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Men’s Rights Redditor: It’s not sexism that holds back women in STEM. It’s just that women are inferior.

Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the lovely IHaveALargePenis explains that it’s not sexism holding back women in science and technology. No way! It’s just that women are inferior at science and technology. No sexism involved at all!

IHaveALargePenis 10 points 1 day ago (15|6)      The fact that women are so underrepresented in many STEM fields indicates that there must be some educational, societal, or institutional force pushing them away.  There is. It has a lot to do with women though. First with STEM, the hierarchy in the workforce always favors the smartest/most knowledgeable people. This means you can't flirt your way to the top or simply just "make it" eventually.  The work is somewhat quantifiable, so people can be tracked in how much work they do. You can't sit around and chat or take extra time off and fuck around. People will find out.  Many fields have horrible deadlines and any person not finishing their work on time can slow an entire project and become the weakest link. When you're holding up something that thousands of people are working on, relying on, etc and they're all waiting for you, not fun. Additionally you'll be pushed to do overtime, heavy overtime. When it comes to software development for example, in the last few months leading up to release, you'll be better off bringing extra clothes and a sleeping bag to work. This can apply to virtually all other fields in different ways for different reasons.  Women and men study differently. Women are great and memorizing but don't focus on understanding. This is why there's a relatively equal amount of girls/boys in STEM the first year, but then it significantly favors the boys as time passes. The problem is that women do great on tests, but don't bother to understand that knowledge, which is fairly important later on and everything you learn will be used in the future (as you move from first to 4th year). This is why girls have been doing better (or so it seems) ever since standardized tests.  There are no problems in STEM for women. There's nobody out there trying to hold them back. My university cracked down hard on this shit, even had security cameras installed to ensure there was no harassment or sexism going on. And you know what changed? Nothing.      The key is attacking gender issues from both sides, rather than the BS of encouraging women to enter and just ignoring all problems men have.  What exactly is there to attack? There's 50% more women in college than men. Women have infiltrated every major out there outside of STEM. Do you know how HUGE STEM is? Let me tell you how huge it is. Go look up any non STEM focused University out there (MIT or Standord) and check the faculty for STEM or other majors. You'll find out quickly that the entire STEM curriculum has fewer faculty than a single major like business.

Maybe IHaveALArgePenis should have taken an English class or two and learned what “irony” is.

Also, uh, how exactly are security cameras supposed to guard against sexism? This is a new one to me.

Thanks to Wrecksomething on the AgainstMensRights subreddit for pointing me to this mantastic quote.

 

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leftwingfox
11 years ago

I’m alright at math, I just don’t like it all that much.

I was pretty damn good with chemistry and biology and the associated math, but couldn’t come up with a research project on my own initiative when it came down to it, and spent most of my second year drawing rather than working.

I’m incredibly glad I took my Uncle’s advice to go to a technical school for practical biology before going for my PhD: I was able to fail out and get into animation without racking up massive student debt.

Falconer
11 years ago

Now, the real question is, how many hydrogen atoms are on my floor.

No more than there ought to be. Probably you have too many hydrogen atoms bonded to oxygen atoms, though.

Fibinachi
Fibinachi
11 years ago

I always liked the line: “Women are great at memorizing but not so good at understanding”.

It has so many neat little assumptions, and it makes a point entirely besides the point it was trying to make. Because the obvious conclusion is that it’s not really about female academic performance. It’s about how all women are really nothing more than zombie-herd animals who parrot lines and don’t think, philosophical zombies if you will.

When asked a question, they’ll tell you the right answer (the dastardly females) and even maybe explain why, but they won’t really be giving you the right answer, because women aren’t people, and so don’t have conscious deliberation or personal thought. They just parrot a line that fits the moment, makes some garbled approximation of sound they’ve been told is the right soundbite to move on in this strict linear progression.

It is The Shittest World Imaginable!

And it always comes up with all this neat little corollaries, like:

A) Because you can memorize everything, you can’t study physics
B) Because you can memorize everything, you can’t do research
C) Because you can memorize everything, you should be a secretary.

And it also has this snide little overtone of how men can do the same, but better. You tell me how you expect to compute mathematical models without memorizing how fucking numbers work, but by having a penis you can memorize AND use the memories constructively to suss out a pattern. You have the ability to think! Your penis grants you the magical powers of salience and sapience, and you’re suddenly a person.

You have cognition. Understanding. You can take things, remember them, and use them constructively.

But women? Feh, women don’t really understand, they just memorize…

… So I like the line. It’s a brilliant shorthand for finding out what people think women aren’t people, let alone humans, but just mere wandering automate.

Dragon Lady
Dragon Lady
11 years ago

Fibinachi, you hit the nail right on the head.

cloudiah
11 years ago

2) How the teenage girls sexually assaulted by several famous people were asking for it and deserve no sympathy. Anti-Operation Yewtree article.
I’ll look for the title so I can link to this later.

Was it this article? Judgy Bitch has company in victim blaming!

Howard Bannister
11 years ago

So, I’m a programmer by day, right?

I work in an office that is just about evenly divided, men and women.

Guess what my opinion is of guys who say ‘oh, women are just no good with technology’?

Seriously, while they’re busy talking about how women are just no good at it… women are in here getting shit done. All day, every day.

Keep whining, fellas. Keep whining.

Argenti Aertheri
11 years ago

Falconer — …that is entirely accurate.

katz
11 years ago

I hate math so much that I became a physical chemist. The absolute mathiest part of chemistry.

Pillowinhell
Pillowinhell
11 years ago

Chemistry has no math??? Blergh…splutter hahahahahahah!!!!!!!!!!!!

Chemistry is all about math! If you can’t figure out how to do the math and figure out which equation to use…you FAIL. And anyone who has gotten further than grade nine science should know that. The only place I can think of off the top of my head where you can apply chemistry without doing he math first would be in home screen while baking. And even then, you still have to know this little mathematical concept called proportion.

Argenti Aertheri
11 years ago

Aquariums — places you can apply chemistry without any more math than counting and reading numbers (add X drops, match to Y color, read number next to it, act accordingly)

Of course, that’s when things are normal, when you swap a 10g for a 30g with 10g sump and have detectable ammonia levels…I have actual chemistry to do >.<

katz
11 years ago

Hey Argenti, I had a graphing question: I want to graph my kitten’s weight over time and what medications he was taking at each point. but the medications are basically binary states (either he was taking each one or he wasn’t). How would you go about graphing that?

Pear_tree
Pear_tree
11 years ago

Katz, I hope you don’t me answering with my personal opinion (although I’m not a statistician). I would use a line plot of time against weight with time on the x-axis. I would then use shading of the graph area to represent whether your cat was on drugs at each time interval. You could also change the color of the line. I imagine a 3D plot would also work but I think using color for the binary variable is the simplest solution.

Cloudiah it sounds like that article but I’m not sure they mentioned the person had been accused of rape. I need to go outside and check.

Pear_tree
Pear_tree
11 years ago

Cloudiah, yeah that was the one. I guess it is important to represent his views but it often seems to be done out of support rather than criticism.

katz
11 years ago

Pear tree: Good idea (and sorry for making it sound like Argenti was the One and Only person who could answer my question) but the trick is that he’s been on several drugs at the same time, each of which is its own binary state.

Rising Phoenix
Rising Phoenix
11 years ago

I am always amazed by people who insist that the education system is stacked against boys and that if boys no longer have expectations of behavior or focus placed on them, they will magically do brilliantly.

This isn’t what the MRM is saying. The MRM is saying that it might do to ask why the learning approaches taken in classrooms don’t seem to work as well for male children. That’s really it.

The feminists find this very threatening, apparently. Can’t have the spotlight shifted away from them for even a second.

cloudiah
11 years ago

Citation needed, Rising Phoenix. On both counts.

Bostonian
Bostonian
11 years ago

HI RUI! (to Rising Pheonix, the sock of the dude on the Last of US thread)

Pear_tree
Pear_tree
11 years ago

Katz, how many different drugs? You could use color mixing with red green and blue. It is a lot of data. What are you looking for specifically? I’d guess patterns between drugs and weight gains/losses

Argenti Aertheri
11 years ago

Katz — idk the “official” way to do it, but I’ve done time v weight and then a second y axis 0-2 so 1 = falls in the middle. And then color code that. Depending how many meds, excel might get unreadable, in which case I’d turn on the chart display thing (so each x value has the y values under it)

misery
misery
11 years ago

It’s just an anecdote of course, but in my high school we had a choice between two hard science profiles based on: math, physics, chemistry, biology. Literally the group that picked the one with a biology focus was ~15 girls, 1 guy, whereas the one with the focus on physics had 11 guys, 0 girls. (I was in the second group) Naturally, everyone in the second group made fun of the one guy, and they also generally considered biology not a ‘hard science’ subject, as to properly maintain their feelings of superiority towards women. In retrospect it was really embarrassing on our side, especially since there were many girls that did very well in ‘hard science’ subjects, which we dismissed as tainted because they only did well by studying more, which didn’t count.

CassandraSays
CassandraSays
11 years ago

Rising Phoenix is a decent name for a sock if you’re a pretentious fucker, this has to be acknowledged.

Monster
11 years ago

@ misery – yes, yes, the old ‘biology is a soft science and therefore easy and not serious’ approach. I am familiar with that.

katz
11 years ago

6 different drugs, max of 4 at one time.

pecunium
11 years ago

Off-topic: The Stop and Frisk case was ruled on today: as practised it’s unconstitutional. I did a write up: Stopped and fisked.