Discussion on All-Girl events

[Joe G.]

Originally Posted by Drake Vargas

There is nothing wrong with this situation. Really, this isn't going against any law or infringing on any of your rights.

Just because it's legal to be a rude person, doesn't mean you should be a rude person.

Do you honestly think you have the same definition of fun as them?

Given that she presumably wished to be included, I'm going to go with "yes." Or at least "more than close enough."

The very graph you posted shows fields with almost no males, and nobody seems to be upset that there aren't more male kindergaren teachers. At the same time, I don't see anyone complaining that men almost completely fill the most grueling jobs on this list.

So get upset about this! Do something about it! People are missing out on the opportunity to gain fulfilling employment right now, time is of the essence! Start a program to encourage male Kindergarten teachers, and eradicate the perception that men working with young children are automatically sexual predators! Create initiatives to remove sexist barriers to entry and cultural normalization of dirty, hands on work as "a man's job." But that sounds like work, and it's easier to complain about people actually taking these initiatives in other fields. It'd take real passion and concern for these issues, rather than only caring about them for the purposes of an internet argument in favor of the status quo...

The fact is, every heavily skewed datapoint on that graph, in both directions, are simply symptoms of the same, much larger problem: That people refuse to acknowledge that artificial societal pressures and factors generate these uneven distributions rather than some innate biological reality of gender, that in doing so, people reinforce those societal elements that created the disparities in the first place, and that no matter how you cherry-pick careers, these societal pressures are overwhelmingly sexist and present women as generally "less capable." STEM is an attractive field, with very obvious benefactors from gender equality movements, and so it gets a lot of focus. I mean, we're on a discussion board about a nationwide program to get more people inspired by this career -- I doubt you could find a similarly sized "For Inspiration and Recognition of Garbage Collectors," regardless of gender focus. But maybe victories here, and breaking down barriers and perceptions here, can help inpart change across the board. We don't only encourage women in STEM to get women in STEM, we do it because it's a part of the bigger picture in the fight against the patriarchy.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Drake Vargas

There is nothing wrong with this situation. Really, this isn't going against any law or infringing on any of your rights. This is a group of men going out to have fun, it is fully within their right to choose who they want to hang out with. Do you honestly think you have the same definition of fun as them? Both guys and gals like hanging out with people most similar to them, there is nothing wrong with that.

Allow me to put it this way:

Your robotics team decides to go out to lunch all together, as a team lunch. They do not tell you, invite you, or otherwise include you--but you hear about it.

Are you, or are you not, singled out for exclusion? There is no third answer. (For this exercise, at any rate. I'm lumping "oops, we forgot" in with "we don't want this person" because if they definitely wanted you, they would have remembered.)

Now, a "workable definition" of discrimination could be phrased as: singling some person or group of persons out for exclusion. Legally, there's somewhere between 10 and 20 different categories that are protected, depending slightly on which state's lists you read--mighty long list, don't you think? The sad part is that all those categories are necessary to be spelled out in the first place...



Let's go back to that exercise. If we assume that you consider that you are not singled out for exclusion, then I find that a little odd--just human nature here, unless there's some mitigating circumstance. If, on the other hand, we assume that you consider the other way (and, to be honest, many people will!), then you may have been discriminated against. On what basis? Well, seeing as I don't know you, or anything about you, per se, I can't say. And, I'm not willing to make anything up. It could have been that for some reason you had some really bad halitosis that day, or it could have been that you were _______ and they were all ______.

That would be what's going on in the post you responded to. And, I'm willing to bet that it WAS unintentional. That doesn't mean it hurts any less! Am I a male? Yep. But... I have had to help deal with the aftermath of what I'll call "unintentional gender bias", with some good engineering-student friends (and it wasn't just me. Several folks were involved in that discussion). All I'll say is that it doesn't just affect those who are on the receiving end, it affects everybody in the group. Eventually. Can I claim that I'm perfect in that regard? NO.


Remember: It doesn't have to BE discrimination to FEEL LIKE discrimination.


Now, in the situation originally mentioned, if they'd asked and been declined, your statement might have had merit. But, they didn't even bother to ask.



As far as your other post: Let's ask Why they aren't saying anything about that. Then maybe something can be determined about what else is going on. Just for the record, I don't have an answer on that--yet. Without knowing what may be behind that IS situation, we cannot know why people are not complaining that it does not match the SHOULD BE situation. (And, TBH: It could simply be that either the men or the women swarm all the openings before the other group can even get an application together. Stranger things happen...)

[Ed Law]

Originally Posted by ThaddeusMaximus

Personally, I just want more freaking great engineers. I don't care what they look like.

A lot of companies learned that diversity is important, not because they want to look good and can say they have more women and minorities etc. It indirectly affects their bottom line. It is money. Having a more diverse workforce makes a company more competitive. For most products that are not aimed at a certain gender or ethnicity, you want your engineers to think like and be able to relate to the population that you are targeting to sell your product. If half of the buyers are women, it would be a good idea to include women as part of the engineering design team. I am saying this from past personal experience. Female engineers bring a lot to the table.

[Steven Smith]

I'll take a gamble at addressing a few of these. Please take a second to consider that I'm really not trying to say you are "wrong" but to just give you an alternative way to look at it. You are obviously as entitled to your opinions as I am to disagree with them.

Spout all theory y'all want, but we're engineers, and we know that theory doesn't hold up in the real world and we must deal with it. The best way is to practice. The worst thing to do to a budding engineer is to give them a false sense of what reality is. I have never coddled, and will never coddle my students- whether it's about discrimination, workload, etc.

As an engineer, I'm often asked to look at a data set and explain outliers. In my case (and I know you weren't specifically referencing my post), I really wasn't trying to "spout theory", as much as try to explain a known outlier (% of women in engineering), with a combination of what I've read and heard (theory) with what I see (experience. Many of the things I have read do seem to show their head in the real world, and industry.

You use the term "coddling" in a negative way, which is defined as "to treat tenderly; nurse or tend indulgently; pamper". I would argue that almost every FIRST student has been coddled in some way, and the entire purpose of FIRST is to "coddle" students by providing them a safe space to grow their skills. If you would like to not be coddled, we could make it to where if a team loses a regional, the team folds, the members lose their jobs, they lose their houses and belongings. We could make it such that at every season, you do a performance review of the your team and the bottom 10% are laid off. I don't think trying to make FIRST "more like the real world" in the sense of making it more harsh and "survival of the fittest" is fair, when the world (engineering) currently defines the "fittest" as male, regardless of other attributes.

Why is the burden on the girls to integrate with the boys anyway? History? Why is it that if a girl wants to be an engineer, SHE has to learn to work in a system that tries to push her out. What have we done as boys to earn that luxury of king of the hill. No one is arguing that women should be sheltered and protected their entire lives from working with the boys, and/or that they will never have to do so. It is literally a single event, for a weekend, where the girls can see firsthand that all that is amazing about FIRST can be run by girls. They are not going to go start an FRC for Girls league to get away from the boys, they are going to better integrate into the existing FRC program by stepping up for that lead volunteer role, or pit crew lead, or try out as a driver when they wouldn't have before.

(This is about the direction I feel FIRST is going in in general. I feel there's too much hype and superficiality and quite frankly, disconnect from industry in general...)

If you are referring to the push for increased diversity and/or encouraging women in STEM, then I would strongly disagree about a disconnect from industry, being involved in a large multinational company for years and being directly involved with our corporate citizenship and university recruiting teams to witness what/why the policies are. It is not to check a box, it is not to win awards in magazines... it is because a diversity of people brings a diversity of thought and new solutions and ultimately makes us a stronger company. The companies that understand this will benefit.

Someone mentioned that so many females leave STEM fields after joining. Even if bucking up female involvement is a goal, is false advertising somehow NOT hampering retention?

If the thing driving women away from engineering is the feeling that it is a boys club and they are not welcome, then yes, you are correct, advertising upfront that girls aren't welcome will improve retention. Only the most dedicated girls and confident girls will enter in the first place and are more likely to stay. However, retention isn't the sole issue, it is also encouraging girls to join in the first place and give it a try. In that case, instead of advertising that FIRST isn't for them to improve retention, I'd advocate for improving the root issue, by making them feel welcome, valued and respected after they join.

Personally, I just want more freaking great engineers. I don't care what they look like.

I agree. I just hope you realize that there are probably alot of potential freaking great future engineers that never discover they would have been one, because society told them they weren't welcome.

Karthik, everyone seems to be up in arms about the lack of female representation in engineering. In my opinion, that ostracizes men more than anything else. The very graph you posted shows fields with almost no males, and nobody seems to be upset that there aren't more male kindergarent teachers. At the same time, I don't see anyone complaining that men almost completely fill the most grueling jobs on this list. This isn't a very good argument for "equality".

Choosing to focus a discussion on a subset of a problem does not mean we immediately accept every other problem as "solved". You give the example of kindergarden teachers, I'll add to the example nurses. Nursing is a huge need and a growing field, one that historically men have not been involved in as heavily. I have friends that went into nursing, and there is a degree of "lulz, a male nurse" that is no more acceptable. If a woman wants to be a cement worker, or another physically grueling job, she should be able to. Similarly, there are a lot of other "grueling jobs" on the female side of it, though some perhaps more mentally/emotionally grueling.

There is nothing wrong with this situation. Really, this isn't going against any law or infringing on any of your rights. This is a group of men going out to have fun, it is fully within their right to choose who they want to hang out with. Do you honestly think you have the same definition of fun as them? Both guys and gals like hanging out with people most similar to them, there is nothing wrong with that.

*Smiti, I apologize for speaking about you in the 3rd person and if I'm offbase speak up and I'd gladly edit it out.

Clearly, there was something wrong with the situation to Smiti, which is presumably why she posted it as an example of when she felt excluded. Her example is not the only one, I've seen many others.

Is it illegal? No. Should the "boys" be "forced" to invite the girls, absolutely not... personal liberties and what not. Should her desire to be included necessarily override their desire not to include her... debatable.

However, based on her post, I know that she was in a lab, working with boys, and the collective group of them probably have an interest in materials science. Smiti likely has a number of other interests that overlap with her peers, and she felt that the lack of an invitation meant she didn't "fit in". I honestly think I probably do have enough of the same idea of "fun" as Smiti, as she probably enjoys robots, engineering, and we'd have plenty to talk about over lunch. I actually did an undergraduate study in computation materials engineering and haven't talked about it in 10 years... so she could probably catch me up on cool new things in the field. None of this has anything to do with the fact that she is female and I am male, nor should it in a professional environment. If the sole reason she was excluded was because the boys didn't want to invite a girl, I'd say that it is a shame they missed out on getting to meet another one of their lab mates.

[Drake Vargas]

Originally Posted by Joe G.

Just because it's legal to be a rude person, doesn't mean you should be a rude person.

Not wanting to hang out with a person isn't rude. Do you actually believe that? Other people should be able to tell me who I can and can't hang out with?

Originally Posted by Joe G.

Given that she presumably wished to be included, I'm going to go with "yes." Or at least "more than close enough."

I don't see the logic here. But it's a minor point.

Originally Posted by Joe G.

The fact is, every heavily skewed datapoint on that graph, in both directions, are simply symptoms of the much larger problem: That people refuse to acknowledge that artificial societal pressures and factors generate these uneven distributions rather than some innate biological reality of gender, that in doing so, people reinforce those societal elements that created the disparities in the first place, and that no matter how you cherry-pick careers, these societal pressures are overwhelmingly sexist and present women as generally "less capable." STEM is an attractive field, with very obvious benefactors from gender equality movements, and so it gets a lot of focus. And maybe victories here, and breaking down barriers and perceptions here, can help inpart change across the board. We don't only encourage women in STEM to get women in STEM, we do it because it's a part of the bigger picture in the fight against the patriarchy.

It's incredibly naive to think biological factors don't play a role in the distribution of careers. Biology is the single largest determinant in a persons character. Yes, there are societal pressures, but they are driven by our innate biological tendencies. We tend to enforce the norm as guided by our unique neurological makeup. Men are typically more aggressive than women, women are typically more empathetic than men. Meaning that on the whole, a lot of women aren't going to like working in a competitive environment whereas men will. And in science, you need competition.

[smitikshah]

I had a whole post typed up but in reading the updated posts I don't think it is necessary to say the same thing others have said over and over. Joe G., EricH, and Steven Smith: I really appreciate your comments in advocating for me on the topic. It means a lot.

"Not wanting to hang out with a person isn't rude. Do you actually believe that? Other people should be able to tell me who I can and can't hang out with?"

In a professional setting, it isn't about having "fun". It was a lab lunch in which you sit around a table and eat while discussing your current advances in the project. I have been to them before. It's not chilling with your friends. It is like any professional work lunch with your co-workers in a work environment.

"I don't see the logic here. But it's a minor point."
Given that I'm working in the same department voluntarily as the rest of them are (we spend 10 hours a day during our summers researching), yes we do have pretty similar definitions of fun. Again, I'm not hanging out with my BFFs here - professional setting.

Also regarding the other posts you made about males are teachers:
http://www.menteach.org/

https://www.oct.ca/-/media/PDF/Attra...Teaching_e.pdf

If you see that there aren't initiatives to push women in labor oriented jobs - then start a campaign if you care about it that much.

About the "it comes down to biology":

Humans are savages by nature. It was embed in our biology to to do whatever we wanted in order to survive and reproduce, including kill. Why isn't it okay to murder if we are biologically wired to do so in times we feel threats on a consistent basis? We are biologically wired to reproduce. Meaning we will try to reproduce as much as they can - being promiscuous. Why is that socially looked down upon now, if we are biologically wired to do so?

[Drake Vargas]

Originally Posted by EricH

Allow me to put it this way:

Your robotics team decides to go out to lunch all together, as a team lunch. They do not tell you, invite you, or otherwise include you--but you hear about it.

Are you, or are you not, singled out for exclusion? There is no third answer. (For this exercise, at any rate. I'm lumping "oops, we forgot" in with "we don't want this person" because if they definitely wanted you, they would have remembered.)

Now, a "workable definition" of discrimination could be phrased as: singling some person or group of persons out for exclusion. Legally, there's somewhere between 10 and 20 different categories that are protected, depending slightly on which state's lists you read--mighty long list, don't you think? The sad part is that all those categories are necessary to be spelled out in the first place...



Let's go back to that exercise. If we assume that you consider that you are not singled out for exclusion, then I find that a little odd--just human nature here, unless there's some mitigating circumstance. If, on the other hand, we assume that you consider the other way (and, to be honest, many people will!), then you may have been discriminated against. On what basis? Well, seeing as I don't know you, or anything about you, per se, I can't say. And, I'm not willing to make anything up. It could have been that for some reason you had some really bad halitosis that day, or it could have been that you were _______ and they were all ______.

That would be what's going on in the post you responded to. And, I'm willing to bet that it WAS unintentional. That doesn't mean it hurts any less! Am I a male? Yep. But... I have had to help deal with the aftermath of what I'll call "unintentional gender bias", with some good engineering-student friends (and it wasn't just me. Several folks were involved in that discussion). All I'll say is that it doesn't just affect those who are on the receiving end, it affects everybody in the group. Eventually. Can I claim that I'm perfect in that regard? NO.


Remember: It doesn't have to BE discrimination to FEEL LIKE discrimination.


Now, in the situation originally mentioned, if they'd asked and been declined, your statement might have had merit. But, they didn't even bother to ask.

I highly doubt the group of men chose to not invite her because of some "subconscious sexist discrimination bias". If they had wanted her around, they would have invited her. If they didn't ask, they don't want to hang out! It's that simple.

Originally Posted by EricH

As far as your other post: Let's ask Why they aren't saying anything about that. Then maybe something can be determined about what else is going on. Just for the record, I don't have an answer on that--yet. Without knowing what may be behind that IS situation, we cannot know why people are not complaining that it does not match the SHOULD BE situation. (And, TBH: It could simply be that either the men or the women swarm all the openings before the other group can even get an application together. Stranger things happen...)

My theory, is that the two sexes have different preferences, ingrained in us biologically and enforced through societal norms. A portion of the population feels that this "status quo" is wrong. To them, unless a field is split 50/50 it is unfair. Here is where the hypocrisy comes in. The majority of the people with this point of view are women arguing that men-heavy fields are the most unfair. The truth is, the reality that most feminists want isn't the reality that most women, on the whole, actually want. When every option is available to women (UC's have a sex split of 50-50), they tend to not choose engineering. Biological differences explain why women enjoy becoming psychologists, and why men enjoy becoming engineers.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Drake Vargas

Not wanting to hang out with a person isn't rude. Do you actually believe that? Other people should be able to tell me who I can and can't hang out with?

So you're telling us that a fair number of people, simultaneously and independently, decided to hang out together but not with one person, who happened to be different from them? I find it hard to believe that someone didn't at least think to invite that person. Like, really hard to believe.

My crew at work knows that I don't usually hang out with them--but that doesn't mean that I don't get invited, asked, or informed by at least one person!

You're right: Not wanting to hang out with someone isn't rude. And you do have freedom of association. But here's the thing: when a bunch of people all exercise that right, against someone else, then it can become discrimination. And I don't think there's a whole lot of court cases where "freedom of association" has been successfully argued as a reason to discriminate. (At least not lately.)

[Joe G.]

Yes, I do think singling out and excluding someone entirely on the basis of a characteristic they cannot control and should not affect the situation is incredibly rude. I've had it happen to me many times, and it sucks. You probably have as well.

If it was about race, we'd call it racism. So why isn't it sexism when its about sex?

Originally Posted by Drake Vargas

My theory, is that the two sexes have different preferences, ingrained in us biologically and enforced through societal norms....Biological differences explain why women enjoy becoming psychologists, and why men enjoy becoming engineers.

Can you quote a scientific study in support of this "theory," which shows such glaring differences that it's worthwhile for everyone to actively work to create/maintain a situation where it's difficult or practically impossible for people of a certain gender to get careers in certain fields or are you just trying to rationalize your own biases?

The truth is, the reality that most feminists want isn't the reality that most women, on the whole, actually want.

A majority of women identify as feminists.

[Liam Fay]

Originally Posted by Drake Vargas

My theory, is that the two sexes have different preferences, ingrained in us biologically and enforced through societal norms. A portion of the population feels that this "status quo" is wrong. To them, unless a field is split 50/50 it is unfair. Here is where the hypocrisy comes in. The majority of the people with this point of view are women arguing that men-heavy fields are the most unfair. The truth is, the reality that most feminists want isn't the reality that most women, on the whole, actually want. When every option is available to women (UC's have a sex split of 50-50), they tend to not choose engineering. Biological differences explain why women enjoy becoming psychologists, and why men enjoy becoming engineers.

There is a difference between wanting a 50/50 split and not wanting a 92/8 split.

Second of all, if women truly aren't that interested in STEM, then why are events like IndyRAGE and Girls' Generation (1540's off-season of a similar vein) so popular? Do you think it's their mentors forcing all of these girls to go? Or is it because they are genuinely interested and have a passion for STEM?

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Drake Vargas

I highly doubt the group of men chose to not invite her because of some "subconscious sexist discrimination bias". If they had wanted her around, they would have invited her. If they didn't ask, they don't want to hang out! It's that simple.

Are you sure that that's what you mean to say?

You just implied, very directly, that they DID NOT want her around. Patterns of that nature are what HR departments dread, as they mean discrimination training, possibly harassment training, and/or investigations.

Why? Do I need to say it again? Discrimination based on a long list of characteristics (of which gender is one, in just about every list I've seen) is not legal. So if a bunch of men are deliberately excluding a woman, then that can fit the legal definition of discrimination. And if you're a company, the LAST thing you want is somebody bringing that kind of lawsuit, because it doesn't matter if you win or lose, you've got at least one black eye.


Now, if you want to explain everything by biology, you want to explain why I, a male, am arguing on the women's side? (Trust me, you don't want to go that route. You aren't me, so you don't know what I'm thinking or why I'm doing this.)

[SoftwareBug2.0]

Originally Posted by EricH

STOP RIGHT THERE.

You just implied, very directly, that they DID NOT want her around. Patterns of that nature are what HR departments dread, as they mean discrimination training, possibly harassment training, and/or investigations.

Why? Do I need to say it again? Discrimination based on a long list of characteristics (of which gender is one, in just about every list I've seen) is not legal. So if a bunch of men are deliberately excluding a woman, then that can fit the legal definition of discrimination. And if you're a company, the LAST thing you want is somebody bringing that kind of lawsuit, because it doesn't matter if you win or lose, you've got at least one black eye.


Now, if you want to explain everything by biology, you want to explain why I, a male, am arguing on the women's side? (Trust me, you don't want to go that route. You aren't me, so you don't know what I'm thinking or why I'm doing this.)

Wow, this thing is off the rails. Lots of people off the deep end from both sides. Everybody take a calm breath and repeat after me:

-Talent can be found where you least expect it. Try to give people a fair shake.

-People can be rude or mean for a myriad of reasons. A person being a part of a protected group is not the only one.

[Drake Vargas]

Originally Posted by Steven Smith

*Citation Needed* On about half of that... but skipping over that for a second.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/sc...tifically.html

http://www.simplypsychology.org/gender-biology.html

http://www.child-encyclopedia.com/ge...-and-behaviour

That's a decent summary of my points. I'm not going to do the research for you. Males and Females have well documented neurological differences. There is a reason there are 4x more autistic men than women and there is a reason why the grand majority of chess masters are male. Our brains are not constructed in identical fashion. You can't deny that and you can't deny the hundreds of studies showing obvious differences in a variety of competence tasks between the sexes.

Originally Posted by Steven Smith

If I were to take what you wrote as truth, I would still argue that being aggressive is not the determining factor in success in engineering or a corporate environment. I would argue that passion for your work is important, as well as competence.

In science, we don't only need competition, we need passion and empathy. I have read, and I have seen, that many women (not all) in engineering tend to connect better with projects that have a societal good associated with it. This could be a project that helps the environment, provides water to 3rd world countries, or saves us from a hurtling asteroid. If there is a project she is passionate about, and she is a competent engineer, than the lack of a primal male aggression is probably not going to hold her back. Increasingly, today's problems are so complex, that it is becoming difficult to do anything of any magnitude without a team as well. Many "traditional female characteristics" also can bring a lot to balance and increase a team's performance.

You are employing a strawman argument. I never said that women in engineering roles was bad; in fact I agree that diversity of engineers leads to new outlooks and solutions. I am just trying to explain the reasoning for the trends that women tend to not go into STEM fields. As far as science not being competitive, this is false. Innovation is the process driven by wanting to make some solution better than ones peers. Further science happens in a capitalist economy and thus there is a competition to get results that trickles down from company level contract bidding wars to the scientists themselves doing the science. To say that science isn't driven by competition is naive. Empathy and morality are important to development too but without competition there is a good chance different countries could be speaking very different languages today.

Originally Posted by Steven Smith

Also, while you have a relative anonymity with a new user name and little details to personally identify yourself, I would encourage you for your own career protection to know that posting on the internet about how women are biologically incapable of succeeding in a competitive workplace could have consequences in the future, perhaps in a time when you have changed your opinion but the internet is forever. You could very well be working for a female supervisor in the future who may not be amused that her employee feels she is incapable of during her job due to her chromosomes.

I've decided to keep my primary account focused solely on the mechanical side of engineering. I created this account to direct the ad hominem attacks I would surely receive away from my team and it's members. My views do not represent those of my team.

Additionally, I don't want people who can't be bothered to read correctly making assumptions about my personal beliefs. Not once in this thread have I said women are incapable of succeeding in engineering fields. I said that on the whole, men and women are predisposed to different things. I don't believe biology ultimately controls every factor of a persons life, but I do believe it heavily influences it.

[Drake Vargas]

Originally Posted by Liam Fay

There is a difference between wanting a 50/50 split and not wanting a 92/8 split.

Second of all, if women truly aren't that interested in STEM, then why are events like IndyRAGE and Girls' Generation (1540's off-season of a similar vein) so popular? Do you think it's their mentors forcing all of these girls to go? Or is it because they are genuinely interested and have a passion for STEM?

Yet another strawman argument in this thread. I never said all women, I said there is a general trend. But way to go ahead and miss the point completely and then advance the notion that two events is a statistically significant point.

[Drake Vargas]

Alright lads, I'm abandoning ship. This thread started with a legitimate concern and has devolved into a mess of accusations, assumptions, and a massive bandwagon.

Not everything is immediately about sex or race.

If you wish to talk about anything, PM me. I'm always up for a civil discussion.

Have a nice evening everybody.