Monday, January 15, 2018

Gender fairness, rather than gender bias

I have quoted SciAm's John Horgan a few times, as he has some contrarian views about science and he is willing to express skepticism about big science fads. But he also has some conventional leftist blinders.

A couple of women posted a rebuttal to him on SciAm:
They found that the biggest barrier for women in STEM jobs was not sexism but their desire to form families. Overall, Ceci and Williams found that STEM careers were characterised by “gender fairness, rather than gender bias.” And, they stated, women across the sciences were more likely to receive hiring offers than men, their grants and articles were accepted at the same rate, they were cited at the same rate, and they were tenured and promoted at the same rate.

A year later, Ceci and Williams published the results of five national hiring experiments in which they sent hypothetical female and male applicants to STEM faculty members. They found that men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males.
This seems accurate to me. It is hard to find any women in academia with stories about how they have been mistreated.

Nevertheless, men get into trouble if they just say that there are personality differences between men and women. If you are a typical leftist man, you are expected to complain about sexism and the patriarchy, and defer to women on the subject.

1 comment:

  1. Tilting hiring until it artificially favors one gender over another is not an improvement. While I was taking a programming class at a community college, My instructor informed us we could get extra credit for entering the STEM fair. When I expressed interest, after much beating around the bush (your grades are already high enough, you don't need the extra credit, etc.) I was informed I was not really supposed to enter the stem fair, I was neither female nor an officially approved minority.

    If the government needs to tell you to 'like science', tell you what career to pursue or take interest in, and gives you gender and race preferential hiring, and educational loans in order to check a box that they aren't 'sexist' or 'o-phobic', then the end result is going to be a governmental social engineering project for mediocre scientists.

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