Funder bars university from grant programme over white-male award line-up | Hacker News Reader

Funder bars university from grant programme over white-male award line-up

nature.com

33 pointssohkamyung47 comments

As a little anecdote, during my computer science studies i had exactly one female student in a ~50 student class. A mandatory class, so that was it for female students that semester. That was general computer science. Those then split up into different specializations for their future line of work. From personal experience, quite a few theoretical computer scientists and more or less the rest into big data. Who went there for the math. People might be shocked to hear this, but not many little girls dream about becoming computer engineers. And i cant really blame them. Having to deal with registers and assembly isnt such an attractive proposition.

Dont get me wrong, they sure exist, however not enough of them to fill any sort of meaningful quota. I have one female colleague in the department and she is very annoyed to be begged to be the token female. And not at all interested.

It was somewhere along that road that it dawned on me that i have yet to meet any female colleague in computer engineering who thought any sort of quotas to be a good idea. They are obvious nonsense implemented by people who never in a thousand years would think about about going into that profession themselves. You cant use them to force people into existence. And outside of kidnapping first semester Psychology or MBA students there isnt much reason to be optimistic for quotas in the future.

This is because of " boys are prince, girls are princesses" and "blue is for boys and pink (or red) is for girls" propaganda. I went to faculty in an eastern europe country and we did not had such crap shaming of jobs based on gender.

I think it's more rich countries where women have options, many decide to do what they enjoy instead.

edit: Did you actually have noteworthy ratio in computer engineering?

Unless you do something about the attractiveness of Psychology and Medicine, there will always be fields with a lack of female students. Computer Engineering being on the lower end of the list. Its a zero sum game, you wont get quota in waste disposal management without an upper limit in every profession that has more then the male/female ratio of the workforce.

You opinion also assumes that socialization is everything. I would argue that there is ample evidence that women are more drawn into professions that help people vs building something alone in their basement. So unless you want to engineer a new women with less compassion and more obsession on tinkering i dont know what to tell you.

Add on top of that the big bias of large parts of a given years computer engineering alumni being on the spectrum.

The question is complicated. On the one hand you claim that in the west certain people are pushed away from certain fields, whereas others have claimed that in more egalitarian countries people are actually pushed into certain fields against their will. In my opinion, as someone that has seen both eastern europe and the west, I tend to agree with the latter idea, as I have personally witnessed large social pushes towards equality in the west, alongside a highly capable female demographic that achieve well in schools, it dosen't add up to me that women in the west are being pushed out of these programs, they simply prefer others. In comparison I see the same high capability and well achieving demographic in the east, with no positive or negative societal pressure on them, with a much more egalitarian professors/students ratio. Clearly there is something else besides capability and social pressure, and as others have pointed out, that is freedom of choice.

> not many little girls dream about becoming computer engineers

This simply isn't true in many cultures. So why is it the case in the West?

Please source this.

Why? Did you provide a source for your claim? No.

The poster i responded to didnt claim what i said was untrue in the West. But there being an exception in other cultures. So which ones? Sorry if that sounded confrontational.

edit: Best i could come up with is Russia and they have heavily biased gender ratios as well https://www.statista.com/statistics/1240183/university-cours...

china: https://image5.sixthtone.com/image/5/9/809.jpg

India has an equal ratio in CS, still looking for CE. The ratio is explained as follow >Limited Career Choice in India: Among families who send their children to university in India, engineering or medicine is the default expectation (both for men and women). Parents place great pressure on their children to study specific subjects for reasons of socio-economic prospects –career and marriage partners are a prime concern. For the most part, children feel they must comply. http://www.hcixb.org/papers_2017/hcixb17-final-37.pdf

That seems to be a general trend, the less pressure, the worse the ratios. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

Thanks for that response. I did take it as confrontational. I apologize.

Don't forget to look back in time to 1980s USA.

Graph: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/cs.png?x91208

Can anyone link/provide a good analysis on this?

I don't have time, but just wanted to comment that I appreciate that you're actually looking into this rather than just handwaving objections away.

Generally prefer being right over feeling right. Since i am an idiot that includes a lot of searching for overlooked facts and perspectives. Appreciate the heads up.

It is an obvious pattern known to anyone who visited or attended Eastern European or Middle Eastern universities.

Here is an example I saw recently: Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi is a STEM research-focused university and close to 60% of their students are female. They have no "soft" majors and most students have to achieve and maintain high performance to stay enrolled and get scholarships that cover their tuition or even give them stipends if they are in the top of their class. I saw female students happily working on robotics, FPGA designs, security CTFs, etc. They would be shocked to see how common it is to be the single woman in a classroom in other countries.

Edit: sentence clarity.

Thank you! Its a great example with Abu Dhabi being less likely to be formed by the economic pressure prevalent in countries like India.

I don't have the study at hand, but almost all parts of the Muslim world that do not restrict women from study have a lot of female STEM interest. I think it was Egypt that had a significant amount of women in IT, too, but I don't recall the finer details.

i'd say it's the same reason not so many little boys dream of becoming a nurse.

And i also think that there's no reason to have such quotas for professions. What needs to be done is giving young people exposure to as much as possible as early as possible.

> People might be shocked to hear this, but not many little girls dream about becoming computer engineers.

In my experience the majority of new high school grads do not choose their uni program based on a deep passion. Usually, they don't even have one or don't know what it is.

I studied CS in Germany at 2 different faculties, and there was a large discrepancy between the first (~15% non-male), and the second (~35% non-male). The second faculty had a lot more female professors, I also suspect that having a more equal gender ratio benefits an even more equal gender ratio: The idea of being a small minority in your degree is just not very appealing, and the negative stereotypes on male CS students are pretty off-putting to women. These do also seem to hold true for a sad subset of the student body.

I dont think you can compare the two faculties out of context. One driver for the especially abysmal ratio in my case was there being a competing degree. A more media focused computer science degree gutting out the low level stuff. There the ratio was great, but that was due to poaching of design students. Same with a data science masters degree poaching of the mathematics department.

While there has been a great example to the contrary of the Arab world (which requires more consideration), it seems that the more choice you give female students to get around some stuff the more likely they will do. That would boil down to some stuff being less attractive. So the question is do you trick/nudge/force people to do it either way?

So the issue isn't event that they didn't give awards to women or ethnic minorities, it's that the women and ethnic minorities weren't available for the group photo.

This response makes no sense.

    The decision, announced by the Snow Medical Research Foundation on 7 March, comes after the
    University of Melbourne released a picture of six white men — but no women or people of colour
    — receiving honorary degrees, one of the university’s highest accolades, in a ceremony on 28
    February
    
    ...
    
    James McCluskey, deputy vice-chancellor of research at the university, says that other people,
    including three women and an Indigenous man, were scheduled to receive honorary awards that day
    but weren’t able to make it.

Why do they capitalise 'Indigenous' but 'white' remains without capital?

To make it clear they're referring to Indigenous Australians (a particular group of people) rather than using the term as an adjective, like "white" is being used.

This is definitely a thing I've observed (marginalised groups being missed out of the photos). Why weren't they able to make it? Was it because they were only asked last minute? Is it because they keep getting cut out the loop? Some sort of passive protest? A deliberately awkward schedule?

I remember a story a few years ago where the woman missing from the photo was missing because... they were in a women-only meetup during the conference, followed by several interviews because they were the only woman there.

Or there’s a pandemic?

Seems these men didn't work hard enough to pass the diversity test. What ever happened to meritocracy?

Meritocracy is what we have. That's kind of the problem. Meritocracy wasn't considered to be a good thing by its inventor.

If M&M's were being randomly drawn from a jar...but the ones drawn were ~90% green - how long should a reasonable person take to conclude that either the ones in the jar are a "stacked deck", or else the "random draw" process is anything but?

Is that "reasonable person" anti-green?

Ignoring the issues with comparing random sampling to self selection, your analogy falls flat due to the population differences. Here you are assuming a racial/sex population distribution equal to the color population distribution of M&Ms, which is drastically different in even the most diverse countries in the world. If your starting population is 90% green M&Ms then pulling 6 greens in a row is quite high.

Pulling grants because the racial/sex output isn't what you want is unethical and anti-science.

<pedantry> if the population is 90% green, the chance of getting 6 greens in a row is only about 53% (tends to 53% as size -> inf) </pedantry>

No, my point was not that simple. No large human population will have the same race / sex distribution as a standard bag of M&M's. But anyone who got an "A" in Probability 101 can look at the actual distribution of M&M colors, and do the calculations. AND - as rak1507 effectively points out - "all 6 green" is both grounds for a touch of suspicion, and utterly wrong as a basis for concluding actual non-random selection.

My other point was about motivated reasoning. One timeless hallmark of human bigotry (by sex, race, religion, age, social class, caste, nobility of blood, alma mater, or whatever) is that, so long as the outcomes of selection are what the bigots desire, then there really is no argument too flawed, nor excuse too weak, to proclaim that the outcomes are fair. But if the outcomes go against the bigots' preferences, then the standards of proof go way, way up.

"When Tom Snow, who chairs Snow Medical, saw the photo, and realized that everyone was white and male, his heart sank, he says."

So, that Tom doesn't even care about the science, he sees race and gender of applicants and immediately makes a decision.

Edit: if one of those applicants has a novel idea to solve the climate problem, it won't matter to Tom, unless the applicant has appropriate skin color.

The funny thing is that the picture doesn't even depict the reality.

"James McCluskey, deputy vice-chancellor of research at the university, says that other people, including three women and an Indigenous man, were scheduled to receive honorary awards that day but weren’t able to make it."

So basically all the hoopla was due to some people missing an appointment, a picture and a bunch of assumptions.

"Snow acknowledges that other actions — such as allowing only women or people of colour at the university to apply for the fellowships — might also have been effective."

This is really madness, I wonder if future generations will judge such policies as harshly as we judge policies of the 1930s (such as numerus clausus on Jewish students) today.

This is happening now in Ivy League universities limiting the proportion of students that are Asian.

Sounds like you've brought a lot of your own bias and preconception to this.

I think his "preconceptions" are pretty much confirmed by the article, as blitzar pointed out above.

As a brown man, my heart too would sink. Not because I hate white males, but because it makes me feel as if I'm not adequate. That if no brown men have made it to that point, how could I?

This is all about perspective. Is my perspective here logical? No. Am I blaming these white men? No. Representation matters to minorities. It helps us "feel" like we can actually achieve stuff.

It's difficult to explain this perspective to white people. But too often I see white people dismiss this perspective, seeing it as an attack on _them_. But it really isn't about white people.

If Tom Snow and his snow white friends [1][2][3] would allow brown people like you to help them decide where to direct their fire-hose of equality money we might see some actual progress. A more diverse group of doctors, scientists, and phds sounds great, but until white people let go of some of the money and "leadership positions" they're still going to be calling all the shots.

[1] https://www.snowfoundation.org.au/our-story/board/

[2] https://snowmedical.org.au/about/our-founders/

[3] https://equalityaustralia.org.au/team-members/tom-snow/

"Australian researchers have largely applauded"

Is there some science to indicate that 'researchers support' like some kind of private/anonymous survey to measure the mood?

Or just the one's they've spoken to, or possibly worse, it's just something essentially 'made up'.

Otherwise I fear its basically narrative fabrication, which is the opposite of news.

These are tricky subjects they require thoughtfulness, nuance etc..

Ham-fisted approaches to communications I feel will not work in the end.

This is rather ominous:

"What remained were the six white men, and “rather stupidly, someone took a photo and posted it, thinking it was something to celebrate”, says McCluskey. “It backfired very badly.”"

Seriously. You just read that. It was 'rather stupid' to take a photo of the people who showed up to receive the award. Because Race. While the issue is serious in a systematic way, again, this is getting bad.

From a quick read-over, I don't sense that either the grant programme or Nature bothered digging much deeper than the photo. Even really basic stuff, like finding out how sexist & racist the women & minorities on campus think the place is.

Obvious Lesson: #1 Must-Do for universities is to have a first-rate troop of women & minority actors on hand, whenever "unfortunate" photos might be taken, to present shallow decision-makers with the "right" image.

It's wild when you lose your grant programme because a few people decided not to show up for Photo Day.

It’s time to stop normalizing hating white males.

Hate everyone (equally)...problem solved.

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