie, is the average man desperate to achieve a certain type of success, leading to increased competitiveness?
I think we all know that leadership positions in STEM companies and academia (and beyond) tend to skew male, the entry level incentives skew female and that females are the target of lots of unwanted male attention.
This obviously implies a bias, because half the apt are going to be female. However the efforts to correct this bias don't seem to have done their due diligence to figure out what the cause is; because at the moment the entry level incentives are clearly unfair in and of themselves. Two wrongs don't make Right, they make Very Wrong - it is a bad idea to correct bias by introducing more biases. Also, my experience in the mining industry makes me think that these incentives aren't likely to work because the cause of the bias is not concern about monetary compensation. I'll spare the crowd my personal theories.
What if the cause is due to the existing precedent? Then wouldn't positive discrimination be an effective solution?
... Or the could do it the way they are doing it.
Clearly, there are problems finding women. There are fewer women; that means it is not possible to have 50/50 across the board. He just said that they are lowering the bar. What are they doing about hiring that is unfair? Probably nothing, if they have to hire less-qualified women or a more-qualified man.
There are fewer women in tech. Why is immaterial to the current discussion. For better or for worse, that's where we are. If you want my two cents, I think part of it is risk. I worked in a start-up for a few years (not in the valley), and there was one female developer in a company of thirty. Why? I think men (especially young ones) are more willing to pick up and move for a high risk/high reward opportunity.
But all that aside, seriously, who actually advocates firing every one so you can have a nice press release? Would you want to lose your job to give some random woman one?
Certainly it's not fair to the employees. Certainly they probably didn't expect to get 10 men and 0 women in their current makeup. There may be no intentional guilt, but it's also not possible to know how they ended up with the makeup they have, 10 to 0, though it was probably incremental and without reflection on the makeup of the team along the way. Assuredly it probably wasn't malicious, but it's also like the people doing the hiring didn't reflect along the way - "hey, we've got 9 engineers and we need 10 and we are going to hire _another_ man for this role".
It's clear they (in this case the company) want to fix this in some way, as instructions "from on high" came down. Again company may or may not know how they got there. The company may also be failing to attract clients who want to vote with their dollars for a diverse company - so there could be a valid business case for this. Or not, maybe they just don't want a company with all dudes.
The original post was pointing out an unfair hiring practice due to this policy. I'm pointing out there is an alternative equitable hiring practice which actually leads to a fairer hiring practice for men and doesn't necessarily involve affirmative action, but that involves starting from scratch again (nobody said you'd necessarily lose your job - they could also easily make those positions available). Obviously this is not a tenable thought experiment, especially in academia thanks to tenure, so that's why we have these systems which, on the surface, may appear to discriminate against men. That said, many people interview for their current jobs in corporate restructurings all the time. That's probably not fair either, but it's accepted practice in the US.
What is this equitable hiring practice? Fire your team over and over until you get more women? What if your ten most qualified applicants are again men? It seems very possible.
And what is this unfair hiring practice? How do you know the most qualified weren't all male? You are using the term "equitable" over "equal", and I'm assuming you understand the difference. I don't believe a company ought to disadvantage men to the advantage of women, because I don't believe discrimination is just.
As for your "nobody said you'd lose your job", yes, you did. Your assumption is that at least one man will lose his job for a woman.
You did not answer my question - would you, personally, be willing to quit your job to allow a woman to take it? Even were she less qualified?
I am 100% pro equal rights for everybody, but this is just the opposite, and all it will achieve is to create tension, prejudice and anger towards women hired under this rules.
https://www.tue.nl/en/news/news-overview/17-06-2019-tue-vaca...
Where did you read about "18 months"? Sounds like "first 6 months" to me. In my experience searching for good academic staff, especially in fields with a lucrative industry takes ages, so I wouldn't be too sure that there will be a strong discriminatory effect when there are not that many women to recruit anyway.
I agree that this move is not the best one. It will end up sending the wrong signals again, which will just lead to backlash on women working in STEM fields. Attacking with opposite discrimination is certainly a bad temporal fix for an existing systematic bias and the tendency of men to downplay competent women.
However, this tendency costs society a lot. It is a fix at least. Someone listened.
I wouldn't expect that they want to make this permanent once things have equaled out a bit.
"If a vacancy fails to attract suitable candidates within six months, it will be opened up to men, and after 18 months the entire scheme will be revised, the university said on Tuesday."
The rule is: For the first 6 months of any recruitment process, only look at female CVs. After this time, also start inviting the men. After 18 months, evaluate the success of this rule and decide whether to follow through for the full 5 years.
So yes, in that article it does say “18 months”. It’s right in the part where it says “18” and “months”.
Also, the original source you cited clears says:
> For the next year and a half, this will apply to 100 percent of vacancies, after which the university will review the percentage covered by the scheme each year.
but frankly, I don't really understand what they mean by "in the first six months of recruitment".
The interview clearly says that the rule applies to "the first 6 months of recruitment", which in my understanding of the process means "after the job ad is posted".
Btw, imho Dutch people have a tendency for "certainly good enough" solutions because it keeps things moving (instead of perfectionist stagnation whenever confronted with complexity like us germans often do). This 6-month period of only looking at female applicants during recruitment looks like one of those. Nobody says that this will stay the rule forever. Also consider that they will get very few female applicants anyway, so there is still a lot of room for men.
But try to understand the thinking for a moment:
If no solution is applied at all because people are waiting for the perfect one, there will be continued discrimination against competence. This has costs too.
"Take no action" might not feel like a decision, but it is one and has ill effects.
Is this better than trying a fix for a short period of time that may be mediocre, but is at least effective?
In most (but not all) fields of human intellectual endeavor, we have made progress far beyond needed, that with the right politics and social commitment, every human on this planet can have all their needs and basic wants fulfilled. There is no need to constantly fuel the GDP, only the craft a world in which people can be happy.
At some point – and you can adapt this example to other fields – you want build a bridge that doesn't collapse, and niceness is not going to get you there. The engineer can be female, from an ethnic minority, disabled or a kid with rich parents, but you want to rely on them being a good engineer and not someone who got a free pass and cuddle treatment.
This is why the primary goal should be skill and not some rather subjective sense of social justice. I feel you promote equality of outcome and not just equality of opportunity.
This needs not be a black and white comparison, but consistently choosing politicians that prefer cuddle over hard results could very well lead to a society where there is no money for the weak, unprivileged, disadvantaged minorities, education, social welfare, medical care, etc; a society that – perhaps out of necessity – will squeeze out some of those people you'd want to support.
I am more or less neutral at this. I never experience those extreme by myself.... except in some job-ad "For the same qualification, we will hire female candidate".
I don't know if we have studies that indicate evidence that less-qualified women are getting more funding than more-qualified men. For example this comment chain is mostly anecdata, which makes it difficult, as it relies on how good-faith we wish to take the anecdote and how that anecdote either enforces one's existing biases or can just be dismissed as anecdotal and not genuine studies. But even the "genuine" studies are in a field where we have a replication crisis.
So, what I'm saying is: I don't know, and I don't think anyone else knows, the whole truth and breakdown of the matter. And I'd be suspicious of anyone claiming they are under a broadsale impression of anything regarding the quality of women in STEM.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_desirability_bias
EDIT: In clarification, I'm essentially saying 'Well, X, but Y. On the other hand, P, but Q.' and you're demanding I prove X to arbirary metric M, even though Y evidences that I'm not in the interest of proving X at all.
(α) All the studies that claim show that the reason we have more men than women is due to malice (eg. misogyny, unconscious bias) are not standing up to scrutiny. They have no scientific validity.
(β) The reason that there are so many 'studies' of the kind I criticise as scientifically baseless is political. There is a political will to have more women in STEM positions.
(γ) The overt explanation for this political will is structurally rather similar to the explanation given by the early Soviet Union for the promotion of non-Russian ethnicities over Russians in the policy of constructing the New Soviet man (новый советский человек). This reason is cogently described in Marxism and the National Question [1].
(δ) I'm generally worried about policies similar to those carried out by the author of [1].
[1] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913...
I think there's mostly an economic need for more people in STEM positions, and with women being underrepresented, that's an obvious place to look for more talent. And there are countries that do have more women in STEM or other scientific positions. So for countries that don't, figuring out what's stopping those women is a valid concern.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentially_contested_concept
[2] https://retractionwatch.com/2016/04/07/philosophy-journal-sp...
This may sound rude, by why are you even talking to me if you're not desiring to engage with me and my literal words? Wouldn't a blog be more suitable for you? Because I'm still not entirely sure how your points interact with me, and why you're responding to me.
When the few women you can find are less qualified, you should ask yourself why. Why are the more qualified women avoiding you? If either your company or your industry had developed a reputation for being toxic and sexist, I can totally see why qualified women would avoid it. Giving more money to women is not going to solve the real problem here. It's also possible that your culture has somehow decided this is not a job for women. I work at a Dutch company that employs plenty of female developers, but all the female developers are from India. I don't think I know even a single female Dutch programmer here, which is weird. Why is this?
Those are the real issues we need to figure out. Simply occasionally throwing money at people, even if it's a lot, is unlikely to fix the structural problems here.
Sure — ashelmire's point was that right now there are more hurdles for men, which leads to men being more likely to be more qualified than women, which perpetuates and amplifies a stereotype.
Though I don't think the solution is to compensate by creating more hurdles for men; we need to identify and remove the hurdles for women. And whatever hurdles remain for men.
This has three very large assumptions:
1. Men and women share the same distribution of relevant abilities
2. Men and women share the same distribution of relevant interests
3. Men and women share the same distribution of societal expectations and external opportunities
A lot of people seem to assume that either #1 or #2 are false, and there's research to support #2 being false. #3 being false also seems intuitively obvious to me, given that it's stereotypically more acceptable to be a housewife than a househusband (as one example of many).
Re: 1, the Variability Hypothesis[1] argues that men have a different, "wider" distribution than women in many categories, including intelligence.
Re: 2, this Slate Star Codex article[2] is full of relevant pointers.
Discrimination sucks and we must push back when we see it, but not every difference in representation is automatically a sign of discrimination.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis#Modern_...
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge...
Social expectations can be a real hurdle.
There's always a bell curve distribution of skill, talent, aptitude, whatever. When the work force population (mostly) reflects the general population (gender, ethnicity, age, whatever), we'll see that people are just people. Some good, most meh, and a few whoopers (who should be paid to stay home, for the benefit of the rest of us).
Another situation - a former female colleague, a married wife with children, during a business trip suggested I go to her "beautiful" rented apartment she wanted to show me and that I could sleep there; "pajamas not needed", "marriage is just marriage, it's not important". I declined; she went cold in subsequent mutual interactions, and as she was a close friend of my boss (I don't want to explore how close), boss started to be cold towards me as well.
So no, there is no threat of physical violence, but there is a significant threat of unjust manipulation that for some reason is not on our society's radar at all. Shitty behavior comes in all genders, but only one is called out for it.
are 'they' mostly (all) men?
Anecdotally, the shittiest groups/institutions that I have worked in were over 80% male. In my experience the organizations that are diverse are also the most productive and enjoyable to work in.
As far as your cousin story goes, that exactly illustrates the problem. There is no reason a women could not have become a solar tech physicist. But the persistent misogyny that permeates academia, despite all these financial incentives from the top, stopped most women from taking that particular line. We need to fix the problem. You can argue that throwing money at women is perhaps not the best way, but then you have to present a method that works better at righting the wrongs in academia.
One’s person’s “joking” or playful banter can be another person’s triggering misogyny!
If you follow any high-profile women in tech on Twitter, wade into their mentions to see sex-based harassment directed at them. It's consistent and ongoing and must be exhausting for them to deal with. (I know it would be for me.)
If one's answer is that that's somehow not representative, I'd like to know why one thinks that shows up on a public forum but doesn't translate to any other parts of the industry.
They are outliers and not representative of the actual community or workforce.
Yes, actually, this entire comment chain is speculation because the original comment was a speculation. If that means that these positions are less merit then this entire comment chain has less merit.
Which lines up pretty well with what I personally observed during my graduate program.
Why aren't men with children staying home with the kids and having the same thing happen to them? Sexism.
I would say it is because of understandable historical reasons and that it is changing in a lot countries. For example in Sweden dads are taking out a larger and larger part of parental leave. It is still only 28% but increasing every year I think.
There are of course many other factors that weigh in of who will take parental leave. To take some anecdotes I've seen in my circles:
1. Women tend to have partners that are older and equal or higher in social status so it is not uncommon that the men have come further in their careers. So when the man is home there will be less money for the household. Sometimes the woman uses that as an excuse to be able to home more and sometimes the man uses it because they don't want to be home.
2. Women will logically be home in the beginning due to them nursing and some want to be home longer total and the dad say yes because they feel the mom have earned it. Some women also feel that the dad will get the more fun stay at home time and want a part of that as well and not only in the beginning.
It is changing but people also prioritize differently and not everything is sexism.
[1] 20% of all profs/50% societal gender ratio = 40% of women are employed as prof assuming only two careers (prof and SAHM).
You're assuming that 1) affirmative action is effective, 2) that women are dropping out for reasons related to sexism, 3) that entrenched policies are so easily "phased out". I'm not sure any of these are true.
Here in Sweden we had last year one higher education program where every single student is of the same gender. 100% gender segregation. The profession that those students graduate for is also unsurprising the profession with highest gender segregation.
I have toyed with the idea that maybe a good step to right the wrongs and get all industries numbers closer to 50% would be to create a new tax which gave under represented genders a tax cut and over represented genders a corresponding tax increase depending on how gender segregated their chosen profession is. That would create an incentive to break gender norms in a country where 88.5% of women and men work in professions that is considered gender segregated, and employment rate of both is almost identical.
The worst are narcissistic, harassing women who are presumed to be incapable of such behavior by people like you, and shielded from any consequences for their recurring bad behavior that spans across years.
We were a very technical field of studies and had only a few woman enlisted. Bringing those few successfully through their time was valued quite high.
Requirements to their work were clearly lower than for us and getting an appointment with the professors was easier for them, too. All in all it was less of an overall-hassle for them.
But yeah, one might say this is some kind of survivorship bias or whatever, I don't care. It's what I perceived and it was also a recurring topic in "mens only"-discussions. So other perceived it that way, too.
For the past forty years, there have been no male-only advancement programs, and (nearly) all sex-based funding has been provided to the majority sex, to advantage them in any field where they’re not currently dominant (and sometimes, just to advantage them in general).
It’s a willful and generational-scale violation of Title IX: that kind of sexist favoritism of the majority is blatantly illegal under discrimination laws.
For forty years, feminism on college campuses has been a majoritarian, sexist power movement — and now it’s spreading to the workplace, as a generation of entitled women graduate and demand the continuation of privilege.
Why is this not the case?
(For the record: I'm not denying your understanding of the situation. I'm trying to understand your position regarding feminism's role in empowering women and the disparate power between men and women that you're seeing.
Women are presently becoming presidents, vice-presidents, etc and forming women advocacy committees inside of corporations and other organizations to use their influence to create special programs for women which advantage them in the same way we’ve seen from the educational system.
And women have become prevalent in all of those fields, over the same time period.
The reason you don’t see them storming the ranks of business leadership is twofold:
1. It simply takes time. A woman who was 22 in 1978 is 63 now, so the very beginning of that group is only now reaching senior leadership — exactly in line with the timing of female advantage programs in the workplace. If my theory is right (and people don’t do anything — which is unlikely), then we’d see the same sexist programs from colleges rolled out into the workplace over the next twenty years. (I think pointing it out is part of pushing back on excess in democracy — hence me calling it out here.)
2. Biology is a thing, and we see that in equitable societies — where women are free to pursue passions rather than coerced to amass power — they tend to choose a different distribution of lifestyles than men. There’s two cohorts in women that are smaller in men, the ones who want to stay home as caretakers and the ones who want to work part time and be part time caretakers. It’s not clear that women try to lead major corporations at the same rate as men — and as anecdata, around half the small business owners, and majority of crafters or service contracting company owners, I meet are women. We may actually be seeing a more fair outcome than first blush would lead you to believe — and desires simply aren’t evenly distributed.
I’m not saying there isn’t sexism anywhere. I’m just saying there’s systemic sexism against men in education — and women who are accustomed to that are trying to bring it into the workplace.
I would describe myself as "burning for the job", to a level that is not really healthy sometimes. But I love what I do, it's more than a job for me and I will (maybe) stop looking for better jobs and giving 110%, once I reach a salary of 100k or more a year (this is still quite a number in Germany, I think).
While some male colleagues also really burn for their jobs and want to achieve great things, my female colleagues are really hard to motivate to go the extra mile. They value free time and work-life balance more than staying overtime, getting something done today and not tomorrow and things alike.
Maybe they are doing the right thing, work is not everything, but I think this might lead to men taking positions which require the aforementioned "mindset", no matter whether it's healthy or not.
Being a stay at home parent is very difficult and very valuable work.
So it still isn't making intuitive sense to me why most leadership is still male if it holds true that women should have the most power and have held the most power over the leadership pipeline for over a generation.
I don’t find it hard to believe at all that extreme dedication and ruthlessness are highly correlated with testosterone for instance. We already know it’s coupled with aggression.
Edit: And this isn’t to say women aren’t competent and can’t be leaders! There are females CEOs, just not as many as males CEOs. There are also more male inmates and homeless. The same traits can easily lead to opposite results.
For example, it makes no intuitive sense that the vast majority of world leaders, CEOs, business owners, etc. are men if all men are being systematically oppressed by feminisim. This isn't how any other system of oppression works (race, class, physical ability). It also makes no sense that extreme dedication is correlated with testosterone but males are not correlated with child rearing, which requires arguably the maximum possible dedication.
So it isn't making intuitive sense why the most people at the bottom of society is male if it holds true that men should have the most power and have held the most power over the success pipeline for over a generation.
It also does not make any sense looking at other system of oppression. If we model our theory based on the typical caste system with the oppressed at the bottom and the powerful at top, then men and women as either the oppressed or oppressor does not fit.
Because many women don't want power over others, preferring co-op over hierarchical structure, while a lot of men don't want equality but to fight and climb the ladder (or die)?
I'm not asserting as univocally true, just musing that the environmental structures in which "normative" men and women thrive might be quite different.
In other words, are men collectively squeezing women out of the game, or are men playing each to the death for personal victory, not handing out free passes to the other opponents, male or female? While the former might regrettably happen, I feel the latter is really the common case.
Oppression conjures images of physical force, so perhaps intolerance is a better word than oppression, by a small but very vocal group of women. You can control others without taking part in a hierarchical structure.
On the one hand, women seem to be evolutionarily adapted to want to be cared for. At least a subset of them is going to complain about just about anything much like children and taking that seriously is beginning to have seriously adverse consequences.
On the other hand, there are sneaky males who try to get the attention of women by standing in for them. Such males are largely pushed to such strategies because they have been starved of physical affection because society denies the fact that women predominantly want men who emerge from dominance competition over them and ceased to cultivate this, which itself is a consequence of women's complaining taken seriously.
These two mechanisms form a feedback loop that is hard to break, especially in the current political climate.
HN's 2 hour edit policy is ludicrous, btw.
All babies cry for help and attention. The bifurcation into two rigid binary genders with roles and expectations layered on later is cultural and varies through history. Evolution isn't that fast.
For example: historians often assumed all relationships between two men were platonic because they were raised in a society with enforced heterosexuality. Their lens became the story. Alternate explanations, like trying to read a character as queer, can fall victim to the same conformation bias. You can look to more recent times to, for example, see Native culture crushed legally and compressed until people believe running around in mass produced war bonnets while hollering respects the culture.
Loki, however, was definitely genderfluid and pansexual.
Secondly, these programs are there to counteract long-standing structural discrimination of women in those fields. Mere legal equality and lack of blatant discrimination does not mean equality is achieved. These programs help push toward a society that may give women equal standing not only in the legal but also in the political, social, cultural, and economic spheres. (Outcomes can speak to existing inequalities in society [1])
Women are paid less than men, are much less represented in well-paying jobs, and barely hold any jobs in many academic fields and decision-making (funding) bodies. Computer science is still a hostile environment for many women [2]. You might common with the continuously disproven "it's due to personal choice" but it ain't that easy: These choices of e.g. working less hours are strongly influenced by our social surroundings and the fact that e.g. working less earns you a lower hourly wage is too. For example, in Germany the share of female academics suddenly drops as they move up the ladder because that happens at an age, when many women might choose to become mothers [3]. However, limiting career progression because of a possible pregnancy is definitely not their choice. Also, the idea that women are just naturally less assertive doesn't hold as studies show that when the social pressure wanes (e.g. by advocating for someone else) they become comparable assertive [4]. The idea that women choose not to work in high-paying professions is also wrong, looking at the historical change in CS [5] or at countries like India or Turkey [6]. Also, pay drops when women move into an industry [7]. Stuff like long working hours also factor in [8].
Third, you are merely offering some anecdotal evidence without providing any case for why women are more advantaged now. The existence of positive discrimination doesn't show equality is achieved and by stating that women are evena dvandatged now, you're going against the scientific consensus.
That doesn't detract from the original point: Your whataboutism regarding funding earmarking has nothing to do with sexual harrassment and bullying. It's still interesting how all the comments piling up ere are based on anecdotes of shock "discrimination" - probably the first time they experience something like that.
[1] For the case: Phillips, Anne. 2004. “Defending Equality of Outcome.” Journal of Political Philosophy 12(1): 1–19.
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/the-tech-indus...
[3] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bildun...
[4] Amanatullah, Emily T., and Michael W. Morris. 2010. “Negotiating gender roles: Gender differences in assertive negotiating are mediated by women's fear of backlash and attenuated when negotiating on behalf of others.” [eng]. Journal of personality and socialpsychology 98 (2): 256–67.
[5] https://gender.stanford.edu/news-publications/gender-news/re...
[6] stakhanov ↗ I stand by my whataboutism. A woman responding in a survey that she feels the victim of gender-based discrimination is doing nothing to substantiate her claim, not even giving her name if it was an anonymous survey. All it takes for her is to not get the promotion and some wheels grinding in her head going "Surely, it must be because I'm a woman". That kind of evidence does not weigh more heavily than evidence that exists in black-and-white in the form of rulebooks and institutional policy for funding agencies and science organizations which plainly state that women are to be put at an advantage. -- Some of the things I described were bits of anecdotal evidence. But the thing I wrote about the structure of the DOC scholarship is black-on-white evidence of discrimination against men, and many people commented with pointers to similar things. whatshisface ↗ >If that doesn't lessen their status in society [deleted] ↗ (comment deleted) Der_Einzige ↗ Most antinatalists reject rationalism. cc81 ↗ But that follows logically does it not as one is more difficult than the other? whatshisface ↗ >one is more difficult than the other cc81 ↗ But some things are inherently more difficult and that means a smaller part of the population are willing to put in the effort or are are smart enough. Nurses do different things than doctors and that means there are different requirements on their education. whatshisface ↗ >Just like a software engineer that creates simple internal CRUD applications for an Enterprise will have lower requirements than someone who works in R&D at a cutting edge field. Konnstann ↗ While I may not grasp the full context of nursing vs medicine, when it comes to my healthcare I would expect my doctor to be able to perform the full extent of what my nurse could do, whereas the same could not be said of the reverse.
About the survey: The question is actually a leading question. Why is sexual harrassment and gender-based discrimination being put in the same category? That very phrasing already suggests "If your boss got a little drunk at the company event, leading him to say nice things about your perfume, you clearly have a very good reason to presume that you not getting the promotion has something to do with that. Do you agree that's what happened to you in the last year?" If you phrase it like that, and 93% of the women go "Well, ... no!" then, really, I must complement the upstanding gentlemen of Max Planck!
About your third paragraph, which strikes me as a very recognizable feminist narrative from the 80s, just a few points that I'd raise as food for thought: (a) The way these organizations, in particular, work, it's not a game of musical chairs where you lose when you don't do the right thing at a key point in time. They are very flat organizations, more bazaar than cathedral, with reverse-hockeystick careerpaths. If you go away for a year, you just get to the same point in your career a year later. (b) Nowadays, men in Austria and Germany, when they have children, generally do take the opportunity that the law prescribes that parenting time can be split between man and woman. Not a single one of the men that I grew up with in Austria was an exception to that rule when they had a child. Not a single male colleague that had a child during the time I was working for a German company was an exception to that rule. When their wives interrupted their careers, so did they. Again, anecdotal. But there you go. (c) Austria is one of the countries with the lowest Gini-coefficients in the world. If everybody earns the same, what is the point of that "money is power is status and women don't have any" narrative? Many women prefer to be teachers, nurses, etc. If that doesn't lessen their status in society, then how do you explain it to a 5-year-old girl that wants to play with dolls, not robots, that you think that that's a problem?
Well that line got me thinking, because it absolutely does. Nurses have lower status than doctors and teachers have lower status than professors. For that matter, dolls have lower status than robots, there are heavily pushed competitions for Lego robots with prizes and institutional support but I've never heard of a competition for doll narrative building. Anti-natalists might think that they're a rebellious rationalist subculture, but I think they're closer to a direct expression of what our society values.
No, not "rationality", "rationalism" as a philosophical position
I think a more interesting comparison would be what has highest status between a male software developer and a female nurse? If we ignore compensation because software development is in a pretty special situation right now.
I have no idea of answer myself.
That in and of itself is a weird one. I used to think that physics was harder than sociology, because of the stereotype that physicists were smarter than sociologists. Then I realized that whatever it is that sociologists do, you could make it twice as hard by making them do twice as much, or by raising the quality standards twice as high. Likewise you could make physics the easiest science by altering the publication requirements to be, well, easier than every other science. It's not that studying the universe is harder in any objective way than studying sociology, it's that what counts as success is defined based on other people's success.
To use doctors as an example, the standard for how good you have to be to practice would get lower if all humans were altered to be half as good at medicine. At the same time, med school for doctors is far harder than med school for nurses. I'm not sure what sets the hard-ness levels for these different fields, but the point is, we absolutely could have a society where nurses were driven twice as hard and had to be twice as smart as doctors, but for some reason that didn't happen.
Just like a software engineer that creates simple internal CRUD applications for an Enterprise will have lower requirements than someone who works in R&D at a cutting edge field. One is easier than the other while both still give value and both are still important.
One thing to note is that when it comes to for example doctors there are more young female doctors than young male doctors in Sweden these days so soon we will probably see a field were that is true for all age groups.
You're comparing the upper and lower ends of the same field, and I agree that it's clear enough why one is harder than the other. However, doctors and nurses do not simply have two versions of the same job.
Using your example, suppose that every software developer was worse. Then, CRUD apps would be cutting edge R&D and enterprise applications would be, I don't know, Excel spreadsheets. If CRUD apps were cutting edge R&D, programming would be easier, and worse programmers would be able to keep their jobs. The field is easier because the people are worse, the people are worse because the field is easier. The question is, what starts this cycle?
Nursing is a tough job, with demanding hours, but I could get a nursing degree in 2 years, whereas I probably couldn't even get into med school, much less get through 4 years + residency. (I'm a biomedical Engineer, have most of the background).
Also, your argument doesn't hold up. If every software developer was worse, it would be as difficult to get into because everyone is worse, not just current devs.
Affirmative action and legal victories can help, but it doesn't mean much without a society-level movement. I do see how this could become a problem at the university level if the pipeline situation isn't fixed. You can see it in other fields where the gender balance flips. Programming became highly paid and women got pushed out. PHDs became overworked and underpaid, and now men don't want to do it because they can access better opportunities.
It becomes a matter of status and culture where people who don't look like everyone there feels it and goes on to other fields. Men may not care about the pay difference, but they do care about the bullying in the workplace and the negative stereotypes.
Spot treatments are usually a frustration thing. They come when people run out of energy trying to fix the system and start looking for Infinity Stones.
It seems to me that much of the pushback is from people who can't even imagine, much less perceive, that there's a problem needing fixing.
Any way, learning about these truth telling exercises, like done at the end of Apartheid in South Africa, is on my to do list.
Input, ideas, and tips most welcome.
Hilariously enough, the Pulse shooter didn't know it was a gay nightclub [0]. Not that this hurts your position - after all, fear doesn't have to be real. But it does offer a (potential) parallel to the "women are being discriminated against in tech!" issues we've been seeing lately...
0: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/5/17202026/pu...
But I also based that on the report of his father saying he planned the attack after seeing people kiss outside the club. I'm sure he figured out what it was when he saw the room full of people there for Latin Night. It may be that he knew what it was and had it as a backup because of what it was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_nightclub_shooting#Mot...
>> "On the day of the shooting, Mateen's father, Mir Seddique Mateen, said that he had seen his son get angry after seeing a gay couple kiss in front of his family at the Bayside Marketplace in Miami months prior to the shooting, which he suggested might have been a motivating factor."
One theory is that he was deep in the closet, self-hating, and knew about it because he went there. The FBI thinks not because they found no evidence, but it's normal for people in the closet to bifurcate their lives. If he were planning to go out like this, ensuring no one found any evidence of that would be a priority.
History is hard to pin down when the people in it are dead.
As a taxpayer I would characterize my non-voluntary funding of such institutions in my country as a form of bullying.
I'm hesitant to include "in German" as the summary is chock full of anglicisms such as "mobbing", "dual career", "work-life balance", or "code of conduct" which mean exactly nothing in a scientific context. I'm not trying to downplay any results the survey may be showing, but what is "mobbing" anyway? If you can't think of a satisfactory definition in English, think about the even more diluted meaning of this term in German where there's a habit of brainlessly using anglicisms to hide lack of clarity of thought, and even to make up pseudo-English words.
And societies are now egalitarian without hierarchical power structures?
Most democracies have a lot of hierarchies, both on the government levels (federal, state, county, city etc) and in the political parties that make up those governments. Democracy formalizes decisions and transitions, but I haven't seen a lot of hierarchies removed.
Hierarchies save us from chaos and anarchy. And at the same time they open us up for abuse and make everything less democratic.
In practice, we seem to strive to find a balance where we allow some hierarchy to avoid chaos (representatives in our democracy, chain of command in governments) while we simultaneously try to cap the powers of such hierarchies and also establish competing hierarchies so they can check each other (e.g. separation of powers in most democracies).
However, we did not really solve anything, but created a system we constantly try to re-adjust once it tilts too much to either direction, and from which we try to eliminate bad actors.
And many academic institutions even add another power structure: non-academic administrators, whose primary incentive is to expand non-academic administration, build buildings &c.
And then there are collegiate sports. I don't even know why those exist, but for some reason they do, and for some reason they are an important power base in an American university or college.
I think it would make sense for a college or university to be primarily run by the tenured faculty: they do, after all, have the knowledge which is the whole reason that a school exists. They don't necessarily have administrative skills, so it makes sense that there be some sort of executive, accountable to the school government.
Perhaps there could be a tricameral school government: tenured-faculty senate, non-tenured employee representatives, student representatives. Assign certain decisions to each; make certain decisions decidable by two out of the three and others requiring all three to agree. Make administrators accountable to all three, perhaps on a sliding scale such the the chief administrator can be removed by one house but the lowest level of employee needing censure by all three to be removed.
But I honestly don't know if that would help.
Are you arguing that democracy has fixed abuses of power?
Definitely spend some time interacting with people that work in the space and listen to their stories, you'll quickly find out exactly how fair a democracy inherently makes things (not at all fair, in other words).
1) A unifying incentive that makes people cooperate (prospects of improvement, opportunity, economic growth).
2) Mechanisms of removing bad actors.
3) Free speech that allows a constant re-negotiation of ideals, values, interests etc. Don't expect a single formula or law is going to solve everything for good, but expect a constant dialogue which allows to adapt to constantly changing requirements even though it may seem tiring.
Decentralizing decision power alone does not cut it as people are going to be sneaky and selfish.
- they implicitly discourage men to apply for job by adding "We especially encourage women to apply." to job ads,
- they understand "equality" as equal number men and women working at some institute/position/area instead of equal rights and opportunities and promoting best minds,
- they have plenty of grants and awards considered only for women.
And all above is coming from so called "smart people" that should give education for the next generations.
Wait, how does that implicitly discourage men to apply? Sure, it is a direct encouragement to women to apply, but that is not therefore an implicit discouragement to men. An implicit discouragement to men would say something like: "We encourage women to apply above others" or "We encourage men to also look for other opportunities".
"We especially encourage white, heterosexual men"
would be completely OK? Because nothing here is "therefore an implicit discouragement to" other ethnicity/sexuality/gender.
Like, women are obviously under represented in tech, despite many efforts by the Big 4 to increase representation [0]. The Big 4 are doing better at getting women into tech, but they still have a ways to go. The survey details some of those struggles. So, logically, you'd like to continue to encourage women to apply. WASPy men don't seem to need this encouragement thus far, but times may change.
[0] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/07/diversity-report/
Why is master and slave unacceptable? Why is fireman unacceptable?
The claim is that using this terminology makes people feel unwelcome. The same logic applies above.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
The reason we have guidelines like this is that these discussions are totally predictable, and therefore devoid of curiosity. They generate a lot of het-up agitation though, which is destructive to the community.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
One of the topics mentioned in linked article is "sexual discrimination". How is it suddenly not related?
"The reason we have guidelines like this is that these discussions are totally predictable, and therefore devoid of curiosity. They generate a lot of het-up agitation though, which is destructive to the community."
Saying the truth is destructive to the community? Is this some kind of censorship?
HN is moderated. You can call that censorship if you like; that word is used in so many different ways that at this point it just expresses a feeling.
Censorship is not a feeling. You are not even correcting me. It's seems that you are marking my comment because you are told so, not because you can show any failure in my logic. Shame on you.
If making such reports is rewarded in a way that can help career advancement, then it should not be surprising to observe such a trend.
In practice virtually every such accusation I've seen reported ends up with the woman leaving the employer, not the reverse.
The counter hypothesis is that women who don't want to deal with the sexist bullshit just give up on careers like this. This has the notable advantage of explaining the gender balance and the inversion of accusation rates.
0. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/malcolm...
Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_evolutionary_psyc...