Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
New research into gender pay equity in Aotearoa New Zealand universities from the University of Canterbury (UC) explores interventions that will improve representation of women at higher levels of academia and therefore address pay equity.
"Levers of change: Using mathematical models to compare gender equity interventions in universities" by Professors Alex James and Ann Brower was published by Royal Society Open Science today. The research builds on the authors' previous work published in 2020 which found that over her career, a woman employed on academic staff at a New Zealand university can expect to earn about $400,000 less than a man.
"It's not new to find a gender pay gap; we've known this for decades," Professor Brower says. "What's important now is to find out what to do about it. Our research is globally unique because we measured research performance and put people into categories. From there we could find out which of these three levers works best for the different categories. So, our research should give universities a plan of action."
The study was the first of its kind to differentiate between moderate and high achieving researchers, based on national Performance Based Research Fund data. The authors concluded that for academics who focused on research, fairer hiring practices would influence pay parity, but for moderately achieving researchers, changes to promotions processes would have a positive change impact.
The authors argue that time will not bridge the gender representation gap in academia and call for bold action across three levers of change—hiring, promotion and attrition.
The study found that the women made up 25% of professors at UC, much improved from 3% in 2005 but still a long way behind men at the top academic level. The gap persists despite women making up more than 50% of postgraduate students in many disciplines for many years, yet remaining over-represented at the levels of lecturer and senior lecturer. UC was representative of the tertiary sector.
More information: Alex James et al, Levers of change: using mathematical models to compare gender equity interventions in universities, Royal Society Open Science (2022). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.220785
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aafcac on Monday September 12 2022, @12:26PM (3 children)
This is a textbook example of begging the question. Women aren't being underpaid. The evidence for that is extremely flimsy and requires specifically cooking the books to come up with that. I don't doubt that there are 2nd and 3rd world countries where it's an issue, but the effort to solve something that doesn't exist is massively harmful. I"m less familiar with foreign countries, but in the US, there is no pay gap. Even after making it easier for people to sue, there was an increase of less than 1% of women suing for being underpaid.
What we do have is boys and men that are falling behind. How much more harm is permissible to men because women aren't seeking these sorts of jobs in the same numbers as men? At the end of the day, women do get to choose whether or not they want to try to get a job in a given field. They also have the right to decide whether or not to take the pay on offer, if women really were this cheap, you would find nobody wanting to hire men as they'd be too expensive.
Also, equity is BS. If you start talking about equity, it makes it pretty clear that there isn't a real problem to be addressed.
(Score: 2, Redundant) by FatPhil on Monday September 12 2022, @07:31PM (2 children)
> Women are under-represented in academic staff in universities worldwide.
Assertion based on a preconception that there is an ideal representation level that they know to be accurative.
> Our work builds on other studies of ‘demographic inertia'.
There is an assumption that it is "inertia" rather than an actual resisting force that opposes the externally-imposed perturbations that keep getting tried. It also presupposes that this resistence will only come from the males in the system, rather than the females, as if females have no agency.
> We find that time will not bridge the gender representation gap in academia, and echo others in saying bold actions are required to reach parity.
Again, this presumes they know that "parity" is somehow a correct proportion for the sexes in every single academic subject. Which is an absurdity, as demonstrated by the academic systems which have been best at removing blockages to finding your right level in academia - the Scandinavian countries (Yes, that includes Finland. "Ylläs is located 115km north of the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland, in Scandinavia." -- https://www.yllas.fi/en , so any Finns who wish to remove themselves from "Scandinavia" will need to give a bit of their country over to Sweden in order to be taken seriously). Those countries have shown that females don't actually want to go into certain subjects, or stay as long in academia, as the equity-for-all banner wavers would want you to believe.
Anecdotally, a large chunk of our academic clients are in Finland (many not Finns, a large number of nationalities and ethnicities are represented), and the gender-ratio is close to 50/50, but probably slightly more males. Why do I mention that - does that not make their point for them!? Au contraire, it helps demolish their point, because those academics are in a wide range of fields, and some are male-heavy, and others are female-heavy - a natural equilibrium seems to have been found, and nobody's attempting to destabilise it.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 13 2022, @02:55PM (1 child)
Does it? I thought that it's said that women also have a trend of not helping other women in the workforce. Which, I mean...if you're helping them *only* because they're women, is that a bad thing?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 13 2022, @03:07PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Monday September 12 2022, @12:53PM (12 children)
... it doesn't say much, while using terrible English to do it. There are many gaping holes in the text. It just seems click baity.
To pick a couple of examples from many
> Our research is globally unique because we measured research performance and put people into categories.
Really? No one has ever done a study which measured research performance and put people into categories??
> The gap persists despite women making up more than 50% of postgraduate students in many disciplines for many years, yet remaining over-represented at the levels of lecturer and senior lecturer.
Does it mean under-represented? That would make sense from the context. Or I completely have not parsed the entire article.
It also does not define "equality" or "pay equity" or explain how these are measured. These are very woolly concepts (e.g. should we normalise pay to job title? To hours worked in role, per annum, or integrated? To number of publications or students taught?)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday September 12 2022, @02:16PM (11 children)
>> The gap persists despite women making up more than 50% of postgraduate students in many disciplines for many years, yet remaining over-represented at the levels of lecturer and senior lecturer.
> Does it mean under-represented? That would make sense from the context. Or I completely have not parsed the entire article.
They mean that there is a glass ceiling that keeps women at the low ranking position of lecturer.
That touches on another problem, that academia has become a whole lot stingier about pay. In recent times, they've been holding all their faculty back, to save on expenses.
Still another problem is a massive oversupply of qualified professionals. They produce a whole lot more doctorates than there are jobs for them. One estimate is that only 12.8% go on to become professors.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by FatPhil on Monday September 12 2022, @07:10PM (6 children)
Now compare that with John Barnes (top flight footballer, nearly a 100 England caps, and played for Liverpool, and Newcastle United at their peak) has said about racism in football. He explicitly says that the visible representation of racial minorities at the top echelons of the game, both as players and in management, is doing nothing to solve the problem of racism in the sport. If anything, the high profile people are *covering up* the grass roots problems.
Remind me how Obama solved the racism that's still rampant in the US...
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2022, @07:31PM (1 child)
Good God, FatPhil, he barely managed to get US outta 2008 crisis, he had no time to re-educate the rednecks.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday September 13 2022, @04:59PM
And of course, all those terrible riots he's been shitting himself over for the last couple years and that totally DESTRYED PORTLAND we all about how racism is over!
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 13 2022, @02:46PM (3 children)
*SCREECH*
Let's just take a hard left turn here and jump the pond. Not like the article is specifically about the university ecosystem in the U.S. or anything...
Compare and contrast with the racial makeup of the NFL in 100 words or more.
*SCREECH*
Now I see we're veering back closer to the topic at hand.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 13 2022, @02:52PM (1 child)
Blegh. Way to go, tango. /s
disregard
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 13 2022, @02:59PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 13 2022, @02:56PM
> Let's just take a hard left turn here and jump the pond. Not like the article is specifically about the university ecosystem in the U.S. or anything...
Stop drunk driving. You've just completely Thelma and Louised yourself.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday September 13 2022, @07:45AM (3 children)
> glass ceiling
Thanks, that makes more sense. I didn't think lecturer was so junior, but I guess so.
> massive oversupply of qualified professionals ... only 12.8% go on to become professors
Well, Professor is quite senior, typically running a couple of lecturers each of whom in turn runs a handful of RAs and PhDs, maybe a couple of technicans/admin. So prof is running about 10-20 employees, equivalent to a "senior group leader" or so. I don't think many people make it to that sort of level in industry either. Or maybe you mean lecturer?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2022, @03:07PM (2 children)
My guess is that GP is conflating US vs. Australian/New Zealand academic ranks inappropriately. In New Zealand and Australia, my understanding is that a "lecturer" is generally a full-time somewhat mid-rank position (as it typically is in the UK too), with decent pay, etc. "Professor," as you note, is the highest rank, and achieved by a select few.
In the U.S., however, "Lecturer" is often just a polite term for "adjunct," which usually means you're part-time, paid abysmally (last time I looked, average adjunct pay per class was about $3700 -- that's for an entire semester course), no benefits, no job security -- in fact, you may not know until you have a job a particular term until a week before the semester depending on enrollment, etc. And in the U.S., "professor" is often used to refer generically to tenured and tenure-track people of rank assistant, associate, or full professor. Those are full-time employees, usually well-paid, etc.
GP is quite correct that in the U.S. there is a near-crisis level of overproduction of PhDs in many fields, resulting in the fact that there are so many people with doctorates that they're willing to take adjunct jobs for years just HOPING someday to score a job as an "assistant professor" and actually get full-time work with decent pay. It's bad enough that many colleges and universities have figured out they can exploit these people, and many departments are like half adjunct ("lecturer") now. Why should a college/university pay an actual "professor" a full salary, when they can get Joe PHD to grovel for a couple thousand dollars per course?
I have no doubt that in many fields in the US, GP's estimate that only about 13% of PhDs go on to find full-time academic employment is true. For the rest, they're scraping by making $20-30k per year with a doctorate and just hoping to "win the lottery" and get a tenure-track position. The last hiring committee I was on before leaving academia had over 200 applications for a junior professor position. The chair of the hiring committee offered to try to lessen the committees work by screening candidates that didn't meet "minimal" qualifications (PhD in the correct field, some experience, at least a couple publications, etc.) and still came back with ~190 applications for the committee to sort though. And this not at a top-tier research university.
Source: I actually was in academia for quite a few years, but quit a few years back because I believe the system is bad enough that it's totally unethical and I refuse to be a part of it anymore. When I'm effectively getting paid over 5 times the amount per course than an adjunct is getting to do the same exact thing with no hope of any benefits or even consistent work, all the while as undergraduates are shelling out tens of thousands per year to be taught by people who are literally living on food stamps in some situations (and the "professors" are told on the first day of employment that "teaching doesn't matter" for promotion, only research), the system is really fucked up.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday September 14 2022, @08:33AM
> I actually was in academia for quite a few years, but quit a few years back because I believe the system is bad enough that it's totally unethical and I refuse to be a part of it anymore.
ps: I agree.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 17 2022, @03:21PM
As noted, and misunderstood, there is a difference between I guess the US system where there seems to be a massive inflation of PhD people and professors of various degrees (assistant, teaching, junior whatever) and the rest of the world. In euroland we have a lot of Adjuncts (these are teachers that doesn't have a PhD, even tho there are probably people with a PhD that also work as Adjuncts even tho if they had one they might as well just work as Doctors or Lektors/Lectors), then you have Lectors which are more or less just like Adjuncts except that they do have a PhD. But they mostly do the same things. Then there are the Doctors that have their PhD but not enough experience or research to become a Lector. Then there are the administrative titles such as Decan and Prefect that runs the departments, they tend to be Professors from my experience but is switching from teaching and research to running the staff. The other big difference I guess is that PhD-students are not actually students but are employees of the university. So you are staff. You get paid a salary, not a great one but you are not poor by any means. While in the US it seems most of them are still somehow counted as being students -- I guess this is why they turn out so many of them, they are free and they pay to go to university and can be used as cheap academic slave labor.
Availability of PhD positions etc seem to vary greatly from field to field. There is rarely a problem to get one if you are into maths, physics or some kind of engineer. If you want to be a social science phd you better win the lottery as you get hit my lightning cause there are so many applicants for those positions.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Opportunist on Monday September 12 2022, @01:04PM (17 children)
Should they hire women even if they are less qualified to meet some gender quota? I would highly advise against it, for a simple reason: Things like that will surface one way or another. And then suddenly, it ain't that one woman that was hired because of quota, the narrative then is that women in general only get their job because of the quota.
And that's the true kick to the stomach. Imagine for a moment if you will: Yu finally earn your degree because you fucking EARNED it. Because you are good. Because you know your shit and because you're one of the best in the world. And you earned that job, because you are GOOD.
But still you'll be called the "quota woman" because "everyone knows" women only get their job because of the quota.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday September 12 2022, @01:27PM (7 children)
Perhaps the gender identifying information should be hidden from those making the hiring/promotion decision. This would be quite tricky, though, and would prevent individual evaluations.
OTOH, studies have shown that identical resumes are more likely to get chosen if they have a male name on them, so it's a real problem that isn't caused by the women being less qualified.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 5, Informative) by EEMac on Monday September 12 2022, @01:45PM (6 children)
> Perhaps the gender identifying information should be hidden from those making the hiring/promotion decision. This would be quite tricky, though, and would prevent individual evaluations.
Multiple companies have tried removing all identifying information from resumes. It usually results in more white males being hired and is promptly discontinued.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday September 12 2022, @02:16PM (2 children)
If all identifying information is included, then one might think that they would be hiring fairly based truly on qualifications. Especially if they have no personal information to go on. Not gender. Not age. Not choice of skin color. I would suggest not even a name -- even if all the names were changed to male names, there could still be bias for or against certain names.
So if they are truly hiring fairly based only on what is represented in the resume, then why would they discontinue this practice?
On what basis can all of the other genders complain?
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 4, Touché) by EJ on Monday September 12 2022, @02:23PM
Because reasons.
Welcome to 2022.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Mykl on Tuesday September 13 2022, @04:03AM
I think the real answer for complaining about this is that the results don't match what they wanted.
The answer given however, is that there is some implicit bias in the way that white males write, which seems to come through on their CVs despite identifying information being removed. They will be quick to stress that white males are not necessarily better writers of course, but that we unconsciously realize we're reading something that a white man wrote. Thus, removing identifying information is unwittingly falling into hiring bias.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2022, @07:06PM (2 children)
I've never heard that assertion before.
Do you have any evidence, including methodologies and data, to back that up?
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Tuesday September 13 2022, @03:13PM (1 child)
I have a counter-example: blind auditions for symphony orchestras. [harvard.edu] Anecdotally, it has done more to equalize opportunity at the high levels of music performance than pretty much any other initiative.
There has been at least one call for eliminating blind auditions [nytimes.com] (apologies for the Times link), claiming they do not result in high enough rates of hiring women and people of color. That seems to be a fringe opinion, and is being rejected as a bad idea. [theviolinchannel.com]
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by EEMac on Tuesday September 13 2022, @11:44PM
Unfortunately, I was remembering an Amazon AI that hired more white males [theguardian.com] and got shut down. D'oh!
I don't fully concede the point: blind hiring was tried and broadly rejected. But the causes remain speculative.
(Score: 0, Troll) by DannyB on Monday September 12 2022, @02:13PM (7 children)
Dear Mr. White Male
Thank you for applying at mega software corp.
Your qualifications for the position are beyond outstanding. However, we regret that your skin color and gender are inappropriate for the position and do not align with the values of our diversity program which is to ensure fairness in hiring.
If you change your skin color and gender, you are welcome to apply again.
Sincerely indifferent,
Mega software corp
Only men have the levers they should be pulling.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday September 12 2022, @04:54PM (5 children)
This is anecdotal evidence, I know, but about 6 months ago I applied to a software megacorp. I was openly a white male, freely listing both my whiteness and my maleness on the optional EEOC portions of the application, and had no trouble getting hired and paid quite well for my services, and I currently have every reason to think I'm on track for being considered for promotion in another 6 months or so. And this was at a software megacorp that claims to have a lot of programs for diversity and equity and such. So I'm not really convinced that the stereotypes you're posting are the reality. I'm sure it varies from megacorp to megacorp, and probably by specific hiring managers and teams and such, but I'll just say that's really not my experience, at all. In fact, the only time my race and gender affected hiring during my entire career, as far as I can tell, was when I worked for a tiny black-owned business and one of my roles was to be the token white guy they could trot out to make the sales pitch and not be scaring the totally-not-racist suburbanites.
Oh, and I think it also worth mentioning that after I had given notice at a smaller (20-person) employer and was working out my 2 weeks, one of the 2 co-owners announced to me and the entire staff that he wasn't going to hire a candidate to replace me solely because of their race (he looked fine on paper, the other techies who had interviewed him were impressed, the co-owner specifically cited his race loudly to the whole office). And that was only the most blatant racism I've seen over my career. So I know there's a problem, even if some people won't admit it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday September 12 2022, @06:35PM (2 children)
My employer is not a megacorp, although it is plenty big. We embrace diversity, have employee stock options, profit sharing bonus program, lots of various small perks, etc. The stereotypes I write above would not apply here.
The sad thing is that they may apply somewhere.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday September 12 2022, @06:44PM (1 child)
So let me get this straight: You described something that "may apply somewhere" but don't apply to your company or mine, and are not in any way wondering whether your by-your-own-admission-stereotyped comments don't match up to reality? And arguing that we should act as those those comments are true despite zero evidence supplied supporting them?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday September 12 2022, @07:28PM
Whether or not it may actually apply anywhere, it was intended to be amusing.
Or should I only make fun of Secret Jewish Space Lasers?
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2) by Tokolosh on Monday September 12 2022, @06:42PM
You could make women register for Selective Service, i.e. the draft, and make them risk life and limb for the country in an emergency?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2022, @02:40PM
Thank you for your one data point, thus disproving parent's entire theory. Do you have any thoughts about string theory? I hear the scientists have been stuck on that one for awhile now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2022, @07:36PM
Oh, well, speaking of men pulling levers, boobs are kinda nice to be pushing around too.
Wait, what?
(Score: 4, Touché) by krishnoid on Monday September 12 2022, @04:46PM
Well, if someone is going to kick you in the stomach over that ... fight back [youtu.be]. What do you have to lose?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by looorg on Monday September 12 2022, @02:00PM (2 children)
Somewhat depending on country and system but it takes a fairly long time to become a professor. Being a professor is in that regard the top of the faculty food-chain. It's the end of the line of a career. You should have all your degrees, then a PhD then years of research and various positions in academia and then eventually one day you might become a Professor.
So women will get there eventually. Considering that in a lot of countries the majority of students are now female. It just takes time. Nothing that will change in a year or a decade. It is many decades down the line. But they apparently want to fast track women based just on the fact that they are women.
To skip steps, which have been tried, is not of benefits to women in academia. If anything all it does is to cast doubt on all women -- did you get this degree or to this level cause of your sex or cause you are actually good at what you do? Some was perhaps clearly promoted to fill some quota or other aspect. Which in that regard is of detriment to the once that didn't. But now you won't know so you'll always suspect that they somehow got promoted based on other then skills aspects and criteria.
That said there is a very limited scope in this study. It seems to focus mostly on pay and professors. As if that is where the gender equality battle then is to be fought.
Most students won't ever become professors. A lot of them won't even finish their degrees. Even less will get masters, a small fractions will get on the phd track and a select few of them will become doctors etc so it's dwindling fast on the way to the top of academia.
If anything a lot of male students should start to get preferential treatment as males are now among the student population in the minority for a lot of subjects and faculties.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday September 12 2022, @05:59PM
My grandmother got an endowed full professor chair at an Ivy League institution back in the 1970's. To get it, she had industry experience, a doctorate, some valuable research, some academic teaching experience, all the stuff you'd expect of a full professor. And she wasn't the first to get there at that institution, there were about 10-12 ahead of her. (And in case you're wondering whether she really deserved it: Her work is still cited and taught decades after it was published, she was consulting for multiple governments worldwide well into her retirement from teaching, and she's even influenced popular works in her field, so yeah, I think she deserved it.)
When I was in college 20 years ago, my alma mater's math department was approximately 50% female faculty, and I believe some of them were full professors although they didn't really focus on titles at that school. One of them was my advisor for a while, she was a great teacher and really knew her stuff.
So I don't understand what the heck you're talking about when you say they'll "get there eventually". There are lots of women, right now, fully qualified for those academic positions.
The main thing that's fouling up academic positions for everybody, though, is the strategy that many college administrations have gone towards of simply not having tenured faculty anymore. Adjuncts are much cheaper, and there's a bit of a glut of PhDs right now thanks to Millennials and younger being the most educated generation the world has ever known, so a lot of them are slaving away for $18K a year hoping to get on the tenure track eventually until they conclude that the tenure track doesn't really exist anymore. And as an added bonus, you can quietly not rehire them if they ever teach something the dean doesn't like.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by captain normal on Tuesday September 13 2022, @04:26AM
PhD is a doctorate degree.
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 5, Touché) by Snort on Monday September 12 2022, @02:51PM (2 children)
I was certain they were going to narrow down to the out of balance ratio of women and men attending colleges and universities.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Monday September 12 2022, @03:38PM
Haha, I was actually typing up a response to the former!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2022, @02:35PM
FTFY
(Score: 0, Troll) by VLM on Monday September 12 2022, @04:27PM (5 children)
I've read about this and its not broken down by degree, intentionally.
So male and female EE profs make the same lifetime money, women a little more actually. They make tons of money as contractors over the summer to dotcom companies or take on programming jobs or whatever. Also the money in some "male" fields flows like water, sometimes. Try being a mech eng or aerospace eng during a war and collecting DoD contracts like confetti.
Meanwhile profs in public K12 ed or sociology are not getting knocked over by the money firehydrant and those professions skew strongly, sometimes almost exclusively female.
You can't force women to work harder jobs without slavery, so ... you're always going to end up with its summer and the male prof is billing $400/hr to the dotcom company to do some bullshite whereas the female prof gets approximately zero dollars to write yet another screed for "HR journal" about the evils of white Christian males that nobody reads anyway. The female has the easier job and its not like anyone forced her not to take CS classes, in fact she was likely very strongly encouraged, but the inevitable outcome be portrayed as "unfair"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Monday September 12 2022, @04:51PM
Don't forget the statistical oddity that shows up when you consider the groups independently vs. together [refsmmat.com]. It may not be happening here, but sometimes relying on the mathematics can obscure the reality.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Thexalon on Monday September 12 2022, @06:08PM (2 children)
Why do you think education or sociology are easier fields than electrical engineering? Have you ever taken classes in them? Done any research in them? Read any of the papers or journals you seem quite certain you know the contents of?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2022, @07:25AM (1 child)
Well, yes. Yes I have. And there is a difference. See e.g. https://telescoper.wordpress.com/2013/05/26/iq-in-different-academic-fields-interesting-quite/ [wordpress.com]
EE is close to the top. Education OTOH is near the bottom.
So if you're a sociologist or in education, you just need to tough it out. Sorry.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday September 13 2022, @08:14PM
Hmm, well that was interesting:
1. Your blog post cites only another blog post which isn't publicly available, not an academic study with methodology. Said blog post seems fairly skeptical of the thing it's citing, as well, so odds are pretty good that you're ascribing to this list a lot more validity than it actually has.
2. It's not proven that there's such a thing as a singular measure of intelligence. Someone can be very smart at some kinds of tasks while being very dumb at others, for instance. There are, for example, very good engineers who I would definitely not want trying to teach classes.
3. Even if the previous statement is true, it's not proven that IQ tests are an accurate way of measuring it. Indeed, the very page your cite has the following statement on it: "IQ tests only measure a subject’s ability to do IQ tests."
4. Except it wasn't based on an IQ test, it was based on another standardized test, the GRE, which among other things is going to be a skewed sample because not all college grads take it (a lot go straight into the working world with a BA), but also may have other failures and biases that are not being accounted for.
5. My degree's in computer science, so according to your own argument if you're an electrical engineer you're supposed to bow down before my superior intellect and just accept that you're wrong.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2022, @07:30AM
Yep, that's pretty much it. And its even worse when we look at the undergrads (where women today dominate). "Blue collar" female jobs are in e.g. teaching and nursing and in the western world these require a college degree. The corresponding male dominated jobs do not.
So if one scratches the surface, it turns out that saying that "women dominate the undergrads, but woe, oh woe, they don't make professors, because men" isn't really borne out by the facts.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday September 12 2022, @05:08PM
'She' can pull my lever ANY TIME!
'He' can just pull my finger. 8)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 5, Touché) by Tokolosh on Monday September 12 2022, @06:35PM (1 child)
Every day we are reminded by articles like this how women are helpless and incapable, and need the intervention of men to get ahead in the world. So a daily shaming of the female gender. Are women not embarrassed? I would be, if everyone told me I was useless. But strangely, it is thought a Good Thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2022, @02:33PM
right up there with the bizarre, twisted logic of one of the prime movers to get Roe v Wade revoked, who was trying to convince people that the choice to be a mother OR have a career is a Bad Thing, so women should be forced to do both to more achieve their potential
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-61789443 [bbc.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JustNiz on Monday September 12 2022, @10:37PM
1) Make sure that the opportunity and remuneration to study does not favour one gender or race over another. This includes completely eliminating so-called "positive" discrimination.
2) Once that situation exists, then stop expecting or even trying to force a 50/50 gender balance everywhere, and finally accept the plethora of data that clearly shows that men and women are in fact different, and do make different study and career choices, based on different priorities.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pgc on Tuesday September 13 2022, @09:26AM
This is not a question universities should be posing themselves.
Universities should be concerned with the quality of their curriculum. Not whether they fit in some social box.