Wednesday, August 22, 2007

More on Women in Science

Matt's right, this is in it's final days. Here are my parting shots:

Women in Science
by: Philip Greenspun
February 2006
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

Why does anyone think science is a good job?
The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:

1. age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
2. age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
3. age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
4. age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
5. age 44: with young children at home (if lucky), fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s

This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.


Is There Anything Good About Men?
by: Roy F. Baumeister
American Psychological Association, Invited Address, 2007
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm


When I say I am researching how culture exploits men, the first reaction is usually “How can you say culture exploits men, when men are in charge of everything?” This is a fair objection and needs to be taken seriously. It invokes the feminist critique of society. This critique started when some women systematically looked up at the top of society and saw men everywhere: most world rulers, presidents, prime ministers, most members of Congress and parliaments, most CEOs of major corporations, and so forth — these are mostly men.

Seeing all this, the feminists thought, wow, men dominate everything, so society is set up to favor men. It must be great to be a man.

The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men. Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Likewise, who gets killed in battle? Even in today’s American army, which has made much of integrating the sexes and putting women into combat, the risks aren’t equal. This year we passed the milestone of 3,000 deaths in Iraq, and of those, 2,938 were men, 62 were women.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

always i used to read smaller content which also clear their motive, and that is also happening with this article which I am reading at this time.
My site > Lexington Law

Anonymous said...

Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems as though
you relied on the video to make your point. You clearly know what youre talking about, why waste your
intelligence on just posting videos to your blog when you could
be giving us something enlightening to read?
Here is my web page : Tao of Badass

Anonymous said...

Great post. I was checking constantly this blog and I'm impressed! Extremely useful info particularly the last part :) I care for such information much. I was looking for this particular info for a long time. Thank you and good luck.
Also see my webpage :: click the up coming internet site

Anonymous said...

It's difficult to find knowledgeable people in this particular subject, but you seem like you know what you're talking about!
Thanks

Here is my blog ... hot massage with happy ending

Anonymous said...

Does your website have a contact page? I'm having a tough time locating it but, I'd
like to shoot you an e-mail. I've got some suggestions for your blog you might be interested in hearing. Either way, great blog and I look forward to seeing it expand over time.

My blog ... www.babesflick.com

 
php hit counter