[HN Gopher] An alternative argument for why women leave STEM
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An alternative argument for why women leave STEM
Author : nabla9
Score : 237 points
Date : 2020-01-17 18:31 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| proc0 wrote:
| Why do we care that there are equal women and men again? Why does
| representation actually matter again? I would find it more
| exciting to see a field with no representation because I could
| make a greater impact! This whole ideology of having
| representation everywhere is very dumb and conformist.
| Nouser76 wrote:
| Because diverse opinions lead to better end products. Having
| homogenized groups of people means you're leaving some
| viewpoints out, and those viewpoints have sometimes been
| extremely helpful for me as a software developer.
| proc0 wrote:
| Sure, however this isn't false otherwise. Non-diverse
| opinions aren't bad by default, and ultimately the main
| concern here is thinking the opposite, that diverse opinions
| are always right.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| Because countries where women are dominated by men both legally
| and culturally, have higher rates of birth, crime, poverty,
| etc., than countries where women have a level of social
| mobility similar to men.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Actually, no, it's the other way around - in less egalitarian
| countries, women are _more_ likely to pursue science and
| technical careers.
| mcguire wrote:
| proc0 has a point: the more people you filter out for
| irrelevant reasons, the more is left for the mediocre who can
| pass the filters.
| e12e wrote:
| Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems to be typical sexism:
| there's work at work which is paid, and work at home which is
| not. Men do little enough of the latter, that doing the paid work
| isn't a problem. Women do such a large part of the former, that
| they feel the need to chose between which part get done.
|
| Sure, the positive way to change this, is to reduce the unpaid
| work (child care professionals are paid, cleaners are paid etc) -
| that is, to acknowledge it as work that needs to be done, is
| productive, and should be part of what society rewards/share
| resources to get done.
|
| But the equal rights / equal opportunity path indicates that we
| also need a (bigger) culture shift so that the unpaid work of
| running a home is more equally divided.
| jfengel wrote:
| It's notable that in general, even when paid, "women's work" is
| less valuable than men's work. The younger a student is, the
| more likely they are to be taught by a woman, and the less they
| are likely to make -- but is teaching a high schooler harder
| than teaching a first grader? Cleaning, child care, and nursing
| are all both female-coded and low-paying.
|
| Women are often pushed towards professions involving some kind
| of care -- and it's expected that they'll want it because they
| have an emotional attachment rather than for money. Being a
| homemaker is the limit case: absolute attachment and zero pay.
|
| I wonder what would happen if we simply made the purely
| numerical correction of counting homemaking in GDP. Would we
| value it more? Would it make it more attractive to men? Would
| we develop better infrastructure?
| Terretta wrote:
| > _this seems to be typical sexism: there's work at home which
| is paid, and work at home which is not_
|
| If it's not paid, how do those doing it live?
|
| Tax documents call the salary worker + home maker combo
| "household income", which may be an appropriate way of thinking
| about the household getting paid and the household looking
| after the home.
|
| This applies regardless of the genders of the happy couple, so
| I'm not sure it's 'sexism'.
| proc0 wrote:
| Running a home is boring and not as valuable as learning a STEM
| degree and helping out society move forward. We can easily
| imagine a distopia where everyone works and no one has a proper
| home, but we surely cannot do the opposite which is imagine a
| world where everybody has a nice home but no one knows how to
| build anything and there is no electricity or water pipes. STEM
| is hard and requires sacrifice to get to a point where you are
| taking on the responsibilities of civilization, and for women
| that equivalent is simply having a child.
| 40acres wrote:
| This seems like a really long argument just to end up at the main
| point being: "It really is sexism". The light bulb moment here is
| that it's not necessarily sexism on an individual level but on an
| institutional one.
|
| I believe there is an obvious difference men and women which, on
| a general level, incites women to weigh family responsibilities
| over career prospects. However, industrialized nations exacerbate
| that difference by making it very difficult for women with
| children to spend the time necessary for career advancement.
|
| The key here isn't necessarily throwing your hands up and saying
| there's nothing you can do about it, but more robust programs for
| parents to help lessen the load of parenthood.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > more robust programs
|
| And by "more robust programs", you mean more related
| confiscatory taxation. Meaning that, again, men must surrender
| even more, and accept even less, to accommodate women.
| icandoit wrote:
| Would you think a tax levied on the childless and payed out
| the child-possessing to be sufficiently gender neutral?
|
| Why are childrens well-being not the concern of men? You have
| assumed something to be true, that I haven't, maybe.
| balls187 wrote:
| My note to the author, enjoy your career. If and when you feel
| ready to start a family, you will. And if it doesn't happen,
| you'll be okay too.
|
| Maternal Age seems like a boogie man story to scare women.
|
| Perhaps STEM women who are early career (24-28) would benefit
| from meeting mothers (both who are in STEM and not in STEM
| careers) who had children at age 35+.
|
| > ...Women who stay in academia expect to marry later, and delay
| or completely forego having children, and if they do have
| children, plan to have fewer than their non-STEM counterparts
| (Sassler et al 2016, Owens 2012). Men in STEM have no such
| difference compared to their non-STEM counterparts
|
| I would love to see the figures regarding the partners of STEM
| Women vs STEM Men. Is it due to the old sexist notion that women
| must "marry up" so a woman with a successful career have
| partnered with someone who also has a successful career?
|
| Having family shifts perspective. Perhaps some of these women no
| longer felt a strong desire to further their career, and family
| matters became more interesting?
|
| As a father, I love my job, but I gladly set aside my career to
| raise my kids.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Maternal Age seems like a boogie man story to scare women
|
| Actually not. It's not just the genetics / pregnancy problems
| that _are proven_ to significantly rise with age... but also
| that the time of menopause can neither be forecast nor the
| effects reversed (some hit it with 40, some with 60!), so there
| is a significant disadvantage (=no kids at all) for waiting too
| long.
|
| Additionally: do you want to deal with a baby when you're 25 or
| when you are 40 or, worse, 50, that keeps you awake all night?
| It's a massive toll on your physical and especially mental
| health - the younger you are the better you cope. And your kids
| will be happier to have a dad/mom who can actually do things
| with you when they're 15-25 years...
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| I absolutely agree, maternal age is not discussed often
| enough, there are a number of risks that go up significantly
| when you wait until later to have children, for both men and
| women. A mother at age 20 has a 1 in 1,441 of having a baby
| with a Down Syndrome, whereas the odds are 1 in 84 at 40
| years of age. Even at age 35 there's a 1 in 338 chance of a
| woman giving birth to a baby with Down Syndrome which is an
| order of magnitude higher than a woman at age 20 has, and
| that's just one defect! There are a whole host of defects
| including Autism that are strongly associated with the
| mother's age. Similarly a woman who has a baby at 40 has a
| 5.5% chance of dying before that child's 18th birthday, at 20
| the odds of dying before your child reaches adulthood is only
| 0.6%.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_maternal_age#Risk_of_.
| ..
| balls187 wrote:
| It's that a _RISK_ of increase, is being substituted a
| guarantee.
|
| And, I should clarify, I was speaking about the authors range
| of starting a family around age 35.
|
| > Additionally: do you want to deal with a baby when you're
| 25 or when you are 40 or, worse, 50, that keeps you awake all
| night?
|
| I see that as personal choice, and each family should be able
| to make that choice for themselves by understanding and
| weighing the risks.
|
| _Not_ be scared into making a decision with misleading
| statistics.
|
| Me personally, I had the means at age 38, that I could hire a
| night doula (and nearly did). Infants usually begin sleeping
| through the night ~6 months, coinciding with them starting
| solid foods (breastmilk tends to go through a baby quickly)
| while solids take longer to digest. As I was on the cusp of
| my little guy starting solids, I tried a couple different
| things first:
|
| * Used a sleep sack
|
| * Moved his pack-n-play outside my room
|
| Both helped him sleep through the night.
|
| So ~6 months wasn't terrible. I also have a unique situation
| that helps me cope with elevated levels of stress.
|
| For our first child, we had a live-in nanny.
|
| I got to enjoy living for myself from 25-35, that when I
| settled down to start a family, I was able to focus on that.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > I gladly set aside my career to raise my kids.
|
| You're going to need some money when they get to be old enough
| to go to college.
| balls187 wrote:
| Nah.
|
| They're 3rd generation immigrants. They need to learn to
| struggle.
| hurricanetc wrote:
| >Maternal Age seems like a boogie man story to scare women.
|
| It's just a biological reality. It is certainly possible to
| have a healthy birth after the age of 35 but the rate of health
| problems and birth defects don't go up linearly with age. The
| rate of pregnancy loss is 35% after the age of 35 and is above
| 50% after the age of 45. This is just reality. If women want to
| have multiple children it is wise to start before age 33.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| The decrease in fertility with age is a biological reality,
| but I also suspect it's influenced by attrition selection and
| stress, and looks worse because of it. Fecundability seems to
| be roughly linear with age, and gravid women have
| significantly higher fecunability ratio from 40-45 than
| nulligravid women do.
|
| > In this preconception cohort study of North American
| pregnancy planners, increasing female age was associated with
| an approximately linear decline in fecundability.
|
| https://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(17)31107-9/pdf
| balls187 wrote:
| The statistics do not tell the whole story.
|
| A reason I suggest young women speak with women who started
| families mid-late career would hear actual experiences,
| giving perspective that it's not as bleak as the statistics
| show.
|
| We had two children, both healthy, after mom was 35.
|
| We also had a pregnancy that didn't go to term.
|
| I surmise women might take some comfort in knowing that
| pregnancy complications are normal.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's not about individual anecdotes, it's about
| probabilities and actuarial risks.
|
| A woman who gets pregnant at 25 is less likely to have
| issues than a woman who gets pregnant at 35 and _much_ less
| likely to have issues than a woman who gets pregnant at 45.
|
| That's the reality.
|
| The fact that _some_ women have successful pregnancies at
| 45 doesn 't change it. Nor does it suggest that women
| should simply ignore the facts and hope for the best.
|
| _Some_ drivers make successful journeys while drunk,
| without killing themselves or anyone else. That doesn 't
| mean drunk driving is a recommended personal choice, or
| that the element of choice somehow makes the risks
| disappear, or that drunk drivers who happen to beat the
| odds and survive many journeys should be sharing their
| lifestyle choices with others.
| balls187 wrote:
| > A woman who gets pregnant at 25 is less likely to have
| issues than a woman who gets pregnant at 35 and much less
| likely to have issues than a woman who gets pregnant at
| 45.
|
| You are equating to "issues" to mean "no healthy
| children"
|
| > The fact that some women have successful pregnancies at
| 45 doesn't change it
|
| Is a straw man.
|
| _Plenty_ of women have successful pregnancies at 35. And
| 25 year old women debating that choice should hear from
| them.
|
| Said differently:
|
| Can you wait too long to have children? Yes. Is 35 too
| long? No.
| pnw_hazor wrote:
| My wife was a developer (EE degree). As soon as our first child
| was on-the-way she put down her programming books and picked up
| the child rearing books. She dropped her dev job the moment her
| water broke and never looked back.
|
| The opportunity cost was enormous but now that the kids are
| grown it sure seems like it was a great plan for us. My wife
| did get a lot grief from her family for dropping out of the
| workforce ($$) until they started having their own kids.
|
| We have two daughters. The youngest is in college for CS, she
| has made it very clear that she does not want to have children.
| The older daughter is not STEM -- she is an Army officer
| (Westpoint Grad) who does want kids someday.
|
| One of my in-laws is using nannies and such even though they
| easily could drop to one income (MD specialist dad, pharmacist
| mom) -- it hurts my heart to see how much time they voluntarily
| spend away from their kids, including weekend shifts, holiday
| shifts, etc. But it is their life, and their kids seem to be
| thriving so what do I know.
| balls187 wrote:
| Between the two of you, why did you stay in workforce?
| shkkmo wrote:
| So it seems that in addition to fighting sexism, we need to
| combat ageism, the viability of non-standard career paths with
| breaks, and the friendlines of the workplace in general to
| families.
| [deleted]
| lordnacho wrote:
| One thing that she touched on that I've thought a lot about
| recently is the age at which we have kids. My father passed away
| a couple of weeks ago, and I compare him to his brother. My uncle
| had his first kid 10 years younger than my dad, and he ended up
| with the fourth one being older than me. He's got 10
| grandchildren, the oldest of which is an adult now. My dad's
| grandchildren will never know him in any real way.
|
| Since the funeral I've thought about this a lot. Our later-life
| relationships will be affected by the age at which we had kids.
| I'm sure this is in the minds of a lot of people in this economic
| age. There's a lot of "investing in your career" where the
| equation doesn't account for this.
|
| I wish we could have an economy where this was easier. Say you
| could have your kids early, in your 20s, yet still progress your
| career. Perhaps pay for it with working to an older age, which
| should be possible with some improved health outcomes. Along with
| a flexible education system that allowed you come in and out. And
| perhaps incentives for firms to let people in and out, instead of
| the constant career grind that requires people to constantly
| push. Some of the finance and legal tracks seem to be for people
| who are expected to die at 45, like some weird victorian
| dystopia.
| trowaway54321 wrote:
| I was discussing this not long ago and hypothesized that we have
| swung the pendulum so far in encouraging women into STEM that
| they feel pressured into the decision, ultimately leading many of
| them to go down a path in which they have no interest.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| Academic careers in STEM require almost exclusive focus on your
| career for the first two decades of pursuit. This is simply
| because that is what the competition does.
|
| My anecdata suggests women are less willing to allow a single
| aspect of their lives to entirely dominate over all others. Child
| bearing happens to be one of the bigger alternative endeavors,
| but it's not the only one.
|
| Supporting women (and men!) who want to pursue an academic career
| in STEM while raising a family is a laudable goal. I hope it is
| more effective than I expect it to be.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Heck, let's spend 99% -- $1.485 billion (in the states alone)
| on better support. That should put a dent in the support bill,
| and I'd sure pick up $15 million if I saw it lying around.
| Wouldn't you?
|
| According to PEW
| (https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/01/09/diversity-in-the-...)
| there were 17M STEM employees in 2016, so this leaves less than
| $1000 per employee for childcare. According to Fortune
| (https://fortune.com/2018/10/22/childcare-costs-per-year-us/) the
| average cost per child is $9K/year (probably more if you adjust
| for the distribution of STEM careers?). I'm guessing STEM
| employees have at least one child on average (some have none,
| others have multiple, etc), so that only covers about 1/9th of
| the bill. That's a dent in the bill, but I'm not sure it's enough
| to make even a proportional dent in the pipeline.
|
| Note that this assumes the money finances a benefit that must be
| offered to all employees; if you can target the women in
| question, the calculus clearly changes; however, I suspect that
| would be difficult under current US discrimination law (IANAL).
|
| That said, I'd rather that money go to employees where it would
| certainly be useful as opposed to the current programs which, as
| far as I can tell, is squandered (to put it nicely).
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| > I suspect that would be difficult under current US
| discrimination law
|
| What statutes do you believe would stand in the way of an
| organization offering excellent daycare services to its
| employees, as suggested in the OP?
| scarmig wrote:
| One tactical approach: a high achieving woman could prioritize
| finding a partner who is interested in deprioritizing his own
| career for the sake of supporting her and raising children. This
| is a strategy high achieving men have used for a long time.
|
| So, pursue men involved in "child friendly" careers. Nurses
| instead of doctors; teacher aides over academics; tax preparers
| over management consultants. Or even men who are passionate about
| the idea of being a stay at home dad.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| I think hospital work is unsuitable for people with children.
| Strangers spilling their blood and guts all over the place; and
| the hours suck rotten eggs.
| ThrustVectoring wrote:
| The dating marketplace is two-sided; one reason why high-
| achieving men use this strategy is because there are a lot of
| women in this niche competing for high-achieving men. There
| aren't nearly as many men in this niche competing for high-
| achieving women, likely in part because there are relatively
| fewer high-achieving women using this strategy.
|
| A big part of strategy in marketplaces is choosing something
| that has a lot of participation so that you can find enough
| counter-parties to make your strategy work.
|
| There's also a biological asymmetry in terms of age and
| fertility. A man who is single until age 45 and then gets a lot
| of economic success can marry a younger woman and have
| children.
| golemiprague wrote:
| Anybody who is doing this is going to loose his woman or at
| least makes her resent him and loose any attraction to him.
|
| You can write stupid articles and researches and whatever, it
| is not going to change the basic nature of men and women. Women
| job is to bring children and raise them, men job is todo the
| rest and until biology changes in some magical way it is not
| going to change.
|
| Women are still mainly attracted to care taking and value
| transference jobs, they don't like stem and not very good with
| creating value, whether it is physical or theoretical jobs, how
| many women music bands do you know? Even art they don't create
| much.
|
| Whoever wrote the article didn't ask themselves why women
| doctors don't leave their jobs, it is also very hard and
| demanding, but they like what they do because it is care taking
| and care taking was always the traditional job of a woman.
|
| Modern thinking demand us to ignore those simple facts and just
| pretend that things are different, it is just a stupid phase
| that will eventually disappear like communism or any another
| stupid ideology
| JDiculous wrote:
| Great article, and the same dynamic applies to all genders. I was
| listening to a podcast the other day where a founder said that
| the most successful people he knew (eg. entrepreneurs) all had
| the worst family lives - multiple marriages, bad or non-existent
| relationships with family, etc.
|
| Work and family is a trade-off, their is no way around it. One
| can live a balanced life and be moderately successful. But to be
| among the best, the most elite, something generally has to give.
|
| That's not to say that we can't reform the systems to not make it
| as "winner-take-all", sort of like how the author suggested.
| tylermenezes wrote:
| I think it's still a form of sexism to assume women are the ones
| who need to care for a child. That's something that very few
| diversity-in-STEM folks are really thinking about.
|
| Many years ago an ex-girlfriend, who works in STEM academia (and
| is otherwise a liberal, progressive feminist), expressed concerns
| similar to the author about having kids. When I brought up that
| it wasn't written in stone that she would need to be the primary
| caregiver, she said she'd never even thought of the alternative!
|
| (Anne-Marie Slaughter touched on this in a 2012 Atlantic article
| called "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" for anyone who's
| interested.)
| naasking wrote:
| A woman would still need almost a year of special work
| consideration for the pregnancy, appointments, and post-birth
| recovery, even if they're not a primary care giver afterwards.
| hyperdunc wrote:
| Women are more likely to want to be the primary caregiver to
| something that actually came out of them. It's biological and
| there's nothing sexist about it.
| vondur wrote:
| I can't speak for women, but the pay for science degrees kinda
| sucks. I'm guessing it would make sense to leave to another field
| that pays better. My wife was a bio major and her first real job
| was selling HPLC columns. She ended up not liking sales so
| pivoted into teaching where the pay is decent.
| dustinmoris wrote:
| Maybe some people value spending time with their children and
| seeing them grow up more than chasing a stupid meaningless
| promotion at a mundane STEM job somewhere. If you have one child
| then you have only one chance in life to answer all their curious
| questions when they are 6 years old, only one chance in life to
| see them learn how to swim, etc. etc.
|
| Life is about collecting wonderful memories with the people who
| you love, not about maintaining some idiotic excel spreadsheets
| in an open plan office. Maybe we should measure how many women
| are happy with their life rather than measure how many of them
| have a certain job title in a certain field. If we can maximise
| the former then who gives a shit about the latter.
| corporateslave5 wrote:
| The truth is men are more mathematically inclined. Why we as a
| society make up all sorts of fantasies is beyond me
| vorpalhex wrote:
| That is clearly not the only reason, and likely isn't even a
| major factor in and of itself. Yes, we might expect to see
| slightly more men in general in math heavy fields, but that
| women tend to drop out as they approach not heavier math, but
| more time consuming/worse work/life balance situations
| (management) suggests the issue isn't just "men are more
| mathematically inclined".
|
| Like any complex phenomenon applying to a multitude of people
| there are several effects happening in different proportion at
| the same time.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| I'm totally on board with making changes that address concerns
| for women specifically.
|
| That being said, as someone not in academia, it seems like a
| crazy path for anyone, male or female. As the article said,
| you're usually 34 before you have a lab established and the
| research program really gets going. Is there any way the system
| could be changed/simplified so that talented researchers could
| start earlier?
| [deleted]
| rudolph9 wrote:
| I wonder how often women in STEM have children with men who earn
| significantly less?
|
| I ask because my partner Is a software engineers. She plans on
| continuing to work and I plan on staying home with the kids.
|
| Practically speaking it doesn't totally make sense since I
| currently earn more being a few years older in the same career.
| It's just what we both have wanted since we found one another and
| we're willing to make the life adjustments necessary to make it
| happen
|
| I can't help wonder how often women partner with men with lower
| incomes. Obviously the physical toll of baring children tips the
| scale a little but given couple where the woman makes
| significantly more than her partner I would imagine the decision
| would be logical for her to continuing work and wonder what
| percentage of women leave stem in this particular subset of the
| group?
| dcole2929 wrote:
| A lot of people would argue, imo correctly, that this is just a
| different form of sexism. The idea that progressing in your
| career means sacrificing work/life balance and more importantly
| family could absolutely be construed as the end result of a
| sexist mind state that doesn't value motherhood and family
| rearing to the degree it should. Obviously this affect men who
| want to be present and active participants in their children's
| lives as well, but as the author points out in many cases the
| inflection point at which ones career can really take off also
| overlaps with prime childbearing years.
|
| There is a lot of pressure on woman to have families and in
| circumstances where their right and ability to both do that and
| progress in their careers isn't respected and protected we end up
| with the current system. One in which woman drop out of less
| flexible fields earlier, and even in them don't get promoted as
| fast as their male counterparts who don't need to bow out of the
| field for months at a time to have a child.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> I've got a big scholarship, and a lot of people supporting me
| to give me the best shot at an academic career -- a career I
| dearly want. But, I also want a family -- maybe two or three kids
|
| Oh.
|
| Up to this point I was keeping notes with my criticism of this
| article, but this caused me to stop and reconsider.
|
| If I may advise the author, I understand how difficult it is to
| balance life decisions that seem to be at odds, but trying to
| deny the very reason why those life decisions are hard to combine
| will not make the choice any easier.
|
| It is stupid and sexist that you have to think of pursuing a PhD
| and having two or three kids as an either/or option, when the
| (probably) man you'll want to start a family with will not have
| to do that, even if they are also a PhD in STEM.
|
| This is part and parcel of the sexism that people complain about.
| It's not just inappropriate behaviour by senior male academics.
| There is no reason why a woman must put her career on hold to
| start a family when a man in the same career does not need to.
| There is no reason why women are expected to be the ones most
| concerned with the business of having and raising children when
| men are expected to be the most concerned with advancing their
| careers. How is that not sexist? How is that not the sexism
| that's keeping women from advancing their careers in STEM
| academia?
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| >How is that not sexist? How is that not the sexism that's
| keeping women from advancing their careers in STEM academia?
|
| Why should the academy structure itself so that women who
| choose to put their attention into their families do not have a
| career impact? If academic positions are necessarily zero-sum,
| it seems impossible to correct for this without seriously
| unfair negative externalities?
|
| How is it that the biases inherent in collective decisions of
| individuals within society are the responsibility of the
| academy to correct for (that men tend to choose to focus on
| career and women on family)?
| [deleted]
| abathur wrote:
| Maybe it helps if I knock the particulars out of your case:
|
| Why should <organization> structure itself <in response to
| reasoned feedback from the humans who constitute it>?
|
| Do you have some clear argument for why members of an
| organization aren't entitled to participate in shaping it?
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| I don't see how my point served to excluded a member of the
| academy weighing in. Note that my question was specific in
| the context of a zero-sum industry. I'm happy to see
| reasoned arguments that address this point.
| abathur wrote:
| You didn't expressly exclude it, but weighing it answers
| your question.
|
| The academy should structure itself in the way its
| members decide it should be structured.
| [deleted]
| blub wrote:
| Yes, nature and sexual selection were sexist and designed women
| so that they have to bear the brunt of having children. That's
| reality, I don't see how it helps in any way to call reality
| sexist.
|
| And having a career is not the most awesome thing in the world.
| Many fathers would very much prefer to spend time with their
| families, but can't because they're expected to first and
| foremost provide for them.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Nature and sexual selection have nothing to do with it. A
| complete lack of societal support for women who want to have
| children and maintain a career in STEM academia (or similar)
| is all there is to it.
|
| >> Many fathers would very much prefer to spend time with
| their families, but can't because they're expected to first
| and foremost provide for them.
|
| Why do the fathers "have to provide"? Why is it so difficult
| for a man to stay at home and take care of the kids, after
| they're born (which he can obviously not really do)? Is that
| nature, again?
| blub wrote:
| Society is supporting women who raise children and men who
| provide. This worked quite fine for the history of human
| civilization, but it's painful for women that want to build
| careers and men who want to be with their families.
|
| First of all, there are very many people that are content
| with that situation. There is no easy solution for those
| that aren't, because nature does play a huge part and those
| 9 months and at least the first year are very important for
| the baby and mother. There is no way the father can provide
| the same emotional and physical support, so he might as
| well ensure that his family is otherwise taken care of.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| The father can't provide emotional and physical support
| in the first year of life of a child? Why? What is it
| that a father can't do during the first year of a child's
| life, other than breastfeed it, that the mother can?
| icandoit wrote:
| I thought the pre-industrial role of women included
| crafts and gathering. I would put those under the
| "providing" umbrella.
|
| If we imagine that fathers taught their children to hunt
| and fight we would expect children to be raised those
| abilities too.
|
| I wonder if role specialization is more prevalent now
| than it used to be. Perhaps some pre-industrial societies
| were more egalitarian than we pretend to be today.
| hinkley wrote:
| I can't speak for women, and I'm just smart enough not to try.
|
| But what I can say is that I don't hold all of the values that I
| did as a young man. I'm not excited about the same things, and
| today I find some of those ideas uncomfortably naive or even off-
| putting.
|
| As I've engaged in more activities, as I've socialized with more
| people, I've encountered many more ideas and a lot of nuance.
| Nothing has simple answers and there are other solutions to
| problems besides code, or tools, or pills, or surgery.
|
| And one of the consequences of this is that I'm not confident
| that if I show up to interview at a startup that I'm going to
| exhibit the degree of 'passion' they're looking for. I have
| plenty of passion. Too much, some will tell you. I just know
| beyond all doubt that your new iOS app is not going to save the
| world, and quite bluntly, that you have some unresolved issues
| that you need to work through if you so desperately need to
| believe how transformative your work is going to be. And I know
| that's not just STEM - all the 20-somethings who I've seen doing
| volunteer work - and bless you for showing up - feel exactly the
| same way. I'm gonna change the world. I _have_ to change the
| world. Otherwise my life is empty and I am nothing.
|
| It can be discomfiting to be around and I'm sure I telegraph it.
|
| They say that young women socialize a little ahead of young men.
| Maybe they just get a whiff of my reality before all the rhetoric
| gets piled on so thick that's all they can see.
| arwhatever wrote:
| It just so happens I have a hidden camera video of you at one
| of these interviews. :-)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtwXlIwozog
| slumdev wrote:
| > And one of the consequences of this is that I'm not confident
| that if I show up to interview at a startup that I'm going to
| exhibit the degree of 'passion' they're looking for.
|
| This is good, though. If you faked the passion, you might wind
| up surrounded by lunatics who actually believe their iOS app is
| going to save the world.
|
| Also, this "passion", most of the time, is just a word that has
| been co-opted by the owner class to mean "working nights and
| weekends".
| hinkley wrote:
| Yeah, I had that pattern in mind as I was choosing my
| phrasing.
|
| Coworkers know that they can come to me and say, "hey dude,
| your code is busted and 4 people can't get work done," I'll
| drop everything and fix it if I can't give you a workaround
| (and it'll bug me until I do fix it). I like that passion in
| others. I get into a little trouble when that passion is
| about completely fixable things that are dragging down
| productivity and morale. I'm not particularly repentant about
| that either.
|
| But when it's some tie telling me we have to work weekends
| because they didn't listen when we told them "shipping this
| functionality by April 3rd is a dangerous fiction and you
| need to come up with a new plan?" you're on your own pal. If
| you can't hear 'no' then you can't make useful contingencies.
| Also it probably means you don't respect the people I respect
| and that's gonna be a problem.
| slumdev wrote:
| It sounds like your priorities are in order.
|
| My passion rears its ugly head when my team is asked to
| take shortcuts and ship garbage to meet deadlines. It also
| comes out when we're asked to implement half-baked ideas
| without having the chance to meet and question the ideators
| and refine those ideas into something workable.
| sequoia wrote:
| In her article, she explains her hypothesis that women leave
| top-flight STEM/academic careers because the demands (and,
| crucially, _when_ they must be met: 20s & 30s) conflict with
| the demands of bearing children during a woman's most-likely-
| to-be-successful childbearing years. She goes on to suggest
| that creating more supports for mothers such as affordable
| childcare and possibly collaborative academic working
| environments might mitigate the issue.
|
| What leads you to think primarily about "passion" &
| socialization? It seems almost as though we read different
| articles, I didn't see anything about that.
| mc32 wrote:
| Yes from her description it does seem like childcare would
| help a lot. But one of the other things she mentions is the
| moving (city/state) as well as travel. But sure looks like
| childcare would go a long way in helping.
|
| I don't think we would build "science towns" like Los Alamos
| in this day and age, but that would probably help as well.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Having kids changes a lot of priorities about passion and
| socialization, although this generally affects all genders.
| foogazi wrote:
| Is there a Paul Graham like post out there about children
| from a woman's perspective?
|
| http://www.paulgraham.com/kids.html
| tomp wrote:
| This is not a sufficient explanation. There's more women in
| law and medicine, which are equally, if not more demanding.
| There must be something else - the nature of work (more
| people, less machines), the atmosphere (less bro, more
| professional), the pay (STEM careers plateau quickly)...
| tmcb wrote:
| I don't have any compelling evidence at hand, but
| professionals on STEM fields usually seem compelled to
| engage on career-related activities off their work hours,
| which is pretty much impossible during childbearing years.
| naasking wrote:
| > There's more women in law and medicine, which are
| equally, if not more demanding.
|
| There exists plenty of gender disparity within these
| fields. Many more women in pediatrics, obgyn and family
| law, many more men in surgery, for instance. I'd like to
| see a study of these disparities to see if the subfields
| women choose have the benefits this author suggest is a
| major cause of women leaving STEM.
| imgabe wrote:
| Law and medicine allow for maternity leave.
|
| In academia, you have a set amount of time to get tenure.
| It is not extended for pregnancy. If you don't get tenure,
| your career is basically over.
|
| While the article talks about leaving STEM it focuses on
| PhDs and academia. This is an academia problem, it's not
| specific to STEM.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Also women in business.
| gnaritas wrote:
| Law and medicine are traditionally seen as high status and
| may retain women longer, but certainly, suffer the same
| issue; women over 30 drop off dramatically in law as they
| leave to become parents.
| willhslade wrote:
| Law and medicine don't Logan's run you out with a
| constantly and pointlessly changing tech stack every five
| years.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Depends a lot upon your language. The ecosystem of lots
| of languages have been fairly stable over the past 20
| years, such as Java.
|
| Of course it doesn't have tons of new shinies. But that's
| the point - if you want a stack that isn't constantly
| changing for no reason, pick a stack that, well, isn't
| constantly changing for no reason. This just means you
| won't be using the latest and "greatest", practically by
| definition.
| slumdev wrote:
| It would happen in medicine if the public generally knew
| the truth.
|
| The risk of a medical error rises by about 1% for every
| year a doctor is out of school.
|
| Either AMA's continuing education requirements are
| lacking, or something else is at work.
| mkolodny wrote:
| Great synopsis of the article. Nothing about GP's comment
| relates to the article's points. In case anyone's reading
| these comments who hasn't read the article, it's super worth
| reading.
| eecc wrote:
| The GP comment is worth a thought though
| fnord77 wrote:
| > you have some unresolved issues that you need to work through
| if you so desperately need to believe how transformative your
| work is going to be.
|
| I think those issues are called narcissism.
| hinkley wrote:
| I did not mean to imply that there isn't a ton of other
| unwarranted bullshit they have to deal with. Reading it back to
| myself, that wasn't clear at all.
| MrFantastic wrote:
| Men are hardwired to ascend to the top of the hierachy so they
| can access all the women. That's why male billonaires will risk
| their fortune to make another billion.
|
| Women are not rewarded biologically for being the top 2% in
| their industry. It's almost as if the higher women climb career
| wise the fewer dating options they have because women tend to
| want men that are even higher on the totem pole.
|
| Outside of a score keeping system, each additional dollar is
| less rewarding very quickly once you pass $150k in income.
| scarejunba wrote:
| It's okay to be jaded, but to present that as coming from
| wisdom that others are missing is both self-congratulatory and
| lacking in self-awareness.
|
| I think you misrepresent startup founders. Most I've met are
| generally very smart people and they've read _The Remains of
| the Day_ too so it 's not like they're this nerd-in-the-
| basement fantasy you get from the movies. The Hollywood fantasy
| is dead.
|
| I'm only saying this so that young fellows browsing HN from
| their computers at university aren't immediately discouraged.
| To them: The world is very exciting here. You can find a team
| and work happily and passionately on something you care about.
| You will be fine. It is probable that you will be better for
| it. Good luck!
| Konnstann wrote:
| I think there are plenty of people who believe "if you're not
| part of the solution, you're part of the problem." I'm lucky
| enough that my job is both interesting and impactful. The
| people that surround me are either incredible scientists or
| like working for a company that strives to, and does, make an
| impact in the world.
|
| I think it's perfectly fine to not care about your job to a
| higher degree than necessary, and I also think it's fine to
| seek out work based on social impact rather than salary. Most
| people can't have it both ways, and end up having to make a
| choice at some point.
| hinkley wrote:
| I've been guilty of that myself. Question is, _which
| problem_? There are so many problems (some of them personal,
| some of them management won 't say out loud) and everyone has
| their own priority queue.
|
| Maybe the real problem isn't even technical. Maybe Jim and
| Tom just hate each other because something happened when they
| first met. We can keep arguing about haproxy vs nginx 'til
| the cows come home, or I could say to myself, "Hey, they both
| listen to Kevin, I'm gonna go ask him for a favor..." but
| that's kinda passing the buck.
|
| My biggest success not falling back to other people for this
| was Ben, who yelled at me - in an open office plan - the
| first time I asked him for help. It took most of a year of me
| making smalltalk at the coffee machine before he was happy to
| see me coming, instead of avoiding eye contact. I think at
| some point he figured out we think alike on certain BS
| technical limitations, and then I started getting smiles.
|
| If you can't tell from this that I'm fond of cats, especially
| shy or cantankerous ones, well...
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| > Question is, _which problem_?
|
| My problems, of course.
| maire wrote:
| Is this poster for real? I am not sure how this got top upvotes
| since it doesn't seem to be about the article at all. The
| article was about women in STEM academia which doesn't seem to
| be at all about women whiffing a poster's reality.
|
| The article is about women in STEM academia which is a tiny
| subset of women in the STEM workforce. Some STEM professions do
| a better job of retaining women than others.
| deyouz wrote:
| The article is about women in STEM in Academia, not just STEM.
|
| And I don't understand why people absolutely need to have
| biological children. I think more people should just adopt if
| they want to raise children.
|
| I also think sexism in the US is the biggest factor for women
| leaving Academia or not entering STEM. In other countries more
| than 50% of the researchers are women and 40% of the students
| studying computer science are women.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Because many traits people care about (like intelligence), have
| been shown to be at least partially genetic?
| tathougies wrote:
| There are few infants to adopt due to the success of americas
| adoption programs and the willingness of americans to adopt.
| The ones that are 'easy' to adopt almost universally have
| special needs that most people (especially working parents)
| simply cannot meet.
| cortesoft wrote:
| The desire for biological children is pretty ingrained in our
| psyche.
| larrik wrote:
| > I think more people should just adopt if they want to raise
| children.
|
| As someone who has adopted 3 children, I assure you that the
| biological route is way easier and cheaper. It's not like
| rescuing a dog from the pound...
| pgeorgi wrote:
| Except for birth and family planning related complications
| that are minimized in exactly the time frame where career
| effects tend to compound (or so the article seems to claim)
| [deleted]
| sprash wrote:
| > And I don't understand why people absolutely need to have
| biological children.
|
| Especially smart women in STEM should have children because
| cognitive abilities like intelligence and conscientiousness are
| largely inherited traits (e.g. IQ is between 50% and 80%
| inherited according to twin studies).
| icandoit wrote:
| >And I don't understand why people absolutely need to have
| biological children.
|
| Consider these possibilities:
|
| 1. A best case scenario is that what you have expressed is a
| personal opinion that takes your genes out of the future in a
| Marty McFly fading away fashion as this opinion hardens.
|
| Fine. Your choice. More pie for the rest of us.
|
| 2. A worst case scenario where this opinion accumulates in the
| market place of ideas and inevitably leads to human extinction.
|
| Impossible right? Well, know that disgust with sex is climbing
| in rich nations (like Germany and Japan) and the number of
| births per woman is falling. Is this a function of wealth, or
| technology?
|
| South Korea has fewer than 1.1 births per woman. That can only
| translate into a poorer, older, and smaller country for the
| future. [1]
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/KOR/south-korea/fertil...
|
| (I tell people that this was the thickly veiled premise of the
| movie Bird Box.)
|
| If that is true, then can it be called a choice? Are people
| actually choosing to have fewer sexual partners than their
| parents generation? Are people really choosing to feel disgust
| at the thought of intimate contact?
|
| Maybe repulsion-to-sex is a bigger threat to continued human
| existence as nuclear weapons.
|
| Another fun article:
|
| https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-long-until-were-all-...
| yorwba wrote:
| > that disgust with sex is climbing in rich nations
|
| Source? People are having fewer children, but is that because
| they are too disgusted to have sex?
| icandoit wrote:
| Nearly half of young women in Japan are "uninterested in
| sex" or "averse to sex"
|
| - https://www.rt.com/news/377342-sexless-japanese-
| marriages-st... - https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/sta
| tements/2015/jun/23...
|
| I remember seeing a similar headline for German women but
| cannot find a source now. (I think people expect weird
| think from Japan so it's good practice to compare to other
| countries)
|
| Maybe social media and instant communication has replaced
| (or dulled) some of, what used to be, our sexual appetites.
|
| Half the world is sub-replacement-rate: "As of 2010, about
| 48% (3.3 billion people) of the world population lives in
| nations with sub-replacement fertility"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility
|
| What statistics should I look for the document disinterest
| in sex?
| yorwba wrote:
| The RT article doesn't say anything about disgust, so why
| bother linking to it?
|
| The Politifact article does involve aversion, but only
| aggregated with disinterest:
|
| _" The percentage of women who responded they were not
| interested in sex at all or felt an aversion to it was
| 60.3 percent for ages 16-19 and 31.6 percent for ages
| 20-24. Combine the age groups, and the average response
| was about 46 percent negative -- the figure that drove
| attention-grabbing stories in Western media."_
|
| To interpret the numbers differently, a net 30% of
| Japanese girls aged 16-19 become interested in sex within
| 5 years.
|
| I tried looking for the original report to disaggregate
| lack of interest and aversion, but I only found it on
| Amazon and don't feel like buying it.
| https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/4930807085
| icandoit wrote:
| The RT article said that "Nearly half the couples had not
| had sex in a month". That happens because they prefer to
| do something else instead.
|
| Will you grant that this means that interest in sex has
| fallen?
|
| The Politifact article says "In 2013 a whopping 45
| percent of women aged 16 to 24 'were not interested in or
| despised sexual contact,' and more than a quarter of men
| felt the same way."
|
| Which matches my claim:
|
| > Nearly half of young women in Japan are "uninterested
| in sex" or "averse to sex"
|
| My claim was that disgust with sex is rising.
|
| Another article makes these delightful claims:
|
| https://time.com/5297145/is-sex-dead/ -
| More than 40% of Japanese 18- to 34-year-old singles
| claim they are virgins. - the fraction of people
| getting it on at least once a week fell from 45% in 2000
| to 36% in 2016. - more than twice as many
| millennials were sexually inactive in their early 20s
| than the prior generation was. - In 2016, 4% fewer
| condoms were sold than the year before, and they fell a
| further 3% in 2017. - Teen sex is flat and has been
| on a downward trend since 1985 - The median age for
| first marriage in America is now 29 for men and 27 for
| women, up from 27 and 25 in 1999. - the highest
| drop in sexual frequency has been among married people
| with higher levels of education - those with
| offspring in the 6 to 17 age range were doing less of
| what made them parents
|
| What do you make of these data points? I think they
| successfully demonstrate that interest in sex is falling.
| yorwba wrote:
| > My claim was that disgust with sex is rising.
|
| > What do you make of these data points? I think they
| successfully demonstrate that interest in sex is falling.
|
| You're equivocating between disgust and lack of interest,
| but these are very different things. I wouldn't have
| bothered asking for a source if you had blamed falling
| interest rather than rising disgust.
| deyouz wrote:
| The average human's genes are not that great as to deserve
| preserving. I certainly see the benefit from preserving the
| genes of the woman who lived 122 years old, though.
|
| I don't think it's bad to find sex repulsing. I mean, sex is
| inherently disgusting. It involves naked bodies and bodily
| fluids. You can'g describe sex in a way that doesn't sound
| repulsing.
|
| Besides, people can have children without having sex through
| IVF. But if a woman is repulsed by sex, I can totally see why
| she would also be repulsed by pregnancy.
| alharith wrote:
| Woke twitter after reading this article: Having children is a
| tool of the patriarchy! Another way that men keep women down! Why
| don't _they_ have the biological maternal desires to have
| children?
|
| Technocratic twitter after reading this article: We must solve
| the "maternal tax" gap!
|
| Normal people after reading this article: "yes, this is what we
| have been saying for years. Promote the family."
| amb23 wrote:
| Mothers--the vast majority of mothers, not the aristocracic ones
| we model our current family structures off of--have always
| worked. They'd strap the baby on their back and go to the fields
| to plow or gather the harvest or cook or weave or chop firewood.
| Motherhood as as a full-time job is a modern invention;
| historically, it was a side gig.
|
| I'd love to see a startup tackle this problem: think a benefits
| platform that allows companies to offer daycare as a benefit, or
| a Wonderschool-like daycare for working parents. Even an improved
| work from home policy for new parents would go a long way to
| plugging the talent "leak" that's prevalent right now.
| snarf21 wrote:
| It isn't a bad idea but really you are just talking about the
| _cost_ of daycare services. Some mothers and fathers stay home
| because they want _time_ with their kids at a very young age.
| They want to be able to go to every show and tell. Most people
| who are able to have a stay at home parent is because the other
| partner makes enough so the don 't need to work. You suggestion
| just makes work possible for a subset that don't work because
| sending four kids to daycare costs more than they could make.
| There are other issues for school age kids where they need care
| close to their school district (for busing) not necessarily
| where they work.
| icandoit wrote:
| It may have also been the case, that before industrialization,
| metal smelting, and anything-faster-than-walking the world was
| inherently safe.
|
| Daycare only become necessary once transportation, tools that
| could cut, and exposed toxins became abundant.
|
| Imagine a world were all parents let their children roam the
| streets from dawn til dinner, child-right-of-way, and any harm
| befalling a child was universally met with public outcry
| against the adult responsible for creating unsafe conditions.
| (If you left a can of gas unlocked and Jimmy burns thing down,
| you are responsible, not Jimmy or Jimmys parents. Rational
| precautions etc.)
|
| Kids would be barred from factories sure, highways and other
| necessarily dangerous places could be fenced off. Contrast this
| with our blame-the-parents instincts, now.
|
| Can we collectively consider taking a step in that direction?
|
| When our workplaces have a spot for our cars and not our
| children, should be surprised that car ownership climbs and
| fertility falls?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > It may have also been the case, that before
| industrialization, metal smelting, and anything-faster-than-
| walking the world was inherently safe.
|
| I would disagree: historically, kids had to cope with other
| threats - illnesses, toxic or otherwise deadly animals,
| general accidents that are "tiny nothings" today could
| cripple or even kill you back then because there were no
| antibiotics...
|
| Back 200 years ago, this only worked because people bred like
| rabbits. Partially of course because there was no birth
| control (or its usage, e.g. intestines as condoms, frowned
| upon by the church) , but also because if you had 10 kids it
| didn't matter if all survived and losses were expected/built
| in. Now with people having only one child or two, these
| _must_ be protected to ensure family survival, and that is
| where helicoptering comes from.
|
| > When our workplaces have a spot for our cars and not our
| children, should be surprised that car ownership climbs and
| fertility falls?
|
| The other idea would be to _provide livable wages again_. I
| am 28 now, my father was barely 20 and a fresh police officer
| when I was born - but he could solely fund me, my sister, my
| mother and himself, saving enough on the side for a
| downpayment on a 100+ m2 flat.
|
| Today? Many young policemen have to work side gigs to make
| rent, and my s/o and I plan for the first kid in 3 years from
| now because without us both working (she's finishing her MSc)
| we don't stand a chance to financially survive, and forget
| about saving anything or buying a place to live if our
| parents would not support us financially. And that doesn't
| even include the question "who will stay home for how much
| time/reduce their hours".
|
| Provide real wages, limit workdays to 4x6 or 5x6 hours a week
| (and ENFORCE this) and whoops, there are the children that
| have been missing. If people don't feel safe they don't have
| kids.
| icandoit wrote:
| I would expect that if wages wise, that screens-per-person
| would increase and children-per-person would continue to
| decrease.
|
| Housing, healthcare, and actual-cost-of-food (because
| eating out is on the rise) are all increasing beyond any
| realistic hope of political reform. Best to optimize for
| children at the expense of any dream of middle class
| comfort.
|
| My parents had a low income and made 2 kids work. I expect
| to stretch things thinner than they had to even with our
| middle class-ish income. (Most meals are homemade and
| vegetarian for example).
| blub wrote:
| Historically, the extended family and neighbors were
| contributing to raising children. For a couple that doesn't
| have family close by and lives in a city, parenthood is at
| least a part-time job.
| Jagat wrote:
| Also, mothers didn't have to keep an eye on the kids all the
| time past infancy. It was fairly common to leave them on
| their own with other kids to play, only ensuring they're fed
| on time.
|
| And once they reached a sufficient age (10 or 12), children
| usually helped the family with their craft.
|
| Before the industrial revolution, what's considered norm
| today was the norm only for aristocrats.
| nimajneb wrote:
| I'm 37 and the oldest of 4 kids and your first paragraph is
| for the most part how I grew up. I don't remember my mom
| following any of us around past a certain age, like 5 or
| so. She cleaned the house etc. while we played inside or in
| the backyard. I remember going up the block to the park
| with my friends without any adults at the age of 10-12 or
| maybe a little younger.
| tharne wrote:
| Part of the issue her is that society, at least in the U.S.,
| has significantly devalued the idea of living close to one's
| family. Sure, some people don't grow up in economically
| vibrant areas, but many others move away from family without
| giving much thought to what they're giving up.
| bradlys wrote:
| > but many others move away from family without giving much
| thought to what they're giving up.
|
| I don't know how large of a population that really is. I've
| found many people move away because their family lives in a
| place that isn't approachable for them to live in. (e.g.
| Grew up in the bay area but not with well to do parents -
| just ones that barely got by. They aren't in careers that
| afford them $2m homes)
|
| And many move away because they despise them and never wish
| their children to encounter their family.
|
| I really do think many people give plenty of thought about
| moving away from family in one way or another. It's their
| family - they lived with them for something like 18 years.
| Everyone gives that thought.
| brailsafe wrote:
| I worked for a company that had daycare as a benefit, but were
| much more reluctant to flex in their more ingrained ideas of
| work schedule. I guess you could say they were more
| conservative overall, despite how much money they wasted in
| make-work. Seemed to more or less be a consequence of having
| employees with kods before they moved to a big new office.
| untog wrote:
| Not every problem is startup shaped.
|
| > think a benefits platform that allows companies to offer
| daycare as a benefit
|
| Companies could offer daycare as a benefit today if they wanted
| to. It isn't their benefits platform holding them back.
|
| In fairness, I can see why companies don't offer daycare as a
| benefit: it's enormously expensive (particularly in major
| metros) and it would be very difficult to plan what % of your
| employees would be utilising it at any one time.
|
| Other countries have solved this problem by making it
| everyone's problem: the government subsidises it. I won't hold
| my breath waiting for the US to do the same.
| brlewis wrote:
| It doesn't fit the HN definition of startup, but here's a
| small, growing company doing just that:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_Horizons
| untog wrote:
| Oh, I've used them! I just really don't think they're a
| startup by any definition. Founded in 1986, 30,000
| employees, 1,000 locations.
|
| And they aren't offering a benefit platform, they're
| running actual daycare locations. Their connection to
| employers is also most commonly providing "backup care",
| not solid day-to-day daycare. Nothing to sniff at of
| course, but that alone will not solve the problem for
| working parents.
| ng7j5d9 wrote:
| And according to one company, daycare as a benefit pays for
| itself by reducing turnover ... although Patagonia really
| stands out by offering such a benefit in the current
| environment. If such a benefit became the norm maybe people
| would go back to hopping between jobs at something close to
| the previous rate.
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/3062792/patagonias-ceo-
| explains-...
| tathougies wrote:
| Daycare isn't an appropriate analogue to your example though. A
| shift in culture that allows you to bring your children to work
| would be and would be absolutely sensible for white collar and
| several blue collar jobs.
| bradlys wrote:
| I've had coworkers bring their children into work - they're
| highly distracting and not good for work place productivity.
| It's not like bringing a pet into work that just sits on the
| floor or on their lap - and may as well be close to an
| inanimate object.
| balls187 wrote:
| Or perhaps, allowing parents to work from home.
|
| I'd imagine many families are like mine, where our house is
| strategically designed for optimal childcare.
| hammeringtime wrote:
| _A shift in culture that allows you to bring your children to
| work would be and would be absolutely sensible for white
| collar and several blue collar jobs._
|
| Young children (under three) babble and screech and cry and
| explore and try to finger everything and put everything in
| their mouth and then screech when you take the thing away
| from them or try to restrain them from getting at that shiny
| object they really want. They play for a few minutes then
| come running over demanding attention and screech if you
| ignore them. They get hungry and cry, they fall and cry. And
| this cannot be trained out of them because they are too young
| for that.
|
| None of this is a problem if you have baby proofed your house
| and they can wander and play with whatever they want, and if
| you are just doing chores and can give them the love and
| attention when they demand it and go back to your chore when
| they go back to playing again. But it is a big problem if you
| and other people are trying to concentrate and work.
| deyouz wrote:
| No... that's madness. A child has no place in the workplace.
| The child would just disrupt the day of the workers and slow
| them down.
| icandoit wrote:
| A running car would be equally disruptive I think.
|
| I have worked at places that paid for convenient nearby
| parking.
|
| I worked at a university that had a daycare just across the
| street. Given the dramatic pay gap between there and
| elsewhere it must have been sticky enough for some.
| [deleted]
| tcgv wrote:
| > Motherhood as as a full-time job is a modern invention;
| historically, it was a side gig
|
| Can you share any study/evidence to support that statement?
| icandoit wrote:
| If we imagine that the work of women was craft work that
| could be safely and comfortably be done in the presence of
| children, then we can compare that to the places and
| conditions of the workplace of todays woman.
|
| If yesterdays woman could bring her kids to work and todays
| cant, then we are pressuring women to have fewer children,
| and dumping the blame on them to boot.
|
| What does todays idealized woman look like? Who are the role
| models we assign to our daughters?
| icandoit wrote:
| Some indigenous North Americans used the strap their babies
| into cradle boards that could be propped up somewhere safe
| while parents did whatever. That handles pre-walking
| children.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradleboard
|
| I wish we knew more about how children spent their days in
| pre-industrial societies. Maybe they played out of site of
| their parents, only coming home to eat. I had a pretty
| autonomous childhood.
| hammeringtime wrote:
| To the extent that was generally true...
|
| * most mothers were still with their infants and very young
| children. The babies weren't being taken care at a daycare
| where you can have one staffer trying to deal with 4 crying
| newborns.
|
| * mothers were doing active work, not work that requires
| sitting in one place, not work that requires long-term
| concentration, not work that requires being on someone else's
| schedule.
|
| I have noticed it is no problem doing active work like cooking
| or the dishes or grocery shopping while bringing along an
| infant. But I cannot do computer work -- baby goes crazy from
| lack of stimulation.
|
| Also, being on a schedule while trying to take care of a baby
| causes immense stress. What if you have a client meeting while
| baby is crying because he needs to be fed ... or is crying just
| due to lack of comfort and attention? Or sometimes (oftentimes)
| baby has a bad night and keeps you from sleeping, but you still
| need to be up and at work at a given time, instead of being
| able to nap when baby naps?
|
| Both parents doing a schedule-bound, desk job while raising a
| newborn baby is not how we evolved to do things, and it's
| always going to be a source of stress and problems, even if you
| have "high quality" daycare available.
| jedberg wrote:
| I run a 100% remote company and have done so for five years,
| since my first child was born. Everything you said is
| something I've experienced.
|
| One of the nice things about being in charge of a remote
| company is that when I bring the baby to our weekly video
| call, no one says anything, and of course they all feel
| comfortable doing the same (although right now there are only
| fur babies).
|
| If I need to take a nap because the baby kept me up all
| night, I can, as long as there is no meeting scheduled.
|
| We try to do things as asynchronously as possible, mainly
| because being remote this is a better way to work, but the
| nice side effect is not a lot of scheduled meetings.
|
| The hardest part honestly is saying no when my son asks,
| "Daddy, do you want to play trains with me?!"
|
| But my point is, I think remote companies with family
| friendly policies will help a lot in this regard. There is
| still the issue of "I need to concentrate for two hours
| uninterrupted", but a lot of the other issues aren't so bad
| when people understand you have kids and they might come to a
| meeting and that you may not be available instantly.
| [deleted]
| choeger wrote:
| As a male that dropped out of the academic career path I can
| absolutely confirm that the author has a point. I made the
| conscious decision not to attempt to become a professor because
| it would be nearly impossible for my wife to have a qualified
| career at the same time due to the required flexibility. Add
| children to the mix and you are pretty much confined to a single-
| career family. Which would be arguable if it wasn't for the
| extremely high risk if that particular career path.
| bitwize wrote:
| Nice try, but in $CURRENT_YEAR's rules of engagement, any
| explanation for gender discrepancy in STEM besides misogyny is
| itself evidence of misogyny.
| SuperFerret wrote:
| Perfect article for sexists to use to justify being sexist.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| My dad spent almost all of my waking childhood at work and I
| still feel really sad and hurt about that. I suspect everyone has
| similar repressed resentment towards their providers, and
| professionals should really consider that when they're planning
| their families.
| rdiddly wrote:
| TL;DR - It's babies.
| o_p wrote:
| Its almost like they are biologically and mentally hard-wired to
| have children! How dares nature to create a unequal duality with
| specialized roles.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to HN
| --especially not on powderkeg topics. We ban accounts that do
| that, for what should be obvious reasons if you read
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
| krastanov wrote:
| I, and many others, hold the expectation that we are quite
| capable of overcoming our animal instincts (in this, but
| importantly in many other aspects also) to make a better world.
| Especially if the presence of the instinct is used as a pseudo
| science excuse.
| lonelappde wrote:
| What would I want to overcome the core reason for my
| existence?
| krastanov wrote:
| Making kids is not even remotely the core reasons that many
| people have chosen for their existence. And this is not
| some egoistical selfish decision: there are many more ways
| in which you can take care of the next generation and make
| their lives better, without having to give birth. These are
| noble pursuits independent of gender.
| o_p wrote:
| But it will really lead us to a better world? Theres a reason
| why we have instincts, its so arrogant from the enlightened
| westerns to think they know better than literally every other
| society in history.
|
| Take it as anecdotal experience, I dont have a study right
| here and women are free to do whatever they want. But a
| childless life is much more likely to be a less happier and a
| unfulfilling life.
| krastanov wrote:
| Sure, some instincts are good, like gagging at the sight of
| rotten food.
|
| But also, our instincts tell us to eat sugar, be
| tribalistic, and (for men) to do stupid stuff to impress
| mates. We are designed to live in caves and chase
| herbivores. But for millennia we have been doing much more
| than what our instincts relegate us to.
|
| And no, this is not a westerner with a superiority complex
| thing. See how relatively egalitarian the cultures of
| various settlers and natives have been throughout history.
|
| Lastly, while I understand that for you and many others a
| childless life would be unfulfilling, please do not assume
| this to be even nearly universal. Moreover, not having or
| wanting your own (biological or not) children does not mean
| you can not help the next generation, through mentorship
| and teaching and community service.
| pencilcode wrote:
| I remember seeing, I think in Netflix's Explained series, that
| the salary differences between men and women were the same as the
| differences between women with children and women within
| children, making raising children the primary cause for the
| average salary disparities. This article rings true with that.
| ianai wrote:
| Corporate America largely sucks. Family building and wealth are
| being attacked at many levels. I just wanted to add that.
| iron0013 wrote:
| I'd love to be wrong, but my gut feeling is that a huge
| proportion of HN readers are men--probably even a larger
| proportion than in the tech industry in general. It makes it feel
| kinda weird when these articles the gist of which are "women are
| wrong about women's issues" come up. That applies equally to the
| "all men's problems are women's fault" articles that seem to be
| just as popular around here.
| tomohawk wrote:
| > I would presume that if we made academia a more feasible place
| for a woman with a family to work, we could keep almost all of
| those 20% of leavers who leave to just stay at home...
|
| That one word 'just' speaks volumes. People grow up. People
| change. Perhaps they want a different challenge than what
| academic achievement can provide. Raising children is
| challenging, daunting, and rewarding.
| toohotatopic wrote:
| How about the variance difference: men and women are equally
| intelligent on average. However, the variance is different so
| that there are more stupid men but also more intelligent men.
|
| Could the drop-out rate simply reflect the higher share of men
| who are able to fulfill the functions that are required at those
| higher positions?
| danharaj wrote:
| The fact that women shoulder the primary economic burden of
| raising children is structural sexism. Sexism is not merely about
| personal conduct but also how we structure society. For millenia
| across many cultures women have had their participation in
| broader society curtailed to the sphere of reproductive and
| domestic labor. That is injustice. As Morenz notes, we don't have
| to accept that. We can structure our work so that women are not
| disadvantaged for having kids and men aren't penalized for taking
| a greater role in raising them.
|
| This seems like violent agreement. I think Scott was trying to
| _dismiss_ the people who criticize them by inviting Morenz to
| make a guest post. Perhaps his dismissiveness is the reason why
| this is so acrimonious.
| darawk wrote:
| > The fact that women shoulder the primary economic burden of
| raising children is structural sexism.
|
| You seem to be making a fairly subtle point here that I think
| others might be missing. Which is not that women choosing to
| take on the burden of childcare represents sexism (which is an
| argument some people make), but rather that the fact that their
| making this choice impinges upon their personal economic future
| is sexist. That is maybe a more interesting point than the
| former, but I don't think it really holds up to scrutiny.
| Choosing to take on the burden of childcare is choosing to
| spend less time working. In any other context, if a person
| chooses to work less, that negatively impacts their earning,
| and we consider that perfectly reasonable and fair. If I choose
| to play video games for 8 hours a day and work part time,
| basically everyone accepts it's reasonable that I make less
| money.
|
| Now, if women are being pressured or forced into accepting this
| childcare responsibility at their own economic expense, then
| yes. That is 100% structural sexism. Also, if society would
| have treated men making this choice differently than women,
| then that too would represent structural sexism. But there are
| men making this choice, and their careers are generally just as
| negatively impacted as the women who make it.
| clairity wrote:
| to compare it to playing video games all day is
| (unwittingly?) falling prey to the very systemic sexism
| you're trying to fathom--that "women's work" such as
| childcare is not "work"--that it's economically unproductive
| and should be "free".
| zajio1am wrote:
| > that "women's work" such as childcare is not "work"--that
| it's economically unproductive and should be "free".
|
| Obviously contractual childcare is work.
|
| Seems to me more similar to voluneer open-source
| development. It may be productive and useful for others,
| but that does not entitle anyone for compensation.
| darawk wrote:
| No, that was not the point of my analogy. Whether it is
| work or not is irrelevant. When I clean my home, that is
| work, but nobody pays me to do it. I do the work because I
| receive the benefit of that work. People care for their
| children for the same reason. And many (most?) couples
| consider the income of the breadwinner to be shared between
| the two of them for precisely this reason: Because _the
| couple_ values the childcare that the childcare-r provides.
|
| I'm not arguing that childcare isn't valuable. I am arguing
| that it isn't valuable to any employer of the person doing
| the childcare, and as such, they shouldn't pay for it.
| clairity wrote:
| yes, the employer is beside the point. the implicit
| assumption that women's work is not valuable is still
| (structural) sexism. that was the point.
|
| edit: e.g.,
|
| > "Choosing to take on the burden of childcare is
| choosing to spend less time working."
| darawk wrote:
| No, the employer is not beside the point. The employer
| pays your salary. If you do less work, you get less
| salary. That isn't saying their work isn't valuable, it
| is saying it isn't valuable _to the employer_. The person
| who values work pays for it. In this case, it is the
| woman herself who values the work. She is literally
| choosing to pay herself, in the form of a well cared for
| child. In the same way that when I clean my home, I am
| choosing to compensate myself for the effort required to
| do so by having a clean home.
| watwut wrote:
| You could have compared it to caring about elderly dad,
| doing volunteer work or anything else boring, unpaid but
| useful. Instead, you compared it to playing games which
| rubs people wrong.
| darawk wrote:
| Who cares what the evocation is? Are we not adults
| capable of following chains of reasoning without
| descending into literary analogy and euphemism? We're not
| analyzing Shakespeare here.
| watwut wrote:
| Where do you see euphemism?
| clairity wrote:
| and that's the systemic sexism--the systemic choices
| about what should, and what doesn't need, to be paid for.
|
| why don't we instead have a society where all childcare
| is paid labor and we just "pay ourselves" for other self-
| benefitting labor (growing food, for example)?
|
| (collective) assumptions like these _are_ the systemic
| sexism. note that this is different from calling a
| specific person a sexist.
| darawk wrote:
| > and that's the systemic sexism--the systemic choices
| about what should, and what doesn't need, to be paid for.
|
| Who is it you think ought to be paying for childcare?
| It's clear who pays for wage labor. The employer pays for
| it, because they value it.
|
| > why don't we instead have a society where all childcare
| is paid labor and we just "pay ourselves" for other self-
| benefitting labor (growing food, for example)?
|
| The answer to this question is "the entire history of
| economics and every lesson ever learned about how to
| structure effective civilizations for the entire history
| of humanity". I'm not really sure how else to respond to
| that.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| > But there are men making this choice, and their careers are
| generally just as negatively impacted as the women who make
| it.
|
| I don't think this claim holds up to scrutiny. Yes, there are
| men out there whose careers are negatively impacted by
| starting a family, but by and large the expectation is a man
| continues working while a woman drops everything. That's part
| of the reason why family leave for men is less common.
|
| Which boils down to structural sexism being an issue for both
| men and women. Men are not allowed to spend time with their
| family and women are expected to drop everything to take care
| of the children. In a more equally balanced situation, men
| would have the opportunity to be the full caregivers while
| women could continue their career in their field of choice.
| But right now a lot of options for families depend on your
| gender.
| darawk wrote:
| > I don't think this claim holds up to scrutiny. Yes, there
| are men out there whose careers are negatively impacted by
| starting a family, but by and large the expectation is a
| man continues working while a woman drops everything.
| That's part of the reason why family leave for men is less
| common.
|
| That isn't what I said though. Obviously men who start a
| family but don't do the childcare won't be negatively
| impacted. I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about the
| ones who _do_ curtail their careers to do the childcare.
| This is a less common arrangement to be sure, but I know
| more than one heterosexual couple who has done this
| (usually because the woman has a better paying career).
| fzeroracer wrote:
| You said that they were equally negatively impacted
| though and I brought up an example of where that is
| clearly not the case. Which is parental leave, done in a
| way as to discourage men from taking time off to take
| care of a newborn while also pressuring women to be the
| primary caregivers.
|
| That's my entire point. They're not equally impacted
| because there are larger societal pressures designed to
| punish women who want to continue their career and men
| who want to spend time with their children.
| darawk wrote:
| > You said that they were equally negatively impacted
| though and I brought up an example of where that is
| clearly not the case. Which is parental leave, done in a
| way as to discourage men from taking time off to take
| care of a newborn while also pressuring women to be the
| primary caregivers.
|
| Read what I said more carefully. I didn't say _all men_
| are equally negatively impacted. I said the men who
| choose to take on the burden of childcare are equally
| negatively impacted.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| > Read what I said more carefully. I didn't say all men
| are equally negatively impacted. I said the men who
| choose to take on the burden of childcare are equally
| negatively impacted.
|
| And I think you need to reread my argument, which is
| specifically talking about those men who do take on the
| burden of childcare against the societal pressure to do
| otherwise. I think it would do you well to reread my
| argument from the top because it's starting to seem like
| you're arguing against something entirely different than
| what I'm saying.
| darawk wrote:
| Yes, you are making a separate line of argument that is
| completely unrelated to the piece of my argument you
| quoted. I am not responding to that because I agree with
| it - social pressure that pushes women into childcare
| _is_ sexism. The impact of choosing childcare over career
| on economic is _not_ sexism.
| [deleted]
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| This assumes that men and women en masse want equal roles in
| raising children. I'm not convinced that this is the case.
| csb6 wrote:
| Sure, many more women may choose to take the more active
| role, but it's important to consider that these conscious
| choices are affected by implicit social pressures and
| expectations that are placed on men and women from childhood
| onwards, such as men being expected to be breadwinners and
| women being expected to be caregivers. These are pretty
| arbitrary social constructs that are not universal or
| intrinsic to nature or even human societies. So it follows
| that what men and women would say they desire is not the full
| picture, since they may be unaware of the implicit forces
| acting on them.
| darawk wrote:
| It's true that these social pressures exist, and they are
| certainly sexist. But I think it's important to distinguish
| that the _pressure_ is what 's sexist, not the impact of
| the choice.
| csb6 wrote:
| Then let's make an effort to expose and reform these
| sexist structures! That is the goal of people trying to
| reform the mindset of STEM institutions. These structures
| are not fixed, and so can be changed.
| empath75 wrote:
| I'd love to spend more time with my kids and my wife would
| prefer to spend more time at work. I make 3 times her salary,
| though, so it's not really economically feasible for us to
| switch roles. She could afford to not work or work part time
| for 2 years. We couldn't afford it if I did it.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| Although I love my kids I would go clinically insane if I had
| to do the stay-at-home raising of them full time. My wife
| OTOH loves it and would rather do nothing else. I know that
| this is swapped for many couples, but I still argue that
| reality is more skewed this way than the other. Maybe that
| will change over time.
| volak wrote:
| People downvote but I assure you many dads agree.
|
| IMO dads don't achieve the same level of bonding as women
| do to their babies and therefore we are able to tolerate
| less of the crap babies get into during the day.
|
| Its not sexism, its just biology.
|
| If I had a project I worked on for 9 months I would have
| more desire to continue working on it into the future. My
| investor is an interested party, but ultimately its
| entirely my drive which moves the project forward
| danharaj wrote:
| What does? I made a few claims.
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| I was responding to the main premise of your comment, that
| "the fact that women shoulder the primary economic burden
| of raising children is structural sexism." This implies
| discrimination due to external forces that make men and
| women behave differently.
| danharaj wrote:
| What do you mean by external forces? These are all
| interactions between human beings. We behave that we do
| in large part based on our interactions with others.
| Would you say that it is "external forces" that cause us
| two to communicate in English?
|
| What is the alternative position you're suggesting?
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| "Structural sexism" implies nonintrinsic forces causing
| discrimination, hence why I called it an external force,
| as it's a force not generated internally.
|
| I think the effects of evolutionary biology need to be
| considered when looking at behavioral differences.
| Evolutionarily speaking, women invest much more energy
| into growing, giving birth to, and caring for children
| than men. This leads to innate differences in behavior
| separate from social forces you are describing.
| deyouz wrote:
| Then how come some women don't want children and even
| dislike children?
|
| The reason why women are more involved in childcare after
| giving birth/nursery years is purely societal factors.
| It's expected of them to behave in that way in more
| conservative places and it's strongly implied in other
| places.
| zajio1am wrote:
| > Sexism is not merely about personal conduct but also how we
| structure society.
|
| What does raising children have to do with society? Decision of
| having and raising a child is a fundamentally personal, not
| societal decision. Each pair should decide how they want to
| split responsibilities of raising a child before its
| conception, based on their preferences, and society should not
| force them to any model.
|
| Also, it seems to me that society already prioritize child-
| raising too much compared to other non-work activities. If
| people would leave STEM/some other field due to work-life
| balance for some other personal goals than child-raising (say
| part-time working in a non-profit), would anyone care?
| [deleted]
| untog wrote:
| > What does raising children have to do with society?
| Decision of having and raising a child is a fundamentally
| personal, not societal decision.
|
| Of course it isn't. Every society needs an up and coming
| younger generation as the older generation stops working.
| That is absolutely a problem on a societal level.
| zajio1am wrote:
| While i agree it may be a concern of a society to be
| stable, it does not automatically translate to necessary
| concern for society as a whole. Many things necessary for a
| society work even if society does not intervene in them.
| People would have children for emotional reasons even if
| society does not intervene.
|
| Also, if a societal stability is a goal, then having more
| than replacement number of children is as problematic as
| having less.
| icandoit wrote:
| >People would have children for emotional reasons even if
| society does not intervene.
|
| What if that isn't true though?
|
| Fertility is universally falling in rich countries.
|
| Could you give me a number of births-per-woman that would
| motivate your concern? I think 1 birth per woman is a
| reasonable number for national concern. South Korea is
| already at 1.0.
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/KOR/south-
| korea/fertil...
|
| Without a future generation long term concerns evaporate
| from concern. Maybe this has already happened in some
| peoples minds with regard to national debt, and the long-
| term sustainability of social security.
| zajio1am wrote:
| It is true that developed countries have often get to
| this point where it may be reasonable for society so
| support child-rearing for stability reasons. But they
| often still have much more people than say hundred years
| ago.
|
| But note that this situation is relatively new, while
| natality was praised even during times where population
| was expanding. My point in this thread is that natality
| is not intristically good (or bad) value and it is for
| country to decide on which level want to motivate
| individuals to change their behavior, but having a child
| is still fundamentally individual decision.
| icandoit wrote:
| I think framing child-rearing as an individual choice is
| a dangerous framing.
|
| That's what I was getting at with the comparison to the
| movie Bird Box.
|
| It's important to think of ourselves as biological
| systems first and thinkers-as-choosers second.
|
| I suspect that an increase in the virtualization of our
| lives will lead to an equal increase in the will-full
| termination of our lives. Suicide. As our lives become
| less biological we will end them with greater intensity
| and frequency.
|
| You may not be convinced, but ask yourself what would
| that road look like? Would you recognize the indicators?
| Could you and the people you care about hop off the ride
| in time? Why did so many Westerners join the ranks of
| ISIS?
| untog wrote:
| > People would have children for emotional reasons even
| if society does not intervene.
|
| Yes, but the success of those children is still a
| societal concern. You want some of those children to be a
| new generation of doctors, teachers, etc. etc... without
| supporting them at a young age (i.e. providing education,
| a welfare safety net) there's no guarantee that would
| ever happen, and they might end up being more of a drain
| on society than a productive member.
| zajio1am wrote:
| I agree that it is reasonable for a society to support
| parents with child-raising to a degree (by say offering
| free public education and healtcare). But it is a
| fundamental responsibility of parents, society is here in
| supporting role.
| SolaceQuantum wrote:
| > What does raising children have to do with society
|
| I'm sorry? Maybe the continuation of society?
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >Sexism is not merely about personal conduct but also how we
| structure society.
|
| Great.
|
| But my personal experience is that this notion seems to vanish
| as soon as we look at things like rates of workplace deaths,
| life expectancy, hours worked, imprisonment, or numerous other
| areas. And even if they don't vanish, the level of attention
| devoted seems to be remarkably different. Would the way we
| structure society in regards to structuring our attention for
| social ills also possibly include sexism?
|
| And I guess such notions can be dismissed as being off topic.
| As they aren't relevant to the actual issue under discussion.
| But when we start viewing larger more structural things as
| sexism, then wouldn't even such dismissal potentially qualify
| as sexism?
| danharaj wrote:
| This might surprise you but a lot of feminists are also
| strongly in favor of workers' rights and prison abolition.
| For example, bell hooks and Angela Davis.
|
| I have never met people more passionately invested in the
| wellbeing of men than the feminists I read and live with. It
| is a shame to me that decades of propaganda have buried those
| voices and raised the voices of those who insist that
| feminism is a zero sum game.
| tathougies wrote:
| Have you considered that the primary enforcer of this
| curtailment is not adults but infants? I mean, I took long
| paternity leave, I am with my daughter at night, and am with
| her whenever I am home. She still wants to nurse on her mothers
| breast when she's sick or in pain. This makes sense as not only
| is it comforting to her (and a childs emotional need is very
| real) but it is also physiologically beneficial (nursing
| reduces stress hormones and helps her heal from disease
| faster). She enforces this dichotomy of roles by screaming if i
| try to comfort her and shes already decided what she wants by
| screaming mama. She'll take comfort from me only if shes
| decided that its something that doesnt require something no man
| can give. And her cry is meant to change both of our emotional
| states to fulfill her every desire.
|
| Is this injustice? Perhaps you could characterize it this way,
| but since the perpetrator is beyond reason and lacks
| expression, I'm not sure how youre going to fix this.
| Damorian wrote:
| This is an obvious truth to anyone with children. Women have
| to carry, birth, and recover from having a baby plus
| raise/feed them in the first 1-2 years. There are so many
| biological factors here that objectively make women better
| primary caretakers for children, putting careers on hold
| because raising a child is harder than most careers, that
| anyone arguing it's sexism is flat out ignorant of the
| reality of raising a child. I hate that
| progressives/feminists try to paint child rearing as an
| inferior choice to a "proper" career when it is something
| women excel at, and should be embraced and encouraged.
|
| Men and women can both program, sure, but only women can make
| people. Society simply reflects this.
| danharaj wrote:
| How many people do you think are involved in raising the
| average child? Two? I had a veritable village of people
| raising me. I can assure you that only one of them nursed me.
| For some reason, though, most of them were women.
|
| It was even more obvious before the establishment of the
| nuclear family that a whole bunch of people should work
| together to raise children because not only does it improve
| the outcome, it's more efficient.
|
| I'd like to get your perspective in 18 years.
| csb6 wrote:
| Structural sexism is not perpetuated by infants. I mean come
| on. Children wanting to nurse is not the big issue; children
| grow up, and do not need nursing when they become toddlers.
| So why are women still expected to be caretakers of toddlers,
| middle-schoolers, and tweens? Surely, there isn't a
| physiological reason. There is clearly something larger going
| on.
|
| In reality, men and women's roles are arbitrary, and the
| sexist structures present today are not the result of
| children asking for it. You are overestimating the intrinsic
| qualities of human social and family interactions, which are
| not as set in stone as you claim. Even the concept of the
| nuclear family - with one possible nurse and mother figure -
| isn't a universal construct of human societies.
| eej71 wrote:
| While its not a universal construct - it is challenging to
| look at the history of many cultures who arrived at a
| similar distribution of labor and the behavior of other
| mammals and not wonder if men and women aren't inherently
| different in some generalized way that isn't readily
| alterable.
|
| For those of us on the other side of the debate, there is
| always this vague sense of some people are underestimating
| the impact of these intrinsic differences.
| kingdomcome50 wrote:
| > For those of us on the other side of the debate, there
| is always this vague sense of some people are
| underestimating the impact of these intrinsic
| differences.
|
| Nailed it.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I suspect that this distribution of labor is not due to
| intrinsic differences, but came with the invention of
| agriculture, and what we are dealing with now is just
| that we are used to these structures. Hunter gatherers
| did something else, and now that we are not all
| subsistence farmers we can do something else again.
| zajio1am wrote:
| > So why are women still expected to be caretakers of
| toddlers, middle-schoolers, and tweens? Surely, there isn't
| a physiological reason.
|
| Enhanced emotional bonding due to emissions of oxytocin
| during breasfeeding? Make men sit with children several
| times a day while getting oxytocin shots and perhaps they
| would have much stronger bonds with their children.
|
| From Wikipedia: Maternal behavior: Female rats given
| oxytocin antagonists after giving birth do not exhibit
| typical maternal behavior. By contrast, virgin female sheep
| show maternal behavior toward foreign lambs upon
| cerebrospinal fluid infusion of oxytocin, which they would
| not do otherwise.
| hurricanetc wrote:
| Biology isn't sexist. Men can't get pregnant so therefore only
| women can deal with pregnancy. Men can't breastfeed or pump,
| either.
|
| People want reality to reflect their world view but biology is
| biology. It's not an indictment on society that only women
| perform certain biological functions.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| The century is young. Who knows what the future might bring?
| naiveprogrammer wrote:
| I appreciate the author's piece but motherhood is not an
| alternative argument for why women leave STEM, it is THE
| argument. It is, in all likelihood, the strongest factor to
| influence women's decisions to leave the field. The evidence is
| getting overwhelming, just check the most recent publications by
| Harvard Professor Claudia Goldin (most recent:
| https://test.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/113672/version/...)
|
| Sexism is real but its importance is far from being large. It is
| really tiresome to see the news regurgitating the talking point
| on wage gap without properly giving context.
|
| What is clear to me is that the wage gap as measured by the
| average earnings by gender (even drilled down by field) is very
| hard to be fixed given the obvious biological differences between
| males and females (in which motherhood reigns supreme).
|
| Women also need to be honest about their prospects, it is very
| hard to juggle a career and motherhood. You can't have your cake
| and eat it too. So there needs to be an honest confrontation on
| the trade offs of motherhood and having a career and the cope
| that comes with it.
| proc0 wrote:
| Yes, this is what I was thinking. Feminism is ruining women by
| mistakenly telling them they want something that might make
| them unhappy. What do women gain by having 50% professional
| nuclear physicists or 50% coal miners?
| bArray wrote:
| I think people have been hinting towards the point that it's
| generally maternity and not sexism that mostly creates the
| differences in career progression. Of course there was a time in
| history where sexism played a major role, but I think that in
| modern times this is mostly gone (although I know of recent
| cases).
|
| We can take several actions to balance the books, but the
| important point I would like to ask is: Do we really want to
| stop/de-incentivize intelligent women from having children and
| having an active role on raising them?
|
| Of course there are lots of compromises that can be made to
| balance the work-home life, but ultimately a decision does need
| to be made. Spending time with your children in those crucial
| fundamental years before pre-school is incredibly important and
| rewarding.
| howling wrote:
| I think people are arguing that to be fair, time spent on
| raising children should be shared equally between father and
| mother.
| badfrog wrote:
| > Spending time with your children in those crucial fundamental
| years before pre-school is incredibly important and rewarding.
|
| Yes, and employers should be more flexible to allow parents of
| all genders to do more of this and keep their jobs.
| thrower123 wrote:
| I do find it interesting that there is so much focus on academia
| - it's probably natural when the the people that are talking and
| writing about this are so often academics.
|
| In business, one thing that I have seen a lot of people crash
| aground on a reef on is that working in professions that require
| STEM credentials is a night-and-day difference from the process
| that one goes through to acquire those credentials. I've known a
| lot of people that loved their computer science programs in
| university, and then found actually working as a programmer such
| a shock that they noped right out into something else.
| chadlavi wrote:
| So... it's not sexism, it's the structurally sexist way that
| child-rearing is handled?
|
| I mean, it's a more actionable level of detail, but it's still
| sexism, no? Just maybe more structural rather than at the level
| of individual hiring or advancing decisions?
| badfrog wrote:
| Yes, the author seems to have a very narrow (and incorrect)
| view of what sexism is.
| chadlavi wrote:
| I do think that shedding light on the way structural sexism
| in policies regarding parental leave and childcare costs _is_
| a very useful thing to do, though!
| epicureanideal wrote:
| I think a larger percentage of society would be willing to call
| this "structural gender-based inequality" rather than sexism,
| because most people including myself use the word "sexism" to
| refer to a belief that one sex is less capable or somehow worse
| than the other.
|
| Similarly, men live fewer years than women, and so receive less
| retirement benefits. This is a structural gender-correlated
| inequality (maybe gender-correlated is even better than gender-
| based) but I don't think many people would call it "sexism
| against men". They would just say "oh, yeah, that's odd...
| maybe we should adjust that now that you've brought it to our
| attention".
| rdlecler1 wrote:
| I wonder if shorter PhD programs, like they have at Oxford might
| give women more time in the workforce before they start becoming
| concerned with starting a family. Maybe starting earlier puts
| them in a more senior position at a younger age.
| scottlocklin wrote:
| Shorter and fewer Ph.D.s (aka constrain the supply the way the
| AMA does) would actually solve all the problems mentioned here.
| Might even kickstart stalled scientific and technological
| development.
| GCA10 wrote:
| Thanks, Karen Morenz, for providing a unified, panoramic view of
| the ways that the standard academic career progression short-
| changes many female scientists, even if each step along the way
| seems to make sense.
|
| It's worth taking a look at three other professions with long,
| high-intensity pathways from apprentice to master --all of which
| have been wrestling with the same challenges. They are management
| consulting, law and medicine. I've written about them elsewhere.
|
| In medicine, there's been a surge of female participation (and
| leadership) in specialties such as dermatology, psychiatry and
| radiology, where it's relatively easier to rearrange hours and
| training regimens to be family compatible. There's been less
| progress in surgery, where hellish hours are considered part of
| the journey.
|
| In law, some firms have been experimenting with a blurring of the
| boundaries between associate and partner, so that there's a
| middle level at which women can enter into motherhood without
| tanking their career chances. (In the traditional model, close to
| 40% of entry-level associates are female, but few of them stick
| around to make partner.)
|
| I'm wondering if either of those models is transferable to STEM
| academia. Are there particular sub-disciplines where professional
| success and sane hours might be more compatible? Similarly, are
| there tenure-track or quasi-tenure track job titles that split
| the difference in tolerable ways?
|
| I haven't researched these well enough to have clear answers. But
| it's worth discussing.
| toufka wrote:
| There is an unfortunate distinction between those other
| professions - STEM fields rarely pay even close to what
| consulting, law and medicine pay. Peers of equivalent talent in
| those 3 professions are generally making double to triple (if
| not more) by the time STEM graduates reach the same moment in
| their personal lives. And that 'moment' is generally delayed in
| STEM compared to those professions; you start generating your
| first real paycheck in STEM, with some stability in your career
| path at your early-mid thirties. Even medicine (which is longer
| than consulting & law), stability can be reached before that.
| fizwhiz wrote:
| > STEM fields rarely pay even close to what consulting, law
| and medicine pay. Peers of equivalent talent in those 3
| professions are generally making double to triple (if not
| more) by the time STEM graduates reach the same moment in
| their personal lives.
|
| These statements couldn't be further from the truth. You
| don't need to hang out on HN for long to figure out that
| FAANG SWEs comfortably make upwards of 400k in their late
| 20s[1]. Barring FB and perhaps Netflix, most tech companies
| tend to have fantastic work-life-balance if you prefer to
| take it easy. L5s at Google make what Partners at McKinsey
| make. If you normalize by the number of hours worked, SWEs
| make a hell of a lot more than their peers in consulting
| (management or the Big4) and about the same as the median
| cardiologist with maybe 20% of the effort.
|
| [1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/19ne7ccUdOWewD4rFDQjjnQEJ
| Dgs...
| 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote:
| What's the median salary for STEM engineers versus medical
| doctors? FANG pays in the p90, but the vast majority of
| STEM make decent but unsurprising salaries, and that salary
| requires them to be in a handful of major cities.
|
| As opposed to a physician, median salary almost double of a
| software engineer, and can live and work in _much_ cheaper
| cities.
| ivalm wrote:
| SWE at FAANG is only a minor, frankly irrelevant, portion
| of STEM. Most people in STEM cannot transition to being a
| FAANG SWE. In fact, the OP article of this thread is about
| progression in an academic career, which doesn't pay well
| unless you become a full professor at a research uni. First
| time you break low 6 figures in this career is when you
| become assistant prof in early/mid 30s.
| ryandrake wrote:
| And of the SWEs at FAANG, the ones making $400k in their
| 20s are yet another tiny slice. So we are comparing a
| tiny slice of a tiny slice of STEM professionals.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| SWE's are a tiny slice of 'STEM' and by far the most
| profitable.
|
| How much do you think the average phd in biology makes?
| maybe 30k/y till 27, then 45k/y till 30, then followed by
| 75-90?
| ghaff wrote:
| And SWEs at a handful of large US tech employers are an
| even tinier slice.
| fizwhiz wrote:
| I think your example of a biologist is a bit
| disingenuous. By 27 they've probably just wrapped up
| their PhD and were making a paltry stipend to work in a
| professor's research lab. If they're inclined to continue
| working for academia then it's not surprising that they
| won't break past 6 figures. You could just as easily pick
| people from different fields that are pursuing a career
| in academia and find that professors at the top-tier make
| a fraction of what their students make at top-tier
| companies.
|
| I also think the remark about "stability" was hand wavy.
| What is it about non-SWE STEM roles that make them so
| unstable compared to consulting or law?
| thereisnospork wrote:
| > By 27 they've probably just wrapped up their PhD and
| were making a paltry stipend to work in a professor's
| research lab
|
| followed by 2-4 years at a postdoc, asked for in every
| job application for a 'biologist II' which has an average
| salary of ~77k (per indeed). This is for industry, not
| academia.
|
| So how am I am misrepresenting the fact that being a
| biologist takes over 7+ years of being grossly underpaid
| relative to a SWE at FAANG to wind up being a little less
| grossly underpaid than a SWE at FAANG?
| fizwhiz wrote:
| Forgive me for I live in a bubble so I don't know a great
| deal about why someone would spend _that many years in
| school_ to land a 77k job. I also don 't know much about
| compensation structure (ex: is comp == salary or are
| there other components?)
|
| I do know a couple of friends that work at Genentech who
| comfortably pull in > 200k so there's that.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Biology is one of the lower paid STEM disciplines, and
| the toughest to break into professorships. Most biology
| majors are just premed anyways.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| > Forgive me for I live in a bubble so I don't know a
| great about why someone would spend that many years in
| school to land a 77k job. I also don't know much about
| compensation structure (ex: is comp == salary or are
| there other components?)
|
| comp pretty much == salary (plus benefits, like
| insurance, 4% 401k match, maybe small bonuses). My take
| is that the low salaries is primarily due to the appeal
| of the work - kids grow up wanting to be biologists,
| (chemists, physicists) so there is a labor oversupply. A
| strong secondary contributor is overhead - a scientist
| can easily cost 2x salary in overhead for equipment and
| reagents (very field dependent).
|
| To your point it is possible make decent money in big
| pharma, but they are essentially the FAANG of the
| bio/chemistry world and still come with 7y postgrad
| prereqs.
| Fomite wrote:
| There's also less room to move. It's much harder for
| someone whose been doing PCR for the past 6 years to go
| "You know what, screw this..." than there is for someone
| whose been working on the analysis of large datasets in
| say, physics.
|
| And, perceptional-wise, leaving for industry is often
| seen as a failure.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| Idealism, altruism. I was in computational biology, which
| is slightly less penurious, but FWIW, I wanted to make a
| contribution to medicine.
| pb7 wrote:
| Doctors are also a tiny slice of medicine. Nurses make a
| fraction of what doctors make, and other roles like
| Clinical Laboratory Technologist and Radiology Technician
| that make healthcare possible make even less.
|
| Law exhibits a bimodal distribution in compensation as
| well. Paralegals make even less than poorly compensated
| lawyers.
| thrower123 wrote:
| This is why I have a bit of an aneurysm whenever all of
| these wildly disparate things are lumped together under
| the umbrella of "STEM". Notably, we keep medicine in the
| acronym, but in almost all discussions, doctors and
| nurses and everything else that would fit under that
| heading are forked out already. - Edit: derp, it's Math,
| not medicine, but there's an indication of how brain-
| rotted I've gotten trying to follow this subject.
|
| Each of them is it's own world with it's own context and
| it's own problems.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I thought the M was maths and medicine _wasn 't_ in STEM?
| sokoloff wrote:
| > Notably, we keep medicine in the acronym
|
| I believe the "M" in STEM is Mathematics, not Medicine.
| toufka wrote:
| And this is another semantic issue here.
|
| The article (and my experience) both deal with the
| "Science" part of STEM, and specifically in
| biology/biochemistry, and specifically in academia
| (professorships at universities in hard-science fields).
|
| And defining those boundaries of discussion should be very
| much a starting point for any of these discussions.
| mdorazio wrote:
| This is simply not true. I have friends and colleagues in all
| these categories and the tech workers on the coasts easily
| make the most money, _especially_ if you balance for hours
| worked. The only exceptions are at the partner level, but the
| number of people who actually make it there is minuscule in
| comparison to the number of people who easily make it into
| 300k+ total comp roles in tech.
| Fomite wrote:
| "I'm wondering if either of those models is transferable to
| STEM academia. Are there particular sub-disciplines where
| professional success and sane hours might be more compatible?
| Similarly, are there tenure-track or quasi-tenure track job
| titles that split the difference in tolerable ways?
|
| I haven't researched these well enough to have clear answers.
| But it's worth discussing."
|
| One of the easiest, and most important things, academia could
| do is make pausing tenure clocks have both less stigma and be
| easier to do. Like, automatically opt-in for both men and
| women.
|
| Unfortunately, it's much harder to pause _grants_ , which is
| its own problem.
| entee wrote:
| I agree with this and the subtlety of the OP's argument. There
| is clearly a problem, there are clearly many contributors, I
| have personally seen The OP situation play out with my female
| friends/colleagues in STEM (and other "high power" sectors).
| This does NOT discount that sexism still is a problem nor that
| there may be cultural/societal norms that influence the family
| planning issue.
|
| It's a complicated issue, it needs to be tackled on many
| fronts. As men in the field we should advocate for those things
| Karen recommends, namely flexible hours, obscenely convenient
| high quality childcare, and other supports to make a career not
| the death of family.
|
| Even if you disagree that there's a problem here (and I think
| you're wrong) how would these changes cause harm? Wouldn't it
| just be a better world if people were less stressed by these
| things?
| codingmess wrote:
| Feminist narrative is that taking care of family is a
| stressful burden and women would love nothing more than to
| get away from that to relax in their fulfilling career. That
| narrative is nonsense, and the evidence is simply that in
| this day and age, nobody is forced to have children anymore.
|
| While a certain fraction of women don't "feel it" around
| their kids and prefer to work, it really isn't the case for
| most mothers. Many have kids because they also then enjoy
| spending time with their kids.
|
| The article cites a number of 50% of mothers wanting to work,
| but I really doubt that number. Or rather, it is too
| unspecific. What kind of work, and for how many hours? Sure
| many would want to work part time, for good pay, with
| flexible hours. But it's kind of silly to ask that kind of
| question. Who wouldn't say yes if asked "would you like to
| get a higher salary, work less hours and so on". There also
| is a "the grass is always greener on the other side effect" -
| many mothers who decide to go back to work end up being
| rather stressed out about it all.
| detoxdetox wrote:
| Lost in the modern rush for status and money, "obscenely
| convenient high quality daycare" used to be called
| "Motherhood" and was supplied by Mothers themselves. Some
| would argue, the most valuable contribution to society, even
| if not directly monetized.
|
| To sustain a healthy population, we used to need 10 children
| per fertile woman, which made "stay at home Mother" an
| obvious necessity for the vast majority of women. In modern
| times, we get by with 2 children per fertile woman, and that
| frees up a lot of female energy to be channeled elsewhere. It
| is high time to recognize that 2 children is still a lot of
| effort and make room for Mothers to take care of their own
| children.
|
| Instead, we are soft forcing Mothers to drop their kids in
| the care of poorly paid strangers at the earliest
| convenience, to spend their full time energy enriching
| faceless shareholders. And have the gall to call this
| arrangement "female empowerment".
| naiveprogrammer wrote:
| There is certainly something to be said about the way stay-
| at-home mothers are perceived by many in our society. They
| provide one of the most valuable contributions to society
| and should be praised. The issue is: many females take this
| issue at a personal level. Being a stay-at-home mom is a
| choice and most people don't look down on women who choose
| a different path. Also, some women can't simply cope with
| the fact that they have a biological clock and their
| careers may be on the way to their motherhood (or vice-
| versa). I wish there were more honest conversations about
| this.
|
| Males also should equally share the burden here I must say,
| as more and more of us run away from life responsibilities.
| The 30 year old basement dweller meme is real.
| theFeller00 wrote:
| With such a large percent of this generation destined to
| be childless you don't think that conversation is coming?
| I'd bet on it once more start to realize the reality of
| their decision. Men or women, really.
| ck425 wrote:
| It's worth noting that the amount of time parents (more so
| mothers) spend with each child has increased vastly, with
| relatively little evidence to suggest much increase in
| attainment. Most studies show that it's quality of time,
| not quantity, with parents that really matters.
|
| The evidence suggests we don't actually need to parent so
| much.
|
| Personally I see absolutely nothing wrong with sending kids
| to day care. We should focus on high quality family time,
| not high quantity. Unfortunately this view isn't acceptable
| in the age of helicopter parents.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| deyouz wrote:
| We should remember that woman != mother. Not all women are
| straight/want children/have children.
| adamsea wrote:
| > Instead, we are soft forcing Mothers to drop their kids
| in the care of poorly paid strangers
|
| What is a "Mother"? Is it different from a "mother".
|
| And I was a bit surprised by your conclusion - initially I
| thought you were going to argue that high-quality daycare,
| childcare, and maternity leave, are so valuable to society
| that they should be provided as a service by the government
| and/or guaranteed by law to be provided by employers.
| [deleted]
| henrikschroder wrote:
| > and make room for Mothers to take care of their own
| children.
|
| Whoa, 50's regression much? Why not make room for fathers
| to take care of their own children?
|
| > in the care of poorly paid strangers
|
| Or you could leave your children in the care of educated
| professionals in child development, who will ensure your
| children gets age- and stage-appropriate stimulation, as
| well as socialization with other children in a safe
| environment, something that very neatly complements caring
| for children at home.
|
| > And have the gall to call this arrangement "female
| empowerment".
|
| Actual studies from countries that have a longer and better
| history of this than the US show that it does increase
| gender equality by quite a lot.
| downerending wrote:
| > you could leave your children in the care of educated
| professionals in child development...
|
| That sounds wonderful, but it's economically impossible,
| except for the rich. The cost would be near or exceed
| what most people clear working a job.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| > That sounds wonderful, but it's economically
| impossible, except for the rich.
|
| In the US, sure, but there are other countries with other
| models...
| [deleted]
| skinkestek wrote:
| > Whoa, 50's regression much? Why not make room for
| fathers to take care of their own children?
|
| Nothing wrong with that, but mother goes first for
| obvious biological reasons.
| kalenx wrote:
| After pregancy and the very first months of life, I fail
| to see any "obvious biological reasons".
| maximente wrote:
| WHO recommends breast feeding until age of 2, so that's
| at least one thing that seems not readily changeable
| across sexes.
| celticmusic wrote:
| you can bottle feed breast milk.
| chongli wrote:
| But that means the mother needs time and a discreet place
| to pump at work. If it's a job where she's on her feet
| all day, that may not be possible.
| analbumcover wrote:
| That is associated with less diverse milk microbiota.
|
| https://www.cell.com/cell-host-
| microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(1...
| codingmess wrote:
| Mothers have the first pick because they invested more
| into the kid coming into being. They risked their life
| and invested 9 months into bearing the child. So they get
| first pick to also be the person spending time with the
| child.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| If a full time caregiver is needed at home, dads can step
| up as well. After being laid off shortly after we had our
| first kid, I decided to give my wife a chance to get back
| into her career while I stayed at home until the kid was
| ready for daycare. There is no reason to put all this
| burden on moms, dads have an equal part in this either way.
| codingmess wrote:
| It is not a burden, it is a privilege. For dads to step
| up, as feminists demand, mothers would have to give up
| that privilege.
|
| And if you believe the feminist narrative that it is dads
| forcing mothers to take care of the kids, consider that
| most women chose their jobs and the expected salary long
| before they meet the future father of their kids. Man
| choose careers that pay less, so the fathers end up
| having to earn the money. Them staying at home would
| simply mean less money for the family, often not enough
| money.
| satyrnein wrote:
| This sounds sort of like "no, you see, I can't possibly
| help you with this, because it's such a privilege for
| you."
| entee wrote:
| Not sure I follow. Given two mothers (gonna leave aside
| some of the baggage here, fathers can do child care, not
| all women/people are straight or fit in the conventional
| framework): Amanda wants to have kids but also wants to be
| a Supreme Court litigator. Jane wants kids and wants to
| stay at home to raise them. Why is giving Amanda the option
| hurting Jane's ability to chose her preferred outcome?
|
| Should we force Amanda to chose? How is that empowering?
| codingmess wrote:
| It's hurting in some ways, for example in increased
| prices for housing. If families with two income earners
| compete with families with one income earner, the outlook
| is bleak for one earner families. Prices simply rise to
| what the two earner households can afford. In fact many
| families can not afford the single earner model anymore.
|
| There are also changed expectation, although presumably
| those can be managed. But once daycare is available,
| pressure can be on women to actually work. Where I live,
| you get strange looks if you don't give your kid to
| daycare from age one.
|
| Apart from that it seems to me if somebody has a well
| paying career (like Amanda), they should be able to
| afford daycare anyway. If they don't, I'm not sure if
| society should pay for daycare just so that somebody can
| go to work to satisfy their ego (if their work yields
| less than the cost of daycare).
| entee wrote:
| The two income trap you mention was the subject of an
| Elizabeth Warren book sometime in the early 2000s. It's a
| real issue, I'm not sure how to solve it, but it seems
| like a different larger scale issue. Also at this point
| its a little late. That societal evolution has already
| created facts on the ground such that in most larger
| cities it's impossible to afford a good middle class
| lifestyle without two incomes.
|
| Given that, what's a simple thing that we could do to
| make life better? Make it easier for people to cope with
| that. Good, easy childcare is one clear way to do it.
|
| It's also wrong to suggest this is a rich people problem.
| If anything the lack of childcare is an even more acute
| strain at the lower end of the wage scale.
|
| Completely free childcare for everyone may be unworkable
| or undesirable for a variety of reasons, but it seems
| clear we can do a whole lot more, and we would benefit in
| the aggregate. Not the least of which because more people
| from different backgrounds in the workplace is a great
| way to build empathy and creativity.
| ck425 wrote:
| What you fail to mention though is the whole host of
| benefits to society that comes from gender equality,
| equality that is a direct result of woman working.
|
| Unfortunately it seems to be fundamentally difficult to
| make both models of the family work equally well
| simultaneously.
| ck425 wrote:
| It's hurting Jane in the sense that her family has to get
| by on one income vs two and due to 'keeping up with the
| Jones' her family then feel poor and disenfranchised
| because they can't have all the same stuff Amanda can.
| Forgetting of course that they then have the privilege of
| Jane being able to raise get kids personally.
| DavidVoid wrote:
| >It is high time to recognize that 2 children is still a
| lot of effort and make room for Mothers to take care of
| their own children.
|
| It's high time that fathers start putting in some more work
| in that department too. Sweden has 480 days of paid
| parental leave, and each parent has exclusive right to 90
| of those days. Have fathers spend some time raising their
| kids instead of just letting their wives do it and you'll
| see that things should get better.
| gfodor wrote:
| I've re-read your comment a few times now, and I don't see
| anywhere you've written something that implies you think
| women ought to become mothers due to some moral standard
| you have. So I don't think the downvotes are warranted.
|
| It sounds like you are highlighting the contradiction
| between the fact that women are now increasingly _expected_
| and _needed_ to do the job of full-time motherhood while
| also somehow, miraculously, contributing financially to the
| family through their careers. I agree that this places
| increased burden on women, and is due for a correction,
| both via new programs /regulation and a cultural awareness
| that this is being asked of them. Your point about raising
| children as 'unmonetized value' is something I think
| culturally we need to grapple with, much like we need to
| grapple with things like the externalities leading to
| climate change. We need to be able to price the value of
| child rearing into our capitalist society in a much better
| way, so women have clearer incentives and more freedom in
| choosing the path they take as they become parents,
| regardless of what path that is.
|
| edit: I should state that while this article is about women
| and hence what I wrote above focused there, the same
| problems apply to men who want to allocate their time
| between parenting and their career. Society needs good
| parents, because we need good adults, and this value
| exchange is woefully un-accounted for in our current
| system. In practice, both parents suffer from having to
| make this trade-off, including those who have someone other
| than the mother take on a large part of childcare.
| azangru wrote:
| Not related to the thesis of the post, but this:
|
| > And yet, if you ask leading women researchers like Nobel
| Laureate in Physics 2018, Professor Donna Strickland, or Canada
| Research Chair in Advanced Functional Materials (Chemistry),
| Professor Eugenia Kumacheva, they say that sexism was not a
| barrier in their careers.
|
| -- is such a bizarre argument to make. How can one conclude
| anything about sexism by asking leading women researchers whether
| whether it has been a barrier in their careers. The very fact
| that they've achieved leading positions says that it wasn't; it
| says absolutely nothing of whether it was for those who have
| left.
|
| _(I am not claiming anything about sexism; I was simply mystified
| by this paragraph)_
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| I find this a bit pointless- Scott Aaronson has his views that
| are not the views of a sizeable majority of women in STEM, who
| find that their career progression is hindered by
| institutionalised sexism. At some point Aaronson finds or
| receives a dissenting opinion from a woman in STEM. He publishes
| it, with a preface suggesting that _this_ is the _real_ view of a
| majority of women in STEM (the opinion "dovetails with what I've
| heard from many other women in STEM fields, including my wife
| Dana").
|
| Fair enough- but how often has Aaronson published, or publicised,
| an opinion from a woman who disagrees with his view? Er. Not
| often. Probably because he disagrees with them and so will tend
| to find that they do not marshal "data, logic, and [their] own
| experience in support of an insight that strikes me as true and
| important and underappreciated".
|
| So what have we learned from the fact that Scott Aaronson has
| published this opinion on his blog? Absolutely nothing. We knew
| his opinion, he still has the same opinion. We know there are
| other people, including women in STEM, that have the same opinion
| as Scott Aaronson. Here is one of them and her opinion. We have
| learned nothing new.
|
| This is just preaching to the converted.
| mech1234 wrote:
| Your judgement of the article was nearly entirely informed by
| who wrote it rather than its contents. That's a good way to
| continue a culture war, not a good way to discover the truth.
|
| I implore you to consider the well-founded facts on both sides,
| not to claim this piece has absolutely nothing worth saying.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| The piece by the young scientist has a lot to say, but the
| preface by Scott Aaronson only has to say "See, I told you
| so!". And that's what I'm commenting on, of course.
| insickness wrote:
| See: Ad hominem (Latin for "to the person"), short for
| argumentum ad hominem, typically refers to a fallacious
| argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic
| at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive,
| or other attribute of the person making the argument, or
| persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the
| substance of the argument itself.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
| lidHanteyk wrote:
| I agree, to the point where I wish that we'd just talk about
| the original article instead of this repost, instead. Maybe the
| URL could be changed to [0]?
|
| [0] https://medium.com/@kjmorenz/is-it-really-just-sexism-an-
| alt...
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've changed to that from
| https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4522. Let's focus on
| the author's own argument now please.
| Konnstann wrote:
| The original essay linked combats the institutional sexism
| claim with data that suggests the number of women who claim to
| have experiences sexism is on par with non-STEM career choices,
| but the exit from STEM vastly exceeds that of other fields.
| pegasus wrote:
| It's not just about whether an opinion is for or against, but
| about the actual arguments brought to the table.
| ThrustVectoring wrote:
| There's a big tendency to ignore the price at which career
| success is sold. You have to give up more fulfilling and creative
| work, perhaps, or spend long hours in front of a screen on
| difficult yet boring tasks, or put in years and years of all-
| encompassing work in various qualification gauntlets. Not having
| paid the price for fame in academic STEM, I have no jealousy of
| the success these people have found - they have their fame, I
| have my free time.
|
| I think a big issue in the study of gender differences in work is
| that it is _much_ easier to quantify the salary earned than the
| price one must pay in order to be successful in the field. About
| the best you can do is compare sub-populations that have paid
| roughly the same price - eg, urban childless single college-
| educated adults. At that point, studies generally show an
| insignificant gender difference in wages and success.
|
| So, why is there a gendered component to participation in high-
| pay/high-sacrifice fields? I've not seen any sort of hard data,
| so I'd have to speculate. If you made me single out a candidate
| for investigation, I'd have to look into the how the heterosexual
| dating market will asymmetrically treat career success. People
| respond to incentives, and dating success is one hell of an
| incentive.
| oefrha wrote:
| > We spend billions of dollars training women in STEM. By not
| making full use of their skills, if we look at only the american
| economy, we are wasting about $1.5 billion USD per year in
| economic benefits they would have produced if they stayed in
| STEM. So here's a business proposal: ...
|
| With all due respect, I don't understand this call to action.
| Faculty position is basically a zero sum game. If more women end
| up as faculty, fewer men will. So, unless it costs more to train
| women than men, I doubt any "investment" would be saved (and
| that's not the point of gender equality anyway).
|
| Btw, this maternal wall idea is nothing new. I talked to my
| mother about gender inequality in hiring many years ago and she
| was quick to point this out (didn't call it "maternal wall"
| though).
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| I think the idea is to keep the rules of the competition
| basically the same, but make it feasible for more people to
| compete. The same number of winners might result, but hopefully
| they'll be more talented, because they're selected from a
| larger pool of competitors.
| pgeorgi wrote:
| > With all due respect, I don't understand this call to action.
| Faculty position is basically a zero sum game. If more women
| end up as faculty, fewer men will. So, unless it costs more to
| train women than men, I doubt any "investment" would be saved
|
| The assumption is that aptitude for these positions is roughly
| the same between genders, so if there's a significant
| imbalance, society doesn't get the best people on the given set
| of seats.
|
| The later calculation is along the lines of "society is pouring
| so much money both into these positions and into getting-women-
| into-STEM programs without reaching this supposed goal, so
| here's a counter-proposal to use this money more wisely"
|
| > Btw, this maternal wall idea is nothing new.
|
| She's quite upfront that she borrowed the term as well, so the
| idea can't be new. But it might be time to reiterate that point
| (as opposed to the popular reduction of the problem to sexism
| only), and since she did a good job (IMHO) to collect
| sources...
| allovernow wrote:
| >The assumption is that aptitude for these positions is
| roughly the same between genders, so if there's a significant
| imbalance, society doesn't get the best people on the given
| set of seats.
|
| An assumption which I have to point out is absolutely not
| verified. In fact, there are mountains of circumstantial,
| statistical, and biological evidence to the contrary - which
| policy makers in the west are increasingly ignoring as they
| ram gender parity down industry's and academia's collective
| throats, possibly to the detriment of the institutions and
| society at large.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| There's no biological evidence to the contrary, and the
| statistical, circumstantial evidence can all be
| convincingly explained by the kinds of structural issues
| raised in the OP.
| gbrown wrote:
| Judging by what happens most times gender in tech comes up on HN,
| I'm sure this thread will be buckets of fun.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't make the thread even worse by posting
| unsubstantive comments about it.
|
| It's a divisive topic, so fractiousness is not easy to avoid,
| but everyone should make sure they're up to date on the site
| guidelines before posting. They include: " _Comments should get
| more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more
| divisive._ "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| ixtli wrote:
| > When you ask women why they left, the number one reason they
| cite is balancing work/life responsibilities -- which as far as I
| can tell is a euphemism for family concerns.
|
| At least in america women are, in this way, almost always asked
| to choose between their career and having children. This is
| asymmetrical with men's experience because whether or not they
| are comfortable with it, its considered normal for them to spend
| most of their time at work even if they have a newborn.
|
| I'm not sure what else you'd call this status quo aside from
| "sexist." It's a systemic sexism that has deep roots in how we
| organize the aesthetics of our society.
| watwut wrote:
| Can confirm that I know multiple women who work less then they
| imagined for themselves or want to, cause their husbands
| basically finds it more fun to be in work and cant be arsed to
| go home.
|
| Their resentment is quite real. Their actions looks like
| choice, until they trust you well enough to vent to you.
| wruza wrote:
| That is often true. But the frequent prequel is also "I want
| a baby" originating from a woman. I don't have un-anecdata
| too, but it happened to me, to my buddies and to my male
| family members. As men may or may not _definitely,
| consciously_ want kids and do related work, at least we need
| to bin resentments into two buckets (fail of promise vs. fail
| of expectation) and evaluate them separately.
| watwut wrote:
| That would be another situation where something that looks
| like a choice from outside is not one.
|
| With some of the women I had in mind, I know for sure they
| strongly did not wanted next kid while husband suggested
| that, so it is not the same (in the sense that he did not
| wanted kid and therefore it should be all on her).
| allovernow wrote:
| >It's a systemic sexism that has deep roots in how we organize
| the aesthetics of our society
|
| Or it's a systematic sexism that has deep roots in human
| biology and thousands of generations of sexually dimorphic
| specialization, and I can't believe we've successfully
| convinced multiple generations of westerners now to pretend
| that men and women are equally suited for all roles, including
| child rearing.
|
| Now we need an article which takes an honest look at the
| possibility that gender imbalance in STEM (and other fields) is
| at least partly a result of similar specialization for
| cognitive tasks, where researchers like the author of the
| article are closer to extremes of an ability distribution. But
| I'm relieved to see a take that questions the tired, pervasive
| assumption that STEM is simply not welcoming to women because
| old white men are sexist.
| manfredo wrote:
| This frames the decision to dedicate more time towards
| childcare than work as a something thrust onto women by
| societal expectation when women would rather work. Studies
| indicate that only 20% of women would prefer to work full time
| after having a child, with the rest preferring part time work
| or staying at home with the children. Furthermore, 70% of women
| with children that are currently working full time responded
| that they would rather be working part time or not at all [1].
| By comparison the majority of men indicate that they would
| rather work full time.
|
| Women and men both have to choose between their careers and
| spending more time with children, and their choices reflect
| their preferences. One can make the argument that this is
| indirect sexism - that women's preferences stem from sexist
| social influence. But the fact remains: most women don't want
| to work full time, and the lower rates of women working full
| time after having children is reflective of women's
| preferences.
|
| 1. https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-
| content/uploads/sites/3/2010/...
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I suspect _given an economic choice_ , many men would prefer
| not to work full time either.
|
| For some reason men don't get asked whether or not this is
| true. It's simply assumed that men will dedicate their lives
| to work because it's the only way to pay for a family.
| manfredo wrote:
| You don't need to suspect, fathers were polled as well. 72%
| preferred work full time, 12% part time, and 16% not
| working.
| herostratus101 wrote:
| High IQ women completely exiting the gene pool is pretty bad for
| the species.
| codingmess wrote:
| If 1 Billion was spent in 2011 to support and encourage
| minorities and women in STEM, it really suggests that some of
| that money should be poured into providing childcare rather than
| propaganda.
| tus88 wrote:
| > women leave the field at a rate 3 to 4 times greater than men,
| and in particular, if they do not obtain a _faculty position
| quickly_
|
| Wait what....you mean by STEM you just meant academia?
| cpitman wrote:
| Exactly my confusion with this article. I have multiple female
| friends who have earned doctorates in STEM who have either left
| or are planning on leaving academia to go to industry. However,
| they are still all going into STEM jobs!
|
| So maybe the problem is that industry STEM is offering an
| overall better benefits package than academia? We're seeing the
| same thing in fields like AI, where academia can't retain top
| talent.
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| Yeah it's unfortunate that the author of this article uses the
| term STEM over and over again and is really only talking about
| the S. I wounder if the issues mentioned here are as common in
| private industry for women in the TEM fields? It seems like at
| least some companies are far more generous with things like
| maternity leave than what you might find in academia.
| trynewideas wrote:
| This is a good model for why women capable of or wanting to have
| children leave but won't do much to explain anything to women
| aren't capable of having children, or who don't want children,
| and still can't break past middle management into
| product/exec/C-suite roles over younger, less qualified men.
| deyouz wrote:
| This! Not all women want children/can have children/are
| straight.
| daenz wrote:
| Another sunken cost taxpayer bill? "Just spend a little more
| money to unlock all the money you already spent." No thanks.
| lonelappde wrote:
| The author seems to ignore the fact that plenty of women do work
| while pregnant and have children and go back to work after a
| little as 3months hiring childcare.
| daotoad wrote:
| You are ignoring several facts:
|
| 1. Pregnancy is very hard on women's bodies. It is not uncommon
| for health effects like high blood pressure, joint
| inflammation, and gestational diabetes to become temporarily
| disabling for expectant mothers. 2. Infant childcare is
| incredibly expensive. Even at professional levels of
| compensation, the expense is likely to outweigh the added
| income from continuing to work. Costs drop significantly once
| children are potty trained, but remain quite high. 3. Three
| months of paid maternal leave is very rare. Even with saved
| time off, taking large amounts of unpaid leave is hard on a
| family. 4. Breast feeding a child while working full days
| requires a huge amount of work, above and beyond the exhausting
| labor involved in having a new baby. If a nursing room is not
| provided, women often resort to spending a large amount of time
| pumping milk in the restroom. Which is uncomfortable,
| unsanitary, and disheartening.
|
| Just because some women have the resources or the stark need to
| return to work so early does not mean it is possible or
| desirable for everyone.
|
| We need to have better maternal leave and accommodations.
| Fathers need to step up and do more of the work. We need to
| have better paternal leave and accomodations. We need to
| support affordable child care options. We need to make the
| above 4 items available to everyone.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Before modern times, the grandparents fulfilled much of the role
| of watching the kids while the moms worked. In fact, some have
| posited that this is why humans live long enough to be
| grandparents - it's an evolutionary advantage.
|
| But in modern society, we tend to cast off our grandparents.
| kipchak wrote:
| Sometimes it can go the other way too. My Grandparents had
| little interest in "babysitting" or living nearby us when we
| were young.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| Or we move 3,000 miles away to somewhere more economically
| prosperous (and also, more expensive) so the grandparent's
| couldn't financially make it viable to come with.
|
| All of my parents grew up and lived in the same state as their
| siblings. All of my siblings live in different states, and none
| of us live in the same state as our parents.
|
| My siblings and I don't have any kids yet, but their family
| life and amount of time they spend with extended family (aunts,
| uncles, cousins) will look dramatically different than my
| experience, and it's only been ~25 or so years.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Not necessarily cast off, but we're so mobile now that we move
| too far away from our grandparents to be able to lean on them
| for childcare (my wife's parents live in a different
| country...)
| WalterBright wrote:
| After my mom passed, my dad decided to move to Seattle, which
| turned out great for both of us. I greatly enjoyed having the
| old man around.
| icandoit wrote:
| I wonder how much the feeling is one-sided. I visit my
| grandparents more often than they visit me (even generously
| discounting for physical ability, income, and the one-to-many
| relationship).
|
| I think the way to measure this might be grandparents moving
| out of state of family (think Arizona and Florida).
|
| Obviously the stigma of aging should get the bulk of the
| responsibility here.
|
| Any got any advice on how to re-norm grandparents? I'm
| hesitating on moving out of state during my kids early
| childhood.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Any got any advice on how to re-norm grandparents? I'm
| hesitating on moving out of state during my kids early
| childhood.
|
| Living in the same neighborhood as your grandparents would be
| best. I know families that do that, and the payoff is great
| for the kids, the parents, and the grandparents. The kids
| love their grandparents, the grandparents love taking care of
| the kids, and the parents get safe, reliable, and free help.
| It's a win all around.
|
| It's the way things ought to be.
| whatthe2 wrote:
| Once a woman has a child, that is her main concern, not work.
| Simple.
| tharne wrote:
| I think the author buried the lede here. My biggest takeaway from
| the article is that you'd have to be an absolute sucker to work
| in academia given how poorly you'll be treated. Each person that
| puts up with this only makes the problem worse, giving at least
| tacit approval to the status quo. If folks were to start opting
| out of academia in larger numbers for jobs in private industry,
| schools would be forced to improve working conditions.
|
| Unlike lower-skilled workers, the kind of person who even has the
| opportunity to get a PhD is also likely to have other good
| opportunities should they choose to take them. Academics should
| improve their lot and that of others by voting with their feet.
| aqsalose wrote:
| Suppose I want to research a $topic, and get recognition for my
| research. As a recent graduate or soon-to-graduate undergrad
| student the traditional path to "doing research for the public
| good of the mankind and personal glory as a scientist" in
| academia is much more salient and easy to take than in private
| firms.
|
| Sure, I maybe have the mental faculties to become an engineer.
| Do I want do so, however? If I go to work in a firm, I need to
| do what the owner of the firm wants to in exchange for the
| monetary and other rewards. In academia, you write grant
| applications and research proposals for something you want to
| do (or to be practical, something you and you advisor agree on,
| but usually the opportunities are much larger than "client
| wants a webshop").
|
| And what I would be doing at a $firm? Building more
| applications and other products and optimized adverts of
| products for other people, when majority of my free time I try
| to avoid unnecessary apps, adverts and consumption of useless
| products that waste natural resources of our planet for no good
| reason at all?
|
| Sure, there are some companies who offer opportunities at doing
| basic research, but a) getting into those jobs you need to be
| exceptionally exceptional (getting into a PhD program, mere
| "exceptional" is enough), and b) would I really, really want to
| work there? I am reasonably sure that I have less ethical
| dilemmas if I am funded by a government or foundation to do
| research at a public university than getting a paycheck from
| $big_name_company, to produce value for $big_name_company.
| theflyinghorse wrote:
| Agreed. I am completely failing to understand why anyone would
| willingly go into academia provided other options are
| available.
| __jal wrote:
| > Academics should [...] vot[e] with their feet.
|
| You do see the problem here, don't you?
| stale2002 wrote:
| I don't see a problem with that, no.
|
| It would result in more people going into successful careers
| in industry.
|
| That's a good thing.
| __jal wrote:
| The problem would be that they would no longer be
| academics.
|
| For a lot of people who head down that path, they consider
| it more of a vocation than a job. It may well be a good
| thing for all the next folks who consider the path, but it
| choosing that would come at a large personal cost for them.
|
| Most folks are not that altruistic.
| zxcmx wrote:
| > If folks were to start opting out of academia in larger
| numbers for jobs in private industry, schools would be forced
| to improve working conditions.
|
| This is exactly what is happening! (Well, the leaving, not the
| improving).
|
| The argument is that men are more willing to put up with the
| particular nature of the poor working conditions in academia,
| hence women _disproportionately_ leave.
| hguant wrote:
| >My biggest takeaway from the article is that you'd have to be
| an absolute sucker to work in academia given how poorly you'll
| be treated.
|
| Every now and then I get an overwhelming sense of guilt when I
| talk to/think about my friends who are engaged in academia or
| pursuing advanced degrees (I'm 28, for reference).
|
| The crazy workloads they have, the insane restrictions on how
| they can do their jobs, and the cut-throat nature of the
| industry means that they're working so much harder than I am,
| and are either doing their part to advance the grand sum of
| human knowledge, or are training to literally save peoples
| lives...and I'm sitting here, a college drop out, getting paid
| _way_ more than they're making, in an industry where I will
| never have any fears about job security, playing with
| networking equipment and writing about it.
| buboard wrote:
| Working longer/harder doesn't mean more efficiently. And the
| idea of the visionary idealist scientist upon whom humanity
| rests is a romantic idea from the past.
| kodablah wrote:
| > I get an overwhelming sense of guilt
|
| That guilt is proportional to the value you place on your
| work-time/daily output. The guilt will subside as your output
| importance does.
|
| Also, the grass often appears greener, and many in academia
| are mired in its doldrums too.
| ghaff wrote:
| From what I can see, tenured professor at an elite school is
| a pretty good gig. But it's a really tough gig to land, may
| not pay very well compared to private industry (assuming it's
| in a well-compensated field), and may force their partner to
| live somewhere the other employment opportunities aren't
| great because your own job mobility is likely pretty limited.
| ng7j5d9 wrote:
| Feels almost like the minor league / major league situation
| in professional sports. Minor league baseball players are
| generally not paid a living wage, and major league players
| start around half a million dollars a year. Obviously many
| players are doing everything they can to reach that dream
| job (even if most fail).
|
| That idea of being a comfortable tenured professor at a
| great school is a dream for many. And obviously, many don't
| make it, lot of folks are going to just drift around as
| adjunct professors, scraping by, taking second jobs. But as
| long as SOMEONE is getting to be a full professor at
| Stanford, lots of people are going to think, "that could be
| me", and get exploited along the way.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah. I forget what the term is but there are a number of
| occupations where's there's a big gap between the
| "lottery winners" and the hoi polloi.
|
| Arguably even the winners in academia don't make _that_
| much in terms of money but they 're still viewed as
| successful professionals, have a decent lifestyle, and do
| OK--especially if they're not in the highest cost areas.
| marchenko wrote:
| These kinds of professions are often referred to as
| "tournaments", a term I think captures their essence
| nicely. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_theory)
| Traster wrote:
| I worked in a company for a while that hired lots of people
| out of academia. The fascinating thing was that despite the
| vast majority of candidates being smart and incredibly well
| qualified, a massive chunk of them had been so tuned to the
| stupid hoops you have to jump through for academia that they
| were near worthless in industry. Whether that was the
| complete inability to treat other people as equals, or just
| completely unable to apply themselves to actually build
| something that could ship. Academia can be a real trap.
| buzzkillington wrote:
| If I had a dollar for every time someone mentioned prestige
| for why we should be doing something I'd have had enough to
| fund one of those dumb projects.
| rb808 wrote:
| > I will never have any fears about job security,
|
| Sounds like you're under 45
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| You should also add to this that increasingly, large tech
| companies have access to much better data for nearly any area
| that is interesting for research.
|
| Further, companies can go from research to product that
| ostensibly makes a difference at scale with a speed that
| absolutely no University could.
|
| I'm really not seeing any reason to stay in academia whatsoever
| if you want to do the most exciting applied research today.
| Maybe if you want to do basic science or something more obscure
| where the applications are very far off.
| Fomite wrote:
| I work in the health sector and honestly, it comes down to a
| couple things:
|
| 1) They have _more_ data. It 's not clear that it's better.
|
| 2) That difference is, to the eyes of many of us, showing up,
| making things worse, and then "pivoting".
|
| 3) I get to decide what I want to do. I want to add a project
| on X? I go work on it.
| analbumcover wrote:
| > companies can go from research to product that ostensibly
| makes a difference at scale with a speed that absolutely no
| University could.
|
| Isn't that the point of being an academic? That you don't
| have much, if any, interest in generating a product?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > My biggest takeaway from the article is that you'd have to be
| an absolute sucker to work in academia
|
| The first thing I thought as well. When you read all these
| horror stories about burned out phd students, why is anyone
| doing this?
|
| If a woman in STEM wants to combine family and work (or a man
| or anyone else really) there are many jobs in the industry that
| are actually relatively 9-5, and pay really well.
|
| I don't understand academia at all. It sounds like a
| combination of paperwork, flying to conferences, endless
| networking, publishing papers for publishing's sake. It's like
| a Kafka novel.
| narrator wrote:
| You can also be working on stuff that has no impact
| whatsoever. There are a lot of physics PHDs working in
| cosmology trying to figure what's going on on the other side
| of the universe. Sure they are doing some interesting
| engineering setting up experiments, but if they find the
| answer to their scientific question they have to find
| something new to research and get grants for which is a big
| hassle.
|
| I think the joy of pure research is that you only have to
| engage in occasional bullshit academic politics and otherwise
| have a completely pure existence in a monastery of scientific
| spiritual ideological purity of sorts. This is probably why
| some of the most sought after jobs under communism were non-
| political professorships at Universities, like being a math
| professor. Many of the post-soviet oligarchs were professors
| at universities during the soviet union times.
| benibela wrote:
| I am in academia, because I do not want to work in an office.
| I do not want to leave my apartment before 11am
|
| Did not work out, since I now have an office, but at least I
| can show up at 2pm without being fired.
| skybrian wrote:
| A lot of jobs in the software industry have flexible hours.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| Or remote work, in which case you don't have to leave
| your apartment _at all_ if you don 't feel like it.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > My biggest takeaway from the article is that you'd have to be
| an absolute sucker to work in academia given how poorly you'll
| be treated.
|
| And women don't have the luxury of putting up with that BS.
| buzzkillington wrote:
| My scientific career ended when I did a back of the envelope
| calculation on how much I would be paid per hour of expected
| work as a post doc.
|
| It was less than minimum wage.
| daotoad wrote:
| My only quibble with this article is that the fact that there is
| a wall related to child bearing and rearing IS institutional
| sexism.
|
| It's just a different form of it than the "my coworkers
| constantly stare at my tits and don't take what I say seriously"
| variety.
|
| We've put women largely in charge of child rearing duties.
| Obviously, men aren't able to get pregnant and bear children. We
| are, however, perfectly capable of changing diapers, singing
| lullabies, and doing laundry.
|
| I'd bet that we would see the same kind of impediments to women
| rising to the tops of their professions in many demanding fields,
| fields where if you take too much time to have a life, you are
| considered broken and uninterested in excellence.
| theFeller00 wrote:
| Faggot alert
| klyrs wrote:
| I'm not a fan of this title. Throughout the piece, sexism is
| regarded as a key factor. The thesis of the article, and indeed
| the article's title, suggests that sexism isn't the _only_
| factor. This isn 't an "alternative argument," it's another piece
| to the puzzle.
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