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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how old Judith Lewis is, or if this varies by area and subject? My mom was a chemistry BS and MS major in the late 60s / early 70s, and she seems to think that when she started in 1966, there were a lot of "women don't belong in science" dinosaur professors, but by the early 1970s they were almost all gone, or at least had been "encouraged" into keeping quiet.

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Maybe they went into engineering. I started uni in the late 90s, the natural sciences already had a nice mix of men and women, except physics. Engineering was still a man's world even then. Then one of my professors dropped the proverbial bomb in class, declaring that "women don't belong in engineering".

It was a fiasco for a little while, the university stated its disagreement but couldn't fire him. He retired a year later (the guy looked like he was on death's doorstop).

The school has been trying, for years, to get more women and minorities into engineering but it's usually just a modest bump in good years, when they have money to actively search. Leaner times, like now, may mean small drop in an already small pool of viable candidates.

more women and minorities into engineering

More minorities into engineering? What school did you go to that the engineering classes weren't almost entirely Asian and/or Indian?

I believe they mean Latino and Black students, which are underrepresented. NACME for instance, is trying to get a engineering racial makeup much more similar to that of the US at large.

http://www.nacme.org/NACME_D.aspx?pageid=96

And while many of the sub-continent students (Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi) would love to stay, many of them are foreign nationals, and will likely have to leave (or choose to).

So out of all the hundreds of minorities, only the two biggest minorities count as "minorities"?

I love US racial doublespeak circa 2010.

There's even more underrepresentation of African-Americans, which doesn't seem to be counted--- a lot of the top schools try to up their racial stats by admitting upper-class Caribbean and African black students. There might be some benefit to it, but it seems that the goal of affirmative action (remedy U.S. racial inequality) is probably not greatly served by increasing opportunities for people who are black, but are also sons of Nigerian cabinet ministers and millionaires.

Affluent black Africans (Nigerians and a Kenyan) and the daughter of white South Africans are actually why I say "black" instead of "African American" these days, as both groups objected to the term.

The underrepresented groups are correctly, American born descendants of former slaves who are identifiable as black, and Hispanics of darker skin tone. But man, is that a mouthful to say.

"a lot of the top schools try to up their racial stats by admitting upper-class Caribbean and African black students"

I don't think it's a conspiracy as you're putting it. I think they just happen to come out better qualified for various reasons ($$ helps a lot), and happen to have the correct skin tone to take advantage of any remaining quota or aid social programs designed for the American born descendants of former slaves.

Yeah, I didn't mean it as a conspiracy, just that the incentives aren't lined up to enact what I take to be affirmative action's main purpose. The goal is to remedy a wrong suffered by a certain group, but because of the way the stats are calculated, it serves in large part to benefit some other group (which is generally affluent and not very oppressed).

Certainly not restricted entirely to sciences - my Mom got her BS around 1969; when she applied to law school, the secretary actually threw out her application because "Honey, if you want to meet lawyers [ie, to marry], just hang out in the law library, you don't actually have to go to the school." (She ended up getting an MLS instead, and loves being a librarian, so at least there's a happy ending to it)

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