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aidrocsid  ·  3190 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Tim Hunt, Sexism and the Cult of Science

I'd say that for the most part we have changed the social system to be more fair. We've got more women in college than men, but there's still a tendency to prefer flexibility and shorter hours. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm not into working overtime either.

The thing is though, you've got to look at what you're measuring and what that tells you. If all you're measuring is how many people of what demographic are in which jobs, that doesn't tell you why.

Personally, I don't think it's terribly healthy to focus on demographic information or to attribute the actions or status of one individual to others simply because they share some fairly unimportant traits. Especially when the difference is between two populations who universally show a statistical divergence of opinion and behavior. Binary gender may not be a cultural universal, but gender as a whole most certainly is.

If women tend not to be as interested in working 60 hours a week as men, why should we need them to? How is that oppressing their full agency? There are women who do choose to take these work intensive career paths who do incredibly well. Women are overrepresented in college at this point. At what point can we stop denying women the benefit of their own decision making?

Would it be better to have inequality of opportunity in order to foster equality of outcome? Because if women, demographically, are, say, just always going to be statistically less likely to go into STEM than men, wouldn't we have to destabilize equality of opportunity to achieve anything like equality of outcome?

Why should it matter what boxes you check on the census? If there's clear discrimination going on, such as teachers telling girls they shouldn't go into math and science, that's definitely something we should address, but that doesn't justify leaping to the assumption that all fields should have a 50/50 gender split or there's sexism afoot.