Post: #1

I think she's smarter than just about all of us reading here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazi....html?_r=0

Post: #2

The better question is should absolute gender equality be present in every single field of human endeavor, or only those fields that hold prestige and respect today?

Post: #3

She's apparently a very smart woman, and yet she completely wasted all the educational resources that could have gone to someone who actually planned to use the degree so she could teach creative writing.

It's amazing how much encouragement women believe they need to succeed.

Post: #4

Christ, 10 pages? I'm actually a bit of a champion for women in science and I'm not going to read all that.

I will comment on the first paragraph, which turned me off to the whole article:

Quote:Last summer, researchers at Yale published a study proving that physicists, chemists and biologists are likely to view a young male scientist more favorably than a woman with the same qualifications. Presented with identical summaries of the accomplishments of two imaginary applicants, professors at six major research institutions were significantly more willing to offer the man a job. If they did hire the woman, they set her salary, on average, nearly $4,000 lower than the man’s. Surprisingly, female scientists were as biased as their male counterparts.

A woman and a man who achieve the same marks at a university do no represent the same level of intelligence or capability. Women have far more support both in the form of orbiter men willing to do their homework or help on their projects and officially sanctioned programs that offer financial and emotional assistance. I witnessed many a girl skate through difficult classes on the backs of the 4 or 5 guys who constantly offered her help. I'm not judging, if 4 people were always on my beck and call to help with my homework in college I would have taken it. It takes a pretty willful woman to refuse that assistance and do it herself. In a perverse way it actually makes it easier for me to hire competent women than it does to hire competent men. I can suss out how much of the work a girl did on her own pretty quickly in a phone screen. The ones who stuck with it and did it on there own tend to be extremely competent and have lots of drive. Because men are typically forced to do most of the work themselves it's a lot harder to tell if they would have slacked given the opportunity.

Post: #5

Did anybody ever stop and think that the skills needed for grades, test scores and actual results might change from high school to college to grad school to post doc to tenure track prof?

No.

That ridiculously simple concept refutes her article.

Besides, all the stuff she wrote is way out of date. When she was coming up there was a possibility of being a STEM professor for people who weren't perfect and wanted a life outside of work. Now, they have to be perfect and be willing to work ridiculous hours unless they are truly gifted at the highest level. Who wants it? The whole point now is not to make discoveries or teach, it's to pull in grants so the university can skim 50% off the top and make money from the professor and grad students working insane hours. I guarantee her life is better as a writer than a mediocre physics prof at some 3rd rate university.

From wikipedia:

Eileen Pollack (born 1956) is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. She is the director of the Master of Fine Arts Program at the University of Michigan. Pollack holds an undergraduate degree from Yale University and an M.F.A in creative writing from the University of Iowa.

She currently resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her son.


She's director of an MFA program with an MFA? Good luck becoming a professor pf physics with anything less than a PhD. She could be high quality and if she had made 1 mistake in her PhD, like doing great work someone else was working on and publishing just a bit after them, she'd be blackballed from the field.

Life's not fair.

STEM is now a joke, 45% of the papers never get cited.

You have a job and a kid, you run an MFA program that probably does some good educating people. Life's been better for you than 99% of the humans ever born. Get over it.

Post: #6

Let me tell you something. I saw this interminable and shameless piece of propaganda garbage on the NYT website.

This hag is not "smarter than just about all of us reading here" just because she got an undergrad physics degree from Yale. Sure she belongs to a very small minority of females that have minimally acceptable quantitative abilities to make it that far. Believe me, it's no big deal.

The reason there are "still so few women in science" is very simple. They are terrible at it. They simply don't have the raw mathematical chops to make it. That's why the ones who get pushed along gravitate to junk fields like climate science and a lot of what goes under biology, where they can get away with very modest mathematical talent. The result of females being aggressively promoted in these fields is a flood of mostly worthless papers and "studies".

Are there exceptions? A few, and they're of no real consequence. And when it gets to the highest level of all, there are no exceptions. No woman has ever won the Fields medal, and for good reason.

Incidentally, since that Jill Abramson hag has gotten the reins in the NYT they've gone crazy. They were no bargain to begin with but now they are pushing feminist propaganda on the daily. This is just another long turd in the stream.

***********************************************

By the way, shouldn't this thread be in Everything Else?

Post: #7

If she was actually a smart woman, she'd just find a rich beta and ride the carousel, like all the others..

Obviously she never cared about physics, so what the fuck is the point of doing the degree? To prove how much of an uppity cunt she is?

Post: #8

The feminists are pushing hard to make enrollment in stem a 50/50 ratio not a Merritt based system. So if a program that has 10 thousand people in it but only 1000 are women they will have to drop the enrollment to 2000 and fuck off the othere 8000.

Pretty soon western men will need to go to the third world to get stem degrees. The same is happening in medicine.

Just like title IX that destroyed thousands of male college sports programs. Many of them Olympic like crew teams. Just because no matter what they did they couldn't get female interest. They couldn't even pay girls to play sports in numbers. Free rides and all. So the only other solution to make things equal is to cut sports programs so that everyone had equally nothing.

Post: #9

Quote: "Last summer, researchers at Yale published a study proving that physicists, chemists and biologists are likely to view a young male scientist more favorably than a woman with the same qualifications. Presented with identical summaries of the accomplishments of two imaginary applicants, professors at six major research institutions were significantly more willing to offer the man a job..."

That's because men invented and developed the fields of physics, chemistry and biology. And developed the scientific method that led to studies like this one being conducted. The fact that she doesn't see this or willfully ignores it is telling.

This is not reporting the news, it's attempting to shape it. I sense that the public has had enough of this -- which is why old print media seems to be dying a little more each day. If people believed this stuff, they'd be subscribing by the droves. Instead, they stop by to leave comments that tear these types of articles apart.

Post: #10

This woman is much smarter:

http://edge.org/response-detail/10670

Female philosopher explains why men are more likely to be brilliant than women.

Post: #11

Don't bother reading Eileen Pollack's whiny drivel. Instead, do read Luboš Motl's rebuttal, in which he demolishes Pollack's weak arguments without mercy:

Quote:Pollack describes some of her math and physics classes where she had a hard time to catch up with others and she constantly wanted to raise her hand to slow the instructor down. You shouldn't be shocked that with these data, her environment wasn't optimistic about her being a physicist. Then she boasts that she graduated summa cum laude.

You may see that whenever the system makes her succeed, it "proves" that she is good. But whenever the system and the environment is telling her something bad, the system and the environment must be rotten. If she disbelieves the system, why doesn't she do so consistently? Most likely, her "summa cum laude" was mostly due to the political correctness at Yale but she is afraid to even consider this possibility and she would like to make sure that the readers will be afraid to consider it, too.

Luboš Motl is a Czech theoretical physicist. The best string theorist of his generation. He was an assistant professor of Physics at Harvard, but allegedly got fired due to his Republican, anti-feminist, anti-PC, anti-progressive, climate skeptic views.

Post: #12

(10-04-2013 06:35 AM)Days of Broken Arrows Wrote:  Quote: "Last summer, researchers at Yale published a study proving that physicists, chemists and biologists are likely to view a young male scientist more favorably than a woman with the same qualifications. Presented with identical summaries of the accomplishments of two imaginary applicants, professors at six major research institutions were significantly more willing to offer the man a job..."

That's because men invented and developed the fields of physics, chemistry and biology. And developed the scientific method that led to studies like this one being conducted. The fact that she doesn't see this or willfully ignores it is telling.

This is not reporting the news, it's attempting to shape it. I sense that the public has had enough of this -- which is why old print media seems to be dying a little more each day. If people believed this stuff, they'd be subscribing by the droves. Instead, they stop by to leave comments that tear these types of articles apart.

I have noticed an upswing in the level of anger in the comment of mainstream news. I suspect this is why comments on articles are being limited and will gradually all require real names.

So, women in STEM. They never consider that gender bias might exist for a good reason, and that Science involves teamwork that is crippled by female ego and feelings. It's what I wrote about here, and it is *exactly* what is going on:

The Need To Be Taken Seriously (Unique Snowflakes)

Is she intelligent? Possibly more so than average, but she still falls victim to the usual fallacious thinking of the so-called intelligent woman, based around - you guessed it - solipsism.

Quote:I attended a rural public school whose few accelerated courses in physics and calculus I wasn’t allowed to take because, as my principal put it, “girls never go on in science and math.” Angry and bored, I began reading about space and time and teaching myself calculus from a book.

"Take me seriously, I am a unique snowflake." I can easily see the problem not being sexism, but attenting a rural public school with limited finances and places to allocate to gifted students. Principal made a call based upon odds. Welcome to government-funded education.

This infuriates me further:

Quote:Mostly, though, I didn’t go on in physics because not a single professor — not even the adviser who supervised my senior thesis — encouraged me to go to graduate school. Certain this meant I wasn’t talented enough to succeed in physics, I left the rough draft of my senior thesis outside my adviser’s door and slunk away in shame. Pained by the dream I had failed to achieve, I locked my textbooks, lab reports and problem sets in my father’s army footlocker and turned my back on physics and math forever.

"I'm unique and special. My professor's didn't single out my work as being of particular merit. I couldn't possibly be simply an average student. I need my feelings constantly validated. My ego is not strong enough to motivate my own behaviour without praise to encourage me. I lack the resilience to persevere due to this fragility, so easily fold, thus proving the point of the high school principal who discouraged me from STEM years ago. I will blame men for my lack of resilience, then wonder why employers value males more in this field."

Even 'intelligent' women are consumed by feels. They fail purely due to this dysfunction.

EDIT: Just read the rebuttal. Brilliant takedown. I read the first page of her article before my eyes glazed over at the stupidity on display and the mental issues that hold her back. I read his entire essay and came away thinking he's intelligent and a rational thinker. Obviously, I'd hire him over her.

Post: #13

Yeah Lubos is a smart guy and his posts can be excellent, though he can also be a real goofball at times. In this case he certainly knows whereof he speaks.

Post: #14

(10-03-2013 01:00 PM)kaos021 Wrote:  She's apparently a very smart woman, and yet she completely wasted all the educational resources that could have gone to someone who actually planned to use the degree so she could teach creative writing.

It's amazing how much encouragement women believe they need to succeed.

The big thing despite the unanimous disapproval of her article that stuck out for me was they wouldn't let her take advanced placement courses in high school specifically because she was a girl!!

I think that's outrageous and wrong.

Post: #15

There is no particular reason to believe this hag's claims about the forbidden fruit of AP classes of yore. Women have been known to lie now and then...

In any case, these anecdotal claims, true or false, have no bearing on the ostensibly general argument she's making. To be reduced to such recitation of trivia is the prerogative of a woman who is out of arguments; it's not ours.

Post: #16

I didn't take any AP classes in high school. I didn't even get into grad school the first time I applied. Some how I still managed to get a PhD in physics from a top 5 school. If not taking a few AP classes and lack of encouragement from your professors is all it takes to throw you off the PhD track you probably weren't going to make it very far anyway.

Post: #17

(10-03-2013 12:32 PM)Menace Wrote:  The better question is should absolute gender equality be present in every single field of human endeavor, or only those fields that hold prestige and respect today?

This!!! Apparently she's never had much statistics - men are over represented at the top of any IQ test for the same reason men are over represented at the bottom; while men and women have about the same average IQ, the variance for men's IQ distribution is much higher, and will yield both a surplus of idiots as well as geniuses. It is disingenuous to complain about the over-representation of men on the right side of a distribution, when these people happily ignore the same over-representation on the left side. In short - where are the feminists' outrage over the lack of women in prisons and mental hospitals??

BTW, it seems that cardguy's post above mentions my exact point:

(10-04-2013 10:10 AM)cardguy Wrote:  This woman is much smarter:

http://edge.org/response-detail/10670

Female philosopher explains why men are more likely to be brilliant than women.

Eileen Pollack further writes:

Quote:That the disparity between men and women’s representation in science and math arises from culture rather than genetics seems beyond dispute.

...

In the early 1980s, a large group of American middle-schoolers were given the SAT exam in math; among those who scored higher than 700, boys outperformed girls by 13 to 1. ... Besides, the ratio of boys to girls scoring 700 or higher on the math SAT in middle school is now only three to one. If girls were so constrained by their biology, how could their scores have risen so steadily in such a short time?

I hardly think that the disparity is "beyond dispute" - though among her politically correct brethren it may very well be so. The SAT back in the 1980s is not the same SAT now. The SAT has been repeatedly renormed ever since the 1960s, so that "the scores have gone up but the kids are about as smart as they were." In other words, it is now impossible to tell, using the SAT scores, the difference between the really smart versus the merely bright.

Post: #18

(10-04-2013 09:32 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  There is no particular reason to believe this hag's claims about the forbidden fruit of AP classes of yore. Women have been known to lie now and then...

In any case, these anecdotal claims, true or false, have no bearing on the ostensibly general argument she's making. To be reduced to such recitation of trivia is the prerogative of a woman who is out of arguments; it's not ours.

I am also suspicious of her claim that she was barred by gender from AP courses. Surely the college board (or whoever administrates the AP exams) would have come down harshly on any school who did such a thing, to say nothing of the state school board? If this was a common practice, surely it would have been litigated ten times over?

But we need to look at this through the meta-narrative lens - the claims that women were barred from AP courses/phys ed/varsity sports/etc way back when are constantly thrown in our faces. The purpose of this is to induce white male guilt - we're supposed to feel accountable for these alleged crimes of the past, and take it upon ourselves to prostrate to whatever twist in the system they claim will make up for it today.

Like Ensam, I'm something of a supporter of getting women into STEM, but for me, it's driven by one factor: I don't want anybody with the aptitude and desire to go into a field to be blocked from it by socioeconomic difficulties, administrative hurdles or race/gender biases. I want the opportunity to be there, and let the chips fall where they may in terms of performance.

But what we are seeing with this woman's article and many others is a long series of complaints that "it was haaarrdd!!!" and "I didn't get to live the fantasy, no-sacrifice life I was expecting!"

There's a weird sort of mixing going on between feminism and Millenialism these days - both groups are writing scores of articles and posts about how they're not haaaappy in their work lives and how there's not enough "encouragement" going on in their field (with activist women, it's about having more female "mentors" and "role models"). It's like they can't muster the drive to do anything unless they are repeatedly pushed and cajoled into it, they will just crawl home a weeping mass of gunk.

If there's real discrimination or discouragement going on, I'm all for removing it, but I have no time for people complaining that the tradeoffs are too difficult and so society needs to change. Anne Marie Slaughter can sit down.

I'm also here to tell you right now that until you get tenure, academic life sucks. Being in a research-based grad program is like the lowest form of rat-race life I could imagine - no money, no prestige, stuck in a basement/lab with no natural light, very little free time, you're at the mercy of your advisor, dating sucks, health sucks. There's a comic strip about grad school called "Piled Higher and Deeper" and the author (I've met him) led off his book-signing talk with anecdotes about grad students committing suicide. IF you get a professorship (which may have to come after one or two postdoc positions) you're on a six-year clock to publish or perish, after which you get evaluated for tenure. If you don't get it, you're out up to 15 years of opportunity cost, in your early 30's, with no money starting over on a corporate science/tech career track.

The best decision I ever made was not going for a PhD. I have friends from when I got my master's who are still in school slaving away for the doctorate. Misery.

Post: #19

I agree with Ensam. Went to a rural high school, getting no accolades for my work or grades because I wasn't rich or had parents with connections.

Went to Junior college and a non-descript state university and got into a top law school with a very high LSAT and a fantastic personal statement.

I was told repeatedly that I was not smart and often that I was barely even a mediocre writer in high school and few times in college. You have to believe in yourself and let your true talents shine. The fact she needs cajoling and doesn't seem to display great, innate talent suggests she is just another above-average intelligence person with a persecution complex because she is terrified she might not live up to the all-too-lofty expectations she has created in her head.

Look at her words: "Pained by the dream I had failed to achieve" - she mentions this after authority figures (professors) didn't encourage her to go to grad school. First off, if she really wanted to go to grad school, she would be proactive, asking her professors if she could hack it in grad school. She didn't - so what did she expect? She expects people she regards as authority figures to coax, cajole and basically force her to achieve her "dreams."

Her dreams aren't about physics, but about being told what to do.