A tenured professor is in no way qualified to decide if you’re personally capable of pursuing a non physical field purely based on your gender. Unless some studies were done to prove that women can’t math, it’s simple misogyny. Not that complicated.
Edit: especially when they’re forcing opinions on people on the taxpayer’s dime.
See, I am not strictly opposed to having one-on-ones with students and telling them they shouldn’t be there (I hope you meant in the profs office, not in front of everyone!). And I’m not opposed to bluntly telling the class “if you had a hard time with these easy problems you should probably leave”.
It wouldn’t be the way I approached a class, but I at least can understand a firm and blunt discussion. I do not agree with singling out women or any other niche of students for that treatment though. That would be the fundamental difference between the two scenarios for me.
The other difference would be in your scenario the profs gave them a (very limited) chance to prove their abilities before saying “this is the standard that needs to be met”. I am fine with hard standards i. general. In the first there’s just an asshole up there telling you you suck as a person before they even let you into the class…
I can’t comment on what the up and coming guys look like, but I use to work in a software company where half the staff were programmers, developers etc.
The software people had no dress code and some of them wore clothes that I doubt the salvation army would accept. One guy Use to wear a t-shirt with a hole in his nipple area, so often his nipple would be sticking out. When I pointed out his nipple was sticking out he just adjusted his shirt and continued to wear it. Oh and he naturally tucked his shirt in.
Some of them didn’t even say a word to others unless they had to communicate and the ones that did would spend their lunch hour obsessing about dongles, how much they despised apple products and why android was superior to iOS.
The one girl who worked in that area I rarely saw her socialize with the other programmers. She spent most of her time with people in other departments.
Anyways just my observations
Pretty much bingo. Also, what a brutal way to get back a test! damn lol. It wouldn’t be my personal approach but I have no problem with toughness in that way.
Yes, both of you hit it perfectly. We SHOULD all just say “fuck you” to naysayers. But that is usually something that a developed adult does more frequently than kids. Kids can get crushed by that (so can some adults, but they’re fully developed).
I have a personal experience with this and one of my major professors, and it burned me. I wanted to prove him wrong but it burned my confidence almost completely for a number of years there. I spent both undergraduate and graduate years in his lab.
Fortunately I no longer have to deal with the asshat. Also I did eventually get back, but this is a situation I know all too well.
This was super super super common for most STEM fields for quite a while. Now that people are being raised with tech to be “indoctrinated” early on, STEM fields aren’t considered “nerd” fields anymore.
Especially with those starting salaries. They’re pretty damn good.
Let’s hope this part remains the same. Crapple can’t hold up to real tech.
http://www.statisticbrain.com/iq-estimates-by-intended-college-major/
Too silly to warrant a response beyond, ‘Speak for yourself, Poindexter.’
What’s the difference between the weighty-ness of a tenured professor vs that of, say, an NFL head coach?
And if we’re talking about a professor who has been around a long time (read: One who came up during the era of misogynistic gender assumptions), then yes, I’d wager he is objectively less qualified.
When evaluating any theory purportedly based in data/fact, counterfactuals are always of more value than ‘pro-factuals.’ It’s the old ‘Black Swan’ argument.
Fuck…your lab mentor was a dick too? My lab mentor during graduate school probably told me a dozen times “Maybe you’re not cut out for this type of work.” (which I kinda knew, I get bored in the lab). I fucking hated his ass. I did manage to publish two publications but I dreaded seeing him.
I did grow to appreciate the lessons I learned there and he truly had our best interest at heart – he just lacked social skills of any sort outside of creating analogies…lol.
I had a guy similar to that in fabrication. He would come in to the shop and literally beat my work to pieces with a hammer for a virtually indiscernible flaw, which was a huge dick move, but did serve several purposes.
If you were a little bit faint of heart or sensitive to criticism- you would leave.
Conversely, there’s the defiant- “I’ll show you!” response that results in excellent work.
Its also at the risk of getting laid out in the middle of the shop- which has happened to him, but not by me.
Its definitely an old school approach though, and does come with some risks.
Oh my God this made me laugh out loud 
[quote=“SkyzykS, post:112, topic:228430”]
Its definitely an old school approach though, and does come with some risks.
[/quote]
I think, at best it makes you very meticulous, which was something I was sorely lacking as a first year. But, at worst, it makes you an anxiety ridden, approval seeking nightmare.
It’s the classic “break em’ down, build em’ approach.”
I saw that push a lot of teammates away in college with my first head coach. Being a dick 95% Of the time, people grow to resent you quickly.
I think to be the best coach/teacher/whatever you have to be adaptable and have tools for each individual as much as people hate the idea of “catering” to kids/players.
You still have those folks that everything is a nail and they’re a hammer…if you’re not a nail then you leave, but they’re definitely dying out.
If you work in STEM share some anecdotes about the ubiquitous nerdom.
Another one :
One guy had figurines on his desk
Yes. This is where this gets political, right? Look at the stats in the article below. You’ll never hear a liberal politician quote those, and the feminists don’t say anything about it because it goes against the agenda of continuing to be a protected group that requires special laws and funds.
Females are leading men in every single category in terms of degree attainment, and we’re making as much money as men when we’re employed in like fields with the same amount of experience. Yet we still hear politicians give the meaningless “women make however many cents on a dollar” quote. They do not like to be empirical and drill down into the realities behind these statistics.
Really, the questions are these.
How much do we want to exert effort into getting women on parity with men in STEM or all the higher paying fields?
Will we continue to feel that our efforts at gender equality are a failure until women are also holding as many leadership/ CEO / US Senator roles as men? Right now more women choose flexibility and part-time work so we’re statistically less likely to want to take on those more demanding roles, at least if there are children. Of course many women are doing them very well.
To me, the encouraging women in STEM fields goal seems reasonable given where we’ve come from just 30 years ago. We may reassess, and I’m not sure we need to hire whole departments of people to accomplish it. And I doubt we’ll ever decide that we no longer need such a department. We’ve won the degree battle over men, but no feminist is going to say that we don’t need a lot more money for women’s causes.
I’m not sure we’ll ever reach the other goal unless we there is a shift as a society toward men and women taking on an equal desire to assume childcare/ domestic tasks, and we have seen that begin to shift. Most of you probably do a lot more than your dads did with kids and home tasks. More people with flexible jobs, working from home. Or we begin to have equal numbers of stay-at-home dads.
Have a programmer at work. He’s fresh out of college, less than a year. He writes automated rules and scripts into one of the software suites we use very heavily (mostly C# and .net).
A few months after he started he was struggling with something, and it ended up taking him like 2 weeks to complete. One day around Xmas time he sends an email out to the IT dist group letting everyone know he had it figured out, but most importantly, “Encompass can eat shit, I got it to work.”
Little did he know the CDO is a member of the IT dist group (who knew right?). He took it pretty well, but our programmer isn’t sending out IT wide emails without asking anymore.
There are data to dispute this:
http://www.aauw.org/resource/the-simple-truth-about-the-gender-pay-gap/
For me the question is, Why does the gender-gap exist in STEM and the ‘higher-paying fields’? To what extent is it due to social, cultural and/or institutional biases?
We will continue to wonder why the gap exists.
Choose, or are essentially forced into?
My point exactly.
Agree. Good points, both. Quoting and paraphrasing Johnathan Haidt here -
Social justice tends to teach that when we see disparate outcomes, we can infer causality: racism or misogyny. There is an idea that we should all be equal, unless the system is biased or unfair. In the real world, we find all kinds of disparity that has nothing to do with systemic social causes. There are just so many factors.
“The truth is, disparate outcomes do not imply disparate treatment, although they are a an invitation to look closely for disparate treatment, which is sometimes the cause of the disparity, sometimes not.”
“…If justice is concerned with finding and eradicating disparate treatment (which is always a good thing to do, and which never conflicts with truth), and finding and eradicating disparate outcomes, without regard for disparate inputs or third variables. It is this latter part which causes all of the problems, all of the conflicts with truth.”
One hundred years from now we may decide, “You know, women just aren’t that interested in the NFL draft, and they aren’t as interested in technology as men.” Right now we have no clue how many of these factors are cultural, or have some biology or some combination of factors at work. I guess our society will answer if we think these disparities are really problematic, and how much they respond to attempts to change disparities in treatment where they are found.
At my school there is no point where a female is told that she cannot do physics. They are given the exact same treatment as males throughout the 5 years the do physics. Then they are given a choice to continue doing physics or choose something else. They consistently prefer to not continue physics and do something else, to the point where there are 5 men to 1 female in the class.
Statements, no matter how minuscule, can affect someones decision to go into a subject. However these statements are not present in the vast majority of cases and yet they still consistently choose to not go into STEM subjects at the same rate as men do.
Great point. Another is how women are 35% more likely to be hired from a job application than a man with the exact same qualifications.
So 7 of the 10 top fields for high IQ are STEM fields and this is supporting your point how exactly?
So instead of using someones IQ test we use what instead to measure what?
I’ll quote a article on the predictions a high IQ can make:
“Scoring highly on an IQ test can forecast significantly higher success levels in all areas of life. In fact, even though IQ tests were initially designed to predict only school achievement, more than a century’s worth of scientific research has shown they’re also predictive of other, seemingly nonintellectual achievements, like better, longer, and happier romantic relationships, creative and artistic talents, socioeconomic status, and even health and longevity. IQ tests have even been found to predict a person’s life expectancy as well as personality traits like self-control, prudence, and risk taking.”
What do you propose instead as a intelligence measure since you don’t like IQ?
And just a general source of information on the issue at hand:
"The lack of women in some STEM fields, like physics, is caused by entrenched sexism. However, these accounts consistently fail to explain why this alleged sexism is nowhere to be found in biology, where 58 percent of doctorates, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees are awarded to women. Or in zoology, psychology, and veterinary science — all scientific fields, all dominated by women. So why do women choose the latter, but not the former? It it just sexism?
The answer can again be found by looking at studies that trace the innate differences, and preferences, of men and women. Autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen has been studying the differences between men and women for over a decade, ever since he discovered that boys were far more likely than girls to develop autism. His research has found that boys (on average) are born with brains oriented towards understanding systems rather than people, emotions, and living things.
This is backed up by research on newborns, which show clear differences between male and female newborns in their preferences. Before they are nine months old, infants show gendered preferences with regards to toys, with male infants gravitating towards trucks and mechanical objects, and girls gravitating towards dolls. The study on newborns in particular helps rule out the the theory that sexist influences from a child’s social environment are the cause of gender differences."
Really good post but keep in mind the wacky left doesn’t care about the reality of gender differences. PC culture dictates that everyone must be the same. And some of the fools on T Nation will type their fingers to the bone in this pursuit.
It’s a real hoot!
Get ready for -
Please define intelligence;
If you can define it, how can it be tested fairly;
If defined and then tested fairly - how can we not consider that white men are the scourge of society even though it is genetically proven that humans are identical, in the same way molecules of water are identical chemically.