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A Chemistry World article summarizes a study by Cornell University psychologists Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci finding that faculty members asked to evaluate hypothetical male and female applicants for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology gave preference to female applicants. Quoting the study:
The underrepresentation of women in academic science is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist hiring. Here we report five hiring experiments in which faculty evaluated hypothetical female and male applicants, using systematically varied profiles disguising identical scholarship, for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference. Comparing different lifestyles revealed that women preferred divorced mothers to married fathers and that men preferred mothers who took parental leaves to mothers who did not. Our findings, supported by real-world academic hiring data, suggest advantages for women launching academic science careers.
The article concludes:
To be hired, women must first apply and the authors question whether ‘omniprescent and discouraging’ messages about sexism in academic appointments makes them reluctant to do so.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dyingtolive on Tuesday April 21 2015, @12:05AM
For better or worse, there's been a lot of hot drama on the topic lately. Modern academia would be the most believable place for that to 180 first.
I'd just settle for professors, male or female, that knew what the fuck they were talking about. The college I went to was supposed to have a very good CS program. Of the lot of them, there were about 2 out of 10 I personally had that I felt were actually knowledgeable in the field, and they were genuinely brilliant. The rest were the constant butt of jokes. Couldn't answer a question that wasn't answered in the textbook, couldn't hold a coherent conversation with you. My favorite was the one who taught a 300-level course who could never consistently decide if you started an array at 0 or at 1.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Marand on Tuesday April 21 2015, @12:52AM
For better or worse, there's been a lot of hot drama on the topic lately. Modern academia would be the most believable place for that to 180 first.
Does that mean we'll be seeing a push to bring more men back into academia? You know, for equality and all. That's been my problem with this topic whenever it comes up: most "equality" arguments are used as an excuse to push for someone's pet group to get mandatory representation (or even majority), rather than equal opportunities for all regardless of gender, ethnicity, or beliefs.
My favorite was the one who taught a 300-level course who could never consistently decide if you started an array at 0 or at 1.
Maybe they used Perl, where you can have it either way. I've never known anybody to actually use it for anything, but it's been possible for a very long time (though deprecated and moved to a module now). From the perlvar manpage:
$[
This variable stores the index of the first element in an array, and of the first character in a substring. The default is 0, but you could theoretically set it to 1 to make Perl behave more like awk (or Fortran) when subscripting and when evaluating the index() and substr() functions.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday April 21 2015, @01:25AM
Unlikely. When was the last time you saw a push to get more men into nursing?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @02:07AM
There is a line in the pamphlets at one of my colleges about the demand for male nurses. Of course those schools also provide full rides for interested female CS students that show aptitude. Apparently most years nobody even applies for it.
Disclosure: I am male and am in the running for a full ride scholarship that is not gender or program exclusive, which few people apply for either. I'm crossing my fingers as it usually goes to, oddly, women in the nursing program.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday April 21 2015, @06:03PM
Unlikely. When was the last time you saw a push to get more men into nursing?
Google: "campaign to attract males into nursing"
About 16,300,000 results (0.61 seconds)
Have you ever actually verified this oft repeated talking point?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @06:16PM
Wow. There are 16,300,000 programs to get males into nursing? Or maybe it is 16,300,000 hits that all refer to the one place that has such a push? Or maybe it could just be that Google hits are a useless statistic in this case?
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday April 21 2015, @08:35PM
There are 16,300,000 programs to get males into nursing? Or maybe it is 16,300,000 hits that all refer to the one place that has such a push? Or maybe it could just be that Google hits are a useless statistic in this case?
Or, you could try typing it into Google and finding out for yourself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @09:23PM
No one is going to look beyond the first few pages. Google is literally useless for this.
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Tuesday April 21 2015, @11:15PM
Tulemused campaign to attract males into nursing (jutumärkideta):
Translation - if you keep the quotes in, there are *NO* hits.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @10:10AM
An array starts best at whereever it makes semantically sense for it to start. Of course, many people are brain-damaged by the arrays in C which are basically glorified pointer arithmetics. Indeed, already the idea that the array index has to be a number instead of an arbitrary enumeration is only caused by certain languages (well, programmers who know nothing but C and languages written by people who learned programming with C probably now wonder what's the fundamental difference between an enumerated type and an integer …)
If you are worried about efficiency of non-zero based arrays, just buy a computer that is less than two decades old. Unless you happen to program heavy numerics, adding a constant in the machine code absolutely doesn't matter.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Tuesday April 21 2015, @02:54PM
I could except that if it weren't for the fact that it arbitrarily happened throughout the same example, and was always happening with abstract stuff, not things like datetimes or things where having a nonzero index might make sense.
for (i=0; iarray.length(); i++)
{
for (j=1; j=otherArray.length(); j++)
{
...
}
}
for (i=0; i=thisWontEndWell.length(); i++)
{
Crap like that. Confused the hell out of me the entire class.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 5, Funny) by Non Sequor on Tuesday April 21 2015, @03:25AM
Real Programmers (the kind who can write FORTRAN programs in any language) regard the starting index of an array as a coding style convention.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by wisnoskij on Tuesday April 21 2015, @03:26AM
Hell I would just settle for professors who knew how to speak English when trying to teach classes in the language.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @04:59AM
"Vi estis mia plej malbona studento, neniam."
And, it is true, you know, even if it is not in English.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday April 21 2015, @03:35AM
Obviously the professor hadn't debugged enough index out of range exceptions : / The gotchas i usually see is when someone packs an array for months with January starting at 1.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday April 21 2015, @04:23AM
At this point your social and political leaning is what qualifies you for an academic position more than anything else.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2, Troll) by aristarchus on Tuesday April 21 2015, @05:37AM
At this point your social and political leaning is what qualifies you for an academic position more than anything else.
This is egregiously and maliciously incorrect! Conservatives (or Sad Puppies of Academia) are not hired due to professional incompetence. In other words, because they are stupid. This follows the observation of John Stuart Mill, who said: While it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that all stupid people are conservative." Smart dude, that. But again we deal with the Wall of Ignorance. This must be a thing on Game of Thrones, is it not? Because the incompetence is incompetent, it cannot see itself as incompetent, and so attributes failure to a vast left wing conspiracy. Hmmm, I know a lot of academics who don't get hired. Many of them are of the social and political leanings you seem to think guarantee a position. Evidently there is a vast right wing conspiracy (know by many names, but "Administration" will do nicely here) conspiring to keep the truth from getting out. University of Oregon comes to mind. Have the Mighty Ducks finally Screwed the Pooch with their latest "interim" um, why do universities need "presidents"? But again, conservatives do not succeed in academia because they are mindless ideological hacks. Cf. D'nesh D'souza. What a maroon!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @12:58PM
> "This follows the observation of John Stuart Mill, who said: While it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that all stupid people are conservative." Smart dude, that.
Really? Because I've known some incredibly stupid liberals, about as many as I've known incredibly stupid conservatives. And a line like that makes me think I'm seeing another one. Wow, it's almost like the two-party system has corroded political discourse to the point where we characterize our opponent as subhuman. How's it going now? Liberals are where all the filthy Jews go, while the conservatives are where all the filthy Christians go?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @01:44PM
What's a poor fiscally responsible, atheist, non-judgemental vegetarian to do? While I really like the libertarian message of respecting civil liberties, it seems they only care about the second amendment. While I'm all for freedom of speech, it seems like people only want to protect their own speech. I'm for selectively raising taxes on the wealthy through closing of loopholes, but I also favor streamlining the tax code to make it simpler and easier. I also think that the path to prosperity for America is through using economists to find out the programs that are delivering the most bang for the buck for most Americans and cutting those that just aren't working. Hell it's like no country can survive when it's run by a sound byte culture. Also veterans...almost forgot. Free healthcare anywhere, forever. You walk in with you vet ID and you're taken care of. Period. Enough treating our vets like second class citizens when they've given so much.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Tuesday April 21 2015, @02:57PM
I feel like Tumblr could provide a strong counterargument to your quote from Mill.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Kell on Tuesday April 21 2015, @05:38AM
Maybe in the humanities. Here in the inhumanites it is raw paper count and grant dollars brought into the university. I am a junior academic in Australia and I have been straight up told that I am being hired and fired on my paper count. I get awards in teaching and I've been told to "refocus" because apparently excellent teaching is not aligned with the university's strategic objectives. Ie. climbing the Times/QS world rankings.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday April 21 2015, @07:37AM
The "Inhumanities". I like that. Do you mind if I borrow it? It has a much better ring to it than "STEM".
And I assume you have seen the Monty Python sketches about Australian Philosophy departments? Priceless.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @09:53AM
But I guess a politician would not get much support for declaring that we must invest more in inhumanities, or that we must teach people more inhumanities.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @10:04AM
Monty Python
Thanks for the cue! [youtube.com]
"...John Stuart Mill, on his own free will,
half a pint of shanty was particularly ill,
Plato they say could stick it away,
half a crate of whiskey every day..."
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Tuesday April 21 2015, @11:39AM
I'm not too familiar with Australia, but certainly in the US and in Europe there are "teaching colleges". They don't have the prestige of the major research universities, but their mission is to actually teach. If that's where your personal priority lies, then go to a college that actually cares about teaching. You'll be a lot happier.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Kell on Tuesday April 21 2015, @01:05PM
The way it works in Oz is that every (non second-rate) university is effectively R1 - you have no choice but to research and teach, unless you are exceptionally good and fortunate to get fellowships that allow you to drop the teaching load. Teaching only academics are such a rarity that nobody knows what to make of them (or on what basis to promote them) and it's almost the kiss of death to go that way. I know of exactly one senior prof who came up through teaching only and he was imported... on the basis of "Why is our teaching so bad? Let's hire someone who knows how to teach!"
Sigh.
Anyway, to address your point: I love my research and I wouldn't want to give it up. However, I also refuse to short-change the students by producing an inferior class. This is partly out of self-interest - afterall, these students are going to be building the planes I fly in and the bridges I drive over!
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.