Discussion on All-Girl events

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Drake Vargas

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".

Of course there are efforts tat support men, male issues, and male membership in underrepresented fields (total or male minorities). They may not have visibility to you [this is a general "you"], or you may wish more existed or that they were more active. If so, I'm sure they'd welcome any help. It's the membership that determines how controversial, active, and effective any organization is. But these groups certainly can and very much do exist whether or not they're regularly mentioned on a robotics forum. As a quick first Google, there's American Assembly of Men in Nursing, American Men's Studies Association, Young Men's Initiative, 100 Black Men of America, the Men Teach nonprofit, and the Mankind Project, before I satisfied myself about the depth. There are also a massive number of male fraternal, social, and religious (not to mention sporting) organizations that support male career and life goals, as well as organizations that focus on male-dominant issues, such as Just Detention International. If there's one you'd like to see and don't, go for it. Every organization ever made was made by a person who felt that.


As for whether people complain that men dominate many grueling jobs on the list, I need to control my temper. Do women push for male-dominate jobs that aren't very socially valued? Not so much, but that's a recursive definition and also applies to low-paid women's jobs, most notably tipped food service (72%). But don't conflate low social value and grueling. Have women fought for access to other grueling male-dominated jobs? Of course. Countless women have being fighting for literally generations to be able serve and potentially die for their country in many military and law enforcement jobs, and for the recognition of women who already did before they were technically allowed. I hope you are not in this position, but I know I could wake up tomorrow to find out that any number of women in uniform I care about are dead for their country on the other side of the world, doing jobs they or their foremothers had to fight just to access, in an organization where they are still far more likely to be discriminated against, harassed, and assaulted. Regardless of what you think of women in combat, to say there's no push to grueling jobs is blatantly ignoring a very, very long and hard history of women pushing just to be able to compete against the same standards of the profession as men.

Phew. And separately, yes, of course there is a National Association for Women in Construction, several for women in mining, Women in Petroleum, Women in Manufacturing, Automotive jobs, and on and on. (Like the male counterparts, these tend to focus on or at least publish more high versus low social value jobs in their industry, but the support network is there.)