White House plan to foster equity and excellence in STEMM is all about equity
whyevolutionistrue.com
whyevolutionistrue.com
>...I simply can’t discern features of the field itself that have been put in place to perpetuate inequities.
If you don't understand how systemic inequity can persist without overt bigotry, then any kind of affirmative action is going to seem counterproductive to you. But bias is self-reinforcing; once it happens for any significant amount of time, it persists even among people with no conscious bias. If you don't actually see a minority doing a job, it becomes slightly more difficult to imagine them doing that job, and that small difference, aggregated across millions of people, adds up to a significant ongoing effect. Add in the economic consequences, and you have a further reinforcement. It's like a traffic jam that persists long after the accident that caused it is cleared. And of course, that assumes that there is no longer any conscious bigotry and clearly there is: there are still organized groups in the US publicly advocating white supremacy, for instance.
The notion of bias being self-enforcing is questionable as well. Unconscious bias here seems like a catch-all for any kind of perceived injustices. For all you know, the effects of unconscious bias could have been reasonably mitigated by education, personality, and sound policies. I'm not stating that biases don't exist, or that they are inconsequential. My point is that using unconscious bias as a catch-all is not intellectually honest as it gives unearned merit to claims made without evidence. The way forward is more empirical work, not more rhetoric.
It seems obvious, to me at least, that people don't pursue careers in areas where no one looks like them, therefore creating a self fulfilling prophecy.
> one that has not been empirically verified
Historically women were excluded from many scientific fields. The effect of female role models has been studied (a lot [1][2]) and there's no denying the real world impact representation (or lack of it) can have.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/margiewarrell/2020/10/09/seeing...
[2] https://thesocietypages.org/trot/2017/02/22/the-role-of-fema...
There is a risk of this, true. But that same risk exists if you stick with the status quo, as better-qualified minorities are overlooked in favor of less qualified majority candidates. Certainly that happened in the past as well, when biases were enshrined in law.
Which leads to organizations contorting themselves to define STEMM in some way that excludes all the female dominated majors: biology, nursing, psychology, social science...
They can't admit that women are already winning at education, so they have to keep drilling down to find sub-sub groups where they're a minority.
For what it's worth, I also don't think that most people would consider psychology or social science to be STEM and this is the first time I've heard of STEMM to include "medicine". So that may factor in as well.
- Things to study to make a good income.
- Things to study to help America maintain technical strength.
- Things that capitalists want you to study.
Art doesn't seem to relate to any of those. (Not saying art is bad. Just that it doesn't seem like it belongs with the others.)
This is three layers of not very constructive all piled on top of each other.
I think the poor responses on hacker news is much more likely a consequence of hyper-partisan politics, rather than the quality of the submission. Topics that touches on race always seem to elicit dogmatic responses from across the spectrum.
Also, I skimmed the thing looking for substance, points being made about actions being taken, and it appeared to all be about ethics and ideals.
[...scrolls down...]
"Oh no"
People conflate social and individual trends with structural restrictions. The best we can do is ensure that the opportunities are not restricted so you have equality of opportunity. The equity crowd seems to restrict opportunities and pretend they can guarantee equality of outcome and still have a free and vital society.
If we want stem, we have to pay for it. The fed does not do this. They won't even fund student programs. All of that money goes into luxurious bio/chem labs used for overwhelmingly useless research. It turns out that none of this is about student education, it's for furthering the careers of "researchers".