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The only thing that will happen is GE will expand the definition of "STEM", so it can show results, and create a number of disparate impact, and even treatment claims against them.
They should be able to go and see that the availability rate for many STEM fields shows a low percent of females, thus GE is aiming for over-utilization of female representation.
Your post really well illustrates the problem. There is a perception there is only one way to be interested in technology and science. Why do you need to wear a <choose your favorite kernel> t-shirt to prove you are a techie. I hate t-shirts. You guy want to have p*ssing match on who has more nerd cried to prove who belongs.
You demonstrate the problem perfectly. You unconsciously made a sexist comment. A pissing contest is a male territorial display. It would be like me suggesting you are posting with PMS. Your bias is explosive. Yes males behave differently.
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It is exhausting. Women have to spend all day "proving" they are techie enough before people even consider the possibility they might be marginally capable.
I would suggest its a waste of time. So lets stop wasting it and do as you please. I could not care less what people think I should be doing. I never gave a crap. Why do you?
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My own childhood: we got a computer when I was 5. I played a lot of video games. My dad made me update his spreadsheets stage 5 or 6. When we had outings with dad, we went to the computer store and the music store. We left with a new game. But the parents made sure we had educational ones. When I was done playing outside for the day I played on the computer. My favorite games were Defender and Frog-ger (and later Carmen San Diego and the Dope Wars).
That represented a run of the mill boy. It hardly represents someone deeply interested in electronics. I mean really.....This isn't hacking BASIC.
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I spent a long time thinking Windows was dumb and preferred to launch everything via DOS, and new all the commands and tricks.
Like many a librarians in the day. Its not representative of a technical interest. It is in fact the typical pragmatic approach more often seen in women. Women became very interested in computing when it became of practical use. Surely most men did as well. However the ones typically interested into computers at a very banal level were typical male. ...for what ever reason.
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I didn't have a chemistry kit because I wasn't super into that. I liked mysteries and had a crime solving kit. I liked puzzles, problem solving and trivia games.
What a surprise that you liked quintessentially female games. Who knows for sure why. It could be interest or it could be because cultures are created that encourage separation. Its uncanny just how little 10 year old boys and girls want to be together.
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No one in my family like chess, I learned to play in middle school and we played at math team practice. We jokingly referred to math team as the chess club because we stopped doing math and spent the time alternating chess and trashcan basketball.
Neither did my family . I just could not help but notice who was interested in it. It was not girls for the most part.
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I don't play often now because no one in my family particularly cared - we play pinochle as a family. I didn't prioritize chess as there were plenty of other games I could play with my friends and family.
I was obsessed with all gadgets and tech growing up - the animator, gameboys, laptops and later PDAs and cell phones. I was so obsessed with Apple when they announced OS X and moving to Unix. I had zero interest in disassembling them. But if you wanted to know the best one I was the person to ask. I stopped playing video games at about age 18, when all the games became first person shooters. I grew out of it. I toned down the gadget obsession at around age 25.
That isn't even remotely technical in nature. That isn't even writing code in C for text processing let alone creating a graphic engine or writing device drivers. You had interest in them for another goal in mind. You had no interest in pointless or convoluted logic.
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I am not mechanically oriented, but I loved learning abou science. I read 3-2-1 Contact and watched the corresponding show and Nova. I liked to know how things worked and how that applies to something else.
Very few people from my high school became engineers. Maybe 5-10 of my 350 person class. Most of them were on math team with me for at least a year. One guy who landed in IT wasn't on math or science team. My best friend who had a math teacher dad, tried to stay far away from tech, but we p,ayec video games together. Her dad tried to use me to convince her to join math team. I could only convince her to do one semester of math team.
Now she is an engineer at a big tech company. Her dad is happy.
Based on the BS definition of what does a future programmer look like, on paper I should have been all in. I had top math scores and grades. I was on the math and science teams from middle school on. I had a very different career idea when I got to college. I even humored everyone by taking the computer science pre-reqs. I took the intro to programming class and was like "nope, this is way too much alone with a computer time," and went in a different path.
It is funny that I eventually landed in software implementation consulting and and now basically the tech infrastructure lead for marketing - but that's because I both understand marketing, databases and systems design. It turns out marketers need to be way more technical than in the past. They try to use engineers for my role, and they fail because they don't
understand how marketing works.
All the above is demonstrable as regarding tech for practical use. Its not not for the gadgetry itself.
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Women don't mind working with men who treat them as peers, but in male dominated fields that is rare. Why would anyone want to work where their colleagues treat them like crap.
Case in point: Uber investigates 'abhorrent' sexism claims - BBC News
I am quite sure a class of men hate working in that atmosphere. You might think some irascible antisocial tech worker doesn't like women. I assure you they are often that way with everyone. I don't think I would want to work with a "feminist" either. Why would I given I have to prove I am accommodating ? The fact is I do work with women , and thankfully, we just get to work.
You demonstrate the problem perfectly. You unconsciously made a sexist comment. A pissing contest is a male territorial display. It would be like me suggesting you are posting with PMS. Your bias is explosive. Yes males behave differently.
I used this phrase intentionally. Our culture has defined a single way to be a techie. The rest or your post demonstrates that. Blah, blah, blah that behavior is girlie. That doesn't count. It doesn't prove you are interested. Blah blah blah.
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Like many a librarians in the day. Its not representative of a technical interest. It is in fact the typical pragmatic approach more often seen in women. Women became very interested in computing when it became of practical use. Surely most men did as well. However the ones typically interested into computers at a very banal level were typical male. ...for what ever reason.
Why do you need an interest in electronics? I am not mechanically inclined, but
The most essential thing I have learned over the past few years is that the bulk of the programming job opportunities are for apps. No knowledge of hardware or electrical engineering needed. The jobs we are creating now are quite different.
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I am quite sure a class of men hate working in that atmosphere. You might think some irascible antisocial tech worker doesn't like women. I assure you they are often that way with everyone. I don't think I would want to work with a "feminist" either. Why would I given I have to prove I am accommodating ? The fact is I do work with women , and thankfully, we just get to work.
It is clear you didn't bother reading through the entirely top to bottom ways women were excluded. Ranging from smaller stuff like not bothering to order women's sizes in employee gifts to having to put up with sexual advances from your boss. This is not even mentioning things like lower pay and crappier assignments that all of the female engineers (in tech) I know have experienced.
Interestingly in fields like civil engineering, with a lot more women, these things are not as common. People don't go you can't design a bridge because you didn't choose a side in the UNIX/Linux wars.
In 1950 and earlier this was more common. Not any more. If you think this is the case today and you are male, then most likely you are either over 70 years old or you aren't married because most women wouldn't put up with that antiquated mindset.
41 years old, married to a woman 12 years younger, she is sitting at home with the kids. Everybody happy because we have our clear roles.
eta: I did just have a thought- perhaps people do not understand what innate/intrinsic means or perhaps it's applied differently in sociology/psychology (if at all) compared to how it's used in science. Maybe.
You seem to be thinking about innate as it applies to physics. In biology, innate simply means the product of our genetic coding. The example that I used earlier was that men are innately stronger than women. I don't think that you had an issue with that statement, so it's odd that you are so bothered by the stated fact that men and women have innate differences in cognition. Men and women certainly have different brain structure so this should be no surprise.
Men have cognitive strengths that favor work in the STEM fields. That's not to say that a certain percentage of women can't work in the STEM field, but it's extremely unlikely that men and women would ever reach a parity in these professions unless it is artificially forced like GE is attempting to do.
Women have cognitive strengths that favor certain professions and women dominate certain fields like veterinary and educational services, but there are no concerted efforts to push men into these fields because men don't care that women are better at certain things that they are.
Are you saying that men aren't equally capable of tending young children as women?
Yes, that's precisely what I am saying)))
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That said the real opportunities being denied men is in the nursing & med tech fields and in education (or at least in elementary school education where the women making hiring decisions in many districts tend to avoid hiring qualified male teachers).
Yes, this might be a case, although I am not sure why men would like to teach in elementary schools.
I mean it's "elementary," and I would guess that men would prefer to challenge children more, and this usually comes when children are already older somewhat...
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The nursing and med tech fields are particularly problematic in economic terms given they pay above average wages, and in personal terms given the impact on male patients that might prefer the option of male staff for certain exams and procedures.
I see your point, but then I would think it might create complications in terms of scheduling and what's not ( coz obviously female patients would prefer the female nurses, and men for the most part don't care either way.
So women as a rule are more convenient as nurses than men.
There is an assumption that women leave technical roles due to child rearing or something. But in reality most women leave because of a crappy work environment with bad managers. Kids are a convenient excuse that allows everyone to part ways while saving face.
This is a first person account above, but the same thing bears out with formal surveys as well. The question is - why do the managers suck?
There is an assumption that women leave technical roles due to child rearing or something. But in reality most women leave because of a crappy work environment with bad managers. Kids are a convenient excuse that allows everyone to part ways while saving face.
This is a first person account above, but the same thing bears out with formal surveys as well. The question is - why do the managers suck?
I've had some terrible bosses. That's something that is expected in the engineering field. There are many intelligent people who move into management yet have poor people skills. This is true in a lot of professions, but especially true in the STEM fields since success in these fields has more to do with competency than personality.
It's also true that men cope with these work situations better. This is why more men work in high-stress professions than women do. The most dangerous jobs are overwhelmingly male. Women are more emotional than men and this is a big part of the reason that women don't do well in these fields.
You seem to be thinking about innate as it applies to physics. In biology, innate simply means the product of our genetic coding. The example that I used earlier was that men are innately stronger than women. I don't think that you had an issue with that statement, so it's odd that you are so bothered by the stated fact that men and women have innate differences in cognition. Men and women certainly have different brain structure so this should be no surprise.
Come on. I think you know full well that my argument is not about men and women being different, or thinking differently. It's the bias assumption exhibited over and over in this thread...the claims... that women innately lack aptitude/potential for success in maths/sciences.
Men have cognitive strengths that favor work in the STEM fields. That's not to say that a certain percentage of women can't work in the STEM field, but it's extremely unlikely that men and women would ever reach a parity in these professions unless it is artificially forced like GE is attempting to do.
Women have cognitive strengths that favor certain professions and women dominate certain fields like veterinary and educational services, but there are no concerted efforts to push men into these fields because men don't care that women are better at certain things that they are.
Your link does not support these assertions. 1. they state differences in cognition do not contribute to differences in intelligence. 2. "In more gender-equal societies, "the male advantage in math virtually disappears" 3. The differences they do see, which you attribute to greater ability for STEM (they do not make this claim) fall at the tails of the distribution curve. So, even if you were correct, this write up does not support your assertion that men, as a group, have greater aptitude in maths/sciences as women, as a group. Men do not reside within the tails of their own distribution.
Did you actually read this link or only skim it? I don't think you are really reading my posts either.
There is an assumption that women leave technical roles due to child rearing or something. But in reality most women leave because of a crappy work environment with bad managers. Kids are a convenient excuse that allows everyone to part ways while saving face.
This is a first person account above, but the same thing bears out with formal surveys as well. The question is - why do the managers suck?
Professional women in the US rarely leave the workforce to raise their children (wish our society supported that). They take the shortest maternity leaves as well.
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