MIT Names First Female President 540
wintermute1000 writes "According to CNN, MIT has just named its first female president. Along with other recent programs' efforts to get more women involved in the MIT community, is this a step in the right direction for the historically gender-biased institution?"
The whole world is gender biased. (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, take a look in the coal mines. They too are very gender biased. You don't see many chicks underground with a jack-hammer. Funny, you don't see them complaining about this, either.
The reason women do not have as many of the 'top jobs' in this world is economics. If you hire a woman and she has a kid, then she will be gone for several months and you will have to pay her maternity leave even though she isn't there. Economically speaking, it's better to hire the man. I don't mean that a woman does not deserve the job or isn't capable of doing it, but managers look at the demographics and see that it is more profitable to hire a man. You could even argue that they are obligated to hire the man for the sake of the shareholders.
Question for women (Score:5, Interesting)
An article related to this topic.
Is Evolution Leaving Men Behind? [spectator.org]
Here's something Charles Darwin in all his philosophies never imagined. As the third millennium of the common era kicks off more American women than men are graduating with baccalaureate and post- baccalaureate degrees. More women are enrolled in law schools, journalism schools, and soon, they will exceed men in all professional schools, with the exception the dreary schools of engineering and business. At this rate, women will soon overtake men as the top wage earners. Evolution is leaving men behind.
McElroy, who writes a column for FoxNews.com, reports being dismayed at finding educated women who are "genuinely horrified at the prospect of dealing with 'lesser' and 'lower' men as equals in their personal lives." But one of the findings of evolutionary psychology is that females of whatever species are hot-wired to find the best possible mate.
The second para is kinda OT, but interesting nevertheless.
Is it MIT that's gender biased.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The whole world is gender biased. (Score:5, Interesting)
Interestingly, most European nations take care of this disparity by granting new fathers potential leave as well.
Re:When will this kind of regulation go too far? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The whole world is gender biased. (Score:3, Interesting)
Why aren't women going into computer science? It's not like coal mining where the job sucks afterwards. Generally, it's sitting in an office and making a lot of cash. So why is it?
-dave
Re:When will this kind of regulation go too far? (Score:1, Interesting)
We urgently need to admit more women and encourage women to go into science and engineering! That will make the difference between a world-class research institution with a healthy social life and an unproductive male-dominated nut house with an anti-social climate where pathetic sketchy nerds are spending more time looking at porn than doing research. This applies to other universities as well and it is our last chance to change it.
Or they just don't like existing discrimination? (Score:5, Interesting)
Jack is the stereotypical incompetent monkey. He's a marketer who noticed that he could get more money if he switched to being a "programmer". Unfortunately his only IT skill is marketting himself to clueless PHBs. (I've worked with him before. He's the guy I mentioned that spent hours trying all combinations of *, & and nothing on every variable in C++, because he never could understand pointers.)
But the bosses _love_ Jack. Jack speaks their language. Jack may not be able to code shit, or anything else, but he knows how to say exactly what the bosses want to hear.
Jack also loves making compliments like "Hey, it's rare to see a chick with brains." (Said verbatim to a competent female employee who's programmed in assembly before. _Way_ more competent than him in any case.) He actually thinks it's a compliment, and not the sexist idiocy that it really is.
Jill, for better or worse, did finish a CS college. No, she's not a genius, but I'd say at least more competent than half the monkeys hired in that department just because they were cheap.
Jack has been on a sort of a personal Jihad against Jill for more than a year. He'd hunt every single mistake in her code and run show it to everyone else, or humiliate her in front of other employees.
He came to me a few times with such "proofs" that Jill writes bad code. Invariably Jill's code was right, and it just showed that Jack didn't understand even the _basics_ of Java. The language he's paid to program in these days. E.g., he didn't know that String constants are internalized.
I called him an idiot to his face on those occasions, and explained to him why Jill's code works and is OK. (Hey, I never said I was a diplomat.) He stopped coming to me, and I thought he got over it. I was wrong.
Recently Jack got promoted to team leader. (As I've said, the bosses _love_ him.)
Their team also had grown with two people fresh out of college. Again a male and a female. Let's call them Dick and Jane. Jane was undoubtedly inexperienced. On the other hand, Dick, by everyone else's assessment, bosses _and_ coworkers alike, was a fscking catastrophe.
What does Jack do? Jack recommends that they fire Jane, but keep Dick. The boss's question? "Huh? Why Jane? I thought Dick was the catastrophe."
Jack insists however that they keep Dick, reasoning that it would be bad for the project to fire both, and Dick will probably learn along the way. Takes all his marketting skills, but he gets the boss to aggree.
So Jane packs her bags, and Dick, for all I know, is still blundering to even understand Java, but still in that team.
Now let's get back to Jill. As I've said, at one point I thought Jack had gotten past his unexplicable feud against her. As I should have guessed, he was actually just avoiding me, after I had called him an idiot.
What's Jack doing now, in his team leader position? Finally getting Jill fired.
So it seems to me like you don't even have to try hard to see discrimination in action. You just need an open mind, which is really what's lacking.
CS _is_ a boy's club. Hiring interviews are conducted by prejudiced people. You have prejudiced people as team leaders and co-workers, spewing sexist idiocies without even realizing it. Or being condescending and treating you a priori like a poor retard just because of gender preconceptions. And you have to interact with prejudiced clients and internal PHBs, who need to assert their testosterone supremacy anyway, but doubly so when it comes to women in tech fields.
Seems to me that anyone who's not outright fired, needs a pretty thick skin to stay in CS. A lot prefer to just leave. I've seen people bail out of CS and into other jobs because of this. (E.g., from programming to usability or whatever else, which isn't as supposed to be an exclusive boys' club.)
And the results of this aren't even perceived as the results of blatant discrimination, but used as further "proof" that women aren't fit to use a computer.
It's not even the only discrimination in this field. Age discrimination against males is at least as widespread.
How Affirmative Action works with us (Score:5, Interesting)
Not that complicated, not discriminatory. If the guy scores better, he gets the offer. Also note that the scoring was largely subjective -- there were plenty of opportunities to get the person you wanted.
The big deal is not her gender (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:gender bias? (Score:3, Interesting)
That would be a very powerful argument, if MIT were not actually historically gender-biased. It's not a fun fact to face up to, but both in student life and in treatment of professors, MIT has shown signs of gender-bias.
It's arguable that in student life, MIT has been less gender-biased and more a symptom of females being discouraged from following science and engineering. MIT was all-male until the 1960s, and since then, from what I can tell, the admissions officers have been trying to admit more women without shortchanging the men. However, having more men has meant different treatment, in student life and academics. For example, in student life, the residential system at MIT has been and still is heavily dominated by fraternities, which means the men have dictated much of how student life operates. That's just an example and not the whole story, of course, since student life is a complicated system.
In the treatment of professors, though, MIT admitted in a report in ?1999? that it found significant bias against female professors in many important areas, including assignment of lab space to new professors.
So, while I agree that MIT, like everyone else, should hire the best candidate, it is absolutely proper for the media to bring into the discussion MIT's previous gender bias and what the effects may be of having a female president for the first time at such an institution.
Re:male/female/black/white (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of people say it's a bad idea this, and a bad idea that... however, history has shown, that companies supporting the "good ole boy" type of infrastructures have keep the minorities out through very shady practices.
My alternative to affirmative action would be that all interviews are recorded and stored off-site as they happen along with candidates resumes. Disputes in this case would have more merit without the need for affirative action. However, not all the hiring process goes on during the interview, so even this is not a 100% fool-proof. It would just give more merit to someone who thought they were discrimanted against.
Because in my experience, give someone the opportunity to pick what they are comfortable with over what may be better... they'll pick what they are more comfortable with.
Re:Is it MIT that's gender biased.... (Score:2, Interesting)
There have been studies done that show that up until junior high, females tend to score better on tests than males. It's only in junior high that these levels tend to go down. One of the reasons given for this is that teachers don't tend to encourage girls to go into math and science. Now we all know that there are more factors at work than that, but in my personal experience, it IS a factor. Now, I went to an all girls high school and junior high (flame me all you want for being a hypocrite here with my single-gender school choice), and something like 70% of our graduating class went into maths and sciences. And believe me, they all liked it. But compare those numbers to that of a typical high school and I think you'll see a big difference.
Re:probably change towards good (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree, the status quo has worked pretty well so far... for white men like me.
Re:male/female/black/white (Score:4, Interesting)
But I also hired a black person (yeah, I know, sounds like a token, but if you know Massachusetts, you know there aren't exactly thousands of blacks applying for high tech jobs either, one of about 15-20 people I hired, along with 2 or 3 asians, and 2 Indians - to some extent, it just reflects the demographics of moderately qualified candidates who applied for jobs).
As a guy who grew up in New York City, a thoroughly urbanized young guy, in many ways I would identify more with a lot of black people more than I did with many of the middle aged, blue collar-ish white males I worked with. In any case, my point is that there are a lot of other factors that come into who people feel comfortable with and who they relate to beyond just the hue of their skin. These are complex cultural and background issues, whether people like to play golf, watch baseball or hack on open source code in their spare time, whether people are religious zealots or avowed atheists, whether people have 7 children or are sworn bachelors. All these things can have just as much effect on the hiring process as race does. That's why I don't believe in practicing affirmative action in the way it is now (I do support legislating non-discrimination, I just think it's generally pretty tough to enforce, since like I said, there are so many other arbitrary but often coupled factors involved in workplace fit that it's hard to say why certain people get promoted, why others get fired, and so on).
Re:Question for women (Score:2, Interesting)
Are you more likely to apply to MIT because it has a women president?
No.
It irritates me intensely when people place emphasis on giving girls female "role models" in the sciences and technology in an attempt to make them more interested in pursuing those fields.
I think that this spreads the unconscious perception among girls that they shouldn't try to explore new ground, or be the first to try something new, or not give a crap how many men and how many women work somewhere - instead, they should wait until another woman has tried it, to see if it's "safe for women". WTF?
I have never cared about the gender balance in any place I have ever wanted to go to. If I wanted to go, I went. Nobody has ever tried to stop me.
A counterpoint (Score:5, Interesting)
The prevailing mindset here seems to be: "Encouraging diversity by lending extra weight to minority candidates is actually discrimination against non-minority candidates, and therefore is bad"
That's not an unreasonable way to look at it, but there's an inteligent other side which isn't saying "discrimination against white males is okay", as the strawman posts here state. The intelligent other side of this argument goes like this:
1. There are prejudiced people out there, people who discriminate against various minorities. If you honestly don't believe this, then you don't get out enough.
2. This prejudice almost always comes from ignorance. By very definition, prejudice means you don't have detailed knowledge of the subject. Most people who interact on a daily basis with multiple people who are [pick a minority] tend to lose their prejudices.
Imagine you have a small firm of some kind, made up entirely of white men who are genuinely prejudiced. They truly believe that black people and women are poor workers. As a result, they are unlikely to ever hire anyone black or female, and are likely to go on believing in their current prejudices. On the other hand, if they were forced to hire black people and women, there's a decent chance (not 100%, but probably more than 20%) that over time the exposure would cause their prejudices to erode, and that they'd begin hiring genuinely qualified members of various minorities of their own volition.
That's basically the thinking behind the affirmative action, quotas, and reverse-discrimination. It's not that "white men are bad and should be punished", or that "we owe minorities for past wrongs, and should make it up to them now". It's that the best way to get rid of existing prejudice is to expose to diverse groups of people, which is something they won't do if left to their own devices.
Personally, I'm not convinced that the good accomplished by this approach is worth the cost, but I at least acknowledge that the other side of the argument means well and has a reasonable point.
Re:enforcement (Score:3, Interesting)
The people who do the hiring and run the place aren't the ones who suffer when funding is cut. My wife works at the University of California and when her department's funding was cut by 70%, they mostly laid off administrative staff. None of the directors got laid off, nor did anyone in HR get laid off. Funding cuts aren't going to hurt the right people. Additionally, a subjectively applicable weapon like that will be used by the enforcing authority to bludgeon departments it doesn't like to death.
Re:hasn't been tried (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Left out option 3 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:probably change towards good (Score:3, Interesting)
The WTP program mentioned in the article is part of this. There are similar programs open to everybody, but fewer girls show up to them than boys. So they have a program for girls that does more outreach.
It's easy to see statistically that white males apply without any particular encourgement (the same seems to be true of asian women, actually). If the chance that a good candidate doesn't apply is higher for a particular minority, that means that the chance that a random member of that minority who wouldn't otherwise apply would be a good candidate is higher (assuming that demographics really don't matter). So you get better results by seeking applications from underrepresented minorities and ignoring demographics in your decision than you do by seeking applications equally from everyone.
Re:Sexist policies (Score:2, Interesting)
Secondly, suppose there is a small delta between the skills of hypothetical white male and the hired candidate. In the long run, is a small difference in skill really that big of deal? It seems like the difference between getting 94/100 and 95/100 on an exam, i.e., unimportant.
I understand why people feel upset over this. I don't like quota systems because they make people think others were hired just because of their race or gender. However, the ridiculous inflation of the differences between candidates seems like nothing more than a case of sour grapes to me.
Re:A counterpoint (Score:2, Interesting)
Philip Greenspun [harvard.edu]
Re:Chicken & egg (Score:1, Interesting)
You should have read the book 'What Could He Be Thinking?: How a Man's Mind Really Works' [michaelgurian.com]. Even though most of us are not living in socially isolated enviornment, you can't simply disregard biological elements within each person. Changing gender tendencies requires a lot more than just social conditioning and plastic surguries. That's why many recipients of gender reassignments in early days had miserable social lives.