Is Science Saturated with Sexism? New evidence suggests the opposite.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/259744/science-saturated-sexism-christina-hoff-sommers

by diderot • 15 years ago

9 3 15 years ago

thisrod• 15 years ago

Ceci and Williams demonstrate that the real problem most women scientists confront is the challenge of combining motherhood with a high-powered science career.

The quoted statement is no longer true when "women" and "mother" are replaced by "man" and "father". Thus the problem really is sexism. The meta-problem is that TV needs villains, so the meme "scientists are sexist when they hire and promote" spreads faster than "everyone is sexist all the time".

The truth is that being a woman is hard, and being a scientist is hard squared. That makes being a woman in science hard cubed, and naturally very few people can do it.

Locke16892• 15 years ago

Kind of.

Here's the actual line from the PNAS article:

“Although the reasons for this attrition are not well understood, it appears to have less to do with discrimination or ability than with fertility decisions and lifestyle choices, both freely made and constrained. The tenure structure in academe demands that women having children make their greatest intellectual contributions contemporaneously with their greatest physical and emotional achievements, a feat not expected of men. When women opt out of full-time careers to have and rear children, this is a choice—constrained by biology—that men are not required to make

Your claim that the problem "really is sexism" is unsupported by evidence. The article seems to be claiming that the primary impact is the physical and biological constraints of being a mother.

Locke16892• 15 years ago

If I may suggest: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/02/02/1014871108.abst...

I didn't even read the pop-sci article.

Is Science Saturated with Sexism? New evidence suggests the opposite.

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