Please read the study, instead of making up rationalizations to avoid dealing with issues of stereotypes, gender bias, and the climate of science and engineering departments in colleges and universities. http://www.aauw.org/research/upload/whysofew.pdf
If, as I claim, it's a bad career, shouldn't those discriminating against women in university STEM careers be praised instead of condemned ^_^? The sooner someone bails out, the better, if this thesis is correct.
(I.e. it would be a lot more productive if you were to address my point instead of totally ignoring it.)
Well, one could argue that, even if the careers suck, science/technology has a big impact on people's lives, so if it's gender-imbalanced that might lead to gender-imbalanced impacts on even people not in the field, as they're stuck using tech designed exclusively by men. On the other hand, that sort of ends-focused argument isn't a very good reason for any actual women to go into the field, unless they're particularly altruistic and doing it to better society.
But yeah, I think these debates do tend to assume that STEM careers are desirable, which is why there is no similar hand-wringing about how few women get construction jobs (<10% women). Certainly they're well paid, which is probably the biggest reason STEM careers are seen as better than construction jobs, given that level of pay has become close to an exclusive measure of job desirability (e.g. we judge colleges and majors by average starting pay on graduation).
Well paid compared to consruction jobs, certainly, but not well paid at all when you look at lifetime earnings. All those years spend as a starving grad student and then poorly paid itinerant post-doc are bad, and if you don't get tenure it's game over for your career, at least as a higher level well paid professor.
It was better when I started playing the game in the late '70s (people weren't parked in post-doc purgatory for hardly as long), but I was under no illusions that I was going to make much money (I pursued it because I had a calling, one I realized in 1st grade).
We ought to mention the elephant in the room: the NSF et. al. decided in the '80s? that they wanted to keep the cost of science low so they pumped the supply big time, resulting in part in the mess we see today. I would have just missed that if finances hadn't brought my budding career as a scientist to a brutal end in 1980.
A further problem with the "STEM has a big impact on people's lives" thesis (as a motivator for going into it) is that the odds of you making a really big difference are low and seriously unpredictable. Being perfectly prepared to figure out the structure and semi-synthesis of penicillin does you little good if you show up on the scene a few years after someone else did it....
Yeah, though my impression is that the current focus is mostly on the good-for-society angle: that it would be better for society if STEM fields as a whole were more gender-balanced, even if not necessarily better for the women actually in those STEM fields.
This is a rather different argument than the more traditional one, that gender-bias/etc. is standing in the way of women who want to go into STEM careers but find themselves blocked. The focus these days seems to be more on women who don't want to go into STEM careers, to figure out why and how we can change that, which is more of a focus on social-engineering/good-for-society outcomes, as opposed to the more traditional feminist focus on personal autonomy / right to pursue your career of choice.
"If there any girls reading this or any of you who understand girls really well, let me ask straight out, why do girls lie about their true intentions/desires always?"
If you actually think women always lie, then why even bother asking us, since you think whatever reason we give will be a lie?
I mean... yes, as a woman, everything I say is a lie.
But if everything I say is a lie, then I am actually a man pretending to be a woman. But if I am a man, then what I say may be true, which means that I might actually be a woman.
Upon learning about the $6,000 cost to get in, I shall think of TED Talks as a tax on rich people to provide free, online quality content to the rest of the world.
I think this is a fantastic model and would love to see it more widely used. For example, a small portion of the tuition of Stanford and MIT students (among others) finance the creation and publication of free quality education material to the rest of the world.
How much faster would our world develop if all education was made available this way, financed by people who have the money to spend to be the first to learn something/have the benefit of real-life interaction with the original professor?
I'm actually surprised by the public spat over $6000; I figured it was much more or invite only. I mean, heck, a lot of the web conferences are $2000-3000.
I believe Mr. Scoble has a family. Anyone here with a family that still works for a living will tell you that you don't have $6000 to spend on yourself.
Mark Thornton at Mises.org has one thing right: "I believe in the unrestricted right to gamble."
But he goes on to say: "Despite this, I oppose the adoption of a state lottery." I would like to agree with him here but I think he's missing the point.
I don't oppose people setting up a lottery, even if those people call themselves a "state." I do oppose those people forcing out competition at the point of a gun.
So go ahead, "state," and set up your lottery with your ridiculously horrible odds. But when the competition arrives and provides far better odds with ease, and you send armed men to shut them down, that is where you cross the line.
I just like to focus on the truly important moral principle at stake, which is to avoid initiating force against other people.
Tax is not forced. The government doesn't force you to pay taxes. They punish you if you don't pay taxes and you earn more money than you spend keeping your business running.
However, there are myriad ways to legally pay zero tax and many people do it every year.
> Upon learning about the $6,000 cost to get in, I shall think of TED Talks as a tax on rich people to provide free, online quality content to the rest of the world.
I would be in favor of overhauling the tax system so it's more like TED, and would happily pay TED-like taxes where I get a high level experience for an expensive price and the whole world benefits as well. Also, it's optional and you don't get arrested/shot for not buying a ticket.
> I would be in favor of overhauling the tax system
Not gonna happen.
What could happen, though, is that you could start something like TED, and charge wealthy people for a high level experience, and let the whole world benefit as well.
These instructions are incorrect. Clicking "turn off buzz" will only remove the Buzz label from your Gmail account.
You need to either (1) delete your Google profile first; or (2) if you want to keep your Google profile, edit your profile to not display followers, then delete any buzzes you may have posted, then removed connected sites, and THEN click "turn off buzz".
