I specifically voted to have an equity hire in STEM because I thought that was important. Not perfectly, but I'm waking the ****ing walk of thinking this is an important issue. Not the world's biggest issue, but nonetheless an actionable one, so stfu with this weak sauce.

Almost certainly lower than the percentage of men.

You actually implemented an instance of the policy I've been arguing for ages so full kudos. I know a maths professor who tries the same but the department won't come on board. Not as good as calling people names on the internet but can't have everything.

It should imo be extended to the experts such as yourself selecting a pool of suitable candidates for a job/promotion and the HR department or some algorithm making the final choice based on diversity.

It can be more important than you suggest. The idea that women can't do maths/science/etc as well as men can impact many girls at the educational level and maths/science/etc education is very important for all.

Why do you keep feeling that you have to qualify it in this way? Why can't we just say that women in STEM is an important issue and leave it at that?

It's irritating because the Juan Valdezes and kelhuses of this world take this issue very seriously. By God, Juan is composing another 5,000-word shitpost as we speak. But the people who are notionally on the right side are hemming and hawing and emphasizing that this isn't actually a priority for them.

On the one hand, I reopened this line of discussion by criticizing the rubrics UC is apparently using. So clearly I have some questions about how they are going about things.

On the other hand, I think you are usually far too quick to pronounce judgements like this from on high, without much real knowledge of the situation. Particularly with regard to people's motivations. I think it's a little too easy to do that, and from where I sit it always seems like your biggest blind spot is thinking that you are less ideologically motivated than the people you criticize for being ideologically motivated.

So if I focus on thinking and writing about what makes sense to me, that's mostly just because I think that's more fair. And often more interesting to me. I'm not sure I agree with everything UC is doing, but I don't know exactly what their process looks like, and I don't have any direct knowledge of how they are thinking about it. I think the goals of the program are mostly good, and I hope it works out. As a stimulant to discussion it seems to me to offer some criticism of specific points, but it also seems to make sense to be a bit reserved in judgement.

Actually this is a big part of the problem. We don't really know what rubric they are using. They are state funded and one of the biggest employers in the entire state, and we don't have the slightest ****ing clue what the process is at all.

From what I can tell, it is very capricious, arbitrary and completely varies department to department, and possibly job opening to job opening.

Is it ethical, or even legal, for a state funded government entity to act like this? Like I said, my guess is what they are actually doing (straight up discrimination) is extremely illegal, which is the reason for the whole diversity statement workaround.

There is also the adjacent issue is that there is actually a law on the books, voted by popular referendum by the people, making the kind of discrimination they are doing explicitly illegal (and it was actually upheld in courts despite repeated attempts by the UCs to get it overturned there). I like how when President Trump decides to circumvent the Democratic process, everyone is going ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG, we are a democracy, one person one vote, this is so wrong, the democratic system as we know it is in peril. But when the UC system does it , we suddenly are all very agnostic about the democratic process and laws against discrimination (even discrimination we deem socially just).

So I say the entire ideological worldview that dictates that not enough women working in STEM is a sociological problem that requires direct discriminatory social engineering to fix is arbitrary and hypocritical. Then I give a number of examples demonstrating the hypocrisy and this is a gotcha? Ok.

But yeah, I think most sane people would agree it is wrong for a state employer to have a policy where you throw out up to 80% of applications for skilled jobs based on "politically motivated diversity statements" before even looking at the application itself. And having no transparency at all what your rubric even is, but conveniently it gets ride of most of the applicants of certain identity groups you feel are overrepresented, and vastly increases the % of candidates that fit identity groups you want.

And if the state decided to undergo similar processes to increase hiring of males in nursing or primary school teaching you would probably agree with me this is a gross overreach.

The point is it isn't apparent to me that we really care about inequality or discrimination at all. We only care when it is ideologically convenient to care.

I have no problem was varying department to department. This might not be completely apparent to people not in higher ed, but there is a strong culture of departmental autonomy, and that departments are constantly in negotiation with deans and provosts. I tend to lean towards bottom up vs top down approaches in cases like this. In our case, our departmental members suggested, debated, and voted on having an equity hire. It wasn't imposed on us from "above" somewhere. It lets each department which are the experts on their particular field make their own judgements opposed to saying the same thing should be true for a math department and a music department. So for instance, we can look at the role that a lack of female representation might play in student attitudes towards mathematics and can come to a different conclusion than the same analysis for music.

Kelhus, you are doing this over and over and over. Please just stop making up hypotheticals where you in effect accuse me/us of being a hypocrite in your hypothetical. This is the whole "your opinion would change if a critical theory expert told you so" thing or the "primary school teachers" thing all over again.

If I actually say something hypocritical - which you've failed to identify so far - then great, have at it. But please stop making these things up. It's doubly annoying because new scenarios like these would need to be carefully unpacked and the similarities and differences identified and so forth.

Here's my suggestion: If YOU believe that primary teachers or male nurses are a problem that needs to be solved, say so. I might agree or disagree. But don't try to make up your guess as to my view in your made up hypotheticals when you yourself don't think it is a problem!

You are taking things too personally. When I say "you" I am not really saying you specifically, but I am treating you as an avatar for progressive, woke, moral judging culture. For all I know you don't even agree with all aspects of woke culture and are a lousy avatar (although from what I have seen it seems you agree with most aspects and you definitely seem to lean into the whole moralizing aspect).

Also, you have this weird desire for wanting to nit it up and demand a lot of work from me to defend things I say that frankly aren't that important to me, especially relative to how much time it would take on my part.

It isn't that important to me to get the exact definition of intersectionality right or whether I personally think it is problematic that certain jobs have 99:1 gender ratios, when my point is we (as a culture, not you personally) are completely agnostic towards this whilst at the same time being outraged about much smaller gender ratio's in STEM.

The general point is it all seems very arbitrary and from what I can tell it isn't apparent to me there is any honest evaluation of what is and isn't working.

I don't think I have ever criticized you and your department specifically. I am criticizing the UC system, where there is a definite mandate from above, and it is very arbitrary and secretive how different departments decide to go about meeting this mandate. And there is no openness or transparency about whether someones application (which take a lot of time and effort) is just going to be thrown directly in the trash the second it comes in because they are the wrong race/gender.

This is just completely untrue though. There are efforts to increase the number of men in both nursing and primary education; and they are generally driven by people with the same "ideologies" as those who support efforts to increase female participation in STEM fields.

It's pretty much by definition that these issues are driven by the same groups of people as well. Both are examples of gendered social expectations artificially skewing the likelihood of people seeking these jobs. The ideology behind wanting to reduce the imbalance stems from wanting to minimise the impact of these historical societal gender norms so logically there is going to be a very strong correlation between support of one and support of the other.

Also as an aside the gender disparities in nursing/primary education are actually similar in magnitude to those in STEM (roughly 5-10:1 depending on the specific fields). It's certainly not true that it's a "much smaller" disparity in STEM.

I think this post is a great embodiment of the surface level thinking that is at issue here.

You have a "general point" or a "40,000 view" of a caricature of a "woke progressive" in your mind. Ok, but when we actually try to talk about some detail about it you complain it is too much work, you don't bother to learn the basic words, you don't care whether the person you are talking to does or does not believe the thing you are hypothesizing, etc. So we get caught up in the weeds of some bizarre hypothetical like that ridiculous bit about the dutch language and we can't lock you down on anything at all before you are returning to your comfortable place of blasting hypocritical woke progressive with zero attempts to actually construct an argument about something specific anyone in the thread is actually talking about.

My advice is to stop responding as I'm your template placeholder for a woke progressive, but you have been wrong over and over in your guesses of how I'm some huge hypocrite in your made up hypothetical. Read the actual arguments people actually make and try responding to those specific things critically.
I think you are confusing arbitrary with nuanced. In almost every one of your silly hypotheticals where you imply I (or the woke progressive caricature you imagine) are hypocritical, there are meaningful contextual differences it takes some time to articulate a nuanced position on. It is true, my utilitarian perspective doesn't just have some easy black and white rule that immediately resolves every situation precisely. That doesn't mean it is arbitrary. It means it is complex, contextual, and nuanced. It means it evolves with new information and conversation and perspectives. That's messy, but it isn't arbitrary.

v Ok. Do you think I was right or wrong to vote for an equity hire in my department?

I'm going to give one example. I know of a woman who applied for a math professor job. She showed up in a female business suit. During the interview visit, one of old white faculty member (not on the committee) asked "how do you expect your students to respect you looking like that". She got the job, but almost didn't if that was the culture in the department.

What degree of "openness" or "transparency" is there about stories like this? If groups of men in stem are systematically more dismissive of women - often not consciously - to what degree is this open and transparent? In truth, almost nothing about hires is open and transparent. Departments hire people based on their own ideosychronicities and research preferences and rapour and blah blah, none of this is documented at some level. As I say, I believe in a bottom up approach where departments have power. Do you not? They SHOULD be allowed to interpret broad university level objectives their own way.

Just wanted to point out that the disparity between men and women in fields where you can't get away with being wrong very often (or in presidential races), exists in other subsets of people as well. It isn't as obvious because the group I am thinking of, unlike the group "males", is greater than 90% of the population. So it doesn't stand out as much that if that group was only half of the population they would be underrepresented by almost as much as compared to the two groups I'm thinking of, as women are as compared to men. So why aren't people trying harder to help this group?

That's a pretty good parody of a Sklansky post.

yes, yes, david, you are very smart and we all feel sorry for the stupid people like Rachel Maddow whose PhDs are not in math.

Did you seriously parse that in only 10 ****ing minutes?

Even with uke's reply I still have no idea what Sklansky is talking about.

Right-handed people maybe
But that must not be it because it's lefties that are disadvantaged apparently
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lefti...ties_n_6288478

Maybe non autistic people?

Ds's worldview rests on two assumptions:

P1: People are divided into smart people (think Math Phds other than me, and the occasional physicist) and stupid people (think Rachel Maddow, and everyone else)
P2: DS is a smart person.

Vague Conclusion: We shouldn't let the stupid people do much. Like vote.

Beauty.

You missed my half joking point (or maybe you just didn't want to acknowledge it). But since you brought it up, do you think that Trump would have been elected if we didn't let stupid people vote? (pre Trump the downside of stopping them didn't make up for the upside of allowing. But given people's concern about the end of the world via Trump, that would switch no?)