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.
Well, even with the things that we know are possible because they happened, like computer technology advances, Meller’s speculation that they would have happened faster without feminism is an absolutely unprovable statement.
What if (purely hypothetically, now) if the curve of progress had remained in the XX century what it was in the period roughly 1750-1900, would we have had, e.g. color HDTV in 1928, a working transistor by 1935, PEACEFUL nuclear power by 1939, manned space travel by 1948, and on a commercial basis a decade or so after, maglev transcontinental rail service (both freight and passanger) by 1955, SST by 1960, commercially viable electric vehicles by 1975, and the internet/cellphones–with the supporting hardware–by c.1982?
You know, even taking for granted everything else about this list, that one little “PEACEFUL”
you threw in there doesn’t cut it. You’re talking about a nuclear world in ’39.
You’re talking about a Blitz with the bomb. You’re talking about a “Pearl Harbor” strike with nukes. You’re talking about a world where, to be reasonably optimistic, London, Berlin, Moscow, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Paris, and Tokyo are smoking, radioactive ruins. And then technological process proceeds just dandily?
I get why it’s attractive, Ozy, just for the weird quotient, but DKM you simply cannot give WWII the bomb and expect a livable world for a long time afterwards.
Of course, it’s all nonsense in any case. Many of those innovations /required/ the war to advance as they did; the Enigma machine existed for long before, but nobody was bothering to use it, which meant nobody was bothering to crack it, which meant nobody was inventing computers. Necessity is the mother of invention; war is the mother of necessity. It’s very, very hard to argue that we’d be where we are without the war; it’s even harder to argue that with four or five nuclear powers going into the war, we’d be here at all.
Well then, perhaps you other men who lose efficiency, reliability and competency when in the company of all those distracting women ought to stay confined to the home where you can efficiently, reliably and competently do the cooking, cleaning, knitting, sewing, etc.
Oh, but in DKM’s alternate reality, discrimination was–and is!– necessary, to ensure natural meritocracy.
In retrospect the quotes on “Pearl Harbor” were unnecessary and silly looking. I meant to say that the Japanese Air Force would have attacked the coast of California with nukes and long range bombers, and thus “Pearl Harbor” wouldn’t really be at Pearl Harbor anymore, but changed my mind. Anyway, my point stands, I think.
MRAL: BTW, Pecunium, I’m smart and Have gret time management skills
The first part may be true, but the last is patently not or you wouldn’t be pulling all-nighters. I’ve had to pull all-nighters, because the situation which required it was outside my control. You aren’t in that spot, unless your courses are programmed by the school, with no input from you.
So, somewhere along the way, you chose to either bite off more than you could chew, or you didn’t keep up with the work required to have the mastery needed to avoid the detrimental aspects of cramming.
For Pete’s sake… Nuclear war is not the end of the world. It’s still rather nasty, but humanity and Western civilization would probably survive. Just look at the the blast radius of a typical bomb… Also remember that the radiological effects are quite short from most weapons.
Plus, who’s to say that we would have the bomb before we developed fast reactors or the thorium fuel cycle? The Manhattan project itself was an artifact of the second world war, and I somewhat doubt that it could have happened under any other circumstance.
And… Um.. What are we arguing about again?
Okay, I’ve read the backthread and I’m ready to respond. I just thought I’d fire off that other post first… Radiophobia and opposition to nuclear technology are far problematic than feminism and women’s liberation.
Re: Main topic.
Making major life decisions like that without consulting your spouse makes you a failure as a spouse. Threatening to leave and deny access to your children is even worse. It should go without saying that the wife is completely in the wrong here. These are things a decant husband or wife just shouldn’t do.
Re: Women in engineering.
There is one fundamental point I would agree with most of the manboobz folk on:
Talent is too expensive to waste.
Loosing even a single Grace Murray Hopper to bias within our field would set us back significantly. Even lesser names in the software trades can accomplish an awful lot. Throwing out this contribution without any external gain is a bad thing.
The catch is, (and, you know I wouldn’t be posting if I didn’t have something to argue about) is that even without sexism we will still see inequalities in the engineering fields. For one, there are some biological differences in brain structure and function. Just look at the mental rotation tests. We also have the cultural expiations of motherhood and the cultural expectations that women work in fields that allow them to directly care for their fellow human beings (there may be biological arguments for these tendencies too, but I haven’t researched the fields). Now, to be clear, these factors don’t mean that women can’t make contributions to the math and science fields nor does it mean that the system should exclude them from these fields. But they do mean that we will have unequal numbers of men and women in these fields. And, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this inequality.
This is where the feminists get it wrong. There is serious talk of applying title IX like quotas to science and engineering to enforce equality. This would mean rejecting many qualified male candidates. This violates the single value I mentioned at the start of this argument:
Talent is too expensive to waste.
Some feminists talk of changing culture so that we pressure young women away from marriage and motherhood. This is decidedly unfair to those women who want these things, even at the expense of a career. The same could be said for pressuring women into science and engineering for the purposes of equality when they would be happier studying other fields. This would also mean that you are depriving the other fields of talent. And, remember:
Talent is too expensive to waste.
In this thread, a number of folks have made the argument that “women bring a unique prospective to technical problems”. I don’t quite buy it… Even in the gender-specific examples mentioned (Apple’s new natural language processing program’s ability to find an escort service but not locate an abortion provider), I doubt that the line-level developers involved have the ability to make such decisions. Even if this were true, I don’t think it would justify any sort of forced discrimination. After all, I could make the same argument about Sociology professors and the Republican party. I’ve been told that there are 50 Democrats for every Republican in Sociology departments around the US. Now, I would argue that having a different political ideology means that you would approach teaching and research in the field differently. By this reasoning, this diversity is a good thing. Yet, I doubt that anyone else here would be specifically arguing that universities hire more Republicans. Why is diversity a good thing for gender, but not for political ideology?
Ultimately, talent is more important than diversity. And…
Talent is too expensive to waste.
Quick Question – Do you mean too precious to waste, because how much are we spending on wasted talent per year?
Dev Guy/Developers! Developers! Developers! is back XD And with his same old same old “what about the traditional women” thing xD
Remember Zhinxy, he says you don’t count as a feminist who’s also a mother and a good wife because it’s impossible to prove your abuse, you could be lying! xD
Developers to the third power comes to us from 1965. We need all the BEST minds in science, because we gotta beat them Russkys. The cost to collectivist BUT NOT COMMUNIZED IN ANY WAY society will be great if we don’t get everybody working up to speed, fitted into the new economy. This is no time for silly quotas. . And get realistic about the BOMB. We’ll make it through okay. Dang right we will.
Yeah, like Zhinxy is wondering…
you keep saying “Talent is too expensive to waste”
What do you mean by that? xD What talent is being “wasted”? Where is it going? What’s replacing it?
How do you know hiring practices that give mostly white male hires are not biased? (outside of the circular reasoning where clearly they must not be because white guys are being hired and therefore white guys are the most qualified, and since they’re the most qualified, them being hired shows pure objectivity) xD
But srsly, you keep repeating it. What specifically do you mean by it? Can you illustrate it, not in generalities or theoreticals where you control all the variables… in real life proof :3 Talent is being wasted and it’s expensive… show us? :]
“Remember Zhinxy, he says you don’t count as a feminist who’s also a mother and a good wife because it’s impossible to prove your abuse, you could be lying! xD”
That’s right! Ah, the memories.
Also devxdevxdev – Where is there serious talk of science QUOTAS? Are you arguing that science is now a pure meritocracy? Extra Credit – Does science serve “a duty to society”(tread carefully with me here, for there are shark infested libertarian waters) that we need “our best minds on” for the collective good, hence expensive?
PPS. How exactly do we know that the current crop of mostly white guys are there by merit, and more talented than people coming in, who could only get there by affirmative action?
Also, the theory behind AA is that equally qualified or MORE qualified individuals are being passed over because of being disabled, being a PoC, being female, etc… it isn’t “touchy feely awww we just want to be faaairrr” like MRAs and others keep strawing (and assuming) it is xD And I love how that WITHOUT knowing the qualifications, they always just assume this MUST mean that white guys who are more qualified are being passed over for people who are less, just cuz… well it MUST be right? Because hiring was wholly merit based before and therefore any outside manipulation can only mean that people are being chosen outside of merit, rather than making sure people aren’t being passed up despite their merits. >_>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule
Sports should be the ultimate example of hiring by merit right? After all everybody wants to win at all costs. So… why is it that they had to make sure that teams have to just INTERVIEW black candidates? No black coaching candidates that even are worthy of an interview and need to be forced up? Or is there a bias that the NFL felt needed to be corrected? It turns out by the way, after being forced to interview black coaches, some teams realized, hay, he might actually be a good fit! xD
Exactly. Before affirmative action, things just WORKED OUT THAT WAY! The rare “exception” got in! And you know, was treated totally fairly, up to their potential as an exception! Except that, you know, even the brilliant successes they had, were often hampered by sexism. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Germain
Louis Bucciarelli and Nancy Dworsky, Germain’s biographers, summarize as follows: “All the evidence argues that Sophie Germain had a mathematical brilliance that never reached fruition due to a lack of rigorous training available only to men.”[69]
Was she simply not qualified for the training? Would her being “ordered” into the ecole polytechnique to train her talents, which were wasted even as she contributed great things to mathematics, especially in the areas of proofs and elasticity?
Whatever you think of Monarchy, would an order by Napoleon, for example, to allow Sophie Germain in, have been a terrible time period specific act of affirmative action? Yes or no?
EDIT – Would her being “ordered” into the ecole polytechnique to train her talents, ( which were wasted even as she contributed great things to mathematics, especially in the areas of proofs and elasticity)? Have been a terrible act? If it takes action to get a person of tremendous talent into training, talent like Germains, is that an unalloyed bad, if social forces combine to keep them out?
What is Dev Guy trying to convince us of btw? o_O Better to leave it to white guys and a few “exceptions” or talent (i.e. abled white guys) will be wasted and the CommieRussianChineseNaziMuslims will take us over? o_O
NWO and Meller would have created a sustainable source of infinite energy at this point if not for AA! XD
Hmm… actually that last part is true… since AA can also stand for Ami Angelwings 😀
Or Alex Anthopoulous xD Who is prolly also ruining their day… somehow… (if Darvish is signed with the Jays and not the Rangers, maybe that would affect NWO or Meller or whatever MRAs live in Texas xD)
Yup! But don’t worry, and build the shelters and remain calm, stop worrying and love the bomb!
The infinite energy will power us to the MRA STARS!
THIS x100000
and it just exposes their biases too, because who could be MORE deserving than a white guy?!? and how DARE a woman of equal or more qualification usurp his rightful position in that field!
Lol. Citation absolutely needed.
You know, if men are actually in average better suited biologically to do math, I don’t mind if the day where all sexism is dead we end up with 40 women for 60 men. In the mean time, there is a huge need of fighting sexism.
“who could be MORE deserving than a white guy”
Probably a younger thiner more masculine white guy.
”
You know, if men are actually in average better suited biologically to do math, I don’t mind if the day where all sexism is dead we end up with 40 women for 60 men. In the mean time, there is a huge need of fighting sexism.”
That’s exactly how I feel. If it sorts out that way, fine. But let it sort out, don’t just scream that it already has.
Men are not better suited biologically for math though. This has been debunked over and over again. I’m so sick of people perpetuating this stereotype, it’s why many girls don’t even bother with math. Not saying you are perpetuating this Kyrie, just overall.
http://io9.com/5867401/there-really-is-no-difference-between-men-and-womens-math-abilities
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100105112303.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090601182655.htm
oh and another about spatial abilities:
Nurture affects gender differences in spatial abilities http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/19/1015182108
unfortunately you need to create an account to read it, but sociological images covered it as well http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/10/25/sex-society-and-spatial-ability/