This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The idea that “no quota means quota for white men” was probably somewhat true some time in the past. It’s not now, and hasn’t been for at least a couple decades. STEM university programs and major STEM employers have been vocally promoting a commitment to train and hire more women at least since I was in college 20 years ago, and I didn’t get the impression that it was a new thing then.
Throughout my career in engineering so far, the proportion of women in my cohort has remained pretty stable, dating at least back to “number of girls really interested in math and science” in high school (there were perhaps more girls with sufficient aptitude in math and science to be decent engineers - but most of them had other academic talents and interests and parlayed those into careers in medicine or law or whatever). My engineering college was about 30% female (despite actively promoting STEM majors to women and having many programs and scholarships to encourage them) - my major somewhat less, maybe 20%. My company was hiring about 25% women in engineering roles, again despite loud HR diversity declarations, by all indications sincere, promoting hiring women. I’ve been involved in recruiting - we do everything legally permissible (that is, almost everything short of literally hiring based on sex) to hire more women and underrepresented minorities. The numbers have been trending upward over my career, but not particularly fast. My company has a female CEO, but certainly the upper levels of management are male-skewed. But then, those ranks probably reflect the cohort of people who started their careers 25-30 years ago.
From the inside of the pipeline, it sure looks like a pipeline problem. A formative experience of mine was a young woman in my freshman engineering class group project that was in engineering college on a full ride scholarship for women in engineering. She was pretty clearly high IQ, but had zero interest in the nuts and bolts of engineering and basically no special aptitude for the skills unique to engineering. She transferred out to the business school after a year, abandoning her scholarship. Seems to be doing very well now.
Extreme example, but I think indicative of the problem: at the margins, there simply is not a significant pool of talented, interested women who want engineering careers but are driven away by sexism. The marginal female engineer is instead a young woman who was basically bribed into the field by a scholarship, targeted program, or just the promise of a lucrative career. The median female engineer looks a lot like the median male engineer of the same cohort, a math-smart nerd who likes tinkering with things, and these women have been joining the industry for a long time already.
There are almost certainly some pockets of genuine sexism in the industry (likely true of all industries). For the most part I think these are in some of the more toxic start up (or born from start up) cultures, which get massively outsized coverage in media (and even there I suspect the coverage is exaggerated). The large majority of us are employed in big corporations, universities, and government agencies where good corporate HR flacks and middle managers have been fighting over every good female job candidate for decades.
More options
Context Copy link