Sensible Erection | How Stereotypes Can Drive Women To Quit Science

Friday, 13 July 2012

How Stereotypes Can Drive Women To Quit Science

quote [ most scientists say they don't believe the stereotype about women and science, and argue that it won't affect them. But the psychological studies suggest people are affected by stereotype threat regardless of whether they believe the stereotype. ]

The psychology behind the persistent gender gap in the sciences.

[sci&tech] [by sanepride@4:40amGMT] [+10 Interesting]

Comments

zarathustra said @ 4:42am GMT on 13th Jul
So, it is the stereotype that they aren't good at it or the media stereotype that if they are good at it they must also be hot little bi-sexual sex kittens?

mechanical contrivance said @ 2:21am GMT on 14th Jul
There's nothing wrong with being a hot little bi-sexual sex kitten or a scientist.

arrowhen said @ 3:38am GMT on 14th Jul
There's something wrong wrong with being any kind of sexual kitten. Kittens are children.

mechanical contrivance said @ 3:55am GMT on 14th Jul
And when I get that feeling
I want sexual kitten
Sexual kitten, oh baby
Makes me feel so fine

arrowhen said @ 9:33am GMT on 14th Jul
That's not only not funny, but never funny!

afrasr said @ 4:54am GMT on 13th Jul [Score:-1 Overrated]
I hate articles like this.

No one bemoans the gender gap in marketing, nursing, teaching, retail etc.

Women are dropping out, because they aren't being made to feel warm and fuzzy.

Boo hoo hoo.

yes.. science is hard. You think talking to your co-workers is hard ? Just thing what will happen when you have a peer reviewed paper published.

Yes... stereotypes suck. Men get stereo typed in science to hell. Mention you work in STEM fields at a bar, and watch the women flee !

But we still do it because science is a passion.

In summary, weak excuse for dropping science is weak.

snowfox said @ 5:05am GMT on 13th Jul [Score:2 Insightful]
Those fields were all male-dominated once upon a time. They were not considered the most respectable professions back then either. That is why they became the domain of women. Secretaries all used to be men too. And teachers.

You don't know what it's like to be told your entire life that you just aren't smart enough to have a certain career because you happen to have a penis.

Women don't want to sleep with you because you say you're a scientist? Really? Are you sure it isn't because you're insufferable? It seems to me that scientists have been marrying and reproducing for an awfully long time so it seems your argument is weak.

Other than stereotypes you believe keep you from getting laid, what stereotypes are there about men in science? And do any of them affect a man's career or is it just his social life outside of that career? Do any of them make his opinions and viewpoints worth less than those of other people? Do any of them increase scrutiny and criticism of his work?

Sure, men suffer from stereotypes, but the things men can't do are things people associate with women. And why can't he do them? Because women are inferior so if he does woman things, that makes him inferior. Defeat sexism against women and suddenly there's nothing wrong with those activities men are shunned from.

b said @ 6:07am GMT on 13th Jul
Well said. While men do in fact get stereotyped, it's nothing compared to what society does to women. When these gender issues come up, I too want to moan "what about teh menz?!?", but if I reflect for just a minute I realise his imbalances things are and that men really shouldn't be complaining until the playing field has levelled out. If it ever does.

b said @ 6:08am GMT on 13th Jul
His imbalances = how imbalanced. iPhone is my only internets machine at home right now.

foobar said @ 6:20am GMT on 13th Jul [Score:2 Insightful]
The playing field will never level out until everyone can reasonably air their grievances without others trivializing them.

incpenners said @ 12:53pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:2 Funny]
Practice what you preach, brother.

feldenglas said @ 2:55pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:2]
Tell us more about the oppressed conservatives.

incpenners said @ 6:00pm GMT on 13th Jul
There you go again.

cb361 said @ 6:04pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Funny]
Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help!

sanepride said @ 6:37pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Funny]
It gets me hot when you quote socialists like Ronald Reagan.

foobar said @ 9:47pm GMT on 13th Jul
I think you'll find that reasonable, thoughtful conservatives are dealt with reasonably and thoughtfully here, even if not embraced.

arrowhen said @ 10:30pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Funny]
We're also nice to any unicorns and time travelers who post here.

Barnabas_Truman said @ 7:42am GMT on 14th Jul
Greetings, citizens of the future! I have traveled to your time from the year 1981!

arrowhen said @ 9:25am GMT on 14th Jul
Please go to the largest nearby city, find the record store with the weirdest-haired white people working in it, and buy one of everything. I'll pay you back in incredibly valuable future money.

Barnabas_Truman said @ 3:46pm GMT on 14th Jul
Tragically, it's one-way time travel. I am stuck in the future forever!

happiest_sadist said @ 6:55am GMT on 13th Jul
It's unfortunate that we can't just "level the playing field" in one shot over its entire surface. That would be the best thing, probably.

All we can do is change the relative elevation here and there until everyone agrees that it is level. Some of the people involved will die during this process and new people will come along to add their opinions. In the meantime, in some places men will be "above" women and women will be "above" men. (This also applies to boys and girls, by the way. Won't someone think of the children?)

If there were a way to formulate what the eventual, ideal level field would look like, we could legislate it into theoretical existence. I'd like to think that this would lead to a decrease in overall suffering, but I'm skeptical. What we decide now may not be acceptable to people coming along 20 years from now, and the people from 20 years ago are liable to be pissed off at us right now. Legislation works for certain things, but I think that it's best served in cases like these as a way to codify changes in social norms which have already taken place.
Social norms change in other (maybe better ways), and I don't know how they work. If I did I would have better suggestions.
I'll suggest this:
1) It's possible to let someone know that they have wrong ideas without attacking them personally.
2) If a person acts in accordance with their wrong ideas, then rudeness to them is tolerable. Personal attacks, whether rhetorical or physical, are not.
3) If a person defends their wrong ideas with personal attacks, then ostracism is in order.
4) If a person defends their wrong ideas with physical attacks, then physical restraint (ideally performed by representatives of an authority recognized by all parties) is in order.

I realize this goes a bit afield, but sometimes my typing fingers get ideas and don't wanna stop.
Oddly enough, my masturbating fingers also do that.

foobar said @ 6:57am GMT on 13th Jul [Score:4 Interesting]

arrowhen said @ 2:12pm GMT on 13th Jul
Bad doesn't stop being bad just because there's worse.

zenviper said @ 2:07pm GMT on 13th Jul
I actually agree regarding marketing... I work at a marketing dominated company and the roles go overwhelmingly to Women. I am not sure the exact figure, but at my location alone there area bout 30 female marketing professionals and only 3 males, of which 2 are in entry-level positions. I just lost out on a new job offering to a woman with significantly less related experience and background. Maybe it wasn't because they were female.. maybe they just had something about them that made them a better fit.. but maybe that something was that they were female... :P

Before flaming, keep in mind this is only an anecdotal half-hearted complaint. I am a tall white male and enjoy being one.

snowfox said @ 6:25pm GMT on 13th Jul
My guess: Men have the money, therefore are making those purchases, and are more likely to buy from women than other men. Women, on the whole, are seen as less threatening and tend to smile more because they are trained from an early age to act nice.

cb361 said @ 6:37pm GMT on 13th Jul
I'm guessing zenviper means the people in charge of strategy, not the actual customer-facing salesforce. The Marketing Department in my company are all women. Well, except for one guy with the top-of-the-range Apple and Photoshop.

foobar said @ 9:49pm GMT on 13th Jul
If it were that, women should dominate in sales, not marketing. Most of the time the customer doesn't interact with the person running the latter at all.

snowfox said @ 4:42am GMT on 14th Jul
Then my guess is that there is a bias toward believing that women are better communicators and better at soft subjects like creativity.

I get the sense that men are just as good at communicating as women (on an inherent level) but have been discouraged from communicating by society. It's one of the ways in which we oppress boys.

foobar said @ 8:11am GMT on 14th Jul [Score:1 Interesting]
Which, of course, actually does make women better communicators than men in practice.

I suspect that rather than women getting preferential access to marketing positions, they're dissuaded from more lucrative business roles that are considered less feminine.

EPT said @ 5:06am GMT on 13th Jul
Comparing an in-industry stereotype to an out-of-industry stereotype? In the former are colleagues who should know better and who choose a vocation that is specifically based on evaluating merit yet still have problems doing so socially, in the latter are total strangers that you're hoping will wet your dick. Marvellous work!

arctan said @ 12:37pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:2]
I especially like the idea that this is a men-only thing, as though women never, ever get shit for being nerds.

The reason for him to ignore this is probably:

1) Female geeks on TV and in movies are almost always played by "TV ugly" actresses who are actually stunningly attractive by real-life standards but just put their hair up and put on glasses,

and

2) In the annoying "bar scene" kind of dating, guys are expected to be the ones to make the approach and gals to get approached. Which means, sure, guys are the ones who get visibly "shot down" while girls just get invisibly totally ignored.

Annoying self-righteous guys talk about this as being why guys have it SO MUCH WORSE than gals because gals are "the gatekeepers of sexual access" or shit like that, but all it means is that when a fat plain girl gets tired of being treated like she doesn't exist and actually tries to make any kind of approach she gets shot down twice as hard, because she's "so desperate" she actually has to try to make a move on a guy. (Don't get me started on all the comedy tropes built around how hilariously transgressive it is to show an unattractive woman actively trying to make the moves on a guy.)

As someone who is friends with lots of female nerds who are no more awkward and non-conventionally-attractive than I am but in my own estimation have a much harder time of it romantically than guys like me, this kind of burns me up.

theolypse said @ 11:37pm GMT on 13th Jul
You're veering, mate.

sanepride said @ 5:07am GMT on 13th Jul
I suspect you have failed to grasp the point of the article.
It's not 'bemoaning' the gender gap in the sciences, it's just putting a scientific explanation to it.

foobar said @ 5:13am GMT on 13th Jul
All the nurses I've ever known (male and female) have told me that there are in fact active measures taken to address their gender imbalance.

As you your bar experience: that's called separating the wheat from the chaff. The ones that stay are the ones worth your time.

Barnabas_Truman said @ 7:46am GMT on 14th Jul
My favorite pick-up line (from the webcomic Nukees):

"You're so beautiful that spacetime curves around you so the photons can slow down and get a better look."

Anyone who cracks a smile or blushes is worth getting to know better.

foobar said @ 8:13am GMT on 14th Jul
The ones who wonder why you called them fat are marriage material.

Barnabas_Truman said @ 8:18am GMT on 14th Jul [Score:1 Funny]
"No, no, I didn't call you fat! I just called you dense."

bruceski said @ 5:38am GMT on 13th Jul [Score:2 Insightful]

mechanical contrivance said @ 2:25am GMT on 14th Jul
I think that would make it difficult to read on a whiteboard, actually.

Barnabas_Truman said @ 7:45am GMT on 14th Jul
Make the whiteboards black and use day-glo markers.

Jack Blue said @ 6:46am GMT on 13th Jul
I bemoan all of those. Just because men does not suffer as a consequence, women consistantly get the short end of the stick as womens work tend to be of less status.

Old brown immigrant women get almost no fun at all.

arrowhen said @ 2:04pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:3 Underrated]
Men don't suffer as a consequence? What about men who are drawn to careers that are considered "women's work" and suffer lower status as a consequence? What about little boys who find themselves in classes taught by women who became teachers more because teaching was one of the narrow range of careers they perceived to be available to them than because of their passionate desire to teach?

Inequality hurts everyone. Not equally, of course, but it still hurts everyone.

Jack Blue said @ 12:25am GMT on 14th Jul
I typo:d. Everyone suffer as a consequence. I hate this shit.

Jack Blue said @ 12:43am GMT on 14th Jul
And apperantly, everyone suffer as a consequence of my typo. I really should stop trying to write in english when tired.

theolypse said @ 1:43am GMT on 14th Jul
We have babelfish. Use your favorite.

snowfox said @ 7:59pm GMT on 14th Jul [Score:3 Underrated]
I am with you on this. It doesn't matter who is getting the short end of the stick, because both groups are getting shorted. We tell little boys that one of the worst things they could act like is a girl, and it's really fucked up. For both boys and girls. It lowers the status of women while oppressing and bullying the men. It breaks my heart to see little girls and little boys being told that the things they love aren't gender appropriate. I honestly believe that if we stop being sexist against women, things will get better for men as well, and we'll be able to focus on any unresolved issues regarding men's rights. I also genuinely believe that if we defeat sexism we'll defeat so many of the underlying hostilities that make people racist, xenophobic, etc because we will be addressing the first taste of bullying people usually get as children, the first barrier that tells them it is ok for different groups to be treated differently and have different rights, and which normalizes oppressing anyone who tries to get outside of the socially defined box that has been made for them. We teach kids early on to punish people for being different than expected.

lilmookieesquire said @ 3:04pm GMT on 13th Jul
Actually, men suffer. Everyone suffers when it's not a well adjusted/proportionally represented sector of the work force.

I'm sure that very talented women AND men have also quit due to the environment.

It's also awkwardly benefited- in that facebook was pretty much made from that environment in a misguided (or perhaps very well guided) effort to find women/dates.

Jack Blue said @ 12:28am GMT on 14th Jul [Score:1 Informative]
I messed up. Did not mean it the way it came out.

I meant something like "Men suffer, women suffer sligthly more".

theolypse said @ 1:44am GMT on 14th Jul
Sligthly: (adj.) In the manner characteristic of sligths. Of or pertaining to the affairs of sligths. Unutterable by lesser beings.

cb361 said @ 6:03pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Underrated]
As a young white native man, I didn't get any fun either. But at least it was my own fault.

the9thcircle said @ 3:52pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1]
Sorry to have to agree with this guy, but discrimination can be practiced by anyone in power. I remember a girl in college relating how her mother become the manager of a business department, and would purposefully hire women with less experience than male applicants because she wanted to give 'the oppressed' an opportunity.

As Morgan Freeman said, if you want to defeat discrimination then "stop talking about it." Just judged people by their character and abilities, and let the chips fall where they may.

I have no problem with women or men being in the majority of specific fields as long as they are the best persons for the job, and don't get their jobs through some kind of gender based favoritism or stereotypes.

lilmookieesquire said @ 4:42pm GMT on 13th Jul
I knew a Māori New Zealand lady in Japan working as a regional manager in an international company and when out drinking she'd commonly say "No American will ever get higher than (random guy) as long as I have any say in it". For the record, she was horribly unqualified at everything she did unless it was yelling at people.

She had been there since the beginning of the company and there was no way she could get a better job back home. She was never leaving (well until the company went bankrupt)

afrasr said @ 8:50pm GMT on 13th Jul
Don't be sorry for agreeing.

You shouldn't feel bad for expressing an opinion that differs from the white knight brigade.

sanepride said @ 9:07pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Underrated]
That's all well and good but the article here is not about discrimination, favoritism or enforced stereotypes.
It's about a self-defeating psychological phenomenon that arises from perceived stereotyping.

theolypse said @ 11:36pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Insightful]
Morgan Freeman is not exactly a social scientist. Playing God in a few movies doesn't actually make a person wise.

arrowhen said @ 12:15am GMT on 14th Jul
But he's still magical, though, right?

EPT said @ 1:26am GMT on 14th Jul
The problem is that 'just not thinking about it' doesn't solve the issue. Another way to phrase that sentiment is 'out of sight, out of mind'. Freeman's motivation comes from the right place, but his plan is not going to work.

theolypse said @ 1:42am GMT on 14th Jul [Score:1 Insightful]
It's the same argument that Cosby uses, and I'm no more impressed when a second highly-respected, rich, successful patriarch declares oppression ended than I was at the first one.

Barnabas_Truman said @ 7:52am GMT on 14th Jul
All we have to do is pretend there's no problem, and the problem will go away!

kichijoii said @ 11:29am GMT on 14th Jul
As Morgan Freeman said, if you want to defeat discrimination then "stop talking about it." Just judged people by their character and abilities, and let the chips fall where they may.

Yes, but the problem with the first recommendation is that most people won't follow the second.

zarathustra said @ 12:15am GMT on 15th Jul
That was what I thought when I was in charge of hiring, but for some reason the most qualified was always the one with the biggest tits.

arrowhen said @ 11:34pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Insightful]
Do you hate articles like this so much you didn't even read this one?

CapnSilver said @ 5:00am GMT on 13th Jul
I thought the point of stereotypes was to save brainpower when dealing with strangers because the stereotype is broadly true? That was the psych 101 explanation anyway

CapnSilver said @ 5:07am GMT on 13th Jul
Not to say that all stereotypes are broadly true, some are obviously a social construct. Does "stereotype" have multiple specific meanings?

snowfox said @ 5:08am GMT on 13th Jul
It doesn't matter whether it was true or has become true, you get your shortcut either way. And because we want the shortcuts to work, we try to enforce them as a social standard.

happiest_sadist said @ 6:58am GMT on 13th Jul
"In the province of connected minds, what the network believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the network's mind there are no limits."

-Dr. John C. Lilly

arctan said @ 12:42pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Insightful]
The amazing thing about stereotypes is that so powerful is the attraction of pattern-matching and categorizing and putting things in convenient boxes to the human mind that you can just *make up* a stereotype and just saying it is enough to get people thinking about it and coming up with reasons their experiences corroborate it.

There've been examples published of experimenters just coming up with something on the fly like "Left-handed people are more likely to get divorced" and all the people in the study nodding along and going "Yeah, I have a cousin who's left-handed and she's been married three times" and stuff like that.

It's a bit like how Snopes.com made up a totally new urban legend to explain how urban legends work and said legend ("Mr. Ed was actually a zebra") actually went viral and became a thing. These are really powerful, entrenched flaws in human cognition we're dealing with here.

backSLIDER said @ 8:52pm GMT on 13th Jul
All I took away from this is that if Mr Ed was left handed he would have been a zebra? Is that right?

theolypse said @ 11:40pm GMT on 13th Jul
No, his zebra wife would have left him.

arrowhen said @ 11:52pm GMT on 13th Jul
No, he would have left her. Because he's African.

kichijoii said @ 11:46am GMT on 14th Jul
Stereotypes help us anticipate future events and shorten the time needed to make an ideal response. They are broad generalizations that give you more than nothing to go on when you enter an interaction with otherwise unknown elements. Say you want to make small talk with a stranger. If the stranger is male, you can guess at which topics he might be interested in talking about, like cars, sports, or women. But this would not be based on anything other than the generalizations about males in your head. Most stereotypes are not perpetuated unless they have some truth to them; however, you can see how often a unique individual is excluded from them. Stereotypes lose their utility (and effect) when you invest more cognitive resources in the interaction. For those subjects in which you have no interest in investing more thought, stereotypes are more likely to have effects.

lilmookieesquire said @ 6:56am GMT on 13th Jul [Score:2]
It's ironic. Most the scientists I know are female. I've always associated science with females.

That said, I took Java programming in college. At first it was about a 5:2 ratio of men to women. By the end of the year it was about 400:3.

I looked around the class and thought "I can't live like this. I can't be friends with these people" and never went to another programming class again.

afrasr said @ 8:14am GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Underrated]
Same.

I know some brilliant scientists.

All of them women.

Programming is a complete sausage fest. I completely agree.

bltrocker said @ 2:45pm GMT on 13th Jul
I know some female scientists. Some are so much smarter than me. Others are ditzes. Case by case. I also know some amazing and crappy male scientists, too.

radioelectric said @ 7:55pm GMT on 13th Jul
Most of the younger scientists I know are women. Most of the professors/lecturers I know are men.

damnit said @ 9:29pm GMT on 13th Jul
On that note, Most teachers in K-12 are women. Considering that most disruptive students are boys, alpha male personalities just tend to clash heads.

arrowhen said @ 11:43pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Informative]
Plus men who want to be around children are obviously creepy perverts.

arrowhen said @ 1:49pm GMT on 13th Jul
You couldn't be friends with people because too many of them were male? That seems kinda sexist.

lilmookieesquire said @ 2:46pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Underrated]
It wasn't so much that they were male. It was the types of people in the class. (Keep in mind this was 1998 or so) and the total lack of women made it a bit creepy to younger mookie.

afrasr said @ 3:18pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Funny]
Programmers need to be a special sort of aspie to be good at it. Usually this is the type of aspie that has no social, or hygiene skills.

Back in 98 ?

*Shudder* The horror....

cb361 said @ 6:17pm GMT on 13th Jul
Hmmm ... maybe you have to be a special sort of aspie to enjoy programming enough to get good at it. I love programming and I'm pretty good at it, but experience has shown me just how dumb I am when it comes to proper science.

damnit said @ 9:25pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:2 Funny]
The type of people in my Computer Science classes got the Gaben-look down, except if they were Indian or Asian.

And some of these guy didn't even take a bath.

I was unfortunate enough take a database class that followed another computer science in the same room. This was Spring semester when it was a cold winter and hot early spring. The smell in that room

-_-

afrasr said @ 2:30am GMT on 14th Jul
Oh god... I gag at the memories of sharing a room with a bunch of DB programmers in an Australian summer, in a room with no airflow..

Smell would have gagged a skunk.

Kat said @ 9:28am GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Good]
Side note: while mixing a band tonight, a woman came up to me and congratulated me for being a female audio engineer. I thanked her and admitted that I still sometimes find it challenging to be female...but that I did put a lot of effort into it.

I have actually had people take pics of me mixing just to have proof that a chick was running the rig. I always find that kind of reaction to be odd.

theolypse said @ 11:15pm GMT on 13th Jul
Being female doesn't come naturally to you?

kichijoii said @ 11:49am GMT on 14th Jul
Yo, quit playin', foo. I know you got the joke.

theolypse said @ 7:48pm GMT on 14th Jul
Only now. :(

RedRiverRat said @ 12:12pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Insightful]
Some of the smartest people I know are women.

It's unfortunate and a sorry truth that so often they are treated like a novelty or are judged by their bodies rather than their minds.

My hat is off for you.

radioelectric said @ 8:40pm GMT on 13th Jul
It is unfortunate that in professional situations women are (I believe) quite likely to be "interpreted" in a two-stage process that consists of:

1) Is she hot?
2) Is she good at her job?

I'm not going to say this is exclusively done by men to women (i.e. maybe women do it to other women out of jealousy?), or that there isn't necessarily some sort of reverse-case where women judge men on whether they are "dashing".

If I'm right then it's not necessarily bad as long as people are able to be professional and focus on the 2nd of those two assessments.

radioelectric said @ 8:43pm GMT on 13th Jul
I would add that I have noticed before that the women I've met in science tend to usually be above-average looking, whereas I think the men span the range from ugly to handsome. I have discussed this before with women scientists that I know and suggested that it could be that a woman whose self-esteem had been lowered by her feeling that her looks were inferior would not have the confidence in herself to try for a career in science.

The people I spoke to about that responded by telling me that what I was saying was obvious, but I'm still not sure that it is necessarily true.

arrowhen said @ 10:14pm GMT on 13th Jul
Maybe you think science is sexy, so you perceive science-y women as more attractive than non science-y ones. (I know I do!)

radioelectric said @ 10:52pm GMT on 13th Jul
It's possible that I'm just getting that subliminally. I don't find science attractive so much as I find ignorance deeply unattractive. (That's ignorance in terms of "having zero areas of special interest at all", most scientists have to have at least one!)

sanepride said @ 9:16pm GMT on 13th Jul
Sometimes I sing the refrain of this song when my wife demonstrates her superior intellect (which happens regularly).

mcclint said @ 12:20pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:2]
Seems appropriate.

lilmookieesquire said @ 4:45pm GMT on 13th Jul
Back. away. from. the. camera. miss.

mcclint said @ 6:05pm GMT on 13th Jul
That vid is from the same guy who does sixtysymbols.com. Most of his videos are shot in close.

sanepride said @ 6:36pm GMT on 13th Jul
It's a great discussion between her and the interviewer. They both make good,intelligent points.

lilmookieesquire said @ 7:51pm GMT on 13th Jul
I can focus on nothing but the giant head of Loki in female form.

sanepride said @ 8:04pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Informative]
Helpful hint: camera pulls back at apx. 0:20.

lilmookieesquire said @ 9:58pm GMT on 13th Jul
Cheers.

EPT said @ 4:49am GMT on 14th Jul
This woman is awesome and should be awarded as many grants as she can handle.

Admittedly the interviewer says he's being a devil's advocate and drives it a certain way, but one thing not covered in the interview is that science is not fashionable or glamourous, and apart from any sexism or moral issues with the ad, the simple fact that it is thoroughly misleading means it will attract the wrong kind of people, who will slough away as they find out it's not really to their liking.

bltrocker said @ 2:44pm GMT on 13th Jul
This has something to do with women. Ronda is a better role model, but I'm not sure by how much.

GordonGuano said @ 3:18pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:5 Funny]
The real reason women don't get into science is because then sometimes they'd have to admit they were wrong, am I right, fellas?

rangerx said @ 5:30pm GMT on 13th Jul
Married, eh?

landsky said @ 4:45pm GMT on 13th Jul

arrowhen said @ 7:19pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Insightful]
This brings to mind two questions:

1) Obviously some women manage to have long, productive scientific careers. Did those women experience less of this stereotype threat effect than the women who quit, or did they just cope with it better. (And the obvious follow up question: if the former, why; if the latter, how?)

2) So what do we do about it? I used to think that, on an individual basis anyway, "avoid being a sexist jerk" was good enough. But if women are still feeling the effects of sexism even when there aren't any sexist jerks around, obviously thats not enough. We might need to move beyond just individual niceness and into the realm of employers providing "reasonable accommodation in the workplace" to women, just like they would to other disabled people. (No offense intended to women, but being born with a vagina into a sexist society IS a disability, just one whose cause and cure is societal, rather than medical.) What form would those accommodations take?

GordonGuano said @ 7:32pm GMT on 13th Jul
I'm imagining a series of PSAs that say "It's yours if you want it, and anyone who says otherwise can go fuck themselves. But you have to take it".

lilmookieesquire said @ 7:56pm GMT on 13th Jul
I'd like to think that sexism isn't 100% wide spread and that maybe they had professional environments where colleagues respected ability over something as trivial as gender.

That gender is an issue, especially in the field of science, is... well it kind of goes directly against science.

arrowhen said @ 9:55pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Interesting]
But that's the thing, even if the environment isn't sexist, the mere worry that it MIGHT be sexist (you know, the kind of thing you might worry about if you were a woman born and raised in a sexist culture) caused the women to lose confidence and sound less competent. I think it would be useful to know whether successful female scientists worried less or worried the same but handled it better, so we could come up with anti-stereotype-threat for other women to use until society finally gets around to fixing itself.

snowfox said @ 4:36am GMT on 14th Jul
Won't work. The damage was done to these women long before they entered the workplace. This is the result of constant bombardment of social messages that women aren't here to be smart, they're here to be pretty. Just walk down the boys' and girls' toy aisles. Boys get models, legos, all sorts of things that would help with spatial relationships. Girls get fashion dolls.

sanepride said @ 9:11pm GMT on 13th Jul
Well the article does point out the sort of catch-22 situation. The solution is more women in the field. Which of course is problematic given this problem of stereotype threat effect.
As you point out, some women manage to endure in science careers, for whatever reason. Maybe it's a sort of natural selection, and as the ranks of these women gradually increase, the psychological barrier will gradually ebb.

theolypse said @ 11:32pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Insightful]
The ranks AND the visibility. Providing young girls with salient examples of women in technical and scientific fields reduces the felt threat by countering the stereotype.

genesplicer said @ 7:59pm GMT on 13th Jul
I recently completed graduate school in the biomedical sciences and have witnessed another phenomenon. Even though female scientists in my field seem to outnumber men, it felt like (at least at my university, in my department) the female professors and principle investigators went out of their way to criticize and tear apart other's research more than their male counterparts, possibly as a way to make themselves look better.

My good friend had a scientist on his committee who he had private meetings with to discuss his proposal with before presenting it to the entire committee to make sure that any concerns about the design of his project were laid to rest. During the meeting she brought up entirely new questions about his research which she had never discussed and failed him. Note that you can only present your proposal twice and if you fail a second time you are out of the program. This scientist was extremely supportive on an individual basis when she didn't feel the need to prove herself in front of a group of her peers.

This wasn't the only occasion this happened, I would also see other female scientists at informal project presentations and journal clubs as well. I was dissuaded from having too many women on my committee because of the potential for a "Women in Science" complex, where they would nitpick apart your research and fail you to prove themselves to others.

GordonGuano said @ 9:19pm GMT on 13th Jul
Mean Girls, grad school edition?

I think you're kind of getting at a pet hypothesis of mine though, which is that it takes both men and women to make a project work, be it research or civilization. In a mixed group, the women won't tear each other down and the men will try to hold in their farts. The interplay between the sexes is where the good stuff happens.

zarathustra said @ 12:13am GMT on 15th Jul
My experience in law is similar. A young female attorney would get torn apart by a female judge for saying the same thing a male would get by with. Male judges were more likely to treat everyone equally.

radioelectric said @ 8:01pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Insightful]
"For a female scientist, particularly talking to a male colleague, if she thinks it's possible he might hold this stereotype, a piece of her mind is spent monitoring the conversation and monitoring what it is she is saying, and wondering whether or not she is saying the right thing, and wondering whether or not she is sounding competent, and wondering whether or not she is confirming the stereotype."

The impression I've gotten from doing a PhD is that this is the universal feeling shared by all young scientists (male or female) when they talk to their "superiors". I know that I myself am a much better scientist when I'm talking to people at the same career stage as I am (or when I'm talking to people who are not above me on my particular career ladder).

graham said @ 10:43pm GMT on 13th Jul [Score:1 Insightful]

landsky said @ 4:02am GMT on 14th Jul

azazel said @ 4:21am GMT on 14th Jul [Score:1 Interesting]
This reminded me of a blog post I read recently. The basic gist is this: a person who's taking a university course in gender stereotyping in photos (women are never shown in the same way as men; an example included a photo of a mixed hockey team; the guys were all sitting in gear, but the girl was in her normal clothes, despite being one of the players, and a good one at that) wrote a detailed analysis of some photos in a magazine - I don't know the actual articles that accompanied the photos, but I think it was about female pilots (for commercial airlines). Either way, he got sued by the company the photographer worked for because in Sweden it's apparently illegal to publish images that don't belong to you (he took photos of the magazine and the photos in it), even if Fair Use would apply to it. Had his blog been printed media it would have been okay though. Fucked up, is what it is. The company basically sued him to censor him, it turns out: someone posted screenshots of the CEO's facebook wall where he admitted to suing to shut the person up, not because of copyright infringement.

arrowhen said @ 9:32am GMT on 14th Jul
women are never shown in the same way as men

That, in turn, reminded me of something I saw a long time ago comparing magazine covers from the same magazine (something famous, like Time or Newsweek), displaying men and women in the same career (actor, politician, CEO of a company, etc): the covers with men on it were all closeups of the face, while the covers with women always showed their whole body.

wangcan0 said @ 8:14pm GMT on 14th Jul
You know, most safety violations aren't *nearly* that sexy.

Goggles on, ma'am. Accidents happen once; safety happens all the time.

mechanical contrivance said @ 2:38am GMT on 14th Jul
Maybe it's because of where I live, but I've never encountered gender bias academically or professionally.

Navier-Strokes said @ 4:47am GMT on 14th Jul
How about this, and throwing it out there?
People focus on making a more meritocratic society.

That includes judging people for what they've done
and only what they've done,
and not judging them for what their family has done,
or what the political party they're affiliated with has done,
or what their ethnicity has done,
or what their country has done,
or what their religion has done,
or what their company has done.

Get back to me when you think that's a possibility.

kichijoii said @ 11:59am GMT on 14th Jul
That will never happen. People will always want something for nothing. People will never want to be held responsible for their failures. People will always want to believe in a just world; facing its utter randomness and meaninglessness, they judge along the lines you have stated above because it's all they have to go on, which is bullshit, but it's all they have.

Navier-Strokes said @ 5:05am GMT on 15th Jul
I kind of agree. I brought this up to point out that, unfortunately, oversimplifications will always exist with people, including stereotypes. You can prefer they don't exist when they obviously do and likely always will, or accept that they do and do your best to prove them to be what they are, overly simplistic. It sucks, but it's reality, and we're forced to move forward from there.

zarathustra said @ 2:42am GMT on 15th Jul
Some of your examples are things people associate themselves with by choice. There is no moral comparison between affiliating yourself with a political party and being born black. If I choose to affiliate myself with the GOP I can't wash my hands of Bush the Lesser - I had a choice in the matter. Being of a race, ethnicity, etc is very different.

Navier-Strokes said @ 4:59am GMT on 15th Jul
All being Republican means is that the overarching philosophy of the Republican Party is closer to your own than the overarching philosophy of the Democrat Party. There's a whole lot of space there, and a whole lot of different dimensions. There can be two people that has similar philosophy in one dimension and radically different opinions on every other dimension. Heck, they can be entirely different on all dimensions if they're from different eras. Frankly, blaming the flaws of one on the other is still overly simplistic. The point is let a person's words and actions justify your opinion of them alone. This isn't unreasonable.