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The New Left

 
Quote:
Originally Posted by silveroak View Post
No, it is empirical fact that there are less women in these jobs. You have demonstrated nothing about their preferences. I have observed where women have been set higher standards for passing classes, been harassed in the workplace far more often, and had a harder time getting work in the preferred field when they did pursue a position in engineering. Now please, as I have already requested once before, present your evidence that women *prefer* the work you are insisting is more intrinsically female.
Maybe these are the reasons why woman prefer not to be engineers. No-one's forcing them not to pursue engineering, even if these things shift the woman's preference by discouraging them.

Then the issue would be ending workplace harassment or try and more actively enforce existing discrimination laws in colleges, rather than a change to our culture itself. Or an end to some kind of subculture within the engineering sector or what have you.

Those things are changing the culture. The culture you have been a part of promoting by claiming that women do not choose to become engineers because it wasn't feminine, and that men should not be forced to take "girly" jobs, which was clearly an insult to those jobs. In short, everything you have been spouting off is part of the problem, and you still have not produced any evidence of your claim regarding women's preferences (which is not the same as outcomes or choices- we would all prefer to be multi-millionaires, but we can't simply all choose to be), despite forum rules indicating you must provide said evidence and it being requested multiple times.

Quote:
Originally Posted by silveroak View Post
Those things are changing the culture. The culture you have been a part of promoting by claiming that women do not choose to become engineers because it wasn't feminine, and that men should not be forced to take "girly" jobs, which was clearly an insult to those jobs. In short, everything you have been spouting off is part of the problem, and you still have not produced any evidence of your claim regarding women's preferences (which is not the same as outcomes or choices- we would all prefer to be multi-millionaires, but we can't simply all choose to be), despite forum rules indicating you must provide said evidence and it being requested multiple times.
I don't think you understand what I mean by "preference", which is that if a woman was harassed for example, she would prefer not to work the job even though she is allowed by law to do so. It's still a preference, even if it's caused by an external reason.

Also it's not an insult to say a job is more feminine, I don't view masculinity or femininity as inherently bad things. But because of that, I also don't think it's bad for woman to pursue more feminine oriented fields and men more masculine fields, if they choose to do so.


In some job fields there may be discrimination, but that would be pertinent to those job fields and not really to culture as a whole.

Provide the required evidence, not another argument as to why you must be right or how things don't really mean what they mean, but actual evidence that women *prefer* not to work in math related fields as you claimed or admit you have no clue what you are talking about.

Quote:
Originally Posted by silveroak View Post
Provide the required evidence, not another argument as to why you must be right or how things don't really mean what they mean, but actual evidence that women *prefer* not to work in math related fields as you claimed or admit you have no clue what you are talking about.
Again, you're failing to understand what I'm saying, which is that woman make the choice not to work in these fields. That may be influenced by culture, biology or a host of other issues, but the fact of the matter is they are given the choice not to. If woman are making the choice, then they are preferring not to do so. I'm saying their choice is their preference. It's really as simple as that.

But while we're on the subject, are woman biologically predisposed to being worse at math and spatial reasoning? The simple answer is, yes. The only question is how much. Part of the difference is that men tend to statistically be extremely poor at math and extremely good. The thing is in nearly all fields men tend to be more highly concentrated at opposite ends of the bell curve, where as woman tend to gravitate towards the middle. There are more men who can't do math at all and math geniuses, where as woman tend to all be about the same on average. [1][2]


http://www.livescience.com/20011-bra...fferences.html
""We do socialize our boys and girls differently, but the contribution of biology is not zero," said Diane Halpern, a professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College in California, who has been studying cognitive gender differences for 25 years. Halpern was a keynote speaker at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference here last Thursday (April 19). "

http://www2.nau.edu/~bio372-c/class/...or/sexdif1.htm
"Men and women differ not only in their physical attributes and reproductive function but also in many other characteristics, including the way they solve intellectual problems. ... On average, men perform better than women at certain spatial tasks. In particular, men seem to have an advantage in tests that require the subject to imagine rotating an object or manipulating it in some other way. They also outperform women in mathematical reasoning tests and in navigating their way through a route. Further, men exhibit more accuracy in tests of target-directed motor skills--that is, in guiding or intercepting projectiles.

Women, on average, excel on tests that measure recall of words and on tests that challenge the person to find words that begin with a specific letter or fulfill some other constraint. They also tend to be better than men at rapidly identifying matching items and performing certain precision manual tasks, such as placing pegs in designated holes on a board."

http://www.science20.com/news_articl...es_math-106756
“Educational systems could be improved by acknowledging that, in general, boys and girls are different,” said University of Missouri biologist David Geary in their statement. “For example, in trying to close the sex gap in math scores, the reading gap was left behind. Now, our study has found that the difference between girls’ and boys’ reading scores was three times larger than the sex difference in math scores. Girls’ higher scores in reading could lead to advantages in admissions to certain university programs, such as marketing, journalism or literature, and subsequently careers in those fields. Boys lower reading scores could correlate to problems in any career, since reading is essential in most jobs.”

http://news-releases.uiowa.edu/2008/...ial-skill.html
"Men consistently outperform women on spatial tasks, including mental rotation, which is the ability to identify how a 3-D object would appear if rotated in space. Now, a University of Iowa study shows a connection between this sex-linked ability and the structure of the parietal lobe, the brain region that controls this type of skill.

The parietal lobe was already known to differ between men and women, with women's parietal lobes having proportionally thicker cortexes or "grey matter." But this difference was never linked back to actual performance differences on the mental rotation test."

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/2/823
"Sex differences are of high scientific and societal interest because of their prominence in behavior of humans and nonhuman species. This work is highly significant because it studies a very large population of 949 youths (8–22 y, 428 males and 521 females) using the diffusion-based structural connectome of the brain, identifying novel sex differences. The results establish that male brains are optimized for intrahemispheric and female brains for interhemispheric communication. The developmental trajectories of males and females separate at a young age, demonstrating wide differences during adolescence and adulthood. The observations suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes."

http://web.stanford.edu/~niederle/NV.JEP.pdf

okay, except:
1) none of these explain the wage gap- they explain some differences between men and woman, but none that would relate directly to the topic being discussed, and
2) Not one of these touches on the issue of preferences for job selection.

Quote:
Originally Posted by silveroak View Post
okay, except:
1) none of these explain the wage gap- they explain some differences between men and woman, but none that would relate directly to the topic being discussed, and
2) Not one of these touches on the issue of preferences for job selection.
First of all, you didn't ask for how it should explain the wage gap, you asked for evidence of one specific thing. That's moving the goalposts. As for how it explains it, if woman choose low paying jobs or not to work at all (I.E. to be stay at home mom's), then it shows that the earnings gap is a result of personal career choice, rather than primarily discrimination.

As for your second point, people naturally prefer things they tend to excel at, and so what people tend to excel at is what they tend to prefer. And obviously men and woman tend to excel at different things, some of the time. If you want me to provide evidence for that claim, I can if you want me to.

Quote:
Originally Posted by silveroak View Post
As someone who has a degree in engineering I can testify that in the Freshman year women were far more equal in numbers to the men than in the graduating class, many because they felt discouraged by their advisors and were given recommendations to switch majors far more frequently then men were. Your sexist assumptions are very irritating and offensive.
As a counter-anecdote, I also have a degree in engineering. I didn't know everyone in the freshman year, so I don't have good data on it. Most of the classes that I attended that year weren't field specific. However, of the women in my second year class though, a higher percentage of them were in my fourth year class than men who were in my second year class.

As someone who is not an engineer, but is aware of studies on the subject, may I suggest we talk less about personal experiences?

Something more like this, maybe?
Quote:
Originally Posted by above link
Or, as the paper puts it, “Informal interactions with peers and everyday sexism in teams and internships are particularly salient building blocks of [gender] segregation.” The researchers add: “For many women, their first encounter with collaboration is to be treated in gender stereotypical ways.” And by contrast, as the researchers note in the paper, “Almost without exception, we find that the men interpret the experience of internships and summer jobs as a positive experience.”




 

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