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Comment by WastingMyTime89 | Hacker News Reader

The point was correcting the factors which lead to women avoiding or not succeeding in STEM not creating an opposite bias.

Maybe a positive bias is still needed to tip the scale but we have to be careful of not drastically overshooting.

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Given that women tend to be cited less than men [1], I don't think you need to worry just yet.

[1] e.g. https://www.science.org/content/article/women-researchers-ci...

All those studies are paywalled and the article has a distinct ideological ring.

Any idea where I could see those studies for free?

Women have “centuries” of not being treated as equals before we can talk about “overshooting”.

This take doesn’t make sense. The goal never was to make up for centuries of inequality (as if we could - that’s going to be of little help to the disadvantaged women, they are dead now) or punish modern men for a past they had nothing to do with. The goal is equality, period.

Creating a world where men are disadvantaged in a mirror situation would be an abject failure. Positive bias is good as a bootstrap because feminine role models are a necessity for young girls to be able to identify with someone in the field and the situation was so unbalanced something had to be done to seed the field.

But in an equal playfield, women don’t need help to stand for themselves. At some point, we will have to stop artificially advantaging them and recognising this point is important.

> role models are a necessity for young girls to be able to identify with someone in the field and the situation was so unbalanced something had to be done to seed the field.

Wrong. The problem is not that girls are unable to feel a connection with Newton or Fleming (Most genius lives are not orbiting around sex after all). This plan don't understands (or simply choose to ignore) how many woman were inspired to became scientists after a father figure, or because their (male) fathers were scientists yet.

The real problem is that the model of "scientist girl" must compete with other --feminine-- roles. Models that show ways much more efficient and easier to became a rich, successful and popular woman. Models that spend trucks of money to assure that young girls notice them. The scientist girl must compete with one hand tied to her back, because this society choose to reward more a woman able to sing and dance, than a woman able to do research.

This is mostly a problem of woman versus woman, not of woman versus man.

I’m not pulling the lack of role models thing out of thin air. Your take goes against decades of research so I will posit that you are plain wrong.

My comment is now surrounded by bordering misogynistic comments. It makes me feel uncomfortable. Sorry to everyone for what I inadvertently unleashed.

> against decades of research

Probably decades of dubious, non-reproducible, sociological research, without a real idea of how things really are in the field. Is just another case of blinded by ideology.

As a zoologist, I am perfectly able to appreciate the work of Jane Goodall and what she achieved. I don't need a "Peter Goodall" at all. This is why science was great twenty years ago and not-so-great now.

For as many centuries men have been called out to go to war, work and die in mines, sail the seas where many met their end and do other hazardous and often rather unpleasant work from which women were spared. Following your logic it would be necessary to ensure that women start working and dying in hazardous professions for a long time, dying or getting maimed at least as much as men do before there is a risk of 'overshoot' (no pun intended).

For those downvoting this, what is wrong with the logic here?

It’s as irrelevant to the core of the subject as the post it is replying to and is trying to pit against each other unrelated issues of the past. As it is a sterile way of discussing the very real issue of gender inequality today and - let’s face it - we all know where this strand of thought is coming from and where it’s going, people are downvoting.

Remember that poor men were historically just as disadvantaged as poor women. And they were never expected, or forced, to go die or get maimed in pointless wars.

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