House of Eratosthenes

This comes up a lot, in my career field. Someone wants to do something about the present fact…which over time has become something of a lingering fact…that very few out of the total number of science jobs, are held by women. And so this latest plan, or stunt, will be introduced with great fanfare. It makes for a lot of attention for those who seek it, but at the end of it all nothing changes very much.

Hooters Waitress Are the geeks like me keeping women out of the field? That is the idea you can see people would like to position ahead of a voice box, just before giving it some hot air so it can lunge out and achieve promotion to spoken thought. They seldom go this far because the thought wouldn’t last long. Keep women out of the field? What meeting was that? I must have missed it. And if I didn’t miss it, I sure as hell wouldn’t have voted yes. Shortening and brightening my work days, working alongside nice-looking intelligent women, like it seems ALL the other male working classes get to do…lawyers, architects, hospital workers, bureaucrats at City Hall, Hooters cooks. Nope, the software engineers just have to toil away endlessly, shoulder-to-shoulder with a bunch of other sweaty guys. Oh, we’re working hard to keep it that way, are we? Well that would be news to this one.

But you can tell the thought is there. In pieces like this one for example, which adheres to what has become a familiar journalistic pattern: Paragraph One mentions that males already in the field, are poorly behaved. Paragraph Two bludgeons the readers with some more statistics about the disparity. The link between these two things is for the reader to imagine.

Which I must admit, is beyond me. What could the link be? “‘I get called “honey” and “dear” a lot, too.’…women still hold only about 20% of all computer science jobs.” Does the first cause the second, or the second cause the first? Let’s see…woman lands a “science job,” gets called “honey” and “dear,” is traumatized, quits to go home and make babies. Or…women don’t hold many science jobs, so the guys in those jobs never actually see women and don’t know how to behave around them. Well that works a bit better. I must be one of the offenders, having occasionally used these terms. But, I make it a point only to do it around women I know fairly well, who I’m sure would not take it the wrong way. Which I have found is very often the case, most women don’t have a problem with it. Especially when you limit your selection to the women who have actually accomplished something that requires disciplined, scientific thinking.

We only have so much energy. Even upstairs between the ears, when we’re not doing anything physical, there is a finite number of “CPU cycles” in the gray matter within any given time interval. We can burn them off thinking about, is that an unintended infinite-loop, or is it a memory leak? Or we can waste them on being offended. But not both. It is highly unlikely anybody is going to do both.

I’d still suggest getting to know a female co-worker fairly well before calling her “honey.” If you have sufficient sanity about you to write some code that works, which is among the very first steps, you probably don’t need this advice.

But, back to the paucity of female practitioners in hard-science fields. It is a trend so durable, we should recognize the possibility that it is a comment from Mother Nature on the human condition. Maybe, just maybe, the chicks — generally — just don’t wanna. I said generally. You make such a remark in any sort of public setting, and the retort comes flying back at you at Mach One: Not so! This chick over here did such-and-such, and there isn’t a man alive who could do it better blah blah blah…yes, true. But this says a lot more about the handicaps of the retort-maker, than it says about men and women. The concern is about statistics. As in, averages. How’d you lose track of this so soon, retort-maker, we were just discussing it. Were you sleeping?

Reality is falling short of a goal, that the women in these fields should number in proportion to women in the general population. That is the concern. The question it inspires is: From whence did this goal come? Reality did not produce it; that’s why it is under indictment. But reality shouldn’t be. Reality never did or say anything to promise this.

Sexy Librarian I’ll answer the question. It came from the premise that men and women are exactly the same. Which is factually, provably wrong.

“What can we do to get more women into the STEM fields?” is something that illuminates, brilliantly and as few other things do, the yawning gap between bureaucratic thinking and reality. If there are some young girls who’d like to sharpen their skills, and they’re feeling somehow intimidated by whatever, then curing that would be a worthy goal for anyone. But after all the failed efforts to manage the girls in bulk like they’re cattle or something, reroute them around, culturally condition them, with so little to show for it, it’s time to see that as what it is: A problem that exists on a case by case basis. Even there, it is likely that the talking-heads have overestimated its effects, and not by just a little bit. There’s a great deal more going on to intimidate young girls away from becoming swimsuit models, or beauty pageant contestants, than from being STEMmers. Fact is there just isn’t that much social excoriation going on in these fields, because there’s not a lot going on socially in any direction. It’s an anti-social vocation. We get together out of necessity, only when it is absolutely necessary to get further work done, or when the bosses make us do it. These are called “meetings.” We hate them. Most of us do anyway. I’d venture to say the only people working in STEM fields who look forward to meetings, are the political-animal types, the ones whose favorite desktop computer application is the e-mail client. The ones who have to have the last word on all matters great and small. The ones who, if you look closely, aren’t really all that STEM-my.

And sadly, those are the ones who all too often become bosses. That’s when you know you’re working for a bureaucracy, and the priority of technological advancement has slipped a peg or two. When we hear about people who look good in suits and are good at talking into microphones, making their noise about “getting more women into the STEM fields,” we know it’s one of those tell-tale signs that the wrong people are in charge. That we’ve got twiddlers in charge. Those who can, do; those who can’t, make fancy speeches and twiddle with the rules constraining those who are doing. That’s best-case scenario. Worst-case is, we have insane people in charge. Because let’s face it, if technology is important, that means technology can alter the course of humanity for the better, just like your course is altered by someone extinguishing the fire that was consuming your house…and in a situation like that, if you’re all worried about whether the fireman has a penis or a vagina, you can legitimately be called a lot of different things but “sane” is not one of those things. Worry about the fire. That’s the job.

How do we get more (x) into STEM (ok, ANY desirable/climate controlled/”leadership” salaried) fields?
1. Lower the standards, but that’s a bit obvious. (SEE: SAT)
2. Proclaim sandwich making, shirt ironing, child rearing, home making, home education, all “sciences”. (SEE: Humanities)
3. Have more (actual) productive professionals simply self identify as feminine, (vagina or not), on “forms”. Automatic “extra” health/HR benefits apply as well)
4. Re-re-rewrite “other than merit” quota requirements for “standard” gub’mint contract application-to-submit-bid tomes.
5. Indemnify “administrative” oversight for catastrophic quality control failures. (SEE #1)
- CaptDMO | 03/14/2016 @ 08:47
[…] Freeberg brings up some inconvenient truth: […]
- DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Women in STEM | 03/14/2016 @ 09:39
Good list Capt., but working for a major gub’ment facility controlled by liberals as I do, you forgot the number-one solution:

1. Throw taxpayer money at it. Hey, if important (liberal) people get endless ritzy banquets, retreats, social-functions, getaways, parties, trying to SOLVE the quite-possibly-non-existant-and-unsolvable issue at hand that’s (other people’s) money well spent!
- P_Ang | 03/14/2016 @ 12:49
Throw other peoples money at it?
Hmmm, I thought that was tacit in #4, and especially #5.
Meh, point taken. I too have personally seen it as well.
RARELY with the actual problem at hand addressed, rarely “unsolvable”, and rarely addressing
“exactly how did this person(s) get hired for that job?”
But YAY! I made a BUNCH of money putting out fires generated by “educated” folk, inexplicably entrusted with matches in the manger.
- CaptDMO | 03/15/2016 @ 15:37
I’ve done phone tech support for well over 20 years now. Would have loved to have been a dba and was trained for that, but didn’t get the chance to use it. Oh well. And I was a Help Desk Supervisor for awhile. Yeah, I know these are “soft science” skills, which is why I put them to use to keep customers from canceling, so the bills get paid.

I think it just comes down to the fact that guys are more willing to put up with interrupts in their private life. Women aren’t. I’ve been on call a lot and I’ve never liked it. Since I didn’t have kids, it wasn’t a big factor. I can see a young woman, new relationship, not wanting to take those calls at midnight when the server goes down or the network gets hacked. That goes double if she has kids. I don’t think women have the same thought processes as men. (And this is a generalization. I don’t want to use the words “think logically” here, but men seem more likely to have that decision tree thought process than women do.) And my observation is that companies are willing to accept women in certain tech areas, like database administration, support and sometimes programming. They tend not to hire women for network administrators. I don’t see a lot of women doing pc repair. Personally, I’m not crazy about hardware. I can work on it but seem to get my hands banged up.

I don’t know how long it will be until we can safely say that yes, there are differences in how men and women think. And there are differences in the types of jobs that women want compared to what men want. From my own personal survey, I can tell you that women tend to think they have the wrong department when they hear my voice on the line. I get the “I’m not sure you can handle this” or “I’m not sure I’m at the right department.” Men are more likely to move right along, once I assure them that they aren’t in billing. And…..I’ve had both men and women scream at me. Women are more likely to apologize the next day.
- teripittman | 03/17/2016 @ 12:43
This is an example of the curious paradox of feminism: Feminists insist that women are just as good as men … as long as they act just like men. While a “traditionalist” would say that men and women fill different but equally valuable roles, the feminist says that men and women must fill exactly the same roles. The things that women have traditionally done, and that most women want to do and get satisfaction from doing, are unimportant and demeaning. There is nothing that feminists hate more than femininity. They say that a woman should be able to do whatever she wants. But if a woman says that what she wants to do is be a kindergarten teacher, or a nurse, or a secretary, they don’t approve of that choice at all. She should want to be a professor of engineering, a surgeon, or a CEO. And if a woman says that what she really wants to do is stay home and devote herself full time to raising her children and maintaining her home, the feminists shriek with horror and/or derision.

The idea that the lack of women in STEM is because of discrimination flies in the face of the experimental evidence. Has there ever been a society, at any time in history, anywhere in the world, where the majority of scientists and engineers were women? Not that I know of. To say that every known society for thousands of years has had the same irrational prejudice is a theory that requires hard evidence. The far more plausible theory is that there is something about the biological nature of men and women that leads women to either not be particularly good at this or not want to do it.
- saneperson | 03/18/2016 @ 09:13
I’ve been a software developer for almost 40 years. I am hard pressed to recall EVER hearing a male software developer say that he didn’t want women around. I suppose if you looked long and hard enough you could find some who feel that way, but they have to be a tiny minority.

When I was in high school I was in the science club. We had about 40 guys and 3 girls. Someone once pointed out to me that when the planned part of a meeting ended and everyone was just sitting around chatting, we always broke into 3 groups, with one of the girls and a bunch of guys in each group. I watched a few meetings after that and she was absolutely right. Each girl would take a table or a corner of the room or whatever, and then a bunch of guys would cluster around each of them, where she would reign as queen of her little group. My friend referred to the guys clustered around each girl as her “harem”. Did the guys resent the girls being in the science club? Certainly not. We loved having them there.
- saneperson | 03/18/2016 @ 09:19
[…] the tl;dr is “engineering student tries to get laid by pretending he’s all about the girls in STEM (but in a supportive, feminist way); fails […]
- Lust in the Age of Asperger’s | Rotten Chestnuts | 03/26/2016 @ 06:57

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Women in STEMMonday, March 14th, 2016

Women in STEM
Monday, March 14th, 2016