Hacker News Reader

Comment by buboard | Hacker News Reader

This old white man may be a good old sexist, but is there truth to the statement "female physicists face more career obstacles than their male colleagues" ?

I was lucky enough to do my Phd with an all-female group of advisors and i m pretty sure it was beneficial for my work. There are all sorts of female-only or female-first awards, funding, prizes, scientist networks and, considering how there are less women in STEM field, conference quotas and funding quotas visibly benefited my advisors and indirectly, me. This provided opportunities for visibility for my (mediocre) work that were just not available otherwise. I 'm not in academia so not sure how this translates to hiring prospects, but AFAIK everyone is struggling, regardless of gender. I'd recommend having a female supervisor however.

View on HN

It’s actually the opposite problem at the moment. Far more women are pursuing college degrees than men. Men have been in this declining trend, they dropout more, get less grants, scholarships, ...etc.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/why-me...

From what I understand the issue is more complicated. Women are pursuing more college degrees than men, but also men still occupy the a disproportionate number of of administative, leadership, and professor positions. The overall story comes that women pursue higher education because they need to acquire more education/accolades to achieve the positions of male peers.

Answering to a "male problem" (e.g. men pursuing less education) by stating it's actually another example of bias agains women ("that's because women need more education to get the same job") is not really a constructive position, is it?

I don't actually know if it is another example of bias against women. I only know that the picture might be more complicated- men may pursue less education but also men can advance faster with less education comparatively. The overall picture is probably not so simple as that men pursue less education therefore men are systematically disadvantaged.

Arguably, it shows that men are disadvantaged in one axis and not necessarily the whole axis, which is why I'm bringing up that there are other spaces along this axis where men are not systematically disadvantaged. I do firmly believe that men are disadvantaged in several fields and spaces which require addressing, but not that that means men are disadvantaged overall.

Couldn't that also be explained by the fact that more women attending college than men is a relatively new development, and most administrative/leadership/professor positions are held by older people, hence the gender ratio will take time (>20-30 years) to reflect the new gender balance?

After all, the people that are professors now were studying in the 1980s-1990s, hence the current ratio of male/female professors should logically represent the gender ratio of the field in the 1980s-1990s if there is no inherent gender bias, not the gender ratio of the field in 2019.

From what I understand new professorships, NSF CAREER awards, and similar are still majority male. There is an observed phenomenon that when men enter a female-dominanted field they still gain leadership positions faster than women do. This happens in nursing and schooling, for example.

That's not really the same thing though, is it? The list of career obstacles that women face as a consequence of being women includes far more than numbers of grants and degree candidates.

The mere existence of an observed phenomena doesn't imply that some other set of phenomena doesn't occur. It's about determining what can be observed. It's making sure that we don't see patterns where there are none. It's also about making the case of whether the observation is a problem at all, or whether it is just a point of interest and that are goals might be to determine what sort of set of problems we are trying to solve.

In my estimation, the most powerful argument for career obstacles is about competency, pay, opportunity. You need to be educated in order to do anything. You need to get paid so that you can survive, and you need the opportunity of a position in order to get paid. The obstacles from this follow the ordering:

I need to survive, I need something to do, I need to live a life that is not full of suffering (so much that I can even control that), and to do that I need to take on responsibility and work so that there is both something to do, something to reduce suffering, something to get paid for, so that I can survive. I need to be competent because the market pays people based on this notion that you should be educated so that you can actually get any job. Otherwise why be educated at all.

Given this, I would think that the goal of a university would be to reduce the price/performance ratio of a tuition at all possible efforts so that the level of competency can be obtained through quality education at a reduced cost while balancing the incentives such that the resources funnel to the right places where problems can be best solved. In my estimation, this is not even close to what is happening and it's where I would hope things start moving forward - since in large part it appears to the largest possible obstacle for people.

> The mere existence of an observed phenomena doesn't imply that some other set of phenomena doesn't occur. It's about determining what can be observed. It's making sure that we don't see patterns where there are none.

I should note that the latter part of this statement is probably even more important that the first. Which is to say, it is not self-evident that a particular observation is how things actually are. The way in which you articulate things is a formulation of reality based on what you have observed and who you are (in all the millions of years of human development that implies). It's important to note that the observation has to be rooted in evidence: measurements and methods, and causal proofs. Even if, perhaps especially, a particular argument is compelling from the perspective of its ethical implications, it does not necessarily imply it stands on solid ground.

I believe, and perhaps this might be where the ethical implication comes from, that there is reason we formulate compelling arguments along the political spectrum or across anything that doesn't have its roots firmly grounded in the evidence (because maybe not all things can actually be observed, maybe you don't have the data, maybe there's a lot more to it). I believe that we do this because there is some kind of narrative structure that underlies the propositions we lay out. That narrative structure is vital to us because it might be that we base our entire emotional stability on the stability of that structure.

If the structure isn't reliable, or someone challenges our notions of how we see a problem, or how a problem could be solved, when its challenged we get the sense that it is challenging us. We don't like that - we don't believe it. Our entire psychological well being depends on whether the narrative structure of the viewpoint holds weight - perhaps most especially when we don't even want to look at the evidence.

Well, there are certainly some traditional obstacles - like taking time off to give birth, or changing your name after marriage messing up your publication/citation counts.

Deciding whether the female-only awards you mention are sufficient to compensate for such obstacles is an inherently apples-to-oranges comparison.

From what I have seen, there are also obstacles that stem from universities and funding bodies doing "affirmative action" that has not been thought through completely.

Think about it - whenever someone needs participants for a committee of some sort, a leader for a research centre, or similar, they always want to achieve a better gender balance than the actual average gender balance in their field. This means that female scientists are requested to do significantly more non-science work than male scientists. Of course this has drawbacks.

> is there truth to the statement "female physicists face more career obstacles than their male colleagues" ?

Since you did your PhD with many women, why not ask them?

It was not in physics and she admits it was helpful to have a few extra prizes in her CV, but i don't know about obstacles, she's a star anyway

A woman wouldn't be in any better position to compare the male experience with the female experience than a man would, because in both cases they would have to have knowledge that wasn't from direct experience.

Sure, they can’t definitely answer “being a woman is harder”. But they can probably give some insight into the obstacles they’ve encountered. In my experience, those obstacles are very different than the ones a guy like me has.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com