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, forgot to sign my post properly again.
By the way, it’s not just MRAL that get angry when people flaunt the way “the world works”. All MRAs I’ve encountered are a little bit like that. Most seem to subscribe to a form of social Darwinism or evolutionary psychology that makes for a very black and white view of the world.
Okay, back to the post. This asshole realizes that his wife did not have an Immaculate Conception, right? He got her pregnant. He’s one of two parents in this marriage. At least she’s “wasting her degree” to do something. What about all the men who are put through college by their wives and then dump them for trophy wives once their careers are in place? Oh wait, that’s probably some evo-psych bullshit about waist to hip ratio and totes natural, right?
As for MRAL, his assumption that because he’s in college, everyone must be in college, is the perfect example of how these guys are unable to see beyond their own experience. And I want to know if Mommy and Daddy are paying for college. Unless you’re completely self-sufficient, you can go ahead and shut the fuck up about entitled princesses and how they’re all leeches.
Also, you’re completely full of shit about women and job security. Women are not hired and are fired all of the time at the slightest hint that they might have a kid, or be thinking about a kid. The employer might try to make up some bullshit reason for the firing, but it’s always obvious when someone gets fired because she got pregnant.
Yeah, I noticed that when Brandon got the giggles over the notion that maybe it might be sensible to allocate more space for female bathroom facilities, especially in buildings where there might be regular high-traffic situations such as entertainment venues.
He seemed to think that the idea was ludicrous and a damning indictment of the way women are “taking over” – but as the former manager of just such a venue myself, it made perfect sense to me. To maximise bar profits at the interval, when you have a relatively limited amount of time to do the things you need to do, you’re going to want to engineer a situation whereby your customers take as close to an equal amount of time relieving themselves as possible – and since it’s an inescapable biological/cultural fact that women need 90 seconds and men just 45, it makes more commercial sense to devote more space to the female facilities to help even things out.
So far from being any kind of takeover by the eevil wimminz, it’s actually a cunning ploy by management to get them to spend more money! Which I’d have thought Brandon would thoroughly approve of, if he’d only thought about it for more than a millisecond.
I got an A in Calc 1, and I slept through class half the time. I also passed Calc 2, despite literally passing out and then waking up and leaving to vomit during the final. Math is an easy major, for little wimpies.
Okay, so I don’t actually think that is always the case, but at least I put far, far more effort into evaluating it than MRAL did. He has proclaimed women’s studies classes easy, despite never having taken one. He also thinks he knows everything from reading an article in the library once. He’s probably also one of those people who thinks they know everything about philosophy because they read a little Sartre (have I mentioned how much I utterly loathe those people).
Or watched the Matrix. xD
One of my biggest pet peeves is ppl who watched the Matrix, were introduced to the shocking idea that reality may not be what you think, and suddenly are experts in philosophy xD
“One of my biggest pet peeves is ppl who watched the Matrix, were introduced to the shocking idea that reality may not be what you think, and suddenly are experts in philosophy xD”
Perhaps unsurprising, then, that many MRAs and PUAs refer to “taking the red pill” as a brilliant analogy for waking up to how awful women and feminism are.
Sigh.
So I went to school with something like 400 girls and about 20 female teachers. I’m ok-ish at maths but a lot of the girls kicked my ass at it.
The honors math teacher also taught physics and while she had like a million babies while I was attending that school, she still kept on her job. The biology teacher had a doctorate in all kinds of math and science. She was a mad woman but brilliant all the same. I guess I should have counted myself lucky to have these women as role models while I was young =)
I have a degree in computer games programming (you know, math, physics and other hard stuff) and while I <3 all the computer techy type stuff, I'm more interested in the business of computer games. I guess it's because publishers make more money than programmers or something…
Sleep is absolutely neceessary for learning, especially memory:
http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1ARAB_enUS452US452&gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=sleep+necessary+for+learning
My students (we’re in finals week here–amazing that MRAL doesn’t realize that different schools and different states and different countries have totally different academic schedules–it’s more or less a function of “i am the center of the universe and totally UNIVERSAL” stance I guess) are usually non-traditional age, usually women (English majors), and often working, taking care of family, including in a few cases, home schooling their children, and eldercare, while having major commutes (we’re still mostly a commuter school). MRAL will be glad that the manly men of this university have manfully fought off any of the newer interdisciplinary programs like American Studies, Gender studies (we now have an 18 hour minor), African American Studies, etc. etc. etc. (meaning we’re SO far behind the cutting edge that it’s pathetic), but I’m sure he’s perfectly capable of assigning English as a totally girly major to the nether hells.
Still and all, I’d like to see the MANLY MAN carry the workload a lot of my students do while getting good grades (do you have to have a foreign language to graduate MRAL? Probably not, but our English majors do).
Still and all, I have two Master’s degrees (one in straight English, one in creative writing), all the coursework on a theatre degree (playwriting—I told the playwriting prof who was also graduate director he was a sexist asshole and stomped off and went to work for the feds, then stomped back to academia a few years later), and a doctorate in English, and have been gainfully employed full time since 1993. The money’s not much compared to some STEM fields, but I’m happy, I do a good job, and I enjoy my work.
@Blitzgal: IF I remember correctly, and the trolls do blur, MRAL is on a scholarship (competitive one), and works summers as a lifeguard, and lives with his divorced mother — still pretty damn privileged compared to the vast majority of my students (men and women–including this year a couple of single fathers) who come from an incredibly poor rural part of Texas and are mostly first generation, and as I said are working often ft, raising families, and carrying a full academic load.
The guy behind Omega Virgin Revolt is obsessed with this notion, to the point of changing his blog’s and indeed his own name to ‘The Black Pill’.
Which just makes him look like even more of a paranoid buffoon than he did before, but I daresay this is only really obvious to normal people.
Wetherby: Oh dear. At least it’s a slightly less unfortunate name than “Omega Virgin Revolt” (which just conjures up all sorts of disturbing images).
Is he the guy that thinks everyone in the world (especially women) hates him and writes about him constantly? I guess his Spider-sense must be tingling now.
I think so – I’ve never read the blog in any particular depth, but apparently he gets false sexual harrassment accusations pretty much all the time, for no reason whatever.
Well, NWO (or was it MRAL?) has already taught us that sexual harassment doesn’t exist, so probably these women are just making shit up because FEMINAZISM!
On all-nighters and the original topic:
When I was in college, widely considered one of the more challenging ones in the US, I pulled exactly one all-nighter that was work related, and that was to make a presentation. I had a strict policy of stopping work when it got to giggle-o’clock, since staring at my paper stupidly wasn’t going to help. Making little circles in powerpoint is much easier than problem sets.
Oh yeah, and I totally had a sissy major-Mechanical Engineering. You didn’t have to be THE smartest to do that one, but you couldn’t slack on work. I finished a term early, with honors.
And in the “hard” applied math class with three terms, I got A’s and B’s. The first term I didn’t go to class, since the professor mumbled and made mistakes on the board. The second term I didn’t do the homework and “50/50ed” it (1/2 grade midterm, 1/2 final). The third term I didn’t go to class OR do the homework. Because I could. Third term was partial differential equations. I do work with those on a daily-to-weekly basis now.
I’m still in school-graduate school, in science, and it very well might be finals week, but I haven’t taken a class in a year so I’ve lost track.
In my department, there are exactly 2 women who are professor level. A few more students and post-docs than that, but at meetings the average age of the women is only a few years older than me, while for the men it’s more like my parents’ age.
The male scientists have always been perfectly polite to me, but they say things like “I used to not like hiring female post-docs, but actually I guess its better, because with the competition for tenure-track jobs they can at least be stay-at-home moms if they don’t make it” to my (female) advisor.
In another department, one of the senior scientists will spend an entire meeting with a potential hire buying drinks for women at a bar. Then he turns around and claims to be a feminist, because he has daughters.
In a former engineering department, I was not allowed to have certain (male) professors on my committee, despite them doing the most relevant work, because the department wouldn’t believe my (female) advisor was doing her job, but rather that the male professor was doing it all.
There’s no sexism in science. None at all.
Women don’t necessarily HATE engineering, math, or the sciences. They are just simply NO GOOD at them! The most gifted women are about at the level of the top 20th percentile of men.
Most, if not all, women in the sciences and engineering fields are hired, promoted, or otherwise kept on simply to comply with the law, public policy or judicial rulings from our nutball regulatory agencies or even more irresponsible Federal courts! The only exceptions are mutant curiosities like e.g. Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, or Roselyn Yalow, which are kept on so they can give egalitarians and feminoids the illusion that all women could do this if it wasn’t for “discriminaton” or “sexism”.
I frankly don’t know what he is complaining about “mooching off of their husbands,” however. Women make their contributions, if any, in work in and around the home, where they ARE likely to be as good or better then most men, and men do their work (in engineering or otherwise) primarily outside the home. Ideally, their respective areas of work should complement each other, and the larger economy and society. Things become utterly distermpered when attempted reversals of roles and vocations occur on a large scale, and the resulting mess is what we have seen in the past three or four decades!
Because I’m not awake enough to tease trolls:
I have two B.Sc. degrees in two different sciences (geology and zoology – and I’ll lay down dollars to donuts someone shows up and beaks about how wimminz are getting all the degrees in “soft sciences” like biology and not MANLY MATH and MACHO PHYSICS). I worked 32 hours a week the entire time I was in school, didn’t get any loans and lived with my parents for all but the last year, when I moved in with Mr. H. and looked after the house and paid bills and bought groceries while he went to a technical school.
SO!
Based on that single data point, all the wimminz is getting science degrees while supporting their partners who are getting silly, useless technical certificates (/academic snobbery).
Moar anecdata: my mother has a B.Sc in Chemistry, her older sister a Ph.D in biochemistry and who taught at harvard. My three closest female friends have advanced degrees in geology, mining engineering and astrophysics.
Hrm, I think I have enough data points now to conclude that women are indeed studying ALL THE SCIENCES. Not like that counts for anything in the minds of any of the resident (or roaming) trolls, but I feel better for bragging about how awesome all my scientist lady friends are.
We hear a lot, maybe even too much,about women who do excel in math and science. To repeat these are mutants, wild exceptions to the rule and no more tell us what real women are capable of doing than a two tailed dog will tell us about canines–or their tails.
Enough bragging already!
DKM, you’re so flattering.
I’m not a real woman.
How hilarious is that. I suppose none of my classmates were real women either. My dad’s coworkers aren’t real women. Every single supervisor I had at the national weapons laboratory wasn’t a real woman.
Funny. If I tell you about the good things, I’m not a real woman. I’m sure if I told you about the bad things I’d be representative of all women.
And yes, it’s true, not ALL women excel in math and science. Oh wait, neither do all men.
Hmm… maybe if SOME men can do science, and SOME can’t, and SOME women can do science, and SOME can’t, maybe we shouldn’t assume abilities based on gender.
Mutants? Amg that explains *so much*
It also makes my university – where women are studying and teaching science and engineering at every level from frosh student to Dean – even *cooler*
We must have been some sort of X Men-like instutition where are the mutant scientists women could get together and practice their mutant powers of mineral reserve calculations and testing Atterberg limits.
Also, it’s the internet. I can brag as much as I want. What are you going to do about it?
Source: DKM’s ass.
David K. Meller: You are very fond of bringing up historical examples, but you don’t seem to know much actually history.
Do you know who tutored Ada Lovelace in maths and science? It certainly wasn’t her father, as Ada had no contact with him growing up. No, It was Mary Somerville, a Scottish scientist and polymath:
http://www.mathnews.uwaterloo.ca/BestOf/WomenInMath7105.html
These women were not anomalies or “mutants” as you so charmingly put it, it’s just that managed to excel at maths and science at a time when women’s participation in science was widely discouraged.
I would also like to brag about the fact that I have a doctorate in linguistics from the second oldest university in Europe, but I guess linguistics is just a girly field, so I should shut my fluffy mouth and go bake some cookies.
Contrast the percentages over time, especially at the highest levels.
Should be child’s play, especially for a “mathematicianette” or “engineerix”. I’m a little tired of hearing about “all” this or “some” that, anyway. Some dogs are born with two tails, but that certainly doesn’t tell you anything about dogs,or their tails, in the real world!
Females who are gifted in Math, on the stratospheric levels required for this article, are in the same positions as two-tailed dogs! They are genetic (and possibly environmental, as well) mutants. I’m sorry if this sounds harsh, but we can do without law, public policy, or what passes for “education” being distorted because of it!
“Mathematicianette”? Wow, you really couldn’t make this guy up.
Are you gifted at maths and engineering, Mr. Meller? I hope so, because you certainly aren’t very gifted at rhetoric.