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.
Hey, DKM?
[citation needed]
Seriously, you can’t just keep asserting something until it becomes true. Reality doesn’t work that way.
And by the way, when your definition of a “real woman” is virtually indistinguishable from a porcelain doll, there is something wrong with your personal definition of “real”.
Don’t thank me. I’m here to help.
Ciiing historical sources (which have nothing to do with my ass). Look at every culture, nation, and race in the history of the world. Men outnumber and excel women in both quantity, and quality at rates of at least 20:1.
As far as current achievements in universities etc. one can derive no valid conclusions from this, since they are obligated on many levels to enroll females in math, favor them with women’s “scholarships”, women’s departments in the sciences recieve preferential funding for admissions and promotions of women (and favored racial groups), and there is always the hidded menace of lawsuits and catastropic publicity by the assorted “Kommisariats of Equality” on both the Provincial and National government levels, inflicting millions of $$$, and other millions in legal fees or settlements, in fines and penalties (often retroactively) for alleged or imagined “discrimination”, no matter how rational and necessary the discrimination was–and is!
More on the mutant thing – can we get special mutant names? I’d like to be “Mnemonica” and my super mutant power would be the ability to recall the Linnaean name of any animal. You know, if that’s an option.
Perhaps DKM could list all his math and science qualifications and engineering achievements, so we can marvel at his brilliance.
Um…you can’t derive valid conclusions from the historical predominance of men in these fields, because women were systematically barred from receiving the necessary education or working in those fields. Do you get it? Women weren’t allowed to excel as scientists and mathematicians. (It’s seriously depressing to think of how much human talent gets wasted because of bigotry.) The few women who did excel weren’t genetic mutants, but they were in “mutant” situations–they were very wealthy, or lucky enough to know sympathetic men who gave them a shot.
Here’s a citation for you, lying Meller: there is no biological difference between men and women’s math abilities. For instance, 5% of math PhD’s were earned by women in the 1960’s. Today it’s 30%.
The study, which looks at 86 countries and found that ability is determined more by access to education than biology:
http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf
Io9’s write up:
http://io9.com/5867401/there-really-is-no-difference-between-men-and-womens-math-abilities
This article says nothing about “stratospheric levels” of talent. His wife was an engineer. Maybe she was a great engineer, maybe she was bad, maybe she was middle of the road.
This is about the talent and ability to be an engineer, period. You don’t need to be particularly gifted for that, although it doesn’t hurt. You need to be better than the average american, but the average american would be better than the current average american at math if not for our anti-intellectual culture.
Perhaps dogs with two tails doesn’t tell you anything about “ordinary” dogs, I don’t know, I’m not a biologist. However, lets take a similar metaphor. Turtles with two heads. Your might say they’re mutants, but that doesn’t mean they don’t tell you anything about ordinary turtles. There are more turtles with two heads than one would expect if you based your analysis on mammals. This tells you something. In particular it ends up being evidence that gravity is involved in the development of baby turtles, and certain events can mess up the development, causing the embryo to have two “midlines”.
So let’s say that women of math talent are unusual, which is actually demonstrably not true. Nevertheless, there are more than you might imagine based on the premise that “All women are good at only one thing, and they are all good at that one thing.” Just as the fraction of turtles with two heads give evidence that turtles develop differently than mammals, the number of women who have math talent give evidence of a difference between the given premise, and the actual path of development.
“Look at every culture, nation, and race in the history of the world. Men outnumber and excel women in both quantity, and quality at rates of at least 20:1.”
I’m surprised you’ve had time to excel at maths/engineering/science/hunting mammoth when you’re spending so much time researching the extent to which human animals with penises are better than human animals with other kinds of genitalia.
DKM’s set up a nice little no-win situation–the underrepresentation of women in STEM in the past was due to their natural inferiority, so you can’t tell him sexism was involved, and the nearing-equal representation now is due to giving them unfair advantages, so you can’t tell him it’s just equal opportunity.
His reality-proofing is near complete and he just has to Spackle in the last few holes connecting his skull to the outside world.
Anyway everyone knows dolls can’t be engineers, silly.
(Except the one in the post image? Oops…)
Man, the image of a doll being portrayed as intelligent and competent in a STEM field must be making Meller’s brain explode.
Maybe this “bigotry” served worthwhile and useful purposes, such as reserving places for qualified applicants, allowing for promotion based upon merit, and shielding employers or contractors from the liability and other costs inherent in the hiring of untested females!
Also, possibly men are more efficient, reliable, and competent when in an environment where we aren’t distracted by women, even women as masculinized as those in the sciences or engineering. There would be additional good reasons for at least “segregating” women (sex-harassment lawsuits notwithstanding) if men were distracted by the presence of women, especially in supervisory or command positions.
There’s no sense in “you have to be bigoted to hire the best candidates.” You just hire the best ones and if men really are superior, that ought to sort itself out.
Unless you refuse to accept reality when it doesn’t fall into your stereotypes and then scream that reality is wrong now.
Or maybe it didn’t.
So let me get this straight… if a man is “distracted” by a woman, it’s her fault?
Can you really not see the fundamental flaw in that argument? Why on earth should women be penalized because men apparently get so easily distracted?
Also, I’m still waiting to hear about your achievements in the hard sciences. I’m assuming they’re throbbingly impressive.
Wow, I can’t believe the speed at which the goalposts move.
First it’s, smart women are mutants.
Then we’re only talking about stratospheric levels of talent
Then women are only good now because they get preferential treatment
And now we’re at, ok, maybe women are almost as good as men right now, but that’s only because men are so delicate that the presence of working (mutant!!!!) women makes them bad at their jobs.
DKM, by the way, I can tell you’d make a terrible, um, “scientistor.”
Because when a good scientist observes reality, and gets a result that doesn’t match their hypothesis, they say “my hypothesis was wrong!”
When you do this, you cling to your hypothesis for dear life even though it’s just something you made up one day, and scream “reality is wrong!”
On the bright side, Vera, in DKM’s world a truly successful woman must be a mutant. Which means you can join the X-Men, or something.
I can’t remember, are women allowed to be secretaries/mistresses in DKM’s world?
If so, are they allowed to be competent secretaries while also being mistresses?
I hope you realize that some men (the majority, I should think) are perfectly capable of carrying on with work as usual without turning into slobbering manbeasts even if there is a (gasp) woman present? I think it’s called “being a normal and decent human being”.
As for the idea that women in the sciences are masculinized… this is all I really care to respond with:
Untested female whats? Cockatoos?
Okay, let’s say you’re correct, and only one in 21 qualified applicants will be female. What purpose is served in assuming that no women are qualified, banning them all from even trying, and losing out on that one? Genius isn’t exactly common; shouldn’t we be open to all of it?
Or possibly, men who are so mentally adolescent as to be unable to concentrate on their work in the company of women should be passed over for such jobs in favor of men who are not so distractable. Which is, you know, most men.
Wait…we are talking about sex, right? About sexy women distracting men on the job with their sexy sexitude? Now why on earth would they be more distracting on that front if they were authority figures, hmm…? Inquiring minds want to know!
Captainbathrobe
Ooh, I’ll be Profesora V.
Like professor X, only instead of having telepathic powers to affect other people’s thoughts, I teach at a university and affect other people’s knowledge.
And just to confuse DKM, I’ll be small and delicate while doing it!
So men are easily distracted by the mere presence of women and are so put off by the sexy they turn into dumb-dumbs?
How flattering to the male half of the population.
DKM – If everything is as you say, I have a question: why are science and engineering more advanced than ever?
In the years since women have been allowed into the field in large numbers, we’ve had a ton of inventions and discoveries. Teenagers today have more powerful computers in their pockets than the ones that guided the Apollo missions. The electric car is finally becoming a reality. Medicine and surgery are vastly more advanced these days than even 10 years ago. We take for granted gadgets and processes that would have been impossible 10 years ago.
If women have torpedoed STEM, why is it going so well?
Oops, our combined mutant powers seem to have silenced DKM.
Piling on trolls is kinda fun. I hope he finds a new goalpost location to present to us.
Of course, anyone at “stratospheric” levels of mathmatical expertise would qualify as a “mutant,” by DKM’s definition, since those people make up a tiny minority of the population, anyway.