Ever wonder why there are so few women engineers? Well, wonder no more, because carchamp1 over on the Men’s Rights subreddit has the answer! It’s apparently his wife’s fault, or something. In a comment with two dozen upvotes at last count, he explains:
I put my wife through four years of college to be an engineer. That’s four years worth of college tuition and expenses, plus not having any income from her. She got a great job and worked for a couple years. She decided she didn’t want to work anymore so she could be a “stay-at-home-mom”. When I urged her to work she said if I didn’t like it she would take our kid and I could leave.
Women don’t want to be engineers that’s why there are so few. It’s too hard. It’s a lot easier doing the “hardest job in the world”, you know, be a mom and living off your husband.
End of story.
Yeah, it’s not like there might be any other reasons beyond laziness and ingratitude, or anything.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on the Human genome, or other types of nanotechnology!
Okay, DKM, I know you came from a cyberpunk dystopia that had all that technology, and now you’re trapped in our universe and it must be scary for you. However, we don’t have those things. We have computers. Some of those things, like the cancer cure, are even physically impossible in our universe.
Honestly. Don’t they give dimension travellers the slightest orientation these days? When I came from the Planet of Tiny Purple Genderless Octopi, I had to have a PhD equivalent in Earth culture before they let me set foot in a dimensional portal.
So your assumption based on those stats is that the difference is biological rather than the more logical suggestion that perhaps the field of engineering is still rigidly cold towards women? As noted in my previous post, math PhDs for women have risen from 5% to 30% in just one generation. Women have shown that they can excel in several scientific fields, suggesting that it’s NOT an innate biological deficiency on the part of women.
So even though technology is progressing at a much faster rate than it did in the past, reality doesn’t match DKM’s science fiction utopia and that’s means ITS THE WIMMINZ FAULT!
That might just be the most profoundly stupid line of reasoning I’ve ever had the privilege to witness.
I’m really curious what “women’s departments in the sciences” are since I’ve never seen or heard of any, and if they get all the funding I’d like to get in on that. Also, if the genius men are distracted by women working with them that means they clearly lack any real work ethic an so probably shouldn’t have that job in the first place.
Oh, and going by DKM’s reasoning (Men outnumber and excel women in both quantity, and quality at rates of at least 20:1) American’s really should just give up on STEM fields since many other countries outnumber us in early education benchmarks and numbers of PhDs awarded (though our research is pretty good…mostly because so many foreigners come over here to teach and do research) so clearly we’re just not designed to work in those fields (pretty sure this argument is just as valid as his).
I don’t think anyone has been asserting that. Many of my comments were about teenagers in general, not 19-year-olds specifically – and I don’t think that teenagers are all fuckheads either. But quite a few indisputably create that impression in their less guarded moments.
And now we know how Meller lost his job.
You’ll be glad to hear that I’m going to stop demanding that you produce your own hard-science credentials, because that last comment alone makes it abundantly clear that you don’t have any.
Mind you, maybe you’re on to something? I’ve just finished reading the Steve Jobs biography, and I couldn’t help noticing that the original Apple Macintosh was delivered months if not years behind schedule. I originally completely bought the book’s thesis that it was all because of Jobs’ insane perfectionism, but maybe it was really Joanna Hoffman’s fault? After all, she was a senior member of the development team, so I can only conclude that she must have held everyone back by giggling about periods or fluttering her eyelashes or doing whatever women do when promoted way over their ability.
I naturally have no evidence whatever for this assertion*, but I understand that you’re not too bothered about that kind of thing if the assertion in question fits your prejudices.
(*and am hoping that Hoffman understands sarcasm if she ever reads this – thankfully, she’s Polish, so it’s a reasonably safe bet.)
Haven’t finished the thread, but I had to comment because I have a personal story relating to this:
I’m a female software engineer working at a large company in an engineering department that’s overwhelmingly male. I have exactly one coworker (out of perhaps 100 or 150 on the floor) who is distracted enough by the presence of the (approximately 10) women on the floor that it affects his productivity. Multiple times every day, he wanders around the floor and interrupts the women while they’re working, just to chat. He also has a nasty habit of coming by my desk after he finishes work for the day, and the only way to get rid of him is to leave.
My solution to this problem would be to tell him to cut it out (which works for a few days) and possibly get his manager to talk to him if he became really bothersome. At worst, we would get rid of that one employee. Apparently DKM’s solution is that the other women and I should be fired so he isn’t distracted? And this should still happen even if he is a crap employee?
Yeah, I’m not sure that makes the most business sense.
So basically the argument is that science and engineering is falling behind because you don’t have your own personal hovercraft, and the reason for this is women. Brilliant!
If it makes you feel better (and it shouldn’t), along with the “nineteen-year-olds are all fuckheads” thesis, there’s also the continuing “old people are pretty much never going to learn anything so why bother” thesis that comes up whenever Meller and milkslave’s merits are compared against Mr. Al. I guess the lesson I take from all this is that people talk imperfectly about age?
Happy early birthday, ozy!
Okay, ‘fess up – Who’s been feeding the trolls after midnight? They’re making even less sense than usual (although if MRAL gets some sleep, I’m sure he’ll be back to his usual charming self soon).
So, today’s rant is “WHY DON’T I HAVE A FLYING CAR, IT’S WOMEN’S FAULT!!!”
[quote=”Sloejenphys”]I’m really curious what “women’s departments in the sciences” are since I’ve never seen or heard of any, and if they get all the funding I’d like to get in on that.[/quote]
To find the women’s department, take a left at the negro section.
Meller world sounds fun, when a sexy woman walks into the workplace:
>>>All of these inventions and technologies to say nothing of many others, except for gravity and inertia control, were projected quite reasonably, in the years following WWII to be available long before 2012!
All the engineer types ended up being distracted developping things like the personal computer, the Internet, smartphones, e-books, public key cryptography…
All kinds of stuff that were not projected by people back then. In fact, the computer as a technology was *classified* right after WWII, and the very idea of a personal computer seemed ludicrous.
The technological advances in just the past century are astronomical when compared to the advances in the centuries before. Yet again DKM shows an utter lack of historical knowledge and it just pulling shit from his ass.
Why would I take a Women’s Studies class? It’s presumably going to be all wyms which is just more opportunities for them to be mean to me.
Like I said, you could learn how to spell “women.” See, you got it right in that first sentence, then you screwed it all up again. Also, prolonged contact with women in a classroom setting will make you less scared of them.
The women sitting around plotting ways to be mean to you are not real. That is your brain trying to trick you.
Math is an awesome subject to study, but it’s not exactly a guaranteed path to a career unless you’re planning to teach math. You’ll be okay, but I wouldn’t suggest acting too smug about other people’s job opportunities. (I majored in English, which isn’t exactly the most career-building major either, but now I work as a comic-book editor and it’s all cool. One of my friends studied pure mathematics at Berkeley and now creates math-based comic books.)
Pssst… I think you can trick David into taking you off moderation by not constantly swearing and hurling slurs at people.
Well said, DKM.
TAB, you need to post a picture of yourself, no argument is complete without it.
Guys I am DUMB. My bus was early so I missed it and I figured it was late so I hung around, but when it started to take too long I ran to my emergency bus stop but that bus was early so now I’m going to be late for my exam! Good thing it’s Pragmatics and I kick butt in that class.
Anyway, hi, Meller! Where the hell do you work? Because “what the fuck is SHE doing here?” has never really come up in any job I’ve ever held. Usually, there are a number of other girls and women in the workplace.
As far as starting rivalries, funny story: I met my boyfriend at work this summer. There was another man interested in me. There was also another woman interested in him. Is it fair to presume that, in your mind, the women involved were the source of strife in both cases, despite them being mirror images of one another?
In any case it doesn’t matter, because (being professionals) no one allowed any of that to affect their job performance.
Way to ignore the very next (non-parenthetical) sentence in my post, which acknowledges that a scant few women had rare circumstances that enabled them to bypass the obstacles.
You know, I’m genuinely saddened by Meller’s apparent belief that we haven’t had any interesting or useful advances in science and technology recently, because it implies a severe lack of attention to and wonder at the world around him.
Sitting right next to me on my desk as I type this, there’s a device a little smaller than my hand. Within the past 24 hours, I have used this device to:
– Talk, with no delays, and near-perfect clarity, to someone located roughly 1300 miles away.
– Send and receive written communication with someone on another continent, with only seconds of delay.
– Identify a song playing on the radio, solely by pressing a button drawn on a screen, which told my device to search an enormous database of sounds and report a title and artist back to me roughly 3 seconds later.
– Instantly access information on global news as it happens.
– Teach someone a basic point of music theory by creating a working piano keyboard upon demand.
– Shoot little irate, wingless avians at stuff.
And I keep all that in my pocket. And I bet most of you do, too!
How are we not living in a sci-fi utopia of sorts? How sad must one be to look at the wondrous, constantly-advancing world we live in and say, “Pfft, we may have computers a quarter-inch thick that work millions of times better than the computers that used to fill a whole room, and we may have mapped genomes, found treatments for diseases that seemed untreatable, grown functional organs from stem cells and transplanted them into patients, built the LHC, found proof that life can exist in insanely inhospitable places, landed probes on Mars, and the list goes on and on and on, but there’s no cold fusion yet, so NO PROGRESS HAS BEEN MADE”?
@POlliwog: Very true (“pets new Android, Wally, lovingly”) but I admit to some grumpiness myself about OMG no holdeck, no transporter, and no flying cars! The Jetsons promised me flying cars!
But then I am realistic enough to know that scientific and technological development cannot always be predicted (actually science fiction as a genre has a long and lousy record of prediction–it fails all the time! and is really best read as commentary on the present the text was produced in), and that given my grandfather plowed with a horse drawn team and saw the moon landing before he died, the rate of development has been fucking amazing.
But even without all that, all one has to know is that if a statement is coming from DKM, it’s completely and totally lacking in any sense or meaning 99.999999999999999999999% of the time.
>>When are we going to have the same degree of control of gravitation and inertia that the XIXth century gave us over electromagnetism–Which was just as poorly understood in 1800 as e.g.gravitation and inertia were in 1911?
Gravity is not a form of energy, unlike electromagnetism. Einstein pretty much demonstrated that it’s the result of the curvature of space time. There is no sense in the idea of ‘controlling gravity’. At best you could make a theoretical argument that it might be feasible to curve spacetime differently, but from an energy expenditure POV it seems like that would be costly, in the sense that I’m pretty sure it will cost me less energy to walk to Mexico than to have a theoretical machine carry Mexico up to my appartment’s door.
>>>Where are the multibillion (multitrillion?) $$$ opportunities in space manufacturing and undersea mining?
Necessity is the mother of invention. What company would waste trillions on developping risky methods to extract mineral from space or undersea when we still have plenty of easily accessible mines right here? It’s just not a profitable venture. Gold from Spaaaaaace is the same as regular gold, it won’t sell for more, so any extra cost is basically coming straight out of profits or labor costs… and if you think you’re going to get a lot of workers to fly to asteroids for less than they can get mining on Earth (which is already a fucking joke, as far as remuneration for labor provided is concerned), you’ve got a rude awakening coming.
Relating to space labor rights and struggles, I cite the very scholarly work entitled “Every fucking Red Faction videogame ever”.
>>Where are the (at least theoretical explorations) of phenomena like zero-point vacuum energy, low-temperature/chemically assisted nuclear reactions, low-mass (“hydrino”) energy, or aetherometry?
Oh great. You’re one of THOSE loons too? The ‘free energy’ loons? When’s your perpetual motion machine coming?
Zero-point vacuum energy has no application. None. I remember a thought experiment that given the frequency of the needed event, even if somehow you were able to have 100% conversion to useful energy of each particle/anti-particle that ‘popped’ out of nowhere for a fraction of a nanosecond, you’d need the entire universe to light a lightbulb.
Cold fusion was a hoax (or if we’re feeling charitable, a giant mess up by the team that published they had done it).
I finished my exam! I didn’t do perfectly, but I had a 96 in the class going in so I think I’ll squeak by.
The one question I just couldn’t answer was which bacterial species act as intercellular parasites of white blood cells. I assume the men here all know the answer because MAN, right?