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Majority of young women in university

ommadon

March 31, 2010

11 upvotes

/r/MensRights

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8596504.stm

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Title	Majority of young women in university
Author	ommadon
Upvotes	11
Comments	16
Date	March 31, 2010 1:24 PM UTC (16 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/bknxz/majority_of_young_women_in_university/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/majority-of-young-women-in-university.1050068 https://theredarchive.com/post/1050068

Comments

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points4 points 16 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

[–]jay76 0 points1 point2 points 16 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

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[–]catlebrity -1 points0 points1 point 16 years ago (4 children) | Copy Link

I like that you left this out, from right before the bit you quoted:

Universities and research institutions must offer affordable child care and flexible working hours so that women who choose to have families can continue to do high-level research while they raise children.

And from the press release about the study linked to there (I put some of the especially relevant passages in bold):

"Family considerations are a major, but not the only, deterrent to pursing an academic career," said Orna Cohen-Fix, Ph.D., a corresponding author of the report and senior investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. "An increase in the number of women postdocs who decide to pursue an advanced research position will translate, in time, to a greater representation of women in tenured faculty positions. Our findings suggest that the loss of talented women from the research track can be reduced by mentoring and a change in the scientific culture to accommodate the needs of both women and men who wish to combine family and scientific careers."

Because women are more affected by family responsibilities, help during the transition from postdoc to tenured faculty — such as affordable, high-quality child care or the possibility to work more flexible hours — may encourage more women to stay in academic research, the study found.

Interesting how you only seemed to see what you wanted to see there.

Yes, overt discrimination may not be the big issue here, but that doesn't mean there are no issues that can be and should be addressed.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points3 points 16 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

[–]catlebrity -1 points0 points1 point 16 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

There are other issues beyond child care that matter, like the fact that the field is overwhelmingly dominated by men. I don't see how anyone could think this doesn't make it harder for women to stay in the field if the vast majority of their colleagues are male. As a man, I've never worked in a field that is 80% female, and I imagine if I did I would have a harder time of it than my female colleagues. When I was in grad school, the department I was in had a decided (white) "boys club" atmosphere to it, even though whenever they advertised for new faculty they always included a line about how women and minorities were encouraged to apply.

Indeed, while I was there the department hired a massively unqualified male professor who got the job essentially because he charmed a few of the prominent men in the department into thinking he was sort of a mad genius. (They were right about the mad part, anyway.) I know, anecdotal evidence.

In any case, on the child care issue. The point is that women in general are expected to devote more of their time and energy to childrearing than men, and as the press release points out:

The vast majority of married women have a full-time working spouse, whereas about half of married men have a spouse that works part-time or within the home. Moreover, among dual-career couples, women are more likely to make career concessions than men. Spending time with family, plans to have children, affordable child care, travel, and proximity to spouse's work place were some of the considerations that were weighed more heavily by women, whereas salary was more important to men.

Obviously, this may or may not be the case in your situation, but either way I would think you would welcome programs to provide better child care and more flexible hours, as they can greatly help both women and men better balance work and family life.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points3 points 16 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

There are other issues beyond child care that matter, like the fact that the field is overwhelmingly dominated by men.

I agree that this might make it more difficult to women (I also agree that many tenure positions are inside jobs).

But since this is not due to overt discrimination, I still do not see why this might justify hiring more women than men rather than treating all candidates equally.

The point is that women in general are expected to devote more of their time and energy to childrearing than men

Well, are we all equal or not? You can't have it both ways. Either women should get treated equally (and men share the burden of child rearing to equal amounts), or we have gender-specific solutions that take women's need/wish to work less into account.

It seems to me that as a society we have moved from the gender-specific solution (which was patriarchy) to the more gender-neutral system. Thus, the problem of combining family with low pay and insane work hours in science/academia is a more general one.

[–]catlebrity -1 points0 points1 point 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

I still do not see why this might justify hiring more women than men rather than treating all candidates equally.

Well, the standard reason is to make up for past discrimination; once more women are in the field there would be no need for this.

But my experience in the field suggests that while overt discrimination may not be such an issue any more, more subtle forms of discrimination remain, which actually make it possible for less qualified me to get further in the field than women because they're better at schmoozing with male colleagues. Some of the older profs in the department were certainly sexist.

Either women should get treated equally (and men share the burden of child rearing to equal amounts), or we have gender-specific solutions that take women's need/wish to work less into account.

Well, in the ideal world the egalitarian situation would be the case, but they're trying to respond to what's the case in the real world, where women are expected to and do perform more of the jobs or raising kids; very few of the women the study looked at had househusbands, while lots of the men had housewives.

In any case, expanding child care and flextime has the effect of helping both female and male caregivers, and can help to make the world a bit more egalitarian.

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