Molyneux wrote:With sports, the simple question of why the fuck they have segregated teams is baffling to me. Outside of sports...for fuck's sake, I think these people honestly do fit the expression "too stupid to breathe".
You don't understand why they have segregated sports teams? Seriously, in 99% of cases, segregation of sports teams would more or less happen anyway, with women being relegated to E grade because your average woman is smaller, slower and weaker than your average man. When we have mixed netball games over here, the guys always dominate the game, despite the fact that guys don't play netball and that the girls had been playing since they were six. The discrepancy is just that huge.
I didn't know that the differences were that extreme, no.
Sexual dimorphism bites.
LadyTevar wrote:Another part of the problem is a lot of women are like me, and just don't do well at Math. High School Algebra was a pain in the ass for me. Geometry was a little better, because of the visual nature of a lot of the problems, but basic algebra fried my brain.
That is quite interesting. According to the current slew of studies, you should be having trouble with visual problems.
(Come to think of it... I recall algebra first becoming easy for me when I started using a sort of visual metaphor for math problems. I had thought of them as linear, but now I think of them as modular things where numbers and terms can be moved by swapping spaces with something else. When I do algebra, I usually think in terms of moving things around rather than mathematical operations; and the funny thing is, I hadn't really noticed that before. I wonder if some people would benefit from being taught to visualize equations in some fashion or other. Bleh, end of long meandering thought.)
Since is NEVER supposed to be fair. It is rational, logical, based on results, and geared towards the best-possible answer. It shouldn't make you feel good about trying if you don't get anywhere, and it isn't a tool for social change.
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Maybe those people, in order to make science more fair should go over to China and India to say "You're producing more and better engineers and scientists than we are, and we don't like that! It's not fair! Wah wah wahhhh!"
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Barring real differences in how guys and girls grasp things(spatial for example), it seems likely that there are cultural barriers against girls entering hard sciences. After all, most of today young adults had parents who viewed being a pilot/engineer/scientist as a male job and this may had influenced them during their growing up years. We also condition girls to play with girls toys and guys to play with guys toys after all.
But then, that's a society thing and not something you can fix with quotas and money.
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PainRack wrote:Barring real differences in how guys and girls grasp things(spatial for example), it seems likely that there are cultural barriers against girls entering hard sciences. After all, most of today young adults had parents who viewed being a pilot/engineer/scientist as a male job and this may had influenced them during their growing up years. We also condition girls to play with girls toys and guys to play with guys toys after all.
But then, that's a society thing and not something you can fix with quotas and money.
Did you read the article? Girls instinctively want nurturing/feminine toys. The only way they could sell power-rangers dolls to girls was to give the girl rangers stylable hair.
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You kinda look like Jesus. With a lightsaber.- Peregrin Toker
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I also heard that women are not expected to have an actual carrier and are to become married and leave their job to become home-makers at the age of 25.
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LadyTevar wrote:Another part of the problem is a lot of women are like me, and just don't do well at Math. High School Algebra was a pain in the ass for me. Geometry was a little better, because of the visual nature of a lot of the problems, but basic algebra fried my brain.
Do you mean, the girls in high school - or earlier, saw that they weren't doing as well as the boys, and concluded that girls just aren't as good at math as boys? I have no trouble believing that's a problem for your generation, but I recall reading an article a year or more ago about how girls are now surpassing boys in math, or something like that. I wish I could just bring up the article again, but regardless, I'm not sure that's nearly as much of a problem anymore. It might still be somewhat of an issue, given Harvard's Math 55, but the OP suggests that it's more an issue of extreme competition being less interesting to women.
If the lack of women in certain fields is due to their competitive atmosphere - and I'm not willing to believe that without thorough evidence anyway - then we must be extremely careful in what we choose to do about it.
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Molyneux wrote:With sports, the simple question of why the fuck they have segregated teams is baffling to me. Outside of sports...for fuck's sake, I think these people honestly do fit the expression "too stupid to breathe".
You don't understand why they have segregated sports teams? Seriously, in 99% of cases, segregation of sports teams would more or less happen anyway, with women being relegated to E grade because your average woman is smaller, slower and weaker than your average man. When we have mixed netball games over here, the guys always dominate the game, despite the fact that guys don't play netball and that the girls had been playing since they were six. The discrepancy is just that huge.
I didn't know that the differences were that extreme, no.
Sexual dimorphism bites.
These are the New York Sharks, a womans tackle football team, their largest girl is 276 and plays defensive and offensive line.
Compare this with The Chicago Bears OL and DL. Their smallest Offensive Lineman is Olin Kreutz, a center at 292lbs. On D we have Mark Anderson, a defensive end at 255. The problem with her playing DE is women don't have the same percentage of lean muscle mass as men and need to be heavier just to be as strong, which means she's slower too.
If we were to fold the Independent Women's Football League into the NFL, you'd be lucky to see a female player at all outside of kicking or punting.
I submit this as a reply to Tevar and whichever idiot misinterpreted statistics to say that she should really be having trouble with math that isn't geometry instead of saying that statistically women tend to have better geometry than algebraic skills...if that's even the case.
I've said it many times, but I wonder how much of it stems from the fact that it's even less socially acceptable for girls to be "nerds" than for guys, and with girls tending to be more susceptible to peer pressure bullshit already without the added pressure. Women far outnumber men in science and engineering classes in Iran, 70 percent of the student body according to this Nature article via Wikipedia (it was fast, okay?)
Me? I hated math until I hit college. I don't know if it was the calculus that was better than the previous crap, or just the sheer idiocy of everything in my pre-college days, but I definitely liked calculus and higher better than high school crap.
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LadyTevar wrote:Another part of the problem is a lot of women are like me, and just don't do well at Math. High School Algebra was a pain in the ass for me. Geometry was a little better, because of the visual nature of a lot of the problems, but basic algebra fried my brain.
Well, speak for yourself. Mind you, the calculus I'm taking right now is bloody hard (mostly because my courseload is such I was never able to study properly to stay on top of it, but, still passing, so who cares), but algaebra is a straightforward matching game when you get down to it.
That said, obviously I find this horrible--I'd like to find these idiots and punch them in the face or something. I'm going back to school now for the purpose of getting a secure professional degree to keep me alive when it all drops into the pot in a decade or so. The last thing I want is to end up in the back of the employment line because the hiring people assume that I only have my degree because of a fucking quota.
The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. -- Wikipedia's No Original Research policy page.
The Duchess of Zeon wrote:
That said, obviously I find this horrible--I'd like to find these idiots and punch them in the face or something. I'm going back to school now for the purpose of getting a secure professional degree to keep me alive when it all drops into the pot in a decade or so. The last thing I want is to end up in the back of the employment line because the hiring people assume that I only have my degree because of a fucking quota.
I've heard that competent women in the science and engineering fields almost always oppose these sorts of measures to because all it does is end up devalueing their education.
"It's too competitive and Women find it repulsive."
Jeez, woman, if you have find it too competitive, is it because you are incompetent?
STGOD: Byzantine Empire Your spirit, diseased as it is, refuses to allow you to give up, no matter what threats you face... and whatever wreckage you leave behind you.
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This reminds me of a few years ago of complaints against the city of Ottawa's recruiting practices of firefighters. Some women complained that the requirements were too high and that it prevents women from being firefighters. They actually had the gall to ask that the standards be lowered. I'm sorry but if you are not capable of lugging around a 200lb human being out of a burning home then I would not want you as a firefighter.
There some things men excel at and there some things that women excel at. Just because a man or a woman cannot do something the other is good at does not make them inferior or discriminated against.
ASVS('97)/SDN('03)
"Whilst human alchemists refer to the combustion triangle, some of their orcish counterparts see it as more of a hexagon: heat, fuel, air, laughter, screaming, fun." Dawn of the Dragons
This reminds me of a few years ago of complaints against the city of Ottawa's recruiting practices of firefighters. Some women complained that the requirements were too high and that it prevents women from being firefighters. They actually had the gall to ask that the standards be lowered. I'm sorry but if you are not capable of lugging around a 200lb human being out of a burning home then I would not want you as a firefighter.
There some things men excel at and there some things that women excel at. Just because a man or a woman cannot do something the other is good at does not make them inferior or discriminated against.
As a matter of fact, I have an aunt who was one of the first female firefighters in Seattle, and did damn fine work. She's also a stereotypical diesel dyke.
The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. -- Wikipedia's No Original Research policy page.
This reminds me of a few years ago of complaints against the city of Ottawa's recruiting practices of firefighters. Some women complained that the requirements were too high and that it prevents women from being firefighters. They actually had the gall to ask that the standards be lowered. I'm sorry but if you are not capable of lugging around a 200lb human being out of a burning home then I would not want you as a firefighter.
There some things men excel at and there some things that women excel at. Just because a man or a woman cannot do something the other is good at does not make them inferior or discriminated against.
As a matter of fact, I have an aunt who was one of the first female firefighters in Seattle, and did damn fine work. She's also a stereotypical diesel dyke.
Good for her. She rose up to the challenge and managed to excel. Unfortunately, there are those like in the OP that wishes to level the playing field at the cost of everyone else.
ASVS('97)/SDN('03)
"Whilst human alchemists refer to the combustion triangle, some of their orcish counterparts see it as more of a hexagon: heat, fuel, air, laughter, screaming, fun." Dawn of the Dragons
This reminds me of a few years ago of complaints against the city of Ottawa's recruiting practices of firefighters. Some women complained that the requirements were too high and that it prevents women from being firefighters. They actually had the gall to ask that the standards be lowered. I'm sorry but if you are not capable of lugging around a 200lb human being out of a burning home then I would not want you as a firefighter.
There some things men excel at and there some things that women excel at. Just because a man or a woman cannot do something the other is good at does not make them inferior or discriminated against.
As a matter of fact, I have an aunt who was one of the first female firefighters in Seattle, and did damn fine work. She's also a stereotypical diesel dyke.
Good for her. She rose up to the challenge and managed to excel. Unfortunately, there are those like in the OP that wishes to level the playing field at the cost of everyone else.
The thing is, it's not levelling the playing field. The playing field is already level.
The Duchess of Zeon wrote:
As a matter of fact, I have an aunt who was one of the first female firefighters in Seattle, and did damn fine work. She's also a stereotypical diesel dyke.
Good for her. She rose up to the challenge and managed to excel. Unfortunately, there are those like in the OP that wishes to level the playing field at the cost of everyone else.
The thing is, it's not levelling the playing field. The playing field is already level.
Chiming in with my own anecdote, here:
My younger sister is part of the volunteer fire department in my town. She's tiny, under five feet tall - but she's stronger than she looks, and passed all the requirements.
Molyneux wrote:Chiming in with my own anecdote, here:
My younger sister is part of the volunteer fire department in my town. She's tiny, under five feet tall - but she's stronger than she looks, and passed all the requirements.
Sometimes it's about endurance more than strength. Also, there are certain psychological barriers in place that prevent people from using their full strength except in emergency situations as a form of protection against over-exertion. Some people can bend, or even break, that barrier and push themselves to the very limits.
The problem with these people is they're in a paradigm of equality of outcome, and they think anything else is "unfair". To them a fair society is a society where the demographics of every profession resembles that of the population of a whole. Anything else must be unfair descrimination, and defending an "unfair" system can only mean you're a closet bigot.
They've been raised on the postmodernist belief that everything is a power play, so they find it difficult to see complexities beyond that (and are suspicious of people who do, because to their mind anyone who disagrees with them is probably a closet bigot). And, of course, it's always easier to "level the playing field" by lowering the bar.
Xisiqomelir wrote:<snip>
The thing is, it's not levelling the playing field. The playing field is already level.
I mean leveling the playing field in the sense of lowering the standards so that anyone can join. For firefighting that is extremely dangerous. That is also true for any essential services.
ASVS('97)/SDN('03)
"Whilst human alchemists refer to the combustion triangle, some of their orcish counterparts see it as more of a hexagon: heat, fuel, air, laughter, screaming, fun." Dawn of the Dragons
Junghalli wrote:The problem with these people is they're in a paradigm of equality of outcome, and they think anything else is "unfair". To them a fair society is a society where the demographics of every profession resembles that of the population of a whole. Anything else must be unfair descrimination, and defending an "unfair" system can only mean you're a closet bigot.
They've been raised on the postmodernist belief that everything is a power play, so they find it difficult to see complexities beyond that (and are suspicious of people who do, because to their mind anyone who disagrees with them is probably a closet bigot). And, of course, it's always easier to "level the playing field" by lowering the bar.
It's probably also because they subscribe to the belief that all men/women are equal and that everyone is the same. So they are taking out their frustration on reality by forcing reality to bend to their will. This is profoundly ridiculous on so many levels my brain is bursting.
STGOD: Byzantine Empire Your spirit, diseased as it is, refuses to allow you to give up, no matter what threats you face... and whatever wreckage you leave behind you.
Kreia
Kodiak wrote:The only way I could think of to get more women into hard sciences would be to offer wild amounts of financial assistance.
And what would be wrong with that? At present, women represent a huge, largely untapped talent pool in a society that desperately needs more scientists and engineers. As long as nobody lowers the academic standards, I have a hard time seeing how offering incentives to attract more women into the sciences are a bad thing.
Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves…We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.--Ada Louise Huxtable, "Farewell to Penn Station", New York Times editorial, 30 October 1963 X-Ray Blues
Kodiak wrote:It seems that applying quotas to science departments for women would not increase the number of female students. Rather it would simply decrease the number of male students until the "distribution" matched up. The only way I could think of to get more women into hard sciences would be to offer wild amounts of financial assistance.
...but wouldn't offering women-only scholarships be precisely the type of gender bias that we're supposed to be striving for in the first place?
No Scholarships are your money, your requirements, I'm starting going through them at the moment for college, there's scholarships for Italians and Blacks, women in a field and the like. Scholarships are already biased.
