Oh, I definitely agree! Scientific illiteracy is rampant, and definitely not a good thing. But scientists being circle-jerking elitists is not cool and ignores much of what science is about. I do have to say that I very much disagree with your second point, though. There's a lot of research that suggests girls are discouraged from STEM fields from a very young age, starting as early as elementary school. Being subtly discouraged for your whole life means that you're less likely to want to go into a particular field. This is unfortunate because it's possible that those people would have really enjoyed being in STEM and could have made fantastic discoveries, but were driven away in their formative years because they were socialized to believe that science is for boys. I have a very distinct memory of being told by an elementary school teacher that boys were better at math and that I should be a stay-at-home mom. I don't think it's much of a coincidence that after that, I barely paid attention in science and math classes until I was in high school. I had a fantastic (female) chemistry teacher and I discovered that I really, really loved science. When she noticed that I liked science, she encouraged me to apply for lab internships and eventually to research universities. I had multiple lab internships in high school with female PIs. Suddenly, being a woman in science didn't seem so weird! Science is my passion and I truly love what I do. I sometimes wonder where I would be if I didn't have such a fantastic string of female science role models in high school. It makes me sad to know that I am in a minority of women who had this experience. Even putting that aside, though, what Tim Hunt said is still insane. It's not like he said that having a gender imbalance in science is fine. Although I disagree, people express this opinion all the time. What he said is that women "fall in love with you" and "cry when you criticize them" and should be completely separated from men in labs. What?! I don't know how many female grad students he's had in his lab, but I have a lot of female friends in science, none of whom have fallen in love with their PIs or cried in front of them.
Study finds, surprisingly, that women are favored for jobs in STEM "Women are wonderful" effectThe “women are wonderful” effect is the phenomenon found in psychological research which suggests that people associate more positive attributes with the general social category of women compared to men. This effect reflects an emotional bias toward women as a general case. The phrase was coined by Eagly & Mladinic (1994) after finding that both men and women participants tend to assign exceptionally positive traits to women (men are also viewed positively, though not quite as positively), with woman participants showing a far more pronounced bias. The authors supposed that the positive general evaluation of women might derive from the association between women and nurturing characteristics.
People like to throw that study around, but it has serious methodological problems (for more, see, e.g., this response). Even if there weren't giant problems with that study, tenure track faculty positions are in the extreme minority of STEM jobs in terms of numbers. There are maybe a few hundred open positions in the US per year in all STEM fields. This is in stark contrast to the tens of thousands (or more) of other possible STEM jobs outside of universities.
If you weren't so absurdly politically biased, you would recognize immediately that this statement doesn't follow from the conclusion of the study you linked. People "associating more positive attributes" with women is inherently tied to discrimination against women; it means they're treated like children and not like adults. People have the same bias towards evaluating children positively too, but we don't allow children to have any responsibility. As for the first study you linked, there's another study that follows almost an identical methodology and comes to exactly the opposite result. It's a gross distortion to present your single study as the last word of SCIENCE!!!! on gender equality in stem. Here is a good overview of the problem. Personally, I feel that college labs at least strive to be quite gender neutral on the whole (even if sometimes they don't quite succeed), and the conclusions of both studies simply reflect the known political biases of their authors.The point is that people will discriminate in favour of women, not against.
Don't get me wrong, I'll be applying to tenure track positions in 4-5 years so it's relieving to know that I won't have the problems that a majority of women in STEM have (although TT chances are <1% anyway). But you can't pretend that women aren't at a disadvantage in every other STEM job (except for nursing, ofc).
Have you watched this documentary called "Brainwash: The Gender Equality Paradox"? It proves that the reason women are a minority in STEM jobs is simply because more men than women are interested in them, due to biological differences between the sexes. I think you're very lucky to be a woman who wants to work in that field, since you'll probably be favoured over your male colleagues simply by virtue of being a woman.
Cue scene from Orange is the New Black: "You can handle that all by yourself, honey?" "I think I can fix it if I focus extra hard with my lady brain."" Edit: pretty sure I really messed that quotation up, but I can't find a clip >:O
Interesting! Thanks for recommending, I'll make sure to check this out. Identifying biological bases of personality and behavior is notoriously difficult and fraught with methodological problems so I'm sure they feature discussions from only the top researchers. As for your last comment, I'm not in one of the fields that was surveyed in the study (linguistics/cognitive science), so you have absolutely no basis for that statement. It's totally fine for you to believe one study with questionable methodology that finds opposite results as every other study done before it, but it's not okay to use that belief to put down other people. Have a nice day!
It's pretty much a fact that men and women are different and have different interests, only social "scientists" and feminists would dare to deny it. As for pro/anti-female biases in STEM, are you telling me that you haven't noticed all the campaigns and programs meant to increase the number of women in those last few male-dominated fields? Female scientists are in high demand these days.
Yeah; it's also a fact that everyone grows up in a society, and society shapes people's interests a lot. It's very difficult to tell what is biological and what is social. I find it interesting that you put scientists in quotations. Are you implying that people who publish in this field, who have years of research experience and extensive training in their field, are not real scientists? I find it extremely hard to believe that you are this ignorant of how science works. There's a reason those programs are in place, because women face discrimination in science. It's currently our best fix for this discrimination. When the discrimination is gone, the programs will also be gone.
Some differences are pretty obviously biological, so much so that they've been observed even in other primates (so we can't say that it's society's fault): Male And Female Chimps Play Differently Male Monkeys Prefer Boys' Toys Female Chimps Play With Stick Dolls I've yet to see evidence of anti-female discrimination in science, to be honest, and even if it existed, I doubt that it could be solved by flooding the labs with female students who needed to be encouraged to be there. If anything, wouldn't that just give the guys a legitimate reason to treat their female colleagues with contempt? I think that the disparity in the representation of males vs females in certain fields can be explained without having to blame sexism, and that feminists are trying to force a political solution on a non-problem (thereby creating a problem). And yeah, I don't have a lot of respect for the social sciences. It seems to me that the kind of people who flock to those studies are more interested in pushing an agenda than doing science.
Interesting articles! I'll have to get back to you when I have a chance to do an in depth reading of the original papers. Wait, so you're telling me that the only thing you've read on this subject is the Washington Post piece on the Williams & Ceci PNAS paper? I alluded to a literature containing hundreds of opposite results assuming you were familiar, but apparently not. If you want a place to start, here are some Google Scholar results for "gender discrimination bias hiring STEM". If you're unfamiliar with how to perform a deep review of the literature of a field, I'd be happy to provide some tips. This article is also a good resource. Let's walk through how the scientific process works. 1. Observe some phenomenon out I'm the world. 2. Read the litrerature of the field, and formulate a hypothesis to account for your initial observation. 3. Test this phenomenon using an appropriate methodology and statistically analyze the results. 4. Determine whether or not your hypothesis is supported by your results. 5. Write this all up and submit to a conference or an appropriate journal in the field. This is how every single scientific field works. If social scientists are undeserving of respect and are just pushing an agenda, something in the above process must be going wrong. Let's think about some possibilities: Possibility 1: Social scientists don't use the process above at all. This is demonstrably false, read and journal article and it goes through each of the steps above. Possibility 2: Social scientists do experiments, but they all fabricate their data. While technically possible, this would require an extensive conspiracy between thousands of scientists over many generations, and is extraordinarily unlikely. Possibility 3: Social scientists' studies are so methodological flawed we can't conclude anything from them. While sometimes this is true, bad methodology can happen in any field, and I'm not aware of any studies that attempt to determine whether any field is "worse" than the rest metbodologically. Let me know if you know of any! Possibility 5: Social scientists are so bad at statistics that even though they have well-designed studies they constantly find false positives and false negatives. Again, while this is possible, statistical ineptitude is a problem in a lot of fields and I know of no evidence that any field is worse than any other. Let me know if you know of any studies on this! Possibility 5: Social scientists do fine studies, but their conclusions over interpret or overgeneralize their data. Again, possible, but unclear that any field is worse than any other. Plus, this is the sort of thing that peer review us good at catching. Since you must have a principled reason to disrespect social scientists, which of these possibilities do you think is true and why? Or if you think it's something else, what is it and why?I've yet to see evidence of anti-female discrimination in science
I clicked on a few of those articles but they're all behind a paywall. Before linking to a list of articles as evidence of something, you should make sure that they're actually available to the person you're trying to "educate". And I know how the scientific process works, but I also know how people work - especially feminists. They think logic is a tool of the patriarchy.
The nice thing about Google scholar is that they often have free pdfs or articles. They'll either appear as links to the right of the search result, or there is also a link below the search result that says "All X versions", which often have free pdfs. I don't doubt you know how science works, but I wanted to lay it out explicitly so that it is easier to identify exactly where things can go wrong in science. Since you think that social scientists don't do science, you should be able to identify where you think the problem is and why it is a problem.
Can you link to some of this large body of research? I keep hearing it mentioned but I've never actually seen evidence. That's certainly not something that should have happened but it's also not necessarily indicative of a larger pattern. And yeah, Tim Hunt is old and out of touch.I do have to say that I very much disagree with your second point, though. There's a lot of research that suggests girls are discouraged from STEM fields from a very young age, starting as early as elementary school.
I have a very distinct memory of being told by an elementary school teacher that boys were better at math and that I should be a stay-at-home mom. I don't think it's much of a coincidence that after that, I barely paid attention in science and math classes until I was in high school.
Of course! Here's a book-length treatment on the issue; the introduction is very accessible and covers most of the issues, and is available through Google books. If you're interested in further reading, you can look up the articles that are cited within the book.Can you link to some of this large body of research? I keep hearing it mentioned but I've never actually seen evidence.